Tough Guy Mountain: Hypercapitalism in the Digital Realm

My grey, genderless, cel-shaded nipples are looking quite perky as I tour The Brandscape, the corporate utopia of Tough Guy Mountain, a Toronto-based art collective. The surroundings, rendered in 360-degree virtual reality, give way to curiosity in my own self-image as I stare down, seeing my body protrude and clip away at odd angles. “It’s very weird for you to be naked right now,” quips a bemused intern. Fortunately, there’s no god to judge me as The Brandscape is revealed to be not utopia, but intern purgatory: an endless parade of office furniture, coffee, and cubicles. It’s not as tedious as it sounds—The Brandscape remains awash in corporate optimism, and Tough Guy Mountain paints over this with a nostalgic layer of net-art visuals, toeing the line between uncanny and ultramodern. Beneath their exaggerated surrealist humour, Tough Guy Mountain’s true aim is to change the way labour is perceived and controlled. Guided Meditation (2017), set in narrative among their other works, takes on the false promise of corporate wellness and crafts a memorable mockery of it, forming a balance between technology and art.

While Guided Meditation might be Tough Guy Mountain’s first virtual reality project, they have continually played the role of ironic corporation in both digital and physical spaces since the collective’s formation in 2012. Their most idealized alter egos come to life in Guided Meditation, where corporate lifestyle is digitized into a futuristic office environment. But Tough Guy Mountain’s true reality is within reach at their studio in Toronto. Named The Brandscape, it shares the same title as their virtual company headquarters, along with some of the eccentric behaviour. The studio’s social media posts are written by a roster of quirky employees, from secretaries to CEOs. Responses to my emails come from a so-called Cathy, portrayed as a soulless executive on Instagram. We arrange a video call, and I wonder if I’ll be speaking to a creator or a caricature. To my relief, I end up chatting with Cat Bluemke, one of the founding members of the collective. She says that the performative aspect of Tough Guy Mountain is integral to their artistic practice, reflecting the reality of how we interact with technology providers through the sharing of data and personal information: we “become a branch of their property, and perform accordingly to that.” They certainly embrace this concept, with sardonic tweets and photo captions about the disposability of their interns—all for the success of The Brandscape, of course. It’s funny, but I question whether their work is seen as sincere when the collective’s members are so frequently in persona. Bluemke acknowledges that there can be an audience disconnect, risking a dismissal of Tough Guy Mountain as “cynical millennial sarcasm.” But that’s not the point—their ongoing projects make for a canonical narrative, that Bluemke says uses performance as “a form of research, a way of understanding… We’re performing aspects of this hyper-capitalist existence that we have with our phones and the way we run our lives. People think we’re being tongue-in-cheek… but we have a serious interest in the labour conditions produced by technology.”

Tough Guy Mountain embraces the design and aesthetic principles that came with the surge in net-art in the early 2010s. Their generated world features pastel pinks and blues, swaying palm trees, and Grecian busts. The environment is beautiful at times, in the way that oversaturated Instagram photos are—glaringly fake, but appealing nonetheless. At other times the environment descends into a void, popping back up with geometric interiors so polygonal that a wave of nostalgia hits me for my old video-game console. If this sounds disparaging, it’s not. All of these components are intentionally reminiscent of the min-maximalism of vaporwave, an aesthetic movement that gained a cult following online for its consumerist parody and unique iconography, remixing concepts from 1980s sound and style. As its popularity grew, vaporwave’s ideology became strangely oppositional to its own origins, becoming commercialized and co-opted to the point where the aesthetics now feel distant from its motifs. Running parallel to these complications in imagery, Bluemke admits that there are inherent difficulties in creating anti-capitalist art in a capitalist society: “everyone has to buy-in at some point.” Moral complexities include gentrification in their studio neighbourhood or exhibiting for galleries that continue to use unpaid interns, concerns that directly conflict with their philosophy. But in exchange, Tough Guy Mountain has been able to provide affordable studio space to artists outside of the collective, creating a larger community to push their ideals and foster artist-run innovation. With those results, their use of vaporwave and web aesthetics appears as a symbolic reclamation of anti-capitalist expression, circling back to its original intentions.

Awarded a Rhizome microgrant in October, Guided Meditation is part of the shift to viewing virtual reality as a serious contender in how artistic ideas are distributed, rather than a mere technological gimmick. The medium should only be a means to an end. The initial spread of virtual reality has seen valid criticism on being flashy, detracting, and more focused on technology than on the art itself. Bluemke agrees that viewers may approach virtual reality projects with preconceived notions, expecting the work to have overwhelming visual or emotional stimulation. But Tough Guy Mountain is more interested in how the audience navigates the work on their own terms, focusing on concepts of accessibility. The first iteration of Guided Meditation was released through V/Art Projects, an app by Trinity Square Video. This version was considerably immersive, not necessarily due to the technology, but mainly through the narrative and worldbuilding elements. My own experience brought about genuine moments of calm, uneasiness, and amusement. Guided Meditation is now being reworked to promote even further viewer participation, adding more environmental simulation while giving the viewer choices in the narrative, made possible with virtual reality platforms and game design. This is a step forward from the original version, where there was a distinct lack of bodily autonomy—the viewer becomes a forced performer in The Brandscape as they are moved through a set track, often having to twist and turn to understand the surroundings. Though it serves the narrative’s purpose, the team had to be careful when building the project: “usually your art doesn’t make people feel nauseous, but there’s a spatial sensitivity you have to have when disconnecting people from a tactile world,” Bluemke says. Financial accessibility is a factor as well; while mobile virtual reality apps have lowered the entry barrier, Bluemke observes that in today’s technological world, personal access to a smartphone doesn’t lessen the likelihood that these users may still face unstable working and living conditions. The irony that many can own a smartphone but can’t be granted secure employment does not go unnoticed. It highlights the societal ubiquity of our electronics and the permeated promise that they will make our lives better. Whether they do or not, the collective has witnessed the increase in user engagement through mobile virtual reality, giving them the power to reach a wider audience both within and outside of the art community.

Tough Guy Mountain’s emulation of start-up culture and techno-solutionism promote the compatibility in ideals between workers in art and technology. Bluemke notes that the struggle for better labour conditions is often happening at technology companies like Uber, Amazon, and Google—companies whose workers are also creating and maintaining our digital realities. Mixing art with the technical fields of game design, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality allow Tough Guy Mountain’s ideas to spread to communities whose struggle is happening at the forefront of our current political climate and open up potential for collaboration. Bluemke hopes that contract workers will utilize the power in what they produce, whether it’s performance, visuals, code, or data. “We have the right to fight. We don’t have to accept the reality of late-capitalism as the sole reality that exists. We have the cognitive capacity to understand different levels of reality.” In the digital reality of The Brandscape, my naked body was a physical protest—until I’m forced into a logo-emblazoned office jumpsuit. But in that moment of strange vulnerability, there’s a distinct sense of freedom; a derailment of the systemic plights of the working class. Guided Meditation is a culmination of this capitalist critique, unleashed into a fantastical vision that may turn out to be more than an intern purgatory after all.

All images: Tough Guy Mountain, Guided Meditation, to be completed, Virtual Reality concept screenshot, 32.5 x 18.3 cm. Screenshots by Tough Guy Mountain, Cat Bluemke, or Paige Adrian.

Paige Adrian is an English teacher living in Takasaki, Japan. She has an Education degree from the University of Saskatchewan.

This article is published in issue 36.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue