A friend of mine has a gripe with most modern filmmakers: She says they don’t really know how to portray smartphone use. Shouldn’t people in films, she often wonders, be texting and scrolling more and talking less?
It’s true that, for whatever reason, certain art forms have been slow to address the fact that, since the introduction of the iPhone, many relationships are largely mediated through screens. For a lot of people, computers and phones provide a central hub to find not just connection, but meaning, comfort, and thrills. Countless artists have dealt with this in a broad way over the decades—think Magdalena Bay’s Imaginal Disk, a hero’s journey from tech-addled nihilism through to human feeling, but also Kraftwerk’s seminal 1981 record Computer World, a still-prescient exploration of what happens to a tech-reliant society—but fewer have explored the connection that, I, and perhaps you, have on an individual level with our devices.
Enter 26-year-old Nina Wilson, aka Ninajirachi. She wants to fuck her computer. Kind of. A track on her excellent, aggressively stimulating debut album I Love My Computer is called “Fuck My Computer,” and it’s kind of a joke, unless it isn’t? “I wanna fuck my computer/’Cause no one in the world knows me better,” she deadpans. “It says my name, it says, ‘Nina’/And no one in the world does it better.”
“Fuck My Computer” is an assaultive dubstep rager that yearns for the days when you could download Adventure Club remixes for free from Hype Machine, and it arrives early enough into I Love My Computer that you can play it off, on first listen, as irony. But it quickly becomes clear that Wilson, who grew up in Kincumber, a regional town in New South Wales, Australia, is playing her album’s conceit straight; this is a concept record about Wilson’s relationship with her PC, emphasis on the P. Moving between EDM, tech-house, speed garage, dubstep, and hyperpop with the jerky irregularity of a spasming ocular muscle, I Love My Computer is sincere and uniquely moving—smartly sidestepping newspaper opinion section questions around Tech Addiction and a Disconnected Society, Wilson instead chooses to tell a specific, personal story about growing up with the screen as your mirror.
