Growing up in the era of online hyper-stimulation

Heartcoregirl is an artist whose music is making waves in the SoundCloud-sphere and beyond — her tracks are filled with dreamy soundscapes and shoegaze-y vocals. Her photography and creative direction offer a unique perspective on intimacy, sexuality and a generation obsessed with aesthetics and online subcultures. These themes all manifest in the latest issue of Core, a collaborative visual arts magazine founded and curated by Heartcoregirl. For the Digiverse, Heartcoregirl shares her influences and the endless inspiration of growing up online.

How would you describe your music and what are your influences?

I would describe my music as dreamy, ethereal and genre-defying. My biggest influences are shoegaze, and the bands I was raised listening to like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive. 

We live in an internet age, so my music is made on a laptop, using autotune like a Vocaloid. 

Lyrically, I play with poetic imagery to build an immersive sensuous atmosphere and Heartcore world. I am inspired by lullabies, aesthetics, sexuality and the blips of happiness and trauma in my life. 

Many people believe the SoundCloud era is “dead”, yet you’ve captured a really good niche on there. How do you navigate the “post-SoundCloud era” landscape?

My music is posted on SoundCloud as it is a platform to share your music for free. I’m an unsigned, independent artist so posting music there just makes sense. Culturally, SoundCloud is responsible for a lot of rappers and emerging genres. It also is a place to be discovered — just as Instagram for models and visual artists. 

As you mention the ‘post-SoundCloud era landscape’, I don't really resonate with this term — I just post songs there because I want people to hear my music. SoundCloud is rich with experimental, outsider music from across the world. I often stumble upon noise music, black metal, rap or sound art with only a few hundred plays. I value this democratic way of accessing and finding new music, free from big labels and corporate gatekeeping. 

Internet culture, cyberpunk and tech seem to be running themes in your art. How do they inform your work?

The internet informs my work as I grew up obsessing over aesthetics and being on Tumblr and Instagram — these visuals I consumed felt like a new reality to me that let me escape the mundanities of life. Using image-based social media platforms and becoming image-obsessed led me to go on to study fine art photography. 

I grew up in an era of hyperstimulation online and having access to such a large eclectic range of influences and reference points. This can be overwhelming artistically but also exciting. I find surrealism and absurdity in the online realm a major source of visual inspiration — filtered imagery, polished and edited influencers, living through screens, over-consumption of media and constantly being a voyeur. I also like creating a character for myself. Subverting the tropes of an online persona is fun — playing with the uncanny as if I am a doll or entity.

What is the meaning behind Core?

Core is a word that can pinpoint aesthetics and niches — hardcore, softcore, heartcore, nostalgiacore. It is a language to reference moods or subcultural movements. Core magazine was made to validate what we post online and micro online cultures, as well as giving a space to throwaway content, valuing it as printable high art. 

There’s a lot of stigma surrounding sex dolls and robots but the recent issue of Core magazine explores them in a unique way. What has speaking and working with doll owners taught you about intimacy and connection?

Sexuality online can be passive and voyeuristic — being a girl posed on Instagram to be gazed upon has some proximity to being a doll: stationary, inanimate, and always hot. 

I talked to doll owners as I was curious about loneliness and differences in people’s desires and capacity for intimacy. After my experience dancing in clubs and sex work, I realised that for some people intimacy can really be commodified. 

Dolls take this idea of a fetish object to the next extreme. A feeling of love and affection for something that will never be emotionally present. Talking to doll owners was insightful and I built relationships with them to have a deeper understanding of their psychology. Dolls are an extreme version of pure objectification, yet can also be a body to project love and desires onto. 

In my work I seek intimacy and bliss by creating something dreamlike. Sex dolls are almost the antithesis of how I see the world — however, my work and research on them as a poetic object is a response to the culture we live in and how I have felt as a woman.