Why the 2010s Were the Decade of Mercury in Retrograde: “Normcore” co-creator Emily Segal’s first novel uses astrology to unpack the sweeping shifts in culture and technology we lived through.
“That made me think about how so many domains of life were now functioning primarily as information flows. That gave me the idea that Mercury Retrograde didn’t have to be this one astrological transit; it could be a metaphor for living in an information economy that was glitching and breaking down—especially at a time when there was so much startup language around unfettered progress, and innovation, and the good kind of disruption.”
"K-Hole was also playing with the instability of that binary between the art object and the commercial object. And I was observing my peers making post-internet art that used tech brands in the art, and I was just like, “Wait a second. That’s too basic. It might also be possible to make this an artwork from the jump if it’s done the right way.” And so the book is sort of a documentation of that art gesture. But, as you see when you read the book, it’s not so simple, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in that thinking that show up.
At that time, artists were putting Nikes on top of Pringles cans and being told it was great art. And every random start-up could potentially open itself up this unimaginable wealth based on its ability to have a certain stance for the future—like, “Anything can happen.” It was all rather flamboyant and ridiculous. It’s just that a lot of those experiments fell flat, and they fell flat at great cost to a lot of people, and that’s a problem."