Sitting down and finally starting to write is exactly for me like starting to work on a digital image. You start with an idea or sometimes without any specific, but immediately you have to be willing to flow when investigating and making that first idea and finally you find yourself sailing and playing in a sea of ideas, words, shapes, concepts and colors. In this case, in the end I chose to start this article by writing with the affirmation that gave the title to this humble writing: Apple stole my distorted emoji 😯

The title is just another silly internet hook, and Apple didn't steal that emoji from me because from the beginning it was never my invention. I think that emojis as well as icons or memes are really the property of those who use them, that is: of everyone. It is a curious and interesting fact to think about those who propagate, distribute or devised some of them but even more interesting is to see where they reach and what meanings they produce.

What defines for me what I call Digital anti-art (to which I referred by several names in the past as digicore or crazycore) is mainly its nature of the random. The random (in Spanish: random) is precisely that conditionality that anything can coexist in a digital anti-art work. Or at least 'almost' anything, because the second determining factor of what can define digital anti-art is the 'aesthetic' factor.

The 'aesthetic' in digital anti-art should not be confused with the simply 'visually pleasing', or belonging to some 'core aesthetic' necessarily, nor directly as the conception of the 'a e s t h e t i c ' of the vaporwave (concept prior to the popularization of the term). The aesthetic in digital anti-art means that which tells the perception that something works and has a coherence and beauty of its nature. Something that although it can be beautiful and pleasing to the eye (either because of its colors, shapes and/or composition), at the same time it can and should be able to be intriguing, disturbing, strange, challenging to the eye.

The third factor that defines digital dada has to do with the inherited condition of Duchamp's anti-art. If at the time it was necessary to question the technique, authorship and beauty in art to make way for any form of previous conceptual art, and affirming that anything can be art if an artist (or anti-artist) so decides; in anti-art or digital dadaism the technique is only one: digital, authorship is shared and anyone can create something by taking resources from anywhere, and beauty is between the 'aesthetic' and the capacity and individual free interpretation of a work.

 Returning to the idea that everything is a mix: Each thing invented is based on something else, or it is a reinvention, a remake, a reboot, etc etc... and about this it has already been written again and again. Kirby Ferguson explores this perspective in depth in his documentary "Everything is a remix". Ferguson popularized this concept through a series of short documentaries produced between 2010 and 2012, where he exposes that creativity does not arise from nothing, but is based on three fundamental steps: copy, transform and combine.

 The reboot and the remix do not promise us a novelty without reference, they start from the idea of confessing that this is based on something that already exists. For good or for worse, we have all been watching it over and over again without stopping both in the movies and on the internet. Movies and series that return in reboot versions, fashions and old styles that return to being a trend in mainstream culture or to arouse the interest of subcultures or specific niches.

The culture of the core, of the nostalgic, of all that leads us to think distant realities of the past or even sometimes of the future take relevance then. The idea of digressing around other realities and times, and of remembering, remastering, reviving, reimagining something has become almost a perfect formula to sell almost anything. But also to invite us to rethink what we left incomplete yesterday or what could have been. It invites us to think once again about the possibilities of a past idea, of a second chance for it. Finally offering us an alternative vision of a world that thanks to this variant becomes somehow better, more beautiful, more interesting, or simply fresher... But in addition, being closed and delimited systems, the internet cores offer us the chance to understand things in a simpler and clearer way (although no less interesting) compared to the notion of a chaotic and complex present.

The diversity of these cores and aesthetics of the Internet are, on the other hand, countless like the niches where they circulate. On Aesthetics Wiki we find literally hundreds of them, making us again overflow the possibilities of the present. If a decade ago it was simply retro or vintage, now there are endless variants from internet cores or internet aesthetics.

"Remove Friends" (2022, Nik Pespi).

 The random, appears in the forms of anti-digital art that I speak of as an echo of all this amalgam of variants of cores, ideas, concepts, thoughts and aesthetics of the Internet. It is in the random where the lines between one system and another are blurred, and the influence of different aesthetic nuclei can coexist in chaotic harmony. Beauty is not in simplicity and order as in minimalism, but neither in the absolute chaos of a raw maximalism. But in the suggestion that such harmony exists precisely in the contrasts. The ying and the visual yang existing between the gore and the cute, the trash with the aesthetic, the glitch with the liminal, the dreamcore with the weirdcore, etc, etc, etc... And of the relationship between concepts and worlds that can be interposed being similar, opposite and/or complementary: such as the dark with the bright, the clean with the dirty, the calm and the noisy, etc, etc...