Pattern Recognition and Transportna: When wounds speak
In Pattern Recognition William Gibson imagined a world where anonymous film fragments pulsed from a cultural wound and found an audience who built a community around them. In Transportna, we encounter music that may emerge from humans and code yet still cuts close to the heart. Between them lies a question not about technology, but about what we are willing to feel — and believe — when art speaks without a stable author, and the link between life and art, reality, art and truth.
Fetish : Footage : Forum
In Pattern Recognition (2003), a series of enigmatic film fragments known only as “the footage” appears online and gathers a devoted following. Cayce Pollard, the main character, moving through a mirror-world London in a state of jet-lag she calls a type of soul delay, spends her nights on Fetish:Footage:Forum — a cult-like discussion space where obsessives trade theories about origin, chronology and authorship. The footage has no clear context, yet it evokes deep emotion. In the aftermath of 9/11, and the breaking of the West’s moral certainty, Gibson frames it as more than viral ephemera: it feels like a signal from a damaged world, an artefact that resonates as a message from a cultural wound. Cayce herself is haunted by trauma — her father vanished in the World Trade Center attacks — and she and the other “footageheads” sense in the clips a therapeutic beauty born of pain.
The allure lies in anonymity. Unclaimed art wells up like collective subconscious grief. In the absence of an identifiable author, viewers treat the footage as a sacred found object, projecting onto it their yearnings for meaning and healing. Gibson eventually reveals that the fragments literally emanate from injury: art as the only available outlet for unspeakable pain. In a climactic description, the footage is “only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark”. The fragments are not plotted messages but raw emanations of a psyche beyond language. That phrase captures the novel’s core intuition: art as a beacon in a numb, post-traumatic landscape, cutting through cynicism by bypassing explanation and striking directly at feeling. There is, of course, an attempt to marketise the footage — such is the power of secrets and the awareness that subcultures need time and fertile ground, both already vanishing in the early 2000s.
Authenticity, authorship and authority
Kira and Nestor, Холодні стіни
The emotional dynamic at the heart of Pattern Recognition — art as the voice of a wound attracting a community of seekers — finds an echo in Transportna.
Transportna emerges in 2025 as a shadowy post-punk project releasing songs in Ukrainian amid the background noise of invasion and displacement. In its sparse profiles it claims Lithuanian origin and Ukrainian roots, explaining that music is a way to endure difficult times. The tracks are cold, skeletal, urban. Driving basslines, drum-machine pulses, reverb-drenched guitars. Lyrics of empty streets, static, mirrors, electric light. A presentiment of loss.
In “Холодні стіни” the narrator drifts through a looping cityscape, while deserted buildings and shadows linger. In “Рви цей нерв”, it claims “We are not jesters, we are only shadows.” Even without explicit war references, the songs feel haunted by aftershocks — transmissions from a city processing trauma. Like Gibson’s footage, Transportna arrives as anaesthetic response to rupture: a message from the void left by violence and uncertainty.
A following gathers quickly. Tens of thousands of listeners, hundreds of thousands of views. No interviews, no live presence, only stylised images of two obscured figures clad in post-Soviet streetwear — Nestor and Kira — half-turned, half-erased. They function less as band members than as narrative handles, characters in an art-house film. Listeners bond not only to songs but to the riddle: who are these people, and how do they capture such aching loneliness? Suspicion arises, of course, as their musical style, the rhythm of production and release, the sense of the uncanny valley in the biographies, visual identities and the lack of a physical presence — or even pictures, video and social media — point to the use of generative AI.
What matters here is not the slow forensic discovery of tools or techniques, but the shift in discourse. The project becomes a cultural flashpoint: what does it mean when a work that may be machine-generated or machine-mediated moves us?
If Gibson’s footage asks how anonymous art mediates collective trauma, Transportna asks how hybrid human-machine art mediates collective feeling. The wound here is double: historical and technological. Post-punk by proxy — emotion carried convincingly even when origin is uncertain. Were the feelings authentic, or well-crafted illusions? If the listener’s emotion is real, does the distinction matter?
Genus loci
Post-punk grew from specific geographies and conditions: late-industrial cities, economic anxiety, subcultures trading guitars for synthesisers. It is prized for raw human authenticity. How then do we read a project with no fixed place, no stable biography, possibly no stable voice, claiming this lineage?
We instinctively oppose a cultural movement with a genius loci to Transportna, and imagine the fabrications of Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, and, of late, GenAI girlfriends, deathbots — a type of marketing gloss and attractive emptiness. Yet those Transportna songs make the paradox persist and raise the question: is this posthuman post-punk a contradiction or evolution? Transportna engages the genre’s aesthetics — detached vocals, minor-key bass, monochrome visuals — while allowing anomalies to remain. Imperfection has always been part of post-punk’s appeal: wrong notes, distortion, raw edges signalling honesty over polish. Here, human error becomes an algorithmic aesthetic. What might be dismissed as aglitch can be re-read as ethos. To move hearts, the work limps slightly, exhibiting clumsy vulnerability. Authenticity comes from malfunction and cracks are left visible, wabi-sabi applied to code. The result is transplantation rather than betrayal: alienated human emotion simulated by a non-human — or not only human — voice yet delivered with enough flaw to register as sincere. The oxymoron might be deliberate.
Strip away the traditional markers — garage band struggle, charismatic frontperson — and what remains is feeling itself, free-floating. Many listeners were moved before authorship entered the equation, many after. Our response precedes our knowledge and lives after it. We experience double vision: one hearing when we believe in souls behind the sound, another when we suspect silicon, but we feel. Which is truth? Gibson hinted at this dilemma: the art speaks before the author is known.
But then, do post-punk and art, as well as the social turmoil the band draws from, become only themes to draw from, references for a GenAI prompt? A brutal invasion and an entire artistic movement, ideology, lived experience and the sociocultural and economic context that it lived in — the suffering of a generation used as what, training material for AI, inspiration, plagiarism, IP infringement? How can we possibly read this?
Or is it always like this? Established poetic forms used throughout centuries — the sonnet, the ode — influence and the anxiety it generates. D. Dinis copying and adapting Pero Meogo’s alva; T.S. Eliot weaving The Canterbury Tales, The Divine Comedy and everything else under the sun into The Waste Land; William Burroughs cutting and pasting from himself; rap and hip hop sampling. Homage, influence, plagiarism, imitation as fertile ground for artistic creation?
In the digital ecosystem of today, and with GenAI, how do we even parse cultural and artistic influence and plagiarism? The dialectics and through-lines that organised most of literary history are a meaningless organising principle today.
We are not jesters, we are only shadows
Silhouettes recur. In Pattern Recognition the creator remains in shadow, identity inferred through faint traces. Transportna mirrors this: figures in half-light, faces obscured by noise, a name suggesting transit without form. The stage becomes an empty screen glowing with our projections. We are audience and mirror simultaneously. The project is, in a literal sense, nobody — a channel through which something flows.
AI here is less a tool than a dramaturgical engine. Nestor and Kira operate as avatars through which an experiment is staged: can a hybrid creation make real people feel real feelings? It can. The emotional connection proves genuine, a kind of affective Turing test. So the value lies in troubling the distinction.
AI in Transportna becomes a medium, a sort of mirror to an emotional state. The uncanny arises because we expect a face behind feeling. When emotion arrives disembodied, we oscillate between recognition and alienation. That estrangement may be the point. It forces self-awareness: were we moved by performance or by projection? If a song brings tears, does the heartbeat behind it matter?
A strange time is coming where social media and AI will merge and, in the socioeconomic and cultural context we are in, the change will be quiet, deep and impactful — more so than Web 2.0 and social media.
Affect, not functionality or efficiency, will drive it: desire, belonging, support, friendship as SaaS; loneliness, mental health, mentorship, influence economies. And art, too. Intention or critical analysis will be useful, but this type of analysis done here, in a few years, will be useless; this will be all around us and most of us, as now, will be untrained — emotionally, cognitively, economically — to deal with it.
So
Fernando Pessoa
Gibson ends with Cayce “weeping for her century, although whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know” — ambivalent mourning for something irretrievable, for a before-and-after she can feel in her body but cannot name cleanly. That future is here, but not evenly distributed. Transportna leaves a similar ambiguity, distilling art to affect separated from persona, or creating a persona in the dramaturgical engine of AI. Are we mourning the loss of the romantic artist, or simply confronting the wounds this music channels? Of what is coming? In a generative world, creation becomes recursive: we build machines in our image, they build artefacts in our image, and we encounter ourselves again — not as confession, but as output; not as biography, but as pattern. When it goes wrong, we enter the frightening territory of text-to-video pornography, the frightening spectacle for children of Troom Troom.
And then comes the harder question, the one that sits under the aesthetic pleasure: is this pornography? Not in the narrow sense, but in the Baudrillardian one — a world where the representation no longer refers back to a stable real, where the image becomes more compelling than what it supposedly depicts, where the simulation is not a copy but a replacement: the joy of control, and its emptiness. If art is a technology for mediating feeling, then machine-made feeling risks becoming the cleanest commodity of all: frictionless, abundant, endlessly re-sellable, unburdened by the stubborn mess of a human life.
This is where suspicion enters in listening to Transportna, and it isn’t merely philosophical. It is produced. It is incentivised. The commercial scaffolding matters: the Patreon gating, the staged scarcity, the “exclusive access” economy, the controlled drip of persona and absence. You don’t just find the artefact; you are placed into a funnel. A community forms — as it did around the footage in Pattern Recognition — but in a different era, under different logics. The forum is no longer only a place of interpretation; it is also a mechanism of capture. Mystery creates attention; attention becomes leverage; leverage becomes monetisable intimacy.
The result is a subtle poisoning of the well. We move from feeling to auditing. We start asking about intent, provenance, pipeline, not because we are cold, but because the environment trains us to be. In a world saturated with engineered affect — influencer sincerity, brand vulnerability, AI girlfriends, deathbots — the reasonable defence is a kind of emotional suspicion. But that defence has a cost: it corrodes the very mode of receptivity art depends on. If every lyric might be a marketing hook, if every voice might be an interface, then empathy becomes conditional. We don’t listen; we verify. Every voice we hear might be a Vocaloid.
Baudrillard would say this is how the system wins. Not by lying to us in crude ways, but by dissolving the distinction between the real and its performance until the question “is it real?” becomes unanswerable, and then irrelevant. The simulation does not need to be true; it needs to be credible, to circulate, to generate responses, like pornography is to sex. The commodity is no longer the song alone; it is the affective loop around the song — the discourse, the speculation, the membership, the paywall, the belonging. The audience becomes both consumer and co-producer: we supply the interpretive labour that keeps the thing alive. The wound is still there, but it is now entangled with a market apparatus that knows exactly how wounds behave online.
So what do we do with this, at the end, when the work has already moved us?
Maybe we go back before modern suspicion, before branding, before algorithms — back to Plato and Aristotle and Pessoa — not to moralise but to remember what we already knew: that art is mimesis, and mimesis is powerful precisely because it is not the thing itself. Love poetry, feel it. Cry and be angry and sad with drama; laugh with comedy. Somewhere in the work there is a kernel of human emotion, of thought — even if the voice is synthetic, even if the arrangement is compiled, even if the persona is a mask designed for circulation. But never trust the poet. Never, above all, trust the performer. Not because they are evil, but because their craft is shadow-craft: they point to firelight and shadows and are nothing if not firelight and shadows themselves.
Even creators, when they are hurt, cry. They don’t break out in an ode or song. And yet, when readers or listeners are hurt, they open poetry books, play songs. We revisit words and music that give the unsayable a shape, an edge, something closer to our fingertips. We do it because art is not life; it is one of the ways life becomes bearable, and the unsayable issaid and felt, and thought.
That distinction matters more now, not less. Creators, writers, readers engage with art deeply. So, listener, give this type of art, today, your heart, yes, but kiss it with your eyes open. Let it move you without letting it replace you. Real life is something else and somewhere else. Whatever art gives, it cannot give the thing itself: the repair of trust, the work of presence, the risk of relationship. If the wound speaks and we listen, then the rest is ours: to step away from the glowing screen, to find what the screen can only make, imitate, or express, and to build it — clumsily, imperfectly — with bodies and hearts that can actually be broken.
As for Transportna, go check them out. They might just be the most interesting thing online, and their music is the best thing I’ve heard in years.
Sources:
Baudrillard, J. (1991) Simulacros e Simulação. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água.
Gibson, W. (2003) Pattern Recognition. New York: Berkley Books.
Muldoon, J. (2026) Love Machines. London: Faber & Faber.
Turchyn, V. (2025) ‘Not Beyond the Machines: Post-Punk After Humanity’. Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/not-beyond-the-mountains/not-beyond-the-machines-post-punk-after-humanity-e3eeecc472b3 (Accessed: 6 February 2026).
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