Once my days of internet fame were over, I began to feel as if there was nothing left of me at all. I floated around like a vaporous ghost, waiting to be noticed nonetheless. Being a marginally famous blogger was the only aspect of my life that I had assigned any value to whatsoever, and when it was all over I was completely alone. We keep trying to do the thing we were once good at getting attention for, but never quite manage to recapture the zeitgeist that crested us up, then dropped us off.

Psychogeography accounts for the emotional effects of an urban environment on its walkers, claiming that a city was mapped in psychic zones. Why does one drift, instinctively, to the left hand side of the street when both pavements are clear? What codes these spaces with meaning? Dérive, then, is defined as unstructured drifting through urban environments to attune oneself to a city and its shifting ambiance. When public space — on the street or through a screen — is structured to keep us out, dérive moves beyond leisurely to become political.

Cluelessness about where the scene came from, or being part of a scene at all, is integral to Weird Facebook's culture. The fact that joining is as easy as sending friend requests to the people involved and just letting their content slowly take over your News Feed means that, for an art community, the barrier of entry is incredibly low. Some people take it very seriously; some people have been cultivating their audience for years. But randos don’t need to know any of this. Anyone can just wander in off the street, walk onto the stage, and start singing.

Technologies that presume to innovate — or worse yet, “disrupt” — are often met with some hesitancy or weariness. They remove power from human hands, and ask us to trust machinery or algorithms. For couture, a trade founded on the belief that humans know best, this is an existential threat. But fashion thrives in the place between fear and boredom. “Manus x Machina” tries to show that wearable technology is not so scary after all; it’s all part of a familiar family tree.