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Health Goth: At its most basic, Health Goth is a collection of styles and mindsets that already exist—like street goth, various internet stuff, and clothing fetish videos—that we’ve brought together on Facebook. It’s also obviously influenced by sports advertisements and the rendered environments they create.You’ve spoken out against articles written about Health Goth. How do you feel you’ve been misrepresented in the media?
It’s mostly just that they're trying to define something that is essentially amorphous. Plus there’s an emphasis on going to the gym, which is something we never really even did.

Yeah, and that contradiction is partly where the interest comes from, because it’s constantly unearthing these new juxtapositions. But there’s also more to being healthy than keeping in shape: meditation, eating well, occupying super clean environments.
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When we started we’d just see an ad or some clothes we liked, and we’d see something dark or sexual in them that wasn’t intended to be there. So really the subversive side was just portraying the ads in a new light, because we wished these aspects were intentional. Things sort of went from there.

We just had a meeting with Adidas at the Portland headquarters. A lot of times these companies can’t really connect to their ads—they don’t realize what they're doing. So I guess that’s where we come in.Has there been a backlash since the Adidas thing?
People’s reaction is gonna be what it’s gonna be, but we’re not trying to do something stupid for a quick buck. There are thirsty people out there, but that’s not us. We all do pretty well in our normal lives. If we can put something out that’s cool, then that’s great—selling out is awesome.How big of a role does net art have to play in the Health Goth aesthetic?
When we were getting into this world we were taken in by a lot net artists who were doing their thing. People like Ramona Vektroid, Gergo Kovacs, and Jono Mi Lo, who was there at the start of seapunk. We’re connected by accelerationism as a movement in general, and all of this stuff draws things out from the constant bombardment of advertising.
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The perspective people have on this is really strange. Everyone in that small scene freaks out when Rihanna starts using seapunk imagery on Saturday Night Live, but think how many people saw that performance who had no idea where that came from. You can’t care about people co-opting net art because that’s the nature of culture on the internet. It has the power to cause things to reference itself exponentially. What are you going to do?

The thing with accelerationist aesthetics is that they can rise and then be reduced to nothing in a matter of weeks. But inevitably, some of these aesthetics will command more attention than others. That’s where we’re at. We can keep curating these images, but it’s really about how people engage and reinterpret it. If this gets pigeonholed into being just about working out it’s going to die super fast. No one’s going to give a fuck about seeing someone in all black hitting the gym on their Facebook feeds.Finally, what's on the Health Goth playlist at the moment?
Dystopian electronic music has an obvious appeal—labels like Pan and Liminal Sounds. And we’re into industrial sounds, which links back to OG goth. Take stuff like L-Vis 1990, who’s pretty forward in terms of production, but drops mixes with Front Line Assembly in them. A lot of his production is taken from whatever sounds those original guys were using, but his shit is clean.But we’ve steered clear of associating a particular sound with Health Goth, because when you tie audio and visual stuff together it becomes more limited and homogenized. Just look at Witch House, which got to a point where there might as well have been a witch house app that could put together hip-hop hi-hats and deep bass and thrown a fucking triangle on there. We don’t want that.Follow Alex Horne on Twitter.