Hannah Diamond and Arvida Byström are girls online

Welcome to Dazed’s PC Music takeover, a two-day guest edit celebrating 10 years of pop music’s most exhilarating label. Head here to check out exclusive mixes, an oral history, and in-depth profiles with some of its key players

It’s a couple of days after Hannah Diamond’s London show at Heaven in which she performed her recent new album Perfect Picture to a room full of adoring fans. “I have one show left tomorrow,” she says, as Swedish multi-disciplinary artist Arvida Byström asks her about the tour dates, “before I get to be my regular non-popstar self.” This comment on popstar performativity, and the performance spectacle in the context of femininity, speaks to a common thread that both explore within their work – in particular, the visage and experience of being a girl online.

Whilst the current digital sphere is overwhelmingly girl-coded and saturated in hyper-femme aesthetics, this cultural embrace of the feminine and girly style popularity marks a more recent shift over the past few years. In the early 2010s, however, when Byström and Diamond were beginning to build their distinctive creative worlds – and when PC Music was emerging – their use of pastel hues and cute aesthetics was mostly dismissed by mainstream culture. Byström’s photos of peaches in lace lingerie, and a portrait of Diamond wearing a baby pink North Face jacket – the cover for her debut single “Pink and Blue”, an early PC Music SoundCloud release – stand as examples of their iconic, and influential, work.

The digital lens through which both artists explore identity also intertwines with the technological machinations of PC Music itself. For Byström, this cybernated perception currently involves her AI sex doll project, while Diamond’s intimate, diaristic lyricism is cast through glowing screens. Having traversed through the Tumblr era, the co-option of feminism and the shift into Web 3.0 – all of which they enthusiastically reflect on – the pair of artists exist triumphantly as “expert girls” in a digital world where, as Alex Quicho wrote earlier this year, “everyone is a girl online”. It’s a reality that Byström and Diamond very much paved the way for.

When did you two first meet? 

Hannah Diamond: We have a friend in common, Aaron Chan, who also goes by the alias of Scotty2Hotty69 and makes really cool video art. Aaron made a lot of the early PC Music lyric videos and SOPHIE’s stage visuals. Aaron is our friend in common that connected us probably around 2012. I definitely came to a bunch of your very early shows in London, which I loved. 

Arvida Byström: I also remember when your first song came out, and it was on SoundCloud. I had like five people that week sending me that song because they were like this could respond to your work, you should know this, which was really sweet.

Hannah Diamond: Such a different time on the internet. It felt a lot less clouty than some of the ways that things go viral or things happen today. I think everyone’s got a different kind of self-awareness now. It's a bit more like everyone's constructing it to happen and they have an awareness of what would be beneficial for them. A different kind of energy. There was a lot of weird and pure stuff happening at that time.

Arvida Byström: I went online when I was 12 or 13, because I wasn’t very cool in school and I was a bit alternative. That was where you found other alternative people to be friends with. It was definitely more of a place to be weird, to be like okay our culture doesn’t really have as many natural platforms and doesn't have that sort of funding, so you went online to get that interaction with people. Now, of course, everyone is online and it’s so much more commercialised online. I’m sure there are underground culture things online too, but it’s so much harder to find. For a long time, everything that was big online was just anything that didn’t fly for people that have a lot of money, so it just had to exist online.

Hannah Diamond: That’s so true. I guess now you have to work quite hard to find those little pockets of interesting things through all the general noise that exists. I wonder if that makes it feel the same kind of level of special in a way; now it’s like you discover it amongst a sea of stuff, whereas before the process of going online was the discovery aspect. I’m glad we found each other in that weird pocket of time.

“Such a different time on the internet. It felt a lot less clouty than some of the ways that things go viral or things happen today” – Hannah Diamond

How have these changes in the way we exist online and interact with technology impacted you and your work? 

Arvida Byström: It’s impacted so much. I came online at a point where not everyone had a camera in their pocket. I had a photography blog in like 2008 and Tavi Gevinson was one of my blog friends. I was on Tavi’s blog scroll. At that time, there weren’t that many alternative fashion blogs. And I feel like my art and everything has grown in a time where someone like me could get big. It was just like a weird lucky sliver of chance.

Hannah Diamond: I feel the same. If I was doing the same thing that I’m doing right now, I would feel like one of many people rather than like someone who pioneered doing something the way that they do.

Arvida Byström: Today there is so much content online and the only way to really get through that noise is to be super, super, super fucking lucky and to keep on maintaining that...

Hannah Diamond: ...Or be consistently loud and shouting about what you’re doing. Which is not my personality at all.

Arvida Byström: Yeah. There was a little time when it was just weird people online who liked uploading things there and connecting with other people. Now we’re on the other side where, generally, it’s so much easier if you have the resources and money to get through that noise. 

There’s currently a real proliferation of hyper-feminine aesthetics, which you both have been instrumental in pioneering. Was there a particular point you noticed this cultural shift into everything being so girl-coded? 

Hannah Diamond: We obviously lived through that Tumblr feminism era, which was problematic in some ways, and also the commercialisation of a certain type of pastel pink feminism that was actually quite one-dimensional. I think it was important, it definitely played a role but it transformed into a beast beyond itself. I remember there was an ASOS t-shirt or something that said ‘feminist’ in an ice cream shop-type font. I thought here we go, we’ve reached an endpoint. And there was the girlboss era of blogging as well.

Arvida Byström: Things have changed a lot in the past 15 years. I think that is also good to remember. It’s really sad that it got so co-opted, but for quite some time it used to be that the only women you saw in movies and commercials were truly just very skinny white people. So it’s good that something has changed at least. 

Hannah Diamond: It’s true. Some positive things definitely came out of it. It also helped to uplift the idea of women or girls as creators as well, which has been a really important part of both of our career trajectories. Especially when it comes to female photographers, that new wave of Tumblr feminism did something for that for sure.

Arvida Byström: Something else that’s really nice is that over the past few years I feel like the girl is now an intellectual. For a long time, with the way I dressed, I looked quite young for quite some time, people would talk over my head and that made me feel really shitty. But now even if I wear very girly or sexy stuff, it’s not like people think that I can’t be an intellectual.

Hannah Diamond: We’re now expert girls in our field.

Arvida Byström: I love that. I was on a panel with Alex Quicho who wrote ‘Everyone Is a Girl Online’ for Wired. She’s such a girl intellectual. She has the cutest little outfits and immaculate, amazing, fun language. It feels like that is definitely happening now, and that’s so nice to see. It’s almost like when you’re a hyper-girl it equals intellectual by concept. The girl is a concept. 

Hannah Diamond: It‘s such a concept. Now you also have to have a really broad aesthetic understanding of what fits into that without it crossing over into some other girl context like coquette or all these other things that make up what a girl could be. One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is this really soft, cute vocal trend that’s happening with PinkPantheress and the liquid drum and bass stuff, and people like Kenya Grace. It’s really cool to see how that's being received now versus when me and some of my friends first started putting out music that was soft and girly and had cute connotations. Back then, it was pretty controversial and there were tons of think pieces trying to work out if we were real. For me, that definitely is progress. It’s really cool that cuteness and softness can be received in a really open-hearted way from an enjoyment level now without it having to be deconstructed as being something sinister or deeper. 

“Today there is so much content online and the only way to really get through that noise is to be super, super, super fucking lucky” – Arvida Byström

Definitely, cuteness and cute aesthetics used to be dismissed and treated so differently.

Hannah Diamond: It used to have a really negative connotation. When I first put out my music, like ‘Pink and Blue’ and ‘Every Night’, everyone was calling it bubblegum saccharine pop. It made it feel very disempowering because of the use of femininity, cuteness and hyper-femininity at the time. lt felt difficult to be confronted with being associated with things that deep down I knew summarised who I was. But also being called bubblegum gave me this deep, disgusting, primal ick.

Arvida Byström: It used to feel like getting patted on the head. Very minimising. When it comes to some of my selfies that are photographic portraits, people always want it to be empowering too. It’s either sexy or cute or it’s just empowering. But sometimes cute things can also hold deeper and sadder meanings, too. It can be a processing of trauma. For me, when it comes to certain feminine aesthetics, especially as I have so many female followers on my Instagram, I like Instagram as a place of homosocial hanging out between women and femme people. Some feminine people just comment ‘yes queen’ or a very positive thing on each other’s selfies and for me, that’s like a way of guys hanging out and watching soccer. Something that’s both fun and an exchange, but there’s also some sort of sadness and processing in it that’s not only pure and good. All these things can exist at the same time and be interesting. It can also be bonding with other people or bonding with a part of yourself. If you liked feminine things as a child, I feel like that’s a comfort thing. It can really hit some childhood happiness and childhood trauma at the same time.

Both of your work centres a lot around self-portraiture, across different mediums. How did you start doing that? 

Arvida Byström: I have this whole narrative of myself and how I came to be the artist that I am. I’m not sure that it’s correct but this is how I read it. It’s basically also us coming online at an age where the internet turned into web 2.0. It started to become more image-based. That also made it cheaper with digital cameras and there was a bigger demand for digital cameras. All of a sudden being a photographer was, for me and my alternative friends, that was cool. Everyone wanted to be a photographer, that’s what you were supposed to want to be. With Flickr, the blogs and everything like that. There were photographers that I did like, and a lot of them took photos of models and other cool people, but I was very depressed and did not feel very cool. And I was really shy and had so much social anxiety.

Hannah Diamond: That’s literally the same as me. I spent so much time on Flickr bookmarking people’s work that I liked. 

Arvida Byström: Yeah, like Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Ryan McGinley… those kinds of photographs. I had to find a way to take photos of myself and I was also living in Sweden. I started using flash a lot. Now things are different to my photos back then but I was using flash photography and that’s how I got the very poppy colours of my early photographs. I was doing a lot of studio stuff rather than around people. So [it came] from being lonely and depressed.

“I’m always thinking about screens as windows or screens as performance platforms or different forms of audience versus performer” – Hannah Diamond

Hannah Diamond: Mine was pretty much the same. Even the really airbrushed aesthetic of my work came from a similar place to all the things that Arvida’s been talking about. At the time I didn't have Photoshop so I used to use this online editor called LunaPic. It was definitely quite weird but I got really into doing it and I used to retouch all the photos using it. Just to see how far I could push it with these really limited tools, because I'd been doing a lot of illustration before I got my first digital camera. Getting the first digital camera was this thing of like oh, I can make images way faster than me drawing everything from scratch, which would take me like a month to finish an image. I started taking photos of myself initially to use as references for the drawings that I would do. If I couldn’t find the thing that I wanted I would take the photo of myself and then use that as the drawing reference. Then it got to the point where I was like these photos actually kind of slay, I should just use the photos. Why am I drawing them after I’ve taken the photo? I would dress up and do all this make-up, and then I would start drawing it. And it’s like actually I’ve kind of done the art.

I also wanted to ask about the gaze – particularly the digital gaze – and how that informs your work? 

Hannah Diamond: For me, I’m thinking about that stuff all the time. It naturally becomes a part of the process. I’m always thinking about screens as windows or screens as performance platforms or different forms of audience versus performer. All these things are like different windows or portals to different worlds. I’m always thinking a lot about what it means to be seen. Like being watched or being looked at whether you’re being looked at or understood. And all these different layers that make that stuff up for me.

Arvida Byström: I love your ‘Perfect Picture’ song. 

Hannah Diamond: Thank you. That’s really about all of that, to be honest. The whole album is just about my weird thoughts about being me online: making images of myself, why I do it and what it feels like.

Arvida Byström: Actually my brother and I are putting together a short film – because we made one that came out this year. We’re making another one about leaked nudes and a teen girl and we used ‘Perfect Picture’ as a reference.

Hannah Diamond: I love that. If you want to use it, please use it. The current setup of the internet has changed the way we think about images. They’re no longer these separate things that are inaccessible to most people. Now everyone can create images every day. It's a part of how we communicate to each other.

Arvida Byström: About a year before I found Tumblr I got interested in feminism. And then I found Tumblr and that was a truly revolutionary time for me. I loved how you created yourself and your thoughts, it was like a mood board of your brain with a mix of your own photos, other people's photos and the questions and little text bits.

Hannah Diamond: For me, it opened a new way of thinking about self portraits. It was like a multi-layered self portrait. It got everybody thinking about the value of their inner world. I think people had a good idea about the value of a person with their image or their body and then Tumblr changed the game so that there was value in your inner world too.

Arvida Byström: Exactly. Instead of just having your body representing yourself. That’s what I miss sometimes with Instagram; of course there’s so many big meme accounts and I feel like they're putting their little brains on display in this beautiful way but it was so nice when you could reblog – it felt like you’re saying I am created by all the people around me and that felt so important. Back then, I was very into deconstructing the gaze and what a body should look like in a photo but then later I got more interested in how female gaze is used as a term that is often just women photographing women still in pretty classically sexy ways.

Hannah Diamond: In male gaze ways still.

Arvida Byström: Exactly. Even when you use your camera or your phone camera to take photos of yourself you recreate the male gaze. That’s why I am obsessed with mirror selfies because you show who takes the photo and there’s something very interesting when you take a pretty classically sexist photo of yourself and objectify yourself in that way and you show that you're holding the camera. That doesn't have to only be empowerment, it can also be mixed with processing trauma or just bonding with other people online. In terms of the gaze, I’m less interested at the moment in flipping the gaze but from Tumblr times I’ve always been interested in certain things that I know that some people think is grotesque. So I always play with that a bit.

I have a cute anecdote before we finish. I knew your music before Hannah but didn’t know that the label was called PC Music. But there was someone who commented ‘PC Music’ and tagged a friend on a lot of my images. I think they were just saying this aesthetic is similar to PC Music. I was like what does this mean? Then probably just a few months later, I knew what PC Music was and realised someone was going through my Instagram and being like this is so PC Music-coded.