Nature sounds on auto-tune (ocean edit), 2022, Perth Festival, Western Australia.

In March 2020, the internet lit up with think-pieces about bedroom singer-songwriter turned international superstar Billie Eilish’s hair. It was now platinum blonde, with a fringe, ‘bangs’.

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell was born three months after the attacks on New York’s World Trade centre in 2001 and has been in the public eye since roughly 2015, when the song she co-wrote with her brother Finnaes – Ocean Eyes – and released on the Web 2.0 streaming platform SoundCloud became a global phenomenon.

Ocean Eyes is soft, epic, dreamy, emotional. It’s easy to imagine it sung by a siren, from a cliff-top overlooking the sea somewhere. The story of its release and circulation are mythic. Finnaes wrote it for his own band and handed it over to his sister to record for a dance performance she was working on; it was uploaded to SoundCloud - legend has it -  purely so her dance teacher could access it. By the next day it was a viral hit. This metaphorical freeway from nowhere to everywhere captures something of the spirit of the times and their golden promise  -  that DIY producers anywhere can, with only consumer electronics, bedroom acoustics and their own creativity, transcend traditional studio systems to build their own empire online. Eilish’s parents are both Hollywood actors and her access to The Culture is therefore different to most, but the narrative still holds.

Billie Eilish has a genius for the relationship between image and sound, form and content. Her vibe is inseparable from her music. She lives, as many people born this side of the millennium do, as a continuous performance and yet she is never performing, entirely authentic and relatable. That’s not a contradiction or craven selling-out. That’s just life, now. While Ocean Eyes underwent a long, barrelling zeitgeist wave, Billie Ellish’s hair was deepest blue – like the ocean, or a boot-up screen, or a cyborg, or a water sprite. For a period of nearly two years, up until the moment of the platinum blonde reveal and in-sync with the narrative arc of other most well-known hit, Bad Guy, she had maintained an iconic two-toned style, jet black with a thick strip of bright colour at the roots simulating re-growth that were dyed toxic, fluorescent green. The wardrobe to match this style was baggy, masculine, street with touches of sport and surf – between genders and against a classic, white-girl Hollywood glamour. This in part explained the interest in her transition to a look more apparently ‘conventional’, a transition so rapid that there was speculation that the black-green that preceded it had been a wig.

There is in many of these articles, a sense of vague disappointment and betrayal that was given less vague form on Twitter. What did it mean, for Billie Eilish to buy into this pretty girl image? The toxic green regrowth was such an obvious simulation, the elevation into style of something – the ‘natural’ growth of hair after a dye job – that would usually be hidden or disguised. Eilish’s work thus far, like many creators coming of age online, had been about exposing the mechanism, an understanding that the endless digital production and circulation of content meant that the ‘simulation’ and ‘the real’ had looped in on each other, were no longer distinguishable, were perhaps no longer worth distinguishing between.

Billie Eilish’s Ocean Eyes forms an integral component of Benjamin Barretto’s Nature Sounds on Auto-Tune (Ocean Edit). A bootleg mix of the song uploaded to YouTube is distorted, manually, using free to use autotune apps, as it plays through an iPad and Bluetooth speakers. In other corners of the hotel room – in the shower, above the concierge station – other speakers play autotuned nature sounds, also from YouTube, presumably uploaded for the open-source purpose of relaxation or sleep therapy. The apps pick up not only the video sound, but the ambient noise of the room itself – conversations, footsteps, the rustling of sheets and clothes. On a television screen removed from its all mount and propped on a chair, Chromecast footage from a laptop displays a live-feed from one of the many ‘surf cams’ positioned at beaches around the world, aggregated through the subscription service Surfline.com. These eyes on the ocean offer surfers live updates of swell and weather conditions. Here, the view is of the iconic Western Australian surfing break of Margaret River. In room 203 the sun sets on screen, positioned against itself in the west, in real time, in a bedroom arranged to be perfectly dishevelled, as though its inhabitant has just vacated, leaving behind the visible mechanics of an experiment. There is distortion, on distortion, on distortion, an exposure of the vulnerability within the system. There is the perfect image, and there is the mess. There is the liquid crystal screen, flat and elegant, and the basement or bedroom it illuminates. There is the dream, and there is the reality. There is the simulation, and there is the real, or is there?

At the heart of Benjamin Barretto’s multi-form practice is painting. In these paintings, technicolour ink stains and painted gestures are juxtaposed with hard edged block coloured iron-on transfers. Or, layers of paint are scraped back to reveal pastel beneath the thick, dark surface. Here, Ocean Ocean Ocean Emotion translates the shapes and colours from a digital print laid over the bed, in which a capture of a pair of boardshorts is distorted as they are move over a flatbed scanner.

The boardshorts, the ocean, the icecream palette, the distortions of logos and enlarged fabric textures that become abstract painting and installation come, for Benjamin Barretto, from the formative influence of a young-adult, suburban Perth life in skating and surfing, from an innate understanding of the relationship between vibe, image, form content, from subcultural signalling through clothes and colour that are tied to landscape, suburban or coastal.  He has returned to Perth, recently, with his family, from a long period living in other coastal cities – Sydney, Los Angeles. The Western Australian coastline appears as image here, reflecting this return, although it is filtered through the cool distance of the screen. Wi-Fi fluctuations contort the picture into pixels, into an occasionally frozen image. This image of home is sound tracked by digital birdsong and the soft, sad, swelling lilt of Eilish’s borrowed voice, slowed, and paused, awash with feeling.

There a clip, on YouTube, titled: Welcome back to NZ Pōwhiri + Waiata for Billie Eilish. Before it loads, an ad plays for the Telstra Wi-Fi network, cutting between difference scenes of makeshift ‘working from home’ set-ups, strewn with laptops and cables: this is your regional office, your home studio, your martial arts dojo. (image of a mother doom scrolling in the dark) And this is your panic room. When the clip starts, Billie Eilish is captured arriving through the international terminal of an airport in Aotearoa. Her hair is black, she wears an oversized black PlayBoy t-shirt, with the familiar logos in lime green to match a pair of tracksuit pants and a black and green scarf. She walks, tired, through the airport while soft, lyrical voices build into a melody. The Hātea Kapa Haka group have come to meet her. They begin a Haka that transitions softly into a cover, in Te Reo, of her song: when the party’s over. The borrowed song in becomes something else, something new. Billie Eilish cries, the singers cry, everyone is happy and sad at once, the music gentle and full of emotion, nostalgia and gratitude. The feeling transmits, through the screen to the viewer, is felt, becomes real.

Gemma Watson