Iterative Beings [diary #1]
by Lou Morlier– see here for the initial publication –
I has been quite intense.
I felt like a laboratory animal going through some freaky mutations. Three iterative beings are born, trapped in my body. Are they parasites? At first I thought I would just be a temporary, sporadic vessel for them, or at best that I could make them coexist flawlessly with the initial me. But they greedily drain my time and energy, leaving me as chimeric aberration wandering aimlessly. I am struggling to find a symbiosis. So far I feel like they are rather diminishing me than augmenting me. Let’s see if my metabolism can adapt.
Am I some kind of connected hypermutant, craving for the next update?
WhispersFromTheDeep published his first ASMR video, “Are you bored ?”, yesterday. On Thursday 27 July, PurJus will be posting the first episode of his vlog series: PureVie. Sovereignless Soul will start live streaming on Twitch from Monday 24 July.
Lou Morlier born in august 1994 in the northwestern countryside of France. 22 years old. Obtained a Bachelor of Cinema and Literature at Université Lumière Lyon II in 2015, and is now attending a Master of Arts at Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin. Morlier organizes the encounter of fetched materials, introduced in foreign environments. Trying – in the manner of an essayist – to unravel the subaqueous meanings of the relics he gathers during his digital cruises. Sometimes archeologist or ethnologist, sometimes fantasist or tightrope walker, documenting and manipulating random things he comes across, in a motion of poetic revamping.
an ethnographic archive of digital distribution
Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:
“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” 1.
One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.
Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.
Fußnoten
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Malinowski, Broniwslaw: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, London: The Athlone Press, London (1967), 12-13 ↩