Iterative Beings [diary #3]
by Lou MorlierPurJus tries as much as possible not to stage his own life for the camera, contrary to what a lot of vloggers tend towards. Instead he captures sparse glimpses of the events and rewrites them through playful editing. PurJus is the most socially engaging. He has been stared at, mocked and judged while he took videos of himself. People looked at us seeing one and the same person. I couldn’t hide behind a fictional character: he is not perceived as such. He is real to those contemptuous eyes. My cat licks at me the same way, may I be obsessed to take selfies with her. She doesn’t make a difference, while humans couldn’t see further than my social manifestation. The tip of the iceberg; the external signs of the phenomenon. Some didn’t seem to think that I could be someone else entirely. Others joyfully participated in his filming. I couldn’t help but think that the ones mocking PurJus’s narcissism were precisely the most disgruntled egos. Praise doubt, banish certitude.
A verse from Jean Cocteau’s Requiem then came to my mind:
Il est juste qu’on m’envisage
Après m’avoir dévisagé.
It is fair that one envisages me
After having stared at me.
In that respect, I seek to embrace the plural singularity of the hyperhuman, which evolves in multiple, imbricated simulations.
SovereignlessSoul ended up being more of a lay back type of character, reflecting my own chronical idleness. He prefers to simply stream his gameplay on Twitch – with minimal commentary and no facecam – rather than producing entertaining content on YouTube. Success is not a concern for him.
WhispersFromTheDeep established himself as an omnipotent, eerie narrator. While he retains ASMR’s soft-spoken and meditative fashions, he is willing to offer introspective, uncanny experiences while placing emphasis on writing and storytelling.
While I have been continually questioning the relevancy of this work during the residency, it helped me to name and understand the rules, structures and issues defining these online self-alterating practices. In the end, it particularly highlighted the thin line between pathological and creative alteration of the self through digital mediums. Both are strongly intertwined, as far as I am concerned.
Eventually, as I looked for the exceptional in commonplaces, my three iterations started resonating within myself in polyphony. From threatening parasites they began evolving into symbionts, cooperating towards the augmentation of my core being. Still, I am not sure if I tamed them, if they tamed me, if I simulate or if I am being simulated.
“How queer, you humans. How you go on, never separating truth from fiction.”
Grave Warden Agdayne, in Dark Souls II (FromSoftware, March 2014).
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 ↩