Digital Mythologies / Digital Plagues (Part 2)

The Text and a Context for Prosumption

To give meaning to a text, it shouldn’t simply entertain you; it should be allowed to interweave itself inextricably into the fabric of your life. To this extent, the text still lives – Read more

Houellebecq – The Map and the Territory (Part 2)

The Shamanic Cryptograph

  • The finished portrait of Houellebecq is described as follows: Read more

Houellebecq – The Map and the Territory (Part 1)

Beyond the Precession of Simulacra

  • Beyond the precession of simulacra, Houellebecq’s 2010 novel The Map and the Territory appears like a groaning hieroglyph, its anguish revealing the entirely alien reality on which our lives are based. The map is our model, the territory is the real and the narrator – the Jed-Houellebecq complex – Read more

Digital Mythologies / Digital Plagues (Part 1)


“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Conceptual Tactility

Calligraphic Sensuality and the Digital Text

When a person writes, there is a certain way in which they ‘inhabit’ the medium. For instance, the posture of the body as it moves the hand across the page and the feel of the letters which are returned to the writer in order for them to respond and govern their shape. This physical experience which is fed back to the writer Read more

Essentials for a Manifesto on Transgressive Simulation

Definitions:

  1. We admit from the outset that the virtual is the estranged simulation of a reality lost. We further admit that Read more

Some Problems in the Aesthetics of Immersion (Part 2)


Doctor: “Another tape involves physical coercion – actually holding the child down: ‘You’re holding a pretty girl down as you eat her. You can feel your dick getting hard.’”
Lotringer: “Actually…”
Doctor: “What?”
Lotringer: “Nothing. I’m sorry.”
Doctor: “Another tape involves sadistic coercion, tying the child down, hitting him hard, making him bleed: ‘You’ve stuck a water hose up a girl’s cunt, and you’re turning on the water full force. She’s begging you to stop.’”
Lotringer: “My God!”

(Lotringer, Overexposed, p.61, bolding mine.)


Too Bored to Fuck

The above dialogue is of a doctor in an early CBT[1] clinic explaining their method for measuring the arousal of patients to certain stimuli. The clinic was run by Dr. Seymour Sachs, an early pioneer in behavioural therapy, and focuses primarily on sex offenders and sexual deviants. The ‘method’ being described is Read more

Some Problems in the Aesthetics of Immersion (Part 1)

From the spectacular to the Experiential

  1. Spectacular art – that is, art where there is an object and a viewer – is losing a certain efficacy and function. Even installation art has the deadened quality of 2-dimensional art, artistic efficacy now shifting from the spectacular to the experiential or immersive. Pollock worked from ‘the floor’ Read more
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