By: Sam Moore

Untitled (A glitch in the matrix)

“It was a cliche thought, but Maria had always sympathised with the monster.” This throwaway line from Imogen Binnie’s Nevada (2013, p.22) is an echo of a common thread of trans thinking that can be identified everywhere from Susan Stryker’s seminal 1994 text on Frankenstein, to Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak? (2019). The relationship between monsters and trans bodies can even be encountered in art by cis creators, as exemplified in the many films by David Cronenberg. The similar trope of monster as outsider has existed in the DNA of popular media since Shelly’s Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus (1818), and James Whale’s cinematic adaptation from 1931. Frankenstein’s Monster is also a glitch, something that exists beyond the confines of the world as normally understood; they’re uncanny, uncertain, a body that exists on the fringe. When Dr. Frankenstein has Igor flick the switch and, in a bolt of lightning his creation is (re)born, that same creation is also glitching out, finding a way to exist beyond and between the boundaries of the real world. 

The first glitch that I remember was from playing the PS2 game The Simpsons Hit and Run (2003). I remember driving Professor Frink’s rocket car and falling off of the edge of Springfield, somehow ending up beneath the map itself. I twisted the camera to look up at the town while I existed outside of it, a moment of slippage. I remember finding it strange, uncanny, but still somehow tempting. I kept looking for ways to fall off the edge of the map. 

In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell argues that the binary body itself exists as a way to limit us, and that the idea of the glitch instead allows us to “consider the in-between as a core component of survival — neither masculine nor feminine, neither male nor female, but a spectrum across which we may be empowered to choose and define ourselves for ourselves.” (p.11) Russell uses the term “fissure” as a way to consider how this glitch is something through which we can fall – like the map in Hit and Run, like the messy body horror transformations of Cronenberg’s horror films – what Russell calls “new possibilities of being and becoming manifest”. 

The Creature in Frankenstein is a glitch in between the most existential binaries of all: that between the living and the dead. In the essay Why Frankenstein’s Monster Haunts Queer Art (2017), Charlie Fox writes about how Shelley’s tale “shape-shifts to suit any number of freaky interpretations”, its meaning fluid in a way that allows us to find whatever we may want from it. This, in theory, is one of the ways in which Frankenstein works as a trans text, a trans glitch: we can transform it into whatever we desire. Fox even references “the possibilities of male birth” inherent in how the doctor is able to create life, blurring the lines between the ways in which we understand not just gender as an idea, but also the gendered body and the meanings innate to it. 

The trans-ness of body horror is rooted in this idea of what the gendered body is; its meaning, limits, and boundaries. In horror, the body is constantly, relentlessly gendered, in a way that often falls prey to binary, almost essentialist ideas: the Final Girl is historically cis; the body is sexualised in binary ways – this is exaggerated in contemporary, meta-horrors like The Cabin in the Woods (2011) that gender their archetypal characters – stoner, slut, virgin, jock – along gendered lines. But these ideas are often challenged in body horror, narratives that are driven by transformation that pushes against the limits of how we understand the body; pushes up against the limits of the map like a glitch in The Simpsons Hit and Run. In Videodrome (1983), Max Renn’s body transforms in a way that is at once gendered and a refusal of gender as a slit emerges in his stomach and he pulls a firearm from it. This is a temporary transformation, one that comes just as soon as it goes – possibly caused by the strange signals of the Videodrome broadcast itself – as Max finds himself briefly outside of the lines of the boundary. This is to say, Max’s transformation, Max’s (trans) body is a glitch. 

In Glitch Feminism, Russell argues that the glitch is a space – which, in video gaming, it so often is; that strange world off the edge of the map – one that allows us to “innovate and experiment”, something that exists in digital spaces and allows us to explore, transform, “faster than AFK mores or the societies that produce them under which we are forced to operate offline.” (p.12)

This distinction between digital and physical realms also has an inherently trans undertone: in Nevada, Maria references the difference between cyberspace and meatspace in Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). This difference is where trans-ness enters The Matrix (1999). 

When Neo is freed from The Matrix, the computer simulation created by machines IRL as a way to turn humankind into batteries, there is a strange freedom that comes from the ways in which he returns to The Matrix; his newfound knowledge gives him access to superhuman feats and, in the film’s final act, he’s able to see and manipulate the source code of The Matrix itself. It’s like hacking, or cheating in a video game: he can learn kung-fu at a moment’s notice or transform his aesthetic into something idealised. When he and Trinity return to The Matrix to wreak havoc, they end up looking like a leather-clad T4T couple. The Matrix is also a world where glitches matter – deja vu is referred to as “a glitch in The Matrix”, a sign that something within the code, the world itself, has changed. This is another moment of slippage. 

A glitch in The Matrix feels akin to the trans slippages of (body) horror, a slippage between boundaries and binaries. A glitch in The Matrix serves as a reminder that it’s a construct, something being manipulated like the product of a videogame level editor. The Matrix, this constructed reality, is nothing more than a pile of code, an endless stream of 0s and 1s; a binary, repeated eternally. It’s ironic, then, that Neo becomes known as the one when he is, in reality, a glitch. This notion of The One – a defining aspect of the mythology of The Matrix – is surprisingly fluid, with meanings that are both messianic, and deeply romantic. For Trinity, Neo is the one because she falls in love with him, and it’s this act of love that produces a glitch in the system of The Matrix, a way for Neo and Trinity to understand themselves anew, breaking down boundaries both within The Matrix, and IRL.

Sam is a writer, artist, and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press, 2020); Long live the new flesh (Polari Press, 2022); and Search history (Queer Street Press, 2023). They are one of the co-curators of TISSUE, a trans reading and publishing initiative based in London.

back to the ball

By: Max Oginz

Manifestations (No Set Future)

In 2023, fashion Vlogger Tristan Payne moves through Manhattan streets as light washes the scaffolding around him. Between asking people “what are you wearing,” he speaks directly to the camera on the importance of authenticity and self-composed historicity. “I wanna speak the truth, I want it to be different, I want to show y’all what’s really going on…I don’t think about this as short term, I think about it as my legacy…so I think y’all should do the same.”¹ The atomized moment Payne walks through, in which what people are wearing is also “what’s really going on,” is characteristic of a specific post-pandemic logic of achievement, where objects, people, and time is given based on what might be called at best good habits, and at worst, good behaviour. Without a message, Payne presents himself to the world, and that presentation is an effective enough legacy. Self-presentation, finding oneself, self-realization, these are the abstractions that manifestation, a nebulous self-help term, serves. The purpose of this essay is not to trace manifestation to its origins, nor is it to provide a serious critique of a term that became a viral meme at the outset of the WFH era. Instead, manifestation serves as a window into contemporary visions of temporality. Manifestation is an imagined moment of mastery over time and capital, one that is particularly suited to the parasocial time of platform life. Such a mastery, I argue, expresses the circularity of time spent online, in which the system that distracts and allows one to live outside time is also the hack that offers users an opportunity to bend time–to 5 easy habits or a five-second countdown, or a special state of transcendent sleep. This circularity presents a particular vision of nowness that should be contextualized within the uncertainties of Anthropocene living. In a time where the prophecy is imminent material collapse, the importance of planning, and of manifesting, gains ironic and paramount appeal.

Since late 2020, manifestation has dominated meme pages and news feeds, variably used sincerely as a tool to improve mindfulness, and a joke parodying the notion of achieving goals simply through visualization or affirmation. In a YouTube video from 2022, self-help author Mel Robbins explains that “manifesting is preparing your mind, body, and spirit to take action.”² This preparation is a mental one with material outcomes. The mental system of manifestation varies from user to user, but manifestation has explicit predecessors in the late 19th and early 20th century “New Thought” movement. At its centre, manifestation is the notion that cognition is a system that can be controlled through the bending or refiguring of certain abstract rules of thought. 

From its outset, the practice was highly gendered and centered around a handful of self-help authors who appropriated hermetic, Vedic, and transcendental thought. These authors persist as apocryphal figures in online forums and instructional videos, with multiple personalities and pennames, each co-opting distinct theological frameworks. In sum, these authors, such as Prentice Mulford and William J. Atkinson, proposed a “mind-cure,” in which patterns of thought had a direct influence on material events. By changing thought, one could change circumstances. Philosopher William James, who provides a “psychological” account of self-help doctrine, wrote in 1902 that “Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision.”³ The modulation of thought becomes the primary object of both New Thought and the online self-help doctrines that are promulgated on Reddit threads and YouTube videos. Abstraction is modulated to achieve an intended outcome. Where one might be introduced to their romantic partner by chance, work hard toward a promotion, or achieve financial success by making some calculated if risky investment, manifestation locates all these capitalist success stories within a mindfulness practice that imagines the outcome already achieved. In other words, manifestation is a way of remembering the future in the hope that it might become the past. Reddit user SpacewithinSpace writes:

A lot of other people that I knew were struggling to get a job too. So i decided to manifest it. First I spent the first two weeks every morning working on my self concept using affirmations and by putting myself in the mindset and feeling of a person who would be earning money. Then when I was used to that feeling and it felt more natural, I visualized every night before bed. Then on a random day, my brother texted me telling me that he referred me to a manager that he knew at the airport to convince them to give me an interview. This was random and out of the blue which is how i knew i manifested it.⁴

In identifying manifestation’s imaginary, a few characteristics stand out in this post, the first of which is the specificity and purpose of the manifestation in question. The specific aim here is a singular outcome: a job for the user. Mentions of exterior circumstances are absent: no family to provide for, nor family history, no mention of class. Second, a divine randomness is transposed onto an intended, planned-for outcome. The manifestation of the job is specific, but the proof that it was manifested is in its divine random out-of-the-blueness. Finally, the singular outcome is transposed on a collective intervention: it’s the user’s brother who helps him achieve the manifested outcome. Taking the outcome of a collective action as an outcome solely for and by the user is central to the certain future proposed by manifestation.

Karen Barad argues that with the discovery of the quantum particle, a cell that can exist in multiple temporalities, time takes on a newly volatile dimension, in which the linearity of spacetime is challenged, and the Newtonian physics of progression is troubled. By her description, the evils of colonialism now travel by spacetime, and their effects are felt across temporalities. In addition to challenging any linear conception of time, she challenges the neutrality of the sciences, argues for a beyond-Derridian deconstruction of science,⁵ and proposes a collective alternative to linear spacetime.⁶ As a system for manipulating temporality, manifestation exploits the disjuncture of atomic time to produce outcomes of capitalist success and excess. It serves as a counter-appropriation to collectivity–a singular but polyvocal encounter with time. Unlike the collective quantum time proposed by Barad, manifestation is a singular quantum time, in which people, objects and outcomes are manipulated as particles existing partially in mind and partially in the world. Or more accurately, partially in the world and completely in the mind. This reaffirms Barad’s call for the production of “collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something that has passed and is no longer with us…”⁷ The abstract certainty of manifestation, its inparticulate, individual randomness, is its selling point.

Rising out of the work-from-home moment, labour and leisure are merely linear temporalities to transcend through thought. This, of course, is not the radical queer reimagining of temporality and quantum physics that Barad argues for. Instead, we are left with a cultish particalization of what otherwise, in Barad’s critique/reconsideration of linear spacetime, are actors neutralized by mathematics and natural science. The images of manifestation – often stock footage culled from paid services, overlaid with subtitles in the voice of a spiritualist proponent of self-help, imbues images with an aspirational appeal. We see astronauts, people in nature, meditation, and nostalgia-tinged evocation of childhood trauma, in which a child and adult, silhouetted against sunset, hold a paper cutout of a house. 

While the trajectory of manifestation’s logic, from have-not to have, is a linear mode of material advancement, the instrumentalization of thought and image for material gain suggests new, nonlinear forms of capitalism. To achieve the ends of accomplishment where it otherwise seems impossible, in the irreversibility of global economies, manifestation employs a pseudo-quantum science that turns thought material, renders habits ‘ atomic’, and privileges the act of visualization. This visualization, as Derrida’s Given Time helps us locate, need not be in the waking world of labour and leisure. 

In the logic of manifestation, there exists a space outside time, in which a transcendence of the physical is possible. This space is accessed through sleep. According to Prentice Mulford, an early 20th-century author of Christian New Thought, “the last thought before going to sleep is the one most likely to remain with on leaving the body…That is, it will be the first clew towards the recognition of your real self when you away from your body.”⁸ Manifestation proposes a zone outside of time, or in the case of Mulford, sleep, in which thought itself is transformed into a natural resource. As an impossible space, the state of sleep becomes ripe for observing the flows of capitalist data from thought to action. The impossible time observed in the state akin to sleep responds to time’s invisible encroachment–it is an abstract response to an abstract state. In Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, Jacques Derrida writes of time as a non-phenomenological non-object. For Derrida, there is no outside time. He writes that “time…gives nothing to see. It is at the very least the element of invisibility itself.”⁹ Manifestation, resistant to Derrida’s framework, the non-visible, non-material nature of time–the event’s constant inside–renders time as a natural resource in use even at rest. By Mulford’s logic, why sleep if not manifesting? Here, an appropriation of Vedic and Buddhist meditative transcendental practice becomes all about producing results in waking, ephemeral life. In sleep, the thought is a natural resource. Each page of Mulford’s turn-of-the-century text, Your Forces and How to Use Them, is printed with the declaration (disclaimer, agitprop?) that “thoughts are things.” Tellingly, Mulford associates this atemporal thinking with technology. “A thought is as real a thing as a telegraph-wire.”¹⁰ Here, we have the formation of a proto-datafication that foretells of the real datafication of habit in the form of surveillance capital. Outside time, thoughts become concrete things to be mined for profit. The purpose of manifestation becomes the extraction of material wealth from habit. In this way, systems of manifestation transcend the simple notion of healthy living or mindfulness, stepping into the economy by stepping outside of time. Derrida associates time with a kind of economic circle, in which given time and time taken are in constant conversation. The gift of time would have to be outside time itself–perhaps in sleep. Manifestation puts sleep, too, under anaesthetic. In his book on sleep in the age of digital media, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the End of Sleep, Jonathan Crary writes that “sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present.”¹¹ At the dawn of the 20th century, already sleep itself was becoming capital, defending itself through communion with angels: “the thought of yourself as a spirit, as a being distinct and apart from your body, will serve as this clew…It will be the telegraph-wire ‘twixt you and them, because they will not stay permanently with you in your gropings on the cruder stratum of life.”¹² The state of sleep in which manifestation is made possible forms a contradictory logic of thought and reality. 

Here, thoughts become reality as a future that can be imagined–and thus transformed into visual material. The online spaces of manifestation, its Reddit threads and YouTube comment feeds, corroborate this transformation. As new technologies cannibalize old ones, thought for manifestation purposes move from telegraph wire to fibre optic cables. Visualization becomes one step in the vehicle for manifesting: “I’ve been manifesting for a month. I got my boyfriend back and he said all the things I’ve ever wanted to hear. Someone posted a video about writing your names together and folding paper then placing it under your bed. I did that. I imagined what our new life will be like. Then when I was used to that feeling and it felt more natural, I visualized every night before bed.”¹³ Manifestation, then, is imbricated with the visuality of online culture–our ability to be seen and see. Crary writes, of the visual situation that “…the demand for mandatory 24/7 immersion in visual content effectively becomes a new form of institutional super-ego.”

As both joke and doctrine, manifestation performs the role of the platform’s economic circle, in which time spent on the platform is time regained through the logic of achievement–which in turn leads us back into the leisure time of surveillance capital. The circle produces certainty, whereas time remains a non-phenomenological, non-object. The question of manifestation is easily construed with a whole slew of other questions that one is likely to be bombarded with when spending time on platforms: techniques to reclaim time from procrastination, distraction, negative self-talk, etc. But what force does the state of sleep reclaim time from? Manifestation reclaims time from the platform itself. It produces a state of certainty where there is simply the flow of time, the endless wastes of time that can be engendered by a scrolling feed. The feed of time.

Capitalism’s mindfulness cult, when considered in light of Anthropocentric clocks, promises to reclaim time we don’t have. Through the capture of what captures us, I aim to take seriously the multiple meanings of manifestation: the manifesto, the presence of a ghostly other, the appearance and reappearance of specific persons and things, and the trace of difference between the sign and object (in which one semiosis is a “manifestation” of another). Manifestation is a window into the platform’s metabolic circle of time lost in distraction and time gained through the achievement of financial certainty, corporeal well-being, and spiritual transcendence. Manifestation’s system of certainty is recoded into an aleatory flow of desires made public, spectral encounters mutating the virtual landscape, and hallucinatory experiences diffused across virtual material.

BIO

Max Oginz is a PhD student in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. His writing and films interrogate the literary, ecological, and cinematic implications of technologically mediated life. His writing has been published in Sleepingfish, Fanzine, Cinemedia, Senses of Cinema, and is forthcoming in the edited volume, Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces.

REFERENCES

1. Tristan Payne, ‘What Are People Wearing in New York City? Midtown, Bowery, SoHo (EP.62)’, 13:27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHCjINBU-eE&list=PLWHh-nTVQ-uTTJSisV-fDhuC4Vlk3i0fY&index=16&ab_channel=TristanPaine ︎
2. Mel Robbins, The 5 Second Rule (Post Hill Press, 2017). E-Pub, 62. ︎
3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: a Study in Human Nature (1902; repr., New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), 73. ︎
4. SpaceWithinSpace, “6 Years of Manifesting – Manifesting is Very Easy and Simple!” March 2023. https://www.reddit.com/r/lawofattraction/comments/12pku6g/comment/jgn58h1/. ︎
5. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-To-Come,” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (November 2010): 240–68, https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206. ︎
6. Karen Barad, “Troubling Time/S and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable,” New Formations, no. 92 (September 1, 2017): 56–86, https://doi.org/10.3898/newf:92.05.2017. 62. ︎
7. Ibid. 57. ︎
8. Mulford. Your Forces and How to Use Them, “Where You Travel When You Sleep,” 6. ︎
9. Jacques Derrida, Given Time. I, Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 6. ︎
10. Ibid. 7. ︎
11. Jonathan Crary, 24/7 : Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013). 15. ︎
12. Mulford. 7. ︎
13. Dependent-Painter-59. “It worked! So, So Well.” March 28, 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/lawofattraction/comments/1bqchv8/it_worked_so_so_well/ ︎

back to the ball

By: Charlotte Lengersdorf

Hacking Writing – Asemic Writing

Black marks on a white background,
Lines form and deform, 
Densifying into complex arrangements, 
Converge into linear formations. 
Horizontal row after row. 
A familiar strangeness, 
A resembling dissemblance, 
A pleasurable frustration.

The formal, structural and rhythmic qualities of the black lines on the white background evoke an undeniable association with writing. They lure the viewer into a habitual act of reading. Any attempt to extract meaning is unsuccessful. While maintaining stylistic coherence, the lack of repetition in the arrangements eliminates any possibility of decoding. Asemic writing treads a fine line between reference and repulsion, a characteristic that is already reflected in the term itself: It combines ‘asemic’, the absence or negation of meaning, with ‘writing’, challenging the key function of writing to convey meaning through written language. 

Visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich coined the term asemic writing in the 1990s, but there are numerous works that predate the term that could be described as asemic writing.¹ The term cannot be mentioned without acknowledging the discussions surrounding its various understandings, including debates about its motivation, its meaning, how it should be read, and how it should be understood. An underpinning rationale, as well as a clear definition, continue to be negotiated in various web blogs, forums and online groups. As Peter Schwenger writes in the first published book on the historical, critical and contemporary contexts of asemic writing, the term asemic writing has not led to ‘a general consensus, an artistic practice governed by conventions’.² The American writer and artist Michael Jacobson, who publishes asemic writing through the website The New Post-Literate and his Post-Asemic Press, states: ‘Sometimes it seems so large that there is no one clear definition of what asemic writing is or will become.’³ The abstract nature of asemic writing defies both theoretical consideration and academic attention. At the same time, it exerts an undeniable fascination and attraction that is hard to resist, as reflected in its growing popularity across various web blogs, forums and online groups.⁴

The terms ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’, and their implications, have been widely debated since their origins in computer circles. Descriptions of the hacker range from the stereotype of the anti-social geek and cybercriminal who gains unauthorised access to computer systems, to the more positive portrayal of the hacker whose ‘energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance’ are indispensable to the well-being of large technology companies, to more abstract definitions of the concept in which hacking is not necessarily bound to the context of computers and computer networks.⁵ The Australian academic McKenzie Wark in A Hacker Manifesto, argues for the value of ‘freeing the concept of the hacker from its particulars, understanding it abstractly’.⁶ Sociologist Tim Jordan writes: ‘Despite 20 years of ongoing research into hacking, it remains unclear what hacking means.’⁷

Both terms, hacking and asemic writing, are bewildering in discussion and abstract by nature. Reason enough, one might argue, not to complicate matters by bringing them together. At the same time, the research for this paper revealed an exuberant amount of parallels in the discourse around hacking and the discussions around asemic writing, almost as if they were talking about the same subject. This paper takes this observation quite literally, using references from one discipline to write about the other, to see what else might emerge from such an encounter. 

Hacking writing,
Writing hacking,
Hacked writing,
Written hack,
Hacking in writing,
Writing into hacking, 
A writing hack.

This paper hacks writing. It is not just writing about the practice of asemic writing as a practice that hacks the formal and structural elements of writing, as explained in the introductory section of this paper. The act of writing this paper is itself subject to the practice of hacking, exploring the concept of hacking through the choices of structure and writing style. The paper therefore explores the relationship between hacking and writing, and writing and hacking in its various forms. Any confusion is intended and welcome.

In the context of this paper, references are taken out of their original context and used to describe a different context in order to open up new conversations and explorations in a creative alliance across disciplines. The aim is to extend and deviate from what has already been written, ‘[hacking/writing] the new out of the old’.⁸ As exemplified in the previous quotation, the altered quotations retain their original wording and structure. The words written in square brackets replace or add to the author’s original words, transforming the quote to talk about the same idea, but in the context of a different subject area. They appropriate the quote to intersect with, but depart from, its original context. The ‘/‘ makes a sentence hover between the contexts of asemic writing and hacking, confusing both and prioritising neither — the order of the words is random to avoid direct identification of the original context. Due to the borderline academic nature of this method, endnotes are used to ensure academic integrity, traceability and transparency to the original source.

This creative method of ‘hacking writing’ is not intended to misrepresent the thoughts, ideas and work of the original author, nor to devalue or disrespect their words. Rather, it seeks to use their words as a starting point for making interdisciplinary connections that might lead to new interpretations and discussions beyond the original context. Hacking writing becomes a process of writing writing out its repetitive cycles of citation and recitation. Feminist media scholars Bassett, Kemper and O’Riordan, for example, in their book Furious, justify their ‘unforgivable […] lack of full citations’ by refusing to maintain the ‘citation circularity, which finds itself trapped in ever smaller circles, an echo chamber that does not break out’.⁹ They argue for ‘the need for new forms of scholarly writing’, in which writing becomes a ‘process of experimenting and opening’.¹⁰ In hacking writing, writing is not a reproduction of what is already known, but a creative process that produces difference: ‘New [hacks/writing] supersede old [writing/hacks] […]. [The hack/The writing] takes information […] and produces new information out of it again.’¹¹ 

Asemic writing cannot be understood merely as a term used to classify or assemble various pre-existing practices or ideas, nor can it be said to explain, describe or abstract an object, a class or the essence of a practice. The term asemic writing refers to nothing other than itself. Unlike traditional writing, whose appearance is defined and constrained by the somewhat flexible but limited forms of its respective writing system, asemic writing has no predetermined or preconceived form. Its appearance is defined by a movement of challenge, of resistance to the known and the prescribed. However, asemic writing is not a mere rejection or negation of writing; it retains a reference to its opposite. The formal diversity of asemic writing emerges from an active engagement with the tension between the constraining properties of writing’s convention and gestural expression beyond routines, habits and systems. The gestures and awareness of the act of writing and reading are countered by a determined resistance to giving in to conditioned patterns of movement and thought. It is a deliberate departure, but not a complete dissociation from conventional writing. It does not seek to separate writing from writing, or reading from reading. Rather, asemic writing leads to more intense forms of writing and reading through active participation in an act that is usually disguised by habit. As Schwenger writes: ’It extends beyond what can be read or understood according to the logic of any signifying system.’¹² 

Wark describes the complications of describing hackers as a class while remaining true to the abstract and unstable nature of the practice. She writes: ‘Hackers are a class […] but an abstract class.’¹³ The article ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ in the title of her book A Hacker Manifesto is a manifestation of this struggle to define that which refuses representation: ‘We don’t quite know who we are […] it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ.’¹⁴ 

[Asemic Writing/Hacking] is best described as a ‘concept’ in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. It does not name something in order to define it, to enclose it within disciplinary boundaries, to exclude it from what it is not. Rather, it is a term that encourages the creation of new practices and discourses; That transcends boundaries rather than erecting them. It is a practice that is defined by a conscious act of troubling and transforming the existing, redirecting it towards the new and different. [Asemic writing/Hacking] is ‘turning a system against itself’; It is a process in which elements and qualities of a system are used beyond their original purpose and limitations.¹⁵ An ‘exercise of ample creativity’, that consists of a continuous surpassing of the known.¹⁶

A practice that challenges a system central to our culture and that frustrates our habitual interaction with media, is easily dismissed as nonsensical and useless and as a practice pursued for mere self-expression and pleasure. The [asemic writer/hacker] is defined as a person who ‘enjoys exploring the details of [programmable/writing] systems and how to stretch their capabilities […], who [writes/programs] enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys [programming/writing]. […] An expert or enthusiast of any kind. […] Who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.’¹⁷ [To hack/write asemic] means to ‘to interact with a [computer/writing] in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way’, to be ‘motivated to [hack/write] for the sheer pleasure of doing so’, Just for Fun.¹⁸ They [write/hack] ‘simply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick’.¹⁹ 

The nonsensical and useless nature of [asemic writing/hacking] seems to be reinforced by the repeated use of words such as enjoyment, enthusiasm and fun. These words are commonly used to qualify an activity as trivial or irrelevant. An aimless, casual, playful or exploratory activity at the other end of doing something useful, purposeful or goal-oriented: ‘”Whatcha up to?” “Oh, just [writing/hacking].”’²⁰ However, on closer inspection, what the [asemic writer/hacker] enjoys is a stretching of their capabilities, an intellectual challenge, an overcoming of limitations. The [hacker/writer] is driven by a ‘desire for access to something new, something previously unknown’.²¹ They ‘derive pleasure in outwitting constraint’.²² The joy derived from [asemic writing/hacking] stems from expanding the limits of what was is considered possible, destabilising and pushing personal and technological boundaries. It embodies a pleasure and desire to transcend the constraints of conditioning, unlocking untapped potential; A liberation from the static, fixed and predictable nature of everyday life. [Asemic writers/Hackers] ‘illuminate the ways in which [programming/writing] is tamed and contained by its socially accepted formats’.²³ 

There is a striking similarity between the definition of humour and the pragmatics of [asemic writing/hacking]: ‘[Humor/asemic writing/hacking] requires a similarly irreverent, frequently ironic stance toward language, social conventions, and stereotypes.’²⁴ [Asemic writing/hacking] and humour involve ‘a play upon form’, questioning the necessity of accepted patterns.²⁵ A hacker’s enjoyment of hacking and outwitting technical constraints is reflected in the central role of humour among hackers. Furthermore, the [hackers’/asemic writers’] provocative rejection of systems translates into their inventive use of language: ‘Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay’.²⁶

[Hacking/Asemic writing] is ‘an invitation to play.[…] to resist a stable meaning in favor of […] the interminable play of differences’.²⁷ It is driven by a ‘joy’ of experiencing the virtual.²⁸ The virtual here is not to be equated with the digital or contrasted with the real. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the virtual is that which is not yet manifested or realised, a realm of potentiality of reality that is not yet actualised in the present. The concept of [asemic writing/hacking] is liberated from its specificity to be understood in a more abstract sense: ‘The virtual is the true domain of the [hacker/asemic writer]. […] To the [asemic writer/hacker], what is represented as being real is always partial, limited, perhaps even false. […] To [hack/write asemic] is to release the virtual into the actual’.²⁹ Through [asemic writing/hacking], the [hacker/writer] penetrates seemingly infallible systems and disciplinary regimes, creating the possibility of new and alternative practices, but also new and alternative futures: ‘Every [asemic writing/hack] is an expression of the inexhaustible multiplicity of the future, of virtuality.’³⁰ The [hacker’s/asemic writer’s] joy in experiencing the virtuality of nature parallels what Nietzsche calls the ‘joy of becoming’, that is, the joy of experiencing the dynamic nature of life, existence and identity.³¹ Joy, here, consists in challenging the rigidity of static ideals in favour of exploring the inherent complexities of life, finding fulfilment in continuous processes of transformation, growth, change, and creation.

BIO

Dr Charlotte Lengersdorf is a visual communicator, researcher and lecturer based in London and Düsseldorf. Her research emerges from an intersection between type design, human-computer interaction and a practice of programming with specific interest in the nonsensical, undetermined and unknown. She holds a BA from the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Her PhD (2023) in communication research at the Royal College of Art, titled ‘Towards an Uncausal Practice of Visual Communication‘,  was funded by The German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

info@charlottelengersdorf.com
charlottelengersdorf.com
@charlottelengersdorf

REFERENCES

1. Peter Schwenger, for example, refers to three ‘asemic ancestors’: Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes and Cy Twombly. ︎
2. Peter Schwenger, Asemic: the Art of Writing (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 17. ︎
3. ‘Four questions about asemic writing, #12: Michael Jacobson’ (14 February 2016) <http://scriptjr.nl/four-questions-about-asemic-writing-12-michael-jacobson/3447#.W8O5Ai_Myog> [accessed 20 January 2022]. ︎
4. ‘Asemic’, Google Group: <https://groups.google.com/g/asemic> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic Movement’ (Sep 24, 2011), Tim Gaze <https://issuu.com/eexxiitt/docs/asemicmovement1> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic’, Tim Gaze, <http://www.asemic.net> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic Writing for Mail Artists’ (2024), Ruud Janssen <https://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/asemicwritingformailartists> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing’, Michael Jacobson <https://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Post-Asemic Press: A Publisher of Asemic Writing & Beyond’, Michael Jacobson <http://postasemicpress.blogspot.com> [accessed 04 April 2024] ︎
5. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010), 458. ︎
6. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2004), [072]. ︎
7.  Tim Jordan, ‘A Genealogy of Hacking’ (2017), Convergence, 23(5): 528–544, 528. ︎
8. Wark, [004]. ︎
9. Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kemper and Kate O’Riordan, Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 15; 105. ︎
10. Ibid., 19; 105. ︎
11. Wark, [080]. ︎
12. Schwenger, 122. ︎
13. Wark, [006]. ︎
14. Ibid., [003]. ︎
15. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 98. ︎
16. Coleman, 97. ︎
17. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’ <http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html> [accessed 20 January 2024]. ︎
18. Ibid.; Coleman, 98; Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: the Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney: Harper, 2001). ︎
19. Levy, 464. ︎
20. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’. ︎
21. Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Society Series (Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 5. ︎
22. Coleman, 98. ︎
23. Schwenger, 7. ︎
24. Coleman, 100. ︎
25. Douglas 1975 as quoted in Coleman, 100. ︎
26. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’. ︎
27. Schwenger, 149. ︎
28. Wark, [060]. ︎
29. Wark, [074]. ︎
30. Wark, [078]. ︎
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. by Richard Polt (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 91. ︎

back to the ball

By: Kelly Wu

A sentence that will produce a line of text is not its own sentence at all.

Keywords: AI; oranges; friends; Google; texting

Why think, when the AI can do that for me? 

How much of our time should we spend taking selfies, speaking to our devices, making playlists on Spotify, etc.? Hours and hours pass us by in digital space without us even knowing. The sun turns dark after 381 TikToks if you start watching at noon on a summer’s day. 

I wanted there to be a consideration of how much we should let the Internet or Internet-generated ideas impact our creative practices, and more importantly our lives. This work is hence an abstract commentary on the intersection between humanity and technology, and our dependence on each other, and how much of our lived experience is lost (or gained?) to digitised space.

For this video, I used the text generation AI on DeepAI.com, whereby inserting one original word or sentence, you could AI-generate an entire paragraph. 

I created and inserted the sentence ‘I generate a sentence from my imagination, and the text generator generates sentences and sentences from my sentence from my imagination.’ I was then able to receive a paragraph of nonsense text from the AI. I then took the final sentence of this generated paragraph and inserted it into the AI, creating a loop. I did this a few times and then from the generated text, I selected key themes, and wrote a performance from it all. The original generated texts no longer exist, only the fragments that I selected. There was a lot of chaos to weed out from the content that I actually wanted to use.

The AI was able to successfully generate both ridiculous text and phrases that were oddly profound, such as the title of this piece, ‘A sentence that will produce a line of text is not its own sentence at all.’ Although logically we know that the AI cannot actually think, and just writes via prediction, I think that we cannot help but to suspend out belief sometimes and project sentience onto it. How is a machine able to write so acutely about such human issues?

Moreover, although I was happy to use the DeepAI as a base, I didn’t want it to entirely cloud my own creative process. From my own experience, I find that sometimes consuming generative art can be difficult, as the nonsensical nature of it becomes tiring. I wanted to see if I could combat this by using human ideas. Predecessors of this genre of art, such as the creators of Sunspring and It’s No Game take on AI writing brilliantly, but I just wanted to separate myself from this a little bit. I felt as though if I fleshed it out enough with my own writing that it could feel more like my work, and less like the machine’s. 

[end]

BIO

I am a queer Chinese-British artist currently studying BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins; I specialise in sculpture, performance, and experimental filmmaking. I enjoy exploring themes of queerness, femininity, the human experience, liminal spaces, and the subconscious. Most of my work I make with the intent to give an audience visual pleasure, confusion, or the ability to question why and how they are doing something potentially mundane. I am beginning to form an interest in post-Internet aesthetics and old-new technology.

By: Sandy Di Yu

Eternal Recall

Keywords: digital immortality; discrete units, archives, subjective duration, eternity

Eternal Recall/You only live on 

A wise man once wrote, “one lives but once in the world”^[1]. Centuries later, a decade or so ago from today, a wiser man popularised the related aphorism “you only live once” by igniting it with a catchy anagram and letting it spread like wildfire on a maturing Internet 2.0.^[2]

I remain cynical of aphorisms both old and less old. How do they know that one lives only once? What makes them so sure that existence doesn’t simply go on and on and on and on and on? It’s not like they died and came back to let us know, like a cyclical continuation of life after death, like wilted flowers renewing their blooms in the spring.

I suppose that’s the whole point. We don’t know, just as surely as they don’t. The impossibility of knowing instils in us the fear of an unremarkable life lived mutely and without purpose. And so we say, “YOLO”, and in a stirring display of presentism, follow through with actions that claw at the possibility of ecstatic escape.

This same unknowing compounds with the unassailable knowledge of life’s ending. We only live once (probably), and it’s not even for that long. This is the condition that makes our limited time precious, and why finitude is a categorical component of Dasein. As the late philosopher and celebrated bank robber Bernard Stiegler once wrote, “Human beings exist only under the condition of the anticipation of death, which is a protention they hold in common, but is also their impossible protention.”^[3]

Our shared impossible protention is the commonality of death, the knowledge of the unknowable. It’s what Emmanuel Levinas calls there is, an alterity that might parallel other minds: “the other that is announced does not possess this existing as the subject possesses it; its hold over my existing is mysterious. It is not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light. But this precisely indicates that the other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence.”^[4] Boris Groys says something of similar nature, but in relation to the flow of time and the implications of museum objects: “…in analysing my own thinking process, I can never find any evidence of its finitude. To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time, I need the gaze of the Other. I read my death in the eyes of others.”^[5]

If the alterity of death and the alterity of the Other are analogous, then the death of the subject might be the gentle marriage of individual minds into an ocean of collective unconscious. It would make true Hito Steyerl’s proclamation about how the internet, the swathe of networked activity often characterised as a collective mind, approximates death by being undead.^[6] If death is a return to the great collective, then immortality is the contrived individuation of the self, continuing on without anticipation. If not death, then there is no destination to anticipate.

But what if the alterity of death is not to be anticipated? What if immortality, in all its grotesque implications, was within our reach? Imagine that you only live once, but you live forever. Without finitude, what would be of being?

What do you think of immortality? Most people I ask seem to shudder at the thought. A lifetime of this is more than enough, they say. But to have it go on forever? One might crumple under the mere thought of that immeasurable exhaustion. Then there are the outliers, those who revel in the idea of experiencing what’s to come with the next thousand or more rotations around the sun. It’s all harmless speculation. No one I know has taken up an offer of immortality and lived to tell the tale.

Not yet, anyway. 

With the acceleration of technological innovations, and with the shared commonality of death that extends throughout human history, we might just be on the cusp of some sort of life-prolonging breakthrough at any moment.

In the bid for an indefinite postponement of biological death is gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. In his interview with Douglas Lain, he claims that people dismiss his project because they don’t want to get their hopes up^[7] rather than there being issues that are overlooked in his proposals.

De Grey will have to forgive me if I don’t quite buy his whole “misunderstood genius” schtick. As the self-appointed spokesperson of everyday people, I’d like to clarify that the root issue with such programmes aiming at indefinite life extension is the replication and perpetuation of the systemic inequalities that would be exacerbated. Who do you think would have access to life-prolonging medical procedures? Surely not the struggling worker who can’t afford private dental, or the time-poor caretaker who must choose between heating and food. Who needs longer-living oligarchs and tech billionaires? They can all die mad, thanks.

Postponement of biological death aside, in the digital milieu, there are other ways to think about immortality. That’s not to say that loading one’s mind up to the cloud would produce any more of an egalitarian society, but conversations about systemic issues can be carried out along with speculative modes of reinvention. Digitality is a relatively nascent field still formalising its structure. The possibility of redirecting its evolution away from the reproduction of preexisting hierarchies emerges with its advent. 

Perhaps such tech optimism feels familiar, and caution to keep this in check may be warranted. Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun warns that the internet in its earlier stages was never truly the utopia purported by 90s technologists with a hard-on for William Gibson, but rather “the Wild West meets speed meets Yellow Peril meets capitalism on steroids.”^[8] In the years since, with the monopolisation of the internet tempered by the phenomenon of platforming, the situation has only grown direr. But if by some miraculous feat we’re able to redress such systemic plights in the digital, might the physical follow suit?

Suppose that digital networks can be built up without the issues latent in their physical counterpart. Can the digital then become a vessel for eternal life? Could a former military-funded project for allowing executable code to survive past Cold War-induced catastrophes let us exceed the deterioration of physical bodies, of earthly death?

Metaphysically, the issue becomes multi-pronged. Digital networks are temporal in their architecture. They necessitate change, an elemental aspect of time. Yet immortality assumes a certain unchangeability. This is exemplified by the preservation of artefacts in museums, as explained by Boris Groys. Taken out of the flow of time, such objects enjoy the status of eternal commemoration. They become immortal, as far as culture will allow, but they are dead, no longer a part of the present milieu. Immortality, then, becomes timelessness, without change and out of time.^[9]

This is further complicated by the genesis of data analytics, a core component of the current tides of the web, and its connection to eugenics. “Both big data and eugenics seek to tie the past to the future–correlation to prediction–through supposedly eternal, unchanging biological attributes.”^[10] With eugenics, phenomenological time is folded in on itself, as the temporality of the object is stretched into eternity. Such is also the basis of biological immortality, of “good” genes that thwart the decay of telomeres. It might not be such a coincidence that the logic of eugenics rears its troubling head in the digital milieu. 

Another issue arises if we accept that immortality is indeed the extended and contrived individuation of the self. Would this be at odds with the digital? Does the digital presuppose a lack of individuation? 

Yes and no. Digitality as a pure concept implies differentiation, requiring discrete units in its very function.^[11] Such units might be interpreted as unmitigated individuation. However, digitality in practice, as the internet functions, is not so straightforward. The transfer and use of data are inherently leaky, spilling into one another as it makes borders obsolete.^[12] There’s little to say where one object stops and the other begin. 

The immortal subject as a digital entity thus produces contradictions. To reconcile this, it must be remembered that subjectivity is fundamentally temporal. Dasein is nothing if not a historical being, bound up in time. Therefore, time in the historical sense must be injected into the immortal digital subject in order to reclaim its untainted existence.

To do this, the historicity of the digital subjectivity may be captured in the digital archive. It might also provide a way to rethink the individuation of extended life, or what it means to be an individual subject confronted with eternity. Counter to the hierarchical systems of contemporary societal structuring, we might consider the archive as the commons, after author Ariella Aisha Azoulay.^[13] We heed the cautions from sceptics telling us that a true digital commons is a pipedream, impossible to substantiate in this reality, but we shimmy forward towards a digital archive that might activate a site, rich in historical nuance, that offers respite from the lonely inidividuation of the immortal subject.

We’re still building our archives, architecture and contents and all. As they continue to be engineered, it is still unclear what it would mean to be a pure subject living on as a digital being. But the historicity sculpted into the framework of the potential digital archive may be key and crucial to the possibility of eternity. Its digital beams and columns reverberate in the realm of not-yet-but-soon, echoing the refrain, “You only live once, but you’ll have always lived.”

[end]

BIO

Sandy Di Yu is a Canadian writer, researcher and artist currently based in the UK. She primarily works with painting, text and digital media, having obtained an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, the University of London in 2018 following her BFA in visual arts and philosophy at York University, Toronto. Sandy has taken part in several group exhibitions, and she has written extensively on visual culture, working with several arts organisations, independent zines and publications from the UK and beyond. Her current research focuses on the dissolution of time that coincides with the advent of digital networks. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Media at the University of Sussex.

REFERENCES

^[1] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Clavigo. 1774.

^[2] Drake ft. Lil Wayne, Tyga. The Motto. 2012.

^[3] Hui, Yuk, and Bernard Stiegler. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 

^[4] Lévinas, Emmanuel. Time and the other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987, 77.

^[5] Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016, 27.

^[6] Steyerl, Hito. “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” E-flux, no. 49 (November 2013). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.

^[7] Lain, Douglas, and De Grey, Aubrey D. N. J. Advancing Conversations: Aubrey De Grey. Zero Books, 2016. 

^[8] Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME: habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT PRESS, 2017, 8.

^[9] Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016.

^[10] Kyong, Chun Wendy Hui, and Alex Barnett. Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. 

^[11] Galloway, Alexander R. Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. New York: Verso, 2021. 

^[12] Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME: habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT PRESS, 2017.

^[13] Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.

By Nicky Broekhuysen & Mine Kaplangi

When the Dust Settles

An unsettled experimentation on a 2016 exhibition The Digital Archaeologist

Keywords: media archaeology; binary code; collaboration; digital archive; experimentation

How do we remember [ex]hibitions? Feelings of the day, [art]work, space? 
Time runs in various ways in digital realms. I always wonder how we will recall the space when it’s [meant to be] temporary.  

As an independent curator and art practitioner, my understanding of digital event programming, archiving and recalling previous exhibitions changed drastically in the last years, mostly due to the pandemic, an event which has consequently changed many previously held perceptions. As a means to further explore this change, I offer Nicky Broekhuysen’s exhibition The Digital Archeologist, as a pathway to guide us as we meander through these far corners of the digital realm in our search for understanding. 

I wrote this text Dig Deep^[3] in 2016, three years after the Gezi Movement in Turkey, where due to the political situation, digital spaces became safer places to gather yet still we tried to hold on to the physical as long as it was due. Since then, many things have changed in my hometown Istanbul where various [art] spaces have closed and been forced to move or transform themselves—a familiar phenomenon currently occurring in London, my new hometown, thanks to state-led gentrification, the financial crisis and other inhumane policies put forth by the current Tory Government. 

What is our responsibility with these memories, then, these artefacts? Just because you remember them, will you be able to hold them when the time comes or when they are urgently needed? Or should they perish into the [in]visible archives of the digital? Does the past become present when you recall them? Who has the keys to the ongoing archiving of the internet lockers? Mckenzie Wark rightfully and beautifully suggests that “we need another worldview, one drawn out of what is left of the actually collaborative and collective and common practices via which the world is actually built and run, a worldview of solidarity and the gift. A worldview that works as a low theory extracted from worker and hacker practices, rather than a high theory trying to legislate about them from above.”^[4]

Sustainability works differently regarding individual memories and storytelling, yet websites need budgets for eternal open-sourcing. We all do have our open and private libraries of knowledge productivity in the arts, yet when shared in social media, newsletters, forums or even diaries, one can lose their way in the maze even with the help of keywords. The Matrix is expanding, and binary codes are now similar to recipes; all we need to do is to cook with the taste of our own hands.^[5] Therefore experimentation, iş birliği^[6], collective-collaborative practices and repetitive acts of making kins are essential for our times to bound the time with the work and resist the destruction of our worlds in the making.

How our paths were crossed with Nicky Broekhuysen
a short story within a story

BLOK art space, where I first worked with Nicky, has been closed since I moved to London, right before the pandemic started in the winter of 2019. The Bumiller Collection’s studio, which generously hosted The Digital Archeologist, has also since closed its doors to contemporary interventions instead of continuing as a nomadic space. So we follow a phantom of stamps that echoed inside the walls of an Islamic Art Collection’s project space that no longer exists. When I think about apparitions and recalling archives, I always find myself thinking about artist Patrick Staff’s work, The Foundation^[7], which takes place around the iconic Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, an archive dedicated to protect erotic arts. Even though the preserved art and works are different, the methodology of Staff’s response to this archive as building relations and stories between objects, artworks and the foundation’s space rather than categorising them is quite spellbinding, a term I frequently use to describe Nicky’s practice.

It was a vociferous Istanbul afternoon when I met Nicky; we found our peaceful moment in an antique shop next to BLOK art space, where we would work together in the following days. Nicky had a Turkish coffee; I made a silly joke to break my social anxiety by offering to read her future [reading one’s future from the coffee cup is a way of saying for future-telling]; Nicky accepted it gracefully as she is always ready for a midday seance. She closed her cup, turned it upside down, and handed it over. I put a cold 1 Turkish lira on it and waited for a while; we talked about our passions, families, and many others. Time passed impatiently; I opened the cup and immediately realised it was not just another exhibition experience with a temporary companion. Nicky was quite special, and so was her cup, showing me a giant ‘0’ next to ‘1’. Such a poetic way of starting a journey with a magical artist like Nicky, who works with binary codes, intuition and repetition as methodologies that create magic when combined. I smiled and laughed for the entire day as the proper grinagog of the project space I was working at the time couldn’t handle the flow of emotions I was receiving through Nicky’s presence. 

Every year following the summer of 2013 was getting stranger and weirder for Istanbul; I was already convinced that Nicky and I were meant to know each other beyond time and space. Our journey was not for or about us, but for both of us to have the courage to face and to reveal something immense that you would rather prefer to have company while it unfolds.

When we make exhibitions, we respond to certain things, experiment and create spaces and stories, but these come to life through various spatial, emotional, and temporal relations. I have recently grown more tempted and interested in these relationships, more so than even at the beginning of my [art] journey. It took us a couple of years to become close friends. After Istanbul, Nicky invited me to her Berlin exhibition at the Bumiller Collection and to write about her work and practice for the exhibition catalogue as well as to moderate the artist’s talk alongside the exhibition’s programme.

Later on, we had our first lengthy dinner in Berlin and talked about parallel universes, our family secrets and how our generation should be more caring and giving, especially while working together and collaborating when it comes to queer loving. Then we published an interview^[9] where Nicky shared the details of her relationship with her grandmother and her life generously; later on, we decided to call each other and have the same conversation^[10] in a podcast format. It was during the first lockdown, and we never felt closer. It was not the physical boundaries that kept us apart; the limitations of our stories were seeking expansion, fluidity and more space. And we decided to let them have their contagion. 

The Bumiller Collection held a contemporary intervention exhibition twice a year and invited an artist to exhibit their work alongside the collection, creating new understandings and relations between the works, artefacts, objects and their time. Using binary code as ‘her artistic language’ Nicky created these incredible messages that calmly ask roaring questions about language to the collection objects, the space, and the exhibition visitors. There was only one screen placed in the exhibition space that shows the video work of Nicky Broekhuysen (see video II) – ‘inserting the digital space into the physical room as part of the exhibition’s exploration of media archaeology.’ The rest of the works played their parts in fracturing our understanding of time by inviting all to meditate in front of this new language that we usually take for granted as machines and computer systems read before and for us. I never thought that binary code belonged to the machines; it is the universal code of a rudimentary understanding of time and system makings. Taking the codes out of their current use and representation and creating lustful, physically-driven languages out of them is very queering and alluring to our already complex relationship with the digital, which can still be distancing for many due to lack of sweat and spit. The objects exhibited from the Bumiller Collection were related to the early times of writing,  tools of writing, manuscripts, and experimentations which were uniquely loose, open to change and to flux yet remain well-preserved in the passing of time. Inspired, Nicky recalled this freedom by reconstructing some of those methodologies yet maintaining supreme craftsmanship and experimentation. I believe the paper will hold the ink as long as it can and we will trust the printed materials as the continuation of the digital realms, which might give us new ways of looking at digital archives and their sustainability. 

Watching The Matrix for the third time from Nicky’s perspective is a caring experience; Nicky uses binary code to open up [time] portals in our short yet wired existence on this earth.

[end]

BIOS

Nicky Broekhuysen was born in 1981 in South Africa. At the age of 13, her family moved to New Zealand where she completed her studies. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Auckland University, she moved to Shanghai, China, in 2006. It was in Shanghai that she first began working with binary numbers 1 and 0. In 2008 Broekhuysen moved to Berlin, Germany where she continued to develop her language of binary code, exhibiting both in Berlin and internationally for the following 11 years. Recently, in 2019 she relocated her studio to The Pyrenees in France to be closer to nature and where she continues to create and exhibit. Broekhuysen is represented by Davidson Gallery in New York.

Mine Kaplangi (they/them, 1987, Istanbul) is an independent curator and art mediator based in London. They are the co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021). They worked as an artist representative and curator at BLOK art space Istanbul between 2014-18. Together with Collective Çukurcuma, they have been curating public programmes of exhibitions and running their reading group events as an ongoing transdisciplinary project since 2016. They are currently working as a freelance editor for the Berlin-based contemporary art platform Artfridge, and publicity manager at a cross-cultural, multilingual, experimental publisher, Pamenar Press (London).

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map is Not The Territory III, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 2. Photograph of a Turkish coffee cup, taken at the antique store right next to BLOK art space, Istanbul [Photo by Mine Kaplangi]

Figure 3. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archeologist IV, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 4. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 5. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map Is Not The Territory V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 6. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist III, Oil on paper, 2016

Video 1.  The Stonebreakers, 2015, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane. Originally exhibited as part of the exhibition ‘The Stonebreakers’ at Blok Artspace, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015

Video 2. The Digital Archaeologist, 2016, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane custom-built physical modelling program and sound piece

Figures 1-4 and Video 2 are the selected works from The Digital Archeologist exhibition that took place in Bumiller Collection, University Museum Islamic Art in Berlin between 10 September – 15 October, 2015.

REFERENCES

^[1] Kaplangi, Mine. “INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN.” Artfridge.de, 2018, www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html.

^[2] Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble in Memoria. 2021. [film] Directed by A. Weerasethakul.

^[3] Kaplangi, M. (2016). Dig Deep. On Nicky Broekhuysen’s Solo Exhibition “The Digital Archaeologist.”

^[4] McKenzie Wark, Digital Labor and the Anthropocene, dis magazine transcript from Digital Labor Conference, New School, 2014, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/70983/mckenzie-wark-digital-labor-and-the-anthropocene/

^[5] Taste of the hand [elinin lezzeti] is a Turkish saying that the dish will taste differently even if you follow the same recipe due to each unique flavour and taste of our hands and fingers.

^[6] This means ‘collaboration, partnership’ in Turkish.

^[7] Staff, Patrick, dir., The Foundation. 2015, www.vdrome.org/patrick-staff-the-foundation/.

^[8] See Video 1.

^[9] Kaplangi, M. (2018). INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN. http://www.Artfridge.de/. http://www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html

^[10] Collective Cukurcuma [CC STATION]. (2020, May 12). Conversation with Nicky Broekhuysen [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wbXkwdZrTI&ab_channel=CCSTATIONICOLLECTIVECUKURCUMA

^[11] Proust, M. (2022). Remembrance of Things Past (Complete in Two volumes) (Reprint ed.). Random House.