Selfie, Suicide

by Logo Daedalus

  This mystified Cairey, as no other course he’d ever taken had, but still, there was something he did not understand about it. When he asked McTeuf what the point of it all was, of Art, or its History, he confided in Cairey that he had no intention of finishing the book he had set out to write in his middle-age. He said that he had only ever written enough of it to convince the Youniversity’s board that he needed more funding & more time. He said that researching such things was purely a fancy of his, a quirk, a fixation which he’d somehow turned into a career. The book was only a way of supporting his lifestyle.

  It was McTeuf who had advised Cairey against pursuing a career in the Arts, nevermind Academia. He told him he would be better off working a more lucrative job & fussing around with paint or drawing or whatever, so long as it was in his spare time- that he’d be much better off making money than spending it on courses- that he could try to make it as an artist if he really wanted to, but really, would be much better off dropping his delusional aspiration of becoming a world-famous, what was it again? Right, a manga artist- as there was no point in making such an attempt in the late industrial age of automation. Soon, he said, you’ll be able to train a neural net to produce art based on your own consumer preferences- & when that happens, how silly will you feel having spent so much time on something that could be created instantaneously?

  He told Cairey that the only value the praxis of art-making had in the burgeoning era of procedural generation was intangible, nonutilitarian, therapeutic perhaps, but ultimately limited to some private value system which markets could only corrupt. He compared the lot of the human artist in this age to the Buddhist monks who created & destroyed their sand mandalas. To prove the absolute uselessness of contemporary art, he had Cairey guess between amateur artpieces posted online, recently acquired pieces at Modern Art Museums, & procedurally generated paintings produced by nets trained on various aesthetic corpuses. When his eye proved incapable of differentiating any of them, McTeuf laughed & patted him on the back. “After all” he had asked “is art what you’ve really been chasing? Or has it been that emptiness of mind you once felt as a child, drawing in your notebooks, the total absorption in the void of that eternal present, which creates an illusion of distance from the world? Or have you only wanted to be rich & famous? Because, I tell you kiddo, that ship has sailed. Oh that ship has sailed.”

  Cairey considered this often ever since. It haunted him like so many things he’d learned at the Youniversity. McTeuf had once warned him: “You’re doomed anyway if you can’t deploy those keywords you moan about. That’s what’s produced in this factory here, which they call a Youniversity. They are the passwords to grants, internships, residencies... & considering your aversion, I can’t imagine you’ll be in any position to become some world-famous artist, whatever that means anymore, hell, you’ll be lucky to make a living. I’m often amazed that I’ve lasted here so long, but then, I have an advantage over you. No one wants to fire an old man when they can just wait for him to die.”

  It was McTeuf who had shattered his dreams at the time. What he’d said had been hard to swallow, but a part of him had known all of this already. He had at the very least suspected it. The issue was that he had only realized his delusional aspiration for what it was after so many years at the Youniversity. He had gotten himself deep into debt only for him to eventually

  graduate in a position no better in talent or aim than when he’d arrived. In fact, the few traditional artworks & virtual projects he had made at the Youniversity had only made him more miserable. They made him question his devotion to making art, to art in general, & further, to the continuance of his own life.

  This is what passes through Cairey’s mind as he notices that the confessional booths which once composed the Exhibition are long gone. In the time since Cairey’s Youniversity days, the MEH has been extravagantly renovated under the new management of the LaFeint Foundation. It now houses the premierest of cyber-anthrotoria.

  This means that Cairey sees an immense simulacra of the radiantly advertised midtown blocks that surround the MEH. There are corridors of towers composed of gargantuan- what look like shipping containers- stacked on top of eachother, kept together with a concrete framework, with every exterior face covered in massive television displays which stream the interior exploits of each artist residing in each floor of each tower, from each & every imaginable angle. Guests are able, by means of control boards at the base of the towers, to flick between these camera angles at will, or else, to stream them on their phones. Bluetooth earbuds are available for free use, ostensibly sanitized after being deposited, & they can be tuned to any crate in order to eavesdrop on its cargo, making use of the ubiquitous interior microphones which capture the authentic sounds of each “artist in residence.”

  Cairey gathers the gist of the conceit. He’d read about this sort of thing opening in Seoul a few years ago. He’d even watched many of its livestreams then, before feeling uneasy with his voyeurism. Livestreams made him feel like a ghost, haunting, for instance, the living room of a Korean girl whose language he could not understand, but whose every action was so plain, so routine, & somehow, so strangely captivating. He had been afraid of how long he could spy on these streams. It condemned his ostensible aversion to them, as he thought such things represented everything he’d come to loathe about the present state of “Art”- that is, the complete dissolution of artist-audience-separation, the obsession with unmediated authenticity, the gawking at artists like they were zoo creatures, turning people blessed with creative talents into dandified pets adopted by anonymous eyes, toddled mobs which treated them like playthings, stuffed animals, dolls, beta fish, to be tossed out, forgotten, or destroyed by the childish whims that govern the affections of spoiled brats with their superfluity of novelties, their continual boredom with an unending procession of surfaces, & so much exposed & half-exposed genitalia...

  Cairey thinks about such things as he penetrates the Exhibition. They are thoughts he’s thought before. They are hypocritical thoughts, which is something he’s also thought before. Truly, he is not so different from anyone else. He knows all too well the drama of rapture & the routine romances of novelty- the momentary bliss of interest, the brief honeymoon period when bliss cools slowly to indifference, to the eventual divorce of disdain, until the next novelty is found, & the cycle is repeated anew. Fittingly, these recirculated ideas fill his mind as he gawks at the first container he encounters, which happens to greet him with a view from a toilet-camera, a favorite angle of the MEH’s many accompanied minors.

  The angle is bereft, for now, of their scatological hopes. In fact, Cairey doesn’t recognize that it’s a toilet at all. The bright fluorescence rippling in the humming water of the bowl is dappled like the sun’s reflection in a placid pool- close to how its seen as one emerges from its depths for air- or how that’s remembered, as in a dream, when the sedimentary flotsam of murk & dirt & microorganisms are erased by the purifying censorship of fantasy, which creates unspoiled views of an impossibly lucid clarity, ungraspable in the living streams of direct sensation...

  He loses track of how long he’s been lost in the toilet bowl. It strikes him as a beautiful scene. It is simple & pure, as water ought to be. It moves him in the way even the kitschiest of landscape paintings moves him, which is to say, it moves him against his critical judgments. It is only when someone changes the angle to its reverse perspective that Cairey realizes what a fool he’s been. He had been enchanted by utilitarian shit-receptacle. He’d even considered it “Art.”

  All the while, his date has been spinning around slowly, taking in the panorama of screens as a single image, not concentrating on any individual screen or cube, but on the container that contains them all, this warehouse of human exhibition, this cyber-anthrotoria which turned the city into a diorama, with its ceiling-screen televising a livefeed of the overcast sky outside, the sky which contains not only the Museum, but the City, the Continent, & the Globe. She snaps out
of her rapture simultaneously with Cairey.

  “Let’s look around” she says.

  So they pass down the simulated streets of this illuminated microcosm, spying on the many sleeping artists in residence through their magnificent digital windows. Though it is just past noon, these artists have lost their connection to exterior time. This is by design. Cairey recalls that when the first of these anthrotoria had been opened,its architect had said something in an interview with foreign press, something like this:

  “A: The true artist belongs to no time but his, or her, own. His, or her, time is both his, or her, canvas & his, or her, instrument. In this way, he, or she, is both artist & art. I believe that we have operated under an inverted conception of art for too long, as we imagine the artworks to be superior to the personalities which have created them. This has always seemed absurd to me. It’s as if someone were to love a discarded piece of something more than the whole of which it is a part. It would be like marrying, not your wife, or husband, but a collection of her, or his, clipped toenails. It’s a form of monsterish fetishism. But my anthrotoria will correct this mistake. They will document the entirety of an artist’s personality & their process of production so that the true nature of Art can be finally grasped & appreciated.”

  “Q: And what is that?”

  “A: The true nature of Art is the Exemplary Human Personality in its everyday environment. It is his, or her, carving of himself, or herself, into eternity with each & every irrevocable decision.”

  “Q: You mean, his ‘life-style?”

  “A: Or her ‘life-style.’ But yes. Precisely that.”

  They pass through the exhibition, but are not struck by any screen in particular. They inspect them with a passing interest which applies itself equally to the other guests who walk the simulated sidewalks & gawk at the creatures in their electric cages. These are just a few selections of the dozens of spectacles they see.

  -A man with a goatee & sunglasses whispering to his partner, a crane-like woman in a beret, who says of a napping artist in residence “he spreads his legs when he sleeps, just like you do” to which the man replies “but he uses his hands like pillows & that’s all you!”

  -A cube in which a transfemale on her back, masturbates into her own face, which wears a rubber mask (of whom Cairey believes to be Jacques Derrida, or one of those other inexplicable post-modern Frenchman he’d been assigned to read in Youniversity). She holds a portrait of the same face, upon which the word “PHALLOGOUROBOROS” is written in sharpie. This triggers a single stocky lesbian, or transmale perhaps, wearing a fez. She, or he, watching beside Cairey & his date, turns to them, chortling to say “what a joke. He probably never understood what arborescence was in the first place. This is pretentious.”

  -A disheveled woman in pajamas scrolls through other contemporaneous livestreams, recumbent in bed, eating kettle corn in handfuls, crumbs going everywhere. Plastic handles of vodka filled with cigarette butts are scattered about her room, along with empty prescription bottles, stacks of underwear, pizza boxes, oozing cartons of melted icecream, health bar wrappers, & dozens of cans of seltzer. Cairey’s date giggles at this. She says “reminds me of college el-oh-el.”

  -An ascetic male-presenting skeleton crosslegged in silence, meditating in the center of his absolutely barren cube, which is rendered on screen in the green tint of nightvision. Cairey asks “is he dead?” & his date shrugs.

  -A bodybuilding manlet, squatting massive weights, chain smoking, displaying the vascularity of his arms. He’s accosted by a recording of his own voice. It accuses him of being a bitch & a faggot.

  -A frenetically naked & gangly androgene coated in layers of spattered paints over a polyester bodysuit, all of which contributes to the fluidity of her(?) gender. She(?) writhes on the floor, crashes against the walls, & smears arcs of putrid browns flecked with colors as diverse as an oily cerulean to a metallic platinum. A hooded man in sunglasses passes by Cairey & his date as they watch this & ask each other “what the fuck?” He turns around to say “I think it’s a bit derivative of Pollack don’t’cha think? Abstract Expressionism?” He laughs at his own quip then disappears.

  -An obese man in a ratty duct-taped armchair playing the original turquoise gameboy color, which contains that iconic Pokemon Yellow cartridge. He’s wearing Osh-Kosh corduroys many sizes too small, torn to shorts just below the knees, along with a t-shirt emblazoned with the promotional photo of the Digimon Movie (the American release) which is also too small, & ends just below his supple man-mammaries. He slurps a fruit-by-the-foot as if it were a strand of linguine & washes it down with a Sprite Remix, before huffing a dramatic exhale & restarting his GBC, readjusting his pose on the chair so that his legs go over the armrests, giving him the appearance of an immense baby held by patched pleather arms. All the while, he chants “Nostalgia! The Nineties! Nostalgia! The Nineties!” The audience for this booth groans & disperses when the picture-in-picture which displays his gameplay cuts to black, after having his speedrun ended by a critical hit from Agatha’s Gengar in the Elite Four.

  The towers in the exhibition are roughly arranged by the interests of their inhabitants, so Cairey has gathered. Turning the corner after the Pokemon player, they pass from “Miscellaneous Avenue” to “Player’s Way,” finding an immense crowd gathered before the towers which contain what Cairey calls the “Performative Players.” No berets or sweaters are to be seen here. Miscellaneous Ave had been belittered with art students on assignment, taking notes, along with a few middle-aged eccentrics- but Player’s Way is a sea of wide-eyed children, teens in streetwear, & the scowling adults who have accompanied them to worship their Gods.

  The screens show scenes of fantastical banality. Men, generally, in their twenties or early thirties at the most, sit in computer chairs, hunched over desks, mice, & keyboards, softly lit by the immense widescreen arrays before them. But this typical scene is always juxtaposed with a splitscreen showing visions of the wildest fancy- skulls exploding under iron boots, grenades severing limbs, tanks on fire, plumes of smoke rising from smoldering corpse piles, massive armies of science fiction mega-marines mowing down hordes of insectoid extraterrestrial demons, cutified magical girls wielding blades the widths of automobiles winking & giggling while slicing gargantuan hulks in half, medieval knights swinging flails, sorcerers glowing with colored auras, goblin archers, ghastly ghouls, mutilated trolls, decrepit zombies, giant spiders, spaceship laser-battles, trebuchets launching fragments of proscenium arches at the fortifications of besieged cities, gatling guns, dirks, lassos, revolvers, submachine guns, molotov cocktails, grappling hooks, rocket launchers, the crosshairs of bolt action sniper rifle scopes, beasts of lore, gods of antiquity, superheroes from every competing corporate franchise, simulated reproductions of famous athletes, pop stars, cowboys, indians, cops, robbers, hideous nightmare clowns... The entire pantheon of the collective imagination of mankind is represented in the games the players play. All of it is situated together, stitched together like a Frankenstein monster brought to life by the renderings of electricity without any sort of discernible order or criterion of categorization- & from all of these scenes, numbers & scores emerge & clutter the screen, reminding the viewer that all of it’s a game. Nothing in these realms could surprise its audience. If a man with the head of a crocodile & the wings of a bird drove a stop-sign honed to a spearpoint through the bowels of a body solely composed of blinking eyes- none would bat their own if it were accompanied with a diminishing health bar, a combo meter, & a voice announcing the end of round three.

  No- the only thing that could surprise in this realm of play was something truly unfantastical, that is, something “real,” banal & familiar. It would have to be like running into a former acquaintance at a theme park, which would render this person somehow more fantastical & interesting than the surrounding attractions & mascots- & this would only be because his appearance was unexpected. Or perhaps it would be like a parent passing into the magical circle of
pretend, demanding acquiescence to chores, routine, & all boring realities of the quote-unquote real world. Contextually, the most interesting part of the game is its player, Cairey realizes here. It is their presence which grants these scenes weight. The players are like the Olympian Gods, & their avatars are merely their disposable dolls.

  “Wow” Cairey’s date says, as she turns on her heels to get a selfie in front of the crowd. After it’s snapped she adds “I never got this videogame stuff or why, like, you’d want to watch someone else play them. You know?”

  “Yeah” replies Cairey, unaffected, “It’s weird I guess. People must like it for some reason, I mean, look at them.”

  “But isn’t it, like, weird?” she asks, “I mean, you can just play them yourself right? Why would they come all the way here to watch them when they could watch it at home anyway?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. I guess so.” he replies.

  But what isn’t weird, really, if you think about it- he thinks- What isn’t weird? For some reason people have an innate desire to expunge themselves in the presence of icons. It is not enough to see it. You have to be there, for whatever reason. What was a Museum, ever, if not the site for this sort of adoration? What was a Church? Or a Sport Stadium? What was the Roman Colosseum? What was a protest, or a concert, or Art if not the occasion for this self-expunging, this distraction,& erasure of boring time? How could any of it be differentiated, really? Aren’t they all weird from some perspective, if you think about it? How could one means of wasting time & self-erasure be weirder than another without it just being a manner of prejudicial preference based on the peculiarity of an individual’s means of doing so? How could anyone explain an act of adoration to someone who doesn't adore what they adore? Is it possible to find some commonality between someone who admires a musician for his musical prowess & another who admires someone fashionable for his taste in clothing? Could it just be that anything exemplary becomes iconic, by some tautological logic, for its exemplary nature- & that these icons stand for the conglomerate masses toiling in uniconic obscurity? Is this what the architect was getting at? Exemplary... He wonders if he has been perversely affected by its curatorial regime. He’s starting to think it is right.