[GR10K]
Text 3047/Image 12
234876—23 LDN
TO PASS THROUGH FOG
LAUGHING DEAD AUDIENCE
I wake up with a film inside my mouth. Formless residue with a medicinal edge. The earphones have fallen out but I can still almost hear it. Replay its aftertaste. You see, I have been trying to cure myself. Unfathomable issues bother me; I am physically unable to listen to any new music, immersing myself in a TV show is not possible without onset anaphylactic shock, even watching IShowSpeed open FIFA packs on stream gives me a full-body headache. Fucking sucks.
Exploring options of immunising myself, I stream everything into my body while I sleep.
The voices of ex-Disney stars and Enrique Iglesias and Animal Crossing theme tracks and laughing dead audiences; all shuffled by an algorithm inside of a stygian MP3 device with no screen that I paid for with cash in an envelope. The earphones look like plants. Plugged into my body, infusing me with a mash-up of cultural white noise. Like a medicinal drip. I imagine a canopy under my skin, a rainforest at night, blooming with invisible colours and musical biopics and post-credit scenes sinking down into the earth, layer upon layer slowly dissolving into this cultural sediment that tastes like paracetamol.
One promising side-effect: my lucid dreams have stopped. Or else I can no longer remember them. A grey line like an 8-bit sword. Behind it lies all of the evil things I have done in that ancient video-game, the one that takes place somewhere between conscious and unconsciousness. A particular place, allowing me to wield cloud-shaped blades, steal someone’s dog, have sex with my clone and turn into a were-dolphin chasing Frontex ships across the Aegean sea. At a certain point flying becomes falling.
All I can do is keep my head down, keep moving, keep myself guessing, keep my employers guessing, keep circling the pause button in the hope of an eventual meet-cute with the void.
If I was a Pokémon I would be the Normal type. They are immune to nothing but ghosts.
SIMULATING PATRIARCHY
En route to a patriarchy-themed Expo. I’m covered in technical garments which are engineered to perfection. A tight hood wrapping my head, preventing peripheral vision. I feel armoured enough to step outside. A white car arrives. Its brand logo is covered in layers of duct tape. I requested the Bolt driver to turn off the radio and to cover the car’s emblems. Usually cars are not a problem. Nevertheless, after watching Little Miss Sunshine (2006) when I was just 10 years old, I spent the following three days in the hospital. Ever since, seeing the VW ornament is a traumatic trigger. It was around that time that my allergy towards popular culture started to show.
I swerve through a mixed aggregate of costumed crowds, cosplay booths and advertising installations. My professional curiosity for absurdity has brought me here. Men are dressed as even more manly men. Little to no upper bodies are covered. Jordan Peterson is invited as a speaker. The theme of reenacting lost manhood is apparent. Here, within a contained setting, the tendency to oppress can be explored freely and feelings about suppressed masculinity can be shared. Axe is the convention’s main sponsor.
Passing by a stand selling whey protein, the crowd is getting more diverse. Next to shirtless men I spot fantasy costumes. My body shivers and my throat starts itching. Within a peculiar section of the convention, a niche bubble of indoctrinated gamers draws on fantasy culture to explore alternative realities that highlight a distinctly harmful form of masculinity.
As soon as I spot a colossal man cosplaying Sasuke I have to put on my emergency glasses.
They were specifically manufactured to help me cope with my issues. The glasses blur my vision to a degree which I can control, depending on the severity of my exposure.
A glowing portal leads to the conspiracy wing of the event. As you might expect there is no consistency to this label.
Doomsday equipment wholesalers cower next to life-extension activists and beaming crypto bros peddling Horrible Bosses (2011) Coin. No one is wearing masks on this side of the Expo facility, but you could map any pattern you desired by connecting the many silver discs of rapper M.I.A.’s anti-surveillance bucket hat that fill the crowd. I squint my eyes through the glasses, letting them pass over a gamer tent speed-running Rome Total War. Western Civilisation rises and falls in a beat that synchronises with the Lana Del Ray drill remix blaring from an Alienware laptop hosting an unsupervised livestream in which it takes a moment to recognise my face under all its protective layers. My armour suddenly feels compromised. It’s overkill. Surrounding me everywhere. The definition of fully-immersive being fought over by exoskeleton jocks in 3D-printed mecha-suits with animatronic sidekicks versus the VR buffs with their diaphanous headsets and Balenciaga Fortnite skins and video-game textures sampled from the interiors of underwater volcanos. Tuning it all out is like chewing glue. My clothing has absorbed me into the chaos. My tongue has fused to itself.
Time to leave. My flight takes off at 2000. On the way out I bump into a very cool-looking guy who tells me he once killed his brother-in-law as a result of falling victim to an elaborate zombie apocalypse prank organised by his extended family and two TV networks. He refused to share his Yankee Candle flavoured vape.
MUSIC FOR AIRPORTS
If it is a real sickness that I have, all the better, all the worse. That’s what I am thinking as I sit in my seat at gate 14 and watch the primary-coloured runway lights bleed out into the darkness.
Air travel is spectacular. I am able to time a song so that it reaches its sonic apex just as the plane wheels touch off the ground. In this way I can exert some form of control over the situation. I always know exactly when to release the music so that it hits at exactly the right time and this has come to provide me with an insane amount of satisfaction for several reasons, starting with the by now very basic contradiction that I am afraid of heights but not of flying. This discrepancy between physical reality (rapid/mechanical altitude/vertigo) with actual experience inside the craft (very banal) cancels itself out, calibrating a perfect tension that in turn allows me to listen to certain songs without a reaction, only a new flavour of dread that both diminishes and heightens the abstract threat of death.
Drone music inside the smoker’s lounge. Two men draped in long clothes standing in one corner look at me while I light the American Spirit between my fingers. My heart is pounding gently and I am reminded of a horror movie I have never seen about time travellers. When I was young and had some imagination I would read horror synopses and then never watch the movies, totally neutralising them.
Today I skim videos like Resident Evil 4 (Remastered) (ALL CUTSCENES) on YouTube to achieve the same effect.
Like popping bubblewrap using the space between reality and fiction. Like smoking cigarettes because they are bad for me. Micro-dosing panic; afraid of no more fear itself; edgy contradictions that synchronise my intolerance for anything except for living in the moment. This is a full-time preoccupation and morbid. Despite my “allergy” I am in constant need of stimulation. Withdrawal hounds my high tolerance for anxiety. But I am coming to believe that this physical repulsion I have towards movies and video-games etc. only points to a greater condition, one in which the marketed thrill of simulated death feels like cave paintings or theme parks— no longer magical.
Kick my feet up. Airports come nice and pre-digested. Like the internet without the content. Minimising cultural exposure, but leaving me at the mercy of my racing thoughts. I pick out a piece of paper and write: Let the rituals of the future be performed at the furthest limits of ourselves — those silent temples of technology and biology inside of which we are truly synonymous as individual and collective— until then I just look to occupy the moments in which the critical situation of modernity registers as only a fleeting numbness, and the ambient terror that scores it exits my vision, briefly, unintelligibly. I gently place the paper into the ashtray, stub out my cigarette on it and watch it burn into dust. A report for the higher-ups, the words already saved somewhere on the other side of the paper. A feeling like I’m on the clock and being watched, so I light another cigarette and take a sample of the area.
You are a suitcase, someone is saying on the other side of the glass. I understand the French even though I don’t speak it. You are just a suitcase. He’s hissing at his infant kid who is crying silently. I will carry you and you will stay quiet because that is all you are, do you understand? The words after that go back into that other language. The speaker is a dead ringer for the Big Bang Theory co- show-runner Bill Prady.
He’s wearing fashionable sweatpants, cream-coloured sludge of what was once the formal glamour of flying, and N95 Mask, completing the spectrum. I guess I filled-in the rest of his face myself. Searching mental history for the Prady association because I’ve long grown suspicious that my brain can no longer generate its own words or ideas. Instead I can only receive them from around me, wherever they are, in no matter what formation. Literal signs and symbols and yellow pages and elevator manufacturers listed beneath the buttons. If only I was a painter. I would locate the source of my colours. Synthesise cool new combinations. The parasitic bugs and mineral salts that can be crushed into dyes and powders and colorant codes. Instead I am helpless with a memory that is less photographic and more interchangeable with the function linking Wikipedia articles. I decide to let these images flood my mind for a while. Bathe in their loose, assured interconnections. The fountain at the Bellagio Hotel. The URL to my employer’s website; one of the most exquisite sequences of letters and numbers I’ve ever seen. A stock-photo of a pinball machine with no high-scores. A packet of crisps with beautiful advertising copy printed on the back next to the multi-coloured calorie index.
The flight announcement chimes. I don’t remember where I’m going. I don’t even know how the universe began. I have no technical knowledge at all.
To me jargon is like an abstract sculpture. Or a jewel. Cloudy but so sharp.
SERVER HOSTS
More angsty logic, feeling like I was born in the wrong generation. 2000 may have been a typo. Stranded from 3000 by a single digit. Now I’m at 30000. Code-share Flight 110. One one zero. One hundred and ten. Eleven zero. 110 is the emergency number in Taiwan. 110 looks like knuckledusters.
It’s a low-occupancy commercial flight with zero-pattern seats like excess tabs. I finish my vodka-ice and contemplate whether the human body at 30k feet might fare better stored like luggage in the aircraft hold, a space I have never seen but have pictured often, along with the image of empty seats up above; ghost flight simulators; the same video refracted across hundreds of screens: perfectly synced like K-pop choreography. You are just luggage.
I place my cup in the indented cup holder. Screen is set to the bitmap flight-path. Bad lights run down the empty overhead compartments away from me. We are moving at night-speed, heading West through space but not time. Just a series of moments that threaten to become one. Motoric, air-conditioned suspense. Maybe this is what it feels like watching a movie in the cinema. An eclipse coordinated by the teasers and post-credit scenes. I picture an empty theatre. Mind jumps to the Golden Trailer Awards. A body celebrating the acceleration of culture into ever smaller particles. Not small enough imo. Where going viral is the object of this dissolution. Predicting the curve; locating trend- outbreaks; reverse-engineerin g patient zero; these remain the playbook of the infection- mongers. The reason my company is obsessed with incels.
The calibration of purity and the profane as the ultimate formula for memes, artworks and various other campaigns.
Up ahead, the man two seats diagonally to my right prods his screen to life. Soon he is playing Mama (2013) dir. Andy Muschietti prod. Guillermo del Toro. January release. It grossed $148 million against a $15 million budget, inspiring studio executives to release horror movies all year round in a ceaseless halloween. The limbs of creature-actor Javier Botet manipulated with wire to make them jerk and then overlaid with CGI, in a demonic operation way more disturbing than the supernatural plot.
This is the closest to this movie I have ever gotten. It’s a weird feeling. Tongue-tied facial recognition. The child actors mouths’ open and close on screen. I know the ending and both of their names. I’m like the president briefed on every season finale. The movie has been modified to fit the screen and I can crop it further with a tilt of the head; the unholy Botet is eclipsed by a logo-printed seat sash.
Back in front of me, the vector-graphic aeroplane passes over a curved scope of pure blue. My stomach drops and my eyes seek some form of purchase. Mama (2013) is set in Clifton Forge, Virginia but was filmed in Canada. I scroll the safety messages emblazoned on the seat-back and feel for the call button on the armrest. My concentration is flaring. Like a random pin dropped into the earth by one of those Google Street-View sleuths rapidly assimilating their location via street-sign morphology, crop patterns and regional facial pixels, the urgent need to place myself comes through a desire for texture, for contrast, for something less precise than geolocation data.
The stewardess seems to proceed at x1.5 speed down the aisle.
The lighting interrupts the continuity of her movements, as if every second frame has been cut out to preserve resolution. Her face becomes scaffolded and distorted and then human again. I trawl my brain for meaning and it comes up with the Global Illumination Algorithm for realistic 3D computer graphics. She leans in to pour the vodka sachet and I see a tattoo of a person’s name in the Disney font on her upper arm. Frozen (2013) was character-rigged on Autodesk Maya. List of discontinued Autodesk softwares like a mutant IP menagerie. BitSquid. FatShark. ToadMan. Fuck. My heart on some separate gravity. Yesterday I picked up coffee in a 3D-printed mug. It was half as light as the object it was simulating and so when I employed the usual amount of force for raising a mug I threw the contents into the sky. The vodka moves like a sheet into the cup. Another ice cube follows. Mental flood not working. Sweat. High-density expansion. Forcing connections now. Manufacturing paranoia. CGI is also the call-sign for AtlasJet (ex-Rusair). A defunct airline previously owned by a holding company called Clintondale Aviation. CGI also stands for Clinton Global Initiative. Squinting my brain. Hard lines threatening to resolve. Some kind of shape in the empty blue. In the fuselage.
God help me I will press play on Crazy Rich Asians (2018) right now.
Detonate mental symptoms with physical ones. But thankfully this becomes unnecessary as I become aware of the fasten seatbelts sound that has been playing an aria for the past minute. My body is already draped in seatbelts. Very heavy turbulence. Soothing. Stewardess displays fear. Recognition of terrifying reality, our situation etc. also conversely soothing. I lean back in my chair. A few thoughts unpause. Are my glasses on? I can’t tell. Armrest shuffle function. Zombie shoes. The language of the future.
FEAR OF GOD
Turbulence increases. The overhead compartment pops and oxygen masks drop. We try to put them on. Unnecessarily. The airplane’s airtight seal is already punctured and everything is sucked out. Air chopped up into atoms spiralling in the sudden surge of chaotic disruption. All objects and humans and culture and context and ideas squeezed through the rapture, out into the glowing and burning sky. The airplane, now an empty shell, keeps flying as I watch it glide into a contourless fog. Ghost flight.
Like something out of a dream/movie/video-game/some fourth thing.
I have not read a book since I was a kid. I had a favourite one but I don’t remember the name anymore. I recall the book’s cover as I nosedive towards the face of the earth. It had a sea creature on it. At school we would spell things on upside-down calculators:
07734. 5318008. 50607.
Later we received scientific versions loaded with new symbols and upright functions. Everyone else tilted their screens back and expanded their alphanumeric vocabulary in order to manufacture full sentences and sexually-explicit diagrams but I could only hold on to a pure sensation of inexplicable loss.
I try to centre myself. Try to feel my weightlessness. The O2 mask is still wrapped around my face, its torn cords fluttering. I grab somebody else’s hoodie spiralling through the air. Labelled Fear of God. To my surprise I feel no reaction. Mid-fall, I manage to coat myself in it. All of a sudden I feel safe. This additional layer wraps me in a second skin. Wraps me in a home I never had. Now I am prepared to lose every portion of being. Become nothing but nothingness. Therefore, everything.
- Text/Sam Harding/Frano Karlovic
- Images/Patrizio Sollis
- Designer/Pauline Hill
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