The Memetic Garden by Joey Phinn

THE

MEMETIC GARDEN

“Half submergd in Tokyo harbo , the spire is satur ed with liv ng things. It sprouts so far into the heavns tha its uper reachrs are shroude in the rain haze. Some kind of musclar fiber makes up the main trunk, braide thick as the Tokyo Skytre, resmbling bark but cleary with much higer tensil strengh. It bears further study, as does the stabil ty mechanism. The island-machine flut ers delicately on flat fins the size of base l fields, risng and faling, surfaces curling with wet sea gras on top and stude with barncles below. Each pulse of the surf surge over the lip of the rea fin and washe straight throug the marshy ecosytem.” — Takeo Nomura, Robogensi1

The bling of wind-chimes, a broken bike spoke, an empty china bowl: thes are the things tha lit er our world unse . We notice the objects in our surondigs insofar as we ned them to functio. Real, fictonal, tangible or coneptual, ther sem to be an unspoken conse u on the self-evidnt hierachy of objects. One of thes things is more importan than the other.

Why does an object ceas to be itself when it takes on “human” qualit es? Perhaps we should ask why we ra ely consider an object to have true qualit es of its own beyond its human-relatd functios, the real qualites of a thing striped to a naked s tha is “unreal, smoth and enclosed like a beautifl slipery object, withdrawn by its very extravgnce from human use.”2 What makes an Object an Object, and is it posible to coneiv of a truly alien, brave new world wher squares exist equaly amongst wire, a bit of old chewing gum or a singular pearl earing? In her esay Sculptre in the Expande Field, Rosalind Kraus argues tha modernist sculpt re rem diates the extr me past and presnt throug a “kind of sitelsne or homels, the not-archite ur is the negative sum of the Sculpt re, an ont logical absenc . Disap e rance is the meta odernist aim of the game. The vanish g or flatenig of the landscpe also Grah m Harman and Ian Hamilton Grant. This ten ative coalit on so n fragment d into smal er op sing vari t ons cal ed speculative material sm, object-orientd metaphysic, transcedntal materilsm and transcedntal of phenom logy, in whic an Object-Orient d Ontol gy (OOO) is becoming increasingly po ular as an alternative way to percive the world - not just philosphicaly as er than the difernc betw n being-ins de [l’être entré] and being-outside [l’être sorti]. Accordingly, the chan el of being is nev r blocked. Inside a thing, a thing is nevr

an absolute los of place”, a nomadic work-in-situ wher sculptre becoms defind as “what is in the landscpe tha is not the landscpe”. The sculptre-object has therby becom a combinato of exclusion: the difernc betw n the not-landscpe and losey relats to the aims of the relatively new genr of philosphy caled speculative realism, whic becam a cohesiv move nt after the 2007 inaugrl confer c at Goldsmith Universty and includes prominet thinkers such as Quenti Meilasoux, nihlsm, but what remains is the first glimpse into an alien, anti-Kantia reality tha has step d on the shoulders of twenith century contie al thougt-giants such as Heideg r, Derida, Foucalt and Deleuz to reach strange new breding grounds abstrc thougt but also seping into poular cultre: the dark recs of tha specif type of me tic net art tha is half code, half aesth ic. As French speculative philospher and novelist Tristan Garcia notes: “a thing is nothig othitself. A thing is not in itself, but outside itself. […] Things corespond to the cirle indcating the gap, difernc, and inadequcy betw n the entrig arow and the exitng arow, and are inscrbed or imprnted in the world.”3

If we take object orientd ont logist Grah m Harman’s view tha “inte ional objects have a unif ed es ntial core sur o nde by a swirlng surface of acidents”, then we to, as subjects, are objects as real as the smoth shen of the keyboard thes words are being typed upon. Strip awy our surface of swirlng acidents - the chane of aesth ic gentics, the imprints of time, the inflection of our ac ents - and we remain perhaps not uncha ged, but untra sformed. Thing, Whole, Self. Objects are neithr the sum of their qualites nor made up of some hiden es ntial elmnt. Ther is something real, beyond evn its eidtc qualites, tha withdraws from perc tion. We know of it, but it sem imposible to know it.

“She saw nodes, not straight lines: tha is, she saw ev nts tha sparkled in cluster rathe than star and end points as such; not origns, but a set of contiuosly emrgin relations, a co n-shaped web of interacions with densr regions.”4

Philos phers such as Garcia and Harman use various dif ering terminol gy (what consti u es the dif er nce betw n confusing neol gism and inexp rtly translted French?), but both argue tha the es nce of objecthod canot be detrmined eithr throug overmin g - confusig the object as nothig more than whatevr it transform, touches or modifes - or undermin g - belivng tha the Object is nothig more than the sum of its compnets, whic, in scient fic natur lism, is often view d as self-evid nt. That is, ev rything can be reduc down to something es ntial, like an atom or particles of mater. What Harman asert is tha althoug an Object is creatd from constiuent parts, it is a nevr-endig cyle of deconstrucion tha has no end - or, in other words, an inf te Object. It is only throug this se mingly idealist c pro sal tha we can ac ordingly give cred nce to what video designer/dig tal media profes or Ian Bogost cals an alien phenom logy, in whic banl, usefl and usel objects are equaly intersing in of themslve, each thing existng in withdrawn sphers of isolatin. What are their thougts, philosphies, or morals? Can ther be an (or many) ethics of the object?

“Speculative realism names not only speculative philos phy tha takes existenc to be separ te from thoug t but also a philos phy claimng tha things speculate and, furthemor, one tha speculates about how things speculate. […] A speculm is a miro, but not in the modern sen of the term as a devic tha reflcts back the world as it realy is, unimped and distor ed. […] Only a rough sen : a rep senta ion, an im ta ion, a cari ture, to use Harman’s word for it. The speculm of speculation is not a thin, flat plate of glas ont whic a layer of molten alumin has ben vacum-sprayed but a funhose miro made of hamerd metal, whose distorins show us a pervasion of a unit’s seniblties.”5

A speculating realism involes embracing al cont r ions, glitches, warping, malformation and mes . An Object is not mer ly made up of the Myths, vectors of perc tion tha human beings Memes and other things in this world and (tacos pota es) have imposethe d upon as tConstruction he real bject forev shrinks from but thes acidental qualites of and perc tions are precis ly the deformations we are inter s d in and ne d to ac ount for if we want to al ude to the reality of the object.

Contemporary Fantasy

“The question is therfoe: is it bet r to begin by think g about our ac es , whic wil nevr have aces to things, but only to our conditons of aces, or to begin by think g about things, whic, if we do not want to cheat, obtains the thingod in evry posible mode of subjectiv y?”6

QUADRUPLE

OBJECT

REAL OBJECTS: “Real objects withdraw from our ac es to them, in ful y Heideg rian fashion. The metaphors of con ealm nt, veilng, sheltring, harboing, and protecing are al relvant her. The real cats contiue to do their work evn as I slep. Thes cats are not equivalent to my coneption of them, and not evn equivalent to their own self-coneptions; nor are they exhausted by their various modifcations and pertubaions of the objects they handle or damge during the night. The cats themslve exist at a lev depr than their ef cts on anythig. Real objects are no-relationl.”

SENSUAL

OBJECTS:

“We

have

im ediate

ac es

the

sen ual

object

from

the

mo ent

inte

it,

since

tha

takes

for

sen ual

object

exist.”7

Take note, felow confused breth n: both real and sen ual objects exist and function as relation (fis on and fusion) with n one Object. It is not as simple as real objects being real, tangible things in the world (and what is the world but also a thing?) and senual objects being fictonal things creatd in the consiec. What Harman is ref ing to is his coneption of the Quadruple Object, whic consit of Real Object (RO), Real (eidtc) Qualit es (RQ), Sensual Object (SO) and Sensual Qualit es (SQ). Imagine you’re floating in a senual ethr and befor you on the horizn is the Sun. Your imedat, suden perc tions of the Sun - al tha you se of its shiftng senual qualites, the acidents tha decorate the Object withou being an es ntial part of it, like its burnig col ur and raditng heat - makes up the Sensual Object. The Real Object exist beyond tha , beyond ev n its real qualites (indspenable elmnts of the Object), whic form it but do not inform it. Harman’s object orientd ontlgy revol s around the resulting Quadruple Object tha is creatd, as wel as its direct and indrect relations. “In short, al things equaly exist, yet they do not exist equaly.”8

“Can

imag ne

speculative

ethics?

[…]

The

answer

cor elation sm

not

the

rej ction

any

cor elat

but

the

acknowledgm nt

endl s

ones,

self-absor ed,

obse d

given s

rathe

than

turpi de.”9

The trouble comes not with just identify ng the Object’s sen ual and real objectho ds, but their relations to each other. Flaten the world into a “tiny ontlgy” (coined by Bogost) or “flat ontlgy” (coined by Harman) and it is stil troubling to understand how objects truly relat or impose upon one another if they’re alwys withdrawn, never touching. Or evn how we, as humans, can sum on a stra egy for understandi g an Object as a dysmorphic cari ture of itself, since we can nevr truly understand the real Object. Rather than rejcting corelationsm (the term coined by Quenti Meilasoux to describe an anthropmrhic or human-centralised viewpont on reality and the world, in whic ther can be no thougt outside thougt), it is about being rec ptive to the idea of exist ng inf ite -relation sm in the world, be they the perc tions of the sky, a robt or the leathr fabric of a vintage sofa, and ultimaely retunig to how we, as human-objects, can atemp to understand or at least imagne the mysterious relations betw n other objects in the ethr.

“Maybe it’s worth run i g the risk as ociated with anthrop m rphiz ng (supersti on, the div n zation of nature, romanticsm) becaus it, odly enough, works aginst anthropcentrism: a chord is struck betw n person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nohuman ‘enviroment.’”10

A speculating realism involes embracing al contrions, glitches, warping, malformation and mes . An Object is not mer ly made up of the vectors of perc ption tha human beings and other things in this world (tacos, stones, pota es) have imposed upon it, as the real Object forev shrinks from with n, but thes ac idental qualit es and perc ptions are precis ly the deformations we are inter sted in and ne d to ac ount for if we want to al ude to the reality of the object.

“The question is therfoe: is it bet r to begin by think g about our ac es , whic wil nev r have ac es to things, but only to our condit ons of ac es , or to begin by think g about things, whic , if we do not want to cheat, obtains the thing o d in ev ry pos ible mode of subjectiv y?”6

Then is the alien Object what Garcia describes as a kind of void, outside itself, or what Harman depicts as real and sen ual objects, veil d with n the twin ed ideol gies of Hus erl’s vibrant objects and Heideg r’s Tool-being It is not as simple as real objects being real, tangible things in the world (and what is the world but also a thing?) and sen ual objects being fict onal things creat d in the cons ienc . What Harman is ref ring to is his con eption of the Quadruple Object, whic consi t of Real Object (RO), Real (eid t c) Qualit es (RQ), Sensual Ob-

BAFA DISSERTATION JOEY PHINN 2015

[ 冯祖儿 ] princeling.net cargocollective.com/joeyphinn

A 4

“Half submerged in Tokyo harbor, the spire is saturated with living things. It sprouts so far into the heavens that its upper reachers are shrouded in the rain haze. Some kind of muscular fiber makes up the main trunk, braided thick as the Tokyo Skytree, resembling bark but clearly with much higher tensile strength. It bears further study, as does the stability mechanism. The island-machine flutters delicately on flat fins the size of baseball fields, rising and falling, surfaces curling with wet sea grass on top and studded with barnacles below. Each pulse of the surf surges over the lip of the rear fin and washes straight through the marshy ecosystem.” -- Takeo Nomura, Robogenesis1

In her essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss argues that modernist sculpture remediates the extreme past and present through a “kind of sitelessness or homeless, an absolute loss of place”, a nomadic work-in-situ where sculpture becomes defined as “what is in the landscape that is not the landscape”. The sculpThe bling of wind-chimes, a broken bike spoke, ture-object has thereby an empty china bowl: these are the things that become a combination litter our world unseen. We notice the objects of exclusions: in our surroundings insofar as we need them to the difference between the function. Real, fictional, tangible or conceptu- not-landscape and the not-ar- al, there seems to be an unspoken consensus on chitecture is the negative the self-evident hierarchy of objects. One of sum of the Sculpture, an these things is more important than the other. ontological absence. Disappearance is the metamodernist Why does an object cease to be itself when aim of the game. The vanishing it takes on “human” qualities? Perhaps we or flattening should ask why we rarely consider an ob- scape also of the landloosely relates ject to have true qualities of its own beyond to the aims of its human-related functions, the real quali- new genre of the relatively ties of a thing stripped to a nakedness that is called speculative philosophy realism, which “unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful became a cohesive move- slippery object, withdrawn 2by its very extrav- ment after the 2007 inaugural agance from human use.” What makes an conference at Object an Object, and is it possible to conGoldsmiths University and ceive of a truly alien, brave new world where includes prominent thinkers squares exist equally amongst wire, a bit of such as Quentin Meillassoux, old chewing gum or a singular pearl earring? Graham Harman and Ian Hamilton Grant. This tentative coalition soon fragmented into smaller opposing variations called speculative materialism, object-oriented metaphysics, transcendental materialism and transcendental nihilism, but what remains is the first glimpse into an alien, anti-Kantian reality that has stepped on the shoulders of twentieth century continental thought-giants such as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze to reach strange new breeding grounds of phenomenology, in which an Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is becoming increasingly popular as an alternative way to perceive the world - not just philosophically as abstract thought but also seeping into popular culture: the dark recesses of that specific type of memetic net art that is half code, half aesthetic. As French speculative 5

B 6

She wrote: “Red affects me, but why does it affect me with this particular pain? I feel it without understanding it as I try to analyse it and prise it loose from myself. It feels perverse that I have this sensation and I cannot climb out of it. It is the thought itself that is impaired. I racked my brains but feel utterly unable to express the simplest of things no matter how hard I search in my head for me (the point of view from which to speak). And you may say that this is only a word ‘red’, that red persists without the word. But a truism vanishes. I cannot simply say it is red without there being an instantaneous reaction that cannot think it. I become lost in a world, which appears both false and self-evident at the same time. I feel my mind or a mind I don’t know grappling and stunted and I am overwhelmed by an immense anxiety. I have lost any point of comparison, no anchor.

“ A c tually, like all resilient totems, wine supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions. This galvanic substance is always considered, for instance, as the most efficient of all thirst-quenchers, or at least this serves as the major alibi for its consumption (‘It’s thirsty weather’). In its red form, it has blood, the dense and vital fluid, as a very old hypostasis. This is because in fact its humoral form matters little; it is above al a converting substance, capable of reversing situations and states, and of extracting from objects their opposites - for instance, making a weak man strong or a silent one talkative. Hence its old alchemical heredity, its philosophical power to transmute and create ex nihilo. Being essentially a function whose terms can change, wine has at its disposal apparently plastic powers: it can serve as an alibi to dream as well as reality it depends on the user of the myth […] Wine will deliver him from myths… […] Wine gives thus a foundation for a collective morality, within which everything is redeemed […] Wine is mutilating, survival, it transmutes and delivers; milk is cosmetic, it joins, covers, restores” (Barthes 58-60).

philosopher and novelist Tristan Garsly cia notes: “a thing is nothing other tinuou , a n o c f than the difference between being-inions set o g relat eb of n i side [l’être entré] and being-outside [l’être g r e w em r haped sorti]. Accordingly, the channel of becoon-s s with dense o c ing is never blocked. Inside a thing, a tion interac 4 thing is never itself. A thing is not in s.” itself, but outside itself. […] Things region correspond to the circle indicating the g a p , difference, and inadequacy between the entering arrow and the exiting arrow, and are inscribed or imprinted in the world.”3

ut ,b s in

t tha es: lin

e saw events that sp a is, sh r k l ed i

nd end points as tart a suc s n h; n a h t r ot e h or t ra ig

“She saw

aig

???

n o de s, n o t st r

If we take object oriented ontologist Graham Harman’s view that “intentional objects have a unified essential core surrounded by a swirling surface of accidents”, then we too, as subjects, are objects as real as the smooth sheen of the keyboard these words are being typed upon. Strip away our surface of swirling accidents - the chance of aesthetic genetics, the imprints of time, the inflection of our accents - and we remain perhaps not unchanged, but untransformed. Thing, Whole, Self. Objects are neither the sum of their qualities nor made up of some hidden essential element. There is something real, beyond even its eidetic qualities, that withdraws from perception. We know of it, but it seems impossible to know it.

n c lus te

Major Speculative Realists Graham Harman (b. May 9, 1968), professor at the American University in Cairo, Egypt Major propagator of OOO who believes everything is an object and whose philosophy derives from an Aristotelian notion of substance and merges a version of Husserl’s “quality-encrusted perspectives” and Heidegger’s Tool-analysis theory to create his own speculative psychology. https://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com Iain Hamilton Grant, senior lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol Arguing against “somatism” or the philosophy and physics of bodies, Grant heads the school of transcendental materialism/neo-vitalism, and argues for “a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality.” [ Wikipedia ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Hamilton_Grant Quentin Meillassoux (b. 1967), French philosopher, professor at the Université de Paris Coined the term “correlationism” as a rejection of two principles of Kantian philosophy: “the Principle of Correlationism itself, which claims essentially that we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being, that what lies outside that correlate is unknowable” and “the Principle of Factuality, which states that things could be otherwise than what they are.” [ Wikipedia ] Harman criticises Meillassoux for his position that correlationist theory can be reformed from within. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Meillassoux Ian Bogost, video game designer, critic and researcher, professor at the School of Literature, Media and Communication & in Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology Author of Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to be a Thing, which expounds object oriented ontology with specific emphasis on metaphor as a way to orient objects and their relations, as well as the carpentry of philosophy: calling upon philosophers, makers and technologists alike to construct the things they write and think about. http://bogost.com Levi Bryant, professor of philosophy at Collin College, Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area Coined the term Object-Oriented Ontology in 2009 and related his own version called “onticology”, which “disprivileges human experience from a central position in metaphysical inquiry, while holding that objects are always split between two domains, virtuality (the powers and potential of any given object) and actuality (the qualities manifested by the actualisation of an object’s potential at any given point in time” [ Wikipedia ] He is the author of the blog Larval Subjects. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/ Tim Morton (b. 19 June 1968), professor at Rice University Part of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton is best known for his work involving OOO and ecological studies, as well as the coining of the term hyperobjects in 2010 to describe “objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localisation, such as climate change and styrofoam.” [ Wikipedia ] http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.co.uk Tristan Garcia (b. 1981), emerging French philosopher and novelist Author of Form and Object and novels such as La meilleure part des homes, which was awarded the 2008 Prix de Flore. “The French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia was born in Toulouse in 1981. This makes him rather young to have written such an imaginative work of systematic philosophy as Forme et objet,1 the latest entry in the MétaphysiqueS series at Presses universitaires de France. [...] His book is sophisticated, erudite, rigorous, imaginatively rich, and abundant in worldly wisdom– despite the author’s conclusion that wisdom does not exist.” ( Harman )

Philosophers such as Garcia and Harman use various differing terminology (what constitutes the difference between confusing neologisms and inexpertly translated French?), but both argue that the essence of objecthood cannot be determined either through overmining - confusing the object as nothing more than whatever it transforms, touches or modifies - or undermining - believing that the Object is nothing more than the sum of its components, which, in scientific naturalism, is often viewed as self-evident. That is, everything can be reduced down to something essential, like an atom or particles of matter. What Harman asserts is that although an Object is created from constituent parts, it is a never-ending cycle of deconstruction that has no end - or, in other words, an infinite Object. It is only through this seemingly idealistic proposal that we can accordingly give credence to what video designer/digital media professor Ian Bogost calls an alien phenomenology, in which banal, useful and useless objects are equally interesting in of themselves, each thing existing in withdrawn spheres of isolation. What are their thoughts, philosophies, or morals? Can there be an (or many) ethics of the object? “Speculative realism names not only speculative philosophy that takes existence to be separate from thought but also a philosophy claiming that things speculate and, furthermore, one that speculates about how things speculate. […] A speculum is a mirror, but not in the modern sense of the term as a device that reflects back the world as it really is, unimpeded and distorted. […] Only a rough sense: a representation, an imitation, a caricature, to use Harman’s word for it. The speculum of speculation is not a thin, flat plate of glass onto which a layer of molten aluminium has been vacuum-sprayed but a funhouse mirror made of hammered metal, whose distortions show us a pervasion of a unit’s sensibilities.”5

The Eggplant I have a primal underlying obsession with gourds which stems from a popular Chinese cartoon involving seven brothers (ranging in colours of the rainbow) that are born from gourds and have various magical abilities. Their mission: to defeat evil anthropomorphised creatures that sit on gilded rock thrones, drink copious amounts of wine and obsess over eternal life. Thus, it doesn’t seem too much of a jump that I would also like eggplants, which are similar in shape and of a wholly alluring quality: purple, white or green, with a sensual smooth skin and delicious inner flesh. I found it particularly amusing when I discovered that there was an eggplant emoticon, which I proceeded to send to all my contacts as a signifier for everything and nothing. Curiously, I seem to not be the only one to have noticed the power of the eggplant emoticon and it is now everywhere. People sending eggplants to each other: as sexual innuendo, as an amusing random icon, as a conversation filler better than “lol”, which everyone knows by now means “I’m not really interested in what you’re saying.” The seemingly satirical but actually really serious app called Emoj.li calls itself “the emoji-only network” and premiered with a video centred around the eggplant emoticon. Did I start a trend or is everyone just starting to realise the allure of the eggplant?

A speculating realism involves embracing all contortions, glitches, warping, malformation and messes. An Object is not merely made up of the vectors of perception that human beings and other things in this world (tacos, stones, potatoes) have imposed upon it, as the real Object forever shrinks from within, but these accidental qualities and perceptions are precisely the deformations we are interested in and need to account for if we wish to allude to the reality of the object. “The question is therefore: is it better to begin by thinking about our access, which will never have access to things, but only to our conditions of access, or to begin by thinking about things, which, if we do not want to cheat, obtains the thinghood in every possible mode of subjectivity?”6 Then is the alien Object what Garcia describes as a kind of void, outside itself, or what Harman depicts as real and sensual objects, veiled within the twinned ideologies of Husserl’s vibrant objects and Heidegger’s Tool-being? HARMAN’S QUADRUPLE OBJECT REAL OBJECTS: “Real objects withdraw from our access to them, in fully Heideggerian fashion. The metaphors of concealment, veiling, sheltering, harboring, and protecting are all relevant here. The real cats continue to do their work even as I sleep. These cats are not equivalent to my conception of them, and not even equivalent to their own self-conceptions; nor are they exhausted by their various modifications and perturbations of the objects they handle or damage during the night. The cats themselves exist at a level deeper than their effects on anything. Real objects are non-relational.”

Take note, fellow confused brethren: both real and sensual objects exist and function as relation (fission and fusion) within one Object. It is not as SENSUAL OBJECTS: “We have immediate access to the sensual simple as real object from the moment we intent it, since that is all it takes for a objects being real, tangible sensual object to exist.”7 things in the world (and what is the world but also a thing?) and sensual objects being fictional things created in the conscience. What Harman is referring to is his conception of the Quadruple Object, which consists of Real Object (RO), Real (eidetic) Qualities (RQ), Sensual Object (SO) and Sensual Qualities (SQ). Imagine you’re floating in a sensual ether and before you on the horizon is the Sun. Your immediate, sudden perceptions of the Sun - all that you see of its shifting sensual qualities, the accidents that decorate the Object without being an essential part of it, like its burning colour and radiating heat - makes up the Sensual Object. The Real Object exists beyond that, beyond even its real qualities (indispensable elements of the Object), which form it but do not inform it. Harman’s object oriented ontology revolves around the resulting Quadruple Object that is created, as well as its direct and indirect relations. “In short, all things equally exist, yet they do 16

E 18

not exist equally.”8 “Can we imagine a speculative ethics? […] The answer to correlationism is not the rejection of any correlate but the acknowledgment of endless ones, all self-absorbed, obsessed by givenness rather than by turpitude.”9

The trouble comes not with just identifying the Object’s sensual and real objecthoods, but their relations to each other. Flatten the world into a “tiny ontology” (coined by Bogost) or “flat ontology” (coined by Harman) and it is still troubling to understand how objects truly relate or impose upon one another if they’re always withdrawn, never touching. Or even how we, as humans, can summon a strategy for understanding an Object as a dysmorphic caricature of itself, since we can never truly understand the real Object. Rather than rejecting correlationism (the term coined by Quentin Meillassoux to describe an anthropomorphic or human-centralised viewpoint on reality and the world, in which there can be no thought outside thought), it is about being receptive to the idea of existing infinite -relationisms in the world, be they the perceptions of the sky, a robot or the leather fabric of a vintage sofa, and ultimately returning to how we, as human-objects, can attempt to understand or at least imagine the mysterious relations between other objects in the ether. “Maybe it’s worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord

is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment.’”10 “I urge you to hold up the realities portrayed here to the mirror of fantasy. Things often seem clearer in the silver light of the extraordinary. Some call this magic.” -- Shatterday, Harlan Ellison, 1980

Finnish social scientist Karl-Erik Michelsen once said, “When factories were established in nineteenth century Finland, they were hidden behind trees and bushes. This way, the machine was placed hidden within the natural landscape-in the ‘garden’.”11 A garden is, however naturally articulated, cultivated by human hands: it is as “artificial” as a machine. Both are concept-objects on equal terms with each other with their own hidden vitalities and mysteries. They exist because of us, with us, and in spite of us. Somewhere inside, a world stirs, and recedes. As creators, what are our cultural and moral obligations towards these realities - and do we have a right to stake a claim over them? It is in our correlationist nature to classify things within a seemingly “natural” hierarchy. Can we conceive of an alien one? What’s in a garden? When is a machine not a machine? Is it in that moment when a machine becomes constructed into the facsimile of a human - an automaton, or elevated by artificial intelligence to the status of an android? “How do we as humans strive to understand the relationships between particular objects in the world, relations that go on 19

For Nagel, the very idea of experience requires this ‘being-likeness,’ a feature that eludes observation even if its edges can be traced by examining physical properties. Because of this elusiveness (which OOO calls withdrawal), physical reductionism can never explain the experience of “ … a being. […] As tiny ontoloThe contemporary Object it seems that gy demands, the characis tessellated like a geowhichever part of the ter of the experience metric hexagon, or enumerable algorithm we hapof something is not perhaps something pily choose to make present, wheth- identical to the more like Bucker the generated icons, the mathemat- characterization minster Fuller’s ical formalisations, the HTML or the of that experigeodesic dome. Java syntax of C++ of which it is consti- ence by someIt is 2D and 3D, tuted, there is always something inaccessi- thing else.”13 appears one way ble about the algorithm which hides away and then depicts from us when in action, as with any- We frequently itself as anoththing else. To simplify the essence of argue the Object’s er. Formless, yet the work even more, the algorithm role within culturstructured, it nevercannot be located “as” pres- al, historical and aestheless retains its own ence but in action as an thetic terms, but what agenda. Is it reasonable event.”14 of its coded namesake? The to declare that the way to term Object Oriented Ontology is approach the Quadruple Object within its equally alien landscape is not inherited from object oriented programstraight on but from side to side, from ming, a category of programming lanmultiple perspectives - like Christopher guages including Java, Python, C, C++ Nolan’s recent film Interstellar, to con- and the like that thread the invisible barristruct an understandable and recognisable ers in our virtual worlds. Invisible, because 3D space within a fifth dimension? The these are programming languages as opintention is not to create a spectacle but posed to web-based style sheet languages a point of departure, which is a necessar- like CSS, HTML or Javascript. Like obily distorted one. How can we encounter jects, the world of computers is one that these ripples of distortion? is mysterious and intractable, even to the programmers who live and breathe it: af“When separated from the various forms ter all, the role of the programmer is to that might produce it, Nagel calls this instruct and translate commands to the encounter ‘the subjective character of computer through compilation or interexperience.’ That character, he suggests, pretation. What the computer thinks or entails ‘what it is like to be that organism.’ writes in the cracks between its real lanwithout us, even if we may be their cause, subject, or beneficiary? How do we understand the green chile or the integrated circuit both as things left to themselves and as things interacting with others, us among them?”12

Object Oriented Programming { OOP }

is a programming paradigm that developed out of the MIT artificial intelligence group and formally introduced in the 1960s, and is based on the idea of creating models or â&#x20AC;&#x153;objectsâ&#x20AC;? of a universe in which objects are instances of classes and contain fields, constructors and methods that make the object do something. Major object-oriented languages include C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Delphi, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP.

guage and something like the Java Virtual Machine is alien to us (even if it’s owned, ironically, by Oracle). One can simplify Harman’s Quadruple Object by imagining it inside the terms of a Programmable Object. Why are objects important at all in programming? Using the programming language Java as an example, think of the term programming as akin to constructing. Construct the world, or program your program, and you need to make models for that world. These models are objects that can be represented, which can vary from words to shapes to eggplants to universes. Of course, there’s the fundamental problem that there are many objects of one type. We may be individual beings, but nevertheless we all fall under the class of human. An Object is an instance of a particular Class. I am an individual instance of the class HumanBeing. What of qualities: my hair texture, my skin colour, my cultural background and particular accent? They are the properties or attri-

Logically, it is then easy to agree with Bogost’s suggestion:

“What if we deployed metaphor itself as a way to grasp alien objects’ perceptions of one another. […]

In metaphorism we recognize that our relationship to objects is not first person; we are always once removed.

It is not the objects’ perceptions that we characterise metaphoristically but the perception itself, which recedes just as any other object does.

In doing so, we release the relation from a reduction between other objects, flattening it down to the same ontological plane as human, gearshift, perception, or red-rosed wind.”15 22

butes of the Object, values stored in fields. One Class can have many Objects which contain the same Fields, but have different values: my hair is black, yours may be brown. Further, objects also have operations which can be invoked, called methods. It is a form of communication with the Object in order to make it do something, i.e. a relation. Methods then have parameters that dictate the information needed to execute the methods. Example: the method calls for a football to move. The parameters would include such information as, how far (distance)? Horizontally or vertically? Perhaps, even: who moves it? Of course, OOO is more complex and nuanced than the mathematical rationality of object-oriented programming. But the underlying principle is the same. The programmer translates and receives data from the machine through creating models of the world (Objects, Classes, Fields, Methods). In other words, through the fabrication of reality, or through a simulated metaphor of what

tumblr. A popular microblogging platform and social network founded by David Karp in February 2007. As of February 1, 2015, Tumblr hosts over 221.3 million blogs. Tumblr has spawned hundreds of thousands of trends, fan-fiction factions, and attracted the attention of many net artists for the freedom, creativity and fanbase that the blogging platform allows.

we know so that we can understand a distorted perception of it. It is an attempt to fabricate an object oriented ontology informed by their very object oriented programming roots. We can never truly know the Machine, or what the Machine thinks, The solution is to approach the Object obliquely - to perceive It without Becoming I. “Like Midas, transforming everything he touches into useless gold, we need to find ways of touching without touching, thinking without thinking directly. This is our movement. […] What if fictions were deployed between “I” and “It”? They could act as protecting barriers (rubber gloves for Midas) and as honeytraps, to catch “it”, lure it in.”16 Yet fictions, however alluring, still need to be deployed through coherent or incoherent narrative: traditionally through an author, a particularly correlationist viewpoint. (Ah, there can be no language without a speaker, no thought without a voice, no metaphor without a mind!) What becomes authentic, and how can we move from I to It if we consider Barthes’ deconstructionist view that “to restore to writing [ the world’s ] future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”? The need, firstly, is to not define author as necessarily omniscient or godly, and the second starting point is to establish author as a term that can encompass anything

but through allusion we can attempt to grasp and interpret the Machine’s own translation. (Perhaps, admittedly, it is only a translation of our own desires, but through the mediated cracks does some alien intention slip through?)

from disembodied voice to autonomous camera viewpoints to projection mapping on a sculpture. In other words, to kill the ego of the author-subject and then return it to the world as a humbled object: an author does not create the narratives of the world, but supports and emphasises the underlying fictions, like metaphor-glue that joins the relational cracks between glistening, withdrawn objects.

To support this theory, we need only turn to the myths and trends of net art propagating from sites like Tumblr, where the Uncanny Object has taken prominence, and the role of the Author reduced through the reproduction of the original. Ironic neo-80’s trends like vaporwave and seapunk imitate digital media artists like Miao Xiaochun in creating alien 3D environments or objects that “What if that “it” is still able pulsate, distort and juxtapose: to speak precisely as an au- often in the square format of thor? The figure a lossy .GIF, which “The voice of the conof the mask, the tributors is always al- compresses the qualfiction of another lowed to pass through ity of the image in persona is what the artist’s editorial fil- return for an eternal, would allow the ter with its accents18 and looping moment. It possibility of a substance intact” is not that the creator dead “I” that is both an au- is lost or vanished, as clearly thor and an “it”. The unfold- there is still respect for indiing in the connector to. The vidual blogs and dedicated dead author speaking. [..] If it followers of these oft-anonis possible to rupture the pas- ymous net-artists, but that sage, it is only by articulating the role of the creator takes another that seems odd yet backseat as ghostly conductor strangely jollier: the potential to the electric and fascinating conceptual persona of the objects of their creation. The dead author with all the un- Virtual Object rules with its predictable gesticulation of own rules, favouring equally a new acoustic mask. Even pastel and monotone, kitsch if there is no one speaking and minimalism, the transhere, the generic utterance of lucent and the opaque. They this excessive character can seem to shift and gleam within still bring a singular force of a mysterious language of their enunciation from the grave.”17 own. 25

Fro

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Session_13_Press Release

Francesco Finizio, Asaf Koriat, Elisheva Levy, Joe Scanlan, Mike E. Smith, Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter. Curated by Joshua Simon 3 December 2010—30 January 2011 (Romantically) Be my encourager. Let me down for me to restore sense. Be my denouncer, because all you need do is attempt for me to succumb. Succumb to the unexpected, to that of delightful bliss, to that of intellectual pursuit, to that of consequence - a consequence that your being commands, one you are obliged to hold. The objective of this piece of writing is to introduce or inform. Inform on matters that you are about to encounter. Matter seems an appropriate place to start, if anything this show is about matter in its entire register. Material, that which constitutes - there are the obvious or traditional, and then the modern and non- existent. We appear to have found a place where they manage to co-exist, one where they matter less. (Matter exists too here in its negative, the de- of material.) Subject, that which narrates - persuades the maker to set out on a journey, and

also enables the ensuing encounter with a viewer. It will hold several possibilities, yet always find its distinctive voice when met accordingly and given time. (Through the process of recognition - aesthetic and ethical - a subject is at the same time an individual standing before the work) Question, that which reasons - query as a means for change, ones personal-political duty. A phenomenon with effect when posed and appreciated. A philosophical stance we all inhabit, and one for which art is to encourage. (Matters) As you turn around, and make your way to the back of the gallery, a deliberate obstacle comes to mind. When contemplated, a sense of confusion and ease gather. The paradoxical nature of experience makes her stumble; luckily she landed yielding. This exhibition is about the task inherent to the press release. Where does interpretation and engagement with text sit in relation to the experience one has with visual art? How does a curatorial practice negotiate a pre-existing press release that is handed over to act for a yet non-existent exhibition? Press release written by Am Nuden Da.

JAVA CODE Metaphor for Object Relation public class SubjectObject —> Sensual Object { Fields: store integer variables ≈ Sensual Qualities; Constructors: initialise the object ≈ Real Qualities; Methods: make the object do something ≈ Object Relation/Vicarious Causation; ∆ Parameters: the way to receive values ≈ the metaphor/ism used to relate Objects and perception; ∆ public SubjectObject(int perception): parameter names, formal parameters ≈ perceptions of Real Qualities inside the Object; ∆ Private string add(string no1, string no2): parameter values, actual parameters ≈ perceptions of Sensual Qualities inside the Object; }

So forget the ethics of the creator: we must consider the qualities and relations of a creator resurrected into Object, released from the constraints of Subjecthood and flattened into the plains of a flat ontology, in which the author (subject-object) can exist equally with the narrative, landscape, context, projections or sculptures within the bracketed field.

It is interesting to note here that the scope of a parameter is restricted to the body of the method or constructor that declares it, whereas the scope of a field is within the entire class (inside the { } bracketed area). In this way it may be possible to relate the scope of a parameter, which always is the result of an action, to Heidegger’s Zuhanden or Readiness-to-hand JAVA CODE Tool-being, and think of Metaphor for Object Relation the scope of multiple fields as elucidating the geography (or ontography) public class SubjectObject —> Sensual Object of the Object’s sensual qualities. In this { context, an author-subject might exist as a ghostly field or Fields: store integer variables ≈ sensual quality that does not Sensual Qualities; make up or constitute the Constructors: initialise the object ≈ Object but through its Real Qualities; presence, af Methods: make the object do something ≈ fects or relates to it. Further, I take a step Object Relation/Vicarious Causation; back to point out the poten ∆ Parameters: the way to receive values tial flaw in this ≈ the metaphor/ism used to relate Objects and metaphorical Java model: if an object perception; is merely an ∆ public SubjectObject(int perception): instance of a class, then a class cannot parameter names, formal parameters ≈ constitute a Sensual Object perceptions of Real Qualities inside the Object; but merely the consequences, ∆ Private string add(string no1, string effects or envi- no2): parameter values, actual parameters ≈ ronment that allow multiple, perceptions of Sensual Qualities inside the Object; similar objects to exist. In this case, a } class header should instead be linked to Iain Hamilton Grant’s argument of object conditions, or perhaps called the sensual ether, and the true Object is actually constituted of the { } brackets. “Take any object whatsoever, on the Schellingian condition that it is not impossible in nature—a mountain, a phone, an idea, an animal, a hallucination— and ask what is involved in its existence. The conditions on which its existence depends do not belong to that object—they are not “its” conditions, but conditions that possibilize it. Since conditions exceed the object, they are equally the conditions involved in other existing 30

objects, and that cannot therefore be specified as belonging to that object alone, nor as terminating in it. That is, the causes of mountain-formation are also causes of geogony, of ideation, of animals, of fever-dreams and of telecommunications. Were this not the case, then each set of objects would envelope its own, wholly separate universe.”19 And lest we forget, it is not only the voice of the undead author-object that is important but also the voice of the Object itself. We should consistently remember and affirm the notion of the Autonomous Object of Intention, which can exist equally alongside the author-object or subject-object but is not necessarily implicated by or made Real by them. As Heidegger argues, “The jug is a thing as a vessel — it can hold something. To be sure, this container has to be made. But its being made by the potter in no way constitutes what is peculiar and proper to the jug insofar as it is qua jug. The jug is not a vessel because it was

made; rather, the jug had to be made because it is this holding vessel.”20 Author does not equal Authorship. The Object may be organic, artificial, readymade or self-generated but it cannot be reduced to the intentions of any creator. It is the Object that acts, and is acted upon. Within the flat stage of objects, humans and sentient authors can co-exist, not as masters but as equals with intentionality. If the garden acts as a vessel, the machine or object is lost within it as illusion: simultaneously itself and yet also part of its context, mirrored and reproduced until we can no longer have clear distinction between installation and sculpture, exterior and interior, object and context-object. The role of the author blurs into the object-schematic. Only when it becomes a tessellated mirror that both reveals and obscures us from view can we begin to understand the Object’s new role.

J 33

wing new capac , gro ity h s e wh l f n , a T h m e y f Chil R er f o f o d Ga e Ge de rd — s.”

“We are patterns. Trapped inside other patterns.”21

ad returned the com ife h p w l h, sprouting elsewh lime no e rt n r a e lik t nd he e e t

ines had imit Mach ated “ ed g life m n i y d d celia ee , t, s e n t i n h rou a it 20 gh en

re repeated. A com p s we u t er ern oms, fed by purple m g att o r a r de a . P ush n m

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Machines had imitated life, and now life had returned the compliment. Patterns were repeated. A computer made of flesh, growing new capacity where it needed it, sending mycelia through the earth, sprouting elsewhere like mushrooms, fed by purple gardens.â&#x20AC;?20

Factory reproductions, handcrafted vintage items, reproduced thoughts and historical artifacts are dipped in history: we attribute power, authority and desire to the Object due to its historical genealogy. Once culturally imbued, we argue the object is valuable because it has acquired historical significance. But what we really mean is that the object is entrenched in the properties of myth: unaccounted for events, the witness to secrets. It acquires a fictional mysteriousness that elevates its status to that of fantasy. We created and reproduced the myth and now the myth has taken on form and sentience, claimed its own birthright and reproduces and remediates us in turn. Take anthropologist Levi Strauss’ assertion that “objects are what matter. Only they carry the evidence through the centuries something really happened among human beings.” We are born from the flesh of Prometheus, culturally inundated by our own fabricated mythology. Within the amniotic fluid of the neo-myth, what is the new role of the reproduced thing? Mythical objects within a culture of myths act like attributes portals between reality and illusion. This is a complex, internalised system of biological mimicry in which consumption is creation. The myth consumes the object, the object mirrors the myth. “The copy is a reproduction - a media form in itself - referring both to itself and to its original, as part of an endless series of “aura-less” multiplications.”22 Objects have an innate, secret power and vitality that draws us to them (from subject to object, from object to object). The Object has the power to seduce, to enchant. It is not, therefore, surprising, that we who have always recognised ourselves as Subjects seek now to become Subject-Object, to increasingly oscillate towards an illusion of planes and lines, pixel-avatar identities, a world where refrigerators feel (“GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction”, Mark Leckey, 2010) and talking 3D-generated heads espouse nonsensical thoughts on love (“Us Dead Talk Love”, Ed Atkins). There is something touching about it, these virtual representations and imitations. They move us, and perhaps we move them. No longer do we ask what is real, only what is meaningful. Yet the Mimetic Object has been vilified through history for this very point: 37

what is fake is not meaningful. A reproduction is not an authentic experience. A photograph is not a painting. Until technology reached the tipping point that birthed the strange culture of the Internet, where more often than not the original and the copy are one and the same down to the very last pixel. An unconscious biomimicry. And categories, too, are being consistently reinvented. Today, we are on a quest to fulfill a strategy of illusion, to construct our very own contemporary fantasies, our very own Wunderkammern. In an increasingly fictionalised universe, what is the role of the Object, and does it not hold true, tangible power even when it is not “real” or merely a “copy”? “Can a simulacrum work as a discord and critique, a unique gesture that is able to address and converse with an object?”23 Of course, in terms of OOO and Harman’s sensual/real objects, there is no true discord or boundaries between “real” things and their reproduction, originals and fakes. Everything is real insofar as it is a thing - we are not so much concerned with realness as what is inherently meaningful, and where the translations of myth and the distortion of an object’s qualities takes the second degree of object - must it always be seen through the distorted lens of our own perception of the first, or can it be perceived in its own right as a meaningful vessel? “In the same way as fake gods are the fetish that must be broken by the iconoclast”, we previously destroyed the ‘fake’ as a reaffirmation of truth, and the death of false promises. Today, we have bent our ideologies 180 degrees and embrace the reproduction as a site for revolution. It defies authorship, claims autonomy and freedom above copyright. It exists in its own right as a cultural meme, inundated with the power of anonymity. The faceless Object today creates the myth and recreates us in its own image, creating alien, quadruple objects that wash up, beached on the shores of our nu-reality. “As labour is dematerialised and the division of labour in industrial production erodes, capital not only occupies the working hours during which products or goods (and its surplus value) are produced; it absorbs all of the worker’s time, as well as his or her existence, thoughts, and creative desires. Products or goods are produced not to be consumed, to be swallowed directly, but as a set of new modes of communication knowledge, languages, or even worlds.”26 38

Thinking along the line of possible number of objects, and having at one’s disposal an absolutely finite space. […] In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcize the possessive nature of man on a ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own. The ship then is no longer a box, a habitat, an object that is owned; it becomes a traveling eye, which comes close to the infinite; it constantly begets departures […] the boat which says ‘I’ and,

vessels, we could compare, in this regard, Roland Barthes’ Vernian ship with artist Lindsay Seers’ reproduced ship of mirrored fact/fiction. In Mythologies, Barthes de-

scribes the image of the ship in Jules Verne as a symbol for departure: and more interestingly, to relate to the ship positively “always means the joy of perfectly enclosing oneself, of

freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from psychoanalysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration.”24 Taking this quote out of context, it almost seems as if Barthes had already foreseen the revolution of the object, the ship that says I and charts its own path to uncanny waters.

“A black-hulled ship, HMS London, sat for ten years in the bay of Zanzibar as a depot for the anti-slave mission, and it is a partial replica of the hull of this ship which contains the Hayward installation, upturned as if to tip out all its dark secrets.”25 The ship is reclaiming its autonomy in both myth and object-hood, be it an infinite ship or a

having at hand the greatest

reproduction like that in the Hayward exhibition Mirror City, where fact and fiction seem to merge as the hull of the ship looms out of the darkened gallery space over you, or as you sit blindly in Seers’ installation, watching the doubled-vision projection on two seemingly spherical objects: one concave, one convex, sitting vertically and blinking, like secretly knowing, complicit imitations of one another.

“Right from the start, the notion of myth seemed to me to explain these examples of the falsely obvious. At that time, I still used the word ‘myth’ in its traditional sense. But I was already certain of a fact from which I later tried to draw all the consequences: myth is a language.”27 New myths pop up in our cultural plaza everyday. They glisten, newly christened; they die quickly like flies, submerged by irrelevance. We call them memes - not quite the Darwinian meme, but nevertheless “a pure, transmutable idea, the dispersion of which can be boundless” - and along with them, new terminology like vaporwave, seapunk, normcore, witch house. A whole universe where a sly entry on Urban Dictionary Beneath th e navy-blu can seal a word’s fate. T e

umblr lurk dashboard kers, labels s a hundred other m of , The wildly newly minted neolog onipopular Dic isms. Sor rows doc ti uments an onary of Obscure d crystallis undisclosed es the desires in y our heart: Lachesism,

n. fire, to plun T he desire to be struck ge over a w by disaster-t ate o survive a it into som ething hard rfall-which would pu plane crash ened and fl t a kink in , to lose ever covers the ga ex th ything in a ib e le smooth arc p between o of your life ne end of yo and sharp, not just a , and forge stiff prefab ur life and ricated bea the other. m that bare ly

Why is a fictional term so popular? Perhaps it strikes a chord: giving meaning and tangibility to some melancholic condition of contemporary youth culture. Perhaps it links to what the Japanese call mono no aware [ 物の哀れ ], or literally the pathos of things, which Wikipedia translates as “a term for the awareness of impermanence [ mujō ], or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the

reality of life.” We could also associate this longing with hauntology, which was particularly well-received in the mid 2000s and included experimental music like that of Ghostbox Label and Burial. Editor-in-chief of literary magazine 3:AM Andrew Gallix writes that “as a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously “out of joint”. There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the 43

“Is Barney’s work a new beginning for a new century?”, asks Richard Lacayo, writing in Time. “It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man’s intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?”

P 45

tures.”28 Artist and technologist James Bridle, on the other hand, argues against the authenticity of the short-lived movement because “the problem with hauntology is that it deals with the problem of the future by going back to the past. And that is fine: but it will not save us.”29

Look also to movements like the New Sincerity, nu-Muzac/ lounge / New Wave music genres, or recent exhibitions like Lone Tree at Marlborough Chelsea which observes that they have “seen lately a significant resurrection of Romanticism in contemporary art […] explore how notions of the spiritual and the magical alongside the sublime and the romantic, have once again, become important” and The New Romantics at Eyebeam which questions “ways in which contemporary artists using digital media engage the body, representations of nature, poetic irony, and expressions of individuality as originally expressed in 19th century Romanticism […] The artists in this exhibition expose an underlying thread of individual expression that extends beyond mere tech-fetishism.”

However blinkered, it is clear both myths and nostalgic trends continue to thrive on the internet, mutating into suspiciously ironic subcultures: transfat, transethnic, otherkin. I feel I’m other, I feel I’m Japanese, I sense, deep down, I’m a fictional character. Possibly two or three. I’m part wolf. A quarter fallen angel. Demi-sexual. There’s a satirical blog out there, somewhere, called Potato-kin, where someone is sarcastically the soul of a potato, in order to mock those who genuinely believe themselves to have been vegetables in their past life. The Mogai Archive lists about a hundred fictional genders, in which you can discover you’re actually gloomgender (definition: nonbinary/indifferent, mostly darkness, the new moon phase…) or, if we subscribe to Metamodernism, perhaps one can claim to be metagender (“to identify around or beyond a gender”).

As the Metamodernist manifesto observes, we are oscillating, bringing back nostalgia, sincerity, magic and illusion. Except perhaps now it is the illusion of disappearance, of a curious geometric flattening towards the horizon, towards banality, the glitch-kitsch, as a strategy for new meaning.

The discovery of such trends is partly troubling, partly amusing but perhaps also simply indicative of a moment in history in which people seem to have a particular penchant for fiction and the transformation of self - transhuman tendencies, maybe, or even hurtling towards the domain of the non-human. Why would anyone want to be a potato? Why not?

end of history” and that, above all, hauntology

itself is “haunted by a nostalgia for all our lost fu46

]

o “T

There is also a new kind of myth, with an inheritance rooted not in the Author. It’s heir not to the throne of Barthian cultural signifiers but nestled somewhere amongst the deconstructed hierarchy of objects: consider not only the historical myths of be-ings, but the contemporary myths of our alien everyday. A daisy-chain of strange myths, propagating and consuming and relating to one another. Rather than a treatise of myth or mythology within the metaphysics of access, it is about the myth of things themselves. Not myths for us, but of us: the myth of every kind of perception and relation. The Myth of the Object.

s” [ e le v Bo s g

er nd wo

ts, tis yien la sc the con d n e ar and he y a ing in t ch og m ld m ne hi ol co ou to ah ter w ide be w e s Br In y by ual na, hat t b er a f e g d e o h g n er th ler ivi ar “W mig lon tor art , la [ a od an c d lic y. m gici wn n in ub log sue e no egu nd edi r p he a o w e ho ur ol r sta m te T e m his is o th yt p ’s r ude er as at th an ts h t in m to ner pr nd t”, n m30 m ruc tes i tive ting sig nd to u ac ia i r.” st ra lec na de r a d ive ed tte cu col asci the eato stea etat d m ma f k cr in pr an it a be thin ole and ter erst will re e s ], “in d y th rt n s un wa [ a as a thu this ] d in an nly o

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Autonomous, mysterious, unknowable, existing somewhere between its real and sensual qualities. As Bogost argues, “Objects float in a sensual ether. […] Objects try to make sense of each other through the qualities and logics they possess. When one object caricatures another, the first grasps the second in abstract, enough for the one to make some sense of the other given its own internal properties. Caricature is a rendering that captures some aspects of something else at the cost of other aspects. The mechanism that facilitates this sort of alien phenomenology is […] a mechanism that welcomes distortion.” This distortion and act of caricaturing is precisely what creates myth - the exaggeration of reality, allusion, fabrication.

n i s

i n g

sa s t

Metaphorism Bogost defines metaphors as a way that objects orient, and refers to the style of Russian social realist poets such as Andrei Voznesensky as metaphors, “characterised by the exuberant metaphor… Such work strives to apprehend reality in metaphorphosis, rather than merely use metaphor representationally.” [ Bogost 66 ] He further coins the term metametaphorism to illustrate the double metaphorical viewpoints of both the human operator and the object in question. Bogost’s interpretation of metaphor and its revolutionary strategy for object orientation is pivotal to this dissertation’s own ontology and ontography.

\* Myth is Metaphor *\ To be precise, a myth is constructed through perverted chains of metaphors, a system Bogost refers to as metaphorism, which “involves phenome-

nal daisy chains, built of speculations on speculations as we seep farther and farther into the weird relations between objects. The philosophical effort to bind such metaphors is nontrivial, amounting to a complex lattice of sensual object relations, each carrying an inherited yet weaker form of metaphor with which it renders its neighbor. […] The relationship between the first object and the second offers the clearest rendition, in-

sofar as a metaphor is ever really clear. The next is rendered not in terms of the second object’s own impression of

the third but as the second’s distorted understanding of its neighbor seen through the lens of the first. […] A metaphorism germane to its host becomes alien to the subsequent object it sequences, unable to pierce its veil and

see the face of its experience.”32 It is exactly through this mediation between first, second and third generations of objects where perception becomes so distorted and opaque that we begin to construct myth, not unlike Barthes’ ideas around the first (signifier), second (sign) and third (signification) systems of language. The Object constructs myth, and perhaps it is our correlationist position to attempt to deconstruct or even reconstruct it. 49

The Fat is on the Table

Maurizio Cattelan on Joseph Beuys beuys is dead beuys is also uniting love and knowledge beuys is more present in a desert freak beuys is sponsored by museum für moderne kunst beuys is appointed professor of sculpture at the düsseldorf academy of art beuys extends ulysses by two chapters at the request of james joyce beuys is surely not a sartre follower, but of course there are many parallels beuys is mentioned next to steiner beuys is back in town beuys is back in belgium, in berlin, US, active in germany beuys is the contemporary artist responsible for the popular notion that politics is an aesthetic activity that anyone can engage in beuys is inspired by steiner beuys is not so reactionary as to deny the existence of the entire art history repertoire beuys is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential post-war german artists beuys is the identification with everything from mythological figures and historical personages to writers and artists beuys is a mythical figure in the art world, however beuys is particularly significant in the light of his introspective research on the possible reunification of human and natural life beuys is in the creation of the social sculpture beuys is either loved or hated beuys is considered one of the most beuys is widely regarded as one of the most important german artists since world war II beuys is demanding sun instead of rain/reagan beuys is more like an evangelist beuys is famous for an extraordinary body of drawings beuys is such an obvious candidate; he started making art following a breakdown that was a result of his experiences in world war II beuys is represented in depth in dia’s permanent collection beuys is beuys is among the most famous of today’s artists beuys is one of the most famous performance artists beuys is valid because wolfgang laib shares his belief in the transcendent power of art beuys is another sculptor that beuys is one of the major figures in post-war german art beuys is known for his shamanistic artist’s persona beuys is among the world’s most comprehensive beuys is in these digital photographs represented not by him directly beuys is a real people’s artist understood by a professor beuys is megjelent a kövek mellett és hamarosan heves vita bontakozott ki közte és a közönség között

beuys is a 1972 lithograph in which the essential feature is that of beuys as everyman beuys is elvesztette beuys is átvett és ami interszubjektiv jellege miatt nem volt beuys is called to account by his presumptive offspring beuys is veel materiaal verdwenen beuys is questioned by the activities of maclennan beuys is instructive beuys is very important in mail art beuys is understandable beuys is known to beuys is not completed by his death beuys is i was never secure and happy in the world of galleries from the very beginning beuys is and how it is pronounced beuys is cleverly recontextualised in beuys is of course enormously interesting beuys is l’eminence grise of community building as an art form beuys is interested in the proportions between crystal and amorphous states beuys is able to evoke the experience of the past beuys is a magnificent beuys is based on three stages beuys is a special case because of the build-up of a curious sense of obligation to respond positively beuys is the generation of my father beuys is talking about the much wider concept of creative potential beuys is regarded as one of the most significant personalities of the past beuys is steeped in the struggle of world war II beuys is a big influence right now beuys is unavoidable beuys is purely a decorative artist beuys is hype beuys is cited as the great collaborator of the twentieth century because beuys believed everybody was a potential artist beuys is on e-bay beuys is a mythical figure in beuys is one artist i wanted to ask you about beuys is one of the biggest art world phonies of recent years beuys is probably unique in the history of art beuys is supposed beuys is a very controversial sculptor beuys is grounded in a tradition of narrative sources that is often absent in american art of the same period beuys is hardly a household name in the history of twentieth-century art beuys is the great shaman of twentieth-century art beuys is represented with his monumental work created shortly before his death, lightning with stag in its glare beuys is best known for declaring “everyone an artist”; koons seems to declare that everyone is a consumer

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact

be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?â&#x20AC;?33

The practice of a revolutionary metaphorism is subtle, but considerably different from a literary metaphor, or a mytho-

logical allegory. We are not interested in just the poignant similes of poetry, the metaphors in fiction, or popular sayings in the English language,

although all of these can and should be included on equal terms in this new ontology. Instead it is a practice of metaphorical carpentry, a term Bogost uses to refer to the actual, applied usage of metaphor to Object Oriented Ontology - our ontology of the world(s). In particular, he compacts the writings of Bruno Latour into Latour litanies that contain “the bestiaries of things”, and has, on his blog, even coded a “Latour Litanizer” that uses Wikipedia’s random page API to generate random lists.

Consider, after all, in Bogost’s example of a word game: “…the mereological possibility space afforded by homography […] A Movie could be in a Letter (‘I just saw this strange movie about an incompetent, vinegar-loving bank robber’), which could be in an Atlas (as a bookmark), which could be in a Tornado, in a Dream, in a Woman, in a Marriage. Or Better, a Movie could be in the Universe, which could nevertheless also be in a letter (“I wouldn’t give up pickles for anything in the world”), in the Mail, in Time. […] Indeed, nutshellery isn’t a

We should not belittle the importance of lists, or bad metaphor for tiny onthe randomness that amusing online programs like Facebook status generators (“What-WouldI-Say”) can provide. Through nonsense comes sense, through randomness order is formed. Word-play is not pointless but a useful tool as a starting point to strategise a tiny ontology. “For we cannot understand what is real unless we understand what ‘what’ means, and we cannot understand what ‘what’ means without

tology - the condensation of multitudes into dense singularities”35

Whitehead once said, “in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true.”36 We should consider objects, relations and philosophies from a position where anything and everything can be regarded as equally important, if in varying degrees of interest (to us).

understanding what ‘means’ is, but we cannot Thus entering a brave, hope to understand what ‘means’ is without understanding what ‘is’ means.”34 53

speculative world.

“Is there a mythology of the mythologist?”37

“By definition a meme can act as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.” — Andreea Radulescu To speak of myths and to speak of objects is to dream of memes. To attempt to do a carpen-

try of metaphysics may seem ridiculous from the hallowed balconies of academic philosophy, and certainly even philosopher Ray Brassier, one of the original speculative realist “founders” as such, has scoffed at the very SR title and scathingly condemned the “stupidity” of the enthusiastic OOO blogosphere, where naive positivism and amateur thoughts

supposedly fester. Does the internet only provide us with randomness, nonsense and daisy-chains of bullshit, or can we see it in a positive light - that we should celebrate philosophy’s opening access to all lovers of wisdom, enjoy the power of ceiling cats and even the amusing quality of stock photographs of women eating salads (alone)? This is not to say we

SR ≈ SF

speculative science fiction Speculative Realism is and can be a speculative Science Fiction. We are in an era where sci-fi no longer simply references the world of the classics: or worlds, to be precise. In Baudrillard’s theory-fiction, there are three orders of simulacra: (1) natural, naturalistic simulacra: based on image, imitation, and counterfeiting. They are harmonious, optimistic, and aim at the reconstitution, or the ideal institution, of a nature in God’s image. (2) productive, productionist simulacra: based on energy and force, materialized by the machine and the entire system of production. Their aim is Promethean: world-wide application, continuous expansion, liberation of indeterminate energy (desire is part of the utopias belonging to this order of simulacra).

of the lived, of the everyday—but reconstituted, sometimes even unto its most disconcertingly unusual details, recreated like an animal park or a botanical garden, presented with transparent precision, but totally lacking substance, having been derealized and hyperrealized.”42 Baudrillard cites the works of Philip K. Dick and Ballard’s Crash as the first fictions to depict this condition of reversal, but this third order of sci-fi can also incorporate the novels of writers like critically acclaimed Haruki Murakami, whose Kafka-esque works illustrating alienation and loneliness in seemingly banal and yet stunning surreal realities are metaphorisms conducting tthe space between our withdrawn perceptions and the startling weirdness of everyday life.

(3) simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.

It is a quiet reversal, a silent revolution. It is either that or the outright confrontation of our simulated hyperreality like in the form of Sam Kriss’ satirical (yet frighteningly serious) Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space in The New Inquiry, which calls for the banning of the moon, the overthrowing of the sun, the absolute disestablishment of the named planets:

Baudrillard refers to the first order as corresponding to utopia, the second to classic SF and the third to an emerging domain where not only fiction, but theory is also changing. Because our contemporary universe has become so saturated by knowledge - we have conquered space and dominated the production of consumerism in all corners and cracks of the world that reality has become immanent and there is no longer any space for any kind of transcendentalism. Baudrillard proclaims the death of fiction and the dawning of the hyperreal: “Today it is the real which has become the pretext of the model in a world governed by the principle of simulation. And paradoxically, it is the real which has become our true utopia - but a utopia that is no longer a possibility, a utopia we can do no more than dream about, like a lost object […] A hallucination of the real,

“We said earlier that for us to abolish something does not mean to destroy it. Once the cosmos was thought to be painted on the veil of the firmament, or to be some kind of divine metaphor, a flatness inscribed with thousands of meaningful stories. Since then it’s become outer space, a grotesque emptiness. Space is a site of desecration, an emptiness in which one moves, and moving into space means closing down any chances for Earth. C.A.O.S. is not interested in setting up limits. We want to create a future, not one of tin cans dodging rocks in a void, but a future for human life. To do this we must abolish outer space with all its death and idiocy, and return the cosmos to its proper domain, which is mythology, so that when we look up it will be in fear and wonder, and the knowledge that we live in a world that is not possible.”43

should refute the rightful place of philosophy in books, journals and other such publications, or claim that enthusiastic teenagers on Tumblr are conducting serious artistic discourse in their renditions of old Mac computers juxtaposed against palm trees, CDs, and marble busts in a virtual grid landscape, but simply that we should open up the field of inquiry.

“In a world we trust as given in time and space, what time is it? Where am I? I keep getting to where she is, with my thoughts, to a place beyond subject and object.”38 Some would seek to say that Object Oriented Ontology or various branches of SR read more like dark science fiction, harnessing unholy panpsychic powers

(proclaiming, perhaps, “we are minds in the world of minds!”) To this, I say: why not? Why not consider OOO within science fiction, or fiction in particular, merging fields of science, technology and politics? There is a reason the speculative realist movement, if we can proclaim so daringly that there is one, captures

Vaporwave is a musical genre and art movement that emerged in the early 2010s from indie dance genres such as seapunk, bounce house, or chillwave, and, more broadly, electronic dance music. Although there is much diversity and ambiguity in its attitude and message, vaporwave sometimes serves as both a critique and parody of consumerist society, ‘80s yuppie culture, and New Age music, while sonically and aesthetically showcasing a curious fascination with their nostalgic artifacts. Vaporwave was first characterized by its heavy use of samples from ‘80s and ‘90s music, typically lounge, smooth jazz or Muzak. Samples are often pitched, layered or altered in classic chopped and screwed style. The genre emerged in 2011 from online communities, such as Turntable.fm. In subsequent years, it gained popularity through websites such as Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Last.fm and 4chan. Chuck Person’s 2010 release, Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol.1 and James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual are regarded as a “catalyst” for the development of the genre. Imagery associated with vaporwave includes glitch art, Renaissance sculptures, 90s web design, outmoded computer renderings and classic cyberpunk aesthetics.Use of Japanese characters and other non western writing systems is also prominent. The visual components of works by John Foxx and other electronic musicians from the 1980s are considered influences of the vaporwave aesthetic. [ Wikipedia ]

In an incisive paper exploring “algorithmic allure” and object oriented ontology within aesthetic theory, MPhil/PhD student Robert Jackson declares that “allure occurs when objects are split from their quali-

If we are all objects, then everything within the space of my peripheral vision suddenly takes on new meanings, dangerous perceptions and mysterious allure. In an age where logic abounds and sentimentality taboo, is it possible to reach a place where objects can be withdrawn and enchanting without turning into a bombastic spectacle? Can wonder attain mythical legitimacy?

the aesthetic mind so enchantingly: it is a perfect and alien system for considering objects in their own right, with their own rights, in a world stunted by the age-old assumptions of viewer, subject and object.

For things to communicate in this post-Heideggerian ontology of sealed off objects, allure is the only method for objects to converse with

A realist study of aesthetics must take several more steps then Fried would ever envisage, and not just understand the hidden absorption between painting and beholder, or even between artwork to artwork in an executing exhibition, but also to the infinite depths of simple things executing themselves. […]

The only hope we and other objects have, is to have access to a set of present-at-hand aesthetic tools which allude to the inner depths of things and in turn expose new worlds. […]

ties, establishing a tension between its non-relational execution and the way it has been described […]

The real, withdrawn Object and its allure is never exhausted, like the viral meme, which peaks and wanes and is constantly being deformed into new forms and resurrected into being.

If we’ve established (or at least proposed, lest one comes across as fanatically blinkered) that myths come from the filtered perceptions of daisy-chained metaphors, then the reason myth remains fascinating and enchanting despite being deconstructed again and again is that the deconstruction itself is only one plane of perception.

It is precisely this sort of allure that opens up the space for memes, or the act of meme-ing.

each other’s caricatured hidden depths.”38

Reproduction is revolution in its own right through propagation, and therefore reproduction is also a daisy-chaining of event-things and metaphor-things that impress, as sensual qualities, upon the Real, echoing Harman’s principle of vicarious causation. Hence, the Mimetic Object is also the Memetic Object: like a genome of sequences, the meme consists of an infinite myriad of constructed metaphors/qualities that allow us to glimpse a caricature of the RO. The memetic qualities can duplicate with ease but the Real Object is always itself: every time it transforms beyond the constrictions of its real qualities, it has become another withdrawn Object in its own right. An endless chain of duplications and metaphors that make up in themselves a sequence of myths (always distorted, sometimes parody). Graffiti the Žižekian signpost: welcome not to the desert, but the legion of the Real. again that, when “Hegel was right to point out again and l—which means one talks, one always dwells in the universa ject loses its roots that, with its entry into language, the sub e pathetic terms, in the concrete life-world. To put it in mor the sensually-conthe moment I start to talk, I am no longer nal mechanism crete I, since I am caught into an imperso rent from what which always makes me say something diffe d to say, I am not I wanted to say—as the early Lacan like e. This is one of speaking, I am being spoken by languag ‘symbolic castrathe ways to understand what Lacan called nsubstantiation’ tion’: the price the subject pays for its ‘tra to the speaking from the agent of a direct animal vitality the direct vitality subject whose identity is kept apart from of passions.” 39

“Any relation immediately generates a new object. If certain components are arranged in such a manner as to give rise to a thing that exceeds them, in such a way that it can withstand certain changes in these components, then they have entered a genuine relation with each other as real objects rather than merely stroking one another’s sensual facades. […] For in fact, my perception of my relation with a tree forms a new object, then I as a real piece of that object find myself on its interior, confronting the mere image of

a tree does meet the criteria for an object. It is definitely unified, for it is one perception. It is also new, irreducible to its pieces in isolation since neither I nor the tree in a vacuum give rise to anything like a tree-perception. And furthermore, this perception of a tree has a reality deeper than any attempt to describe it, which is precisely why phenomenological practice is so tricky. But if the other piece. Thus, we find an asymmetry on the interior of the object, between the real me and the sensual tree.” [Harman 117]

Becoming aware of her hand opened her elephantine ears - the gush of water came through again abruptly and poured down her neck. Enveloped in sound and still in front of the Heisenberg monument, the large crater of the Miterland (Big Bang) behind her and the communications tower looming over her, her ringtone started up but she failed to either hear it or recognise it as issuing from her device. Instead she heard something from the past, from just after the dropping of the bomb: huge plumes of smoke billowed up in towering columns in various shades of grey. She saw it with her ears; sound deceives less, or so she thought.

U 64

“As Howard Parsons puts it, wonder ‘suggests a breach in the membrane of awareness, a sudden opening in a man’s system of established and expected meanings.’ […] In Graham Harman’s terms, wonder is a sort of allure that real objects use to call at one another through enticement and absorption. As he puts it, ‘Allure merely alludes to the object without making its inner life directly present.’ Wonder describes the particular attitude of allure that can exist between an object and the very concept of objects. If allure is ‘the separation between objects’, then wonder is the separation between objects and allure itself. Wonder is a way objects orient.” [ Bogost 124 ]

v 65

As such, ontography is composed simultaneously of both mystification and demystification. If the ontograph is the bestiary, then the Quadruple Object is the homunculus - not a tiny man, per say, although a tiny man can certainly be an object - but incorporating the scientific definition of a scale model that illustrates the abstract characteristics or qualities of the Object and its fourfold polarities. THE ONTOGRAPH

“From the perspective of metaphysics, ontography involves the revelation of object relationships without necessarily offering clarification or description of any kind. Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation. […] Ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence.”40

Models like an exploded-view diagram that clarifies the operations of a mechanical object to a human operator, for example, makes for a good aesthetic representation of an ontograph. As such, seemingly narcissistic or satirical trends in music/net-art genres like vaporwave and seapunk also serve the ontographic purpose through their juxtaposition of 3D models, flat images and seemingly random choice of objects in a flat world, sometimes animated, always mysterious - you are left asking yourself, did this aesthetic decision happen naturally or was it intentional? The line between glitch and purposeful rendering blurs and the semi-arranged objects gain both autonomy and alien beauty. Consider anything from propositional structures in literature like Derrida’s Glas, imaginary architecture in the Projects of Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, diagram-proposals for exhibitions like for Dan Graham’s installation Time Delay Room, or art book-objects such as Lindsay Seers’ Nowhere less now (iamnowhere), which functions as half fiction, half editorial comments, sandwiched with dictionary definitions, images and photocopied pages.

We’ve spoken extensively of objects but have no real word to describe the flat landscape or ether of relations in which they reside. I referred to the landscape as part of my ontology’s terminology as the context-object, but it is necessarily to adopt a new term that can encompass all the objects, relations, fictions and myth-ing of memes that occurs below the surface. I propose, therefore, Harman’s idea of the ontograph, or more precisely Bogost’s elaborated version 2.0 of a practice of ontography.

Ontography is a nonsense term made up by writer M.R. James as a fictitious branch of professorship, and has since been reclaimed by Harman and Bogost to map the geography of objects. Online dictionary site Wordnik’s About page superimposes an illustration of Humpty Dumpty with the proclamation that words mean what we want them to mean. Their definition of ontography is as follows: n. A description of beings, their nature and essence. n. That division of geography which is concerned with the responses of organic beings to their physiographic surroundings or environment. For our purposes, these definitions are quite appropriate - except for the use of the term “being” and “organic”, which presupposes living creatures as opposed to inorganic things. Our ontology includes every kind of thing - and not every kind of these things will be interesting to human perception or be worthy of ontographic study, but the underlying principles nevertheless grant us a new way of peering into the midst of the everyday. It is within this seemingly fictitious field of ontography that I believe the Memetic Object is worthy to be studied as a wholly original new specimen within a glass sea of specimens: 66

the world of today is full of the new and contradictory, with virtual replicas fighting with the artificial components and the ethical value of bio-materials. Never has it been more exciting of a time to re-question the definition and role of the Object and to upgrade the lens of our microscope to one that levels out the playing field. Thus the demand for reformation from within the aesthetic system: a transformation from the I (dead author) to the It (sublime autonomous object): both positive (addition through reproduction) and negative (the sculpture as combination of exclusion), planted and rooted within the Uncanny Garden as myth-memes/context-objects. We could call it a collection of ontographical Gardens within a Hortiscape; the truth is, we could call it anything. It is only through a proliferation of fictions that we begin to decipher and re-cipher the mythology of objects, and find our own place in an un-hierarchical world. Speak no longer of the uncanny valley, which dips and peaks, but perhaps, instead, the uncanny flatland. “The true alien recedes interminably even as it surrounds us completely. […] Speculative realism really does require speculation: benighted meandering in an exotic world of utterly incomprehensible objects. […] Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger”41

Y 70

What comes out as 4D? Is it the subject, the object or the context-object? Or is it a sleekly transformative creature, glistening wet as it emerges from the husk, the ghost emerging from the shell ? It is not utterly human or ma chine or even necessarily cyborg â&#x20AC;Ś its parts, made anew, are organic, having not been post-fabricated but constructed from our electric dreams , the accelerated devotion, belief and investment towards the

Contemporar y Fantasy.

Notes 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 9 10 10 11 11 12 12 13 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 18 19 19 20 20 21 21 22 22 23 23 24 24 25 25 26 26 27 27 28 28 29 29 30 30 31 31 32 32 33 33 34 34 35 35 36 36 37 37 38 38 39 39 40 40 41 41 42 42 43 43

Robogenesis, Daniel H. Wilson, 265 Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 85 Form and Object, Tristan Garcia, 11 Nowhere Less Now, Lindsay Seers Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 31 Form and Object, Tristan Garcia, 3 Definitions from Graham Harman’s Quadruple Object & Mike’s blog Avoiding the Void Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 78 Jane Bennett in Alien Phenomenology, 65 Karl-Erik Michelsen, as referenced in ADD Metaphysics, edited by Jenna Sutela Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 29 Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 63 Algorithmic Allure, Robert Jackson, 148 Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 67 QGJCPLB, Weir, 5. QGJCPLB, Angel, 36. Nowhere Less Now, Lindsay Seers The Speculative Turn, Iain Hamilton Grant, 43 The Child Garden, Geoff Ryman, 84 Takeo Nomura, character in Robogenesis, Daniel H. Wilson, 264 ADD Metaphysics, “Copying as a Media Form”, Ines Weizman ADD Metaphysics, “Copying as a Media Form”, Ines Weizman, 101, 103 Mythologies, “The ‘Nautilus’ and the Drunken Boat”, Roland Barthes, 66 Nowhere Less Now, Lindsay Seers The Space of the General: On Labor Beyond Materiality and Immateriality, Chukhrov Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 11 Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation, Andrew Gallix Hauntological Futures, James Bridle ADD Metaphysics, “Copying as a Media Form”, Ines Weizman Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 81 Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 135 The Speculative Turn, “Concepts and Objects,” Ray Brassier, 47 Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 58 Whitehead, quoted in Alien Phenomenology, 110 Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 12 Algorithmic Allure, Robert Jackson, 141 The Speculative Turn, “Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?”, Slavoj Zizek, 205 Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 38 Alien Phenomenology, Ian Bogost, 34 “Simulacra and Science Fiction”, Two Essays, Jean Baudrillard Manifesto of the Committee to Abolish Outer Space, Sam Kriss, The New Inquiry 72

Images A Crystal tapeworms, Mike Winkelmann AKA beeple / beeple-crap.com A B Examples of red objects: red lipsticked mouth, red jets, glasses of red wine, grape diagram B / Google image search ‘red’ + ‘red wine’ C Eggplant-related information, memes, photos / Google image search ‘eggplant’ + C Wikipedia D Diagrams of Harman’s Quadruple Object (Ten Possible Links) and Heidegger’s Fourfold D theory / Google search E Sky, photo-manipulated and vintage sofa stock / Google image search ‘sky’ and ‘vintage E sofa’ F F Object diagram / Google image search ‘object diagram’ G G Vaporsims, 5kz, Socrates vaporwave bust / 5kz.tumblr.com H H Vaporwave examples (still images from GIFs), kyttenjanae / kyttenjanae.tumblr.com I I Limitless, Miao Xiao Chun / Google image search ‘miao xiaochun’ J J Storiform pattern, photo-manipulated / Google image search ‘pattern’ K K GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, Mark Leckey, 2010 / Google image search L L Purple gardens, Chris Tobi / https://www.flickr.com/people/39831995@N07 M M Nowhere Less Now, Lindsay Seers, the Tabernacle / Google image search N N Océan class 120-gun ship of the line Commerce de Marseille / Wikipedia O O Potato stock image / Google image search ‘potato’ P P Cremaster, Matthew Barney / Google image search + cremaster.net Q Q Bogost’s Latour Litanizer in action / bogost.com R R Incessant Computers, J. Falconer / itguidesandnews.tumblr.com S S Vintage book cover for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick / Google ima image search T T Screenshots of GIFs, video and website work, Vince McKelvie / vincemckelvie.tumblr.com U U Mountain Lake, Salvador Dali, Tate / Google image search V V Azure Day, Yvés Tanguy, Tate / Google image search W W Projects, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin, Tate / Google image search X X Time Delay Room, Dan Graham / http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/time-delay- room/ Y Y Sony VAIO Exploded Diagram of PCG-GR150/PCG-GR150K/PCG-GR170/PCG- GR170K (LCD/ DISPLAY) / Google image search Z Z Spanish landscape with mountains, Dora Carrington, Tate / Google image search

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