Zoom In: Can you feel me across this divide?

I asked James Worth if he’d want to produce some collages for this project. What we got is a cyber romance (of sorts) in that it’s deeply romantic in its hope for human connection; but also theoretical in its lead to concepts of human identity and the body within the hyperreal.

Yep, wasn’t expecting that.

Good.

I can’t say I know James Worth, I can say he brought himself to this. It’s a lot of work, so sincere thanks, and forgive my pre-ramble for getting in the way. Writers gotta write, and he got me thinking…

Nothing’s ‘real’ anymore

What is real in a digital world? Is this it? A collection of pixels, fonts, and HTML.

Even analogue photography wasn’t real: Light captured on a surface. The moment imprinted.

You could argue the silver halide in a negative is no different from the silicon-based pixel in the digital image. Developing photographs in a lab you’re using chemicals, tapping your keys you’re firing electrical signals and semi-conductors.

Both are means to an end. Both are ‘media’.

So, is pen and ink real then? Is real you, the writer, the creator behind the representation?

Real are the thoughts in your head: untouchable, private, unique, damaged, beautiful, difficult. Digital is a vehicle, optimized for task.

Who cares if digital is ‘real’ anyway?

Away from the technical, it’s personal. You can have digital anyway you want: as a medium to achieve your aims, to be yourself, to re-present your many selves, to fake yourselves.

Digital: take it with you. Keep creating the other world of our lives: a temporary moment way back in a machine, flashed onto weeping retinas, saved somewhere, a cloud running out of blue sky.

Everyone knows you don’t really look like your passport photo or your online dating profile. At some point, I’d argue, we all need someone who wants more than pixel love.

Enough from me. I get carried away. Happily.

James Worth Explainer:

There are few things that matter to me less than the state of the digital empire. The internet. The cell phone. Brain rot. AI. I don’t find these things interesting. They do not stimulate my curiosity or offer me any insight into the purpose of being a person. They surround me regardless. They shape the day and the deflating world. They are inescapable, either in the way they stake some claim over you or over something that once mattered to you.

More importantly, these digital aspects interfere with a thing that does matter most to me: the personal relationship to the body and its relationship to the physical world.

There are no bodies on the internet. The idea of the body is everywhere. You might even be convinced that this is an archive of bodies across time and space. It’s just light on a screen. Now is all we have. The body which houses you is the only one you get. I’m here to interrogate what we do with it.

Digital Minds Collide 07

Toward Eden

Imagine this: you are here by choice. Impossible when everything is decided. There is a rhythm to this endless need, it vibrates at the frequency of the most awful thing you’ve ever said.

You can’t get enough. All of it, all the time. It is removal and reminder at the simultaneous never-ending moment which demands all attention. The two feelings require one another. They make two walls into a room. You lie down there. Into your hands you cry and those hands are too busy interfacing with things past to receive you. You cannot receive yourself. This alley is the only house you are allowed. Without this, you are homeless.

My body waves the flag by James Worth

Somewhere in you there might be sexually explicit content. Here, let me teach you to police it: For starters, your body is a perversion–carve that into the grooves of your smooth brain as fact upon fiction.

Desire is a fiction to be kept quiet. To be found wanting? Amidst all this pleasure? A timeless shame upon you. All of this can be seen. Trace your edges in the dissolution of the camera’s lens and–dissolve.

The hair you grew as grass with the godly hand of your biology is a portal to your perversion. Down the trail of your spine is a chasm to be concealed lest anyone ever see something free and unfettered as need spread open. The subtle curve of your hips toward Eden is a flag snapping in the ceaseless wind.

My body waves the flag. If I exist inside the mirror, formless, I can be free. To remind the mirror of my only form is to tell one and all that I’d like someday to exist outside of these walls.

That I move when I am told to be still. That I can be an offering to myself and nothing else. Somewhere in you there might be sexually explicit content. You may sell it but you may not own it.

You reach out into an ether for confirmation of something, only the immortal mannequin held up no longer belongs to you–no longer is you. It is devoured and you will never quite know by what or by who.

I cannot make this romantic.

This is not a world by James Worth

What makes a wall but a resistance to movement? What contains a body is itself free to stand tall and proud of all it censures to the censored square.

Imprisoned head holding itself hostage under threat of true clarity–that to move along is a choice indeed even when the choice is not made. Walk into the prison–they lock the door behind you and place the key in your hand before a world too wide to turn away from.

This is not a world. This is not a home. This movement is not motion. Not living, not breathing, but swallowed by an ocean. Random, cruel, the cold man devout. This obeisance kindles hatred of the inside and the out.

Open your hand–the palm is glass with a fever burning down to the rotten core of collective apathy. Feel the weight of it–not a world but the heft of all humanity fed through the piston processors of an insect digesting loneliness for energy with which it fucks itself to death.

This is not a world. This is not a home, but a waypoint between birth and obliteration. This is the process of obliteration.

Liberate this member from an arrangement of squares, as it burns through the corneas it never will exist again. The body is gone, the blood flows on, fluids down a drain, something only eyes can see–something the walls cannot fathom.

There is You–who exists in one place only with all the knowledge in your head which is yours and yours alone. There is You–a physical form which is as it is now, always fluxing always yours.

There is us–who we can touch, see, breathe, love and lose to the neverending now. This is a world. You are a world. To contain it is a choice. To contain it is obliteration.

Can you expand into now–can you feel the tips of your fingers.

I can’t feel you across this divide–can I make you feel? Now–do you feel me?

Toward Eden by James Worth

More Voices Across the Stack: Coming soon…

Wow. That really brought something to this. If you’re liking this stuff then jump in and follow along. Take a look at the list of work so far and who is coming next as we continue exploring digital culture.

Let’s help get this work seen wider and support everyone who is contributing.

Thanks for keeping up. Still more to come.

Best wishes

TE