I address you in my capacity as the title executor of the estate of Tvordis Veeler, my late husband, and as a curator whose work concerns digital preservation of cultural memory. I am the steward of my husband’s most intimate digital device: his personal computer which he called Theseus. The worlds we will traverse are moments outside time between two local machines: his and hers.
In the twilight of his life, he promised me his computer, which he called Theseus, and challenged me to “examine this archive of a mask in its incompleteness.” To lift these files out of their grave and put them in places they would never expect to find themselves. Through this gift of his un-curated digital self, he ensured I would never be alone.
This grief ritual has been a central site of my work for many years now. His death formed an immutable rupture between before and after, and our life together is the well of inspiration that drives me today.
The unit of analysis of this practice is the word. Tvordis once told me that “words are rocks.” I have to keep reflecting on what this means to me, and whether that meaning has shifted. I think the gist is that people make meaning. Words are inert until translated in the mind and heart of a living subject.
We fell in love through text messages and when we finally got in bed together I whispered “I left my phone for you.” He was word before he was flesh. Now he is word again.
I have found myself writing this same eulogy over and over since I transitioned. Forgetting is the left hand of memory. Art becomes a portal through time, a potent channel activated only after you’ve forgotten making the artifact. Silly me, before I even called it art, the blueprint was written. We can come back to now, it will always be here.
What’s in a name?
A dead letter.
Words are rocks.
two banks of four spot welded steel cubicles seven feet high with swinging saloon doors and bar latches
on the far wall light streams through stained glass and catches steam in the air
on the outer panel of the cubicle is a small and meticulous etching of three peasants, drunk and asleep at the foot of an apple tree
removing the drop ceiling in a 100 year old apartment expecting asbestos and finding hay
is raving liberatory queer praxis?
are there nightclubs in the utopia?
seven years ago my husband came to berlin and got a tattoo of an earwig and a sigil from finnegans wake
and almost to the day i met a james from ireland who was the first to recognize the sigil as the union of the two brothers: shem the penman and shaun the postman.
we talk about exile
a central theme of joyce’s work
the encyclopedic knowledge of james joyce which I inherited from my husband has the same character as an overpass temporarily repurposed for a generator show
i am on the run from a memory whose primary inscription is rewritten beyond recognition
exiled from language, which remains the true site of my avatar & the primary medium of this work called dead name
Permanent abjection from normative category.
The title of this series is an olive branch
An invitation to step across with me into a convenient fiction
what’s in a name?
this is obviously a quote from romeo and juliet about the ties of family or whatever but in ulysses, bloom turns the phrase over all day as he thinks of his status as an immigrant jew in ireland, quite literally translating his name to assimilate
ulysses concerns exile from nation and problematizes nationalism itself by producing a definitively irish novel outside of ireland
Joyce signs the novel:
Zurich
Trieste
Paris
The three cities where it was written.
the wake is an exile from language itself
Fleeing the strictures of signifier, sign, and linearity, everything is happening at all times at once.
Constructed from words yet frequently labeled unreadable.
Last week i walked for hours and hours thinking about what i would post for my fourth hrt birthday
I took a day for reflection, and I’m thinking about a fucking instagram post.
On my first birthday I found that I had worn the same brown a frame corduroy dress the day started hormones, and hemmed myself into a tradition of photographing myself in it on each subsequent anniversary
i remember three years stressing out about taking this self portrait
I always ended up taking it when the sun was a it’s zenith, scorching and self conscious
The least optimal light
Using my drone so I wouldn’t waste my girlfriend’s time
constructing my precious insightful little caption
i think about joyce’s viconian ricorso, a final step in a cycle of four like eddying out on the river of time
stepping out of a pattern and listening to the rhythm again
his favorite cigarettes were gauloises but I think I prefer camel blues
I am leaving Oakland, driving back to Los Angeles.
I am looking for a coffee and a bathroom before I go.
I don’t know how I happen upon this cafe near Grand Lake.
Hand written chalk menus crowded with words. Faded yellow paint with crimson moulding.
Undesigned, in a way that indicates its longevity.
No light wood.
No hostile danish furniture.
No 10,000 dollar espresso machine.
There is a pot of diner coffee sitting on a hot plate, above it hangs a sign that says ‘complimentary coffee.’
An older man stands behind the counter.
I tell, I don’t want anything else, and ask if I can pay him for the coffee.
He looks at me like I’m crazy.
’It’s free,’ he says, with a bemused smile.
The coffee is so hot in the styrofoam cup. Only powdered creamer, which I forego.
No lids.
I burn my mouth ten times and nearly spill it on myself as I get on the highway.
And I hear that sound again
“you have to help. I brought you a this.
a what?
(insistently) this!!!”
“well you have to be something.”
“ok, today I am a spreadsheet.
tomorrow I was a sprouting thing, spreading my first two leaves
listening to radiant light and hearing a chorus radiating up through the soles of my feet.
yesterday I will be a prayer”
sometimes the space between the mask and the soul feels impossibly vast
sometimes words are spoken aloud only to confirm what has already happened in dreams
there is somewhere between no future and utopia
in a distant corridor, a candle flickers
we move inexorably toward
I walk through the park and see elderly people dancing tango in a community garden
I think of growing old
i believe capitalism will end in my lifetime
this is an article of faith over logic
how do you feel when you hear these words?
Democracy
Community
Individual
Liberation
Radical
Care
Boundary
Trust
Conflict
Accountability
Revolution
Innovation
what’s in a name?
in the first days of the genocide I performed an essay called Obituary at Gray Area in San Francisco, on the same day Marc Andreessen published his techno optimist manifesto.
I asked a question that I haven’t stopped asking myself since October… why the fuck am I making art right now?
who is this for?
it is just for colleagues?
god i hope not.
i want to break containment
i want to be in the world
it seems I can only write in transit
walking and walking into things
i don’t research seeking logical substantiation of my arguments
i read for the solace of kinship
i am starting to think this is also why i make art
what use is my vulnerability? what use is a speculative obituary for an unbroken body?
Well,
the epiphany of this fake death
is what i am praying on
a revolution localized in my own body
another world seeping through the locks, seemingly from nowhere
my husband ended his world as he knew it
and as he did so, mine began
When you think of an avatar, what shape does it take? Where is it allowed to exist?
Is it separate from you? A part of you? Is it clothes? A body? Your body?
I forget.
Anyway, we met and exchanged bodies.
Or he slipped out as I entered.
I’m not sure.
We were together there for a long moment before it got quiet again.
I promised I would remember.
We wrote what we called a question in the form of a book. It was more like a rat’s nest of dramatic assertions in the form of a hypertext.
People have seen it, read it, and contributed to it.
But I removed it from the internet.
It’s horrible. And unfortunately the desperate thrashing thing is a codex that inscribes my fate.
We evacuated the pages over three manic days.
Only breaking the loop through a ritual removal of my 18 month old rat tail. Thus severing the tether which bridged the rupture of our meeting. My connection to this alternate reality eroded over the years, like a dream’s traces washing off the conscious mind as it returns to waking life.
I refer to it in moments of desperation.
I have worn through the fabric of that memory. It stretches far beyond its container.
I didn’t realize what I was doing until it was already done.
Then he was gone, just as quickly as he arrived.
And I was alone with a full suite of memories which are allegedly my own.
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment.
It feels more like a gradual handover.
A body given and received with gratitude.
I think about the inscriptions we leave.
After we are flushed back out of ourselves.
And I think of our book that I cannot decode without him, which nonetheless animates the very fabric of my work here on earth.
I departed everything everywhere to become someone somewhere.
I feel my body in time.
I am walking an unruly dog.
When we cross the threshold together, home is always our destination.
Am I pilot or passenger?
led by this companion animal stopping and starting doubling back charging forward
Each time she stops, I take it as an invitation to listen to a world unpierced by my footsteps.
I place my awareness two inches in front of my forehead, crossfading cacophony and absolute stillness.
the places she pauses distant echoes of the waste accumulating in our cyclical wake
Sutured into a body that came with a complete set of memories.
A plural experience mediated through an individual container.
Each time it freezes, I begin again.
Over and over.
I fall through the street.
Jagged polygons shoot out of my body mesh.
Completing the training mission as the game collapses around me.
Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto, doesn’t matter.
I’m having the bardo dream again.
Today I am James. Standing at the mirror in a filthy public restroom.
I go to the car. I find the map. I descend the stairs. I walk into the foggy forest. I reach the gate.
I am at the mirror again.
I deviate from the program. I walk up the road until I tell myself, yet once more, that this is the road I came in on, and that there is no use going back.
“In my restless dreams, I see that town. Silent Hill…” Mary repeats in sotto voce.
Always looking for a girl.
He was looking for me.
And then for an instant I clipped through him.
Or was it him through me?
I forget.
In part, this performance was an act of resistance. I would rather talk about death than VR.
I love to die.
I love it so much.
The tower rewards with regeneration.
I think of the places I’ve called home.
And the ones I’ve been ready to depart at a moments notice.
While my husband, Tvordis, decorated his perfect Chicago loft in an old soda pop factory with matching mid century modern furniture, I was preparing for a reality where I could leave the country tomorrow with a Pelican case and a backpack.
I didn’t want to leave.
But I wanted to die.
I think of home computers.
The computers I’ve called home.
And the ones I’ve been ready to depart at a moments notice.
My husband’s computer, Theseus, is a lived-in laptop.
Almost 15 years old and still works. We stopped updating the OS around 2018.
Three motherboard replacements, two batteries, optical drive long since replaced with an auxiliary hard drive bay. Maxxed RAM. Rehoused in an entirely different case. Tvordis was so proud of it.
He sits in that loft with Theseus, generating poetry using the latest open source machine learning libraries (Tensorflow and Keras) which he trained on Finnegans Wake. These models took days to train and their outputs were clumsy, exposing the edges of the algorithm. He didn’t quite know why he was doing this, except that he felt he needed to. He felt like he was surrounded by a chorus of angels, sitting for hours at his computer with the fan whirring at full blast.
Three years later, he was dead.
A wave of open source neural networks promised a new age of computing. It was possible to train a model on his personal computer. Seven years later, so called AI is ubiquitous – computer vision, machine learning, and the datacenters that underly it are distant and invisible. The cloud joins the local machine as a passthrough for these atemporal intimacies. The automated witness aggregates the intimacies of the world.
An indelible impression becomes a confluence of memories worn through with rewritings, residing in the body and scattered across globally distributed hard drives. Alone with his computer, I performed the poems by clicking and dragging through them as a single line of text.
This was not the beginning of my life as an artist, but it was a beginning.
I think of the body I called home.
And the body I was ready to depart at a moments notice.
I’m leaving the country next month with a Pelican case and a backpack.
A memory returns as I think of somebody else.
My memory's camera hovers just to the left of my head. I on my back and you somehow inclined over me.
I can see my own face in the right periphery of the vision. You are faceless, headless.
I only sense your hands.
Your body forms a vague greygreen shadow, like a reflection through the side of a panel of glass.
It lasts one of those dense eternal seconds in fantasy.
Which will certainly replay like an unstageable film for several weeks.
I know already it must have been my room, and it would not be the last time we laid together.
The bed must have been languorously deep and soft. The ghostly blue light at midnight after our eyes adjust.
We must have already been talking only as gravely as first loves can
for many hours already.
My body was still blank but my residual self-image no longer reproduces it this way.
I might never be satisfied with the word I choose to describe the way you touched my chest, palms open, eyes closed, begging yourself not to forget me.
I am a grown man reinhabiting my younger mind and our threadbare memory
but not my body.
If I strain I can bring the feeling of your hands on my hairless chest into focus. I cannot square the image with its sensation.
As I think of conjuring her body in my mind at an instant I cascade through ten more darkened hallways I may never retrieve.
I flipped the record and God Only Knows played
I hardly paid attention to the song
I rested my head in her lap and I felt a tear drop onto my temple
and diffuse through the fine pigmentless hairs
she asked me what it feels like to be in love
I paused for a long moment and said
'This.'
we walk along an empty road, past a grand country estate which seems hundreds of years old
we are running through waist high grass
the full moon rises and we take a moment to appreciate the moonshadows over the grassland
we enter a hole in a fence, the moon splinters through the tree canopy
there is no adjusting. no distinction between branch and apparition
hand in hand in hand
we trust we are on a trail
if only because the way is not obstructed
we hallucinate light shining through breaks in the canopy as puddles
we bury our feet ankle deep in real pits of mud
a tiny pulsing green glow on the forest floor
i ask if i am imagining it, no, we are seeing the same sleeping firefly
owls hoot in the distance
branches crack
we are not alone
a low hum becomes an encompassing roar above us and we shriek, squeezing hands and pulling close together
it slowly dissipates and we heave a sigh
we sense steep elevation changes on either side, and struggle not to lose footing
we find ourselves babbling to assure one another of our presence
we fall silent again
yes, that puddle is a reflection, i can see the mirrored movement of the trees above
i step in one
they lose a shoe in the mud
i feel the blackberry bramble snag my pantleg
we reach a clearing and see the moon again
and scramble up a hill laughing in elation
we reach the road again
this is the road we came in on
is your work about the body?
Sure, whatever you want!
should I put ‘queer trans artist’ in my artist statement?
is your work about the body?
well here the fuck I am reading you my fucking diary
Here!
This is my body.
Wow your work is so vulnerable!
Thanks I don’t really feel like I have a choice!
What is the difference between an agent and an avatar?
The second essay in this series was called ‘about my avatar.’ in this essay i contend that the avatar is more like clothes than a body.
when a cis person tells me trans people can modify their avatars, and that such a thing is liberatory
i think, motherfucker i modded my physical body.
but what about clothes?
in 2021 I released a world called The Projected Observer at Gray Area Festival. This one of the first serious presentations of my work.
there is a lot of irrelevant window dressing
it’s really clothes for my first self portraits.
alone in my studio, topless
seeing my own tits for the first time
this is a distilled gesture; the video synth is a distorted mirror, and my sight is what is being captured.
in 2022 web3 boosters shilled an idea of a sovereign identity online. a bipedal anthropomorphic surrogate, which we were to dress in designer virtual fashion. trans people, i was told, would be liberated through their control of their appearance.
What about identity is sovereign?
Two years later
time delay between camera shutters and an image appearing on michelle’s laptop
i look in a time delayed mirror reviewing poses and postures
chin down
chin down
chin down
eyes on the camera
I hear trans models are hot right now
Maybe there’s a chaser who wants to pay my rent
is she submissive?
without question
is she breedable?
this has not been proven.
i remember being invisible.
a presence floating over a man’s life ready to enter the scene when he was ready to exit.
he rode that fucking thing till the wheels fell off.
i remember my first encounter with the shape that would become my avatar.
miss sammie radiates positive energy.
In her novel, Sarah, my friend Laura wrote a phrase I’ve held ever since I read it:
“you are not only a figure of tragedy but a miracle in our midst”
Sarah was one of my first major inspirations as an artist.
The story is incredible, but that which inspired me happened off the page.
See, Laura wrote it, but the author was named JT Leroy.
Laura got this book published in the year 2000 with a phone and a fax machine.
She didn’t need to have a body until she was asked to do a reading.
Panic.
Until the tragic stroke of genius that sealed her fate befell her.
She instantiated an avatar, piloted by her sister in law, Savannah Knoop, who played the androgynous proxy for the author, who is also protagonist of the novel. The novel describes the fantastical and miraculous experiences of an ambiguously gendered ‘lot lizard,’ who went from town to town with their mother turning tricks in truck stops, switching genders for convenience and safety.
For the next six years she/he/they rode a wave which I view as the high watermark of the broadcast media celebrity culture era.
Vogue shoots, coke ads, called things like ‘the next Truman Capote,’ the Bono talk.
Teri Gross interviewed JT, and it’s hard to listen to how eager she was to believe this story about a child sex worker.
So what happened in 2006?
Well, the “greatest literary hoax of all time” was uncovered, and the walls collapsed.
People don’t like to be tricked, but sometimes it takes a convenient fiction to uncover a deeper truth.
Would it make you feel better if JT really did do all those things he described?
A year later, Laura was sued for fraud by the production company which was to develop the film adaptation of Sarah, directed by Stephen Spielberg.
The production company won.
She remains controversial.
Is she stealing tranny valor?
Another word for a convenient fiction is a hoax
Is dead name a hoax?
Am I stealing widow valor?
Would you feel better if my husband was dead?
There are people who earnestly call themselves trans widows, but more in a “you killed my husband” kind of way.
this series started as a polemic wrapped in a eulogy, a confluence of technological grief (a term coined by my friend alice yuan zhang), and grief mediated by technology
this was the era of peak metaverse hype where all around me, colleagues breathlessly transmuted silicon valley marketing into speculation on a future dreamed up in boardrooms by venture capitalist chuds and management consultants
as a co founder of new art dot city, i was frequently roped into this discourse
new art city is an artist run virtual space which allows artists to create 3d multiplayer websites without code
so like.. is this the metaverse?
no, it’s a fucking website calm down
what’s in a name?
the longer i do this project, the more it feels like prayer.
i am sick of worlding
suspicious of speculation.
what qualities make a world?
when do words become worlds?
my instinct is to say that worlds are for living in
do I build worlds?
to the extent that I co-create a world I want to live in.
The most relevant feature of the ‘in game physics’ of new art city is that space is not scarce. This alone inverts one of the longest standing and most pernicious features of making art under capitalism.
Are there white cube galleries in the utopia?
Does art need to be separate from the fabric of life?
my contention when I started this project was essentially that there is nothing about a third dimension in the browser that alters the phenomenological character of networked life
as legacy russell so eloquently tells us, there is no boundary between url and irl
we are already jacked into a synchronous and interactive simulation
one day you logged on and never logged off again
and so lately I’ve been thinking about linear algebra
Biggest glow up of 2024 is her rebrand as artificial intelligence
sam altman and his effective altruist buddies tell each other ghost stories
is this god?
it’s fucking statistics please just be normal!
Eliza was a mirror, nothing has changed.
we make art about stories of the future ripped from headlines of trade press
you display insufficient reverence for the quotidian magic all around us
Not in a distant future but here today
In the metaverse, heaven is a datacenter
And the cloud is a place on earth
For the longest time I felt like this presence
hovering over the scene of his life.
A silent witness to an unfolding play
that I would one day have a part in.
some days I feel like an emissary of his vision.
it’s an interesting shape to carry.
the female archivist of the dead male artist.
one of the best ways for a man to increase the market value of his art is to die
Tvordis was in on the joke.
he released the tape in June.
in August, he was dead.
A few days ago made four years since he left the body.
for the past two years I’ve been performing his eulogy as a lecture.
in places where lectures are expected.
For two years I’ve gestated this swimming memory
yet once more I wrote an essay when a poem was demanded
are we living in the end of history?
is art just entertainment for rich people?
am I a commodity contemplating itself?
is representation praxis?
who decided that there would be a second web?
who decided that there would be a first one?
will this consumer product contain the seeds of my liberation?
do I have to read the Benjamin to make myself understood?
what is the shape of capital?
what sound does it make when it accumulates?
are aesthetics politics?
are politics aesthetics?
and then I read the Benjamin in a fit of desperation and feel understood myself.
let me tell you about my late husband, Tvordis Veeler
This poem is a temporal duet— his words interposed with mine.
born sam cortese in hollywood california in 1993
to parents greg and jocelyn
a child who spoke to adults hoping beyond hope
they wouldn’t notice that he was five.
an infectious optimism
a personal reality distortion field
tvordis became tvordis two decades later, on a lark that would ultimately prove fatal.
he left the body in San Francisco in August 2020, a year after we moved there together.
In my first hour of knowing him, Tvordis taught me that not even death is death.
He didn’t die, he lived.
And he showed me what happens when you turn off the lights.
He had the courage to end his world as he knew it.
And at that moment, my world began.
he told me about the gradual unfolding awareness
that we came from another place and found each other in this one.
it’s not that we didn’t choose to be born,
we just don’t remember choosing.
In our last year, we were inseparable.
We shared everything.
and with equal measures of joy and desperation,
we tried to document as much as we could before he had to go.
what we made together filled a book and 11 cassette tapes
when he left, he gave me his personal computer
and challenged me to “examine this archive of a mask in its incompleteness.”
To lift these files out of their graves
and put them places they would never expect to find themselves.
believing that the things he left behind would be retrieved.
the dead only exist to the extent that we remember them.
he’s been gone for four years now
and I still feel like an emissary of his vision.
it’s an interesting shape to carry.
the female archivist of the dead male artist.
one of the best ways for a man to increase the market value of his art is to die
i am wearing my pink camo pants and jelly platforms with frilly socks, a mesh bra and open silk button up
i sit in my friend’s kitchen drinking coffee which they prepare like gong fu cha and serve in tiny cups
offhandedly they offer me a homemade mushroom chocolate from their freezer
i take one
we stroll through neukolln, a bit late from chatting
i see the police before i see the march
riot gear, but helmets held at their sides
i remark about cryptic humor of the officer in a full face of makeup and white gel claws
we fall in with the palestine block
we march, we chant, i feel the familiar comfort of being a voice in a crowd. we chant in german, in english, in arabic
we laugh and count the shirtless men in their windows looking down at us
the mushrooms are starting to hit, i smile feeling the warmth rising from my abdomen
i feel the familiar joy of strolling along in a sea of dykes as far as i can see
we see police impotently holding cameras on poles, which demonstrators deftly block with banners and keffiyehs
surrounded by adorable lace clad apple cheeked 24 year olds holding signs and drinking radlers
before i know it, the police have their helmets on. they descend in pincer columns, grabbing a few protesters and pulling them out of the crowd
i learn a new german phrase: ganz berlin haßt die polizei
i feel a jolt of fear
am i in danger?
am i ever not?
another chant: you are not alone. you are not alone.
my friend darts instantly into the action, phone in hand videotaping
i lose them in the crowd
my awareness heightens
after awhile i find my friend again
they sheepishly apologize for feeding me mushrooms
‘i forgot this was kind of a demo’
‘it’s ok, i’m american, at least we aren’t being kettled or tear gassed yet.’
the officers pull back
we continue marching, now with the vague sense of foreboding hovering over us
marching along, hearing katy perry on the speaker truck several blocks ahead of us as the party portion of the march continues, seemingly unaware of what is happening in the rear of the march
we look over our shoulders, the pincer descends again, i repeat my new german phrase
what will happen if i, an american transsexual, am arrested in a foreign country?
i am not alone
i am not alone
in front of us a party
behind us a riot
It’s one of those days where the dream’s residue hasn’t quite washed off.
I am strolling through the city periodically interrupted by associations for which the primary memory is lost.
Was I someone else?
We speak in order to ratify exchanges made while dreaming.
We came from a place where there is no me.
Where does the player character end? And the interface begin?
I am non player non character
How do I touch the animating mechanics of whatever game I find myself playing
stay alive.
the game is usually uneventful.
a few times a day i get called boss, bro, buddy, even sir on occasion
who cares
and in equal measure a stranger tells me they love my style
or my tattoos
whatever
an oblique way of complimenting my body
i get photographed while strolling through soho
on the way home from the New Museum office in Tribeca
he says i look great
i say i did not consent
no matter where I am, no matter how I look, whenever I leave the house, a program runs in the background
i sit on the subway rehearsing my lines
for my inevitable encounter with the nameless faceless malice of every horror story I’ve heard from other transfemmes in my community
i practice my explosive animal fury
back the FUCK up.
i’m not afraid of you.
this line of thinking is not without consequences
the hair on my neck stands up
my cheeks flush
i am recreationally dosing cortisol
and then i remember
i can radiate pure love
have you ever met a trans person before?
hi, i’m sammie
seems like you’re holding a lot of anger
that seems painful
do you have any questions for me? while i’m here?
this may be your only chance to ask them.
where did you learn about us?
oh honey you watch too much tv.
and then of course the moment arrives
I enter the station and ask the attendant a question.
i am wearing a blue linen dress which flows past my ankles. a blue crew neck sweatshirt. a blue head scarf. A black flowered cloth mask.
skin completely covered.
my voice gives me away.
a man follows me down the stairs to the platform.
it is empty except for an elderly woman who acknowledges neither of us.
“i thought you were attractive” he says
at first i dont realize he’s talking to me
i sit motionless and silent on a bench
vaping under my mask
he’s standing over my left shoulder.
“you a faggot. you a faggot. you a faggot. you a faggot. you a faggot.”
over and over again
i do not acknowledge him. I stare straight ahead.
he goes away for awhile
i don’t dare look back
he’s over my shoulder again
“hey mama where you stay at?”
when he turns his back, i dart behind a pillar. i crouch and peek around the corner to see if he’s still there. he’s confused, looking for me.
this is a stealth mission, Snake
stealth.
if i apply the correct social and physical modifications
i can hope to become invisible
To be read, as a result and not a process.
you survived this stage.
you are permitted to continue suffering.
But you did not pass.
the place you are looking for does not exist.
he gets on his train and I cry on mine
and I don’t move to New York like I planned
and I don’t get into New Inc like I thought I would.
I said once that the avatar is more like clothes than a body.
But what about clothes?
What type of girl uses this computer?
Misgendered by the italian photographer I repeat my staircase wit ‘sono una donna’
What happens to my precious metaphor about the feminized invisible labor of preservation if you don’t read me as a woman?
I am tired of stunting.
I get 15000 steps a day exclusively in platforms
Rocking a casual 6’5”
If I cannot hope to be read the way I see myself,
I can at least be intimidating
I think of the way a certain kind of male colleague stares through me.
Standing in a circle at an opening, attempting to contribute to a conversation.
Being so roundly ignored that I wonder for a moment whether I still exist.
A sympathetic glance from a friend as I drift elsewhere.
I am a mouth
I am a sensing organ
I am tired of pleading with men
To make things with technology
Or to fund urgent work
I am tired of dancing in the negative mirror
Shoehorning an idea into a legible container for whoever is holding the key.
This is a fucking bar tab to you.
If I was cis and looked the way I do, would you speak to me differently?
It’s so stupid.
Am I really going to come up here and talk about fucking micro aggressions?
During a fucking genocide?
OF COURSE the gender binary is fake
Of COURSE there is no self!
Please just tell me I’m not crazy.
How can I be read for the softness I feel inside?
It circles and rises. Easy to spot, hard to see.
Seeping in like water, sloshing through locks and dams into peripheral vision and involuntary vocalization. Dysphoria the unnameable, euphoria the uncountable.
Refracted on platonic solids are disembodied fragments of a portrait that rang. Mom's pearls and my first tattoos: an anchor and a garbled DNR in morse code.
My new voice, hidden among the protean angles, no longer probes but inhabits a register.
Seeing myself in glittering fragments which slowly move into my awareness as if from nowhere and retreat. The broken manifold becomes more continuous. Searching in the angles, points of light project widening gradients until the edges intersect. Yes, I am starting to see a face in there.
My secret vocal training in sighs and particles. His bedroom voice is mine everywhere. You can either cut the cord or choose not to use it.
I'm thinking in tongues
I remember everything.
I mouthed the words of our favorite song.
I realize his absence more.
all now in time, we walk, you are, somewhere, something, now, and always.
toward
WE SPEAK IN ORDER TO RATIFY EXCHANGES MADE WHILE DREAMING
THE DICKSUCKING FACTORY CLOSED DOWN SO I HAD TO GO WORK AT THE MINDFUCKING CENTER
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED BITCOIN WENT TO ZERO
MAKING OUT ON THE STEPS OF THE BK MUSEUM WHILE ABOVE US SOME TEENAGERS CALL US F*GGOTS AND BELOW A GIRL IS READING DAVID WOJNAROWICZ EY I LOVE DAT FREAKIN MEMORY
don't ask me where I got these ontologies
you do not want to know
DREAMS TRAIN US FOR THE TEMPORAL DISCONTINUITY OF FILMS
I AM BACK IN THE PROCESS OF DOCUMENTING BECAUSE I SENSE THE PRESENCE OF MIRACLES
NOT HUMAN DEFINITELY BEING
GIVING MY FERAL PRIVATE EQUITY BOYFRIEND A LICK PAD OF FOIE GRAS
INSECURE SOCKET LAYER
TO ALL THE ELECTRONS I EVER INCONVENIENCED
THIS STARTUP IS ENDING CAPITALISM
I DREAMED SO SLEEPLESSLY
WHAT THE FUCK IS DOMICILIATION, DO YOU MEAN HOME-MAKING?
TIRED: KINGMAKING
WIRED: KINMAKING
MY FIRST MEMORY WAS A BARDO DREAM
OUR DREAMS ARE STRIPED ACROSS THE SAME RAID ARRAY
GOING ON THE COMPUTER TO MAKE PICTURES ABOUT GOING ON THE COMPUTER
TURING COMPLETE GIRLFRIEND
BRB MY PHONES GONNA CRY
CROSS INTO FANTASY
ETERNAL SUNSET OF THE SPOTLESS TECHNOLOGY
I REMEMBER THE THOUGHTS BUT NOT WHETHER I CHOSE TO SPEAK THEM. DID THEY CROSS INTO YOUR AWARENESS?
AN IBM CUSTOM HYBRID CLOUD PLATFORM SOLUTION BURIED UNDER 18” OF WET SILT
GO HYDRA MODE WITH REAL TIME IOT BIG DATA CLUSTER ANALYTICS PIPELINES. INVISIBLE, UNKILLABLE, UNCOUNTABLE.
YOU ARE IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA
ONE DAY YOU LOGGED ON AND NEVER LOGGED OFF
THE BRAIN IS NOT A COMPUTER IT IS A TYPE OF MEAT!!!
THE ORIGINAL MEANING OF THE ABBREVIATION ‘LOL’ IS ‘LITTLE OLD LADY.’FUCKING LOOK IT UP.
CULTIVATING A SPACE OF NOT KNOWING
DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, PROFANE THE DREAM WITH A NAME, LEST IT DEVOLVE INTO FANTASY
TO DREAM, PERCHANCE TO SLEEP
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DREAMS IS SUBJECTIVE AND CONTINGENT
TWO tokens that are TRULY nonfungible are of GRATITUDE and FRIENDSHIP
THE DREAM IS THE ULTIMATE FREE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS
YOU HAVE YET ONCE MORE MISTAKEN A DREAM FOR A PROMISE
THE CLOUD IS A TYPE OF RAILROAD
I HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE
I AM SEEING THIS FOR THE FIRST TIME
MY FIRST WORD WAS ELLIPSES;
DONT COME IN I’M PROBLEMATIZING EXISTING ONTOLOGIES
GETTING CYBERBULLIED BY GHOSTS
THINKING OF GOEING ON THE COMPUTQR
CAPITALISM CREATES PERVERSE INCENTIVES. PERVERSE INCENTIVES CREATE PERVERTS.
WHEN THE WALLED GARDEN LOOKS LIKE A FACTORY FARM
WHEN THE VAPORWARE SMELLS LIKE FARTS
The title of this series is an olive branch.
An invitation to occupy a convenient fiction with me.
“
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy:
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot
Nor arm nor face nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O be some other name.
“
One of many idioms instantiated in English language canon by Shakespeare, it draws into relief the disjunction between sign and signifier.
James Joyce returned to the phrase in Ulysses – Bloom turns the phrase over to himself throughout the novel, in relation to his sense of exile from the Irish Nation. Bloom was a Hungarian Jew, his surname was a translation of Virag, the Hungarian word for flower.
After Molly’s famous yes, Joyce signs the novel with three words:
Zurich
Trieste
Paris
Ulysses takes place over a single day, and my husband told me that you can walk the entire path taken by the Bloom and Dedalus, that the distances are that perfectly inscribed.
Joyce wrote this quintessential Irish novel in exile.
I was building a synthesizer in a hacker space in oakland called the sudo room, which is located in a collective of collectives called omni commons.
I met a guy named Don who was always hacking on javascript projects. We would chat lightly about music while we worked.
I ended up moving home to LA and a few months later I saw an online exhibition curated by an old schoolmate of mine.
I’ll never forget how it felt to show up to this website and see a bunch of text scrolling up the left side of the page, a 3d space with a bunch of green diamonds moving around, I jog my mouse, wait… I can look around. I touch an arrow key, I can move!
Wait…… those diamonds are PEOPLE!
I look up the platform, newart.city, and see that it’s led by that guy, D0n.xyz!
I email him right away asking how far along he is with the project, whether he needs any nontechnical community support help. He does, I join, and my life changes forever.
For the past four years, I have been a human interface between artists and the underlying technology of new art city: a nexus between the dream and the possible. I know the boundaries, and I can ask the boys to push them.
They’re good boys, I love them so much.
And so for the past couple of years, I’ve been using New Art City as a performance tool, gradually learning javascript by hacking my spaces with the scripting window. Over time I started playing with things like p5 and hydra, which have been amazing tools for learning.
I’m blessed beyond measure to call the creators of both of these tools friends, as a result of my work at New Art City.
This summer, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to learn how to make software myself. The tool I’m using today is by far the most complex piece of software I’ve ever built.
I am leaving Oakland, driving back to Los Angeles.
I am looking for a coffee and a bathroom before I go.
I don’t know how I happen upon this cafe near Grand Lake.
Hand written chalk menus crowded with words. Drab yellow paint with crimson moulding.
Undesigned, in a way that indicates its longevity.
No light wood.
No hostile danish furniture.
No 10,000 dollar espresso machine.
There is a pot of diner coffee sitting on a hot plate, above it hangs a sign that says ‘complimentary coffee.’
An older man stands behind the counter.
I tell, I don’t want anything else, and ask if I can pay him for the coffee.
He looks at me like I’m crazy.
’It’s free,’ he says, with a bemused smile.
The coffee is so hot in the styrofoam cup. Only powdered creamer, which I forego.
No lids.
I burn my mouth ten times and nearly spill it on myself as I get on the highway.
And I hear that sound again
we walk along an empty road, past a grand country estate which seems hundreds of years old
we are running through waist high grass
the full moon rises and we take a moment to appreciate the moonshadows over the grassland
we enter a hole in a fence, the moon splinters through the tree canopy
there is no adjusting. no distinction between branch and apparition
hand in hand in hand
we trust we are on a trail
if only because the way is not obstructed
we hallucinate light shining through breaks in the canopy as puddles
we bury our feet ankle deep in real pits of mud
a tiny pulsing green glow on the forest floor
i ask if i am imagining it, no, we are seeing the same sleeping firefly
owls hoot in the distance
branches crack
we are not alone
a low hum becomes an encompassing roar above us and we shriek, squeezing hands and pulling close together
it slowly dissipates and we heave a sigh
we sense steep elevation changes on either side, and struggle not to lose footing
we find ourselves babbling to assure one another of our presence
we fall silent again
yes, that puddle is a reflection, i can see the mirrored movement of the trees above
i step in one
they lose a shoe in the mud
i feel the blackberry bramble snag my pantleg
we reach a clearing and see the moon again
and scramble up a hill laughing in elation
we reach the road again
this is the road we came in on
i am wearing my pink camo pants and jelly platforms with frilly socks, a mesh bra and open silk button up
i sit in my friend’s kitchen drinking coffee which they prepare like gong fu cha and serve in tiny cups
offhandedly they offer me a homemade mushroom chocolate from their freezer
i take one
we stroll through neukolln, a bit late from chatting
i see the police before i see the march
riot gear, but helmets held at their sides
i remark about cryptic humor of the officer in a full face of makeup and white gel claws
we fall in with the palestine block
we march, we chant, i feel the familiar comfort of being a voice in a crowd. we chant in german, in english, in arabic
we laugh and count the shirtless men in their windows looking down at us
the mushrooms are starting to hit, i smile feeling the warmth rising from my abdomen
i feel the familiar joy of strolling along in a sea of dykes as far as i can see
we see police impotently holding cameras on poles, which demonstrators deftly block with banners and keffiyehs
surrounded by adorable lace clad apple cheeked 24 year olds holding signs and drinking radlers
before i know it, the police have their helmets on. they descend in pincer columns, grabbing a few protesters and pulling them out of the crowd
i learn a new german phrase: ganz berlin haßt die polizei
i feel a jolt of fear
am i in danger?
am i ever not?
another chant: you are not alone. you are not alone.
my friend darts instantly into the action, phone in hand videotaping
i lose them in the crowd
my awareness heightens
after awhile i find my friend again
they sheepishly apologize for feeding me mushrooms
‘i forgot this was kind of a demo’
‘it’s ok, i’m american, at least we aren’t being kettled or tear gassed yet.’
the officers pull back
we continue marching, now with the vague sense of foreboding hovering over us
marching along, hearing katy perry on the speaker truck several blocks ahead of us as the party portion of the march continues, seemingly unaware of what is happening in the rear of the march
we look over our shoulders, the pincer descends again, i repeat my new german phrase
what will happen if i, an american transsexual, am arrested in a foreign country?
i am not alone
i am not alone
in front of us a party
behind us a riot
we accidentally march too far ahead of our bloc and we find ourselves in the zionist terf bloc
jesus fucking christ