brio. Spring 2022 // Simulacra Issue

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of Contents 2 r from the Editor3 4 Ruby Quinn Marshall sing Pepsi: Objectified History in Victor Pelevin’s ration P 10 Gabriella Frisch oring the Simulacra and Postmodernist Thinking Through ber Theory: How Gödel Informs Baudrillard 20 Hannah Seigel

for Cornelia the32Bear, Designed to Look Like My Dog view Magazine: 34

36 Zhenzhen Yu of Arc Follows Me Around Australia

38 Sean Knox Krupa ne Consciousness, Jonas Mekas, and Downtown Cultural ory

55 ributor's Biographies d the Issue: Biographies 71 72

Vivacity, spirit, an individual energy.

The discipline of Comparative Literature is based on the observation that the study of single texts and cultures is enriched by reflecting on the texts and cultures surrounding them. No text or work of art exists in a vacuum, and literature is not confined to a singular concept, language, or people. We hope to view literature from broad and inclusive perspectives, illuminating how philosophy, anthropology, history, language, poetry, literary theory, and other human expressions come together, and where the visual arts, theatre, and modern media offer crucial comparisons. This journal aspires to embody these ideas while remaining in a constant state of becoming something new with each issue, submission, contribution, translation, and reading.

brio. is a student-founded publication that combines literary criticism with imaginative works and visual art. In an effort to represent the wide spectrum of discourses that serve as the foundation of comparative study, the journal accepts submissions from any source and in any language.

IMULACRA begins in capitalism, advertising, a dissolving empire,

raphic politicians, hostility, psychodrama, false redemption, and is

uickly followed by sex, masculinity, music, the writer, and hell as

ned by a child, ending in moments captured from cinema, war as it

rs online, impulse, the constant blurring of our selves and our

ology, our art, our material emptiness, what we leave behind, and

uffering on earth.

can author philip k. dick claims to explore the question of “what is

y?” in his science fiction. in explaining how science fiction attempts

ovide exploratory and by no means fixed “answers” to this

ion, in ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two

Later,’ he takes inspiration from the text our SIMULACRA is on, Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, when he speaks Disneyland. Disney represents the “American way of life”

ding to Baudrillard, as it covers up one kind of simulation:

isneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of

eal" America that is Disneyland…Disneyland is presented as

maginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real,

ut belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.

terms, or not, you and i have been touched by the escalation of the hyperreal. in the composition of the relatively small number of pages constituting our SIMULACRA, each artist adapted their pieces since their first drafts. the editing process for our SIMULACRA, from my point of view, was beautifully catastrophic, as every person seemed to have revelations, such as when an editor could make no sense of writers’ most passionate words and phrases, until she stopped trying to make sense and let the words speak themselves (following Victor Pelevin’s advice, “когда не думаешь, многое становится ясно”). the author dwelled in the discomfort of all the changing shapes of their tangible product with grace. everything feels truly handmade (it was, from the words to the cover design) and by hands that know what they are doing even if all of us are struggling to say anything. by struggling to say anything, these and many writers who tackle complex systems have produced compelling language that indeed says something.

it is my steadfast hope that comparative literature as a discipline and way of approaching texts embodies humanism rather than imposed “logical” systems, ideological strains of the violent centralization of the power of knowledge in Europe and the US, and a pernicious history of colonial thought so embedded in our simulations we often fail to see it or criticize it, let alone try to revolt against it. rather, permit us our subjective, personal reactions to texts that undo and redo themselves as

n) the detangling of western judgment from the study of literature,

me others to speak instead of us, praise oral literature, cherish

ctive experiences unfamiliar to us, and abdicate practices of

ectual mastery, dogmatism, and essentialism. the closest definition

erature i have in my book is the human voice petrified for us to

n to. i mean to say: permit us literature without the borders and

chies and without the academic urge to debase ourselves when we

pret texts in the space of another; permit us to leave behind the

s institutions put in our mouths and revel in what each of us can

n response to human creation.

tunately, our SIMULACRA’s primary language is English due to a

ty of non-Anglophone submissions this round, which deserves

owledgement, as we are a multilingual journal and proud to be one.

ope that our next issue for this fall will feature more languages,

res, and stories—without this, comparative literature loses what it alive and we fall back into the deathly traps i have been speaking here.

you so much, the people who came on board later in the semester

ist me. thank you contributors; all of you are not only dazzling

rs but have been endlessly joyful to interact with over the months. you brio. readers for giving us the grace to produce what should

later. and thank you for reading most of all and listening to our voices. we would love to hear yours.

with thankfulness, megan finkel (she/her) editor-in-chief of brio. journal

Ruby Quinn Marshall

History is understood through habit, through objects, through

ns and papers and pop music; the material of our lives makes a

ical narrative: our object associations are our history. In his novel,

ration P, Victon Pelevin shows how the understanding of history is

d by objects, how this seemingly fractured understanding reveals a

r truth about historical change, and how history itself may be

dered an object. A post-modern slurry of mythology,

merism, and post-Soviet ennui, Generation P runs Babylen

sky through the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and follows him

shifts from poet to advertising copywriter in a world that seems to

tize, above all, the ability to describe and sell objects. Tatarsky is

nually rewarded for his prowess in writing copy, and ascends the

ratic behemoth known as the Institute of Apiculture that rises to

e power vacuum the USSR left behind. Despite his increased access machinery of the state and its advertising agency—and his

ased understanding that the two are rarely differentiable—Tatarsky

ns hopelessly confused about who or what causes the immense change he sees in the world, and he questions the role he himself

in history. In fact, he begins to question if anyone can decide the

e of history. Generation P shows a process of historical change

stood not through what makes history but purely through what

starting from the generation referenced in the title: “Once upon a time in Russia there really was a carefree, youthful generation that… chose Pepsi” (1). History may be explained through its products, that which has the capacity to be advertised and interacted with, simulating interaction with history (Now I may buy Pepsi, before I could not). The social forces that produce historical change are mysterious and ephemeral, as Pelevin’s narrator explains (“It’s hard at this stage to figure out exactly how this situation came about…”), and in some ways irrelevant: the force behind history one way or another makes Pepsi symbolically significant, a thing that holds within itself an explanation of a deep transformation. Pelevin shows historical change happening at the scale of the object, ultimately arguing that historical change itself is an objectified process, a universal constant outside of human control.

In Tatarsky’s world, objects thrum with the history they contain or represent. No sip of Pepsi or drag on a Davidoff—no human interaction with objects—can come unstuck from the weight of history, the vapor and lifeblood of ideology, cultural context, and historical specificity that even mundane objects imply. To Tatarsky, a “bottle of Johnny Walker” is reminiscent of “the town hall,” and this merged bottle/town hall is indistinguishable from “the ideological exhaustion of communism, the senselessness of bloodshed” (76). An object is capable, in the world of Generation P, of describing the world better than any other explanation could, forming a sort of historical pattern. One’s

ormations than any analysis of history, and this dynamic is put on

ular display when Tatarsky contemplates the dissolution of the

R. The collapse itself is a subtle moment in Tatarsky’s life—he reacts

professional anxiety, as the Literary Institute where he is a poet-

ar will lose funding—and he shows little desire to understand what

d the political reality that defined his life and country. Taught to

his eye “fixed firmly on eternity,” as life in the USSR had seemed,

sky seems almost blinded by the collapse, gazing at a historical so huge that it has made itself obsolete, “a microscopic dot on the

screen of the mind” (4). The enormous effect of the collapse is

, though, less subtle for the reader, as the narrator asserts that the

R had begun to “improve so much that it ceased to exist” (3). The

tor frames the new Russia and its attempts toward a market-

omy as a post-nirvanic state, one that transcends so magnificently

t severs from reality. Pelevin does not depict any sort of collective

on to show the social disruption caused by the collapse. Though

was, in reality, mass protest and political turmoil, Pelevin’s artistic

ocuses on the minutiae of social change relating to the individual

he object. Tatarsky confronts the transformed reality on a very

scale: looking at a pair of dusty Soviet-era shoes in a shop, no

r able to access the world that produced them. He experiences a

ent of strangely intense humiliation and recognition. The

ormed world has no use for this remnant of Soviet life, the “clear

used to call ‘our gestalt,’” but the transformation can only be understood through these shoes and their alien appearance (4). The shoes contain within them the memory and presence of a life that no longer exists: the material remainder of historical, political, and environmental forces that no longer exist. They are the product of a machine that no longer produces, an object reduced to pure perception.

As Tatarsky notes to himself, when “the subject of eternity disappears, then all of its objects also disappear” (5). Tatarsky recognizes historical change through material change; he knows the world is different only because an object that used to have a place in society no longer does.

Using objects to understand history is an almost sick obsession of Tatarsky and his fellow copy-writers. A coworker, the fanatically antiSemitic Malyuta, is “convinced…sunflower seeds were inseparably fused with the image of a patriot,” and uses his constant consumption of sunflower seeds both as shorthand for and to reify his ideological commitments (94). The unwieldy fusion of daily life’s detritus and grand historical narratives is not merely a perversion employed by nasty and brutish characters, like Malyuta: even Tatarsky cannot escape this distorted reality in which the object is king. Despite the novel’s lack of direct attention to the historical or political realities its characters experience, its narrative world is almost claustrophobically focused on the way objects invoke history and politics.

In Generation P, a void of defined power in the advertising

nt any character who knows more or has more power than another.

Tatarsky’s seemingly powerful bosses die, becoming the victims of

unknown vacuum or force. The question Tatarsky continually to his new boss, who materializes smoothly into the gap left by

d, is, “but how did it happen?” (61, 143). When he is told by a

w employee that the man he is supposed to write copy for has been

n out,” he attempts to figure out how the death “fits in” with

y and comes up short (143, 144). However, the appearance of a new

makes the question fade away; Tatarsky is back at work,

essing even as some unknown force picks off his superiors. And so

uestion of who controls historical change remains and becomes less

the more power Tatarsky possesses. Central to Tatarsky’s rise

gh the ranks of Moscow’s advertising world is his failure to

stand what forces structure, shape, and control his success. This

al anxiety–his confusion and lack of understanding about who is

harge,” both of his life and of his world–remains unresolved by the

. The pattern of boss-removal and promotion is rendered in its

test colors in the conclusion of the novel. Tatarsky’s most powerful

Azadovsky, is revealed to be not only the director of the Institute

he husband of a Babylonian goddess, Ishtar. At a ceremony held in

scow radio tower, Tatarsky looks into the “sacred eye” of the

ess, in which he sees a “golden glimmering, as though he had just several minutes watching the rising sun, then closed his eyes and

what was I supposed to see?’” (242). Tatarsky sees nothing, only the shadow of enlightenment, and in fact feels a profound loss of vision and understanding, yet all is supposedly explained; after he is chosen as the next husband of Ishtar, Azadovsky is promptly strangled to death. This scene retains much of the indecision–the lack of coherent or explicable power dynamics–that characterizes the deaths of other bosses. Despite the fact that Tatarsky himself is now the replacement, his understanding of the world is unchanged. He is left, newly divine, with more questions, little agency, still feeling as if he is in the employ of some unknown force–“‘Will they strangle me sometime too?’” Tatarsky asks (244).

Tatarsky wonders who controls the cult of Ishtar, and is told by Farseikin, a supposedly wiser member, to “not stick [his] nose in… That way [he’ll] stay a living god for longer” (245). Farseikin explicitly links the lack of understanding, the recognition of one’s inability to figure out what is causing one’s success, to that acquired success itself: godhood isn’t knowledge, it’s ignorance. Though Tatarsky and his coworkers and bosses itch to acquire the decisive control of the world promised by ascension, power in Generation P doesn’t yield the ability to change anything.

Tatarsky achieves a nirvana of obfuscation, but the question remains: why is advertising so crucial for this post-Soviet world? The Institute, an advertising agency, is the mouthpiece of a divine will—the “servants of the great goddess” (240)—but their task is only vaguely

s to be informed of the true extent of the agency’s intervention in

roduction of everyday reality. Morkovin, Tatarsky’s guide and cult/

rother hazing him up the corporate ladder, informs him that the

ute controls the actions of all political figures in Russia: from

n down, all gaffes, scandals, and policy are written in-house and

rmed by fabricated 3D-models of the people involved. Tatarsky

ions this schematic, wondering who decides what the politicians

bout, who decides what is decided on, to which Morkovin

ns, “‘Decide’ is only a word really. In actual fact we don’t have too choice about it. We’re hemmed in tight by the iron law of

sity” (175). Morkovin says that there are no decisions being made,

o not make decisions is an impossibility: the wheel of political

er turns onward, not through the corrupt push of an oligarch or a

e from a bank (both of which, he says, don’t really exist), but

y from its own inertia, an omnipresent desire for movement to

nue. Defined by Tatarsky’s coworker Morkovin, this “monetarism”

is the control of gross stocks such that the economy remains

al, uninterfered with, and static. This, obviously, is a bizarre

nation for the way the world works, an amateur bedtime story

t to explain the ways of the world, but most importantly, it

tifies the historical process. Not only are the politicians you watch

V fake, not only are they having fake arguments, though the

ons they make are real and can affect you, but there is in fact no

chides Tatarsky for his naivete, saying “the world isn’t run by a ‘who’, it’s run by a ‘what’” (177). Historical change simply engenders itself, with no specific contextual impetus that can be understood, an “impulse” (82) so constant and inherent to the world that history as a process of transformation becomes an object and institution unto itself.

Pelevin presents a character who understands historical change only as the material process unfolding before him: through the imagery and objects produced by certain eras, through the reality we assume to be present like a pulse underneath Pepsi or a pair of shoes. Historical change is more representation than process, in some ways is an object itself. In Tatatsky’s world, there is no real possibility for dynamic change, no true struggle over direction. Even revolutionary, radical change is degraded: Che Guevara appears in the novel as a Buddhist ghost playing pen-pals via Ouija board embodied by a t-shirt for sale.

The meaning of his life and his personality is not only commodified, but lost entirely. This commodification is never more inevitable than when it is almost subverted: a repeating motif, “the Tuborg man” who appears on the label of a beer can, seems to reverberate through the novel as a possible route through which Tatarsky can access nirvana, change, enlightenment. Unlike Tatarsky’s interactions with the other debris of social life—scotch bottles, sunflower seeds— this beer can is dissociated from its historical context, and seems to almost come alive. He notices the Tuborg man (painted in soft oils: a slouching, sweating man leant

can first shortly after his experience on acid, recovering on a park

h outside. He notices with special attention the beautiful expanse

rames what is effectively a brand mascot: “above the [Tuborg] head was a searing expanse of blue, and he was standing on a

w track that led away beyond the horizon” (129). Tatarsky begins

osing slogans for this powerful label, instantly connecting the on the can to a much weightier reality than perhaps is warranted:

uborg man as a wayfarer, a lone but successful traveler. Tatarsky is

us of the change that the Tuborg man seems to be able to access, his

tial to satisfy thirst. Unlike Tatarsky, who is stuck flailing upwards

mystifying schematic of power, the Tuborg man is free; one of the

ns Tatarsky creates for the beer is “Think final,” a phrase that

s some sort of release from the roiling, inexorable change that

es Tatarsky. Fittingly, after his ascension to godhood, Tatarsky

mes the Tuborg man: but does this transformation mean anything?

sky walks calmly in the horizon, free of Moscow, seemingly free,

n the other hand, there is no more Tatarsky: he himself has become

dvertisement. It’s a moment of total objectification and

mercialization of the soul, fraught with its own meaninglessness. He

ruck by some kind of thought,” pauses, but cannot act or truly

, “grow[s] calmer,” and continues walking, always captured by the

ra (250). The Tuborg man, far from offering a potential ‘out’ or

answer to who is causing the world to change, becomes the

advertisements for commodities, the flash of life meant to humanize a beer can. The fundamental shallowness of Tatarsky’s being at the end of the novel is analogous to the way historical change has been presented through the novel as an inevitable, inexorable, already present ‘thing’ which is charmingly adorned with meaningless bosses, petty dictators, dusty shoes. Pelevin’s Generation P shows that no effect can be engendered by the human being: people are set-dressing and irrelevant husbands to the fundamentally unknowable object of history.

Theory: How Gödel Informs Baudrillard Gabriella Frisch

The first principles of things, metaphysics, deal with the ability

rceive and know reason and rationale. When one concerns their self

reality, they find their attempts at awareness and reflection to have

ounded into phenomenological questions regarding reality and

ation: two systems that have been operating in a confusing, blurred

m since the concept of semiosis and representation came to be.

Baudrillard, in an attempt to parse out reality and unreality,

oped the notion of simulacra–a theory which has serious

cussions in regard to the historical understanding of binary systems

n a world proliferated by signs. Baudrillard’s simulacra and

ation theory extends beyond any one compartmentalized realm, is apt to study it from filmic and mediatic perspectives, as cinema

mage-based media are wholly concerned with the reproduction of

y through signs and visual stimuli. Simulacra, as defined by

rillard, differ in degrees corresponding to historical periods–the

odern, modern, and postmodern. The postmodern period offers the

radical and apocalyptic theorization, wherein reality and

nality become meaningless concepts as the simulacrum precedes the

nal and the distinction between reality and representation dissolves

hyperreality; however, when one reframes the precession of

no longer a threat but a transaestheticism–a notion permuted by Baudrillard from Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant establishes his theory of reality as a finality without end that characterizes classical aesthetics. In his essay “Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art,” Baudrillard reverses Kant’s thinking, claiming: “We are now in an end without finality… In other words, we are in a transaesthetics” (Baudrillard). The transformation of aesthetics as an eternal process is fortified by Gödel's number theory, which rejects the apocalyptic ending simulacra predict by way of the implosion of binary systems. Instead, transaesthetics mutate constantly, as meaning and interpretation change and affect their informing of aesthetic. Simulacra, existing in unfixed, permuted states across time, are not easily affixed with a definition but best understood as systems of signifiers and symbols within anthropogenic culture and media that construct a perceived reality. Perceived reality, as the comprehension of simulacra, then imbues life with a simulated meaning: “simulation… is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (Baudrillard 2). Hyperreality is a state that occurs within the postmodern degree of simulacra, where reality and fiction meld so cohesively it is impossible to tell one from the other. This entwining generates a simulated state that is inherently irreversible and different from the original. Hyperreality is more complex than just a melding of two opposites. What one considers original reality could very well have

ation was ever rooted in truth, or if the entire system was built on

acra and is a pageant of empty signifiers that refer back to nothing.

mpossibility of making a distinction between reality and simulation

mines the real itself. Erosion of the real leans into postmodernist

icism towards traditional frameworks of what is true or false or

or wrong and how to establish this philosophical schema. The idea

nything can be simulated, not only questions the systems that

ionally determine what is real, but the relevance of reality

ether.

The precession of simulacra consists of four distinct stages that

rcate the muddling and eventual disappearance of the boundaries

een fiction and reality. The first stage is a faithful image or sign that

sents and reflects what is believed in as profound reality. There is a

ng in realism as “...a liquidation of all referentials by their artificial

rection in systems of signs” (Baudrillard 4). The second stage

sts of an ideological representation. The articulation of ideology is

n enlightened progression of thought, because representation relies

binary system– if one thing is an untruth, then another thing must

ruth: “simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’

een ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’” (Baudrillard 5). Simulation perverts

y, denaturing the binaries that are intrinsic to human belief systems.

rillard describes simulation as malevolent and infectious because

and images do not faithfully reveal reality but can instead hint at

encapsulating: “there is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity” (Baudrillard 12). In the third stage, signs mask the absence of profound reality, covering over known reality or the absence of reality. There is no longer a question of false reality but whether the real is still real. Thus, a supernatural or mythological element is introduced–if the real was never truly known or realized, then it must be fantasy. The sign appears as a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original.

Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation can take place if the initial presentation did not happen.

Baudrillard considered the existence of signs without basis in reality an ordered sorcery, where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the increasingly hermetic truth. The fourth and final stage finds the simulacrum in the purest form–completely abandoning any and all relationships with reality. There never was a reality to declare real and everything is discursive, for there is no outside position. Signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims: “the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything… but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference” (Baudrillard 10-11).

The fourth stage is one of total equivalency, where cultural products no longer pretend to be real in a superficial sense because the experiences of

y are expected to be phrased in artificial, hyperreal terms. Any

nsion to reality as such is perceived as lacking critical self-

ness. In the fourth stage, simulacra become so severed from reality

“never again will the real have to be produced– this is the vital

on of the model in a system of death” (Baudrillard 4). The four are apoptotic of the original. Throughout the precession of

acra, signs and signifiers gain an imbued meaning that differs from

ource material, creating a routine killing of reality as it is replaced

perreality and the simulation.

The postmodern era, associated with the third order of

acra, is where this hyperreality is established, as postmodernism

explicitly with imitation. Postmodernism as defined by Fredric

on, is “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the

gence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a

ype of social life and a new economic order” (Jameson 3). Under

modernism, both culture and practice operate as distinctive systems.

s of individualism linger as a vestige of modernism, becoming

ete in the postmodern era as the culture of the masses shifts in

of the commodification of objects, breaking down the distinction

een representation and reality: “Individualism and personal identity

ing of the past [and] the old individual or individual subject is

’” (Jameson 6). When the subject dies in modernity, what remains

mitations of imitators and representations of representers. This is “a

is left is to imitate dead styles” (Jameson 7). Hyperreality, the stacking and blending of simulacra, is birthed in postmodernism, after the death of the subject. An era where “art is going to be about art itself” (Jameson 7). On a cinematic level, hyperreality functions as the reproduction of images that are reproductions of false realities, or “the transformation of reality into images [and] the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents” (Jameson 20). Postmodernism values art being made about art for the sake of art because commodification and consumer culture have so strongly perpetuated art spheres, that creation is only able to exist within this hyperreal self-reflective space of designed reality. In the postmodernist world the simulation is no longer a reflection of reality, nor a reference to it, but a creation of a new real by artful models that are not based on reality.

The cycle of the reproduction of false images in the third stage of the precession of simulacra precedes the theoretically apocalyptic fourth stage, which involves the implosion of the binary system. Binarism organizes the human condition, engendering opposites like reason and unreason, truth and untruth, pedagogy and destruction. The dialectic is rooted in understanding and non-understanding. However, in the fourth stage of the precession, what constitutes known reality is not only distorted but completely divorced from preexisting comprehension.

There is a displacement of the real so that signs, signifiers, and other representational imagery, no longer re-present. The binary collapses in

ated. As antitheses converge during this implosion, meaning, which

nds on difference, ceases to exist: “there is just a sort of contraction

ach other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional

into one another: an IMPLOSION” (Baudrillard 57). Instead of

ing, a state of pure entropy materializes, where nothing has any

in reality. This is the state of being hyperreal–when the conditions

ionality are discontinued. Reality no longer has any importance, as

reality has thoroughly inserted itself into the Anthropocene,

ining the real and imaginary.

Number theory as an axiomatic set of standards for approaching

asoning of meaning provides an alternative way of evaluating the

anence of the binary system. Gödel's two incompleteness theorems

ot only shaped by pure mathematics but define the acquisition of

owledge and reason. The first incompleteness theorem finds no

m of listable theorems to be capable of proving all truths of natural

ers. For any consistent system, there will always be statements natural numbers that are true but unprovable within the system.

econd incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows

he system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. This

sophical framework can be applied to any functional knowledge.

ely, it is impossible for humans to ever obtain complete

standing of the system they exist in. Gödel originally intended for

rgument to prove the existence of a higher power; however, his

truth transcends human understanding, that there is God. Because of Gödel’s theorems, omniscience is impossible, hence an all-knowing God cannot exist. The reason omniscience is impossible is because all knowledge operates on a self-referential, systemized binary. What is known is known because it can be compared to what is not known that exists outside of the system extending to infinity. There will always be a bigger system, and there will always be what is known and what is unknown. Therefore, the binary structure is inherent and essential to structuralist meaning.

Baudrillard posits that the collapse of the binary is an inevitable condition of the fourth stage of the precession of simulacra; however, according to Gödel’s proof of incompleteness, meaning must persist, even in the state of hyperreality. Following the linear precession of simulacra and the death of the original, Baudrillard theorizes that the real desists as signs and signifiers replace source material; however, by implementing Gödel’s logic, the real does persist and there is no eschaton of meaning. Simulacra operate within the bounds of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and exist as transient aesthetics. The transaesthetic moment is where everything becomes aestheticized, manufactured into a sign for consumption–illustrating the aestheticization of all objects within the culture of advertising and media that pervades everything. This aligns with hyperreality, when transaesthetic culture emerges in reality and representation, the spheres

pretation of media in relation to the objects and concepts associated

visual signs over a temporal and longitudinal space remain in a

ant flux. Coherent art dissolves into all other visual modalities of

ostmodern world of hyperreality. Baudrillard’s end-state of

acra frames signs as no longer distinct from the practices of

mption, and thus are reduced to the status of nonsignifiers. Under

l’s logic, the ideas that there are coherent categories called reality

nowable entities called art can be upheld despite hyperreality. Art with time towards strategies that remain prescient even with the

rd momentum of simulacra. The setting of the postmodern brings the production and dissemination of information, which leads to

er volumes and heterogeneity of the hyperreal; however, the state hyperreal does not ruin the interpretive quality of media. Art, and visual media will always persist with meaning, so long as consuming it understand the flexibility of visual mediums to adapt

side the precession of simulacra. There will not be a loss of

ing in the postmodernist age, but rather a mathematically sound

aestheticism–a changing with the times to stay within the known

ds of what is real.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems delineate that there can be no

ematical theory of everything, no unification of what is provable

what is true. Quantitative proofs can only come from starting

mptions, not on any fundamental ground truth from which all

reality indicates that human understanding will only ever be incomplete.

This incompleteness further invokes that the system of human reality will never be closed and completed. Even if hyperreality is the state that reality exists in, it is not in danger of collapsing in on itself. Baudrillard postulates that deterrence, a process he identifies as both the destruction of reality-based systems and the result of the destruction of realitybased systems, subordinates human behavior to the hyperreality simulation. This mode of thinking prohibits any opportunity for chance or free will as society continues to be dominated by an influx of signs, symbols, and images. According to Baudrillard, “deterrence is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable or involving systems” (Baudrillard 60). As the world orients in imagery, hyperrealism becomes the system society progresses into, under which Baudrillard assumes that “the real is confused with the model” (Baudrillard 53), ending “the perspective and panoptic space” (Baudrillard 54). By using Gödel’s theorems, it can be understood that an apocalypse of meaning will not happen in the way that Baudrillard prophecies. Instead, the experiential of the transaestheticism of society will take place as the visual modalities of the cultural sphere progress with the movement of simulacra and retain meaning and functionality.

Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra provides a comprehensive and peculiar model for understanding society’s relation to signs and signifiers. However, this model is not infallible and presents

ic, operate outside of the known limits of reason. Gödel’s

standing of incompleteness creates boundaries under which the

ization of society must operate. The concept of simulacra is useful

recession of definitions under which society can be organized, but

s not predict the downfall of reason and meaning when Gödel’s

ems are considered. The transaestheticism of society is a process

will continue for as long as signs and signifiers are present.

ing, context, and historicizing will oscillate with time, and visual

a will stay in a tandem of flux as well. All reason and the products

son must be facilitated by what is known, and there is no logical

n to assume that a loss of meaning will befall any signifier that was

prescribed meaning. Meaning may change with time and

standing, but transaesthetics will persist and society will continue

rd in an unfixed, amenable reality.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Precession of the Simulacra” in Simulations. Trans.

Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman, New York, Seniotext, 1983.

1-79.

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulation and Transaesthetics: Towards the Vanishing Point of Art,” The Conspiracy of Art. Manifestos, Interviews, Essays. Edited by Sylvire Lotringer, Translated by Ames Hodges, New York: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press, 2005. 98-110.

Gödel Kurt, and B. Meltzer. On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems. Dover Publications, 1992.

Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso, 2009.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Edited by Nicholas Walker, Translated by James Creed Meredith, Oxford University Press, UK, 2007.

Hannah Siegel

ed Hell once.

its patches ber-green grass linging, lifelessly, to spring.

n-hope rivers

d blackberry trees.

e wasn’t there.

a was).

ped on a twig.

ght a leaf in mid-air middle of the street.

surprised me).

had brightly-lit windows shell darkness g oceans

a cliffside.

In the end, Hell was a picture book propped up on my cousin’s lap pop-up pages casting shadows on the slippery cream sheet below

I spent most of my visit

walking down an alleyway

looking for myself in every corner.

Hannah Siegel

writing a poem about my teeth

orgot about you

ling around in the dark

sed the wrong key

e microwave

your charred remains on the fire escape

black beads falling like rice

wedding,

es of something horrible and ill-begotten,

ng hole in the middle of you,

moldering.

elia, you were my friend.

ears, one brown, one white

opped—permanently—inside out

many times did I cradle you? you gently like a babe

ou, squeeze you, press you into

hest and let you

me off to sleep?

O soft and gentle thing.

that night, shoving you into a fluorescent-dim abyss folding your ears in as usual wrapping you tight—

Tinder to your funeral pyre.

I can kiss your forehead and sweep up the ashy bits of you hard and bitter and stuff you into the trashcan.

But I cannot bring you back.

I’m sorry you had to die for my love.

I pick up a ringing payphone and mournfully reveal

“Mother, I’ve killed the dog.”

Hannah Siegel

do you write poetry?

verything you love in a box

on’t open it until spring

ee years time.

e meantime, don’t forget to live—

ot guiltily.

e did you study?

brary was a dark room after midnight

wing blue box where every sonnet was dictated

w precisely it punctured our teenage wounds

trung us back together all fragments

he shape of light

, I went to school.

do you write?

you have fallen all the way to the bathroom floor and are wellinted with the shower drain there are only so many places we can

One of them is up.

Do you write about me?

Never. But I do write because of you.

Is this poem about me?

No. But we’re both inside it together.

What is poetry?

It’s what happens when we claw our way out of here.

Zhenzhen Yu

val stage

onsummation went quickly. It was only after, as he bathed alone in

ulchered tub, that he noticed a hot, pearlescent storm sweeping

he pampas. He lay with his eyes half-lidded and tilted towards the

ow, watching scales of gray rain hit the window. As the warm water

d beneath his chin, he thought, disquieted: I do not know this place

people.

mio was afraid. He was a young man and did not like to be afraid.

ad seen the iniquity of these people when he had come in his

an— the peeling paint's malodor in the lemon-colored bar at the

f town, the barefoot children who went in a single piece of calico

wandered like dumb waterfowl. Cockspur coral trees, their tight

hes denuded, stood limply along the perimeter of the manse. When

eathed deeply in the pampas air, he smelled an ancient static quality

was unwelcoming to him. When he went to see the expanse of his

and, he pushed his fingernails into the soil and sensed a hostile

y in its damp maw. There was a slickness that suggested the trail of

ellow maggots.

ould not deny his bride's wealth; Virge unmanned him. The lesser

moment, like the tension of water at the lip of an ewer. He had been too sick to fight in the Chaco War as a boy, and let El GOU's coup pass over him like water over a duck's back, and now he owed his stature to a woman. But his was not a strong build. He reclused in dark rooms, studied his abstruse languages, and— for whichever army would have him— inserted his feelers into the shapes of cryptograms. But when he dreamed, he dreamed he had a body like a racing mare's, shining and bullion, flanks wet with the lather of work.

Despite the manse's emptiness, Virge seemed to insert herself uncannily into corners. A mole perched below her eye gave her an ugly, bird-like quality. Her hair was dark and fell inelastically. She was too tall, stooping indecorously to move through doorways. She did not have anything worthwhile to say to him, but he always found her in the corner of his vision, lingering like a miasma.

"The manse," he said to his newfound bride. "Does it have a name?"

Filing her nails, not looking up, she answered: "Does it need one?"

In that moment, he decided he did not like her at all.

The late winter pampas sang from out his window, and the smell of

neath every step. Meadowlarks with breasts drenched in blood-red

d curiously at him while he bathed. While Eutimio lounged,

ntina, cowed into submission, declared war on the Axis. Since the

broke, Monzon from the university would ride to the manse and long nights conversing lowly with Eutimio about the things to

. These dinners Virge attended silently with carafes of white wine

ragrant pastafrola. Though Eutimio knew Monzon was not here for

mpany, he could not hold back his surprise when German

ograms began to exchange hands.

no soldier," Eutimio observed.

— but they shelled our last decipherer a fortnight ago."

spicious. One would think you are trying to get rid of me."

zon waved a hand. "He was on the field. You are not here to fight;

will not find you." He stood. "And Perón pays well, too."

mio put his books aside and thrust himself into the cipher's work.

while, it seemed he could continue the life he had maintained. He

ot explore his property; food appeared, borne by silent maids, to

hallowed halls of Virge's manse, and then shrank some more to avoid wherever she was in the house, and finally again to the blocks of ciphers on the paper at which he chipped with his ice-pick of a pen: the mineral heartbeat of Morse, the phlegmy stutter of a captured radio frequency, the traitorous theorems of Rejewski. With the delicate tip of his pen, he rearranged crates and men across the ocean.

Awkwardly, in an attempt at reconciliation for some transgression she didn't understand, Virge would press him into drinking with her long into the night. He supposed she had studied his lively conversations with Monzon and attempted her own experiment in the same fashion, childishly assuming that the key to success with Eutimio was facilitated by wine. He took some pleasure in the idea that she could not make him like her, but he acquiesced regardless. Her family had maintained a small library of records: she played an Oriental Madame Butterfly, a Soviet Petrushka, an unpatriotically German Ariadne auf Naxos. During this last staging, she suddenly murmured a single word: "Aphasiac."

Eutimio swallowed his wine very quickly. "Excuse me?"

Virge pointed a long finger to the record player. "The boy singing— the Bacchus— he is my distant cousin. An aphasiac."

a sad story." Reaching a long, damasked arm to the table, she

d herself some more wine. "He fell off a horse when he was

n, and he can't form words, but he can form song. They say—" she

d her sphenoid bone, where the emergent line of her black hair was

nd downy— "it is because it is different areas of the brain, though I

d defer to you on that subject. Not just Ariadne auf Naxos, I have records of his voice, it's all soft like damask..."

mio did not usually regard much of what she had to say, and he had much interest in the opera, but something about the depths of the song stayed him in his chair. "He isn't German, is he?" The words

melodic and smooth, but to the linguist's ear, there was a hesitation

d them, a non-nativity in the dimples of diphthongs that could not

e aphasia alone. He shifted in his chair.

he is Italian; they named him Neroli."

mio put aside his wine and listened to Bacchus's song, for so long

Virge began to glance at his face with nervousness, then asked, "Is

astrato?"

castrato?"

"Italians do it to boys." He pondered the logic of this, then continued: "They must do it young. For a higher tone of voice. "

"No, not Neroli." She looked to the window, disquieted. "I didn't know they were barbaric. I don't think my family would, I..."

"It was many years ago," he said, his tone curt, because all of a sudden he was filled with the overwhelming, petulant need for her to stop talking— the high pitch of her voice suddenly felt as sharp as a noxious needle against the richness of the record. How was it that a stunted boy like Neroli could produce so stentorian a sound? As he sat and listened by the fire, he felt his stomach inflate with shallow hatred. Virge had quieted, but now he wanted Ariadne, too, to stop singing about her long sleep. Let me hear Bacchus extol Circe and her impulses. He took another dark swallow of his wine.

Virge drained her own. "I'm off to bed," she said, not without suggestion, but Eutimio stayed until the record ended. Like a moth, he felt held in rapture by the shining dark— almost wet— sheen of the record's wax carapace. He only moved to stand up and flip it over, and

ted into pale brightness and he fell asleep in his chair.

ays afterwards, the sound of the opera rang through his ears like a acrid gunshot. Harsh was the heroic tenor: "Circe, ich konnte

n". If Virge still lingered feebly in her corners, he did not see it.

n he found himself drawn, like slipping into an ewer of honey, into

allowly colored bar, it was with Bacchus's refrain still sweetly

pering in his head.

oy with soft hair. "I'm Chente."

g beside him on the pallet, Eutimio drank, disappointed. "Yes," he

not offering his own. He wished the boy had not said that.

te waited, his hands fiddling in his lap. He was tall, but Eutimio

ht about how something about him looked diminished; as if there

d never be anything more of him; that he had only been brought

xistence because Eutimio had entered the room. Only when

mio set down his glass of whisky, and stood, lit by flickering oil

w, did Chente relax. "I can do a lot of things," he added.

mio thought about it. "Alright. Don't speak."

"Don't speak," Eutimio repeated, not realizing how much he wanted it until he said it: "I don't want you to say a word." He was twenty-seven years old and had never thought about what he wanted before. His words were not his own words anymore but a clean magnetic alignment with his thoughts— and Chente was not Chente anymore but a sad shadow against the wall— and both their shadows were only things without mouths which flickered and dematerialized when you were not looking at them— and cryptograms were no longer human language but resolved themselves cleverly back into inanimate shapes— and the image of Neroli beckoned tonguessly before his eyes. And so Eutimio fell madly in love.

ii. Heartbeat stage

Spring on the pampas no longer seemed so frightening. It reached out to him with long and invisible arms, its wind sweet and rich as wheat chaff, and pampas grass whistled and sang like the clean bristles of a horsehair brush. On mornings, he would leave his ciphers on his table and journey out on his grey Criollo. The sawdust smell of the city began to fade in his mind. Screamers sang their lilting songs; far away across the flat lowlands, he saw the horses of other riders with their incalculable journeys, and he raised a hand at them both in greeting.

bedience, she produced from the attic a smooth photograph of an

iling boy in greyscale shades of fawn. His warm brown hair was

d behind the soft shell of his ears, his warm brown eyes were as

y as a newborn calf on spindly legs, his warm brown skin was

hed in small stars of freckles. Far enough away from the manse,

mio would lie with the photograph, hidden in the grass like a

head, a prickle of sweat running down his back as he thought about

ime of his rough, gloved fingers against the delicate albumen skin. were some days when he could not stop looking into Neroli's

and he would imagine the hot spring air would burn him into the

and that there had never been anything but this narrow world

h terminated at the brim of the River Plate, that he himself was a

against the ridge of the bright sky.

ad never been a person until now. He shed a teary, translucent film

his eyes. He had read about first love but not really known it—

nside he always felt there was some flaw of his which untethered

rom humanity— but now he felt the coolness of Neruda's dewy

re against his rider's boots. The wind carried the scent of raw

rs to him. Neroli: he held the three syllables of the name on his

e like a candied fruit as he rode. Neroli meant orange blossoms,

Neroli, Neroli, Neroli was a woman's name, besides. It was like he smell and taste the word neroli on the wind, in the virginal

could not exsanguinate it from the senses even if he had wanted to.

His infatuation with the Italian was a triangled layering of falseness, three-sided like the fatal thrust of a bayonet's tongue— a betrayal to his manhood, to his bride, to Argentina itself. But none of these relationships were tenacious in the first place, he reflected, feeling a little dizzy as he voiced to himself this forbidden thing. Argentina did not love the Allied; she did not care if he coveted the German and the Italian. And Eutimio was not much of a man, anyhow— it was only against Neroli that he felt like a brute. Sometimes he fantasized himself in Ariadne's position, dressed in a rider's hard clothes rather than a sapphire gown, but still in her voice he swore fealty to the realm of the Greek underworld for her Bacchus. These were thoughts that were blown away in the spring wind, and he returned to the manse with a skull clear of error.

And what of his arrears to Virge? Virge was nothing at all. He listened to Ariadne auf Naxos so many times he felt as if he could play it by ear, and when he asked an unhappy Virge for a piano, she acquiesced without a word of protest, sending for workers with hard muscles who lifted the piano with taut hempen ropes into the empty foyer. She was a lonely, desperate woman, but even she had given up on breaking through to him. Retreating into femininity, she became a diaphanous figure

s of silk. But he felt her gaze on the back of his neck, hard and like a pygmy owl's.

d not know what Virge thought about his coldness. There was a

ike hesitancy to her that made him want to hurt her in disgust, but

er part of him wrung its child's hands and mumbled wordlessly his place as a man. He could forget all of it when he played piano,

h. He played Ariadne auf Naxos until his fingers bled through,

the wordless trilling of some notes could sound as clarion clear as

nes it mimicked. The star-bright twinkling of an arpeggio, a fan-

rray of half-steps, and he could form lines which sounded : Es gibt

eich, wo alles rein istz! Eines Gottes Liebste! Was haften die

ülen Gefühle an dem benommenen Sinn? It was a high, angelic

age that only he could speak. He did not know when his life had

n to revolve around codes. Nothing was ever said to him, or

ed forthright. He woke and decoded sheaves of tiny German

ograms— he played German songs on the piano — he went to the

w yellow bar in town and asked for what he wanted without words,

ored kerchiefs which he wore at his throat like the necklace of a

mer.

hest felt always very warm and sinuous, as if a spider were spinning

eb inside its cavity. As the unassailable ciphers grew, his own

and his childhood god. What was that god to him? Was Roman Bacchus the true god? When would the larvae of the common fly hatch? Was this lust incestuous? Was aphasia contagious? He thought of it as a grateful disease. The throttling weight of dioceses and archdioceses fell from him as easily as an iguana shedding its skin; he had ears only for the Greek through the Italian through the German. He listened to Neroli's Bacchus again and again, until his head was filled with the song like a madness:

Circe, ich konnte fliehen, Sieh, ich kann lächeln und ruhn -

In his youth, he had learned German to fluency, but as his mind boiled, the language cascaded back into the impenetrability of runes. There was a freedom in its unintelligibility, a weightlessness when he did not have to sit at his table and decipher it, like picking apart a bezoar with a pin.

He was grateful to Neroli for this. He thought he loved Neroli better because he was stunted— a sweet tenor, a dumb mind, a castrato in all but the genitals. He whispered his secrets to be borne unto the trade wind: "I want to dress you in silks so you can be my bride." "I secrete your image in my palm." "I wish you would carry me in your arms."

Or, whispered like it was a great secret: "In the olden days they would have gelded you." But the fantasy always ended whenever Neroli would

e summer shift of the dry grass, when he put a hand to himself, he

nger needed to look at pictures of dewy Neroli. He only needed to the sonorous voice of his throat, and then no voice at all but the

f the piano. Sometimes he wished the trade wind would carry his

s to the manse, too, that it could hear what he said, that his

rous thoughts could be as unconstrained by its ceiling as the sky or

in canopy above the balcony of the yellow bar. My castrato, he

ht, grass staining his back as he lay in the grass like a limp

head. A gelding knife was nothing more than a pruning; the red

oms of the cockspur coral tree were lacerated and, as a result, grew

further. Any blade he slew Virge with would be a gelding knife.

n I can be with Neroli," he murmured into the dirt, telling all the

arvae that dwelled there. "I will ride my steed across the sea to

I will moult like a nymph. I will lather like a mare."

cups, at the sallow bar, he finally decided to kill Virge. He did not

his hands to have the strength to kill a woman. To test his resolve,

bling he went to the pond behind the brothel. With rough hands he

gled a black-headed swan, crushing the downy tube of its throat

blood expelled from its soft and rubbery beak. "Don't feel too

," he told the dead swan. "You can be something else later." Then

cked its limp carcass to a frightened Chente, and told him to make from its bones as payment. On the ride home, on his gray Criollo,

fire. He would laugh aloud in short, cut-off barks. He held his knife loosely in one hand.

Virge was waiting, lonely, in the foyer. She did not see him. The piano faced away from the window, and as he dismounted from his steed he could see her head bowed at her seat, her dark hair pooling against her neck. He saw her shoulders tense, saw rather than heard the sigh, before she began to play, and spoke a strain more lovely than he had ever rendered them. He heard the words she had chosen, refracted through the windowpane:

Kommt der neue Gott gegangen, Hingegeben sind wir stumm!

At the last word, she knocked the chord with such force that the piano rocked with echoes of discordance, and then her left hand fell away and it was only the index as she played it again and again: Stumm, stumm, stumm!

Eutimio stooped and retched. Without warning, his mouth had filled with the noxious oil of a dish of roasted swan. When she stood and departed, he did not follow her, still vomiting clear bile and expelling the taste from his throat. It had drained all the kineticism from his blood

lammy. He was unsteady on his feet.

n he opened the door to the manse, he walked slowly to the piano. he constrained the sheet music in a fist, and looked to the

epiece with drained and rheumy eyes. There was nothing he could

hat was not legible to all.

tehead stage

on went shortly. The war was something Eutimio never saw a

se of, but their manse grew lush and fat with its bounty, swelling

ine floorboards after a rain. The empty corners were populated

cooks who did not speak Spanish and owlish maids. One autumn, said that they should see Ariadne auf Naxos at the opera house in

ty, after leaving the children under the care of a governess imported

Santiago. Eutimio had not seen the city in a long time; its acidic air

harper than he remembered. Their hotel room was the color of flax

melled like new paint. Eutimio folded his traveling clothes, and

d out the window at the veiled tops of ladies' heads, before putting

m around Virge.

taging was unremarkable. Teatro El Círculo's Ariadne was helmed

oreign star, a yellow-haired Madame Solvig with a vocal range two

connection, Virge invited them both to dinner. Eutimio pulled out Virge's chair, and folded his evening jacket behind his, and talked with Monzon about the poor showing of Pablo Birger at the Grand Prix, and poured himself an ecru-colored Taittinger, and looked up to meet the eyes. He was thirty years older than the picture. He had grown pinkish fat. He no longer played Bacchus but Zerbinetta's comic dancing master.

These things played through Eutimio's head as Neroli smiled politely at Eutimio, and slightly inclined his head before he turned to Solvig. On the other side of the table, the new Bacchus tipped back his drink, and told Virge: "Solvig plays piano wonderfully, you know."

In juvenile German, Virge replied: "Well, Eutimio used to play the piano." It was difficult for her to hide her need to get his attention. "I hope my heaven doesn't mind my saying this, but really he learned only for your opera. It was so long ago, but I remember that was the spring he was quite taken with, well, Neroli's Bacchus." Her eyes darted to him. Eutimio set his flute down. "I suppose I remember that," he answered, and then could not bear looking at her anymore and turned his gaze up at the chapel ceiling. Painted Paul and Silas gazed back down at him, their lime plaster eyes peeling and judicious. Virge turned back to her conversation, but now he was thinking of that fat piano, and the way it had split apart in his hands when he tried, desultorily, to play it again a few months ago. After so many years of disuse— that it was

mio looked down into his lap, and took another sip of his

pagne.

me comment from Virge, Solvig flashed a bared-teeth laugh like a

Neroli watched her, then leaned over and tapped her silvered

der. "Darling, what is it?" she asked, tone muted by champagne,

the tone one would use for a pet. "Do you need me to say

thing for you?" He nodded; he slipped a notepad from his breast

et, and wrote down something with a small pencil, and Solvig's eyes

d with mirth as she scanned the page. "My little mute wants to about the piano, doctor," she translated, willowy. "Apparently little flattered that you would learn it for him."

li turned to him, then. But Eutimio could not think of anything to

Sean Krupa Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (until June 5, 2022 at The Jewish Museum)

Arrangement of Frames from the Films of Jonas Mekas, Sean Krupa, 2022

A friend called to let me know that he’s now familiar with every genre of pepper spray video. Another sends me video evidence of a nano-bot forklifting a sperm towards an egg– successfully curtailing insemination. On Twitter, someone replies to the “craziest video on the internet” (a zip-lining tween ramming into a sloth) with: “This is such weak tea…3 minutes ago I saw a video of a male horse trying to mount a female horse and the female horse kicks the male horse in the head and it dies instantly.” I continue scrolling, see an ad, a tweet about “vibe shifts,” and then watch as a Russian helicopter spins onto a Ukrainian highway,

If you’re online enough, you have probably seen more than

ideo of someone dying. It could have been an act of senseless or a keyhole into wars, bombings, or beheadings: all pixels

eating the boundaries of someone’s final memory. Responses to videos are haunted by detachment following desensitization.

more bearish the violence, the less real the simulacrum seems,

more contained, as if the lives held within the frame had never

ed on their own but rather began and ended when you pressed

There are more videos online than anyone could ever watch. day, one billion hours of content is consumed on YouTube

, roughly 32 years. More than 500 hours are uploaded in a

e minute. For perspective, it would take 80 years to watch the

unt of video uploaded to YouTube in only an hour.

The excess of video available to watch is only eclipsed by the

uity of video currently being made. While you’re reading this,

le are likely filming themselves eating, shooting, fucking,

ng pepper-sprayed, and watching and reacting to other videos

most anything imaginable. This feat of self-performed global

illance arises like a reflex to an implicit call to arms. It’s as if

the last century, an invisible banner has been raised in the name

cording and uploading everything physical, capturable by

making and displaying, a new specter now plagues many people; if one is not recording it while it’s happening, how can they be sure it really happened? Blame this impulse on Freudian-inspired advertising, Fordism, uncurbed technological advancements, smartphones, social media, a rise in narcissism—whatever. Still, this online bank of video information holds one of humankind's most enduring cultural records of the 20th and 21st centuries. The prevalence and instinct towards recording, uploading, and watching, thus, simulates a primarily unconscious and flailing cognitive process: memory.

(Cobwebs Spun Back & Forth In The Sky) – Nick Vyssotsky, 2021 The most memorable film I’ve seen recently is a collection of

media, they are inevitably exposed to a broad spectrum of content, posted by the accounts they follow or, as is becoming more

mon, shown to them by the platform’s algorithm, as it continuously itself on the content that better holds our attention. This content

ally offered up to the user without a great deal of context for what

are looking at. Ultimately, it is up to them to create the meaning

d what they see. Cobwebs Spun Back & Forth In The Sky is in this simulation of the experience of being online, filtered through

a culled by one user, a subjective refraction of the digital spaces

n which we live.”

Watching the film, Cobwebs Spun Back & Forth In The Sky, it’s

to tell what is going on and what is real. It begins with a selfie

ds before a drone strike. What follows ranges: a tidal wave

urns an off-shore oil drill, molten lava leaks beneath a rainbow, and

ronized robots dance ceremoniously. There are also shocking and

ic scenes in this uncanny valley: an influencer runs from the Las shooting, fishermen chug beer cans found in the stomach of a fish,

olice brutalize the homeless (also more pepper spray). Most of the

are unsettling and overwhelming, with no inherent meaning or

xt besides the viewer’s impossibly limited interpretation.

ithms programmed to pander videos of vitriol into echo-chambers

ss similar illusions, as do the platforms that exhibit them. In this

Cobwebs and online videos are puppeteered to show us a reflection

As the rapid spread and consumption of online videos through social media and 24/7 news inundate our on and offline experiences, the distinction between what’s on- and off-screen, what is chimerical, and what is real, becomes even harder to separate. We are now conscious, video after video, scroll after scroll, of unexplainable things outside our scope of imagination and explanation. This awareness, seemingly real but often devoid of any and all context, produces decade-defining anxiety: a sensation that what we see on-screen is happening all around us, all the time, and seemingly all at once.

Installation view: Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running, The Jewish Museum, New York, 2022. Courtesy the Jewish Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni.

Perhaps no installation of recent memory captures this aspect of online awareness as the layout of avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas’s

ing, which from February through June, is not designed by an

thm as one might think at first. As viewers gathered in a dark,

ma-like space, condensed cuts of Mekas’ works played on various

ns encircling sitting areas. As the films begin and end in

termined patterns that spotlight standout moments, viewers are

fed in an ocean of sound and film, which, like online videos or

on a feed, operate like decontextualized parts within the whole.

Newly initiated and veteran viewers of Mekas’ work alike would

found something thrilling in this experience, as the temporal and

ory disjunction of the films reveals a playful and prescient

onnectedness. The tall and looming screens, shaped like the alien

nels from A 2001 Space Odyssey, also amplify this overwhelming

ience. Viewers have the freedom to focus on a single screen or themselves trying to catch glimpses of the panoramic display. In

egard, this expeditious form of viewing recalls the experience of

ming online videos while scrolling down an algorithmic rabbit

but also functions as a memorial to Mekas’ own lived memories.

The show incorporates Mekas’ first feature (1962) through his

2019), with each screen standing like a monument or tombstone,

weaving Mekas’ films into the shape of a life lived through the lens

amera. Mekas is famous for the syllogism: “I make home videos

ore I live. I live therefore I make home videos.” His vitality for

ng is carried through the blindsiding presentation of The Camera

the Christian Marclay’s time-synchronized The Clock: “You don’t feel that you are watching a film, you feel you’re existing alongside a film.”

Surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of moments that Mekas felt driven to record, one can’t help but exist alongside him as the exhibition revitalizes a past of arresting beauty and intimacy. In this way, the show does more than provide a new way of seeing through Mekas’ revolutionary camera. The Camera was Always Running acts to preserve his life’s work – to fossilize his rowdy spirit in the chromatic amber of home video.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) Jonas Mekas Mekas’ later films recall bodily impermanence. In Requiem (2019,) he shows us bouquets and meadows of flowers, all blooming asynchronously to Verdi’s own 1874 Requiem. Mekas died only hours after editing the work, leaving it unfinished and perhaps offering a final glimpse into his near-death consciousness. Televised interjections of all-

nce, sour the springtime breeze. In Requiem, Mekas recognizes that

th and rebirth breed decay and death; here “April is the cruelest

h” indeed. The French writer Michel De Montaigne, who acts as a

ual forefather to Mekas in the way he attempted to study his

ing self in essay as Mekas attempts through video, writes “I have

n the blade, the blossom, and the fruit, and I now know their

ring.” Mekas confronts this “withering” in his last work, without overcome by it. While his footage of flowers might be obscured

e wastelands of war and global suffering, he is not afraid to again

impses of beauty amid the terror.

One of Requiem‘s predecessors, A View From Greenpoint

), unveils Mekas performing ritualistic banality with convivial

: he enjoys a beer with friends, sings on his recurring accordion,

okes that he will marry his cat for a tax break. In these moments, he

says that he doesn’t know who he is anymore, conjuring tears. His

ntial crisis climaxes in a sung refrain: “All my friends don’t sing

ore.” The exhibited film ends with him leaving behind his SoHo

ment, the center stage of his earlier films, and the place where he

is family had lived since 1974. A View From Greenpoint ventures

hemes of dislocation and alienation that have long inspired and

ed Mekas’ work as an immigrant of war from Lithuania and a

ntown ex-patriot.

During its opening at Anthology Film Center, a similar

Time (2022). The film is nothing groundbreaking: a series of interviews on New York Life overlaid with flashbacks to the mythological 80s.

This was a time and place when poetry, punk, new wave, pop art, and hip-hop were interwoven into a novel cultural fabric that would define the coming commercial and cultural spheres. The film’s central conflict then is how an artistic golden age was lost in the neoliberal wake of today’s New York. Dick brings attention to this repeatedly, juxtaposing her super-8 footage with digital video of over-saturated highrises and ceaseless construction.

As with many New York stories, Dick’s is primarily preoccupied with real estate. She provides a survivor’s testament to better days (imagine $80 rent for a one-bedroom in the East Village) and remembers when there were still neighborhoods Downtown that protested commercial chains out of principle for ensuring community. The characters in the film, mainly her friends and their children who are now struggling to pay to live in New York, develop the film’s secondary plot: a love letter to old friends. In Our Time often turns bittersweet, though, like in the scene when Nan Goldin laments about why she stopped taking photographs of people and now only shoots the sky: “All of my friends died.”

At her 2021 exhibition, Memory Lost, Goldin showcased these vignettes of sunsets and dawning skies alongside a new film

red on the opioid crisis. Her work from the 80s, such as The

ds of Sexual Dependency and the Other Side, which pictured a

ntown New York full of drag queens and music, were also shown.

ng In Our Time’s Q&A, she admits that it was Vivienne Dick who

ed synching her works to a musical soundtrack, thereby

xtualizing images with music–a typical venture in film since silent

ma and also in Mekas’s work.

The history of Downtown New York’s cultural impact is defined

terdisciplinary overlapping, as artists from every trade coincided in

me, relatively low-rent places. One of these artistic zones was the

Maker’s Cinematheque which Mekas kickstarted in 1969. The

er focused on avant-garde films while also functioning as a focal

one of Mekas’ students, into the cultural zeitgeist. The theater’s history makes clear that no one was as important to the exhibition and promotion of alternative film culture in Downtown New York as Mekas himself. Eventually, the theater moved locations and evolved into the Anthology Film Archive, where Mekas spent his last years trying to build the largest film-focused library in the world.

Flash forward to 2022, when Goldin and Dick sit in the Anthology theater as an audience member asks: “How do you feel that everyone now is a photographer in one way or another?” Goldin’s response is typical for her laconic deadpan: “I always thought there were too many photographers…now it just so happens that I was right."

In another sentiment, Mekas elaborates on the defining question for our image- and video-ridden-age at Lincoln Center in 2016.

Interviewer: “With all of these phone cameras, and everyone making videos everywhere all the time now, what do you feel needs to be explored in cinema?”

Mekas: “Why do you want to explore?… You don’t do it because there is a necessity for you to do?… Do you really seriously think you do what you do because you want to explore? Or not because you have this drive and necessity and if you don’t do it or you will go crazy…you have to do it…art does not have anything to do with exploration."

Interviewer: “I suppose then it’s a silly question… I’ll just keep

Mekas’ response essentially speaks to the role of an artist as maker. Again, his answer is that in order to live, and as a result of alive, one is instinctively drawn to making video. Mekas then

fies a key characteristic of video culture: recording, like memory, is

red by unconscious reflexes. Mekas even admits that he often has

ea why he is filming what he films. In his defining venture into

imental filmmaking, Walden, (or Diaries Notes and Sketches), he

sses this with the on-screen proclamation: “I don’t know so I make

” His work thus, in large part, is a project to contextualize an

dy decontextualized world: the world of outlying artists and

grants (himself included).

The world of Walden is primarily one of Downtown New York

ulturally-defining moment, and Mekas stands as both witness and

st to this artistic growth spurt. Downtown New York notables,

as Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, and the Velvet

rground, all overlap in the same spaces as avant-garde filmmakers.

work is also notable for the way Mekas renewed avant-garde

making methods, such as shooting with overexposed film, editing

nconsistent frame rates, and dramatizing sequences with stop

on. In his hands, these techniques evolve with integrated narration,

ards, and ambient noise that all serve as contextual compliments. In

way, Walden becomes Mekas’ first true “video diary,” the form of making that would become his staple. Mekas’ “video diaries” are

stream of consciousness while filming the external world going by.

While Mekas might not know why he makes films, in Walden, he becomes content with celebrating how and what he sees, writing on screen: “They tell me, I should be always searching, but I am only celebrating what I see.”

Mekas is also quoted saying “home video is the folk poetry of the people.” This excerpt marked the entrance of MoMa’s 2021 exhibition, Private Lives, Public Spaces, which showcased the “largest body of moving-image work created in the 20th century.” This “body of work” consisted of home movies made by amateurs and avant-gardists alike, preserving varying scenes from a suburban cookouts to a pitchfork-wielding Salvador Dali frolicking in his seaside garden.

Private Lives, Public Spaces then sought to time-capsule a widespread consumer reaction to accessible video technology, a period defined by blurring lines between what is deemed ordinary and what is esteemed as artistic.

Mekas, who often said the main enemy of his films was the 20th century itself, didn’t exactly think everyone should make videos as his “folk poetry” rallying call has been thought to signify. He once told a psychiatrist in 2016, who asked if he should begin making films, that he should stay a psychiatrist. Only if he was driven mad with the prospect of not making home movies, and only if he needed them to survive, would the psychiatrist get a pass. Still, many have framed Mekas’

he poetic potential to create imperfect cinema. A similar idea

ed García Espinosa, founder of the Cuban Revolutionary

nment’s film program, who remarked, “[imperfect cinema] is not

an act of social justice – the possibility for everyone to make films –

so a fact of extreme importance for artistic culture: the possibility

overing…the true meaning of artistic activity.”

However, if the post-modern death of the artist has taught us

hing besides that not everyone can be a poet, it’s that there’s no true

tive meaning of artistic activity. Today, it will not be the artist but

r the ordinary person who will unintentionally make videos that

ss any and all visual art in their cultural impact. For examples of

ook no further than pedestrians filming the Twin Towers

psing or 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recording Derek Chauvin

g George Floyd. In this light, our 21st-century tick to record

thing has made online videos omnipotent and omnipresent, capable

ching everyone and seismically shifting cultural foundations.

Mekas was prophetic in how he predicted this urge and its

ct, channeling “imperfect cinema” with his unique form of proto-

ing. By blending the ordinary and the artistic, he not only

ered the blueprint for avante-garde filmmaking but also for

ding and poetizing everyday life. However, one of the key

ences between Mekas’ home movies and his 21st cultural successor

t today’s online video culture today is less concerned with

be seen. Seeing and being seen through online video in this way inspires mimicry and misrepresentation, often leading someone to develop online identities that drastically contrast their offline behavior.

Moreover, Mekas, who is consoled with witnessing events without projecting evaluation onto them, seems foreign to an online video culture that strives to convince viewers of a predetermined agenda–one they often already believe in.

As online videos continue to be exhibited in echo chambers through decontextualized forms, the experience of seeing them is not directed by its inherent or intentional poetic potential, but instead by the viewer’s myopia. Accidental Cinema becomes the central output of today’s unconsciously driven video culture, one named for its random and endlessly interpretative ubiquity. We have all become mobilized as video makers and consumers, with or without the poetry.

“In my films that Paradise is not yet lost, there are little bits of Paradise preserved.”- Jonas Mekas

Back on my phone, I see a satellite recording itself touching the sun. I see a bird of paradise flapping in a pond and a giant squid washing ashore on the other side of the world. Climate calamity, road rage, and far-away wars all come into view. I am aware now that all of these things exist in the same breath, even if I have not witnessed them physically.

nline at this accelerated moment in time. As cultural receivers and

ngers, we are now permanently wedged between past and present,

een time-traveling and time-keeping. Through online videos, we

tially simulate a collective memory, one that offers a skewed view

n everlasting hell, as well as brief glimpses of paradise.

1 @ZeroSuitCamus. Twitter, 11:03 AM · Mar 16, 2022 2 https://www.renderforest.com/blog/youtube-statistics 3 https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-videouploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/ 4 The exhibition was curated by Kelly Taxter, with Kristina Parsons, Leon Levy Curatorial Assistant, the Jewish Museum 5 Smith, Zadie. Feel Free. Penguin, 2019.

6 Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. 1921 7 De Montaigne, Michel. Essays, pg. 245. Penguin, 2004.

8 Taken from Film at Lincoln Center Podcast, #71 - Jonas Meakus.

9 Taken from Film at Lincoln Center Podcast, #71 - Jonas Meakus.

Quinn Marshall is a senior at UC Berkeley studying Molecular Cellular Biology, with a minor in Russian Literature. She is a ssional snake handler.

ella Frisch (she/her) is a writer and a Cinema Studies junior ring in English & American Literature at New York University. njoys reading and writing creative and academic prose, and poetry. particularly interested in the polysemic quality of words–that contain meaning both in definition and sound, which contributes to overall functionality in literature and poetry. Her ng is fueled by dirty chai lattes and sparks of inspiration at venient times.

ah Siegel is a writer living in New York City. She is a senior in the ge of Arts and Sciences at NYU, majoring in sociology with rs in French and social and cultural analysis. When unoccupied, she ften be found crossing state lines to visit her dogs and loved ones— ularly in her hometown of Orlando, FL.

zhen Yu is a junior and English & American Literature major at She is a 20-year-old girl with the lower back pain and hobbies of a ar-old man (geocaching, birdwatching, chess, caring about day Night Live). She also runs a weekly contemporary national post-punk radio show on WNYU 89.1 FM, and regularly ibutes music reviews to Pitchfork, NPR, Bandcamp, Loud & , and the Quietus. She enjoys writing about dead birds.

Knox Krupa (He/Him) is a third-year student and a T.S. Eliot w at Gallatin studying the history of science and religion through arative literature. In his fleeting free time, he enjoys youtube opology, birdwatching IRL, and bridging the unintelligible gh sound.

megan finkel is a queer writer from houston. she studies comparative literature and Russian and is currently writing her senior thesis on Socialist Realism and science fiction from the Soviet Union. she enjoys poetry, translating, and music people make with computers.

SAB is a 21 year old trans and nonbinary playwrite. they are currently living with four cats and their partner in East Brooklyn. they enjoy music, writing poems and mid-length features, and are looking for work in queer mental healthcare specialized in suicide prevention and response for trans human beings.

Cristina Coppa is a reader, writer, editor, and an English & American Literature senior minoring in Creative Writing at New York University. She enjoys reading and writing prose, poetry, drama, and comics. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Guillotine, The English & Drama Review, The Greene Street Review, The Macksey Journal, NYU Comic Book League, and elsewhere.

theda wilkens is a queer poet, artist, and pianist from austin. her work has been published by swim press and the Journal of Erato. she is currently studying Neuroscience, in the hopes of eventually pursuing a career in Pain Science. she enjoys poetry, Fiona Apple, yerba mate, and engaging in highly theoretical conversation.

elijah made the cover.