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[fiction]

of consciousness and its mysteries; technology and its psychological effects; creative-social relationships and dynamics (within micro-communities & collectives, between mediums, between the artist & muse); cinema and its influence on fantasy and desire and conceptions of life and reality; the source of the self and selves and the conscious and subconscious authorship of a social self (personas, rôles, the self & the other); the strange loop of consciousness, an epiphenomenon; media addiction and dependence; the psychological effects of artificial worlds, artificial realities; reality slipping and the fantasy-prone personality; the psychological effects of environments and of design and architecture on sensory and emotional experience; concepts of creative renewal & renascence; the subjective experience of time; the effects of asceticism, boredom, isolation and sensory deprivation; the mental phenomena of synchronicity, connectionism, collective impulse and simultaneous invention; invocation of the muse and creative possession; flux states of mind and alternative states of consciousness; Pygmalionesque relationships to artifice and the Pygmalion effect on artists; superfluidity between mediums; the socio-cultural effects of social media, the internet, the ubiquity of cameras, surveillance and continuous observance; the recursive relationship between self-reflection and self-representation

[fiction]

excerpts from a current project

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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v1]

I’m becoming more perceptive to the strange and haunting effects of the psychogeography of the empty complex on the mind, of the divisions of space within.

This is a dead space which repels the living. A Sartrean hell. No matter where I am here, in any room, in any hall, in all of my wandering, the repeating pathways, I’m always lost, displaced, deviated. I do things without thinking, not consciously so it seems. I no longer rationalize what I do or censure my thoughts. I suddenly find myself d
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v2]

I sense that we are connected through a phenomenological dimension which only the camera can see. A reality not otherwise visible. We are connected in a mirror plane with no distinction between the visible and invisible. In this dimension we coexist with the phenomenal, the supernatural world without time.

The mirror reflects a transitory state. There is no terminus within and none to the world it reflects. Therein a door to the unreal is open. The body does not cross over. The body does not en
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v3]

I recognize in myself a drive towards a cinema of total simulation wherein reality becomes the observer of itself → hyperreal. It controls my intuitions and impulses as an artist. It controls my work.

On videotape, I see the flicker, the first images, the protovision of a new real: a hyperreal inside of a screen, in the flat dimension of television. I see the first images of a real merging with an unreal, emerging as high-fidelity simulation.

The hyperreal of cinema:

↳ a territory of superfi
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v4]

What are the mathematical limits of a real within a real, a territory within its map, a world drawn within itself? No different from a mirror and its image, the transubstantial limits of a world within a world are non-absolute and are extensive of that which is apparent in reflection, without limits beyond view.

On camera, the mirror extends the dimensions of reality in reflection — a mirror inside of a mirror, a fragment the size of the whole. A mirror in a mirror: a heterotopia which can only
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v5]

A new contingency: access to the other is access to the self. I want to assimilate with film and its other in a synthesis of being and becoming.

Self-recognition is uncanny, unnatural. I don’t recognize my hand in a latex glove on camera, or my face inside of a knit mask.

[Experimenting with methods of self-concealment on camera → a body under latex ≻ a black gloved hand ≻ a black hand which brings a cigarette to my lips ≻ a black hand which has sensation but no feel ≻ a black hand which extin
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v6]

In her working process she tends to be schizo-frenetic, oscillating between two states: total concentration and a near manic inattention and distraction — an unpatterned thinking, a certain mania driven by caffeine, anxious energy, a chemical high of inspiration.

It’s the mirror she paints, the mirror of herself, though inseparable and the same.

In an enormous standing mirror: the artist rendering her chiral reflection ↔ the reflection rendering the artist on canvass → a self-portrait greater
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v7]

Why does the presence of a camera inspire strange behavior from me? I feel no different, but I act without thinking. I act in ways which are unfamiliar, eccentric and deviant. I act as if I’m not myself. Everything I do is impulsive, accidental, a mimesis of someone or something else who appears to be me yet she is not.

I’m no different from the woman on tape, although she is a stranger to me. This woman exists in a dimension beyond my own. She can reach, touch, extend beyond me, through the ca
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v8]

Science and magic can marry and give birth to the miraculous.

The camera is a machine for communing spiritual desire, communing with the psychic world. I’m only convinced that I’m not dreaming by the clarity of what I’m seeing. But its substance is like dream, and it changes without changing, without record, without memory.

I’m in awe, though I’m afraid of how easily I slip between worlds. I don’t know where nature begins, which real mirrors which, if there is no separation between interiority
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v9]

This tenement — a house of many rooms, all strange and intimate — it’s a palace in my mind. A palace of empty chambers, of space decolonized, depopulated, where emptiness is enormous, sublime. A building which was never beautiful — now beautiful and wondrous in abandonment, in obsolescence against time.

These white and empty rooms allow for the primeval + magical powers of the imagination.

Here, there is nothing to detract or sever the individual from their concentrative power. I never have to
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SCENARIOS FOR AN EMPTY ROOM 94–96 [v10]

I can’t dismiss the paranoia or the ways in which I’m repeating myself, my unusual behavior, my actions, my inclination to follow cycles and patterns. I’m always re-wandering the same pathways, re-exploring, as if I had forgotten. How I become absent of mind in these spaces, amnesial; how I distract myself, my imagination taking over.

Such mental illness is intensified here. I restrain myself around windows. I keep doors locked. I try to stifle my thoughts in whisper, whispering to myself. I ca