altærbody

꧁꧂ personal blog. art, research, literature, poetry, writing.

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ANNA SEW HOY, Psychic Body Grotto

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"There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him 'personal.' Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

--T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent

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Beverly Buchanan

Barnesville (1989) oil pastel on paper, 38 x 49 1/4 inches

Bogart, Georgia (1989) oil pastel on paper, 38 x 49 1/4 inches

Cameron, South Carolina (1989) oil pastel on paper, 38 x 49 1/4 inches

From Next Generation: Southern Black Aesthetic by Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art

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"A subject is not the symbolic identity that corresponds to it. To understand how alienation operates, it helps to start with this basic disjunction between subjectivity and identity. Identity consists of the various social positions that one occupies: job, familial status, religious affiliation, political preference, ethnicity, and so on. No matter how much I see myself as any or all of these identities, I am never fully identical with them. This failure is subjectivity. No matter how I might mold them to fit myself, none of these identities can fully coincide with my subjectivity.

At the same time, symbolic identity, despite being unavoidable, is a flight from subjectivity. We seek respite from the problem of subjectivity in the promised security of our symbolic identity. The necessary failure of identity to provide this security doesn’t lessen our proclivity to seek it out continually for what it promises. Our political being depends on the relationship that we adopt to our symbolic identity.

Sinking into a symbolic identity, in contrast, allows one to avoid confronting political questions as political. These questions appear to have ready-made answers from the perspective of a symbolic identity. In this sense, symbolic identity is always an avoidance of the problem of emancipation. This is a point that Alenka Zupančič stresses in What IS Sex? According to Zupančič, “(emancipatory) politics begins with ‘loss of identity,’ and there is nothing deplorable in this loss.”4 Identity enacts a depoliticization of the subject. All identity is conformist.

When it adopts — or attempts to adopt — an identity, the subject always conforms because the forces of social authority establish every symbolic identity, even those that feel the most transgressive to those occupying them."

--Todd Mcgowan, Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldnt Try to Find Ourselves

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Easy For Who To Say

Lorna Simpson (1989)

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i think privacy, true real privacy, is going to become the next status symbol post-polluted internet.

the first video i saw when i opened youtube was "Tracking Down the Girl on the Deftones' Album 28 Years Later". why are we doing that. why do we want to know so much about one another. (i know why)

i was looking for this video where this dj is talking about what they've termed "digital pollution theory" and connecting it to extractivism and racial capitalism. basically who will have the privilege of having a healthy and safe offline life with fulfilling actual relationships and who will be forced to earn their living through content and outrage farming for a "community" of mostly bots (dead internet theory).

and then, the only substack i actually read, sam kriss' Numb at the Lodge, where he's talking about his 2026 prophecies and being right about all of them:

"Most prophetically of all, I said that as Twitter’s cultural cachet waned, it wouldn’t be replaced by Bluesky or Threads or Substack, but the real world. Not in the sense that everyone would put aside all this frothing online hysteria and just focus on their actual lives—I meant that instead of trying to whip up cancel mobs on social media, people would just start physically attacking each other."

and even though i don't really like her writing because they're weirdly unfairly misogynistic sometimes, i skim her articles sometimes:

"I see 2026 as the year when people actually take the effort to live a life more offline in good faith, and from a place of genuine desire to do so. It isn’t just some niche trend like the “Luddite teens” who opt for flip phones or the return of book clubs, though it’s these things, too. It’s a subtle change, the vague sense that the novelty has worn thin. That joke isn’t funny anymore. This sweater is last season. I’m tired of this show, and I’m ready to change the channel."

i think people are really not having fun on the internet anymore. no one is finding the fulfilling connections they once did when this first started and it felt like everyone behind every screen name was a real person. it just feels like a giant mall, but like a dead mall so it's extra sad. i've been tweeting since 2010 but i think i'm finally done with that website, which sucks because i'm so good at tweeting. but putting your every thought out online in short little quips that no one even reads feels very prole-coded and gross. do not even get me started on instagram. every post feels like someone is announcing the death of a family member. and there's no way, no actual way everyone is "thrilled to announce" something new every single day. why do we all say that now lol? "so excited to announce" "honored to announce" what are we doing.

a lot of twitter people jumped ship to substack but no one really reads that either. i'm actually shocked by how bad most of the writing on substack is. you can tell that people on there are looking for a "wholesome" way to content farm and make some extra cash.

i even feel weird about personal writing on this blog for some reason. i have transcended the desire to have anyone know anything about me but i'd still like a way to kind of track the development of my thoughts about things in a quick and dirty way, adding links and quotes etc., basically research--i have written in a journal since i was 7 years old, and since i have that practice i feel like i can separate discussion of my like, emotional life and specific people and events from writing like this where i'm kind of just putting a pin in a thought.

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Lakhovsky Coil 1 2

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"One of the results of current cultural processes is a widespread anxiety magnifying worries about the future we must contemplate together; this is everywhere translated into a need for futurologies. Never, until this contemporary period, did any individual culture experience such an intense obsession with the future. The passion for astrology, the predictions and prophecies that were Assyrian or Babylonian in origin and that spread most actively, perhaps during the European Middle Ages, were far more the products of a synthesizing or magical thought than anything produced by concerns about really safeguarding the future. The same held true for the Mayans and Aztecs or in ancient China. Nor did the notion of progress, so much touted by Victor Hugo, take shape as motifs of anticipation. These days, futurology is an obsession that tends to set itself up as a science. But any possible laws of such a science would be stamped by the same principle of uncertainty that governs the métissage of cultures."

--Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation (p.163)

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Heia for the royal Kailcedrate!

Heia for those who have never invented anything

those who never explored anything

those who never tamed anything

those who give themselves up to the essence of all things

ignorant of surfaces but struck by the movement of all things

free of the desire to tame but familiar with the play of the world

truly the eldest sons of the world

open to all breaths of the world

fraternal territory of all breaths

undrained beds of the waters of the world

esh of the esh of the world pumping with the very movement

of the world

-Aimé Césaire, 2013

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Joshua Serafin, VOID by the Sea, 2022, performance documentation.

Part of ‘Cosmological Gangbang’ (2020–ongoing) – a project whose queer ecologies are rooted in Indigenous Filipino epistemologies and precolonial conceptions of gender – VOID envisions a genderqueer deity for our time. The nude artist whirled and writhed on a dirt mound around a central hole filled with a black, viscous gloop closely resembling oil. Plunging their hands into this orifice, they threw sheets of the liquid into the air with such intensity that the matter itself seemed to be dancing: an animacy starkly at odds with characterizations of inert ‘natural resources’ – a distancing framework regularly put in service of extractivist worldviews. ‘Maybe you think this distance and material will protect you [...] but then you realize it doesn’t protect you from anything,’ declared Serafin, slicked with the substance. In Exposed (2016), Alaimo writes that activists and artists may ‘perform exposure’ to ‘grapple with the particular entanglements of vulnerability and complicity that radiate from [anthropogenic] disasters and their terribly disjunctive connection to everyday life in the industrialized world’. Colonial fantasies of impenetrability and sovereignty become more ludicrous with every display of bodily permeability to the stuff of the world.

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Looking north - Green Hill, Slave Auction Block, 378 Pannills Road (State Route 728), Long Island, Campbell County, VA Photos from Survey HABS VA-605

"Green Hill" plantation was built by Samuel Pannill who first bought 600 acres from William and Moses Fuqua in 1797, and added to and developed the plantation 'til his death in 1864. According to tradition, these original stone features were used in the auction and sale of slaves. The small of the two elements was used by the auctioneer while the stone table was used to display the best qualities of the slaves. The authenticity of this story has not been documented. Both auctioneer's stone and table are in good condition. They are presently used by the owners to hold milk buckets, etc. Auctioneer's stand, is a solid stone block, approximately 1'-2" x 3'-0" x 10" high. Stone table approximately 3' square and 3' high. It is supported by four rectangular stones set upright into the ground. A bottom stone is shaped as a cross to fit between the posts at each corner. Top stone about 3" thick; bottom stone about 2-1/2" thick. No mortar used.

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Aria Dean, Dead Zone 4, 2017.

Cotton branch, polyurethane, bell jar, wood, signal jammer

13.25 (height) x 12.5 (diameter) in / 33.7 x 31.75 cm

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BLACKBOX

Aria Dean

2017

Etched plexiglass

6 x 10 x 12 in / 15.24 x 25.4 x 30.48 cm

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box (a clear mirror)

Aria Dean

2018

etched plexiglass

6 x 10 x 12 in / 15.24 x 25.4 x 30.48 cm

'Some Kind of Halfway Place,' Higher Pictures, New York

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Nontime imposes the tyranny of its spaciality on time: in any life there is a north and a south, and the east and the west. At the limit, or, any rate, at the crossroad, as one's eyes fly over the seasons, there is the unequal struggle of life and death, of fervor and lucidity, even if it is one of despair and collapse, the strength as well to face tomorrow. Such is life. Such is this book, between sun and shadow, between mountain and mangrove swamp, between dawn and dusk, lame and divided.

Time also to settle one's account with a few phantoms and a few ghosts.

--Aimé Césaire

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Untitled (Gold Painting) (1964)

Robert Rauschenberg