I’m Not Going To Talk About It: The Artworks On My Phone
A silly little rectangular infinity gallery has flattened all the wonders into palm-sized dopamine dispensers that beg for stale commentaries and star ratings. I think of the magnificent temples in the world where once living idols would puppet the will of the divine to the faithful, now all image fodder for Buddhafluencers and Bodhisattvamaxxers—but I’m happy to see it. These images on my phone are the wind in my weekday doldrums. I share them with friends, and if I wanted to art-speak it, I would call it a “micro-curatorial practice,” but it’s a constant aesthetic plunder mainly from X.com, or Xitter (pronounced shitter) as I like to call it—which exists downstream of 4chan, Discord, and Tumblr necroposts. Now, if you’re an Instagram normie or TikTok teen, you are most likely even further down the Xitter river, and I don’t know anything about Lib Xitter (BlueSky) or Trumpcirclejerker (freedomsocial?), but I’m certain that based on posting volume, these places are echo chambers completely divorced from any aesthetic venture beyond reaffirming their own biases—ensuring a psychic dopamine-to-cortisol masturbatory experience. I myself am just a mere prisoner to this handheld magic lantern and when the inverted carousel spins as my fingers run across the glass I feel something beyond the dissipating warmth of the deteriorating lithium at hand.
Now, images so powerful that religious scriptures have viewed them as heretical from time to time are constantly invading the space in our brain where we scan for food, predators, or perhaps even see the fey-like creatures on the periphery of our vision. So our wonder is being killed by the onslaught of mostly sex and death by pessimistic Freudian algos. Sometimes I will scroll past something that will make my thumb freeze, and I have to save it.
I enjoy the titillation of freedom from my own psychological prison—the algorithmic panopticon. The female figure is supposed to be Undine, who is a nymph that demands unwavering loyalty but ultimately is doomed to die from mortal man’s failure. In this case, the Undine is an idea that nurtures the mind that creates her with her breast while he is imprisoned by some turn-of-the-century Western authoritarians. The idea that we can cling to for salvation in the face of imprisonment and torture by the regime-run world never fails to impress me. It’s hopeless, but the tenderness with which our ideas can give us solace in the face of cruelty is something I find freedom in. In this century, we don’t need the truncheon-wielding legions of state authoritarians, because we created an atomized world where opposition is mostly aesthetic, and authority has so much power and will to violence that the military will run simulations on how to stick a rocket through our mouth and out our ass without collateralizing the neighbors next door. But the same freedom exists in the prism of our mind, the same Undine offers her breast to us by the jails of our own creation. I don’t think there will be any political revolution in my lifetime, but in my dreams, I have been visited by beings of pure light that offer their embrace, and I cling to them—with great hope, I hold on.