Thought Daughter
Through The Front Camera: Renegotiating the Terms of Our Digital Narcissism
Despite our shamefully acknowledged screen addictions and public health calls about to dangers of social media, we have yet to fully consider the stakes of building a digital persona. What if we reconsidered our digital lives not in terms of mental health but the mental? Using Sigmund Freud’s theories of primary and secondary narcissism this work considers the usage of personal technologies at memorial sites, in war zones, and as sighted weaponry in American mass shootings.
Voidal Blue: A Chromopolitical Review of Blue-Black in the Work of Chris Offili
When Fred Moten writes of Trinidad-based painter Chris Ofili’s use of blue he reverses the common phrase to describe them as “so blue, its black.” The term “voidal blue” is not meant to just simply describe the deepness of blue-black, but rather fold within blue-black philosophical discourses of emptiness. The work of Chris Ofili, which heavily utilizes a “voidal blue,” allows us to understand the hidden, secret, and obscured inside in his paintings, Trinidad, diasporic cultures, and within Black contemporary art.
Antagonism and Ontology in Autofiction: I Love Dick as Case Study
The proliferation of interest in Chris Kraus’s autofictive novel detailing to final years of her marriage to philosopher Sylvere Lotringer comes not from their popularity in the Marfa, Texas scene but from its content. Self-effacing, eye-catching, and unbelievable I Love Dick, begs the question “Did this really happen” on every page. From the gaps between loving and knowing, husband and wife, reality and fantasy emerges Kraus’s experimental work and the genre of autofiction at large. By predicating autobiography with fiction, the tension and incompatibility between the two genres creates an ontological antagonism that is best analyzed through the language of psychoanalysis and its attention to difference.
Your Hologram Is Not A Holocaust Survivor: The Social Problematics of New Technologies of Remembrance
When Eva Schloss, a 91 year-old Holocaust survivor,is unable to repeat the word “reboot” while inside a cage-like apparatus built from 116 cameras, one starts to reconsider how necessary it is to have a hologram of her likeness. While Holocaust museums and awareness spaces push to integrate new social technologies with remembrance, the daily issues these technologies pose seem to fall to the wayside. This essay aims to critique the usage of virtual reality, social media, and holograms and its misguided and transgressive enunciation of the promises of post-memory.
Not Even In That Florida Water: Solange’s Ghosted Concert
What happens when videos disappear from Youtube? Where do we go to find them? In the case of Solange’s medley performance of her 2019 album “When I Get Home,” you can only find it on Reddit. Through the themes of Solange’s seminal album and the choreography/production of the live performance, questions of authorization, ownership, and authentication on the Internet are explored. The term “leaky internet” emerges to describe the spaces where images proliferate in resistance to these structures, for better or for worse. This piece exists as both a formal essay and a privately hosted HTML page, incorporating audio and visual interactions alongside the text.
What the New Materialists Wouldn’t Get About Sophie Calle: Speculative Realism and Its Misconsiderings
New Materialists in their object-oriented ontology are waging a war against correlation. They want to separate art objects not only from their social and political surrounding and the artists themselves but from all objects. How then might New Materialists consider the work of Sophie Calle, who interrogates the relationship between subjects and their objects, and her position as Other within spaces and the lives of her subjects? The answer is they can’t and don’t. This piece explores the shortcomings of speculative realism in analyzing the work of Sophie Callie and art objects at large, opting rather for a Lacanian reading of her body of work.