The Continuous Failures of Optimism:
An investigation of the screen, futurity, and digital affect
By

Kevin Holliday

A THESIS SUPPORT PAPER SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF FINE ARTS EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN 2021
© Kevin Holliday, 2021

Acknowledgements:
A profound thanks is due to Randy Cutler for getting through this with me, and to my family for the support
necessary to even begin. A special thank you to Rosalina Libertad as well for the beautiful documentation of the
thesis exhibition. There is truly an endless number of people to thank. I like to think they know who they are, but I
would also like to acknowledge that I am all the better for having met them, and been allowed to learn from and with
them.
It is also important to foreground this paper with tre acknowledge that I am currently living on the unceded
territories of the Coast Salish peoples including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh
nations, and the work outlined in this paper was produced on these lands as well. If we are to imagine new ways of
existing in the world we must begin by actively dismantling the systems of power currently in place, especially when
we benefit from them. This acknowledgement is far from sufficient, and as a settler on this land I try to keep this at
the front of my mind, and invite you to do the same as you engage with this paper and the world beyond it.

Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Introduction

1

On Context or how I inhabit the present moment
...Personal
2
...Aesthetic
3
...Affectual
5
...Screenbased 6
Work I:
continuous failures of optimism, or what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss)
...and Abject Materiality
8
Work II:
or will it make anything alright?
...and De-monumentalization

11
12

Work III:
currently untitled:investigations in foam
...and Conspiracy and Paranoia

13
15

Optimism or how we might look to inhabit the future
Postscript~On the thesis exhibition
Works Cited

22

Works Consulted
Appendix

24

23

19

16

6

Introduction:
We are living in a time of futurelessness.(Malik, Tanner) Regressive societal forces, and
impending ecological catastrophe, among other things, have removed the ability of the future to act as a
waypost for the present. There is no longer a clear outcome for the present moment, and this instability
has given rise to any number of absurd and disturbing phenomena, the rise of nationalism for example, or
the proliferation of conspiracy theories, the alt-right emergence in digital discourse etc. The internet, or
digital space more generally, was supposed to provide a newly emergent and democratized way of
existing, a digital commons. This never came to pass, and instead we have ended up with a worryingly
feudalistic cyberspace. I am interested in whether it is possible to reorient ourselves, and to reimagine the
possibilities that were once available. How does one speak about the internet, the digital, the “future”,
without using its own corrupted language? As tech culture emerges as a dominant normative force in
society, how can one maintain the integrity of a technologically based counterculture and align it
otherwise? By navigating these questions we can perhaps begin to allow a reclaiming of the
emancipatory potentials of digital technologies.
I have since a very young age been firmly embedded in the internet, though full disclosure, I am
old enough to slightly predate the widespread adoption of at home internet. I never fit in very well IRL, and
much of my formative years were spent in digital spaces, MMORPGS1, forums, etc, so I have spent a
significant portion of my life mediated in online spaces, for better and for worse. My memories of a time
before the internet are fleeting at this point, but I do remember before it had so fully permeated every
aspect of my life. My artwork deals with what existing in these online/digital spaces can mean. It is an
attempt to explore the vagaries, affects, detritus, and experiences of this permeation, the leaks and
feedbacks between URL and IRL2. I explore what potentials these spaces, and the technologies that
support them offer, but also attempt to elicit a criticality about how we are conditioned to relate to them in
hopes of encouraging new ways of relating to, and living with, digital culture and technology.
I consider my work a form of multimedia collage in a screen based installation practice. It
involves a recombining of disparate elements, both physical and digital, into a newly emergent whole that
carries the meaning. Each element is carefully selected, but no single element exists on its own. They are
all part of a conditional relationship with the other objects in the installation. The process of sourcing
these elements is intuitive, and involves a stumbling upon, as opposed to a seeking out. The work ideally
functions to help physicalize the ways we exist digitally as a means to open up critical dialogue about the
ubiquitous privileging of the screen in an increasingly digitized society, and the problematics inherent to
the attempted universal space within. I work mostly with found objects, large scale digital prints and video
collage, but I also explore materially and respond to whatever is available, as it is important for my
process to proceed organically and responsively to the environment in which I find myself. I utilize found
materials in order to drive home the material nature of these investigations, and to highlight the material
and lived history that is often excluded from digital narratives.
The projects I have undertaken in the MFA program focus my research into digital space, and the
ways we construct our identities, and our environments, through the mediation of screen based
technologies. I am seeking to engage critically with an evolving relationship to technology and visions of
the future. I have been thinking through the role of optimism, and whether or not optimistic visions of the
1
2

Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games
URL indicates being online and IRL is an abbreviation for In Real Life

1

future are still possible or beneficial given the state of the world, a growing trend of national isolation, and
increasing social, economic, and ecological precarity(Malik). I am attempting to answer for myself
whether “productive” visions of the future are damaging to marginalized subjectivities, and are envisioned
at the expense of solving the problems of the present. Another particular focus is challenging what is
often allowed to pass as the "neutrality" of cyberspace. By expanding our relationship to technology, and
making space for non-normative relationalities, I am hoping to highlight the need to ground racialized,
queer, and gender non-conforming subjectivities in a cyberspace from which even their potential to exist
is too often erased(Benjamin ch.1). Intentional and unintentional digital erasure of non-dominant
perspectives is a pressing problem that will only become worse with the advance of virtual technologies if
left unchallenged. In this way, my work is an examination of how the contemporary condition is
continuously mediated through screen based technologies, and a way to think through reorienting that
relationship, and opening it to alternative modes of existence.
There is a deep sense of anxiety embedded in the contemporary moment, and I am interested in
exploring this emotional or affective quality of the contemporary post-internet condition3. Trying to
embody the nature of digital affect is a major through line of my thesis. As the world becomes
increasingly precarious, and capital continues to consolidate, we are being sold a vision of technological
salvation. Automation, AI, VR, etc, all harken a new technological take off, but the future promised is one
that is under corporate and algorithmic control(Cramer). This has caused me to question the possibilities
and problematics of technology and the ways in which we portray these possible futures. The thesis
project navigates the ways certain perspectives and subjectivities are proscribed from theories of futurity
and the adverse material impact this has on both the present, and emergent futures(Malik).
Context:
I am mixed race Chinese and white Canadian/American, and while I grew up in a comfortably
middle class environment both of my parents grew up poor working class (my mother in Vancouver and
my father in Marquette, Michigan) and their experiences have helped inform my own position. I am a
visible minority, but my class position and proximity to whiteness has protected me from much, though
not all, of the systemic oppression I might otherwise have faced. I am also a sometimes-male presenting
non-binary person. I occupy a hybrid position in which certain privileges come and go depending on how I
am read or perceived by others. I think this has made me very aware of how tenuous these privileges
really are, and how actively people have to work to maintain and perpetuate them.
My Grandma was born in Chinatown in Vancouver and her stories have coloured a lot of my work
in terms of aesthetics and motifs. They are often attempts to bridge into an imagined communal past, or
perhaps more correctly to help this past maintain a presence. My Grandpa fled the Communist Revolution
in China following WWII, and eventually found himself homeless in Vancouver and working on a pig farm.
They would go on to start a Chinese restaurant, which became quite successful and has provided for
much of my family. His experiences, I think, formed a radical generosity within him that I hope I can work
to pass on. I say all this this to point out I have a conflicted relationship to capital in so far as it has
provided for me throughout my life, but I must acknowledge the way class re-establishes itself, and
provides opportunities to some by denying them from others, and that I have materially benefitted, and
continue to benefit, from this exploitative process even as my work stands critically against it.
3

Post-internet is a hazy amorphous term, but I use it here to indicate a state of perpetual connection and complete permeation. A
way of living that is at all times mediated through screen based technologies and transmitted over the internet. It is not to say we are
living after the internet, but at a time where it is no longer sensible for many of us to conceptualize ourselves as separate from the
internet.

2

I originally studied economics from 2006-2009, and this experience of studying the economy
during the global financial collapse informs my thinking to this day. While studying, it became very
apparent the ways in which certain worldviews were privileged and enforced by academic narratives, and
the way other perspectives are written out of legibility. It helped shape and contextualize my critical
attitudes towards capitalism, the failures of our systems of government and hegemonic society as a
whole. It also highlighted for me the complicity of academic institutions with the horrific mismanagement
of industry. I did not have an easy time at university and though I did excel academically it made me
aware of how little that matters. I am often thankful I did not have a “productive” experience as I could
easily have allowed myself to be folded into an oppressive structure instead of positioning myself against
it, or realizing it had always been positioned against me. Working through what this opposition means,
and how to think about dismantling these structures is a large focus of my work.
I am also a queer gender-non conforming person and as such unfortunately often run into the
imposed limitations of society. This position in particular drives a lot of my work which deals with
expanding the possibilities of the future. It is through recognizing the way the present, and the past, has
been limited for certain people(because of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc) that we can allow those in
marginal positions to envision new potential futures. I was lucky enough to find a vibrant and supportive
queer community in a greasy fry kitchen in Toronto which did this work for me, I am trying to find ways to
pass that work forward.
The aesthetics that I employ when making art are directly informed by my lived experience. I have
a very specific aesthetic sensibility that has remained consistent as my art practice evolves around it. As
this sensibility is a constant throughout my thesis project, and my life beyond that, I think it makes sense
to begin with some background on how that aesthetic has been formed. The first, and most enduring
influence is my Grandmother. She embodied a certain kind of glamour and theatricality that informs me
personally and how I conceptualize my work.

Figure 1. Photos of my Grandmother and her paintings on my dresser - 2020

She grew up in Chinatown, and the experience of spending time there has shaped my visual
language. Stories about her past also find their way into my work as well, particularly those about the

3

Cantonese Opera. These productions were hugely influential to her community, and I’ve heard much about
her experiences of them. They existed for a long time in my mind as a mythical space, imaginings of what
they must have been like. The aesthetics of this specific theatre practice is something I look towards for
inspiration in terms of composition, colour, staging, etc. One aspect that I most directly draw into my work
is the multilayered flatness of the patterned fabric backdrops, which are a form or motif I have repeated
throughout my practice. Embracing this flatness is in part about maintaining a visual linkage to
non-western art traditions, but there is also a resonance with the flatness and artificiality of digital space
that compliments my investigations.
My thinking on flatness has been greatly influenced by Takeshi Murakami’s writing on the
postmodern art movement Superflat, which explores the development of the flat picture plane within
Japanese art and entertainment. Murakami also draws out this relation to digital space in his “The Super
Flat Manifesto”: “One way to imagine super flatness is to think of the moment when, in creating a desktop
graphic for your computer, you merge a number of distinct layers into one.”(1) When working on
physicalizing digital experience, it is important to maintain this relationship to flatness, and looking
towards Cantonese opera specifically, is a strategy to do that. I should note that while I have located this
inspiration in the tradition of Chinese Opera, Murakami’s writing is specific to the context of Japan. I have
found a resonance with his writing that I think is applicable in some ways to Chinese art as well. Having
said that, Japanese media, particularly anime, has also been deeply influential and helped refine how I
produce work in these ways.

Figure 2. Image of a cantonese opera stage(https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-9037450-nakhonsawan-thailand---february-22-chinese-opera)

Another important visual or aesthetic influence is 90’s rave culture, and the happy hardcore scene
in particular. The bright pop colours and sense of irreverent celebration tinged with loss and sadness is
the aesthetic foundation or undercurrent in all of my work and this is where it springs from. Movies like
Gregg Araki’s Nowhere(1997) have informed my aesthetics immensely, though not just the film itself but

4

the entire cultural milieu in which it takes place. I am also influenced by the idealism and utopian visions
of rave PLUR4 culture, and am interrogating the potentials and pitfalls of these types of positions towards
futurity. I am particularly interested in the way our relationship to the future has shifted since the 90’s
which is a time period defined by optimism. In acknowledging the influence of this historical moment I am
simultaneously wary of giving in to the power of nostalgia.

Figs 3 and 4. Stills from the film Nowhere - Gregg Araki - 1997 (Figure removed due to copyright restrictions)

The current times are increasingly precarious, and we have watched, and continue to watch, many
of the foundational myths about western society unravel5. As the state of the world becomes more and
more unstable, nostalgia provides a comforting outlet for many people. Grafton Tanner, in his book The
Cirlce of the Snake explains how the precarity of the world has resulted in a weaponized nostalgia, a
longing for “the good old days” as it were. “Rattled by destructive global events and armed with the most
powerful communication tools ever invented, the West has plunged into its own past, committed to
recapturing what might have been lost with the dawning of an eternal present, when daily political
traumas and digital sirens shackle us to now.”(Ch. 3) We can see this in the rise of nativist movements,
around the world and the slide into traditionalist authoritarianism. Nostalgia exists as “a rhetorical tool
that can be utilized to dangerous ends”(Ch. 3). We are fed certain visions of the past as if they are
remedies for the present, but they are at best distractions, and at worse calls to arms. This is a dangerous
and unproductive nostalgia, and something that must be countered with an alternative.
In my work I am trying to occupy a different sort of nostalgia, not a nostalgia for the past, as the
longing for the past is an untenable solution for people who depend on the desperately slow progress of
societal change, but a nostalgia for a way of relating to the future. The installations are not about going
back to a point in time before these problems arose, but going back to a mindset before accepting that
these problems are unsolvable. It is an idea about being nostalgic for the future. Utilizing the early web
aesthetics of the 90’s, to invoke or appropriate this techno futurist culture that surrounded the early
internet is one strategy for exploring this idea. By using colours, bright pinks, greens, and yellows for
example, and motifs, flowers, bad cgi, etc, that are associated with this time I am hoping to locate the
work in a historically rooted relation to technology as a conduit of futurity. The 90’s was a time of deep
techno-optimism, and the internet still held potential as an emancipatory digital commons. I utilize this
aesthetic in order to build a connection to this lineage of optimism, and to interrogate the currently
foreclosed potentials of technology. This is a way to point to the need to reclaim the future's liberatory
4

PLUR stands for Peace Love Unity and Respect and was an attempt at founding a guiding principle of radical inclusivity for the rave
movement
5
These myths or ideals include a belief in egalitarianism, meritocracy, progress and prosperity. Basic protections, securities and
supports, which were not even available to everyone in the first place, are being eroded. Spaces which position themselves outside
of the global capitalist enterprise are consumed. The very idea of maintaining the basic functioning of the ecosystem in which we live
is somehow still out of reach. Precarity infiltrates every facet of the contemporary condition. (Malik)

5

sense, and emancipatory potentials. In this way, my work is aesthetically not rooted in a specific historical
moment, but perhaps a historical affect or outlook, and is attempting to reclaim or revive that feeling, and
restore the possibility of a relation to technology beyond corporate control. In these ways I am trying to
harness the feeling of anxiety as a productive method of critique to combat what Tanner calls
futurelessness. By confronting the source of the anxiety and offering a new way of contextualizing or
channeling the urge towards nostalgia I am hoping to point towards the need to imagine new possibilities,
and work ourselves out of the catastrophe of the present without retreating into an imagined idyllic past.
During my time in the MFA program I have been trying to open a discourse about how we relate
to the screen, and how the screen itself functions as a support, or a material, and not as an invisible
infrastructure, or neutral conveyor of information. I’ve noticed there is a trend to remove the legibility of
the screen as an object, with borderless very thin monitors and I think this is a problematic attempt to
erase the technically mediated quality of screen based technologies, and thus post-internet life. For this
reason, it is important to highlight the mechanics of display, wires, screens, lights, cords etc. This is a
strategy to foreground the necessary complicity of post-internet art with the current state of capitalist
production, and hopefully to open up this relationship to critique. Making use of these technologies, or
existing in these digital spaces, demands an awareness of how they are employed as normative forces,
and pushing them forward when they try to recede. Thomas Lamarre speaks to this idea of the screen as
a locus of power relations in his book The Anime Ecology. He puts forward the terms ontopower and
platformativity as a means to better understand “how the social technology of television media stretches
across the sovereign power of the family, the disciplinary spaces of school and work, and biopolitical
sites of crisis disaster and emergency.”(28) He highlights the need to consider the “viewer-image-screen”
interaction as the site at which these power relations are exercised, but also where they can be
resisted(355).
Drawing attention to this triad of viewer, image and screen, and attempting to reorient how we
conceptualize and position ourselves within this relationship is a major focus of my recent investigations.
With the thesis work I am pushing towards building a space which exists outside of this digital world, but
references, and recreates the affective qualities of post-internet life. I think this is one way we can start to
question how embedded these normative forces are in all facets of online culture, and push towards a
confrontation with what can pass unnoticed as part of the infrastructure of the web, or of the nature of
the technology itself. The screen in this way acts as a stand-in for all future oriented technologies(AI,
computer learning, facial surveillance, etc) as they are the visible interface by which these technologies
become legible. Further, the screen highlights the ways these technologies, or algorithms, are allowed to
recede, to operate their control from an abstracted distance. The screens in my work are thus trying to
draw attention to themselves functioning as an interface into a virtual space where the viewer is not
necessarily centered, and not attempting to recede as a disappearing mediator that encourages
immersion. The screens are deployed in such a way to make clear that how the viewer interacts with them
is secondary to how the screens are interacting with each other, and the network of the installation itself.
Work I:
Each of the three works I will introduce in the following sections takes the screen as the central
point of its investigation, and builds around it to question, or complicate some aspect of our relationship
to screen based culture. The first work titled the continuous failures of optimism, or what if we could
recognize catastrophe(capss)(fig 5 and fig 6) is a large-scale multimedia installation. It is made up of two
screens on broken camp chairs playing looping videos of two different views of a CGI avatar in a crying
animation cycle. These chair screen assemblages are facing a wall in front of which hang two long

6

banners suspended from the ceiling. The left banner is a pixelated green colour field digitally printed on
transparent plastic film, and the right banner is a collage made of salvaged plastics. In between these two
hanging elements is a plinth on which sits a stack of colourful flower shaped blobs. On top of this stack is
a small pink portable dvd player displaying a looping video of a kite with the text of a poem overlaid6.
what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss) was conceptualized to explore the idea of the
screen not as a site of passive consumption, but as a site of agency and affect. This is why the screen
assemblages are oriented towards the wall and away from the viewer as they position themselves to view
the pictorial elements hung from the ceiling. This is a strategy employed to complicate the viewing
experience, and unsettle our everyday relation to the screen. To inspect the smaller elements, or to have
an unobstructed view of the hanging pieces, requires standing with your back to the avatars inhabiting the
screens. This functions to establish a feeling of simultaneously viewing the work and being viewed by it,
of entering into a reciprocal relationship with the screen space. The hope is that this heightened sense of
viewership will help explicate the complicated and ubiquitous role screen based media plays in our day to
day lives. I also think this decentering of the viewer helps to build a more immediate connection with the
figurative videos which heightens the mood or affect the work is trying to evoke.

Figure 5 - the continuous failures of optimism, or what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss)(Details)

6

I have included the poem in the appendix.

7

Figure 6 - the continuous failures of optimism, or what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss)

what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss) was conceptualized over the summer of 2020 and
was my attempt to work through the feelings built up over that tumultuous time. With the advent of
lockdowns, continued and sustained police brutality, ignored calls for justice, disintegration of social
support structures, and endless zoom calls there was a profound sense of disconnection. I was also
experiencing a deep sense not of loss or grief necessarily, but of an undirectible negative affect.
Everything became overwhelming, but also doing nothing felt irresponsible. There was a specific feeling
of sadness about a forced digital togetherness, and a hyper awareness about productivity and leisure.
This installation was about unpacking all of these feelings and allowing them to exist for themselves in
space. Digital affect is an ongoing thematic concern in all of my work, and I will discuss the specifics of
what I mean by that more fully in a later section of this paper. Suffice it to say for now that the screens act
as a vehicle for that affect, and the installation as a whole is my attempt to embody it physically.
The material impetus for the work came on an aimless walk when I happened to find the blue
folding camp chair broken and discarded beside a trash bin. There was an immediate resonance with its
abject state7 and it, along with its red partner, form the central figure of the installation. I wanted to create
an object that could carry the idea of reimagined use value, and alternative modes of existence. By
reutilizing a discarded and broken object as a technological support I am attempting to convey the idea
that there is necessarily space for new relations to technology, and that we must rethink how we create
and value these relations. It is also an attempt to question what will be discarded in the name of technical
progress, and how we can make new space that allows more radical potential relationalities. Utilizing the

7

My thinking on abjection here is influenced by reading Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. I am thinking through the possibilities of
overcoming the process of othering, marginalization and violence that occurs when confronting corporeal reality.

8

abject, broken chair and the technological object of the screen highlights the precarious nature of our
relationship to the future, and the need to reimagine how we will inhabit it.
While putting the installation together I was working towards formalizing my impulse to work
with images or materials of poor quality: badly rendered or provisional sculptural objects, found objects,
and pixelated low dpi images etc. As stated previously, this is a strategy that points toward the need for
expanding our potential imaginaries, and working to prevent the foreclosure of future possibilities. An
essay by Florian Cramer, “Crapularity Hermeneutics: Interpretation as the Blind Spot of Analytics, Artificial
Intelligence, and Other Algorithmic Producers of the Postapocalyptic Present”, has helped contextualize
this strategy. I was particularly drawn to the concept of The Crapularity, an alternative to the singularity
promised by AI proponents, which he borrows from The Grumpy Futurists collaborative presentation
“Alternatives to the Singularity”. The Crapularity is an alternative near future where instead of AI
developing to be increasingly responsive to the real world, the real world is made increasingly in response
to the existing capacity of AI(38). The result is a world where deviation from algorithmically inscribed
norms becomes a luxury dependent on the ability to employ human labour(39). He points out the ways
that relying on statistical analysis of data influenced by histories of oppression will perpetuate an already
vicious cycle, and prevents access to the future based on necessarily discriminatory speculation(30,52).
I’m interested in challenging the ways we think about media, and in particular the ways we can resist
being enveloped in a burgeoning infrastructure that will erase the potentials for alternative modes of
existence.
Reading Cramer also solidified a resonance I was feeling in the art of Sondra Perry, an American
artist, who has directly inspired me to work in this way, and to conceptualize the possibilities of combining
discarded objects and screens. While thinking through ways to create these abject screen assemblage I
became very interested in more sculptural screen based installation practices, and specifically Perry’s
exhibition Resident Evil(Fig. 7). Of particular relevance is the way Perry embodied meaning in the work
materially, something I was aiming to achieve in what if we could recognize catastrophe(capss). Her
installations force an active viewing experience in a way that highlights the work needed to be done to
unravel the technological forces that she brings under scrutiny. For example, Graft and Ash for a Three
Monitor Workstation (2016) and Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhoon coming on for a Three Monitor Workstation
(2016) are both mounted atop exercise machines to challenge the typically passive ingestion of screen
based media, and force a revaluation of how we engage with digital content. While my work does not
activate the viewer in this way, I am interested in this kind of reorientation, or challenging of the viewing
experience.
Perry’s work exemplifies the potential of screen based installation to function as social critique.
Her practice focuses on the impact of image making and technology on Black identity, and draws
parallels between digital phenomena and IRL experiences. I am directly inspired by the way she will
physicalize an abstract experience in order to better critique or understand an elusive idea. I am very
drawn to the allusionistic nature of her work, and how she sets up a web of associations to organically
lead the viewer through the ideas presented. There is a purposeful ambiguous relationality of the images
and objects in her installations that is balanced by a clarity of purpose. This allows her to maintain
cohesion despite the esoteric and disparate source materials. I try to keep this balance in mind when I
construct my own installations. This way of working with montaged or collaged allusions is common to
post-internet practices but Perry’s is the most refined that I have seen, and directly inspires my own
thinking and making. Perry is deeply invested in highlighting the legacies of theft and exploitation that are

9

reproducing themselves online, and forcing people to reckon with the fact that these logics pre-exist the
digital space, but operate now with a broader scope and increased efficiency.

Fig. 7 Resident Evil - Sondra Perry - 2016 (Figure removed due to copyright restrictions)

Cramer and Perry have helped me develop and think through this impulse to use provisional,
discarded, and poorly formed objects, and interrogate the possibilities of “crappy” or provisional art as a
strategy of critique. The found objects, or “garbage” salvaged off the street, acts as a means of
interrogating a politics of the refused. By using discarded construction materials I am hoping to open a
dialogue about use value, and what it means to reinscribe a use on something that has been rendered
“useless”. This strategy is a direct response to the anxiety about minority subjectivities being written out
of legibility in future spaces(Benjamin ch.3). It is an attempt to rethink how we relate not only to discarded
objects, but more broadly how we relate to non-dominant modes of existence. I am hoping it builds a
sense of connection with the abject objects/subjects and works to offer new methods of inhabiting the
world and relating to what is already in it. The specificity of the chairs is important here because it is
intended to invoke a bodily resonance with the viewer that allows this connection to be more easily made.
This is a strategy to allow the viewer to read themselves into the work, and inform the future oriented
space of the installation with their own lived experiences and understandings, to imagine how they would
inhabit this space. By building these new relationalities to discarded objects, I am hoping to ensure they
are allowed to continue to exist. The intention behind these gestures is to in some way resist the flawless
nature of computer based processes, but also acknowledging that the present currently exists in a state
of collapse. It is important to acknowledge that people are actively living through the many catastrophes
of capitalism, and situating these installations in the present while pointing towards a future is important
in explicating the power of critical and aesthetic resistance in imagining possible alternatives.

10

Work II:
or will it make anything alright? (Fig. 8, Fig. 9) was
chronologically the next work I produced. It is a smaller,
pared back installation that focuses on the text
component that played on the pink screen in what if we
could recognize catastrophe and also looks to refine some
of the strategies employed in that installation. A concern I
had with the original iteration of the text piece was its
illegibility.Throughout the thesis project I have been
experimenting with frustrating the ease of viewership in
order to challenge our relationship to the screen, but the
small screen, while aesthetically pleasing, proved too
frustrating to the viewer. The text video is reworked to play
on a larger screen which is attached to a roughly curved
metal pipe by an orange tie down strap. This screen-pipe
assemblage is suspended from the ceiling by an aircraft
cable that runs through the pipe. An equal length of pink
cord drapes from each end of the pipe onto the ground.
White text plays on a blue background. A media player
with a stickered USB plugged into it hangs from the back
of the screen by an HDMI cord.

Figure 9 - or will it make anything alright?

Figure 8 - or will it make anything alright?

Building upon the theme of complicating the idea of viewership
this installation involves turning the screens away from the wall
and towards each other. The idea here was to create more of a
direct conversation or relationship between the screens into
which the viewer must position themselves. The second screen
hangs in a similar assembly that is flipped on its horizontal axis.
It is suspended in front of the other screen, but slightly offset.
They are close enough together that each screen obscures the
other from most angles. It is hung in the same fashion as the
other screen at the same height. This screen is playing a looping
video of a figure in front of an ambiguous sunrise/sunset. The
figure is almost entirely obscured by the tie-down strap. Both
media players are plugged into a power bar situated on the
ground between the screens. Each screen is connected to its
own unnecessarily long extension cord the bulk of which are
bundled underneath them.

I conceptualized or will it make anything alright? with the specific goal of exploring the themes
introduced in what if we could recognize catastrophe but focussing on the concision of the visual
language. It is intended to allow a more direct engagement with the viewer-screen-screen relationship but
also to allow for a less restricted spatial experience. Where what if we could recognize catastrophe was
set up as a stage set with a dictated visual flow or will it make anything alright? is given more space to
encourage a looser association, and allow a reading of these screen assemblages as autonomous
objects. By removing the screens from the context of a larger installation I was hoping this work would
help to clarify their function as the focal point of this thesis investigation. Screens, and screen based

11

culture is what all of my artwork and research is centered around, and in or will it make anything alright? I
wanted that to be made more explicit.
Two artists that have inspired these formal choices are Jesse Darling and Takeshi Shiomitsu (Fig.
10). Their work, both together and separately, provides a great deal of inspiration in terms of installation
strategies, and the potentials of found object assemblages. I am drawn to the poetics of form in their
work, and the way they build relational contingencies between surprising objects. There is a celebration of
the banal as a way of building surprising new uses or ways of relating to familiar objects which is an
exciting and productive strategy. I am finding that there is a potential for constructions/assemblages to
offer new modes of existence and new methods of inhabiting the world and relation to what is already in
it.

(Left)Fig. 10 Jesse Darling and Takeshi Shiomitsu - Spirit Level, AND/OR, - 2015 (Right)Fig. 11 Takeshi Shiomitsu - PaleHistory - 2013(Figure
removed due to copyright restrictions)

Shiomitsu’s solo work(Fig. 11) also serves as inspiration in terms of strategies to decenter the
screen and attempt to de-monumentalize technology. Building a new relationality to screen based culture
is very embedded in my own practice, and seeing new techniques to forward that message is inspiring.
The use of found objects and construction materials in particular, in conjunction with the decentered
screens is an attempt to draw parallels about the ways in which these infrastructural materials are
overlooked as objects in and of themselves. This is a strategy to allow, or encourage, the viewer to think
about the screen outside of its normal position as a discrete object, and to draw attention to the larger
systems that these materials simultaneously produce and are produced by. Or will it make anything
alright? was made to explore the idea of demonumentalizing the screen, and developing the visual
association of the screen as a construction material. The primary motivation for my material research is
forming the idea of the screen as a site of identity construction and establishing a visual language to
express the equivalence between the screen and more immediately recognizable construction materials,
such as a pipe, foam, drywall etc. This recombination of materials is something I am using to draw
attention to the materiality of the screen space itself so that we can better think of it as a site of
constructed meaning, as opposed to a neutral method of content transmission.

12

Work III:
I sought to expand on these material
investigations in currently untitled:investigations in
foam(Fig. 12, Fig. 13) in order to see the results of
shifting the focus from the screens as the central
objects to the construction/infrastructural
materials, in this case foam. I was hoping this
shift would help to make the connection between
the two more explicit. I was also interested in
moving from the larger screens of the previous
installations to smaller phone and tablet screens.
The intention was to expand the conversation on
screen culture to include mobile handheld
devices. The mobile screens were left unplugged
running on battery power to highlight their
untethered nature.This installation was in many
ways less successful than the previous
installations but it did succeed in expanding the
conversation to include the increasingly
ubiquitous mobile screen.

Figure 12 - currently untitled:investigations in foam

currently untitled:investigations in foam consisted of three
foam screen assemblages suspended from the ceiling. The
central assemblage consists of a piece of salvaged carpet
underlay hung in a U shape with a phone sitting in it like a
hammock. The phone is playing a looping video of Hatsune
Miku dancing8. The left assemblage is composed of a piece
of yellow upholstery foam hanging from its center point on a
loop of yellow rope. Tied to one end of the foam by orange
Figure 13 - currently untitled:investigations in foam
string is a tenuous macrame net made up of flower knots
holding an ipad. The ipad is playing a looped video of CGI parrots flying in a blue sky. The right
assemblage is similar in that it is a piece of upholstery foam hanging from its center point on a loop of
8

Miku is a recurring preoccupation in my work and speaks to a certain anxiety about the state of production and consumption of
digital media. She exists as a corporately owned, but crowd sourced entity, and highlights the growing trend of prosumer culture, and
full monetization of existence and presence(citation).

13

yellow rope. A tablet is tied to the back of the foam by an orange string flower knot. This tablet is playing
a looped video of a CGI dove flapping its wings over a grass field.
This installation also has several floor based
components(Fig. 14, Fig.15). There are two screens,
one under each of the periphery assemblages, and
one pink dvd player on a large rolled up piece of
underlay at the back of the space. The screen on the
right lies on its back wrapped by a piece of underlay.
The screen on the left sits at a 45 degree angle
supported by a tied up piece of upholstery foam. It is
also sitting on a piece of underlay. Both screens are
playing the same gif of a sparkling popcorn ceiling.
Figure 14 - currently untitled:investigations in foam(Details)

I decided to work with foam as I was
interested in furthering my
investigation into soft forms that
started with the flower shaped blobs in
what if we could recognize catastrophe.
The contorted lumps suggested a kind
of constrained organic shape, or a
bound body. I wanted to explore this
bodily resonance in a more direct way
by making the soft bodies of
upholstery foam the central materials
of this installation. I was hoping the
Figure 15 - currently untitled:investigations in foam(Details)
contorted soft forms would operate as
a stand-in for a bodily presence, or to act as a suggestion of the presence of living bodies in this work. I
don’t think I managed to activate them in this way, and their significance is unclear as a result. Trying to
find ways to signify a lived presence is something I have struggled with throughout my thesis
explorations, and have not yet resolved. In the past I have relied on the performative use of my own body
in my installations to convey this lived presence, but as I have moved away from performance I have been
trying to find a substitute that can ground the work in the same way. Coming to terms with whether or not
this is necessary has been an ongoing process during this masters program.
While the upholstery foam was less than a success, the underlay operated just as I had intended,
and was one of the more successful elements in this installation. I chose to work with it as a material in
order to convey a sense of lived in history, and as it was salvaged from an old home it carried with it years
of use. It was stained and ripped in ways that marked it identifiably as an exhausted and consumed
material. Using such a recognizably deteriorated and labour intensive construction material helped
forefront the ideas of use value, and productivity that circulate in my work. Suspending it from the ceiling
was an effective way to draw attention to itself as a material outside of its use as an infrastructural
support. While this elevation was successful in regards to the underlay I don’t think enough of a relation
was made to the screens. The intention was for this questioning of the materiality to be carried over from
the underlay to the attached screens, as I was hoping a visual equivalence could be made between the
two, but they didn’t come together to make the conceptual connection in the way I envisioned. I do think,

14

however, this installation strategy successfully conveyed the sense of anxiety that is an undercurrent of
all of my work. It functioned to capture a moment of upheaval, or collapse, and forces the viewer to sit in
this moment and think through it.
The CGI birds are a repeating motif displayed on the screens that speak to this anxiety in a
different way by dealing with the idea of internet based conspiracy theories. There has been a
proliferation, and a rise in prominence over the last several years of conspiracy theories, and reactionary
alternative worldviews. For example, the reemergence of the flat earth theory, Anit-Vaxx propaganda, 5G,
Chemtrail enthusiasts, Lizard People and the arguable facetious idea that birds have been replaced with
drones by the government as surveillance devices. This rise in paranoid thinking is hard to divorce from
the general rise of disaffection, and is likely a response to the ongoing period of instability that has been
playing out since the beginning of the new millennium(Tanner ch.4),
There is a connection here between the
constant state of collapse we are currently living
though and the search for meaning in the increasingly
ridiculous symbologies of conspiracy theories. There
is also a parallel between the found footage relating
to conspiracy theories, and the salvaged materials
discussed earlier. Both are attempts to engage
critically with the “detritus” of the present moment.
The videos are generally pulled from youtube where
they fail to circulate with very little engagement.
Repurposing these poor quality videos allows for the
possibility of engagement with the margins of the
digital condition. There is a relatability to the poor
quality video, similar to that of the salvaged objects,
that allows it to speak to many things at once, while
not pinning down a specific reading. Hito Steyerl
offers this analysis in “In Defense of The Poor Image”

Figure 16 - the continuous failures of optimism(Thesis Install)

Poor images are thus popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many. They
express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for
autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for
transgression and simultaneous submission. Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the
affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for
intensity, fun, and distraction (Steyerl 41).
There is potential in these found videos, or poorly rendered animations, to speak to the entirety of the
contemporary moment, but it is also possible for them to say nothing at all. Steyerl points out the poor
image’s power comes from its resistance to commodification, which somewhat paradoxically increases
its ease of consumption: “They lose matter and gain speed” (Steyerl 41). I think pairing these appropriated
videos with the abject objects helps to ground them in a way that allows them to slow down and regain
matter. They become more expansive, more embodied, while still maintaining the strength of their
immediacy. These videos help to ground the work as an exploration of the digital condition which is
awash in these paranoid conspiracies and disinformation. This paranoia is being weaponized into an

15

aimless regressive force, that, instead of addressing the societally rooted anxieties that are creating the
conditions for conspiratorial thinking, placates with easily scapegoated phantoms.
There is an excess of negative affect swirling around these conspiracies, and the internet in
general that is being actively misdirected. In Ugly Feelings Sianne Ngai defines paranoia as “a species of
fear based on the dysphoric apprehension of a holistic and all-encompassing system” and highlights its
potential as a strategy of critique, but also points out the way it has only been legitimized in certain
circumstances (299-301). Ngai points to the failures of theory to react to the evolving systems of power,
notably capital, and becoming increasingly empirical as capital becomes increasingly virtual(300).
Embodying the systemic critique of the paranoiac is thus a potential avenue for critiquing the increasingly
abstract and amorphous forms of vector capitalism. Ngai concludes the chapter titled Paranoia by noting
that “while paranoid logic always offers ‘escaping’ as one option, it offers ‘thinking’ as the other’”(30?).
Paranoia can thus be activated as a call to action, and not just as a placation.
Engaging with these images that reference paranoid conspiracy theories is an attempt to reorient
how we relate to the digital, and to refocus the contemporary affects that are being directed towards
escapism as opposed to criticality. By recreating these spaces of equivocal, or amorphous, negative
affect in my installations I am hoping to foster the necessary conditions for new ways of thinking. These
are not immersive spaces because they are intended to disallow the opportunity of escape. They are
embodied spaces, but they are not places that encourage settling and are intended to function as starting
points. Each installation is a way to highlight the need to move forward in new and more radically
inclusive ways.
A final note about the works presented in this paper is that they also solidified a growing shift in
my practice towards more sculptural works, and away from the stylized flatness, or theatrical quality of
much of my earlier work. Earlier in this paper I established the importance of Cantonese Opera, and the
flatness of the picture plane in Asian art on how I conceptualize my practice, and these remain important
aesthetic influences, but as I progressed through the program I found myself working more in the round.
Highlighting the constructed nature of the viewing experience has always been important, and leaning
into the stagelike set up, and controlled access was a way to address this. I am still deeply interested in
the aesthetic qualities of digital space, and how it relates to theatre and flatness, but as I looked to
investigate the idea of creating multiple networked screen-viewer relationships that exist in the same
space utilizing flatness no longer functioned in the same way. The visual flatness created more of a
distanced viewing experience, which I think is an effective strategy for eliciting critical engagement with a
work, but affect is easier to convey through a more embodied experience. The installations became less
about situating the viewer in a way that was referencing the theatricality or constructedness of digital
space visually, and more about allowing them to experience the affective qualities of existing in those
spaces.
On Optimism and the Future:
The digital cannot, of course, be entirely described in terms of negative affect, and there is still a
great deal of optimism surrounding technology and the potential futures it promises. Techno-Futurism is
a movement that really emerged and took hold of the cultural conversation in the 90’s. Incredible
technological progress, and bright optimism at the end of the cold war combined to create an idea of
everlasting growth and prosperity. Into the early 2000’s this optimistic view of the future had largely been
curtailed by the beginnings of the war on terror and the collapse of the dotcom bubble(Schwartz and
Leyden). Technological progress, however, was not curtailed and allowed to expand into and reinforce this

16

new pessimistic worldview. Now even in the face of looming environmental catastrophe we are seeing a
re-emergence of the techno-utopian framework(Bina et al). These pronoiac fantasies are often employed
to gloss over the impacts of implementing these new technologies. Bina, Inch, and Perriera, offer a very
good overview of the ways this is employed when discussing new “Smart Cities” in their article “Beyond
techno-utopia and its discontents”. Critique is split into three broad categories, technological solutionism
and the economization of urban life, quantitative universalism and reductionism, and the illusion of
political neutrality of smart technology(9). They go on to say that planning “based on techno-utopian
ways of knowing and governing are colonizing contemporary futures in highly problematic ways:
promoting technologically determined and therefore reductionist approaches to urban development that
are blind to the political, social and environmental complexity that characterizes urban life”. Allowing this
type of determinism to guide planning and development essentially forecloses the possibility of existing
in certain ways, and literally writes marginal people out of these future spaces.
I am pushing back against this utopian way of thinking for exactly these reasons. A utopian vision
is impossible without an essentializing and universalizable subject, which, as someone who occupies
several intersecting minority positions, I know is not tenable. There is not a single utopian vision that can
account for the varied experiences and desires of the entire populace of a city, let alone the world.
Techno-Utopian thinking also presupposes an equitable relation to technology that does not exist. My
work is attempting to open an optimistic relation to the future by pointing out that it is still malleable. It is
not about prescribing new visions of the future, but opening the viewer to imagine for themselves new
potential ways of inhabiting the present and moving into the future. Bina et al, refer to this as “educating
desire” and show how speculative fiction can be viewed as building critical frameworks for alternative
imaginaries and act as an antidote to dominant forces of capitalist techno-rationalism (28).
My thesis project is thus trying to exist in an in-between space that encourages critical
engagement, and eschews a solidified endpoint. It is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic, abject
and celebratory. It is intended to exist on a spectrum that allows the viewer to situate themselves, and
hopefully build their own narrative into the future. Suhail Malik speaks to this need to overcome
determinism and reconceptualize our relation to the future in his article “Risk Exposure — Surfeit Futurity.”
He argues that there is a tendency in modern western thought to cancel the future. “Together,
neoliberalism and climate breakdown reduce the future to a zero-point or, at best, the continuation of the
bleak dynamics already in place, a modification of the dismal present.”(1) Citing Francis Fukuyama and
Frederic Jameson he outlines the defutrity thesis “that the future no longer orients or commands the
present”(2). He sees this idea of defuturity as a misunderstanding of the contemporary moment, and
posits that instead of a lack of futurity there is a surfeit of futurity. “Futurity overwhelms the present and
historical capacities to order or give meaning to the future and also to an internally permuting present.”(4)
For Malik the past present and future exist in a feedback loop with each other all interacting in a
“speculative time complex”(5). It is the failure of utopian visions, and the thinking they have created in
western thought that is preventing the conceptualization of different possible futures. By opening the
future to speculation we can move past the constraint that the future must be determined by the
conditions of the present(5). I think of my installations in this way, as speculations about a non
determined futurity, and hope they act as invitations for others to do so as well.
Ultimately all of the work and research I have undertaken during this thesis project is about
expanding our capacity to imagine the future. It has never been about determining ways to exist or to
move, but about pointing out the problematics of our current trajectories and uncritical relationships with
mediating technologies and the systems that support them. It is as, Ruha Benjamin writes, “about

17

reimagining the default settings – codes and environments – that we have inherited from prior regimes of
racial control, and how we can appropriate and reimagine science and technology for liberatory ends.”
(Race After Technology Ch. 5) There is a long lineage of critically alternative futurities, and my work is
about highlighting the need to engage seriously with these visions, and open the space for many more to
come. We must maximize the potential for new ways of thinking, and forestall falling back into default
positions. If the antidote for determinism is speculation we must encourage as many people to speculate
as possible. It is through critical and aesthetic speculation that we can resist determinist narratives and
move past the feeling of hopelessness engendered in the present moment and each of us enter into our
own uniquely radical and emergent future.

18

Postscript~On the thesis exhibition:
I approached this final thesis exhibition as an opportunity to revisit several earlier works, and
explore the possibilities made available by installing in a larger space. I was particularly interested in
bringing together the several discrete installations and sculptural works I had been producing throughout
the last year, and presenting them as a network of interrelated ideas or explorations. The idea of
establishing these works as a network came out of the experience of setting up currently
untitled:investigations in foam. I liked the way the multiple screens began to look like outcroppings of a
larger system, but I was not satisfied with how the individual screens were reading. I wanted to see how
they would function if instead of individual screens each outcropping was a full installation.

Figure 17 - the continuous failures of optimism(Thesis Install)

Thematically all of the works I had been making were dealing with the subjects I have presented
above, precarity, paranoia, conspiracy, futurity etc, so bringing them all into the same space allowed for a
deeper conversation to take place, both between the viewer and the installation, and the objects, images,
and materials themselves. Each installation zone was set up to complicate the viewing experience in a
different way in hopes of challenging the viewer to reevaluate their relationship to screen based media. I
think the work benefited greatly from being allowed more space, and more variety in terms of screen
deployment. Where the individual installations felt sometimes a bit restricted in how they could be viewed,
this exhibition allowed for a multiplicity of experiences which is an important development in my work.
This variety reinforces the need for new ways of thinking through, and being with technologies, and was
intended to point to the possibility of existing differently within these digital spaces, and reclaiming their
potentials.
While several of the elements were reinstallations of earlier works, I also undertook two entirely
new works, the central car seat based installation and the soft sculptural screen on the pillar. I wanted
there to be a strong center to the exhibition so I planned the dangling screens and construction fencing to

19

create an ambiguous sense of building/collapse. This idea of creating new relationalities out of
precarious situations is integral to my thinking so I wanted an installation that spoke to it more directly
than I had previously. I was also interested in questioning the idea of progress, and what it means to think
of the future as a non productive site. The inclusion of the car seats was an attempt to work through the
ongoing problem of how to imply a body in the work. I was originally planning to fabricate large soft
sculptural flower forms the size of bean bag chairs in order to point to a lived presence in the work.
However, I was lucky enough to happen upon the car seats in the free section of craigslist and was
immediately struck by their anthropomorphic form. I believe they ended up functioning much better than
the sculpted forms would have, and elicited a much more immediate affective response. Much like the
dilapidated camp chairs, they imply a body that is otherwise missing from the space of the installation,
and invite the viewer to question who’s body that is, and ideally to think through their own body in relation
to the work.

Figure 18 - the continuous failures of optimism(Thesis Install Details)

The piece on the column was intended to
operate as the focal point of the exhibition. I wanted all
assemblage pieces to carry the same weight, and exist
without a hierarchy of importance, but I envisioned the
single screen as acting as a point of authority. It is
intended to function with a different logic to the other
works, and hopefully invites critical engagement. It is a
sort of counterpoint to the potentials of paranoid
thinking represented by the cgi birds. The soft sculptural
frame was made in reference to the spikes used to stop
birds from perching on building ledges. The video is an
animated recreation of a viral video of a woman in
Myanmar streaming an exercise class while behind her
the military is beginning to stage a coup. This piece was
Figure 19 - the continuous failures of optimism(Thesis Install Details)

20

intended to show the perils of leaving our relationships to technology unchallenged, and allowing our
futures to slip under someone else's control. I was trying to work through my thoughts around the
complicity of screen based media, and entertainment algorithms with the weaponized nostalgia, and slide
into regressive authoritarian nationalism. I wanted this screen to really convey what I feel is at stake, and
what drives my research and artistic practice, the fact that we must actively fight for a radical future.
The question came up during my defense: “What does a radically emergent future look like?” and I
can’t say that I had a particularly good answer for it. I still don’t think that I do, but what I mean by a
radically emergent future is a future that is open to everyone, that allows everyone equal and equitable
access to the mechanisms and technologies of futurity. It is an expansive future, and one that can’t really
be defined as it necessitates malleability. I can’t say what the ideal future will look like to anyone other
than myself, and so it must remain an ambiguous space of possibility. My work has been about thinking
through how to highlight this need for ambiguity, for potential, for alternative arrangements.

21

Works Cited
Apprich, Clemens, et al. Pattern Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.
Bina, Olivia, et al. Beyond techno-utopia and its discontents: On the role of utopianism and speculative
fiction in shaping alternatives to the smart city imaginary. Futures. Volume 115, 2020.
LaMarre, Thomas. The Anime Ecology: a Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. University
of Minnesota Press, 2018.
Malik, Suhail. “Risk Exposure — Surfeit Futurity.” Making and Breaking, vol. 2, Centre of Applied Research
for Art, Design and Technology: Avans University of Applied Sciences, 2021.
Murakami, Takashi. Superflat. Madora Shuppan, 2000.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.
Schwartz, Peter, et al. The Long Boom: a Future History of the World, 1980-2020. Texere, 2000.
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2013.
Tanner, Grafton. Circle Of The Snake: Nostalgia and Utopia in the Age of Big Tech. ZERO Books, 2021.
Teixeira Pinto, Ana. (2019). Capitalism with a Transhuman Face: The Afterlife of Fascism and the Digital
Frontier. Third Text. 33. 1-22.

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Works Consulted:
Benjamin, Ruha. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in
Everyday Life. Duke University Press, 2019.
Bourriaud, Nicolas, and Erik Butler. The Exform. Verso, 2016.
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media. The MIT Press, 2017.
Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” Wired, Conde Nast, 1 Apr. 2000,
www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an Essay of Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1984.
Kurzweil, Raymond. The Age of Spiritual Machines: How We Live, Work and Think in the New Age of
Intelligent Machines. Phoenix, 1999.
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press,
2016.
Nakamura, Lisa, and Peter Chow-White, editors. Race after the Internet. Routledge, 2012.
Sawyer, Michael E. Homo Liminalis: An Africana Philosophy of Temporality. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Wark, McKenzie. Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019.
Wilderson, Frank. Afropessimism. Liveright Publishing Corp, 2021.

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Appendix:
the continuos failures of optimism(imgine), or what if we could recognize catastrophe?(capss)
Sit in, on?, your bed
or lack thereof (imagine owning a bedframe)
Leave your house(if you have one) Imagin yuou do if you dont, it doesnt matter
(it obvs matters
tremndsouly)
Don't go outside for a week or 2 or tehree
,or imagnie tht u have or tht u havent,
That u will or that u wont
we r still in bed(duh) but maybe we thnik about smthing beyong ourselves
, this is the importnat part, dont' allow urself too much interiority
,(but
do rmmber not trust too much an extrerior)
Download IMVU delter IMVU download IMVU delelte IMVU imagine how mnay times you can repeat thius
before learning what it is

imangine for a sec that ayn of this matters, or doesnt depedning on who u r (try nto to
mremain too aware of who u are or whoit was somehow decided u arer), unlwess ofcourse it is
incosequential(must be nice, lucky u...)
imagnie for a second that some ppl have never thoght about any of this and will nvr thiunk abt any of this
(then try,lol do i have to>? forget)
Imagine the ppl who are not able to thnk abt this anymore
Keeep their names in ur head, froever or until no longer necessary, a hopefully not poiuntless distintcion)
but thern keep them neways)
sometimes we r all they have lesft and that is ,of course ) very little consoloation
cry or dont cry depending on ur mood or the weather or the position of the stars or w/e
(rly just
recognize that ur mood is no longer a reliable compnanion)
, srry its out of my control)_
hold in ur mind hte idea of a coping mechanism
(now actualize it, bt worse)
wht it must be like to beallowed to exist
, the
vry thought!,
,what afeeeling!
cast your mind back to a time before evrtyhing became an exercse in mangaing expecations
imagnie a time b4 ior after u were assualted in the street, befroe
or after u developed a fear of ppl running,
,B4 or After,
(this time it rly doesnt
matter)

24