there’s a strange, kind of petty problem that i feel like i have been facing from strangers and sooometimes, peers around my circle of work. i feel a bit like a child writing about this, but it’s so frequent and strangely upsetting the more it happens that i’d kind of like to air it out, especially because i don’t have much power or visibility to begin with.. this is also kind of an exercise in trying to name this weird thing that impacts me
i see patterns of young people, usually (but not exclusively) similar to my age and background, entering the space of practice i am in and meticulously crediting influences, artists, etc. — except for me. circling around me, sometimes directly using my code, assets, thought, language, ideals, crediting rich circles of influences — but never me. i’ll do a surface skim of someone i’d love to speak to, and see this weird mirror of every article i’ve recently shared – not general concepts (i’m not so original), but exact material i’ve been collecting…
this one was directly copying my CV – down to the google docs title i used ? 🙁
i’ve witnessed the obvious things like taking a game made with my gamemaker and erasing all attribution–which is expected when you make tools like this, but the more dreadful part is the more selective circling of words; a suspension of myself not just by deleting lines of code, but constructing this ecology of influences and being and work that take everything i’ve produced and am surrounded by and love and breathe but removing me, my name, despite my collaborators being there
how do you describe this form of erasure? it is the most ambient one, but also the most harrowing.
sometimes it even goes to tweeting quotes from my talks that i haven’t really shared outside, circling, circling, so strangely; as if i’m being systematically omitted from being, reassembled elsewhere, selectively being unacknowledged. this creeps into doubts about my worth
other times, this happens with other peers in the space without so much as a heads up. it doesn’t feel like sharing infrastructure, it hasn’t felt generative. most of the times, i’ve tried to commiserate about my constraints in work, time, legal status, sense of place to these people in larger positions of power, and then be told “but i do so much”; most discussions with supposed peers have often made me feel dismissed in my struggles, despite them reassembling my verbatim words or form clearly in some way…. these days i think about how low-trust i am now, and how i’ve had to claw myself into being for much of my life
i’ve been feeling very invisible lately and these small accumulations kind of weigh on me. maybe it’s easy to replace the shape of myself. perhaps many of you deem me unnecessary. it’s other people that make us disappear
Suffering is no longer interesting, so I’ve begun the process of dying.
I started abstracting my feelings into art, which is why it’s ever the only thing I am interested in doing these days. It feels urgent–a survival mechanism–saving myself in order to save others, understanding all human beings as consequence. I stopped writing when my anger became violent, and its visibility is difficult to display.
Nothing new is happening but self-acceptance. I listen to myself talk about love like a child, I think about my mother who bore me as a barely-child, I live again in every abandoned world and truth. Look at how far this dependence on delusion has carried me: now I can walk to the Pacific any day and give myself to it. All grandeur is still as immense. I’m not detached enough to think that excess has become mundane, and still find myself rational enough where I create most problems in my life by delay, doing the wrong intentionally. The same logic is used to crucify myself for anyone who will bear witness.
I looked at myself so much that I made this body of nothing into something. Before this, others had to believe that there was something in that gesture: that when I looked, there was weight, a mass, a calculation. The intention was to suppose significance, to put one thing in relation to the other thing in the world. All dead, dormant things with taste and color and hue and their own voracity. All this life might be a history of longing. I’ve become the environment, and no one can help but see me.
Kristin Ross writes “For the only way you can belong to your era is without knowing it—which is to say, through belief.”…
February is short but my life is even shorter. The more I read the more I understand invention covers emptiness; my impetus to record is mostly a sign of regression. My only faith is in the tangibility of attending, everything else so compensatory.
I’m making things that are ambitious, and I am growing unkinder. Here is a site where the whole world can be willed, where you play god; here is another where the houses flood the screen, where people suffer and you watch them in the nook of space; here is one where my whole humanity is excised, with no one to run through. The most interesting of the past years is of field recording (and proximity) and performance (and intimacy), getting comfortable with wasting people’s lives and my own, attention to seeing, seeing becomes all surfaces. Of course in the work I put in, I want to make myself divine, or make an experience close to the divine, or represent the sublimation of the divine. Of course, there are already too many stories about 23-year-olds busy making to make themselves.
When people ask what’s on my mind, I talk about simple things: not knowing where I can legally be in a bit over a year, a persistent detachment from America and its all, the desire to author something so heavy that everyone else has to write in it.
There is nothing new in the morning. It is just as beautiful.
