Images of Lightness -
a written essay on Jimmie Durham, digital material and intimacy
publication; edition of 36
(Paper, Ink, Glue)
Written and produced over the course of a year, I ended up deciding that the thing that was supposed to have become my bachelor thesis should be regarded an independent work. (This is not because I am convinced it exceeded all expectations in sheer quality, but due to it’s essayistic nature, the label “thesis” simply turned out giving it too much of a definite frame)
[excerpt] “On tuesday the 17th of November 2015 at 10:15, my friend Miron Galic sent me an iMessage. This seemed strange, for I never use iMessage. Also, the speech bubble appeared empty. To be sure, I tried copying the contents into a different textfield, nothing happened.
We have been holding an empty conversation since then. Every so often, we send each other text messages that appear to only contain a variable amount of space characters.
Its twin, a mirrored image, living in this other box of photons that is Miron’s iPhone 5, what I’m holding in my hands is one half of a Rorschach, stretched through space and time, quite literally. All textual and visual individuality annihilated, except for a name that was assigned to some numbers, years ago.
Pure interface, pure software, pure communication, beautifully distilled, all that is left is a sense of shared space, or time, whichever. Maybe touch is something that does not happen only to the ‘touch screen’. Maybe it does not only reside in the microscopic changes in pressure between the glass and the backlight, measured by capacitive sensors. Maybe it does not stop there.”
digital version(only a few hardcopies left, hmu)
