glossary of daemons (ongoing)

“In multitasking computer operating systems, a daemon is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.”
—Wikipedia

🧟: You probably met at a party. Or at school. Maybe even at work. That, or your mutual connection(s) or some other unifying factor(s) will likely pull you back into each other’s orbit at some point, during which a superficial conversation about your respective lives will transpire as a ritual of decorum. As such, you zombie scroll past their intermittent acts (i.e. posts, tweets, whatever) with passive indifference, neither resenting them nor caring for the details of their life—unless, of course, the publicized details in question either (a) implicate your mutual connection(s)/unifying factor(s); or (b) intersect with your personal outlooks and agendas. You, like everybody else, unwittingly, apathetically, constitute the silent majority of other people’s audiences, none of whom you have found it necessary or convenient to un-fan, un-follow, un-friend (yet).

🕵: Maybe you’re a witch. Or a corporate agent. A card-carrying member of the press? Better yet: A registered Republican. No, a radical progressive! But wait. You’re too…what’s the word? Unique. What about “an-intersectional-hybrid-of-discrete-identities-that-may-not-even-be-compatible?” Did we get that right? Well, your costumes may change, depending on the circumstances, but a suit is a suit, and the objectives are clear: absorb, control, or destroy. You scrutinize every little thing your targets share about themselves with hand-me-down rubrics authored by the governors of your associations. Always so critical (“and rightfully so,” you tell yourself). Who else—who better—to perform the important work of surveilling the others? Everybody better watch their step, because you won’t be un-fanning, un-following, or un-friending anyone anytime soon. After all, somebody needs to be keeping tabs.

👻: You might have been/could have/would have been lovers. Soulmates. Your minds, or your bodies, or whatever, reached euphoric heights together that can’t so easily be forgotten (or, at the very least, be un-remembered). Then again, chances are just as well that you’re enemies, and that an undying inner compass will, on occasion, turn the needle in their direction, spurred by the kind of curiosity that’s only satisfied by the deepening of a grudge or a dose of schadenfreude (whichever comes first). Lovers. Enemies. Whatever the case, these distinctions don’t really apply in this limbo you’ve found yourself in. You are, in every manner of the description, a ghost: helplessly bound yet virtually incapable of making contact. So you haunt their digital footprint with your swirl of muted feelings: watching, waiting, willing something, anything to happen. God forbid they turn their accounts private (or deactivate them altogether).

🧛‍♀️: Coming soon!

🧙‍♂️: Coming soon!

Last updated: July 05, 2022

buzzing along

...everybody’s”reading”andalmosteveryoneisreadingwhichleadsmetowonderifanybodyisjust,well,reading.toomanyslipsandnotenoughslidestakesthefunoutofthestorm,butistoppedcountingbecauseitrainsallthetimenow.whichishowiknowthoseheadsdemand(plainandsimple);withothersit’stakenfromrightunderbyaquicktrick.sometimesthere’satrade,though,butthosearerare,oddenough.pinhere,butdropmeoffthere(here’sgood,too,thanks).oh,right,beenherebefore.beenthere,too.lookslikehighlighteryellowistheneworangeisthenewblackisthenewwhitewasthelastredandisnowblue,whichcouldbethenextpink(butneverpurple).somebody’sreading(nobody’sreading)butdoesn’tmattereitherway.whichisn’ttosayitdoesn’tmatteratall.dependsonwho’saskingandwhy,butwhoseopinionmattersinanygivencontextandhowdidwedecidethatitmattersbecauseikeephearingeverythingisrelative(orwhatever)onlythat’snotreallytrueisitbecauseweallcontainmultitudesandthosepositionsaren’talwaysinharmony.whoamonguscansayknowsforsure.idk.maybesomeoneisreading(ifyouare,pleasesay”hello”orsomethingtothateffectbecauseitwouldbenicetoknowthatsomebodyoutthereishere,too).justtryingto:falloutoftime/falloutofstep/falloutofline/falloutofit,theniremember… <loop>

casual encounters

Consider this sentence and what it’s doing: What this, in its totality, confirms about me in any given meta-contextual framework about/around me, and what that reveals about the string of someones hailing from a multiverse of elsewheres who each found it meaningful to co-construct a system of relations that presupposes me, presupposes you, presupposes that couple over there, presuppose themselves, even(?!), and—here’s the crux of it—presupposes David (Wojnarowicz), who I recall railing against pre-existing systems in a book of his audio recordings that somebody transcribed and published, that I read (but didn’t finish) over the summer, that then led me to discover, through others’ interpretations (and, sure, through my own, too), a man who also happened to have an acquired appetite for casual encounters, forming what I’ve come to perceive as our greatest common denominator (perhaps even greater than capital “a” art, which, I’ve been led to believe, channels authority from you—no longer somewhere: just. nowhere).

"take my breath away"

01. This is where Danh Vo’s spiral leads: Two plants, seated in pots, the only living organisms along the helix. Which is to say that the end of the path feels more like a beginning.

02. Looking up from the rotunda floor, K. notes that "Take My Breath Away,” Vo’s career retrospective at the Guggenheim, does nothing with the atrium. Unlike James Turrell's "Aten Reign" (2013), or Maurizio Cattelan's "All" (2011), Vo foregoes the museum's architectural potential for a simpler program, limiting our sites of interest in the objects on display. For the most part, the sculptures, photographs, and works on paper are confined to their areas.

03. In the first room, a marbled ruin from antiquity, severed at the ankles, stands in contrapposto amid two politically-significant sprawls of Cold War-era upholstery: One set drapes from the height of an exhibition divider, stained with foreboding silhouettes of Catholic altars; the other latches, a mass of weathered leather nailed to the adjacent wall.

04. About halfway up the ramp, photographs taken during the Vietnam War of young Vietnamese men living their lives—holding hands, perusing art galleries—along with typed and handwritten letters, all entice from behind their glass vitrines. These artifacts, the wall text offers, can be read as conceptual surrogates for Vo’s own history. Telling, since this reading is trending in popular analysis.

05. Philip Kennicott, in his review for The Washington Post, likens Vo's show to a "memoir in objects," a description that indulges what the artist describes as presenting "the tiny diasporas of a person’s life." But if, as Vo contends, the “self is plural,” then this framework limits the objects' imaginaries to a finite domain, expanding no farther than what his personal horizons can accommodate.

06. Grant the appropriated objects lives of their own and the possibilities multiply. Chandeliers acquired from the Hotel Majestic in Paris. A motor engine from a brand-name car that Vo’s father aspired to own. Family heirlooms. Vo activates these things from within, beyond, and between their material affects—but, as co-curator to his own show, he reminds us that he exists independently of them, too. Can we assume the reverse also holds true?

07. I'll concede that a big part of what makes this show interesting to me is its open fixation on Vo’s biography. His formative years, we're told, imparted a tragic series of misfortunes. And yet here he is at the Guggenheim, a once-refugee now Danish-naturalized international art star feeding us authenticated artifacts of material opulence alongside disparate accounts of lives under siege—all, invariably, in the splendor of their specificity. Realities rise and collapse, colliding and refracting, with little else than the artist's phantom breath binding everything together. Take his breath away and the objects on view yield glimpses into lives of their own.