A body is being infected. Full of cells and borders, barriers, and thresholds (never membrane, never mucous), a body receives the world with which it reproduces itself as it would an infection, only as long as it protects itself against this world, disintensifying it, dimming and dulling the stringent light at the heart of matter.

Or, a body is the very defense against infection. A body is not autonomous, possessed, or self-possession by some ghost of a self. A body is all wires, cords, nerves, and strings that, while circulating code, traverse the cycle between transmitter and recipient without distinguishing them. A body is media and medium, already prosthetic. Or, a body is an infection. An infection from which a self must immunize itself.

A self then is a shield and a sieve. A self is a skin, and the skin is numb. A narcissistic self (from narcosis, numbness) is skin become scab in solidification of identity. At the edge of a body traversed by flows with neither source nor recipient, a self necrotizes itself, scabs, encrusts, excludes.

A narcissistic self loves its reflection, because this reflection is of an other, is another. Transcendence of reflection fails for a self that immunizes itself from itself.

This is violence: infection. This is identity: immunization.

Yet, there is another interpretation of this myth. Reaching out to the reflection that evades touch, touched as a reflection, one fades, one blurs, warped by gentle ripples. A narcissistic self confuses self and other, is this confusion. A narcissistic self blurs and is this blurring of self and not-self.

Yet, we live in a world where skin can neither sieve nor shield the world. Alienation blurs to fragmentation. Whereas violence produced in terms of infiltration, invasion, or infection founds itself on a clear distinction between self and foreign, friend and enemy, and all the walls where this difference is waged, violence for the self that is not so clear nor distinct is implicit and implosive. Such violence is waged with an excess of reality.

Too great a proximity to everything for a self without a skin, like the instantaneity of the wind, a surging without interiority. A surging without. Such violence is the self’s dispersion, dissipation. Not the loss of the real, but the more real than real, from which there is no retreat, for which there is no defense.

The flows and fluids of virtual art, where everything swerves and seeps out of everything else, can be described, like the musical mosaics of bod [包家巷]’s Nicholas Zhu, as “the sound of uncaring wind.”

One finds no solace there in a museum where there are no spectators, only participants. Like matter itself, the bodies preserved in various contortions and screams behind the pixels of this screen are not containers of souls, but, depersonalized to the degree of an abstraction without empathy, there remains… what remains. What remains?

A clearing. A moment of silence. Forgetting that you have forgotten. A zero-degree of intensity. Frozen, there, a statue in the fog. A ghost in the machine. A poem in the rupture of real. A song.

Listening closely to the whispers of The Recurrence of Infections, we might begin to probe this clearing that is not emptiness, though it is quiet. Where everything is all smooth exteriority and dull, frozen grimaces that neither express nor expose since there is no beyond inside from which light could shine. In repeating infection to the point of infarction, bod [包家巷] a(n)esthetizes the sterility of the outside, exposes the sleek vacuity of surfaces too smooth to expose themselves.

Shhh. A body is sleeping. Beneath the digital drift of static — a storm through whose thunder strikes electric, flashing ghosts and fleeting selves that flare in its snow — it’s quite simple, there’s a whisper, there’s a poem, quiet, simple.

The poem goes like this:

This is the sound of uncaring wind
As she told my child that she was leaving
He would close his eyes while crossing the road
And see truth
Bleached by the windowsill sun
And my lungs begin to blacken

A quiet clearing
Water sounds
No burns
 Nothing

Over time the silence of winter
Turns to summer, fades to fall
I forgot what I was missing
When grass began to whisper

A moment of silence.

A whisper in the wind as it surges through you who are dispersed in its wake. bod [包家巷]’s delicate sound design, on which is carried a voice that is dispersed into, a whisper that dissipates into, a shuddering as if something here had fled, is sometimes abrasive, sometimes excessive in cloaking the song of which it is the performance. Other times it is quiet, it is simple, displaying in the flush, fluid gestures of these statues their inexpressive longing to express that only a handful of interiority can offer.

The poem occurs there where the digital is pierced by and pierces the real that is no longer. To introduce a contagion into the outside, folding power in on itself, is to cultivate an interiority that screens, mesh, or plasticity cannot dissolve. To cultivate sleep. To nourish song.

In the fragile poem that courses through its caustic sheath — the many-sided and meandering conducting or performance of it — something like a seed of vulnerability is introduced, as if a virality into the computer that renders it real. A song so tender it exceeds its mediation, so too a dream does its sleep and a spirit its screen.

It can only splinter into supplements. A ghost, flickering in neon numbers, pointing at its ashes, as if to say, “I am too alive to live.”

A body is being infected. Full of cells and borders, barriers, and thresholds (never membrane, never mucous), a body receives the world with which it reproduces itself as it would an infection, only as long as it protects itself against this world, disintensifying it, dimming and dulling the stringent light at the heart of matter.

Or, a body is the very defense against infection. A body is not autonomous, possessed, or self-possession by some ghost of a self. A body is all wires, cords, nerves, and strings that, while circulating code, traverse the cycle between transmitter and recipient without distinguishing them. A body is media and medium, already prosthetic. Or, a body is an infection. An infection from which a self must immunize itself.

A self then is a shield and a sieve. A self is a skin, and the skin is numb. A narcissistic self (from narcosis, numbness) is skin become scab in solidification of identity. At the edge of a body traversed by flows with neither source nor recipient, a self necrotizes itself, scabs, encrusts, excludes.

A narcissistic self loves its reflection, because this reflection is of an other, is another. Transcendence of reflection fails for a self that immunizes itself from itself.

This is violence: infection. This is identity: immunization.

Yet, there is another interpretation of this myth. Reaching out to the reflection that evades touch, touched as a reflection, one fades, one blurs, warped by gentle ripples. A narcissistic self confuses self and other, is this confusion. A narcissistic self blurs and is this blurring of self and not-self.

Yet, we live in a world where skin can neither sieve nor shield the world. Alienation blurs to fragmentation. Whereas violence produced in terms of infiltration, invasion, or infection founds itself on a clear distinction between self and foreign, friend and enemy, and all the walls where this difference is waged, violence for the self that is not so clear nor distinct is implicit and implosive. Such violence is waged with an excess of reality.

Too great a proximity to everything for a self without a skin, like the instantaneity of the wind, a surging without interiority. A surging without. Such violence is the self’s dispersion, dissipation. Not the loss of the real, but the more real than real, from which there is no retreat, for which there is no defense.

The flows and fluids of virtual art, where everything swerves and seeps out of everything else, can be described, like the musical mosaics of bod [包家巷]’s Nicholas Zhu, as “the sound of uncaring wind.”

One finds no solace there in a museum where there are no spectators, only participants. Like matter itself, the bodies preserved in various contortions and screams behind the pixels of this screen are not containers of souls, but, depersonalized to the degree of an abstraction without empathy, there remains… what remains. What remains?

A clearing. A moment of silence. Forgetting that you have forgotten. A zero-degree of intensity. Frozen, there, a statue in the fog. A ghost in the machine. A poem in the rupture of real. A song.

Listening closely to the whispers of The Recurrence of Infections, we might begin to probe this clearing that is not emptiness, though it is quiet. Where everything is all smooth exteriority and dull, frozen grimaces that neither express nor expose since there is no beyond inside from which light could shine. In repeating infection to the point of infarction, bod [包家巷] a(n)esthetizes the sterility of the outside, exposes the sleek vacuity of surfaces too smooth to expose themselves.

Shhh. A body is sleeping. Beneath the digital drift of static — a storm through whose thunder strikes electric, flashing ghosts and fleeting selves that flare in its snow — it’s quite simple, there’s a whisper, there’s a poem, quiet, simple.

The poem goes like this:

This is the sound of uncaring wind
As she told my child that she was leaving
He would close his eyes while crossing the road
And see truth
Bleached by the windowsill sun
And my lungs begin to blacken

A quiet clearing
Water sounds
No burns
 Nothing

Over time the silence of winter
Turns to summer, fades to fall
I forgot what I was missing
When grass began to whisper

A moment of silence.

A whisper in the wind as it surges through you who are dispersed in its wake. bod [包家巷]’s delicate sound design, on which is carried a voice that is dispersed into, a whisper that dissipates into, a shuddering as if something here had fled, is sometimes abrasive, sometimes excessive in cloaking the song of which it is the performance. Other times it is quiet, it is simple, displaying in the flush, fluid gestures of these statues their inexpressive longing to express that only a handful of interiority can offer.

The poem occurs there where the digital is pierced by and pierces the real that is no longer. To introduce a contagion into the outside, folding power in on itself, is to cultivate an interiority that screens, mesh, or plasticity cannot dissolve. To cultivate sleep. To nourish song.

In the fragile poem that courses through its caustic sheath — the many-sided and meandering conducting or performance of it — something like a seed of vulnerability is introduced, as if a virality into the computer that renders it real. A song so tender it exceeds its mediation, so too a dream does its sleep and a spirit its screen.

It can only splinter into supplements. A ghost, flickering in neon numbers, pointing at its ashes, as if to say, “I am too alive to live.”