Dead End

How to accommodate grief in your life

 

An avatar whose intelligence is away from the keyboard rotates. On their back is a smiley-face; an emoji covered in cum.

Happiness stained.
All over.

As the figure spins a voice speaks: to it, to us, to you. A super-egoic breaching of the echo-chamber. A reading of poetry invoking networked pathologies, image dumps, blockaded communication networks. An imagist and splenetic journey through griefing as counter-protocol in our contemporary digital agora.

This work explores laterally the subcultural phenomenon of griefing within online culture, posing modes of image-gathering that grief play has generated in the now ‘dead end’ world of Second Life, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environment. Using screen capture alongside photogrammetry we documented a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs).

Screening at: OVERPR!NT AG!TATE  ACT!VATE

 

How to accommodate grief in your life

 

This artists’ text examines the relationship between photographic images and Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) environments. We note that such scripted image worlds necessitate a fundamental reconsideration of the capacities of image, its formation, reproduction, storage and circulation. As an archaeologist would document an excavation, extending conventional methods through 3D visualization technology to work in new ways with the archaeological record, we chose to document a world built and razed digitally by a now dormant group of anonymous gamers called the Yung Cum Bois (YCBs). We turn to some definitions of griefer as a subcultural phenomenon within online culture to attempt to contextualize our involvement some more, thinking through the forms of image-gathering that grief play has generated, such as scripted object attacks where image-objects spawn and self-replicate, continually spurting out copies of themselves, lagging the region, slowing down frame rates, consuming land resources. Here we witness images blockading network logistics. This was active fieldwork. We got involved. We applied visualization technology learnt from archaeological computing research to the avatars, temporary structures and abandoned ruins of an online world, Second Life (SL). We patched together a kind of virtual photogrammetry, enabling the monumentalization of avatars, objects and scenarios, recompiling these into new configurations and uploading them freely to be reused, detourned and weaponized by our virtual friends. We situate this endeavour within a cobbled history of imaging technology, the networked self and its pathologies, riffling through our own image dump. Here.

Philosophy of Photography Volume 7 Numbers 1 & 2 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article.
doi: 10.1386/pop.7.1-2.83_1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Luchador Grieves

Grief / Grieving

Sadness To Incorporate

Actions that lead to sadness

To experience a grievance

To FEEL a wrong

Bad Feels.

Manly tears.

Butthurt monitors.

And then they spawned their shit, freezing

And then they fucked w/ my moment

My frame-rate

My frame of reference

A crashed sim

A world that is frozen

Frozen pubbie tears

Drunk by a squad of goons

A disquisition on community

To be-together, alone?

Not a unity…

A division in common

To meet each other as common problem

Sovereigns or Multitudes

Will inaction

Being in action / will to power

Authority or pleasure?

No death principle

No reality drive

And then you did something really bad

And then…

Lynx breath

Hot Breath

Beasts in glass, stirring

Shadow

Glass

Salty Edgelords

A transformation of beasts

Beneath nature, virtual embodiment

Exploratory spires

I’ll right it, they say it.

Bubblegum and palaces

Encompassed, bearing weight

This is assigned!

Assignation. Resignation.

The dead ends of possibilities.

To accommodate grief in your life.

To attend to separations,

Internets and srs-nezz.

This has stood here. A really long time.

To connect, I cut.

Connect. Cut.

Flows and breaks.

A machinic logic.

A narrative of filtration.

An outside, gone viral. A camp, camping.

An epic history of nothing.

Ephemeral exchanges, refused communications.

Caught jerkin’ it, you mili-furry animal!

Low expectations as continual revolt.

A party of cum.

Pro-recreational hazards.

I weep. For my possibilities.

Your tears are my fuel.

N00bs and old-fags.

The summer of 93. I have been there since…

In the basement of neck-beards rage.

[hate speech section]

The trouble of naming…

Would you die for me ~

Hi,

I am getting in contact to ask for some help.

My friend, you see, is lost.

Down a black hole.

A toe was stuck in a black tar pit.

Suction and pull.

Lost.

A squirreling set of pathways of circuitry and community. Leading nowhere.

A dead end.

A cat, burnt out, burning up.

A project of community building based on common division. A desire to embitter worlds.

Embittering. Embattled. Better.

An entertainment.

No longer paining / paying to be entertained.

We entertain ourselves.

Gloomy masturbation in proximal warfare.

Infernal kings and commons.

Poops and Walmart.

Cumbois in eternity.

A question of trying to work something through.

You see, she is building.

A family, a set of friends.

A multi-themed sculpture.

Occupations and Avatars.

Subjects and Objects.

Narratives and Programmes.

Gamers. Gaming.

I ain’t playin’.

Play-fare.

Misery / or grief.

To grief /

To turn one’s eyes white.

To shadow.

A plague upon your HAUS.

A contagion.

To play.

Exploit.

To play without purpose.

Swerves.

Good grief.

Polluting one board with another.

Goodnight the cancer known as …

A disquisition of play

That which is disquieting.

Once upon a time: a matter

teh internetz is a srs buzinezz

fuck you

antagonism against computation.

Trolls against mods.

Are you a wizard?

To accumulate points. To acquire edge.

A competitive logic.

The citizen’s logic.

Compute / Consume / Comply

Cosplay.  

Play!

Or… not.

Genuine play. That’s a fucking laugh.

A doll which the evil wizrd has turned against us.

Capitalist methodologies

Desire and thanatos

Kill and fuck

Comply and consume

We live in a dead end.

Moving round the corner to full stop.

I went on a march once.

It was very playful.

Shattered expectations.

A swerve.

A swerve of the dice.

Thrown.

Lives gambled away.

Played out.

Ex-haus-ted.

No survivors.

Bare survival as encouragement.

Outsourcing.

Dead.

To kill. War. Vengeance.

Civility.

Enmity.

The ends of community.

all in this together

A shitstorm of inequality.

Fuck you.

Don't lose your chance to choose.

Singing in the rain

FIVE YEARS: 29.10.16.
FILM NIGHT SCARY MOVIES.

your tears are my fuel

horrorshow jammiwam
toten tanz

Woe, grievous Woe, to all who now In this vile World abide;
For Times await you big with Grief,
And every Ill beside.

brexit tears drunk by a squad of goons
ganking spanking suffering

He smiled, eyes sliding out of focus.
"I was dreaming…"
"Dreaming what?"
"I don't remember… we were singing. In the rain…"

singing by hausu
dancing by dead

The Ballad of Virtual Dependency,     

digital Video 1hr 30 minutes

The Ballad of Virtual Dependency is a compilation of  5779 postcards from the W-Hat Archive.  W-Hat, now defunct, was a group of goons associated with the Something Awful forum, active on online platforms, notably the computer game Second Life released in 2003.  W-Hat built collectively, modelling content, scripting actions and roleplay. Their symbolic milieux, Baku and W-HAT, were 3D collages, a changing scenography of original content and found objects, generational elaborations, transindividual significations, collectivities and antagonisms. Their postcards present a vulgar vernacular history of 3D modelling: low poly provocations, self-replicating objects and weaponised images.

Screened at Annihilation Event  2017