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Melancholy Broken Body
The links, short essays and even shorter fragments presented here as “Melancholy Broken Body” constitute neither comprehensive resource nor critical argument, but a mood board. Each element prods a narrative that is as incommunicable as it is hard to avoid in our experience of making, thinking and interacting online: that of the body’s relationship to our wares – hard and soft – and of that connectivity’s impact on the spirit. There is a sadness out here on the web, a kind of immanent loss that breaks our bodies in the way that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome does, pinching a nerve to cause paralysis and somehow agonizing numbness.
What follows is a spoiler alert, perhaps, for those who choose to read through Julia Kristeva’s “On the Melancholic Imaginary”, reproduced to our right: the article concludes with the thought that works of art “enable us to establish less destructive, more pleasurable relations with ourselves and with others” and allow the ego “to assume an existence on the basis of its vulnerability to the other”. Let this be the function of our work online.
Special thanks to: Alessandra Hoshor and Paige Johnston.
It's time we start a healing process
The Eternal Internet Brotherhood
The Eternal Internet Brotherhood’s “About” page and introductory video explains the project succinctly: it is a gathering of artists – friends, perhaps – convened to rehabilitate creative and communicative practices through a restorative use of “data, dreams, feelings, knowledge, light and sounds.”
On the Melancholic Imaginary
Julia Kristeva
In “On the Melancholic Imaginary,” Julia Kristeva cites Fyodor Dostoevsky’s notes for his 1872 The Devils (which has also appeared in English as Demons, or more interestingly, The Possessed):
“[…] My head ached, my body was broken. In general, the fit’s aftermath – that is, nervousness, a hazy and, in a certain way, contemplative state of mind – lasts longer now than in preceding years. Previously, this passed in three days and now not before six. In the evenings especially, when the candles have been lit, a hypochondriac sadness, without object, like a blood-red tone (not tint) over everything.”
This passage fragments the body of the author seized by his work. The “hypochondriac sadness” that takes hold as the candles are lit occurs today before the glow of a screen, without object, like a white-blue tone (not tint) over everything.
The Brightness
Cécile B. Evans
Most pop cultural dream analysis resources online will reiterate the folkloric association of losing one’s teeth in a dream with anxieties relating to loss, attachment, and death. Freudian psychoanalysis is consistent with this, suggesting that men who dream of losing their teeth are fearful of castration – a significant loss, tied to identity – specifically as a punishment for onanism.
Cecile B. Evans’ The Brightness (2013) stems from the artist’s investigation of Phantom Limb Pain, part of a body of research to which I contributed a Skype interview with a Dr. Cecile B. Evans – a research nurse who specializes in working with patients experiencing this pain, and whose name mirrors the artist’s down to its middle initial, “B.” The Brightness’ 3D animated choreography adds to Evans’ interrogation of how emotions inhabit and navigate the immaterial and material realities of our networked: detached from our mouths, our teeth do not disappear, but come together to assert a singular, circular, and uncanny “presence of loss.”