TESTS, ALLIES
AND ENEMIES
This is the point where the imaginary hero is torn in two. Except that there are no heroes here, just several points of departure for the non-fictional narratives of the now. The ghost is free. It spreads out to infinity, becoming one with the symbolic edges that replace the missing horizon. The body? It's the end of the body and of the subject as we know it. This is post-subjectivity, its symbol is the ghost. It cannot be seen, you cannot point at it, but you might sense it in the air, in the distance or around you. A hyperobject. It isn't unique and it follows patterns instead of becoming one. It’s fundamentally illiberal and it rises to birth out of the texture of the dreamscape. Nonetheless, it doesn't want to do any harm. In fact, it doesn't want anything. It's just your eyes playing with you, misidentifying how the light refracts on the window. You project your image onto it, because your brain cannot handle something that’s shapeless, imageless. That’s how through your own eyes, the ghost looks like you. Your words, your moves, your biases, your fears, your hopes, your desires. Slowly, you act like you were in there. You draw the lines of the constellation. The dream machines are observatories exploring the vast sky of data. Through the ghosts you try to become, through their moves you try to imitate, through their uncountable languages you try to speak on, they extract your subconscious, systematic behaviour and store it as a data body, a portrait of your ghost. This portrait is then used to restructure the constellation along the lines you drew, repositioning the ghosts not to be more like you, but to something you might like to become.
Inside Dream Machines
by [Hunor Karaman]
Onwards North