A Backstory from My Backrooms
Do you like movies? Then you'll love my 4000-word essay on backrooms, no clipping, and the AI discourse
On August 1, 2019, in response to a query about what “no clipping through the backrooms” means, a user dubbed “Dragonvarine” on the STEAM app community forum replies, “It means you lost. You descended into madness.”
In April 2023, I wrote a rangy essay on a particular shade of Pantone yellow, dogs and the dog days of summer, A.I., premium mediocrity, gaming, the ‘no clipping’ game glitch, the ignoble end of the U.S. War in Afghanistan, poetry, narcotic technology, the September 2021 cover of Vogue, Dennis Cooper’s 2005 novel God Jr., sculpture as IRL rendering, the iPhone as an apparatus, and the internet myth of the ‘backroom.’ As with many societal issues plaguing us today, the backroom can be dated to a 4chan post.
Commissioned by Swiss Institute in New York for a catalogue somewhat belatedly accompanying a summer 2021 solo exhibition by artist Jan Vorisek—the book actually came out last fall!—I worked on this furiously over the course of a few late nights while simultaneously preparing to install a solo exhibition of my own. To wit—I was on fire.
Sadly, a major portion of the essay was axed from the first run of the book due to a printing/layout error. My friends at the institution were appropriately horrified and they made a sweet goodwill gesture of messengered merch, donuts, and assorted exquisite pastries. See, like God, I too forgive the penitent.
With the release this weekend of newly crowned cinema auteur Kane Parsons’s A24 joint Backrooms, along with a recent essay by Prof. Shira Chess on the genealogy of the ‘backroom’ and ‘no clipping’ for her Substack The Unseen Internet (and the MIT Press Reader), I thought now the perfect time to circle back and re-release this essay of mine.
ENDLESS SUMMER
For 2021, the Pantone Color Institute chose two shades for its annual “Color of the Year.” One was a saturated yellow, a choice that was couched in the following rhetoric:
As people look for ways to fortify them-selves with energy, clarity, and hope to overcome the continuing uncertainty, spirited and emboldening shades satisfy our quest for vitality. PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating is a bright and cheerful yel-low sparkling with vivacity, a warming yellow shade imbued with solar power.
In Jan Vorisek’s exhibition No Sun, staged in New York over the course of the summer of that year, a curtained swathe of yellow—not yellowed with age, just freshly acrid—was an eye-searing feature of his video installation Dog Cloud (2021). Or, at least, that’s how I remembered it. The fact of the matter is, the PVC curtain that impressed itself upon me was downstairs in the show and the video was upstairs in another room on a monitor surrounded by a ring of heavy, black curtains with a plastic midsection I’d characterize as a color on the verge of becoming. It makes the word orange wither on the tongue. The tension of its indeterminacy, the threat of oscillation, turns the shade into a shadow, like a threat in a horror film. And yet, oddly enough, that aspect originally didn’t seem as impactful in comparison to the show’s overriding take on a primary color. It was gold, the way a trophy in a video game might be, and yellow like the color of piss. I mean this as a specific compliment. One odd connotation of “yellow” is cowardice or gutlessness, a projection still apparently lingering in the lexicon of Oxford Languages, which strikes me as slanderous to the tint of yolks, a generative substance, or the cast of lemonade—the stuff one traditionally makes out of sour offerings.
A placeholder in my mind for this show was yellow because the windows had a filtering film covering them on that second floor, too. There was no natural light, no sun, then, allowed. It was sparse, and on reflection, even lonely. Only staging and media—like a setup for some kind of game that was already over. An untitled sculpture in the show, made of epoxy-coated Styrofoam chiseled and painted into a form that looked like a prop from a post-apocalyptic film set or first-person shooter mise-en-scène—imagine a piece of the labyrinthine walls of the original Doom (1993) transposed from rudimentary 3D graphics into high resolution for reality—seemed to confirm the hunch. In retrospect, I start to get the joke. It’s not fun, but it is funny. Now, more than ever, we need gallows humor just to cover the blues.
August, when I saw Vorisek’s show, is the most heated, sluggish time of the whole year. It was on August 17, 2017, that the writer and consultant Venkatesh Rao set forth the term “premium mediocre” as a term to describe “millennials”—particularly the bicoastal, gentrifying variety—in an article he published on his blog, Ribbonfarm.1 Rao considers August the premium mediocre month, similar to how a pundit once declared in Slate, a month before 9/11, “[August] has a dismal history. Nothing good ever happens in it. And the United States would be better off without it.”2
The dialogue throughout Vorisek’s video (whose doggy aspect, for the record, involves a shot of a German Shepherd briefly bounding through a field) is of a similar tone and cadence as the script etched into a number of metal tags he made for the show. Two of them were safety-pin-piercing the aforementioned drapes, right near where one would push the fabric aside to enter the room, and another was given to me by the artist that summer. On one side of the metal is a protruding pattern of raised dots modeled after the grill on an intercom speaker, and on the other is an oblique poem:
The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer
Gasping Apart
The Agonal Frazzled Memory
Encounter A Brittle Fantasy
As if in a parody of emphasis, those odd lines have a chiseled, vermilion underline on the medallion—a design motif that conveys a vaguely official or authorial seal, regardless of the actual information being conveyed. Here are the first lines of dialogue in the video, delivered by two people in what appears to be a control or command room, where little seems to be being actively managed:
“When did you get back from the desert?”
“Well, I got drunk last night. Everybody knows, I think.”
They are actors, ostensibly, but I have no idea who this “I” or “you” is, and, frankly, I think they’re evading a “when” question with a “what” answer. “Who” is very much in doubt, of course, and the video doesn’t chase after clarification thereafter. The untrue, or at least unstable, seems more realistic. I mean this as a compliment—identity verification is inescapable in a contemporary, digitally linked society and I like to still imagine the possibility of a person who just doesn’t care if you understand them or not. A little illegibility is welcome these days, especially in a city where, as the palpably beleaguered collective editors of n+1 bemoaned in their Winter 2023 issue: “For thousands of years, this was the principle of illumination that triumphed over all others. Louis XIV’s Versailles and Louis the Tavern Owner’s tavern had this in com-mon: the recognition that some details are worth keeping hidden. But now blinding illumination is the default condition of every apartment, office, pharmacy, laundromat, print shop, sandwich shop, train station, airport, grocery store, UPS Store, tattoo parlor, bank, and this vape shop we’ve just walked into.”3 Artificial light, of course, no sun—that natural heat just gets worse every year. I want to believe the illegible will inherit the earth, but there may not be much of it left by the time the VIPs of visibility are done with it.
The lines from the metal tags seem to be a version, or perhaps a rewrite, of a similar text that served as the title for a sculpture—The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer Retention Gasping Apart the Agonal Frazzled Memory Fading from Interior Energy—which the artist made in 2020 of a resin-cast hand encaged by a metal exoskeleton, or elaborate jewelry accessory, depending on one’s tastes. It was included in a solo exhibition that same year—Song for Dead Time at Zurich’s Galerie Bernhard—and the adornment, or a close version of it, has also been shown by itself as a discrete sculpture (Hallucination, Memory, and the Terminal Oracle, [2021]) and appears again in the video Dog Cloud as worn on a real human hand belonging to somebody reading aloud a text wherein a series of assertions start to sound like some tautological mission statement. “Sound becomes noise / noise becomes music / when entertainment becomes pain / pain becomes entertainment.” Echoes of the words start to press upon subsequent ones, turning the speech into a whirlpool and draining itself with the final ambiguity: “Where ambient becomes ambition.” That’s the end, period.
But it’s not the whole story. That final phrase itself was a continuation. An installation from 2020 shown at the Kunstmuseum Bonn was titled The Ambiguity Between Ambition and Ambient. A literary reading is a form ostensibly for the expression of an author, as in poet, or character, as in an actor portraying such. They are assumed to be explicable or to have some underlying psychological motivation or profile, but the subjectivity of Vorisek’s characters in this video as they’re written, or as they read, is no more revealed than is the personality of an automated voice as omniscient narrator from a prior scene, wherein rapidly blinking purple spirals accompany a stream of words and clauses imparted too quickly to comprehend. The human rejoinder then, like feedback, seems like another distortion. A repetition becomes an endemic quality of a human mimicking the machine. Is this how one exhibits a desire to transcribe, to annotate, or to be overwritten? Is this modeled by the artist in forms sincere or facetious? Why not both?
In the artist’s book Image Distortion Continuum, which Vorisek produced for his exhibition Collapse Poem at the Kunsthaus Glarus in 2020, he opens the first section, “An Incomplete Guide to Chaotic Writing,” with the following: “Feedback and Distortion—two inextricably connected phenomena— weave information in on themselves and extend back into the body that they originate from, so it appears they overwrite precisely that body they once stood beside.” And that is precisely what I initially suspect when I see somebody reciting words well: they are being overtaken, as many of us are in the more banal yet technologically cutting-edge way by the once-exciting promise of instant digital communication. One can say anything, but what if we’re just being read down by the machine and then saying what we already know it wants to hear, to project, to amplify? We don’t really need to say anything anymore—the machines will learn from and talk to each other, and we won’t have to understand a thing! No questions—just clear answers, right or wrong. This, I’m told, is an exciting new proposition for culture and society. Incredible. I don’t mean that as a compliment. I’d rather have something so subtle that no machine, much less many people, could even receive the signal.
Jan Vorisek’s sculptures and installations are rangy, consisting of found materials and objects he makes, or ones he alters, assembled into tableaux that tap out messages, perhaps for the ears of a dog to hear. Once I realized that there seems to be no center to any of it—you can declare fealty to the parts, but there’s nowhere to land, really— I became more sensate to it. It’s a piecemeal attachment style convincingly arranged as a broad collation—or coalition—of forms or references, all containing kernels of information that one can free associate from or with. This is one of the few ways I have left to describe any sense of reality. It is certainly my own devotion strategy, to constellate shards and shrapnel of the assault of content that experience has become in a digitally interpolated, interrupted, and discontinuous life. The personal is (still) political, after all. There’s a certain instability to Vorisek’s work that I identify with, especially the repetition, reiterations, and versions of forms, which in his case seem to be spiky lumps, pedestals in curious proportion to their proffered objects, humbly functional furniture as ambiguous detritus, metal attachments and spiraled coffee tables, or even bricks that look like cinderblocks. There’s a “poor image” quality, after Hito Steyerl, to these actual edifices.4 The blocks memorably appeared in Memory Hotel (2020), installed in a room where the light was filtered by gels in scarlet and sunrise red. More Doom, or is it just doom? The real things in his world are visible in ours, too, but given the way he presents physical matter and ambient light as either isolated fragments or an art-directed encounter, they look rendered. As if waiting to be dragged and dropped into the right production, or making you feel like you somehow stepped onto one in medias res. It jars—something’s missing, something’s off, the transition is sudden. From that, the work derives power.
Writing in the summer 2013 issue of Artforum, art historian and critic Michael Sanchez surveyed some effects of digital circulation and aggregation websites like Contemporary Art Daily on the aesthetics of contemporary art.5 After 2011, when he claims mass critical usage of the iPhone was reached, the traditional premise of the art center— whether that be cities as incubators of artistic scenes or institutions as functionaries for artistic legitimations—was dislodged, the visual proof of which was in part the prevalence of galleries adopting overhead fluorescent light fixtures in order for their shows to resemble the ones CAD seemed to favor. (As Sanchez argued). Art would now inevitably be made to appear and be seen primarily on a smooth screen, probably an Apple product. The transition was sudden, and its flattening effects still percolate. If you, the artist, weren’t already seen before this point, then you had next to no choice in the matter of getting viewed. Decentralization is hawked as an ideal for tech and finance, but contemporary art was the lab animal for it this past decade and change. The phone is an apparatus, after Giorgio Agamben, which turns the art object and the subject of the artist into nonsubjects captured on slides like cells for study of their replication and reproduction. Smart. I see years of Jan Vorisek’s art, which he has been exhibiting since 2011, as flat planes on an Apple-manufactured screen and believe its depth and dimensionality anyway. Similar to the 3D of a render, where verisimilitude models a live experience, reality turns into an extension of the virtual. This is the major business of our time, and an artist’s work is charged with making a story out of the reality.
His looks not just coded for some subcultural signification, but coded, like something you’d expect to find in a room you hadn’t walked into but rather had pushed the “B” button on a controller to drop into. This is akin to falling out of reality and into a backroom—a fictional concept that has taken on a real life of its own as many notions that started as jokes on a 4chan forum have. The backroom is a liminal space, a seemingly endless series of rooms, hallways, and doors—generally lit by overhead fluorescent lighting for harsh, yellow, labyrinthine spaces—that feels familiar regardless of one’s ability to pinpoint where or what exactly this is. This place, if we can call it that, is strongly associated with the suspicion or fear that there is someone or something somewhere in it even if they never appear. Such an affective dynamic is referenced as a pervasively unsettling quality in Vorisek’s work, like a noise, and the volume on the uncanny manifestations of it can be modulated to the point of making it subtle and totally missable, or sharply alarming. It becomes clanging in Devotion Strategy (2020) from Collapse Poem, where an inflatable black polyester maze occupied a room of the institution.
One could go inside—there were some stools, a metal and glass table and lamp draped in black mesh, along with a single-channel video displaying another series of spaces, including a subway car and other hallways resembling the architecture of bunkers in some villain’s lair. This is a room with not so much a view, but windows onto further rooms, and where have I seen that spiral metal coil on a glass table before, anyway? It was similar to, if not the same as, an earlier sculpture—Crime Design (2018), the low-slung, chrome rings of which may well be a bootleg of or riff on Eileen Gray’s Adjustable Table E1027. In a story, motifs reappear for a reason. Reoccurrence establishes a sense of time. Foreshadowing, perhaps, portentous, yes, but then again, one could say this was also just a room filled with air. And the backroom isn’t real. But stories, like faith, can make one act and feel like anything is possible. This is both dangerous and the only way some can live.
Jan Vorisek and I are about the same age and prob-ably both remember when video game graphics were clusters of sharp-edged polygons lit to look believable. But it wasn’t real and it didn’t quite look the part. But there was something more interesting than credibility going on: by rotating one’s perspective in the game there might be a sudden and accidental glimpse underneath a 3D structure or object, revealing it to be an empty contour of the shape or character. This was one of my favorite moments in gameplay—when it became obvious that it was a construction, that there were gaps and holes and the illusion wasn’t all that fluid. The code didn’t have to be cracked, it visibly already had cracks, and one could take a good, long look. I did not know there was a term for this until recently: “No clipping.” Generally speaking it’s a tool for programmers that allows them to see a level from a different perspective. The command can be entered into the debugging consoles of PC games to turn off collision detection so that a player might pass through solid objects in the rendered environment. Newer games are gorgeous; they look flawless and impenetrable, even better than real. I can’t get interested. And I have noticed that it’s considered a beautiful experience to be absolutely immersed in a fastidiously engineered world where the user has no agency and cannot break or build anything beyond the rules of the game. Mission accomplished . . . ?
Vorisek doesn’t seem to be trying to convince me of anything, but rather quietly and doggedly advances a subtle agenda of bait and switch. It gives a setup that is meant to be seen through and deliberated upon, not embraced. I trust this process over art that claims clarity and directness because this mode places its faith in me as a viewer to determine the findings of the experiment on my own. This is rare, and beautiful. With an oddly playful lack of sentimentality, his practice tempers the illusions it sets up by insisting on the overall picture’s artificiality. He exports a piece to one show that he first imported into another; when he renames a piece, like a file, with minor changes or adjustments, it undermines easy identification as well as our inclination to assume discrete works are, like solid identities, unquestionable and unassailable. What we take for granted about objects in space becomes imperiled. Bodies notably seem included but mostly in the form of Vorisek walking through or standing still in his rooms, generating noise, distortions, feedback that forecloses the figure or subject of the artist as locus of meaning. I start to wonder, if I held out my hand and touched the work, would it really be solid? Thoughts like “Is this real?” give way to “Am I?”
On August 1, 2005, American author Dennis Cooper’s novel God Jr. was published by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. The New York Times, in a review published on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, declared it “the literary equivalent of machinima (films made from video-game images).”6 I think of the book as illuminating yellow, which is odd in retrospect, since the cover design features none. The spine and back cover do, though. It seems I’ve remembered this work not as a flat cover, or straight text, but as an object spatially and as spread open but also turned over, as if for no one but a person who was going to be thinking about it even without the words in front of their face. Imagine having no proof of being overtaken, nothing to recite back with total recall, only sixteen years of living in your head with a story that never fully reveals itself no matter how many times you go through the lines— the facts of the matter—again.
The main character of God Jr. is a father, Jim, whose teenage son, Tommy, is dead from a car crash that also partially disabled the driver, Jim. He’s pretending about the latter bit. It seems he thinks it helps him appear less monstrous to others if they think at least he suffered, too. Before the accident, he was a real estate agent who covered parts of the Hollywood Hills and did well. The post-9/11 falter of the market provides him with a window of opportunity to raze a lot adjacent to his house and try building a monument to his son based on one of the kid’s drawings. A neighbor dubs the incomplete project “folk art run amok.” Problems quickly arise—the drawing hastily consulted as master blueprint is a mess, poorly rendered with no actual interior indicated, ergo the father’s monumental reconstruction has none either. It’s hollow, with red and yellow scales screwed on as a skin. And then the drawing turns out not to have even been made by Tommy but the kid’s girlfriend. Jim was finally trying to get close to the boy, and now here’s another distancing effect. This is a comedy of errors played in the key of unresolvable tragedy. The quest for clarity and control is, clearly, a failure, and the book isn’t even a third of the way over yet. It gets better, or worse, depending on your sense of humor: the father turns to playing the video game that the son played, in which the original structure he has ruinously imitated actually exists—to whatever extent one might possibly deploy the terms “original” and “exists” in such a context—to find the inside world of the monument.
In short, he no clips into a backroom, a purgatory where he declines to participate in his game-overed life and extinct marriage and instead devotes himself to getting high and having existential exchanges with oddly sentient characters. Clipped, steeled sentences narrate his unhinging as a Socratic dialogue between humanity and its works—the virtual creations speak to him beyond his comprehension, or so he imagines. Sounds familiar. He lost everything after something of apparently little value to him in life was lost, killed off. He’s not blameless. The story is unclear if his descent is for the purpose of an ascent, or not. Redemption is in the eye of the beholder, the reader, or user, of this book. I’m using it right now. It’s no coincidence that in the parlance of technology and drugs, all participants are “users.”
On August 1, 2019, in response to a query about what “no clipping through the backrooms” means, a user dubbed “Dragonvarine” on the STEAM app community forum replies, “It means you lost. You descended into madness.”7
Jan Vorisek has another sculpture, titled The Incomplete Interior (2022)—it’s a plywood plinth incorporating Perspex, Styrofoam, resin, PVA, paint, latex, paper, and cardboard. The installation photo of it makes it seem tall but proportionately it’s about the scale of a smaller human. And its ruggedly metallic appearance is a ruse—these are lightweight materials playing a role, and its central tower is a model for nothing on a foundation of poly-styrene manufactured by Dow Chemical. I don’t need to explicate what they’ve done, it’s common knowledge, and this substance of theirs fills land with trash we will never escape. If Vorisek’s model was built, the resulting place or locale would be as brilliantly, tragically unhelpful as Jim’s useless yet inescapable edifice.
During the last month of No Sun, the United States made its dramatic exit from Afghanistan. The work wasn’t done, the game in the desert wasn’t over, but then again it never would be, so better to cut losses and quit while behind. Some might say, “You lost.”
Walking around New York you might see many spaces where a commercial business has vacated, leaving the place in limbo, unused, or banished from use. Such locations have been allowed to lapse into nowhere. You could say these are not real places, in a sense. But there it is—I can point to it and anyone can peek into their windows and see nothing for themselves; it’s not my hallucination. The Modell’s on Atlantic Avenue, Rite Aid on Grand Street, CVS at Union Square, the Duane Reade at Broadway and Lafayette—to name a few liminal spaces. New York has some of the most valuable real estate in the world, and yet these locations are accurate images of it, too. Is this a joke, or is it for real? Why not both? To quote Venkatesh Rao: “At some level, civilization itself is at a transitional premium mediocre state somewhere between industrial modernity in a shitty end-of-life phase, and digital post-scarcity in a shitty early-beta phase.”8 We’re running out of real room to live because of stories that became systems about the way things work that some-one( s) somewhere(s) once made up. Realistically, I might instead say the answer to such issues is “beyond my purview,” or, I could recite poetry:
The Radiant Pressure That Shimmer
Gasping Apart
The Agonal Frazzled Memory
Encounter A Brittle Fantasy
Try introducing that aloud into the discourse—as in a national conversation, or, just between you and me and the world—then perhaps a clear and illuminating reply would be:
“That means you lost. You descended into madness.”
Who, me?
Right at the end of the run of No Sun, the September 2021 issue of Vogue was published. On its cover, in the background of a gaggle of models—headlined “in real life”—there was a man facing away from the camera and looking at his desktop monitor, on which there was a brilliant rising sun.
Now it’s spring. A new billboard has gone up on Canal Street: Apple has another iPhone to offer us. Oblong, canary-colored, and illuminated by stagy lights above, the phone is held forth and slightly tipped forward, like a monstrosity about to squash us with its cool smoothness. It is looking down on us and occupying the lion’s share of the foreground. This is the new principle of illumination that triumphs over all others. “Hello Yellow” the board says—and it’s giving more dread. I was nudged into the desert of the real by simulations of a life. I believed a premium-mediocre fiction, and now, in a sense, I’m trapped in an empty room. I’ll keep believing, I will just walk in these halls—do I have a choice, really? The city recedes further. I rarely see the sun and now it’s almost summer, again. It’s nothing personal.
Afterword, May 31, 2026:
I had a few further thoughts vis-à-vis Shira Chess’s aforementioned essay as well.
As Chess notes, the backroom “touches on everything from Gothic literature to internet folklore to video game culture to ’80s nostalgia. But above all, ‘Backrooms’ captures a feeling — and one that I would argue has become a defining condition of life under Corporate America: dread.” The precise naming of this structure of feeling, after Raymond Williams, seems useful.
She has a specific and intriguing thesis about the backroom as an articulation of what she calls “Institutional Gothic.” I didn’t quite register the ‘backroom’ as gothic in the literary sense she invokes though, with qualities of “duplicitous, monstrous antagonists, terrified heroines, fragmented narratives, and the supernatural.” The readers themselves projected all that into the backrooms—going on a simple, crummy digital file—using their own imagination (our minds being the true loci of horror). Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for one, is a gothic novel because of what she wrote into her book. At the time, people were horrified that anyone could imagine what she came up with. Her story was considered astonishingly nasty and the characters remain so to this day. (She also didn’t care much for grammar.) Now, the would-be reader simply hallucinates or dissociates it all on their own. This is authorship now.
I think the backroom concept has moved in that gothic direction though, given the tone previewed in trailers for Backrooms.
When I first learned about the backrooms what I found compelling was its lack of such structuring devices or narrative qualities like gothic, romantic, conceptual, etc. And its lack, the blankness, even meaninglessness, was its pure, untapped potential as material. This interests me because it’s a quality common to a range of cultural phenomenon or physical experiences, from the original QAnon ‘drops’—contemporaneous with the backroom’s…discovery?—to sounds in your apartment building at night that can’t quite be placed or traced as an effect of a particular cause. I’ve written previously about conspiracy as folklore—see my feature in Spike #62, ca. Winter 2020—and this premise that feeling or affect could be attached to something so seemingly simple, even banal or cruddy reminds me of something Mike Kelley said in a 1992 interview. “If I could make something that moving, that could have you frightened for the rest of your life, and all it was was a piece of clay that falls off a piece of cardboard . . . That so much emotion could be invested in this piece of shit—that’s amazing.”
And one final note:
“Cyberspace is dreamscape, a place for exploration and reverie. […]The theft of the capacity for reverie by the social industry, the way it has used gaming-industry techniques to lead us into a guided trance, down pathways lit up with virtual rewards, is therefore no trivial matter.”
Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020)
“In a generally devastated global human condition, the Blue Bicoastal Millennials of the US represent The Little Demographic That Could.” Venkatesh Rao, “The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial,” Ribbonfarm (blog), August 17, 2017, https://www.ribbonfarm. com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocrelife-of-maya-millennial/.
David Plotz, “August,” Slate, August 1, 2001, https://slate.com/news and-politics/2010/08/august-lets-get-rid-of-it.html.
“Why Is Everything So Ugly?,” n+1, no. 44, Winter 2023, https://www.nplusonemag. com/ issue-44/the-intellectual-situation/ why-is-everything-so-ugly/.
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux Journal, no. 10, November 2009, https://www.e-#ux.com/journal/10/61362/ in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.
Michael Sanchez, “2011: Art and Transmission,” Artforum 51, no. 10 (Summer 2013): https://www.artforum.com/ print/201306/2011-art-and-transmission- 41241.
Lenora Todaro, “‘God Jr.’: In the Game,” New York Times, September 11, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/ books/review/god-jr-in-the-game.html.
Dragonvarine, STEAM, August 1, 2019 @ 5:53 p.m., https:// steamcommunity.com/app/1111210/ discussions/0/3158630999999006556/.
Rao, “The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial.”
Thanks for the response to my work. I am still chewing on this, but your point player/audience/user projection is well taken. Aligning it with the 2021 pantone in your original essay was something I hadn’t considered… nicely done.