The Lament of the Network
Written by Ilaria Sponda in occasion of The Odor of Box in the Heat: Lament on Containment and Capture by Linn Phyllis Seeger
“In the final stage of his ‘liberation’ and emancipation through the networks, screens and technologies, the modern individual becomes a fractal subject, both subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed on himself and doomed to endless identity (1).”
Jean Baudrillard
The contradiction of the network lies in its very nature: it interconnects subjects and things while isolating them in physical space. “Network” is a word linked to the concept of care and support, both in real life (IRL) and online. There are not many public talks on positive networks of care nowadays in our Western culture as we grow cynical about love. “Cynicism is the great mask of the disappointment and betrayed heart,” to quote activist and writer bell hooks. Networks build platforms, which are nowadays similarly dead if we consider the higher rate of ghosting and the generated divide rather than the connectedness. Dutch theorist Geert Lovink says, “All we can do in the current social media architectures is transmit news. But outside social media, communities do not merely generate news.” Endless identities, enclosed within the network, enclosed within the self, witnessing an infinite world consumable from a four-walled bedroom and its intimacy.
For Linn Phyllis Seeger, intimacy is a form of currency under today’s communicative capitalism. The moving image piece “The Odor of Box in the Heat: Lament on Containment and Capture” reflects on the ways in which communicative-capitalist technology manufactures morbid, uncanny futures. Considering the interconnectedness between the password-protected interior of one’s mobile device, the domestic and sexualized intimacy of one’s bedroom, and the encrypted high security environments of current and former urban fortress-architectures, these futures are being understood not as generative spaces that are wide open and unfold linearly, but as enclosed, labyrinthine interiorities where time is a loophole — spiraling just as the laundry in this remote laundromat in the middle of the Italian periphery.
The piece is set in the Cloud, which manifests itself here as the artist’s 3d-rendered bedroom and a generic crypt. Morbid interpretations arise from the affiliation of the two: a bedroom is a private space par excellence, a place for personal worship, yet as well, some kind of burial – a boxed space, where every object holds a story. There are no objects in the rendered room though. Instead, various, unrelated scenes seem to emerge from the bedroom: a clip released by the Pentagon in 2020, showing two navy pilots tracking down (supposedly) a U.F.O.; various crypts and cryptic spaces throughout European and U.S. sites and cities; intimate iPhone-shot footage of a person at the sea, a person dancing. The bedroom is a case, a box, a cage of meandering visions that appear with no apparent sense of cohesion. The bedroom is everyone’s bedroom, accessible from personal devices in this semi-public space.
Throughout her artistic research, Seeger has adopted an iPhone-based methodology to explore contemporary modes of intimacy enabled through digital communication. “Social networks and urban spaces are the sites where my work is rooted, both seen as fluidly interconnected rather than two separate worlds,” she asserts, kind of confirming Lovink’s thesis of the Internet’s invisibility, thus its intrinsicality with today’s routine and structure. Yet these 3d-rendered lovers lying down on a bed are not expressing any emotion or energy, while being drained of their energies by the Cloud and the machines that produced them.
“Intimacy is utilized, played out as an instrument of power, where trust is a manufactured good made of relatable content and self-extinguishing DM’s. To a certain extent, communications technology has always been a means to bridge physical distances and has been facilitating intimacy through the circulation of information and private messages across geographies, ever since the installation of telegraph lines (2).” (Seeger 2023).
This distorted kind of intimacy is further enhanced by the muffled voiceover running throughout the video, which is an excerpt from the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb”. In 1877, Thomas Edison tested his newly invented phonograph by reciting the first verse of the rhyme, making them some of the first lines of spoken word to have ever been recorded and played back. An unsettling, yet reassuring lullaby articulates the passing of time: a lament of the network, oh so active, yet so anonymous.
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- J. Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Verso, London, 2015, p. 64.
- Seeger, Linn Phyllis. 2023. “Linn Phyllis Seeger”. Interview by Author. Accessed December 23rd, 2023. https://www.coeval-magazine.com/coeval/linn-phyllis-seeger.
