Antigraphic
A struggling monkey lies strapped to a dentist’s chair. The chair faces a compound eye of flashing monitor screens, each displaying a different video feed. Trails of wire hook the monkey’s most interesting nerve centres to an array of monitoring devices.
This monkey is you. You’re caught in a deluge of sensations. Bombarded twenty-four-seven by the million pinpoints that taken together and taken for granted feel solid. Our monkey squeals.
Or perhaps the room itself is you. The room in its necessary context, with its unique selection of channels. The monkey has no name but the room is called Self.
I am a hermit. I am hermetically sealed from the world by a malady of perception. I was not formed from my society; I am not a child of my time. I know nothing of Coke, or MTV, or any technology. My thoughts are eddies in a teacup; do not mix into a sea flowing with currents of fashionable memes. Can Shroedinger’s cat survive in this purgatory? When I die I will be reconnected with a tribal narrative. They will create a story for me and resolve the fuzzy greys of my life. They will open the box and see that the cat has been resolved, poisoned.
But no; I am no hermit. I am a trader. As an artisan I weave tapestries filled with vivid colours borrowed from the world around me. I barter and negotiate for your similar creations with crude gestures, and we exchange and finally understand each other. In an acknowledgement of tradition, these tokens we have exchanged are ancient clay tablets of Sumeria…