Blake Butler - Nothing - A Portrait of Insomnia

InsomniaGames.com, $708.00

InsomniaCoffee.com, $1,588.00

Beyond these already begotten name tags, there are the endless reams of potential doppelgängers, poised to slink out of the void for somewhere around $9.99. The registrar’s suggestions in lieu of insomnia.com spill on for pages, each yours quickly, at a click, though by any instant also perhaps sucked up by another buyer, the eLandscape changing, becoming tamed:

FREETURMOIL.COM

BIGTURMOIL.COM

TURMOILLIVE.COM

EASYTURMOIL.COM

TURMOILONLINE.COM

NEWRESTLESSNESS.COM

TURMOILSTORE.COM

HOTTURMOIL.COM

MYRESTLESSNESS.COM

TURMOILPRO.COM

TURMOILFORYOU.COM

TURMOIL4YOU.COM

TURMOIL4U.COM

TURMOIL2U.COM

BESTAGITATION.COM

HOTWAKEFULNESS.COM

WAKEFULNESSPRO.COM

WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.COM

WAKEFULNESS4YOU.COM

WAKEFULNESS4U.COM

WAKEFULNESS2U.COM

YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

MYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

FREESLEEPLESSNESS.COM

BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.COM

EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.COM

HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.COM

TURMOIL4YOU.INFO

TURMOIL2U.INFO

TURMOILFORYOU.INFO

TURMOIL4U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4U.COM

SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.COM

SLEEPLESSNESS2U.COM

SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.COM

BESTAGITATION.INFO

YOURINSOMNIALIVE.COM

YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

YOURINSOMNIASTORE.COM

YOURINSOMNIAPRO.COM

YOURINSOMNIA2U.COM

YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.COM

YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.COM

YOURINSOMNIA4U.COM

NEWINSOMNIALIVE.COM

NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

MYINSOMNIALIVE.COM

NEWINSOMNIASTORE.COM

MYINSOMNIAONLINE.COM

HOTWAKEFULNESS.INFO

WAKEFULNESSPRO.INFO

WAKEFULNESSFORYOU.INFO

WAKEFULNESS2U.INFO

WAKEFULNESS4YOU.INFO

WAKEFULNESS4U.INFO

YOURSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

NEWSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

MYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

BESTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

FREESLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

BIGSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSLIVE.INFO

EASYSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSONLINE.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSSTORE.INFO

HOTSLEEPLESSNESS.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSPRO.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS2U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESSFORYOU.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4U.INFO

SLEEPLESSNESS4YOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIASTORE.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAPRO.INFO

YOURINSOMNIAFORYOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA4U.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA4YOU.INFO

YOURINSOMNIA2U.INFO

NEWINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

NEWINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

MYINSOMNIALIVE.INFO

NEWINSOMNIASTORE.INFO

MYINSOMNIAONLINE.INFO

Any one of these suffix- and prefix-affixed strings is potentially yours, a waiting doorway into somewhere to be developed or resold, or otherwise resigned to the middle ground of registration. Some of these may once have perhaps been bought and built by others and then abandoned, in the shape of houses haunted by what was and now is not. The skeletons of these once-entered and since-abandoned electronic rooms still abound here, archived, if not in brain meat or old caches, until somehow those archives crash or are erased, by some furious weather or magnetism, some god act. So much of nothing these days ever is deleted — copies of copies, zombified. What is spoken from any platform might appear in mirror sites at anonymous addresses without permission, culling text simply to feed search engines, traffic, endless spool: a silent congress, a morphing backlog, electronic window, every hour in your home. Spam folders stacked full of language piling up without an eye, sent by machines to millions of accidental or magnetized addresses, sometimes sucking actual unique messages into its vortex, claiming presence in the blank. The result here, with such influx, is that there’s so much being made you’ll never see — throes of constant building and recycling — an endless tunnel, corridors upon corridors of code. Many of these sites, too, are aimed at particular persons, in subsets of language. What will be missed. How does one choose. Soon it is the flux itself that is the identity, perused as unconsciously as one passes ads and grows old.

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“The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption,” writes Deleuze, “the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate — namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death.”182 Expression in the age under computers and endless replication continues to further and further incorporate the inorganic spread into its flesh, turning in on itself as would more and more mirrors, a reflective and variating outer shell — there are more nodes alive now than at any other minute in history, no matter when you read this sentence, no matter how long this book survives, until there comes some Other [pause] Meditation. And yet the light is on inside us, drinking. The light sees, eats, absorbs all. It “connects the tableau of cruelty with that of stupidity, and discovers underneath consumption a schizophrenic clattering of the jaws, and underneath the most ignoble destructions of war, still more processes of consumption.”183 And, grown out from this light, the outer scrim grows thicker, both holding out and holding in, silent in meditation, ever-present. So much is about an often unconscious but continuously updating manipulation of the existent, finding new doors hid in large maps, milking the error up into replication and recreation. There is virus, hacking, glitch. Within each of these, the thread continues spreading, knocking out new doors inside itself to keep up with the coming fold.

“You have to get people very quickly,” says JODI, an award winning duo of video game mod artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, specializing in video game mod and web browser crashing art. “You need to give them a karate punch in the neck as soon as possible. And then — of course — they don’t get to the details, and the site will just sit there for the next five years or ten years, or maybe 100 years. And maybe their children will have the time to explore the details… [(laughs)].”184 JODI’s work, like forced waking, and silence musics, spurts in manipulation of the error in a creation. Their piece My Desktop OS X 10.4.7 (2007)185 is simply a zoomed-in view of a user negotiating a Macintosh OS X desktop screen at rapid pace, scrolling and clicking and blipping back and forth through various folders, programs, access points; copying and pasting glyphs of command text; causing the system’s error sounds and movement usage tones while a synth-dictation voice spells out each move in collaged glitch. The result, while at first startlingly commonplace in appearance for the ubiquity of the computer screen as realm of art (and after all, we are probably viewing this video on our own desktop, a screen inside a screen), becomes quickly claustrophobic and manic in its process, made more so particularly because of its very banality and any day, everyday, but supermagnified terror sound.

The very fact of much of JODI’s work being indistinguishable but from certain stretched moments of daily integrated electronic experience is what makes it, as an entity, so effective — like the strange light of certain scenes in Inland Empire , there and not there, like ours but slightly off. JODI’s modded scenes of popular games like Wolfenstein 3D and Duke Nukem II catch the user’s avatars in glitch boxes made of colored space that interrupts the body and the air — sheets of architecture folding into limbs and breathing space around the user’s only tool inside the codeworld — while the errored sound of the game inside the game goes on. Another project, simply titled OSS , comes on a CD-ROM, which when inserted in the user’s computer immediately overwrites the desktop with a pyramid of 317 files. The effect, unlike the string of viruses and spam popular throughout the ’90s, is not to cause dysfunction, but to “manipulate the surface of your system. An interface is a translation of code and your understanding is what you believe and that’s all there is to a computer, it’s a language.”186