Gut feelings: Indigestibility as an archive of surplus Otherness
My mother always told me to bleed discreetly. I have taken heed of this warning in my pursuits, biting my tongue before the words can spill over. But the wound festers, and now I find myself bleeding on everything I touch, so to speak. I want to admit the wound for the little girl I was, picking at this scab, begging to be believed. So I return to those nostalgia-steeped snapshots of girlhood, and interspersed between there’s the crispness of a particular, recurring bodily mechanism: vomiting. I didn’t know at the time, but nausea- its psychological and ideological loadedness- would critically recalibrate my relationship to just about everything. Indeed, when it comes to primal bodily sensations, Moveable Feast is deeply indebted to my illness, for the set of experiences it granted me.
Immersive proximities / Critical distances: Revitalizing the Gesamtkunstwerk and Brecht's Dialectical Theatre in the metaverse
From its outset, the ‘total work of art’ has been marked by unreconciled dialectical tensions. Between its sharp-tongued condemnations of technology and simultaneous reliance on it, its yearning for decentralised mass transcendence and its slippage into totalitarianism, the multifarious incarnations of the Gesamtkunstwerk have not served as actualized visions so much as a recurring dream. That is not to say, however, that these contradictory impulses signal a hopelessly vague lineage, destined for “the trash heap of history” as Lebbeus Wood has proclaimed. Even while its specific taxonomy remains ambiguous, the Gesamtkunstwerk- precisely its dialectical struggles- have proven fruitful as a means to understand critical pedagogies in the new millennium, taking on forms far beyond the term’s geographical and disciplinary locus. When taken to be a loose assembly of aesthetic elements rather than a monolithic, centralised endeavor, the potency of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic ideal among interdisciplinary art forms since the nineteenth century becomes undeniable.