In the rush to get to the bottom of our own obscure or banal questions, it’s easy to ignore what these predictive searches really are: a kind of social cipher, an anthology of digital anxieties, a collective dreaming.
By merely wandering, the dérivist frustrates the spatial logic of capitalism, in the process discovering new currents, fissures, and vortices of possibility within a deeply familiar space.
Where does the materiality of reading end and literary posturing begin?
Was it in fact Warhol who wrote the Great American Novel?
The status quo is insidious because of its ability to effortlessly co-opt those tenses: a set of constructs born and shaped in the past, hardened in the present, and extended into the future by way of a tacit and self-serving agreement.
What am I reading? Ulysses, always Ulysses.
The gif, as a miniature model of specific experience, can be seen as a first faltering step towards a kind of tech-utopian vision.
These bits of buried poetry, the divergent and deeply personal connections I found myself making, ran like a subterranean river beneath the familiar cultural production of the Status Update.