Until I recall which direction I was trying to go and I burned my soul with that, burning thru the friendships I had made. Contemplating love and regret, regret that was about me, regret that was parents, regret that was I, regret that was not disappointing it about myself, regret that had pain like that, regret about this and that too. Honestly confused - creasy in the memory.
∴
Last September, I met someone with whom I quickly developed an intense connection. The dynamics of our relation seemed unmistakably brimming with possibility, that I interpreted its futurity as inevitable. Instead, the gaps between messages grew, plan after plan was cancelled, and I began to unravel. The future I had so confidently imagined myself into failed to materialize.
I experienced this event as a crisis. It shattered my relationship to reality, particularly my relationship to the flows of time, and to how I understood a particular archive of events would unfold into a future.
∴
For Lauren Berlant, a crisis is always a crisis of causality, it occurs when X doesn’t lead to Y.
∴
He used to come to the park and sit by the fountain, saying i was the first girl he loved. I got interested in him and transferred my feelings to him. every year we sit here after school and cry and we say things like 'Don't let this happen’.
∴
As I spiralled further and further into a depressive episode, I became preoccupied with archiving through writing every moment of our brief time spent together. When writing failed, I would go on walks to revisit the scenes of our dates, restaging the sensations of our encounters. I refused to ‘move on’, ‘to get over’ the event that shattered me, convinced that dwelling in in the aftermath of failed futurity would lead me somewhere else. X did not lead to Y and so I needed to find my way to Z.
∴
‘Moving on,’ ‘getting over,’ are placations that manipulate us to sew together the pieces of our fractured selves in the aftermath of a crisis. These phrases orient themselves towards a linear thrust of time, asking us to move forwards by finding a way back to an approximation of that which we were before the event in question. Melancholia, or the refusal to re-sew our attachments to straight time’s thrust.
∴
Please Markina keep trying to make a fuss about liking the serious male roles, it'll get u closer to becoming something worth dying for.
∴
I felt as though returning to the scenes that set up my eventual undoing were exactly what was required to find pathways that lead elsewhere, towards a Z whose contours I could not yet imagine. Revisiting the scenes of possibility – now also marked with the knowledge of their failure – might be considered maladaptive, insane even, as if these returns might produce the outcome I had initially desired. But these returns turned me towards other feelings and other places – parallel temporalities that spun out from these spaces made leaky from desire.
∴
Language is a violence against affect. Words that become habits of speech – tighter and tighter containers for inexpressible experience with every (re)utterance – have a habit of foreclosing the immediate in favor of the abstract.
∴
I grew up here. I was so happy to be myself there, but I also considered my queerness so personal. I still love this place, and it's the place where I come out to my parents. I’ll never forget this place, and my mind and heart, but that never happens. I’m like a ghost in the woods.
∴
In the months that lead up to and followed this unravelling, I had been developing an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual data of Queering The Map, a spatialized archive of over 139 000 user submitted LGBTQ2IA+ experiences from across the world. What resulted was QT.bot, a digital intersubjectivity capable of generating speculative queer and trans narratives and the environments in which they might occur. The stories that populate the virtual landscape of Queering the Map range broadly from tender moments of intimacy and connection to experiences of trauma, violence and dehumanization. QT.bot digests these polyphonic affects, weaving together possibility and trauma, without closing the wound.
∴
What happens in the rupture, in the break, in the collapse?
∴
Our map wasn't neat, turned into some timeless things. A rose compared to every trunk, buds too have their richer and better guise. It's changed the way we find life in things, much more.
∴
QT.bot is an exercise in queer failure. Whereas the aim of commercial text generation AI is to produce text that is indistinguishable from that which is written by a human, QT.bot refuses this normative logic by producing texts that do not pass. In doing so, they reveal that failure is also a space of possibility.
∴
To dwell in the aftermath of desire-cum-disaster, is to cultivate a kind of negative hope. It sees failure not as a finality, or a position of discomfort from which to gather oneself and continue forward through linear time, but rather as a splitting force that fundamentally shatters and reorients one's trajectory.
∴
I had such a great first kiss with you here, but the beginning and the end of that kiss makes my heart break.
∴
I am depressed and manic simultaneously. This might be what underlies my desire to articulate/theorize a kind of negative attachment to the world that does not foreclose futurity, but finds just as much pleasure (if that is the right word) in its failure as in its success. A way of being in the world that is as tuned into the ripples of failed futures, wayward temporalities, as it is the thrust of the present and its horizons in the “real”.
∴
As I write this I am listening to Juliana Huxtable’s DJ set for HÖR x TTT x United We Stream. A thread in the comment section reads as follows:
D Momcilovic:
Some good tunes here, but many don’t work and mix well. A bit erratic
Riley Hooker:
It’s important to invite chaos in to your life
Xeena Ellison:
ERRATIC IS THE NEW STABLE!!!
Juliana Huxtable:
SHES MANIC
∴
Worked here for about half the year after 2nd week of prom. I was thrilled to watch the artistic show held under a massive house dome at Mystery Island. When I said goodbye to welcome my friends to our place, two good friends in 8th grade told me I was a sociopath.
∴
When I moderate Queering the Map, I dissociate. How else am I supposed to process the proximity of:
“We finally got married! 1st lesbian marriage here”
with
“You held me down and raped me. You took my soul. The police laughed at me because I was a gay. I still see you sometimes. You smile. Taunting me. I will never forget.”
∴
Lauren Berlant, thinking with Stephanie Burt and Tony Hoagland, defines dissociative poetics as “realism for a world in crisis.” Realism, in an aesthetic sense, is concerned with depicting the world ‘as it is,’ forgoing the whims of subjective interpretation in favour of ‘objectivity.’ Dissociation, as it is understood through a lense of pathologization, is always outside of objectivity, it is to lose touch with reality. Dissociation is a response to the ‘too muchness’ of an event, particularly when the event in question is one marked by trauma.
∴
Either I was queer here or it was just down the street, we're too early to say.
∴
Losing oneself in the speculative visions of LGBTQ2IA+ life that QT.bot propagates is an experience of dissociation – a mode of processing that Lauren Berlant considered to be “an affirmative force for loosening the world.” Time, space, and subjectivity collapse, excavating from the ruins the multiplicitous visions of the parallel possible. Logic unravels, and the human desire to make meaning is put to the test. We read into the beyond of what QT.bot presents to us, building scaffolding that leads to places beyond causality.
∴
If the future is unknowable, perhaps the best we can do is rehearse for its unfolding by looking backwards, building roadmaps from the fragments of the parallel temporalities of the could have been, the happening then, the happening there.
∴
Walking through that future, and since then, I never looked back, now that I know it made sense.
∴
Deciphering the ‘what went wrong’ of this fledgling relationship as a means of rebuilding in the aftermath of heartbreak, proved to be futile endeavour. Immersing myself in the disjointed worlds of QT.bot enabled me to loosen my attachment to causality as a tool for sensemaking in the aftermath of failed futurity. QT.bot became a refuge, the friend whose shattered mode of processing the world felt the most relatable to my own.
Like QT.bot recursively wandering the worlds of Queering The Map, I returned and returned to an archive of experiences I was unable to ‘make sense’ of. Attuning to the seeming incoherence in the broken links of their stories, oriented me towards pathways that ran parallel and beyond the Y that never came, to find my way from X to Z.
∴
Perhaps incoherency does not signal a lack of meaning, but an excess of it.