Jake Watts
Invited to collaborate by Kirsty Hendry
PP
*
The others and I had been itinerantly chipping away at the newest projection; we were all communing within the perimeter of that document, occupying roles and anticipating moves. Our fluidity was evident, but your cursor dragged my peripheral gaze wayward with its incessant and glowing amber blinks. I watched with fascination as your words tumbled forth; you traced backwards and forwards editing as you went; I had no knowledge of what your next move would be; our intentionality was veiled by our silent simultaneity, and yet I was enthralled. Our immediacy placed us in the same moment, the same inhabitable locale. We were threading and forming a stimulating collaborative endeavour; its perplexing interchanges between artifice and reality flooded the page with opportunities to become more than just our individual incarnations. In that moment I was with you and wanted to be next to you.
*
Grasping a position in time is becoming a brutally complex multiperspective task. I know that living through glocal rhythmic lexicons has gotten me all glitchy. It feels as if durational phantoms are shifting beyond our movements and are punctuating and doctoring our communications. You and I are tied to being untethered.
*
It was no longer a case of boldly placing my foot in the stream as the flow of time coursed between my toes; the tidal wave of sweeping meta-times had instead washed us both away. All I could focus on was the then current nowness of the experience and the possibilities of other projected nows I was yet to encounter.
*
Perceptions of here have become highly individualised; my time has become tailored to me—dates drop from clouds; their insistent impertinence moistens the palm with digital droplets of anxiety. My life is seemingly spread across digital warehouses where millions of calendars sit side by side. Snippets of future time are delivered without demand, recipients are alerted and their attention diverted; I am living in the shadow of the next self-imposed and self-managed ‘now’. My time card is punched and logged everywhere I go; I am a middling byte of big data and my voice feels quieter now more than ever. I wonder if I’ll ever cross paths with you again? Will I find your flickering presence in the exploded vistas of time we are occupying? I want to become more than the sum of our digital selves, but the soft aesthetic outerwear of our apps are denying us the intimacy I crave.
*
I’ve made the superfluous gesture of turning off the GPS on my phone; I won’t be connecting with the idea of checking-into platforms. Our Limboing conversations are being ambivalently marshalled through the ether into each other’s hands. The affective and literal weights of our transmission are seemingly effortlessly hosted on hydro-cooled industrial islands—those marooned in uncharted and previously deregulated space. We are tripping across screen to database to eye and oscillating back again, there and back, there and back, there and back . . .
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Biography
Jake Watts is a researcher, writer and Embassy Gallery committee member based in Edinburgh. He is currently focused on research workshops within higher education and neoliberalism. staxtonfoley.wordpress.com
In response to: Kirsty Hendry Last Seen at 16:31