Invoking Debord’s notion of psychogeography and Jorn’s visual rendering of it in their art book MÉMOIRES, this speculative visual poem written by Kalen Iwamoto and produced by Wen New atelier plays with the dialectic of presence and absence of the human subject in an imagined metaversal geography. 

Appropriating, or détourning, the language of maps, the poem interpolates and effaces the human subject in a single gesture, introducing the notion of the subject by pronouncing its absence. 

This void leaves a trace of nostalgia and longing, but also a space of pure potentiality—a precondition for the emergence of another kind of subject that refuses to engage with machines and nature in a relationship of otherness. 

The disappearance of the subject is also an oblique, self-referential allusion to the lack of ego and subjectivity in conceptual writing.

Exhibited at Expanded.art as part of the group show “Techno Terrain: Nature in the Age of the Metaverse” 29 August — 9 September 2023

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