Walter Scott “Heavily Greebled” and Megane Voghell “Jets de sauvegarde,” Fonderie Darling, 5 March – 10 May 2026

“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
—Leo Tolstoy, A Confession and Other Religious Writings

Among the most reliable strategies for coping with the seemingly relentless and interminable meaninglessness of contemporary life — the never-ending cycles of plague, war, famine, and death and the reiteration of these through ubiquitous media — is excess.

Drunkenness is a method of extending dreams into consciousness, or rather, of blurring the boundaries between dreams and waking life, the subconscious and the conscious.

One reason could be that dreams collapse time. In a 1975 study published in the journal Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, researchers found that dreamers of especially bizarre or emotionally charged dreams experienced time at up to 1/100 of the duration of absolute time, meaning that a dreamer could feasibly live 100 dreamtime minutes in the span of one waking minute.

“Living the dream” is commonly held as a desirable goal. We chase after dreams and try to turn them into realities. Cinema emulates the dream state by projecting images and restructuring time and meaning onto a screen.

Cinema, therefore, is the most intoxicating form of media in which viewers become dreamers experiencing collective reciprocal hypnotism.

Quantificateur sonique vol. 4: Charmaine Lee + Maxime Corbeil-Perron, Fondation Guido Molinari, 28 February 2026

“A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history.”
—Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

In Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self, he recounts a child’s dream that she writes down in the form of a fairy tale in 12 stages and gives to her father, Jung’s colleague, as a Christmas present. Stage Six reads: “[Once upon a time, there was] … a bad boy with a clod of earth. He throws bits of it at the passers-by, and they all become bad too.”

This dream is atypical of an innocent little child’s reveries, vaulting into the archetypal realm. Jung recalls that the young dreamer died prematurely one year later and interpreted that her dreams were an adumbration or anticipatory shadow of death cast over her waking life. But Stage Six of the doomed girl’s dream foreshadows more than her own death. It clearly signifies the viral contagion of pure evil that warmongering represents.

There are two assumptions that this archetypal dream suggests but does not make explicit. First is that the boy is bad independent of his implicitly bad actions, i.e. throwing bits of earth. And second is that passers-by who are hit with bits of earth also begin throwing bits of earth.

Les Vespérales with Annie Bloch, Église du Sacré-Cœur-de-Jésus, 7 March 2025

“The cigarette is the symbol of a machine age in which the ultimate cogs and wheels and levers are human nerves.”
—“Going Up in Smoke” The New York Times, 24 September 1925

Cigarettes are suspiciously emblematic for our accelerationist, disposable, and self-destructive society. We burn through objects and ideas nowadays at such a heated pace that we rarely even remember what happened yesterday.

We chain-smoke people as well, using and discarding them like so many butts flicked into the gutter. “The rapider pace of civilization,” the 101-year-old Times editorial declares, “accounts for the extraordinary growth of the cigarette habit.”

Addiction is a condition that few people like to address. Addicts attempt to avoid it, preferring to believe that their habits are personal choices. And non-users or former addicts tend to sidestep the topic for fear of sounding sanctimonious or self-righteous.

But perhaps the best argument against smoking for the Bohemian radical is that to smoke cigarettes is to be subordinate to hyper-capitalism in its most toxic form. Cigarettes are counterrevolutionary.

In the marketplace of addiction, smokers are the commodities, not cigarettes. Human beings are infinitely renewable and insignificant to mercenary machinic exploitation. One is too many and a thousand is never enough.

Animals of Distinction, Jump Cut, Cinema Moderne, 10 March 2026

“What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.”
—Sylvia Plath, “Cut”

In her article entitled “Traumas of Code,” published in the autumn 2006 issue of Critical Inquiry, the American scholar N. Katherine Hayles suggests: “as the unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language.” Thus, just as the smooth interface of consciousness is only revealed when it is ruptured by unconscious traumas, computer glitches expose the seams in the fabric of our increasingly digital reality.

The film scholar Laura U. Marks in her 1997 essay “Loving a Disappearing Image” writes about the melancholia of glitchy moving images — diminished, faded, ageing, and decaying visual media that “flaunt their tenuous connection to the realty they index” — arguing that they “all appeal to a look of love and loss.”

What is startling about glitch aesthetics is their durability. At a time when fads and fashions in film and art more broadly turn over with aggregate haste, digital decomposition is perennially hip, a loss that paradoxically lingers. Perhaps this is because accelerated innovation spells accelerated obsolescence.

There is scarcely a city block nowadays upon which one does not encounter a flickering fluorescent light bulb or burnt-out LCD display or some form of seizure-inducing electronic glitch. In the malfunctioning cityscape, subconscious mourning is constant when technological breakdown is ever-present.

A bug in the system means that there must be a line of code missing somewhere.

Mon amour, c’est pour le restant de mes jours, dir. André-Line Beauparlant, Monument-National, 12 March 2026

“Selten habt Ihr mich verstanden,
Selten auch verstand ich Euch,
Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden,
So verstanden wir uns gleich.”
—Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder

In Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a seasoned fisherman risks life and limb to reel in the biggest fish in the ocean. But the fish is so mammoth that the fisherman has to tie it to the side of his boat to bring it ashore, and once he arrives, the fish is just a skeleton, sharks having picked it to the bone.

This tale contains competing morals and compelling insights. One is that avaricious forces will inevitably whittle down to nothing everything that is truly great. Another is that one should never let one’s proverbial pies cool on the windowsill because they will invariably attract unwelcome trespassers. Another is that there is only one fisherman and one fish, but practically infinite axiomatic sharks.

Still another is that fish are ancillary to fishing.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Gallery views of Walter Scott, “Heavily Greebled,” Fonderie Darling.}