Poet’s Note: “Exploring Virtual Bodies” is a poetic cycle. The title is kind of self-explanatory. It’s a collection of six long poems about the human body, physicality and love in the age of the internet. It has a slightly dystopian atmosphere which involves paranoia, controlling systems, government surveillance and mentions of other people disappearing or dying. It’s meant as a whole, which means every poem is narratively connected. It’s an intimate fictional diary exploring what it means to be alive today and what it feels like to love somebody through computer and telephone screens today.
Illustrator’s Note: Screen Reflections is a collection of visual artworks that was inspired by the cycle of poems Exploring Virtual Bodies by Jan Jindřich Karásek. In the poems, Karásek paints a rather cold, distressing and emotionally detached picture of life lived in interaction with virtual reality.
In the spirit of cubist painters of the early 1900s, the human bodies depicted in the present collection of artworks are heavily distanced and abstracted from their natural representation. The colour scheme is a cold monochrome, and the expressive qualities of the artworks are of machine-like shapes and rhythms. Each artwork was made digitally.
Although the artworks are abstract and they bear symbolic qualities, the viewer would be misguided if he or she tried to uncover a true subtext to the artworks. Frankly, even the artist himself could not name a single true meaning to any one of the artworks, even though he could very well analyse what they could mean. The symbolic potential, however, is present, and it is left for the viewer to approach the artworks through his or her own history of experience.
THE LAST GREAT WAR
.
tranquility of your body makes me shiver
with the indifference to our differences
I secretly become calm with your breath
matching mine in the absence of a border
slowly embracing your limbs as mine
and losing any sort of resemblance to
the person I was in the last great war
we led against our identities relentlessly
and cold as we went for all the weapons
the system had told us to use in case of
unexpected emergency and you emerged
beautiful and hollow in the state of a near
nervous breakdown caused by the sudden
reminder of the father of your father
beating your father in the backyard
so beautiful and full of little lights
it was almost impossible not to become
the light itself and the light beats the dark
with its artificial sunrays
.
and you look at me and say I am sorry
I was so hard on you expecting you to love me
when clearly all you can do is wait until
one day you’ll no longer feel the need to sell
everything beautiful inside you
to the buyer with the highest offer
financially speaking you’re begging for
an opportunity to be yourself
.
in the meantime you’ll have to be
satisfied with the person you are
which is nobody after all the shifts
you worked on the construction of your
ever-changing personality in the backyard
with fathers lighting every shade of
oneself with the rays of everybody
in order to be yourself you have to be
everybody you ever lost in the last great war
of our bodies decomposing with the smell of
the standard oil used to lube the machines
that will take your grandfather‘s job
but politely say I am sorry when asked
for a reason and your mother will say
I wish I was a machine before she kills herself
very quietly on a live stream for a couple of her
followers and you not being one of them
will make you all the more guilty
at least it wasn’t loud at least it didn’t
wake your neighbors in their ongoing pursuit
of becoming strangers to you
.
I am slowly changing into the king of limbs
my body becoming yours in the first great war
against anxiety induced by the presence of
another body touching mine
you’re slowly changing into the king of limbs
indulging in my fingerprints as if they were
unique despite the factory next doors
indulging in my voice as if it was irreplaceable
despite the next app they are working on
in the start-up of your ex-partners trying to
bring your mouth to life with the words
I love you repeating again and again
into their ears with algorithms you will
never understand in your fragile humanity
I will join them once this is all over and
together we shall rise to the holy market
with you as our trophy shielding us
from our unlovable bodies and bringing us love
and if not love then money if not money then fame
but for now we are the kings of our limbs
projecting the togetherness we created
on the walls of the system to say
you have not smothered us we are breathing
and the air is filled with our smells
sweaty and imperfect and disgusting
in a way which makes us all desire the other more
like dogs smelling other dogs for their unholiness
.
and despite being flawed and ugly
in some parts of our ever-changing bodies
we can still touch and hug and kiss and fuck
each other so tight we can hardly think
of anything but the other person
breathing loudly in the same room
.
the system is only powerful as long
as it is still ours to embrace
what you cannot love cannot control you
the backyard is still lit with the bulbs
you left here in the last great war
against verbal communication
as long as you can touch it
you will find it hard to hate it
digital representation of his fingernails
.
he has hurt other people in his pumpkin-like
attire seemingly unaware of the power his
fists have on the rest of the kids in class
.
we politely asked him to leave the chat-group
but he keeps on returning with different nicknames
as if starting new was possible for ones like him
.
last time he called the teacher a whore and afterwards
shared his screen with violent pornography and then
parents had to shield their children’s eyes with their palms
.
I’m not saying we have to exclude him from the others
but I’m kindly asking you to exclude the others from him
he once scratched my eyes with his fingernails
.
and I wasn’t quick enough to close them really tight
I can see but every object is now related to his violence
there’s simply not enough space on the internet
.
for kind people and those with evil urges
we decided not to investigate it any further and
as a collective we wish to never see his avatar near ours
.
we kindly recommend home-schooling
.
best regards
rachel
STREAMING PERSONAL THINGS
.
the thought of yesterday ends up in your breakfast
somehow someday everyday it seems to be harder
to chew what’s left of the food you used to swallow
whole and thorough and someday there will be an
audience to cheer you up when you’ll be having
the worst day of your life which is not today even
if you tend to think so while the sheets of your bed
tickle your thighs with the overwhelming feeling
of loss which is never close nor far enough so it’s
somewhere in-between and you have learnt the hard way
that between is the worst place to put your feelings into
.
but they clap and laugh as you masturbate your way
through the evening thinking about every man you‘ve
ever learnt to love just enough to not crumble as
they become fading avatars on your bright screen
and as you finish you smell your fingers and the hope
of resemblance to what you once knew is once again
little bit less there and suddenly you’ll feel it stranded
on the tiny shell of your apartment which no one visits
but everybody sees on one of your micro-cameras
which you placed everywhere just to feel a little bit
of connection to those anonymous faces they show
you in the evening news and one day they will also
learn to love you just like you did with brad and josh
and even your mother when she wasn’t having
one of her moods she called panic attacks in a shy voice
which never resembled panic even when she tried to
scream to her cellphone screen with another name on it
.
you will call her tommorow and you will say that
you’re very sorry but you won’t be able to explain
exactly what for so you’ll turn off the camera
.
and smile just to yourself
the picture will stay on her wall
for another year and a half
until they force her to take it down
dead people on the internet
cause anxiety to the living ones
don’t you know that these sites
are meant to calm its users down
ALMOST TURNED OFF THE MACHINE
.
one day I won’t be sleeping next to her
but I will be trying to fall asleep in front
of her virtual face on the giant screen in
my living room where I don’t live anymore
but still breathe the same textures as
my roommates do when I’m not looking
.
still life is not an actual life but objects merely
remaining in one place till they’re immortalized
but only for a very few people who still care
about paintings but me and her we are not one of
these people we only care about what’s in front
of us which is very funny if you think about it
.
but please don’t think about it and don’t let
her think about it because the screen is
all I have and her face in it is the only reason
I still search for ways to make my computer
incapable of losing battery it can never be turned off
while I sleep I think of it and wish for virtual reality
.
I turned off myself and I almost turned off the machine
but my hibernated body is not the same as its
I function on the basis of dreams as it functions
on the basis of facts and those two should
never collide as long as I can help it
she sleeps and I don’t but it won’t be too long
.
till one day it will be the other way around
what is turned off will be alive once virtual bodies
move again in the rhythm of our lies
when I said I love you last time I didn’t mean it
but now when she can’t hear it
I really really do even if it’s through a microphone
.
parrot flies through a city of her favorite videogame
and repeats my words like a little song for children
her and I haven’t really grown we just
got used to being half-way there
repeat the words after me when you touch your body
and it actually won’t be yours anymore
BIO Poet / Jan Jindřich Karásek is a Czech poet, writer and cultural journalist. His debut poetry collection “Measuring the Distance” was published this year. He is studying screenwriting at Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (known as FAMU). He has written articles and literary essays for Czech Television, Czech Radio or Revue Prostor. He is currently working for the design magazine 519. His work revolves around physicality, relationships, language, violence and myths.
Bio Illustrator / Lauri Renvall is a Finnish visual artist and designer, who occasionally works as a language teacher and translator. Renvall has recently been fascinated by the possibilities of utilizing cubist and surrealist aesthetic and symbolism in digital art. He considers these styles well fitting to depict aspects of the contemporary psyche the way he experiences it in western cultures. He also thinks that the aesthetic of these styles and the digital medium can be used in a fruitful dialogue with each other.
Behind his visual language is the inspiration he draws on artists such as Fernand Léger, Kazimir Malevich, Kraftwerk and Henri Rousseau (to mention a few), as well as theories of constructivism in human psychological development. In his art, Renvall prefers to guide the viewer to a symbolic framework and let him or her interpret the artwork by coming from his or her own subjective lived experience. Thus, there are no right or wrong answers to what message his art might be bearing.
