I’m that angel

I’m that angel is a cycle of writings and performances that explores the contemporary conditions of how we work on and against the computer, narrated from the cognitive cell of one highly neurotic user. The project considers the master narratives of technological and socioeconomic progress that have naturalized Web 2.0’s largely unprecedented user platform, as well as the pre-histories of the Millennial, the blogger and the prosumer: trenchant constituents of the digital public that figure into ongoing Western concerns with the relationships between sincerity and authenticity; realism and reality; the diaristic and the literary; and the author and the individual who nominates to take on, and produce under, that title.

Nodding to the defamiliarization strategies of Russsian formalists like Viktor Shklovskii, I’m that angel takes shape as a stony stone, a cut in the stream – a book. The format concretizes found quotes and other elements; and in every line, a pathology characteristic of our era. Call it inattentionality as method.

Designed by Eric Nylund, this book shores up the bibliographic and citational structures that underpin much of the Internet, as well as literary forms like the confessional and the epistolary that offer precedents for net vernacular. I’m that angel works to build an expanded form of the printed page that draws upon the computer screen’s predecessors: the exegetical framings of The Talmud, for example, and the columnar stutter of Derrida’s Glas. The work attempts, in short, to thread hypertext into a paraliterary matrix.

The second part of this project involves readings of the entire book, performed by actor Justin Sayre, at colocation centers worldwide. If the book sustains a material limit that belies the diffuse shape of the cloud, then these sited readings attempt to effect similar concretions by having author, actor and audience occupy a highly securitized, geopolitical and visual field that is rarely made available to the public. The first such performance occurred, over three nights in April 2012, in an all-glass, octagonal conference room, overlooking racks of servers, at Digital Realty in downtown Los Angeles.