located css v4 FINAL

I'm trying to find the [[context|Context cont.]] I need. There's [[something|Post- cont.]] I'm longing to return to.

On the internet, images appear as isolated fragments. Posted and reposted without source. Assembled within a tapestry of other author-less images. The context of the image is [[everywhere|everywhere]] and [[nowhere|nowhere]].

1. A [[time|time before]] before this one 2. The rest of my [[body|I Lost My Body]]

J'ai perdu mon corps follows a disembodied hand after it is severed from the rest of its body in a woodworking incident. The hand gains sentience inside a medical fridge, before embarking on a journey back to the body it has just lost. The film is spliced with flashbacks, distilled to their tactile elements. See: the prick from a thorn. In J'ai perdu mon corps, [[memory|phantom limb syndrome]] is accessed through the skin; the whole world remembered via touch. (click-replace: "See: the prick from a thorn.")[See: a palm in hot sand.] (click-replace: "See: a palm in hot sand.")[See: fingers grazing the keys of a piano.] (click-replace: "See: fingers grazing the keys of a piano.")[]

I make a note in my phone at 12:24 am that asks: how do you locate something within a distinct time? When I read back on it later, I don't know if it is referring to the [[historical|history]] or the personal, to objects or to [[memories|ghost strata]]. I don't know if it's meant to mean anything, or if my pre-sleep brain had just been running lines to keep itself awake.

When Patricia Lockwood wrote about the internet, she described it as a portal you enter in order (link: 'to be everywhere')[(open-url: 'https://www.window-swap.com/Window')to be everywhere]. There are no walls, just a doorway that contains all space. Everything tangled in the [[string|context collapse]] of everything else. The everything-ness of the internet leads to something academics call <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[Context Collapse|context collapse video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/contextcollapse.png"></a>. A term for when various, previously distinct groups are brought together in online spaces.

When I'm a teenager, the photographs I see online become tools to inform my own sense of reality, to look at and provide context for a ballooning world. I do not see these photographs as belonging to people. There are too many of them, I decide. It's impossible to know who took what. All I can do is look at them, and think: [[there’s the world|the world]].

When I'm 15, for the only time in my life, I decide I have a favourite image. It is a (link: 'photograph')[(open-url: 'http://www.mikaeljansson.com/album/porter-fall-2015/17359/')photograph] by Mikael Jansson of a slow dancing couple in Cuba, taken for a Porter Magazine campaign. The campaign itself is full of images of people dancing, standing on rooftops and loitering by empty pools. Models wearing extravagant clothes in dimly lit rooms with old mirrors and stained walls. It is one of the only photos from the collection in which the subjects appear unaware of the camera. I find myself drawn to the warmth of the room's yellow light, the scene made intimate by the couple's obscurity. Five years later, I see <a class="tooltiptrigger">a still<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b8/cb/d2/b8cbd22e373ccc38b2a3ee44c69c24da.jpg"></a> of a slow dancing couple from the Wong Kar-Wai film Happy Together floating around the internet. All I can think about is the Janssen photograph, how [[similarly|decide]] the figures in the two images hold each other.

In a 2012 article, Sunny Moraine writes about the atemporality of online spaces: the idea that instead of experiencing time on the internet as linear, we experience aspects of the past, present and future [[simultaneously|simultaneous time]]. In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell views this atemporality as a flattening, which compresses past, present and future into a constant, [[amnesiac|anachronism]] present.

Usually, a malapropism is the mistaken use of a word in the place of a similar sounding one. An aural almost-but-not-quite, where the meaning can't line up. The words either direct you to a [[dead-end|Opening Screen]] or to something <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[new|malapropism video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/sopranos.png"></a> and unexpected. (click-replace: "aural")[oral]

Phantom Limb Syndrome refers to the sensations felt in a limb that has been removed. Nerves that used to feel on behalf of the removed limb continue to send messages to the brain, which has not yet rewired itself to align with [[changes|invoking]] in the body.

Like a starfish <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[dividing itself|starfish video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/starfish.png"></a> in half to reproduce. Growing the missing arms, regenerating itself back into completeness.

In the end, the hand has to let its body go, and as a viewer, I can't quite understand what it's supposed to do with itself. Other than become its own body. Other than reconceive itself as a [[new whole|dividing starfish]]. Where does the [[boundary|boundary]] of the body end? Does it ever?

I spend a lot of time thinking about The Inflatable Crowd Company, which specialises in inflatable mannequins used to simulate large movie gatherings. Mostly, I think about behind the scenes images of the mannequins that appear online. The ones that reveal uncanny glued-on <a class="tooltiptrigger">faces<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="https://wonderfulengineering.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/How-to-Do-Big-Crowd-Scenes-7.jpg"></a> or show a <a class="tooltiptrigger">sea<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="https://www.ripleys.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Inflatable-Crowd-Company-2.jpg"></a> of shiny, bald plastic heads. When the [[illusion|society of spec]] is stripped away, the mannequins just become gestures toward flesh and blood. The bodies used to fill rooms when living people are too much work. (click-replace: "work")[money] (click-replace: "living") [CGI]

When I eventually watch Happy Together, almost all the frames feel as though they could be dropped into the Jansson campaign. The two cameras begin to blur for me — taking on one another's palettes, displacing <a class="tooltiptrigger">actors<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c2/bc/d0/c2bcd0c3c6138596bdd31c018bdf6001.jpg"></a> for (link: 'models')[(open-url: 'http://www.mikaeljansson.com/album/porter-fall-2015/17352/')models] and back again. The claustrophobia of the film permeates the photographs, and the detachment of the photographs is [[everywhere|it feels wrong]] in the film.

What form does your 'real' body take? <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[A concert-going pot plant|potplant video]] <img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/potplant.png"> </a> <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[A rollercoaster-riding stuffed bear|bear video]] <img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/bear.png"></a>

If I focus, I can imagine myself at the point where the nose of the car meets the rubble of the wall. If I focus, I can feel the splintering between the real car and its image. If I'm quick, I can find the point of rupture and [[slip|like...]] into it.

In Xavier Dolan's Matthias & Maxime, the young auteur directs himself throwing up in a bathroom. His character looks in the mirror, drunk and unsure of the boundary of himself. He swipes at his reflection. Covers the birthmark on his cheek with one hand. Removes his hand. Puts it back. When the auteur-as-character-as-reflection uncovers his cheek again, the birthmark is gone. For a moment his face becomes otherwise, the birthmark [[elsewhere|alterity]].

It feels wrong to invent these arbitrary links. To sever the images even further from their respective circumstances, burying the ideological with the aesthetic. But I can no longer view the objects otherwise. They keep speaking for each other inside my head, [[coming together|flattening]] before swerving at the last minute.

One world [[bleeds|synecdoche]] into another. The self hovers nervously between them. It lowers itself into a hot bath of incongruent salts and [[oils|dentist car]]. Melts and multiplies.

I read a news report about a car that has driven off the road and into the (link: 'second floor')[(open-url: 'https://abcnews.go.com/US/dramatic-video-captures-car-crashing-2nd-floor-dental/story?id=52353574')second floor] of a dentist's office. It is like watching two discrete contexts rub up against each other. Think: road and sky. The back of the car hangs over the edge of the damaged building. I can feel it in my body like losing balance on a pair of roller-skates. The whole centre thrown out, preparing for [[impact|gaps between certainties]]. (click-replace: "Think: road and sky.")[Think: vehicles and dental health.] (click-replace: "Think: vehicles and dental health.")[Think: a handsome race car driver watching an old pair of dentures lap him over and over.] (click-replace: "Think: a handsome race car driver watching an old pair of dentures lap him over and over.")[]

Like sliding into the gap between two sofa cushions. (click-replace: "Like sliding into the gap between two sofa cushions.")[[[Like feeling a breath of fresh air between two badly chafed thighs.|dolan]]]

Over time, the images' likeness to one another begins to feel like a visual [[malapropism|Malapropism]], with my unconscious accidentally [[exchanging|Happy Together]] one for the other as I recall them.

In Synecdoche, New York, a lonely playwright orchestrates a reconstruction of his life inside a New York warehouse. He hires an actor to play himself; extras to fill out the simulated world. His family and friends are played by other people. Actors played by actors. It's brilliant, says his wife Claire. It's [[everything|played]].

The play gets bigger and bigger, is never finished, and never receives an audience. The actor portraying the playwright jumps off of a building. The playwright gives up his role as director to become one of the characters. The [[boundary|baudrillard]] between art and reality doesn't matter, or was never there.

I view the inflatable movie mannequins as a [[spectacle|debord]] of the body. A version of the human that subsists on its own image, viewed at a great enough distance that the illusion remains splintered from the real.

Toward the close of J'ai perdu mon corps, after several detours and obstacles, the hand locates its body asleep in bed — bandaged wrist propped up on a pillow. I watch the hand tenderly line itself up with a wrist it can't physically connect to. The connection exists only in the [[abstract|in the end,]], through a history of shared sensation.

There is something to the equivalencies the internet creates. A film set in Argentina collides with images taken in Cuba. The run-down backdrops of Happy Together – real homes of characters trying to make a living – become indistinguishable from Jansson's stylised campaign locations. The distinctions between art and commerce, what's selling something and what isn't, become increasingly [[porous|art v commerce]].

The remainder of the self continues motioning toward the lost part. [[Invoking|inflatable mannequins]] the limb like an anecdote in conversation before realising you can't remember how it ends. You only remember where it linked up [[in the first place|Opening Screen]].

In Guy Debord's understanding of the spectacle, the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it and come to be understood as the epitome of reality. In the movies in which they're used, the inflatable mannequins are representations of the body, interpreted as [[real|what's a real body?]]. A body that needs nothing, alienated from the [[demands|toward]] of occupying space.

Whenever I re-watch the movie, I feel more inside my body than I did beforehand. I am able to see myself as a thing capable of sensation, as a series of embodied memories, rather than a mind devoted to its own consciousness. My body is no longer just seen, but felt. Something that can't help but belong to itself. (click-replace: "seen")[an image] (click-replace: "felt") [a pulsating, sensing system] (click-replace: "belong to itself") [belong to the world] (click-replace: "belong to the world") [constitute its own [[context|Opening Screen]]]

The question for Moraine, then, is how to know when to mourn an online space or object when it can't be marked by the same ruin as a decaying body or building. Instead of seeing the impact of time, abandoned digital spaces become static relics. The sign of abandonment is not physical degradation, but an absence of activity, traced to the last time an online space was updated – [[the last point|future]] at which something was done to it.

In abandoned online spaces, the future (link: 'never happened')[(open-url: 'https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53792/17-ancient-abandoned-websites-still-work')never happened]. Things don't [[age|old self]], they simply fall out of use.

His reflection provides a glimpse into alterity: the self that might but inevitably won't. He is made available to us via a new [[frame|third space]] of reference.

I think about all the selves I've curated on the internet over time. The various tumblr blogs full of bad poems and awkward selfies, progressively abandoned as I assumed new [[selves|who?]] on new platforms.

My old blogs, and my presence on them, exist in pristine condition. The teenagers in those photos haven't aged. Their feelings haven't been felt all the way through. They are all [[versions|relic]] of me to whom the future has not, and will not, happen.

For this reason, Moraine suggests that abandoned digital spaces are perpetually oriented <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[towards the past|waterfall video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/waterfall.png"></a> Without evidence of changes over time, they are always [[turning backwards|history]], closed off to the present through which they're accessed.

I'm made to think of anachronism: the phenomenon in which something appears to be distinctly 'out of time'. Yet, without a linear, temporal norm to guide the internet, the idea of identifying something as [['within time'|historically accurate]] in the first place seems almost impossible.

I bury myself into a specific genre of video on YouTube, in which someone determines whether a given thing is 'historically accurate'. I am drawn to <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[videos|costume video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/costumes.png"></a> that analyse the costumes of period pieces – interrogating materials, patterns, silhouettes and the like, determining which films successfully emulate their [[context|yearn 4 context]].

I realise that the comfort of these videos is the emphasis on context itself. The reminder of a time that once was, is no longer, yet can be identified as belonging to a distinct [[past|time before]].

A third space between two collapsing contexts: a face and the reflection of that face, lit by the spark of [[something else|Context cont.]].

The entire world is reduced to a warehouse. One part to represent the whole of humanity – the <a class="tooltiptrigger">[[everyone is everyone|synedoche video]]<img width="300" class="tooltipcontent" src="img/synedoche.png"></a> of the film's thesis. But what the protagonist creates is not life in microcosm. It is a performance that overrides life's ability to actually play out, simulating to the point of [[pointlessness|context collapse]].

When I see the images of the two dancing couples, away from their respective contexts, I stop being able to discern what either object is trying to tell me. Their (link: 'politics')[(open-url: 'https://lwlies.com/articles/wong-kar-wai-cinema-hong-kong-transition/')politics] are either diluted or erased. They're reduced only to surfaces I can touch, surrounded by [[dead space|Opening Screen]].

In his diaristic documentary Ghost Strata, director Ben Rivers collates a series of reflections on the manifestation of time. In one monthly fragment, Rivers records a conversation with Britsh geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, discussing the concept of ghost strata as rock imagined in a place it is [[no longer|what is ghost strata]].

Zalasiewicz gestures toward the large rock formations around him. Layers of sedimentary rock form lines and grooves in the mass. These strata represent a set of dunes from a river that existed a quarter of a billion years ago, recalled only by the [[seams|theoretical layers]] that remain.

Ghost strata can be understood as theoretical layers of time. When you stand within a tunnel that has been dug out, you occupy a space that was once filled with rock, the [[ghosts|memory]] of which, according to Zalasiewicz, are still imaginable.

If you try, you can project the presence of missing rock, feel it coming through the air, through you, and out the other side. Ghost strata becomes our imaginations of the past. Using the rock that still exists, a kind of history is conjured: a mass half-remembered through the sense that [[something is missing|Post- cont.]].

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howtobelocated

@howtobelocated

I'm trying to find the

context

I need.

There's

something

I'm longing to return to.