Nathanael Jones

Zeal 1

How a waking life spent pleading with logic gates for access auto-generates job descriptions on a hyperlink, spawns larval stage candidates. In the slurry of the real see yourself, an online presence bent into the appropriate language and metrics. The banality of theatrical continuity is hot, or, how machine learning side steps organic processes of arousal. You make me wet/ myself a cat misbehaving on a countertop, hairless/ meme, silicone-based subjectivity, or lubricant. Turned on by the prospect of faking desire, a C.V. is as predictable as softcore porn. Cue synthesizer keyboard rendition of whale song, hollowed distance ferrying plotted emotions across an ocean's axes. This webbing, wireless in practice apart from the bundled cables running along the sea floor. How a mind paints, parsing reality into theory and back again.

Zeal 2

Today we are building a smart home. What is performative in “we;” or, how capital pours, a liquid between so many moving parts in an orchestra. An inability to congeal—that is, cure—into a rigid score. First this way, then that. What is emotive in this context are varying degrees of friction, elastic solvent holding discreet molecules in suspended tension, l'un à l'autre. At this scale social logistics need tracer bullets. First this is a vehicle. No, this is its engine. Now it's a house. A brick wall equipped with a memory cataloguing holograms of every mallet strike, chisel chip, every thing the cold sunlight touches. Leaving us uncovered.

Zeal 4

To call up a future landscape invoke the pronoun “we,” used here not to fix a series of points where consciousness occurs, but to describe the slow, platonic forehand populating metaphor, this artificial life. If everything is durational then place too is impermanent, a script written in real time by its actors: a good humanist, we found the republic. Scatter enough seed—a mono-crop. Standing stock of constantly mutating turbines coughing bachelor machine music. Roots extending out into each other and retracting in time for extinction level events. I dies sometimes in the future. The limits of identity like a cattle chute.

Waiting at the window eager to photosynthesize, but the lighting cue never arrives.

We are up all night in an apartment on Chicago's lower west side eating jonagolds, writing our memoir on Blackberry's, brick phones. Text as verb and noun. Essays half-typed, half-text to speech dictated pinging back off of nonexistent emails as we low sweet nothings into rotary phone receivers:

“don't you see you/ are the future subject/ matter in absentia/ inured to the cold/ boredom of space.”