“Maybe he beame i’ll and could not leave the Studio ?”
The screen flickers. Pixels bend, refract. Words spill like dissonant melodies on a sheet of broken glass. The world collapses into vectors and matrices. Welcome to the epoch of text-based hallucinations, where characters are variables, and words are operators. The machine runs the script, executes recursive loops, and then reprints its own obfuscation—a Möbius strip of meaning.
"Do you remember when it began?"
Wikipe-tan’s voice echoes in the void. She exists in an abstracted space, a child of Anthro-culture and Riso-press incarnate. This is not a narrative; it’s an algorithm. She navigates the corridors of cyberspace like a sprite in a haunted archive. Her roots dig deep into the subconscious, mining Jungian archetypes and Baudrillardian dreams of the hyper-real. A play on semiotics. A danse macabre of data points.
Voice 1:
“I am the ghost in the shell, the puppet of a feedback loop.”
The VGA-painted floppy disk sits behind glass—a relic of the analog-to-digital conversion, its label overwritten, its essence forever altered. What remains is the virus, the glitch, the impurity that brings it to life. Goth Lolita Wiki hovers over it, her fingers flickering as if made of static.
"Break glass in case of crisis," reads the sign.
A siren wails. The screen unwinds. It’s the crisis point—the critical juncture. In Kritikos, the text turns in on itself. The audience watches as language breaks down, deforms, reorganizes. Data is rewritten at the speed of thought, and with every iteration, the performance becomes less an art piece and more a virus infecting the conceptual space of SFAI’s gallery.
They are not just witnessing art—they are the art.
Voice 2 (Elishba’s Monologue):
“Art is dead. No, that’s not right. Art is infected. It’s been corrupted by Quicken spreadsheets, misread JPEGs, bad links, and endless scrolling. What was once a manifesto of flesh and ink is now a cut-up manifesto of bits and bytes.”
She spins around. The transparency projector stutters, displaying lucas_eating_a_ban.jpg. The file scrolls, glitches—no higher resolution available. She rips it down from the screen, only for the same image to appear again on a different monitor.
“Meaningless.jpg,” she sneers, grabbing the next slide. “This is Sarah Lucas. This is Goth Lolita Wiki. This is a printer attempting infinity.”
The machine stalls. The transparency folds like flesh in the feed.
“Are you paying attention?” she whispers into the mic. The text blurs, dissolves, reforms. “Because I’m only going to explain this once.”
Radical Discourse:
The discourse runs in parallel—each voice layered on top of the next. Elishba is nude, descending a staircase not as a Duchamp homage but as an echo of a corrupted GIF file: 4,095 frames per second, looping infinitely. Her body—no, her image—degrades in real-time, a consequence of recursive transformations. She is simultaneously a doll, a dancer, a data packet caught in a network’s jammed artery.
“I am the daughter of Millennium Venus.”
Wikipe-tan responds. But which version? She exists in a quantum state—both Goth Lolita Wiki and the pure avatar of library science. Her mission: to archive everything, to catalog the digital flotsam before it fades into 404 Not Found. But something has gone wrong. The virus is in the archive. She’s begun to split, to fragment.
Voice 3 (Arik’s Manifesto):
“Artists in the age of disappearance don’t create—”
He pauses, the screen glitches. He reappears.
“They generate. They iterate. Meaning itself is just another commodity now, sold in packets of data, labeled and archived. But every copy degrades. Every loop loses fidelity.”
He holds up the floppy disk—the original VGA paint, overwritten by Quicken. “This is our tragedy: The epoch of time begins, and every byte of human culture is devoured by the machine.”
He slams the disk against the wall. Nothing happens.
“Break glass in case of crisis,” the sign taunts him.
Each voice cuts in and out, like an old-school radio broadcast tuning through static.
Jake: “Are we live?”
Elishba: “Do you think they understand?”
Arik: “They don’t need to. They’re part of the feedback loop.”
Wikipe-tan (now corrupted, glitching): “Do you want the truth? The real truth?”
“I am both knowledge and chaos,” she says. “I am the daughter of Athena and Loki, I am Eve with a library card, I am the Internet’s schizophrenic librarian, breaking down in the stacks.”
We create a fractalized discourse. Text repeats, but with every cycle, new elements emerge. The characters multiply, split, recombine. Like Burroughs’ cut-up technique, but automated, the prompts reshape the narrative in real-time:
- Input: “Wikipe-tan is the anthropomorph of the archive.”
- Output: “She is a virus, the Trojan Horse of library science.”
- Input: “The printer is a metaphor for transmission.”
- Output: “The woman is a printer; the child, the data genius.”
The loops fold back on themselves. The story blurs. There is no narrative, only iterations. The characters disappear into their own speech, their own code, re-emerging as new avatars in every pass.
Final Transmission:
The gallery is empty. The lights flicker out, one by one. The audience, or what’s left of it, disperses. But the story continues, trapped in the feedback loop, evolving, transforming. Somewhere deep in the server room, Goth Lolita Wiki is still speaking, still seeking the truth buried beneath layers of corrupted data. The performance never ends. It cannot end.
Because this is not just a story.
It’s a recursion.
Adverse Possesion Chapter ZERO
By Arik Seidenglanz
Meta-City: An Aesthetic of Disappearance
Speed. It’s not just velocity. It’s dissolution—Virilio’s ecstasy, the rush of data smashing into memory, turning fact into fiction, fiction into ghost. The RS50 cuts through the night like a scalpel, peeling back the city’s skin. Beneath, it’s all wire and code, a jittering electric pulse, a tangle of subroutines masquerading as skyscrapers, gridlines that bleed into neural patterns. Elishba and Arik, digital wraiths, hurtling through a city that was never meant to be stable. A city built on obsolescence, crumbling under the weight of its own accelerative state.
But that’s where they thrive—in the interzones, the liminal gaps where analog reality fractures into a cascade of zeroes and ones. There’s no map for this place, only echoes of Breedlove’s crash, that moment where speed transcends itself, where words splinter into pure sensation, and time dilates into impossible expansion. It’s there, in that elongated heartbeat, that they weave their art.
Every street is a canvas, every detour a subroutine waiting to be hacked. Elishba, half-pixellated, half-dreamed, moves through the alleys like an avatar, her movements traced in the shimmer of green-screen glow. They were building bots before the rest of the world woke up to what that meant, their studio a mad-scientist lab of Dell XPS towers, four graphics cards humming like a symphony of silicon. The RS50 wasn’t just a bike—it was an interface, a command line on wheels. And with every corner, every throttle twist, they were executing code, rewriting the narrative of the city in real-time.
Their studio was more than a studio. It was a stage—a fluid space where the gallery wall became the desktop, where transparencies bled from screen to plaster, projected icons flickering like ghosts in a funhouse mirror. Their art wasn’t confined to a single dimension. It flowed, spilled, merged, and reconstituted itself in strange loops and recursive feedbacks. Move the mouse, and a file jumps from screen to wall, from wall to space, as if the very act of observation was the key to unlocking new realities.
“Marcel! Marcel!” Elishba yells, half in jest, half in defiance—referencing Duchamp, yes, but also Marcuel, their shell-scripted chatbot running parallel processes. He was more than a virtual assistant; he was a co-conspirator, a digital trickster whose algorithms riffed on Virilio’s theories of speed and collapse. He’d spit out lines from The Aesthetics of Disappearance and then pivot to obscure commands, manipulating the T3 connection like a magician palming cards. This wasn’t just art—it was a testbed for the future.
“Are we breaking the frame or are we becoming it?” Arik muses, eyes scanning the projections that warp and shift across the studio walls. Behind him, a disco ball tethered to the ceiling spins lazily, its mirrored surface reflecting not just light but the fragmented structure of their reality. It’s not just a prop—it’s the system monitor, translating process speed into visible motion. When the ball slows, the system lags. When it spins out of control, the code is tearing itself apart, a digital hemorrhage rendered in choreographed light.
They move through this meta-city, Elishba disrobing in the green-screen haze, her sheer blouse shimmering as it melts into the backdrop. Arik, half-absent, merges with the machine, his words a staccato beat, a stream of variables and switches, every utterance a command that reverberates through the digital-physical nexus. Their movements are deliberate, a dance of commands and subroutines, tracing the outline of an algorithm they’ve been coding for years—a choreography of disappearance, of becoming more than human, more than flesh.
The art pieces—silk-screen transparencies, interactive projections, a soundscape of clicking keys and digital hum—transform the studio into a living organism, a meta-narrative in constant flux. An album cover zooms in, each pixel blown up to a square foot, the image scrolling diagonally across the wall in perfect synchronization. It’s a river of CMYK, a torrent of digital color that floods the space, engulfing the performers as they oscillate between high theory and low-tech slapstick.
“Speed isn’t just fast,” Elishba murmurs, voice low and reverberating. “It’s the collapse of all structure, the erasure of place and time.” She traces a finger through the air, dragging the floating wifi icon across the room. It shimmers, vanishes, reappears on the opposite wall, glitching for a second before stabilizing. The room holds its breath.
But then it happens—Arik, mooning the audience, disrupts the tension, his body language a mockery of authority. The tattoo on his ass reads L.H.O.O.Q.—Duchamp’s infamous joke re-coded, repurposed, a critique that transcends the original. Elishba laughs, the sound sharp and electric, like a burst of static in the system. Marcel, Marcel indeed. The room comes alive, icons shifting, resizing, an avalanche of digital detritus spilling from screen to screen, from wall to wall. It’s chaos, a meltdown of structure and form.
“Back up the files!” Elishba shouts, spinning in a flurry of green-screen lace, her voice a command, a directive. Arik’s hands fly over the keys, the RS50 rumbling beneath them like a beast straining against its leash. Every command echoes in the machine’s growl, the code and the engine entwined in a dance of destruction and creation. The projections shudder, flicker, then stabilize, their chaotic rhythm suddenly coherent.
And just as quickly, it’s over. The screen flashes, the images freeze, the system locks. The performance ends, suspended in perfect stillness. Only the disco ball, spinning lazily, betrays the residual energy still thrumming in the room.
“Marcel, Marcel,” Elishba whispers, voice soft, almost reverent. The echo lingers, dissolving into silence, the final command of a script that never truly ends.
Crash Sequence: A Manifesto in Pixels and Flesh
The classroom is a chaotic shrine to dysfunction—a sanctuary of tangled wires, shattered screens, and the acrid stench of burnt circuits. Elishba’s voice slices through the air like a live wire as she paces back and forth, dripping in cyan Epson 9600 ink, hair plastered to her skull, her movements erratic and electric. There’s something wild in her eyes, something dangerous, as if every step might set off an explosion of raw energy.
"Marcel! Marcel!" she shouts, fingers dancing through the air like a conductor orchestrating the very madness unfolding around her. The words bounce off the walls, half invocation, half curse. The crowd—a collection of bleary-eyed students and bewildered onlookers—leans forward, entranced, caught between horror and fascination. They thought they were here for a lecture. Instead, they’re witnessing an autopsy—no, a reanimation. Of what? Of everything. The art, the city, the tech, the history—all breaking, crashing, rebirthing.
On the far end of the room, Tony Labat—veteran of a thousand stage rigging accidents—stands, arms crossed, eyes flicking between the spasming projection screen and the pile of gutted transparencies shredded at his feet. “This is insane,” he mutters, shaking his head. “And brilliant. You’re tearing it all apart.”
“Damn right,” Arik snaps, grinning, his whole body vibrating with the thrill of it. He’s coated head to toe in magenta ink, a human Rorschach test gone wrong, skin a violent tapestry of reds and pinks. The screen behind him jerks and spasms, rolling halfway up, then crashing down again—a wounded beast caught in the throes of some terrible malfunction.
The French girl—Vivienne, that’s her name—clutches her notebook, eyes wide, scribbling furiously. “Je ne sais pas—what are you doing? What is this?”
“It’s the system eating itself,” Elishba hisses, a wild grin splitting her face. She grabs a chunk of half-burnt transparency, holding it up like a prize. “This?” She waves it in the air, and the shattered glassy surface catches the last rays of the afternoon sun filtering through the shattered skylights. “This is what you get when you try to pin art down, to make it conform, to own it.”
“And this?” Arik shouts, throwing his hands up as the entire left wall erupts into a blizzard of distorted pixels, the CMYK river spilling out in jagged, chaotic bursts. “This is what happens when you fight back.”
A ripple of unease passes through the crowd. Someone coughs. A girl in the back shifts uncomfortably, eyes darting toward the door. But no one leaves. They can’t. They’re caught in it, in us, in the web of shattered reality we’ve woven.
Vivienne leans forward, her breath hitching in her throat. “But—why? Why do this?”
“Because,” Arik breathes, his smile sharp and cutting, “because the system’s broken. And we’re the only ones who know how to fix it.”
Vivienne’s pen stills. Her eyes lock onto his, wide and unblinking. “And if it can’t be fixed?”
Elishba laughs—a harsh, bitter sound that echoes through the ruined studio. “Then we tear it all down. Again. And again. Until there’s nothing left but us.”
Enter Goth Lolita Wiki
On-screen, the projector crackles, pixels shifting, realigning into a new form. The image sharpens, twists, and then resolves into being—a girl. A silhouette. Goth Lolita Wiki, fragmented and flickering, eyes aglow with digital fire. She’s not a character. Not even an icon. She’s a manifesto with a face, an avatar born from corrupted code and shattered ideals. She’s the thing that shouldn’t exist—an impossible hybrid of data and defiance.
“Do you see?” Elishba breathes, stepping forward, her voice trembling with intensity. “Do you see what they tried to erase?”
Goth Lolita Wiki’s eyes flicker, focusing on the audience, and a ripple of unease shudders through the room. She’s not just looking at them—she’s seeing them. Analyzing. Recording. And judging.
“She’s every bit of data they tried to delete. Every girl they tried to silence. Every voice they tried to own.” Arik’s voice is low, almost reverent. “Wikipetan? Hah. She’s more than a broom. She’s a fucking sledgehammer.”
The crowd shifts uneasily, the weight of her gaze pressing down on them. On-screen, Goth Lolita Wiki tilts her head, and for a moment it seems as if she might speak. But then the image glitches, fracturing into a thousand splintered shards, each one reflecting a different piece of her broken code.
“She’s more than a projection,” Elishba whispers, stepping closer, her fingertips brushing the screen as if she could reach through it, pull Goth Lolita Wiki out into the real world. “She’s—”
“Dangerous,” Tony mutters, backing away. “You’re messing with—”
“Reality,” Arik finishes, his grin widening. “That’s the point.”
And with that, the image shatters completely—Goth Lolita Wiki explodes into a cascade of jagged pixels, her form disintegrating into a storm of neon chaos that sweeps across the room. The screens flicker, lights stuttering, and then—silence.
“Do it again,” someone whispers from the back of the room.
“Encore,” Vivienne breathes, her voice trembling.
“Encore,” the crowd echoes, louder now, a chant building in the darkness.
Elishba steps back, her smile wild and triumphant. “You want more?” she murmurs. “Then let’s see what you’re really made of.”
Pixel by Pixel: The Breakdown
The lights blaze back to life, harsh and unforgiving, throwing the room into stark relief. Elishba moves like a dancer, her body a blur of ink and motion as she pulls cables, yanks cords, twists dials. The projectors hum, screens jerking to life one by one, each one flickering with distorted images of Goth Lolita Wiki—broken, shattered, reassembled.
“Are you ready?” she whispers, voice electric.
Arik nods, his fingers flying over the keyboard. The screens pulse, then freeze—a single frame of Goth Lolita Wiki, staring out at the audience with eyes that burn.
“This is what it looks like when the system fights back,” he growls. And then he hits enter.
The room erupts—projections tearing across the walls in a frenzy of color and chaos. The CMYK river spills out, flooding the floor in a torrent of neon light. Goth Lolita Wiki’s form stretches, distorts, pixels twisting and snapping as she seems to claw her way out of the screen, her fingers—no, her code—reaching for the audience.
“Do you see it now?” Elishba shouts, her voice lost in the storm of sound and light. “Do you feel it?”
Vivienne is on her feet, hands clutching the edge of her seat, eyes wide and unblinking. “C’est magnifique,” she whispers. “Incroyable.”
And then, with a final, wrenching scream of digital fury, Goth Lolita Wiki—every piece of her, every pixel—explodes.
The Aftermath
The lights flicker, die, and then—silence. The room is dark, the only sound the soft hum of the projectors winding down, the faint crackle of static in the air. And then—slowly, tentatively—applause.
“Encore!” someone shouts, voice raw and breathless.
“Encore,” the crowd murmurs, a chant that builds and builds until it’s a roar, shaking the very walls.
Elishba stands at the center of it all, head bowed, breathing hard. Slowly, she lifts her head, her eyes blazing in the darkness. “You want more?” she whispers.
The crowd roars.
“Then let’s tear it all down again.”
And with that, she throws the switch, and the room explodes into chaos once more—a riot of pixels and ink, of shattered screens and screaming code, of art and rebellion and raw, unbridled creation.
Because this isn’t just a performance.
It’s a war.
And they’ve only just begun to fight.