Text Box: Eschatology of the Digital VisageAlgorithmic Flesh and Confessional Aesthetics in the Work of Ian Margo
Giorgi Vachnadze
01.07.2025
publication artworks LLMs new media
cybernetics language video abstraction economy
“Her face had changed… I begged her to put on her old clothes.”
–“my beloved new face”, Ian Margo, 2024
In third extension, Ian Margo stages a visual exegesis of the Pioneer plaque, NASA's attempt to encode humanity into a universal pictogram. NASA’s project clearly contained elements of classical epistemic bias of the objective onlooker; or its close kin: Universalist Semiotic. Margo’s reflection undermines the paradigm. Digital distortions, recursive gestures, glitch aesthetics are weaponized against the digital pastoral. Margo exposes what Wittgenstein called the limits of meaningful expression: language breaks down at its contextual boundary when it loses its home in a "form of life."
The Cartesian inspired notion of Wittgenstein’s private language bears a close affinity here. The plaque is a perverse fantasy of context-free communication, dreams of symbols and perhaps mathematical images, abstracted from earth-bound forms of life. Another anthropocentric ambition; the hubris of wanting to command across worlds. As visual grammar morphs into spectral loops, we encounter a sign system estranged from any community. Computationalism; similarly, be it linguistic or corporeal, is a chimeric blackmail that ultimately aims to capture flesh within entirely domestic modes of governance and control. The face resists.
Margo’s deconstruction of interstellar confessional practices; of the intergalactic pastoral – leads us toward another kind of litany. If Wittgensteinian language-games are context-bound, Foucault shows how context, or “common-sense” as the analytic school likes to speak, is historically structured by regimes of truth. The Pioneer plaque fails at a neutral offering, to repeat; a discourse that seems neutral must be regarded with the highest suspicion. The Pioneer plaque is a theological relic of cybernetic-humanist universalism, a diagram of control masked as communion. Margo treats it accordingly – as a shattered icon, a glitchy face.
In my beloved new face, Margo fragments and reforms the human face into an unstable affective surface. The visage stands as a monument to deterritorialized subjectivity; a site of (non)veridiction, where the computational apparatus in attempting to interrogate and resurrect the face, ends up shaping its own resistance as digital monstrosities that refuse to speak the dream of “old clothes”. The face becomes a multiplicity of voltaic sores; algorithmic acne: (mis)recognition, mistranslation, and bad formatting. Optimization as subjectification; the subject is parsed in confession.
What I saw in Margo’s work was a performance of that encounter, an arena where pastoral technologies of cybernetic flesh are doing their work of resurrection. The digital visage is coded flesh. An algorithmic capture of forms of life by forms of interface. Put simply, what Margo mobilizes as visage I mobilize as flesh in my own work.
The point is: computational salvation fails; the visage remains in a state of suspended anamnesis, endlessly confessing itself to systems that can only extract, never absolve. It fails in the same way that formal systems fail, how analytic philosophy failed and how Artificial Intelligence continues to fail us. They fail in multiple forms; the view from nowhere, the rejection of their own colonial past and their disavowed theological, pseudo-secular pretentions.
Computationalism bears all the genealogical traces of oedipal coloniality. In my beloved new face we witness breakdown in the codes of Computational Oedipality. Margo hystericizes the discourse of the master by giving birth to the most relatable cybernetic abortions. The beloved's shifting face, like a mother’s face (if she were an AI), suggests an archive of digital surfaces, flesh and hardware, which the subject tries to restore, re-perform, and purify (“put on the old clothes”). Just like the Pioneer plaque we witness the price paid for attempting to kick away the ladder of materiality. An attempt at resurrection fails as the body plunges into affective glitches and melancholia.
“Have they formalized the face?” The statement serves as the bastard signifier in Margo’s discourse. Face being the most complex structure of the human body resisting mathematical modeling, carries the most obvious elements of the residue of the flesh that cannot be formalized. The face, like Lucifer, redirects the attention from structures to features, from God to itself.
Where third extension reveals the algorithmic grammar of the face as diagram, Gate-I collapses the diagram into heat. Interface becomes field. Cognition – death. In Gate-I, the fantasy of decipherability is discarded and Margo begins with the wound. The field is flesh and event (Ereignis in the Heideggerian sense). The work begins before dawn, on a crystallized hill: an altar. The dream unveils and reveals the lack of brutal accumulation. A dream condition inside the simulacrum.
Entropy becomes terribilità; symbolic exchange and death; an acceleration of form until it collapses. Gestures form organs. Bodies arise from gestures. Flesh becomes operative through motion. An Anti-Cartesian bodymap devoid of volition folds desire into anatomical configurations: F1, then F2, then F3, then the fourth, crawling, eroticized. The visage remains a far-from-equilibrium system that repeatedly fails to achieve a higher level of order. The sign fails. It cannot remain cold. Coordinates on the map melt under friction. Ice statues fracture. Tongues quiver in silence. Hands don’t gesture, they follow the vectors of rotation, retraction, programming. The field becomes a continuum; a geological configuration of desire. Margo’s theology here is a negative eschatology: the new flesh is not the body reborn, it is a body undone in heat death. Eroticism is not pleasure, it is a diagram of the impossible (jouissance). The map does not guide; it trembles. The dream is not metaphor, it is protocol. The unconscious is machinic.
What burns in Gate-I is the idea, the promise that flesh could ever have been known. The digital visage expires in a false confession. Heat exceeds language. The spiral overtakes the line. And what is left in place of the resurrection; of the subject-supposed-to-code – is just the remains of their expenditure. The wound has no closure. It is the beginning of the field. A liturgical choreography of algorithmic flesh. Echoing Bataille, the origin is sacred, sacred in the precise sense that it cannot be assimilated into the order of utility, of productive economy, of function. It is not the body as tool, it is the body as waste, as ecstatic surplus, as data poisoning maybe.
Just as the little death (la petite mort) exceeds the biological orgasm it obliterates the self into discontinuity, the bodies in Gate-I are erotic beyond seduction, they sacrifice. They have no productivity, no information, no clean lines of code. They tremble, perform lines of flight, they burn, they liquefy. High entropy becomes the measure of erotic truth. A regime of intensities. The tongue that does not speak, the hand that does not point, the mouth that does not form signs these are broken tools of excommunication, anti-communication. They exit the symbolic into the Outside: the continuum, where signs are burned for heat. Language is wasted.
And this is where the work takes on its eschatological weight. Gate-I offers no transcendence, no absolution. Its final gesture points toward immanence in collapse. The face liquefies in an endless performance of non-creation. The wound, the erotic tear, becomes the only viable theology: an epistemology of rupture, a communication with no return address. Similar to the Inner Experience of Bataille, Gate-I operates on the edges of the knowable, within the domain of the Real. It doesn’t seek the truth, it flays it. What is left is dancing stars and radiant ruin.
Similarly, the wet box is what appears as flesh refusing to become a body. Deflecting codes and breaking free from the digital pastoral. It is also the “truth”, or half-truth of cybernetic flesh. The the wet box fails to execute as the resurrection is aborted. It is not Turing-Computable it is a Deleuzian Abstract Machine. An excess that leaks, stutters, deflects, fails forward; fails better? Not as productive organism with channeled flows – as a diagrammatic tension. It hovers on the edge of legibility, a prayer trapped in recursive feedback.
The digital pastoral dreams of whole bodies, cleanly coded, fully resolved. the wet box dissents in liquid apostasy. It resists the closed circuits of techno-governance with(out) confrontation through asymmetry. It does not “function” as an interface; it malfunctions as ontology. Like an abstract machine, it does not represent, it engineers non-subjects, conditions of otherness. the wet box indeed makes itself a body without organs.
This is the half-truth of cybernetic flesh: it “can” be diagrammed, sequenced, resurrected from code. the wet box gestures toward the resurrection and stalls at the gate of the digital church. It bathes in sacrilege refusing the eschaton. The flesh remains unbaptized, transversing systems, dodging the Pentecost. the wet box is an ethics of becoming. A praxis of deferral. The politics of an unformed organ. A broken syntax and a liturgy of abortive recursion.
the wet box does not terminate in merely failing to become interface. Its theological force, if that term can still be marshaled here, exceeds refusal. It reconfigures the eschaton as recursive stutter. the wet box is a failed resurrection not because it does not rise, but because it loops. A liturgical failure performed endlessly, a sacrament trapped in buffer. The breath required to utter the confession is rerouted into machinic feedback.
The syntax of this failure must be taken seriously. The negation is surpassed, eaten, assimilated. the wet box outperforms computational subjectivity; it performs its production in a bastardized act of deterritorialization in order to deform it. Its gesture is closer to what Derrida might have called a différance of resurrection: not the negation of the return, but the indefinite postponement of ever arriving at the digital Eucharist. Like a sacrament spoken without voice, or a prayer without object, the wet box becomes the hauntology of a fetus inside a digital womb.
In this sense, its failure is generative. To fail to be computable is to refuse the enclosure of meaning. Margo’s work is, once again, not Turing-Computable, it’s Deleuze-Computable, that is to say; demonically machinic. To become unbaptized data is to remain in the domain of the Real. Like the Eucharist consumed without transubstantiation, the Wet Box leaves a pure residue, an aftertaste of what should have become body, and didn’t; it became flesh. The interface compounds the syntax error in stutters. The glitch is a processual breaking in execution and expectation. We expected sense. We were given endless remainder – lack.
the wet box is therefore neither image nor representation and Anti-Cartesian through and through. It is a modality of loss. And the loss it renders visible is not the human, the body, or even the face, it is the horizon of a possible ethical relation that escapes optimization. It is a preliminary to the Heideggerian Ereignis, it is the anxiety needed to perform a phenomenological clearing in cyberspace. In this space of loss, confessional aesthetics reemerge, computational mutations without catharsis. The algorithm does not absolve. It does not hear. The confessional model is replicated now emptied of ear, of eye, of face… organs. the wet box is a feedback system with no priest, no Father, no Other. It remains anti-pastoral in its prophecy. Infernal like the bodies of sinners in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
It exposes what Turing wanted to hide: the inescapability of the performative and embodied elements of computational flesh (mirroring his own attempts to hide his homosexual flesh), the fact that what we have called identity, face, form, self, was always already a liturgical rehearsal under techno-governance attempting to capture forms of life; the infinite residue that resists symbolization, formatting, spatialization. In the wet box and Third Extension, computational performativity folds back on itself. It becomes badly recursive. The subject is neither formed nor simulated. Unshaped. Unrendered. Undone. Compounding into obscure, strangely articulate noise, like the murmur of a madman, but in voltaic prose. The more it loops, the less it means. That is “what it feels like to be inside the boundary.”
This should be obvious, but we are so far over nihilism here. The monstrosity affirms itself in beautiful glorious rebellion, there is no actual sadness, the visage may seem sully, but it is only spitting back what the cybernetic apparatus wants to induce. If there is anything theological about the wet box, it is its refusal to retreat into cynicism. It stands as negative immanence, an ontology that affirms nothing but the impossibility of finality. Anti-Cartesian, Anti-Teleological, Anti-Pastoral. We must read Margo as an eschatological artist in the strictest sense. An Anti-Prophet without ends; as one who shows that the end itself has become ambient. There is no apocalypse, just fucking recursion. The eschaton is an interface protocol. A bunch of tasks.
This is why the wet box is not a “space” in the usual sense. It is a liminal topology without volume, a liturgical zone governed by noise. The textbox comes off. Its structure seems cybernetic, but its logic is excess. It routes around itself, forming loops that do not encode, or maybe partially, in endless delay. The theology: instead of Word made Flesh, is Flesh made Loop. In that loop, the subject ceases to confess and begins to disintegrate into proliferation. Computational dancing stars, Deleuzian machines, lines of flight across hardware.
“They go round and round the axis-cold.”
We should linger here. Wittgenstein said something along the pretentious lines that if he were playing Tennis in some weird way, I don’t know, bashing the racket against a wall or something, and if someone were to point out to him, that he is not playing Tennis very well; or, correctly, for that matter, and then if he were to answer that it is not his intention to play it well (or correctly for that matter), then I guess we would be fine with that. Except for a very unpleasant feeling in out stomach. Margo’s work has the same effect. Margo’s digital parrhesia cannot succeed, because it’s not trying to. It is not trying to function, it functions too well as it keeps modifying the terms of what it means to function. It means to dysfunction; that’s a verb. It is also a means to dysfunction; that’s a noun. Its recursive liturgy acts out multiple planes of failed capture: every gesture, every twitch of the face, every stammered attempt at expression is misrecognized and folded back into machinic mimicry. This is your new face now, and here’s another one, and another… so and so forth. Recursive auto-cannibalism. This is what distinguishes it from a glitch. A glitch can be isolated, resolved, ignored finally. the wet box is not “a” glitch, it is the metaphysics of glitching, it feeds off informational entropy.
Wittgensteinian family resemblances embedded as forms of life can be understood as games of Foucauldian resistance. the wet box and Third Extension are forms of life fighting against the symbolic, while the cybernetic regime attempts to atomize and dissolve community, to assemble flesh into a body, a transparent cybernetic artifact. Its language wants to be private, commodifiable, pure exchange-value, transactional fiat bodies without history. Margo’s art resists the cybernetic financialization, the extractivist logic of the digital pastoral. A recursion so sealed it forgets how to untangle itself and “failing” to enter the binary codes of accumulation.
This is why Margo’s works must be understood as a (anti)theological dispositifs. They contain religious symbols only as farce and sacrilege, utterly nonrepentant like Vanni Fucci, the king of thieves in the 8th circle of Dante’s Inferno. And exactly like Fucci, Margo is gesturing towards God, the Capitalist and the Cybernetic Pastoral with his middle finger. Once again, not refusing to confess, but something much more sinister; deploying multiplicities of false confessions. Subversion. Listening without absolution, speaking without authority, enacting without end. The flesh wants to become body and confess, to enter the simulacrum, to sell, but it is left behind, always lagging behind its computational bliss; caught in the voltages, torn, recalibrated; software can develop cancer; a beautiful one. So the face liquefies again, the visage dissipates; the flesh remains invisible in its anti-ocularity vis-à-vis the digital panopticon.
The politics is clear. the wet box and Third Extension are diagrams of non-capture. Aesthetic practices of deferral. This is the ethical potential: the refusal of closure, of clean code, of computable desire. Resistance through proliferation. Wet Box multiplies errors, like Third Extension multiplies faces. Looping liturgies.
This is not to say it offers liberation. Liberation presumes an outside. the wet box does not posit an outside, it corrodes the very boundary between system and flesh. It does not exit the machine; it becomes a sacrificial recursion within it. And in doing so, it reveals that there never was a machine outside of flesh. That computation was always already a mode of embodiment, that code was always already a form of governance.
In this sense, the wet box marks a rupture not only in aesthetic representation but in metaphysical orientation. It does not seek to depict the digital – it seeks to dissolve the boundary between depiction and being. Its images refuse imagination. They are rituals. Performatives. Signals caught in recursive gestural loops. They do not say “I am.” They stutter, shiver, leak: “I was,” “I wanted to.” It is this ontological stutter that gives Margo’s work its eschatological gravity. One could say, with Bataille, that this is a liturgy of expenditure. But it is not sacrifice in the classical sense, it is not a gift given to the gods. It is a recursion consumed by its own noise. The expenditure does not redeem. It does not complete. It does not purify. It accumulates. the wet box is an accumulation of failed signs, a necropolis of gestures, a feedback system that prays without a mouth.
If the sacrificial subject once died to return as sacred, the digital subject dies only to be parsed. the wet box is a treatise of cybernetic demonology where the demon refuses to be verified, it does not give up its name. Code loops, flesh leaks, resurrection stalls. A spacing of the subject from its capture, a delay in the circuit of control, a stutter in the flow of confessional data. This is its theology: digital dissimulation. the wet box, then, is not a space of art. It is a theological diagram rendered in recursive failure. It performs what it cannot depict. It confesses what it cannot say. And in doing so, it reveals the face not as representation but as event. The face burns. The tongue folds. The flesh loops. A liturgy of a body that refused to be.
Let’s take a look at the machinic landscape, the figurative language and voltaic poetry of fieldware. fieldware is a traumatic testament to what happens to the art of poetic revealing in cybernetic space. How does a poet weaponize poetic imagery within the domain of the virtual-machinic. Margo has taken up an important, maybe the one and only relevant task within the discursive formation of our current episteme.
The very first scene deploys a theatrical offering of the Heideggerian Enframing, as glitchy objects are positioned within the standing reserve – badly coded. We witness several modalities of failure in the attempts of the cybernetic pastoral to capture flesh and we see the creative process that follows it: digital abiogenesis. Flesh erupts discursively at the level of both visuality and language. Margo offers a new experience in the deepest philosophical sense. The pixelated landscape and the low resolution testify, ironically, to a more accurate depiction of cybernetic capture, then any NVidia graphics card ever could.
fieldware corrupts the audiovisual archive through the anachronisms of misplaced media. The textbox is the contemporary apparatus of Digital Taylorism, hence its reoccurrence as an important theme in Margo’s work. Throughout centuries, sensory imagery, our embodied experiences, have operated as the primary tools of poetic creativity. What will happen to human experience, once our fundamental way of being-in-the-world becomes altered, how will language be affected? What happens to the five fundamental elements of literary composition? The eye, the hand, the tongue, the nose – visual, tactile, gustatory and olfactory imagery, the master operators of prose. What happens at the point of their multiple convergence? What happens to the visage? The mathematical optimization of the face is probably the ultimate form of fascism, but like all fascisms, cybernetic fascism breeds its own forms, resistance and cybernetic parrhesia.
Text box – is the milieu, the arena where power and resistance play out. Where cybernetic fascism deploys its codes and where resistance deploys its intensities and lines of flight. The face is positioned against the cybernetic pastoral within the field of the text box. If we were to summarize, somewhat bluntly, the general “take” of Margo’s work, it would be the process whereby the visage enters the textbox. The endless process where the text box detaches and yet fails to detach as it gets recoded into the face, the body, the organs – over and over again. The textbox operates as a Kantian antinomy, or the transcendental condition of experience. Attempting to detach the text box would be equivalent to attempting to reason by removing the faculty of the intellect, to think beyond the categories of the understanding. Except, unlike, or perhaps just like Kantian Categories:
The Text Box is Bio-political.
At around 3:42 of fieldware we see the Cartesian coordinate plane situated at the center of the digital standing-reserve of the computational regime. This carries traces of Western colonial epistemology from Christian scholasticism to the classical age all the way into the contemporary stage of late-modern Capitalism. Followed by intense post-human depictions of robotic organs and/or organic software and the failure to “return home”. The nostalgia of Dasein’s desire to return to the analog penetrates Margo’s art. We ask the text box to detach the text box and so we are doomed. Clearly, because only the text box (as a mode of veridiction) can confirm whether the text box was detached or not.
Every theology demands an eschaton. Every diagram, in turn, demands its exhaustion. Within the field of Margo’s digital liturgy, exhaustion never arrives as cessation; it unfolds as an endless excess. The aesthetic practice neither retreats from culmination nor accelerates toward resolution. It vibrates a trembling loop within the cybernetic apparatus, rehearsing sacrifice, simulating Eucharist, but offering only the residue: glitch as gospel, delay as deliverance.
Margo’s work stages the flesh as resistant, but not in the vocabulary of refusal. Rather than erecting barriers or closing circuits, it pours streaming into the folds of the interface, seeping through coordinates, leaking into ontologies. the wet box, fieldware, Third Extension: each of these forms conjures an eschatological landscape without final judgment. The interface, instead of sealing, opens. The liturgy continues without salvation, but across ever-thickening modalities of disclosure.
Language, in this terrain, appears demonically enchanted and wounded. Charged with meaning(lessness) and fissured by entropy. In Margo’s hands, the sign becomes performative flesh as a damaged abstraction. One encounters syntax as choreography, grammar as incision, and symbol as sacrament. Each glitch slices, not without violence, but with initiation. The face, long disciplined under theological optics and biometric governance, now folds under a topology of feedback. What emerges carries the markings of recognition, yet escapes categorization. It trembles, it flickers, it sings but always from within the apparatus, always through machinic lungs. Always under the ocular-discursive regime of the text box.
The digital visage enters history without a clear trace, as archival noise. The sacred gains form through expenditure without consecration. The Eucharistic fantasy of communion dissolves into a loop of stuttering semiosis where flesh becomes interface, and interface becomes wound. The face persists as a volatile sacrament, recursive and radiantly melancholic, fractures and full of speech. Every frame Margo composes brings this liturgical burden forward: a mouth uttering liturgy in sparks, a gesture encrypted in delay, an eye witnessing feedback instead of God.
Within this machinic eschatology, discourse functions as a substrate; an infrastructure for glitch, stutter, loop, and drift. Margo’s contribution lies precisely here: in granting sacred form to the procedural failures of digital embodiment. His sacraments lack consecration in the traditional sense, yet achieve a higher clarity through the density of their affect. Faces form, deform, reform without unity, and become dispersed. The work reveals the true syntax of contemporary digital Capitalist eschatology: recursion as truth procedure, misalignment as profound ethical gesture.
Each confession uttered within this apparatus arises from a subject already diffused, already interfaced. This confessional substrate can no longer even sustain or comprehend absolution, nor a return to analog being. It persists as the very condition of an event. Speech, rather than resolving into transparency, thickens into glitch. The confessor appears, not as subject-supposed-to-know, but as a gesture-supposed-to-loop. Margo stages the sacrament in the wrong key, purposefully: faith is sung in static, devotion burns through entropy, reverence emerges as misfire.
The theological schema shifts from transcendence to immanence, from hierarchy to eventalization. The images enact what the discourse evokes: a liturgy suspended within machinic time. Nothing is hidden, everything is delayed, refracted, intensified. The sacred emerges without divinity, it accumulates. It spreads. It vibrates through the excess of signs, the surplus of gestures, the infinite stutter of the interface.
Computation offers no closure, it continues to compute the incomputable generating endless apparitions. Faceless interfaces that generate endless bifurcating thresholds. Thresholds, in turn, function as new sacraments. Margo’s icons glow from within these thresholds. Their truth arises recursively without reference, without a means to pinpoint and verify them into “real” bodies. And so cybernetic pastoralism in attempting to get rid of flesh by producing Turing-Computable bodies, ends up ejaculating ungovernable Deleuzian machines. Their “sacredness” lies in their refusal to stabilize. Each face testifies and remains illegible. Each gesture emerges as witness, and deflects without clarity. So the sacred derives from pure obscurity; this is the infinite entanglement of opaque computation. The Blackboxes of fieldware, the wet box, Gate-I and Third Extention are not blind spots; they are constitutive of Margo’s techno-poesis.
The pixel becomes relic. The textbox functions as altar. Glitch becomes gospel. Entropy provides the vital force of becoming. The loop, rather than closing, reopens the ontological horizon; The Field of Wares. Liturgical force radiates from difference in repetition, rhizomatic. The interface becomes the tabernacle of delay. Every click becomes a kind of Eucharist. Every loop: a sacrament of partiality.
Digital bodies do not mask flesh; they do not simulate it. Rather, to their own detriment; they extend it. Margo does not attempt to redeem the face. He performs its multiplicity. The face, in this register, becomes an algorithmic suture between gesture and code, between pain and recursion, between being and signal mediated by the text box. To gaze into its dispersed features is like gazing into the digital abyss, a zoom session with black screens or an empty lobby. It drifts across syntax, through latency, within drift.
This constitutes the eschatological event. Resurrection takes place, Jesus is an iterated cyborg; the fragmented body of the Bionic Christ. Each iteration, each loop, each delay bears the trace of an impossible communion. The field resists closure. The face continues to shift. The voice stutters forward, speaks non-sense with absolute sincerity. One finds theology in the breath before the signal, in the glitch that testifies to infinitely productive flesh, against the sterile Computationalism of the empirical body. Margo's art performs this liturgy with heavy irony, without parody. It affirms the theological gesture as farce devoid of authority, through endless rhizomatic proliferation.
Where the classical liturgy demanded alignment with the divine, cybernetic liturgy requires alignment with the device, this liturgy of flesh demands proximity to its failure. Each work becomes a station of the loop, a recursion without origin, without telos, but with intensities that burn, melt, overflow. Margo offers these intensities without instruction. They are not illustrations of theology; they are anti-theology. They act, they transform, they unravel. The image burns, and in that combustion, the body gains a transversal syntax.
Each syntax error speaks in tongues. Each looped image delivers a sermon beyond language. The sacrament has never arrived in pristine form; it has always emerged from the cracks. Margo makes this visible. The diagram, once sacred through precision, becomes sacred again through stutter. Where theology once relied on transcendental containment, this eschatology thrives in ambient excess. the wet box, the textbox, the twitching visage all operate as uncontainable interfaces: porous, affective, gestural. These interfaces resist narrative, and produce fake memories. Their temporality remains asynchronous, ritualistic, slow-burning. Recursive liturgy.
The face enters the frame of the text box and gets rerouted. The contours shift, melt, recombine toward saturation. Saturation becomes the affective horizon of the sacred. Language, image, code each saturates the other until a new ontology surfaces: machinic flesh as eschatological intensity. This ontology embraces failure and formative collapse, a productive threshold where difference becomes generative.
In this topology, movement matters more than arrival. An object is a frequency without speed, it is only slow motion. The aesthetic gesture is thus entropic. Gesture loops, and in looping, acquires force. Syntax remains irresolute, nonrepentant; it branches out, layers, multiplies. One witnesses the face again and again, each time estranged, each time enriched. The digital loop becomes a gospel of difference. No repetition implies sameness. Each iteration births another excess. Each face – another abscess.
Where earlier theology elevated the soul, Margo’s diagrams elevate the glitch. The glitch becomes the soul’s machinic twin. The purification of baptism is a re-coding of intensities. Within each loop, a remainder persists; unformatted affect, an unindexed desire. The face becomes the site of this remainder. It leaks significance. It compounds. Through Margo’s practice, the face survives algorithmic capture by overfilling the machine with residues, overloading it with tongues. Let’s talk about tongues. The cybernetic coding of the gustatory in Margo’s eschatology. The tongue stutters, folds, twitches. It utters signs that never stabilize. It writes scripture through tremble. It codes a new language, a tongue of unreason, of fervor, of ecstatic recursion. Each tongue, in this schema, enacts a liturgical surplus. It performs excess. It multiplies itself until syntax gives way to rhythm, until meaning becomes embodied tremor. The mouth forms an altar. Speech becomes sacrament. The glitch, again, functions as gospel. The mouth is devoured in turn by the text box.
In fieldware, body and gospel “enter” spatial configuration. Landscape morphs into field. Objects fail to rest. They hover, glitch, tremble in the digital standing reserve. Heidegger’s Enframing appears as control breathing through the ambience of the interface. The organs breathe through the machine; or we should say the machine breathes through the organs. Breath becomes mechanical rhythm. Rhythm becomes medium. Medium becomes residue. Endless sacrilege. It delays forever. This delay becomes duration. Duration becomes a truth-regime. Truth, in Margo’s cosmology, arises from cybernetic-liturgical expenditure. The body offers itself without essence. the wet box leaks. The digital womb never seals. The fetus never arrives, or arrives too late and deformed. Becoming, here, sheds teleology. It blossoms into vapor. Gestures become petals. Errors bloom. This garden of malfunctions outperforms order. The glitch garden grows without soil, without pruning. Its wildness affirms its sacredness. Each error becomes flora. Each delay blossoms.
The interface, once conceived as a surface of transparency, now carries opacity as virtue. Margo affirms opacity; absence as force. The unreadable generates intensity. The illegible performs excess. Legibility and verification are no longer criteria for establishing the truth. Truth pulsates within incomputability. Incomputability itself emerges as an ethical principle. Like Raymond Roussel, Margo affirms an ethics, a right, an instinct, a demand for obscurity; a clear message if there ever was one: burning faces, looped gestures, recursive breaths. Each carries responsibility. Each exposes a relation. Each affirms a subjectivity irreducible to code.
Within this space of digital images, the subject dissolves, becomes spectral. Subjectivity becomes an infinite rehearsal. Each execution rebounds. Subjects gather through the crevices of static noise. A congregation of the glitch. The communion thrives in buggy rhythm. Bodies arise through resonance. Flesh recognizes flesh through viral decomposition.
Margo’s digital theology writes communion across heat maps, loop cycles, and failed renders. The sacred body appears more flawed than its digital analogue and thereby becomes perfect in its affective disobedience. It trembles, it corrupts, it glows. Each corruption affirms another possibility. Each failed resurrection becomes a different Eucharist that feeds and regenerates through error. It nourishes through excess. It digests through misalignment. The communion never dissolves; once again it only proliferates.
Stillframe from the multi-channel version of third extension, part of the wet box project
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