Some Unusual Qualities of Particular Labyrinths

The mirrors in the so-called "Palace of Narcissus" actually served a distinct purpose, as do mirrors in palaces generally, to serve as simple surveillance systems controlling vulnerable points of access, such as stairs. It is for this reason true that, as the lyrics of the lay go, the number of mirrors proliferated as the number of actual personnel in the palace declined. However, the importation of more and more mirrors into the palace was rather the effect of fewer and fewer personnel (the mirrors being needed so fewer and fewer guards could control the same amount of space) rather than as folklore has it, the cause.

Further, it has been mathematically demonstrated, that, owing to the well-understood laws of optics, it is wholly possible that the palace’s main chamber could have contained numerous blind spots, because of, and not despite its mirrors.

It is, no doubt, by the cunning exploitation of this geometry and physical fact that the victims of the palace were dispatched, by assassins unknown, rather than strangled by their own reflections, as legend has it.




The Labyrinth of the Minotaur, it is said, possessed unusual acoustics. This we read in the excellent "Encouraging Voice of the Labyrinth."

It is said that the "fatherly voice" in the labyrinth is "heard everywhere and at all points equivocally." Further, that the Minotaur could hear everything that happened in the labyrinth equally well, from any distance or position, as though it were occurring in the folds of his ears. This is the unstated reasoning behind the author's claim that time and space did not exist in the labyrinth for the Minotaur, for whom it is completely transparent and intelligible monad. The author then goes on to identify the Minotaur as God, as Mithras, in whose catacombs there is terrible enlightenment, or as Moloch, to whom all children are ultimately sacrificed.

As for the unfortunate children of Thebes, it was said that the sound of their own footsteps or voices were alienated from them, appearing to approach them from behind in a distorted form, perhaps owing to the same sonic dynamics that gave the Minotaur his omniscience. Perhaps further, the victims of the labyrinth were so chased by their own magnified footsteps and panicked voices into delivering themselves into the den of the Minotaur himself.

If so, this perhaps explains how the Minotaur had complete and instantaneous intelligence from every point in the labyrinth: the Minotaur may have occupied some central location to which all the passages of the labyrinth conducted and magnified all sounds.




If any of this is plausible, even possible, it provides a possible context for an explanation of the enigmatic "voice" of the labyrinth. It is the distorted and pitch shifted echoes of the doomed youths themselves as they grope their way to their doom. Both the voice and the encouragement are chimerical.

Its author could certainly not be the Minotaur himself, who is described universally in all accounts as mute.




"Our Life Now" is the title of an artwork noted at the Venice Biennale 2048 for its shockingly high casualty and fatality rate, even at a Biennale where lethal and near lethal artwork were very much in vogue. The labyrinth section of the installation begins with a highly realistic scale replica of a mall shopping arcade in Hong Kong in the late 20th century, whose glitzy twists and turns eventually become those of an Egyptian tomb, which alludes directly to the author's previous collaboration on the retail sarcophagus of Madonna and his still earlier work on the "hidden retail spaces of the dead.” *

This museum quality replica actually holds the mummified body of Norman Mailer, a fact that is only revealed in the following darkened chamber, where viewers are forced to endure a reading from Ancient Evenings read by a Mailer lookalike.

The viewer's only escape from this ordeal is to discover the concealed secret door that leads out of the reading, as the passage by which they entered is slowly filled in with sand during the reading.

The secret passage opens up onto a maze whose walls are virtual advertisements that patrons must negotiate using eyemice or I-GUIs. Revolutionary at the time, this maze of ads is now a staple at tradeshows, air and infospace musems and arcology condo displays. Indeed, the viewers are inclined to believe they have reached the end of the installation as the virtuspace commercials are for the very corporations that sponsored the exhibit.

Instead, the maze itself collapses and the viewers instead find themselves in the very real freezing mud of a trench in Le Mort Homme in 1916. Viewers have no sooner taken positions to view the bleakened craters of the field before them, when sharp whistles announce an incoming enemy assault, in this case, wave after wave of celebrity lookalikes with live historically accurate ammo.

A pitched battle generally ensues between the panicked art going public (which has the advantage of position) and the waves of hardened celebrity imitators, ultimately descending into extremely vicious hand to hand close quarter combat as the celebrities overrun the trench, using such improvised trench combat weapons as sharpened shovels, Grammys, Emmys, Cable ACE Awards and Academy Awards. This is where most casualties occur as the art going public usually has little more than the Biennale schedule and artist's statements to defend itself.

*Very different in its signification than the artist’s Universal Centotaph for Tom and Suri Cruise, Whose Circumference is Everywhere and Whose Center is Nowhere, which consisted of several strains of engineered bacteria carrying various slogans, such as “EXTREME WEALTH BRINGS ITS OWN WOE, WHICH HAS NEITHER SYMPATHY NOR DIGNITY” and “WHOM GODS WOULD DESTROY THEY FIRST GIVE AN INCOMPETENT PUBLICIST” as well as samples from Cruise’s most famous films that can only be played back on the now obsolete 120 BB (gram negative) gPod. ("Pain and Information Aesthetics" NAND, Vol X).





The very undecided and deeply problematic nature of the Labyrinthus Pareidolia on Mars makes its inclusion on this list controversial. Aresologists, exoarcheologists, Marsologists and geologists remain violently divided as to whether the structure is a natural formation, alien artifact, giant facbot printing error, hoax or advertising campaign from the future or symptom of material planetary mental illness. As such they have differing opinions and analyses as to whether the “friezes” “faces” and other depictions of the labyrinth depict Martian mythology or history, attempts at therapy, or “a trailer for the extinction of the human species.”

This leaves aside the perennial controversy over whether or not there is Afterlife on Mars.



Most Marsologists maintain that Mars as a natural phenomenon effectively ceased to exist with the successive printer errors of the Mars Condo Society and that as rogue facbots and frankenweiners have effectively remade the planet, Mars has effectively been not so much terraformed as “anthropomorphized,” and, as such, Aresologists have no actual object of study (Aresology actually being a branch of human and post-human cultural studies). On the whole, Marslogists wish to continue the venerable tradition of empirically based intersubjectively available science and reject the operational premises of Aresology as wholly lacking any intelligible criteria for its purported phenomena or testable hypotheses or statements, being not so much a science as a catalog of pseudo events and quasi experiences.

Aresologists, in turn, cite the catastrophic events, unexplainable data and failure of the missions previous to Mars Condo One as dispositive of the peculiar cybernetic and psychological phenomena of Mars having some indigenous origin and point to the continuing vexing presence of Martians as indicative of phenomena that cannot be accomodated in traditional natural science, no matter how our concepts of space, time, cause and identity are modified, but rather can only begin to be described in a new framework that accepts such paraphenomena as Martian Spiders as "para-phenomenologically pseudo-real abstractions as given reals."

Despite, or rather because of this, there is actually quite a lot of consensus as to the proposed demolition of the labyrinth and any other observable structures on Mars. However, rather than a preemptive strike on Mars in a presumed Earth-Mars War, as some critics have claimed, this is simply to, in the words of one Nobel Prize Laureate “place man back in his proper position as a thinking being and re-enable the regularities that are the conditions of possibility for natural science.”

Our Workout and Why We Do It

It was media I had ripped off the War Channel (née History Channel), like rape ape squads from the new wars that had raged across Africa and Europe, Prime 8’s and child soldiers on mass rape and humiliation B/T/K raids through homes for the elderly. That shit was ill. You’d plug it in for a few seconds and then you’d need a real serious tranq and beer chaser to avoid the fast pukes, or just huff for a awhile and jerk off to something normal like Dutch centipede movies or some nice slow Japanese guro, or a Herschel Gordon Lewis flick, let the CNS fade to its normal smooth black.


I know they say the Snuff Wars were about orgone, but like I asked in my famous mertweet, who the fuck has ever seen an orgone? People have been pulling sick shit on each other ever since the first time somebody had a sharp stick and some raw ideas of physical comedy and there’s nothing that hasn’t happened in the last forty years that didn’t happen in Goya’s Horrors of War, or the Holocaust I or II, except that maybe it’s weird that we pay robots to jack each other off while we do it. Life and horror are sick and repetitive, like pornography, which is why I work in the sick and repetitive horror pornography industry. This is why I am an artist, and this is my artist’s statement while I’m strangling you during weird rough sex in the Kevin Costner suite of the Kevin Bacon Complex.




The Kevin Bacon Complex isn’t really a tesseract, but that’s what they want you to think, but rather just the biggest orbital theme hotel in existence ever since Dubai II fell out of La Grange during the late unpleasantness. The rooms shift around, some have lethal traps, others have HBO –you know, the usual Hilton/Kempinski deal. The whole place was basically a mausoleum for every dead star who did old fiber stuff that your grandma liked with her biker alderman wife. It supposedly looks like Kevin Bacon crucified on a hypercube, but since no one can get out there to look at it, who knows? The concept was a constantly shifting puzzle of endless themed luxury suites with nostalgic media themes and now I am reading the damn brochure to you while the monkey pours movie theatre butter on your back.




But this isn’t about sex, it’s about power, which is the absence of power, which is why you are here, to watch my workout, because, like cheating on you with your girlfriend or fuckbot or barely legal guardian this is what makes it real. Human beings are social creatures and can you see me flexing, because with these veins popping a look like a fucking Sequoia root system and I don’t need you to blow me now, but yes, can we please download another magazine not about dinosaurs defecating in muscle cars? We’re social creatures and we need the love and surveillance and constant connection to be whole as we basically live in glass hive of Borgs/Necromongrers/Cenobites/Kyben that get off on leathery sick shit that used to be called communication.



But it’s not communication any more. It’s what comes after the vanishing point, the transparent society. It’s an x-ray of the Invisible Man’s imaginary friend. It’s not communication for the same reason working out isn’t a sport. Working out isn’t a sport because masturbation (qua masturbation, not like on XXXESPN) isn’t really a sport.



Because neither is the ecstasy of Saints.



Speaking of which, now is as good a time as any to tell you that during sex with you I like to fantasize that I am masturbating. This has been going on for a while and I’ve been meaning to tell you and wanted to break it to you in a sensitive way and have been waiting for more data, but there you go. I thought now, during sex, would be a timely and salient time to tell you about it, which is why I had you put on that bondage gear with all the post-it notes on it. Now that you are secure inside your GIMP-IMAX sensory deprivation/I-GUI helmet it can be told to you, over the sound of seagulls laughing cue seagulls.






My masturbation fantasy is really abstract, like I can’t really put it all together. In it, I am touching myself in an unfamiliar way in an little used part of the house that isn’t real, like the parts of a house in a dream that only exist in a dream. Likewise, I’m touching a part of my body I don’t normally touch or find arousing. I also can’t say what it is. It’s a new part of my body that is also not clear. Also, I’m not touching it directly. It’s like I’m pulling on the dimensional space around my nipples, the geodesics and tensors that lead to the surface of my skin, but not my skin itself. I am masturbating an invisible and unclear organ with a phantom hand.


It goes without saying that it’s really hard to come.


That’s probably what I like about it. My fantasy sex organ is really unclear, like a cryptid glimpsed in a dream. Sometimes I imagine that it can grasp my hand back, like tentacles, or clamp down like a vagina. Other times, it is gloriously numb, like the splinter in a wound, like an arrowhead or bullet, a thorn I am pushing out of my skin.



It’s vague and distant. When I want to come I switch to my usual fantasy, that I am a suicide bomber and you are singing telegram sent by an ancient dead race and we meet in the labyrinth of an already extinguished city, the last ones, the last ones.



Then we meet and it turns out your telegram is a cookbook.





This act alone, and not the cocaine, proves I am a genius.




The universe, I say, is basically a big computer. And like most computers, it is basically full of porn. That’s the deep web, the dark matter, that’s what’s hidden in the cosmic cloud drive we can only observe indirectly. It's porn because like porn, everything is permitted, but nothing is allowed. The sex always happens for someone else, to someone else. No touching. Nothing touches.

In the present, pornography is the dominant form of life, because God is dead (or rather, unconscious) and without God, or something like it, no other form of representation or being is possible.





I am genius because I am untimely, because I am probsolete –I am format that is no longer supported or will not exist for years to come. My medium is my message and my message is the golden record on Voyager VI, which is to say, I am to be first read and truly received, not by this generation, nor the next, but by a vast alien machine intelligence that will misinterpret yet enable my mission and send me back to you, as V’ger. This to and fro is what is meant by dialectic, which is to say I am a destiny, which is to say I am going to come so we need to put it somewhere no, not there, though possibly on the Venus flytrap by the Georgia O’Keefe.



I am probsolete. I am replaced by myself, by what came next, what the fashion designer supercomputers had already planned last season. It wasn’t your great grandfather’s
cyberpunk or your grandfather’s steampunk or your bio-dad’s transhuman fascism . It was something unbearably ugly and potent. It was the merging not of living matter and technology, but of marketing and necrotizing fasciitis, of disinformation and cancer. I could not compete or dialog.



Which is good because I really had started to freak out a little because my sex fantasies were getting really borderline normal. And at first, I thought, that’ s cute, but then it wasn’t cute. It was kitsch. It was all sunshine and puppies and first time anal sex in your pre-teen bedroom –really vanilla normal unmodded hetro stuff. And kitsch is the first sign of true decadence. The contest between Nietzsche and Wagner never ended: we are their syphilitic children. Kitsch is always the beginning of fascism and not the sexy hot kind.


And this above all, is why I am a genius, a humanist genius in world with no humans,
and long after the last man, keeping the totalitarian world safe from fascism.

This is our workout and why we do it.