Spectre, Stalker, Lover, Spam. Intimate Ecologies of Cloud-activated Mourning

identifying similarities in the way information is circulated as and through stories, this practice-led moving image research translocates the traditional nursery rhyme 'Tinker, Tailor' and its functions as counting game, fortune-telling, and the oral tradition of which it was a part, into our contemporary metaverse. In doing so, this research troubles the collective future leJ amidst the planetary crisis and rethinks who might be authored to foretell it. This research takes as a given that there is a palpable sense of mourning amongst younger generations, and explores how trauma is narrativized, circulated, and stored within cloud-activated networks. The title of this research 'Spectre, Stalker, Lover, Spam' plays with the old nursery rhyme, 'Tinker, Tailor (Congreve:1695), commonly known as a fortune-telling and counting game passed to younger generations throughout the centuries of traditional oral storytelling, circulation and exchange. This research identifies similarities between the ways in which stories circulate in today's metaverse, and age-old oral traditions, which however, shapeshiJ now into seconds-long moving image stories, or 'slices of stories' (Ball:2020).Building from a tradition of artists working with and through the medium of networks and platforms (Bennani:2020, Scourt:2019, Citarella:2021, Fei:2008-11), as well as mourning (Watkins:2019 & 2021, Zahedi:2021, Leon:2020, Rose:1996) my intention is to transform the device of the iPhone (or similar smart device) into a creative partner (Jurgenson 2019). Making use of time-based narrative
formats on social media, I will build an assemblage-based series of moving image works. These will be moved away from platforms, and will instead be activated across online and odine spaces. My moving image works will allow for In7mate Ecologies to emerge: sensuous systems enabled by shared viewing experiences across social media, peoples' private devices, and public adver7sing screens. These particular ways of re-seeing, re-inhabiting, and re-imagining the world will allow for the sense of a shared, real-time unfolding of history.'Necrowritng,' being 'in the wake', 'staying with the trouble,' and 'becoming-human' (Garza:2019, Sharpe:2016, Haraway:2016, Jackson:2020) act as foundational methodological departure points for this project by offering a means for understanding post-anthropocentric modalities of mourning and collective belonging through storytelling. Technologies of community-building through online narratives and memes (Jamal 2020) will be explored with regard to the question of the 'encounter' / 'Ana-materialism' (Golding:2012). I will elaborate on how psychotic geographies (Fisher:2016) and contemporary online spaces as rotating anarchitectures are sites of terror (Lyotard:1974) and explore their role in illustrating the circulation of trauma (van der Kolk:2014) within current PTSD societies (Kholeif:2020).I will go on exploring the importance of aesthetics as means for sensing and sense- making (Weizman/Fuller:2021, Guaiari:1992). This Vnally will allow to better understand my moving image practice as a model to counter the binary pounding of the information age by semiotic signifying (Berardi:2018).