I BOUGHT A TRIGGERING BOOK

I bought a book because it was advertised quite intriguingly, i.e., that its contents would disappear (Voidopolis). As an author myself, I was fascinated to see how that would be possible and what would be its "costs." Because, like pretty much everything that we go through and/or witness this life, something else will result because of actions.

First and foremost, for anyone who lost someone/anything at any point in their lives, the book is highly triggering. What and who is lost is lost is lost. To treat this lightly is disrespectful, to say the least. Second, for someone who is neurodivergent, like I am, to be told that in order to access the physical book one must also have a device that allows them to download an app which, in return, allows the reading to proceed, that means the following: instead of having a reading taking place at your own pace, one must hold two objects in their hands, or have them nearby at all times. In such a case, the reading does not stop because something may be hard to process (although that's not the case here), or because a word may be new and the context clues are not sufficient to decode its meaning, etc. In this case, one finds it difficult to read because of this unnecessary addition. Whatever happened to having the pleasure to read? No, I am from this century, I am aware of augmented reality, but it is tricky because some people are built and wired differently. That aside, when you discover the augmented reality, especially the text parts, you say to yourself, "But, wait a minute, isn't this the old erasure technique?" That's not new at all. (Found/blanked poetry )Third, the author uses photos of strangers that she found published online for free. There are various websites where such images are collected for public use. However, she uses photos of people, and if she and the famous publisher, MIT Press, knew anything about this, that's working with real subjects whose permission may not always be easy to acquire, but it is still a very disputable area. Years and years ago, when I was researching for my own book, (Transacting Sites of the Liminal Bodily Spaces), it became more and more evident that even if I was intrigued by the plastination technique applied to remains of human tissues/organs (BodyWorlds series), they were not anonymous or serialized, so I had to make sure how sensitive that aspect was for my own research and readers. Thus, going back to this book, I think the author, who first used the photos and uploaded them on her Twitter account, and then took them down to use the photos in her book, should have probably and ethically worked only with images from her personal archive. It matters how we use someone else's material! Not only because we make them public for our own interest and gain, but also because whatever these strangers may have posted originally was not perhaps meant to live in perpetuity. The profits of this book should go, at least, in part to those people or a special fund where such images are vetted more thoroughly before being used by anyone. Fourth, this is labeled as a digital performance, but as I am playing with my laptop keyboard, I am also creating an ephemeral performance right now. Oh, dear, how pretentious would that be, i.e., to assume that a performance, digital or otherwise, is reduced to having no hard work behind it, it "just" happens, to use spontaneity and rebrand it as something else! Whatever happened to respecting performances, even those experimental? Fifth, coming out of COVID-19, knowing what was lost during that time, being aware how our mental health is probably in an even more fragile state of being, how suicidal rates have increased in number, all this should have been talked in detail before proceeding with this experimental project. Oops, my bad, digital performance. If we are not digital content creators these days, we are no one!

All in all, the book is a huge disappointment because, if I return to what I said before, meaning to loss, anyone who lost someone vital to their identity does not want to be triggered by more loss, or the fact that one day this world would vanish from the universe's map, or, worse, that it may be gone for a period of time, and then it would pop up exactly like before, like nothing ever happened, as if loss did not disrupt one's life in profound and irrevocable ways. Whatever happened to responsibility?

Imagine this: your heart stops to beat. No one can make it work again. It stops. Your life ends. That's it. Nothing else. Let it end, so whoever is left to be without you mourns that loss properly. The death of the author was a literary trend initiated by Roland Barthes in the late '60's. The death of a book is tempting only if what we are dealing with is a "DOA." In which scenario (sic!), readers playfully and only temporarily metamorphose into "medical examiners" of the book, holding sacred this caveat: they know that, in order for them to determine the cause of death of any book/artifact, the "cadavers" should stay still. FOREVER.