There was a period—not long ago, though it now feels structurally distant—in which proximity still carried the promise of intimacy. To move closer to the body was to approach it, to enter its field, to risk some form of recognition. The language surrounding images depended on this assumption so completely that it rarely announced itself. To look was to want. To frame was to possess. Even critique relied on this premise. The gaze was dangerous because it desired.
It is difficult to identify when this stopped being true. Nothing declared itself as a break. There was no new aesthetic that made the shift visible, no theory that arrived in time to name it. The change accumulated. Images began to circulate before they were encountered. Bodies appeared not in singular contexts but across systems designed for continuous presentation. The interval between seeing and forgetting collapsed. Under these conditions, desire became inefficient. It slowed the process. It required selection where the system required flow.
What emerged in its place did not announce itself as a replacement. It simply operated without needing to justify its presence. Looking no longer depended on wanting.
The images in The Eternally Collapsing Object of My Affection do not argue for this condition. They assume it. They begin, accordingly, without a body. A corner appears: two planes meeting at a seam that organizes space in advance of any subject. Nothing happens. The image does not invite interpretation. It establishes a field in which whatever follows will already be structured. The gaze does not arrive at the body. It is already there.
When the body enters, it does so without the privileges it once held. It does not appear as a figure that can be recognized, located, or addressed. It presents as surface already under condition. The black-and-white images remove the most immediate markers of vitality and isolate the operations that will be performed. Skin becomes plane. Indentation becomes line. What had once been taken as depth resolves into variation across a field that can be compressed, held, and reorganized.
This is not abstraction in the sense of elevation or stylization. Nothing is being purified for aesthetic effect. The body is being made compatible with a way of seeing that cannot sustain it as a whole. The closer the image moves, the less there is to recognize. Detail does not accumulate into meaning. It disperses it. The body does not withdraw. It yields.
At first, it is possible to misread this as an intensification of intimacy. The proximity is undeniable. The frame excludes everything that might situate the body within a broader context. The viewer is brought so close that distance appears to collapse entirely. But the expected consequence—recognition, connection, the confirmation of another presence—does not occur. Closeness does not resolve into relation. It produces a different kind of clarity: that proximity, under these conditions, is simply another form of access.
Hands enter, and with them the last available language of intimacy seems to present itself. Touch, after all, has long functioned as the guarantee that something is happening between bodies. Here, too, the expectation fails. The hand does not introduce care, nor does it escalate into recognizable violence. It continues the logic already established by the image. It presses, steadies, reorients. It does not solicit response. It does not wait.
What becomes visible in this gesture is not an attitude but a function. The hand is not expressive. It is procedural.
Two bodies move through this condition, though the distinction between them never stabilizes into difference. Whatever separates them fails to register at the level that governs the images. The first body appears to undergo a progression: surface, compression, contact. The second seems to enter at a later stage, as if the process no longer required its earlier steps. What reads, in sequence, as escalation is more precisely a reduction in friction. The procedure does not need to establish itself again. It proceeds more quickly because nothing in the system depends on the singularity of what it encounters.
This is the point at which the work begins to disclose the conditions that made it possible. The images do not simply depict a way of seeing; they emerge from an environment in which seeing has been reorganized by forces that exceed any individual act. The saturation of images has altered the threshold of attention. Where singularity once produced charge, repetition now produces neutrality. The body, continuously available and continuously replaced, loses the capacity to hold distinction. It is not concealed. It is over-present.
At the same time, the mechanisms through which images are encountered have become increasingly procedural. Framing, filtering, segmentation—these are no longer solely decisions made by artists or photographers. They are embedded operations within the systems that distribute images at scale. The body arrives already formatted, already aligned with the structures through which it will circulate. What appears in these images as pressure or compression mirrors the logic through which bodies are made compatible with their environments.
Within such a field, desire does not disappear; it becomes irrelevant. The gaze does not need to want the body in order to operate on it. It requires only that the body be available.
Color appears, but not as restoration. It does not return the body to presence or reintroduce vitality in any stable sense. It behaves as residue—something that has not been fully absorbed by the operations already performed. It stains the image. It lingers where it should have been reduced. The red does not enliven; it interrupts. It suggests that something of the body persists, but only as an inconsistency within the system that has already reorganized it.
The vertical bars make the condition explicit. They do not depict the body, yet they are inseparable from what has been done to it. The segmentation that structured the earlier images becomes visible as structure. The image no longer conceals the conditions of its own legibility. It shows them.
After this, the return to the body does not restore anything that was lost. It confirms that there is no outside to the system. Even where color remains, even where softness suggests a lingering materiality, the transformation has already taken place. The body cannot be seen as separate from the processes that have made it legible. What persists does so under condition.
The final image does not resolve the sequence. It removes the need for resolution. The grid does not represent the body. It replaces the requirement that there be one. The continuous has been divided into units. The organic has been reorganized into a structure that no longer depends on the presence of a subject. And yet the faint trace of flesh persists in the coloration, preventing the image from resolving into pure abstraction. Something remains, but it no longer functions as a body.
It would be easier to name this as violence. It would be easier if there were a moment at which something was done—an action that could be identified, resisted, or condemned. But nothing here rises to the level of event. Nothing breaks. Nothing announces itself as rupture. The transformation does not occur in time. It occurs as condition.
This is why it is difficult to recognize while it is happening. One continues to look, to touch, to frame, under the assumption that these gestures still carry their earlier meanings. It takes time—distance from the moment itself—to see that the meanings have drained out of them. What remains are operations that no longer depend on what they act upon.
To be seen under these conditions is not to be known, possessed, or even exposed. Exposure still implies the possibility of recognition, the idea that something hidden has been brought into view. Here, nothing is revealed. The body is not uncovered. It is made compatible.
Affection, in this context, cannot be understood as preservation. If there is attachment, it does not stabilize the object. It returns to it, repeatedly, not to sustain it but to continue its conversion. What is held is not the body as such, but its capacity to yield.
The images do not document this process. They participate in it. They emerge from the same set of pressures that have made such a transformation not only possible, but increasingly inevitable. What they reveal is not an isolated gesture, but a broader reorganization of how bodies are encountered within contemporary visual environments.
The storm never needed to declare itself. It was already present in the conditions that made these images legible at all. By the time it becomes visible, it no longer requires interpretation in order to persist.It has already reorganized the sky.
The New Poetics 