War in the Air

Boryeon Choi

*This essay was first distributed by 0'st issue of abs in 2021, and below is the machine-translated version of the original text.

I realized roughly a decade ago that I could not reorder the times that had passed through me, the times I myself had passed through, into a chronological narrative. For a long time already, yesterday and today had borne no relation to one another, neighbors I had never chosen had come to compose me, and both good and bad were nothing more than coincidence. Attempting to casually climb aboard a heated debate about straight routes and detours, I instead found myself gazing at the empty center of a table and its softened edges, and suddenly became aware that I was being looked at by the table. I think of broken roads, severed roads, blocked roads. On my broken routes, plausibility does not operate, and what went ahead does not explain what follows behind. Hostility and hospitality unfold not as responses grounded in valid reasons but rather in a manner similar to the movements of insects sorting out isomorphic beings.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story The Highway, a couple living in a shack adjacent to the road witnesses one day a procession of automobiles fleeing at an unusually rapid speed. At the end of the procession, a young man asks for water to cool his overheated radiator, and the woman riding with him delivers the news that nuclear war has brought the entire world to an end. However, the novel provides no route by which to determine what exactly has occurred, because the car departs before the couple can ask what that “entire world” actually was.

Nevertheless, if one wished, one could pose the following questions. Through what configurations of time and space did I pass, which coincidences were amplified within positive feedback loops, which negentropic machines, whether gaslighting or spotlighting, were mobilized to attenuate that amplification, what firefly-like entities remained, and how that slow and faint remainder produced a form of slowness that became a motive or an acceleration. In order to prove that I am a machine in operation and that humans operate in a machine-like manner, I rewrite myself in accordance with multiple incompatible versions of the self-introduction letter that demands my selective reconfiguration. Within endlessly generated post-me subjectivities, even the condition of the broken road is compressed into a narrative of overcoming that begins with “despite the broken road…”. Trash is pushed further away, to more distant and more remote places.

You may have heard it said that to change a human being one must change where they live, whom they meet, or how they spend their time. Here, place, people, and time are presented as if they were parameters that could be adjusted individually, but in truth they are entangled in ways that cannot be separated. What are presented as choices are in fact nothing more than forced purchases. Does the fact that one can choose among multiple-choice answers mean that the student possesses free will. In revolutionary times, the individual encounters a moment in which they must answer whether they will intervene in a life that may or may not become their own in order to change the world. You are placed before an interrogation that asks whether you will attain true peace by joining the fight or remain in ignoble peace by retreating. At this point, does choosing one of the given options signify free will. Is there no option to become a rat pup and slip away into a dark rat hole.

I am not the sum of what I have chosen but rather the sum of what I did not choose, a tedious accumulation of banal coincidences and an endless refrain of these necessary accidents. The only thing that escapes this refrain is a tic beyond the control of consciousness, which, unable to withstand premature expectation, always runs slightly ahead of the refrain. The tic may not be able to halt the infinite loop of the refrain, but it does render it slightly out of alignment. At times this misalignment begins and ends so quickly that it cannot be analyzed with the naked eye and can only be detected through frame-by-frame analysis. The results are surprising, revealing a constantly vibrating human in whom dozens of micro-tics occur simultaneously. As indirect realists would say, what appears to be motionless and what sounds like silence are the result of perception temporarily suspending data updates in order to avoid overshooting or of substituting arbitrary data.

racing the ominously vibrating low frequencies that leak from these misaligned gaps that have not been fully patched over, and suddenly approaching the input stage, one becomes entangled in howling. Every saga unfolds in this manner. Personal conditions continue to collapse. Epistemologies, practices, and arts that had barely managed to sustain themselves are smeared like the sound of keystrokes coming from the next room. Only the drone sound flattened by repeated recording remains as a viable listening experience. Into this soft sonic indeterminacy bursts a violent optical electron gun, and a media alliance is forme