#reoccurrence

Left, screen captures from Les Savates du bon Dieu, directed by Jean-Claude Brisseau, 2000. Right, screen captures from Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, directed by Leos Carax, 1991.

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There is directness and equipoise in the fervor, just as the greatest turmoil has precision. Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears down building after building, house by house. It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit exactly into the wound that it makes.

First, the catalyst:

I have never been in a state of “complete” remission. When my oncologist informed me of my “NEAD” status in April of 2024, little did I know it came with a caveat. Apparently, it was my metastatic disease that was showing no evidence of active disease. Meaning, only my liver and left lung were in “remission”. This also means, my primary tumor site (left breast) has always had its tumor. Through all the treatment, through all the imaging, through all the follow-up’s and blood work- it never changed.

What led to this discovery? A breast MRI. A breast MRI that has opened Pandora’s box. A 30 minute test that has now upended my life all over again. Third times a charm, right?

Second, a little history:

An ER visit in January that required an abdominal CT scan showed a small tumor on my liver and a small tumor on my lung. So, my remission status had been tossed out of the window for the majority of this year anyway. When this happened, at my next follow-up, my oncologist and I agreed to maintain my current treatment plan and do more thorough imaging (MRI) on my next imaging interval. I was shocked at the findings but not really surprised. When remission was communicated to me, I had a terrible reaction and an instant fear it was only temporary. I couldn’t understand how backwards that seemed. I should have been happy and ready to move on. Little did I know my brain was preparing me for what was to come.

Third, what’s next:

The MRI revealed that my primary tumor has not changed in three years of treatment. The radiologist who analyzed the test recommended surgical intervention. I immediately contacted my care-team. Initially, the mass was chalked up to being scar tissue per my oncologist’s PA and I ate that up with a spoon. Two days later, I received a letter from the breast center strongly encouraging me to have the site biopsied triggering another outreach to my care team. This time I was informed my oncologist was on vacation and he would contact me on his return with a plan of action. One week ago, he suggested I have a double mastectomy. While radical, an approach that would eliminate local reoccurrence and greatly reduce instances of future metastasis. He spoke to a surgeon who isn’t onboard with this radical approach. She insisted I have a biopsy to determine medical need. Patients with Stage IV typically never have surgery. The goal is focusing on the metastatic disease, ensuring it’s controlled and in some cases (like mine) reversed. However, if there has been a reversal of metastatic disease, some surgeons will perform surgery to reduce potential local reoccurrence, etc. Today, I had a diagnostic ultrasound to determine the method of biopsy to be performed. Thankfully, we can proceed with the ultrasound guided method. After this test, the radiologist came to speak to me and informed me I will absolutely be having surgery. My tumor is still highly suspicious and suggestive of malignancy and creating problems in the future. The aggressiveness of the surgery will be determined by the biopsy results. A minimum, I will have a lumpectomy. Or, I could still be having a double mastectomy. My biopsy is scheduled for Monday. My results will take 7-10 days and then I will see the surgeon.

Finally, feelings and questions:

Shock, frustration and an overwhelming grief have taken over. How did we get here almost 3 years post diagnosis?!

Why didn’t we do this at the beginning?

Why didn’t anyone tell me CT scans weren’t monitoring my breast?

Why didn’t anyone tell me they saw this on my mammogram in November?

Why did I just assume treatment meant a systemic approach that included my breast?

What did I misinterpret from every appointment since diagnosis?

Did I lose the trust I had in my care team?

As I was getting changed for the ultrasound today, the mirror in the changing room had window clings. “Be Strong” with pink ribbons and hearts. All I thought was “again”.

Top, Haus-Rucker-Co., Oase No. 7, documenta 5 exhibition, Fridericianum museum, Kassel, West Germany, 1972. Via. Bottom, Robert Irwin, Nine Spaces, Nine Trees, Public Safety Building Plaza, Seattle, Washington, 1983. Via.

Oasis no. 7 was a temporary architectural intervention contributed by the experimental Austrian collective Haus-Rucker-Co to the fifth edition of Documenta, an exhibition of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany. Conceived as “an emergency exit leading people to another realm,” the work consisted of a translucent, inflatable orb precariously protruding from the classical eighteenth-century facade of Kassel’s Fridericianum. Theatrically staged as an artificial oasis, the orb contained two plastic palm trees, a hammock, and a red flag. Via.

Irwin subdivided the approximately square plaza into nine smaller squares, each 22 by 22 feet, and placed at the center of each a square concrete planter which also provides seating. In each planter is a flowering purple plum tree—small, delicate, with one-lobed, dark red leaves. Each “room” is surrounded by a fence of small-mesh chain link, coated with blue vinyl; the fence rises to a height of 16 feet, where it is topped with lights, one pointed at each of the nine trees. The rooms open into one another through large doorways in the fence. Via.

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When what were believed to be Mary Magdalen's remains were discovered in 1279, there was "a strong fragrance, as if a storehouse of sweet spices had been opened." As The Golden Legend explained, "so powerful an odor of sweetness pervaded the church that for seven days all those who entered noticed it."s The corpse of a fourteenth-century Italian nun, "despite its being plentifully covered in flesh and fat, and though it had not been embalmed," similarly "exhaled a gentle odour, a heavenly fragrance." The grave of another saintly woman exuded "a supernatural fragrance so sweetly aromatic and unlike any earthly odours," and this fragrance grew stronger "at times when Holy Mass was celebrated, almost in token of her pleasure at the entreaties addressed to her." From the tomb of St. Dominic, too, "an odor of such sweetness came forth that it might have come from a storeroom of perfumes rather than from a tomb," and following her death in 1607 the corpse of Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi evidenced a popular variation on the theme when it leaked fragrant miraculous oils.' Teresa of Avila's corpse was examined nine times (the last in 1760, 178 years after her death) and evidenced always an exception state of preservation, even though the clothing was completely decomposed. Immediately after her death, the floral "aroma that her holy corpse gave off was so strong" that "it spread through the whole house." In the Carmelite convent of Alba de Tormes, where her transverberated heart is enshrined, the reliquary glass occasionally breaks and the sweet odor of sanctity is still released.'

Top, Rodney McMillian, 18 boxes, 2006. In the background: Untitled (The Surpreme Court Painting), 2004-2006, installed at Marta Herford. See also. Bottom, screen capture from Two people exchanging saliva, directed by Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, 2024. Via.

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In apophatic—or negative—theology, divinity is approached through subtraction rather than affirmation. God can only be named by what He is not; any attempt to define or capture the divine within the limits of language risks collapsing transcendence into idolatry. Contemporary AI infrastructures invite a strangely inverted version of this logic. While they are not divine or infinite, they are increasingly experienced as ungraspable totalities – systems we can’t fully see, examine, or even exit, but whose effects structure our perception of memory and possibility. If God is entirely unknowable by metaphysical necessity, the machine is only unknowable by political and technical design. The danger, then, is not that AI becomes godlike, but that we begin to treat its outputs as though they offer objective truths rather than probabilistic compressions of past data, both real and imagined. Artist and researcher Isaac Sullivan, who works across image, language, and machine learning, describes this shift plainly: “AI reorganizes the conditions under which memory can still refer to the world.” What circulates is synthetic recall; images, narratives, and information that may never have existed, yet move through the world with the same authority as lived experience. The terror is not that machines think. It is that thinking becomes machinic.

Originally coined in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, the Dark Forest imagines the universe as a hostile terrain where every civilisation must remain silent to survive. Online, the metaphor has migrated into strategy: in a world of extraction and algorithmic capture, silence, or subtraction, becomes survival. At first, this logic felt intuitively correct to me. If the gaze is everywhere, perhaps the only ethical response is disappearance. But we cannot claim silence as neutrality. When the right to withdrawal is unevenly distributed, disappearance becomes a privilege rarely afforded to those already hyper-visible: racialised bodies, marginalised communities, precarious workers, political dissidents. To vanish is not always resistance; sometimes it’s just surrender. States and platforms rely on what I think of as coercive abstraction: turning human lives into simplified data points to track, predict, or target. The most brutal example is Israel’s Lavender AI system in Gaza, which converts entire populations into numbers on a kill‑list spreadsheet. Coercive abstraction flattens complexity in order to dominate it.  Meanwhile, subversive abstraction responds in reverse, abstracting ourselves just enough to slip the grasp of systems that would otherwise fix us in place. Under this logic, pure withdrawal becomes a form of complicity. But total transparency—full submission to the data feed—is also capture. It is internalised surveillance, the colonisation of our own self‑perception. What remains is a third position: strategic illegibility within unavoidable entanglement. We are inside the machine. This relationship cannot be dissolved; it can only be negotiated, lived inside with as much intelligence as we can still exercise. If obligation was once described as one of the most basic human social sentiments, it now migrates inward, into a form of self-governance. We become responsible for how our legibility is produced and circulated, and how it is weaponised. Anthropological research on surveillance infrastructures in Chilean urban peripheries shows this logic at work; CCTV cameras installed before water, roads, or electricity (many not even connected to monitoring systems) confirm that surveillance no longer functions as protection, but as management. As Foucault observed, security apparatuses do not discipline individuals; they administer populations. As Isaac puts it: “The gaze arrives first.” Fanon once wrote that the coloniser is unsettled by the subject who can “see without being seen.” Under contemporary surveillance, the asymmetry reverses, and we are rendered visible to systems that cannot be seen back. This disparity becomes the condition of domination.

Top, screen capture from The King of Kings, directed by Cecil B. DeMille, 1927. Via. Bottom, screen capture from In die Sonne schauen (Sound of falling), directed by Mascha Schilinski, 2025. Via.

I’m watching them, but they don’t know that I know that they look at me.

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The AI slop aesthetic is more than a technical artifact or cultural curiosity. It’s the consumer-facing product of computational capitalism—created by transforming human culture into a standing reserve of data. Each uncanny image, synthetic influencer, and AI-generated article is part of a much wider transformation. Slop is waste, but it’s also fuel.

Slop is the product of a different kind of Krebs cycle. It begins when AI models are trained by devouring billions of images, videos, and texts from the internet, using neural networks with trillions of parameters that learn to identify patterns, relationships, and structures in the data. To digest all this requires staggering amounts of energy. Synthetic outputs are then excreted and then rapidly spread online. Then they are ingested once more, and the cycle continues.

This is the latest in a long evolution of industrial media that has been recognized by theorists and artists over decades. We could think of Vilém Flusser’s “technical images” in the 1980s, or Harun Farocki’s “operational images” in the early 2000s. Now we have “metabolic images.” Metabolic images are visual material made by consuming billions of other images to be broken down and absorbed by AI models via a gargantuan infrastructure that absorbs energy and water, and excretes media, atmospheric carbon, and other pollutants. If we consider all the forms of generative AI, including text, images, code, and video, it is fundamentally metabolic media. It has a burn rate that is astronomical and growing, and is now directly competing with humans for basic resources like land, energy, minerals, and fresh water.

Karl Marx once described the shift from rural to urban living under capitalism as a disrupted metabolic process. In pre-industrial societies, waste easily cycled back into production—human and animal feces from small farms returned to the earth as fertilizer, maintaining soil fertility and sustaining agriculture. But industrial modernity broke this cycle. As masses of people migrated to cities, the human waste that once nourished fields began accumulating as urban pollution. 

People threw excrement into the streets, depriving rural soils of essential nutrients. Soils became depleted, which then required the introduction of artificial fertilizers, exacerbating a cycle of environmental degradation. John Bellamy Foster later called this phenomenon a “metabolic rift”: the systemic disruption of ecological and metabolic processes by capitalist production. Sociologists like Jason W. Moore trace these metabolic rifts back to capitalism’s origins in the sixteenth century, and they resurface in new forms as each phase of industrial development reorganizes the planet.

The turn toward massive, data-heavy generative AI is driving a new and dramatic metabolic rift. It’s affecting the environment, patterns of work, supply chains, culture, and visuality itself. And it’s filling information ecosystems with torrents of shit, endless digital detritus which is never properly flushed out. Instead, it is fed back into the system as raw material for the next generation of AI models. This is the basic material cycle of AI’s metabolism: consumption and excretion patterns where AI-generated images have material consequences and consequences for our materials.

Top, photograph by Gary Leonard, National Guard troops at First and Alameda. A Barbara Kruger mural is legible on the wall of The Museum of Contemporary Art in the background, Los Angeles, California, May 2, 1992. Via. Bottom, photograph by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images, National Guard troops beneath Barbara Kruger's Untitled (Questions), 1990/2018, June 2025. Via.

WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?

Untitled (Questions) was always a protest of its own, though it didn’t initially have much to do with Trump. The mural was commissioned by MOCA in 1989 and was initially meant to feature the text of the Pledge of Allegiance. Even though Kruger began conceiving the work two years prior, the gesture seemed to refer obliquely to conservative handwringing in 1988 over attempts to keep the Pledge of Allegiance out of classrooms, with George H. W. Bush, then vice president under Ronald Reagan, claiming that such a gesture was unconstitutional. One Republican representative’s spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that Kruger seemed like “a left-winger blowing off smoke.”

Alex Greenberger, from This Barbara Kruger Mural from 1990 Has Become the Year’s Most Poignant Artwork, for artNews, June 12, 2025.

Top, screen capture from Blue Heron, directed by Sophy Romvari, 2025, with His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks, 1940 reflected in the bathroom tiles. Bottom, screen capture from Two People Exchanging Saliva, directed by Natalie Musteata & Alexandre Singh, 2025, with a held postcard showing the marble Cupid and Psyche, a 1st or 2nd century Roman copy of a late Hellenistic period original. Via.

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Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we’re up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there’s a little splashing on the surface, but that doesn’t even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.

Charles Yu, from How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, 2010. Via.

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Artists are nourished by each other more than by fame or by the public, I’ve always thought. To give one’s work to the world is an experience of peculiar emptiness. The work goes away from the artist into a void, like a message stuck into a bottle and flung into the sea. Criticism is crushing and humiliating. Pollock was hailed as a genius by the time he died, but could he have forgotten the widely repeated witticism that his paintings could have been done by a chimpanzee? As for praise, somehow it falls short, empty superlatives. The true artist knows the pitfalls of vanity. Dangerous to let go of one’s anxiety. But did you understand? must always be the question. To like and admire is not enough: did you understand? And will you understand the next thing I do – the wet canvas in my studio, the page I left in my typewriter? Unreasonably, the artist would like to know this, too. Praise has to do with the past, the finished thing; the unfinished is the artists preoccupation.

Top, Blinky Palermo, Projektion, 1971, Offset lithograph in colors, on cardboard, with full margins, with the original paper folder, 40 × 40 cm. Via. Bottom, screen capture from From the Notebook of…, directed by Robert Beavers, 1972. Watch.

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The world stands displayed in such a manner that, in contemplating it, religious man discovers the many modalities of the sacred, and hence of being. Above all, the world exists, it is there, and it has a structure; it is not a chaos but a cosmos, hence it presents itself as creation, as work of the gods. This divine work always preserves its quality of transparency, that is, it spontaneously reveals the many aspects of the sacred. The sky directly, "naturally," reveals the infinite distance, the transcendence of the deity. The earth too is transparent; it presents itself as universal mother and nurse. The cosmic rhythms manifest order, harmony, permanence, fecundity. The cosmos as a whole is an organism at once real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality. Ontophany and hierophany meet.