Endless Spectator, The Screens Suite by Jesse Damiani

Meet me at the end of this sentence; let’s grab a drink in the period.

Is it such an impossible idea to ascribe placehood to a typographic symbol? In the same way that half a dozen “picture elements” (aka “pixels”) convened at specific coordinates on a screen can indicate the end of a sequence of words in order to afford the reader’s mind a moment to digest what it just read, why can’t the period act as a linguistic watering hole for parched eyeballs?

Well surely it can, just as the hashtag can be used to create a temporary autonomous zone for emergent conversations. Like the punctual period, the hashtag gets its meaning and utility from adjacency—as a barnacle firmly affixed to otherwise pristine words or phrases that, for a moment, may come to occupy an outsized memory address in the collective psyche.

Which is what Jesse Damiani attempts with Endless Spectator—less a book and more a typographic acid trip into Alice’s Visual Wonderland, were it set in a meme-filled internet chatroom. The experience is confronting, contortive, and disorienting…and yet thanks to typographic hand jams like the hashtag and other memetic simulacra, he provides some navigation aids, even as you snake through what feels like someone else’s online nightmare.

But whatever you do, do not not dig in and poke around! How often do you get to voyeuristically rut around in someone else’s unclosed browser tabs, drawing associations as you try to deduce which rabbit holes they must have been going down before they walked off and forgot to Clear History? What subconscious biases do you bring to your analysis? When you finish, do you feel dirty?

In an ironic twist, there are no spectators in Endless Spectator. The mere act of looking involves you, and just like on the internet, the act of looking can be transgressive, if not towards the content, but towards yourself. Through its visual bewilderment, Endless Spectator makes you realize that the cacophony of the internet is alive and pulsing, and you’ve already been consumed by it.

But fear not—if at any point you find yourself overwhelmed, just find the near period at the end of a sentence, stare into the blackness, and you’ll find yourself back here enjoying a pleasant drink with me, as though we never left. —Chris Messina, Inventor of the hashtag

Jesse Damiani is Deputy Director of Emerging Technology at Southern New Hampshire University and Director of Simulation Literacies at Nxt Museum. He is Series Editor of Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press) and a Forbes Contributor covering media and technology, with other work in Adweek, Billboard, Quartz, The Verge, and WIRED. His poetry can be found in Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, PANK, Verse Daily, and others. He hosts TECH TOCK, a talk show in Microsoft’s Social VR platform, AltspaceVR, and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 100 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-291-4