If I don’t do it or build it (or ask Bruce Miller or Priscilla Cohan to build it), I’m not buying the idea that a symbol or metaphor or implied action could/would fill the void in my experience. I’m not kidding and I like labor. I consider not kidding (and labor) an aesthetic and political position. I don’t know much about how or why I would suspend my disbelief. I believe people die. I started to commit to a death practice (prepping) in Preparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome -- looking for loophole-based comforts and other void filling material/noises/behaviors. The Cellular Automata (programming by Satchel Spencer and the not-me dancer is Ondine Geary) and the footage of a generative adversarial network test (trained on the video footage from the cellular automata) both live/die in the fiction/nonfiction neighborhood (the former as straight death practice and the later as faux resurrection). Language works hard in both death and fiction...I’m thinking about that labor and its consequences in The Post-Verbal Social Network.

-Michelle Ellsworth