Thursday 29 August 2013

Posterity



Well this is disconcerting, being dead. I gather it happened at some point in the last week, just after I’d opened the last box that I’d been waiting for from the printers. Apparently it was a “Massive Myocardial Infarction brought on by excessive consumption of caffeine pills, Ritalin, and energy drinks over an extended period of time”. The bastards killed me. I knew it, I knew something like this would happen. I could feel it. They were sucking the life out of me one click of the mouse at a time. 



They were killing me, but then really I was doing it, to myself, and I knew it had to be done. They were important. I was onto something, and even if they were going to be my epitaph I knew it would be a glorious one. It is precisely because they drained me so completely that they can now go forth and embody me so comprehensively. They are me, and I am no longer. Well, shortly I will be no longer. It was my followers on Twitter who raised the alarm after I hadn’t tweeted in two days, and wasn’t replying DM’s, and it was my fans generally, on Fb, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, that lobbied for the stuff I had been working on, the project I had just completed, my magnum opus, my progeny, my terracotta army, to be kept in perpetuity, to be put on display, to be lauded. Paradigmatic they said, exemplary of what a maverick, independent, eccentric designer could do at the start of the 21st Century.

^My Byronic ode to the infinite thinness & ineffable depths of technology & the internet

They even took the fragments of the epic youtube film that I had been working on, what was going to be my “grand viral saga”, my Byronic ode to the infinite thinness and the ineffable depths of my life and of the internet, and they put them together to be shown with my children. The whole lot was bought by the Design Museum, to be put in a gallery supposedly. Apparently as the contemporary epitome of ‘Identity’ being manifested in objects of design. Makes sense, I mean those things basically consumed me. They are me, they’re all that’s left of me, and as I fade away I can at least take comfort in the thought that I gave birth to something worthwhile; that my body may be carbonised and float up into the afternoon sky, but I will remain, hard and shiny, colourful, bold, tasty, and delightful, offering myself up to the gaze of every passer-by, flirting, glinting, enticing…

^my pieces in the Design Museum

2 comments: