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Belkis Ayón, “Untitled (Sikan with white tips).” 1993.

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Today’s necessary noise.

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9. THE FILM’S ORIGINAL NEGATIVE MAY LIE UNDER THE M3 HIGHWAY IN ENGLAND.

Stewart’s threats to destroy the footage were unnecessary. EMI executives, foisting off Hardy’s requests for the original footage in 1976, eventually told him that the 368 canisters of film he sought had been used as filler in construction of Britain’s M3 highway, even leading producer Peter Snell to the landfill and pointing to a trove of cans at the bottom of a hole to underscore the point.

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Edmund Dulac, "Cerberus. The Black Dog of Hades." ca. 1915.

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Today’s necessary noise.

Michio Miyagi, Masterpieces of Koto. (Canary Records, 2024.)

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The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.

Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.

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Antoni Tàpies, "Dentelle." 1977.

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Today's necessary noise.

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Since they’re so important for biology, scientists have long wondered how the first cell membranes came about. What made up “the very first, primordial cell membrane-like structure on Earth before the emergence of life?” asked the authors.

Our cell membranes are built on long chains of lipids, but these have complex chemical structures and require multiple steps to synthesize—likely beyond what was possible on early Earth. In contrast, the first protocell membranes were likely formed from molecules already present, including short fatty acids that self-organized.

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Julie Mehretu, “Untitled 2.” 1999.

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Today’s necessary noise.

Various artists, Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971​-​1996. (Light in the Attic, 2024.)

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Following Deleuze and Guattari, we might define the internet novel as a physical, rhizomatic text with two instantiations: the autofictional novel and the database novel. In the former, more common case, the author is interpreted, willingly or not, as its hermeneutic center; whereas the latter, less common case employs some combination of innovative structuring, excision, and appropriation that highlights (1) the factuality of elements that are presented as such; and/or (2) the order of its content. As a result, most database novels tend to be indeterminate. Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (trans. 2018) is written in various, rhizomatic set pieces – with different protagonists spanning centuries and locales – that relate to each other by loose association, and can be read in any order. Conversely, autofiction’s scrollable, anesthetized prose tends to be linearly ordered, winking and nudging the reader’s attention to the authorial persona outside of the text, as is the case in Gabriel Smith’s Brat (2024), which is narrated as it is being written by one Gabriel Smith.

These classifications leave us with two clean brackets of categorization, but also two questions: Why has so much of recent literary fiction deferred to the autofictional camp? and why should we look beyond it?

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Clare Rojas, [Untitled]. 2018

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Today's necessary noise.

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Afew years ago, there was a panic over the rise of the “internet novel,” in which the “reference novel” finds tradition. Web 2.0–informed writing “is dystopic in its moral vision,” author and frequent tweeter Brandon Taylor wrote in a “Substack post.” “‘Internet novels’ have succeeded too entirely, which is to say that they are too exactly like being online,” wrote critic Becca Rothfeld. The fear was of a cheapened literary experience that leaves you as empty as a scrolling binge. Today’s internet novel doesn’t recount a person using websites and social media so much as those websites and social media form the linguistic scaffolding of a story. With My First Book, published in May, writer Honor Levy proposed the internet as co-author.

The first line of My First Book—“He was giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb”—is language ripped from chat forums (and the rest of the short story collection follows suit). In his review for the New York Times, Dwight Garner admits that he had to look up “haplogroups,” but that he “responded to the way these sentences crackled even before.” Levy’s whole thing is style, because the internet-voice provides the substance. Internet-voice has zettabytes of information at its disposal. Internet-voice assumes the reader does too.

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Alice Neel, "Richard in the Era of the Corporation." 1978-79.

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Today's necessary noise.