Kayleigh Barbosa

To and From a Black Hole

To and From a Black Hole is a video loop of frames of myself blinking with a straight face looking into the camera made up entirely of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters. These characters encode all electronic forms of communication. The video then starts to degrade itself and glitch, exposing exactly what it is made out of. After awhile, the video will loop and the process begins again. The video is displayed on a computer monitor in the corner of a dark room, a solitude place where these communications and degradations often take place. Heavily inspired by ideas from Slajov Zizek (The Metastases of Enjoyment) and Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments), To and From a Black Hole explores what it means to be a masochistic yearning lover from a female perspective in the post-Internet era.

“I am a masochistic lover. As a product of the digital era as well as being part of the first generation to have grown up with easy access to the Internet from childhood, I have formed special relationships with people online - whether it be friendships via social media with people across the world, or meeting and falling in love with local men on online dating applications. My point of focus lies more-so on the dating application portion of these relationships, as the applications breed an environment that feels self-degrading. You know that you most likely will have trouble finding people you like and actually want to talk to, and you know that talking to most of these people will feel like pulling teeth, and that this whole process has been gamified in a horrific way - yet you still go on to degrade yourself in hopes of finding someone special. The basis of my exploration is rooted in the idea of the masochistic female lover’s discourse as explored through the method of writing a love letter. I deeply resonated with one of the letters Heloise wrote to Abelard in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. “You are the sole cause of my sorrow, and you alone can grant me the grace of consolation. You alone have the power to make me sad, to bring me happiness or comfort’ (113)”Through my work, I am taking these ideas quite literally by showing a “mirror image” of myself made completely of ASCII characters, posing questions about representations, truth, and what makes something “real.” The monitor will purposefully show failing portions of the images where the veil is lifted and the audience is exposed to the characters that make up the image. This has made some auidence members want to intervene and fix the image, thus in turn also makes them a pseudo-masochistic lover as well - because they never will save the piece from it’s own self-sabatoge. “...masochism is inherently theatrical: violence is for the most part feigned, and even when it is ‘real’, it functions as a component of a scene, as part of a theatrical performance; violence is furthermore never carried out, it always remains suspended, as the endless repeating of an interrupted gesture. It is therefore the servant who writes the screenplay, i.e. who actually pulls the strings and dictates the activity of the woman (dominatrix): he stages his own servitude" (p.99 of Slajov Žižek’s The Metastases of Enjoyment). As the artist, I am the true masochistic lover as I am the one who is purposefully putting on my own theatre of suffering - a ‘failing’ exhibition. Initially this was a work intended to only explore the act of writing a love letter, but through reckoning with personal unrequited yearning and noticing patterns of amorous masochistic behaviour not only in myself but throughout all my research, the final idea of tying this form of language together with images through the unity of the idea of masochism came about. After all, maybe ASCII can be classified as “love letters.” Curious about some of the other media that served as inspiration for the masochistic lover? Check out my SoundCloud playlist here, including some songs referenced directly in my thesis paper: https://soundcloud.com/kayleighfromthesong/sets/to-and-from-a-black-hole-the/s-9Q1o8YkHtoO?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing”