Lament #27

CRUFT: To Synchronize Our Heartbeats

How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
        – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

We're in an Internet-induced collective hallucination and it's toxic.

I am a visual artist who produces code-based auto-generated art, live art actions, and mixed-media collage all of which examines the relentless flow of information on the Internet. The Internet is source material I appropriate, juxtapose, and remix by writing computer code that is automated and runs on a 24/7 schedule producing a form of collage I call CRUFT. The resulting artwork is haunted by images of nostalgia, climate collapse, genocide, and authoritarianism as I explore broader artistic issues such as stillness, repetition, overload, uncertainty, and loss.

I was in lower Manhattan on September 11th 2001, when I saw smoke rising above the towers. I was oblivious to the two passenger planes that were being subverted into missiles and unaware that I was experiencing both warfare and terrorism. The media showed images of the planes impact and the buildings collapse in a repetitive loop. Our screens became weapons of terror, the system of representation was hijacked and we were forced to relive those terrifying moments by viewing images presented as a never ending present. This is when I began to make CRUFT.

The Elegy CRUFT series was created in response to our current dangerous times when virtue has become a vice, empathy has become a sin, and the concepts of truth and facts have disappeared. Each CRUFT in the Elegy series is composed as an infinite loop. The loop never arrives but keeps moving forward with a tragic desire. The meaning is fixed semantically but there is change with every iteration. Each iteration embodies our inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo as we carry on with our lives as normal and experience in real-time the collapse of large-scale systems. This work bears witness to that collapse.

My art practice also includes live art actions combined with auto-generated CRUFT and mixed-media collage created by applying traditional media such as charcoal, paint, wax, and ink, to prints of selected CRUFT. The live art actions and mixed-media collage both subvert neoliberal goals of efficiency, productivity, and distraction.

Art isn't an aesthetic exercise; it can interrupt our hallucinations and synchronize our heartbeats by offering us a way of being-in-the-world that can protect us from the hostilities in which we live.

Robert Spahr
Carbondale, IL
October 2025