Elegy #8

CRUFT: To Synchronize Our Heartbeats

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

There is so much broken and fragmented information to consume on the Internet, so the task is to build something from the leftovers. This is CRUFT.

The Internet is the raw material I appropriate and remix by writing computer code that is automated and runs on a 24/7 schedule producing a form of auto-generated collage I call CRUFT. This work lacks certainty, it is variable, fragile, and impermanent.

The 2025 Elegy CRUFT series explores the myth and imagery of American exceptionalism during these dangerous times as our government infrastructure is systematically dismantled. Systems are failing, things aren't working, and we wait for the world to go back to the way it was. The artwork 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.

In his book After The Future, Franco "Bifo" Berardi refers to 'the slow cancellation of the future [which] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s.' He is referring not to a direction of time, but rather a psychological perception. Berardi also suggests we are stuck between globalization and global war, between identity and capital and we seem to be incapable of producing radical change. Berardi is describing my own sense of time. No forward movement, no progress, standing still. No sense of time. No sense of place.

Mark Fisher reminds us in his book Capitalist Realism, that we are stuck in a cultural loop based on movie reruns, adaptations, and franchises. Time has forgotten to move forward so when we imagine the future it's not new at all. Faced with an uncertain tomorrow, it's easy to be seduced by an eternal present.

Post-traumatic stress. Post-traumatic growth. Realignment.

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
May 2025