A Permeating Presence (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 20 May 2015.



What an interesting phenomenon that Slender Man is.

Over the past couple of years, many of my students have been inhabitants of the Slenderverse. It was interesting to witness some of their involvement in this world dwindle into nothingness following the Wisconsin tragedy. It was equally as interesting, albeit more horrifying, to witness some of their involvements deepen post-pronouncement.

(Does this validate the Tulpa Theory? Can we kill Slender Man simply by killing our thoughts of him? Or does he operate on some sort of quantum level? Is he still there even when we can't see him? Has the story become bigger than the storyteller(s)?)

It is perhaps more interesting to me now as I sit here and relate all of these stored memories to everything we’ve been talking about.

Art, I'm with you. There’s something very Baudrillardian about Slender Man’s proxies acting out their hyperrealities in "reality," of their human experience not becoming simulated but rather being a simulation of reality. I fear we're treading dangerously close to Baudrillard's fourth stage of the sign-order system. Some would even argue that we’re already living in it. Do you think these girls were just plain maladjusted and therefore were predisposed for "possession," or do you think they were unable to foresee the repercussions that would arise in the transference of their digital fantasies in the realm of reality because their sign "has no relation to reality whatsoever. It is its own pure simulacrum"? Have any of you seen the film Heavenly Creatures? Perhaps the Slenderverse was their Fourth World.

In response to your first message, I partially agree that the knowable presence of a project’s initiating artists can suffocate the project’s aura (and subsequently its survivability). However, I also believe the initiating artist is frequently the one who helps catalyze the progression of the story from the constructed identity of an anonymous observer. Someone relatable, someone detached, someone with similar levels of separation from the project as the rest of us.

So, the initiating artist is there with a permeating presence, (s/)he just chooses (wisely) to stay concealed behind the curtain until the final scene. Sometimes (s/)he never emerges at all. Sometimes we assume the process was organic. Sometimes it was really just an unlabeled Genetically Modified Organism, creating a schism between what we think we are consuming and what we are actually consuming.  

Art, this goes back to the e-mail I sent you in regards to DeLillo and the postmodern propensity toward anti-reality, toward the blind acceptance of artifice as reality. Unless we diligently peel off the layers upon layers of gleaming, plastic packaging we’ll never know what they’re hiding at their core. However, what are we to do when there is no core, only endless layers of more synthetic packaging? Do we bemoan the lack of objectivity or do we embrace the abundance of subjectivity? Is all of this fruitless to even wonder about since there is no fruit, just a representation of the fruit?