In their short graphic work, The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Junji Ito describes a rock face, recently exposed by an earthquake, which is riddled with human-shaped holes. It’s eventually discovered that each of these holes is perfectly fitted for a particular person, and that upon discovery of their hole that person feels compelled to insert themselves into it; stripping off their clothes and vanishing into the earth. Attempts to extract them fail, and their ultimate fate is unknown until several months later, when a second earthquake reveals more holes on the opposite side of the mountain. Unlike their counterparts, these have been warped by years of tectonic movement. The story then ends with the emergence of a monstrous human figure, one of those called into the earth, whose body has been twisted and bent to conform to the tunnel through which they pass.
While perhaps never captured quite so clearly, or in ways quite as expressive of contemporary anxieties, this core idea of the interplay between the absence and presence of the human form is one which lies at the heart of horror. What is a ghost after all, but someone both absent and present at the same time? What is the fear of death, (our own or someone else's) but the realization of a body’s absence while it yet remains? Even in more grounded works of horror, the shadowy figure half-glimpsed, (there, but no longer, or maybe never at all) is a near-constant motif in everything from slashers to psycho-dramas.
And while our collective material conditions have changed dramatically, many times over, in the long history of this ur-theme, it has managed to persist because humans invariably seek to recreate themselves in everything they do. Sometimes as a positive likeness, a full-blown imitation of ourselves, but more often as a negative likeness, meant to fill in the gaps of what we can’t be. This is at the core of all technology: objects and systems, built by and for us, and always in answer to the limitations of our bodies. A sort of negative space we wrap ourselves in, trimming and tweaking its edges so that we can better fit our round pegs into square holes. And in the process, we can’t help but be reshaped as well.
Because no medium we can create, no matter how ingenious, will ever be completely free of distortion or loss. Systems are never neutral, and will always affect what moves through them, regardless of whether that system is natural or constructed. In and of itself this is neither positive nor negative. In fact, our ability to be reshaped by our own creations, whether hard technologies like computers or soft technologies like language, represents a profound radical potential.
But far too often we are blinded by the desire to delve into our own technological shadows; to retreat into an anthropocentric worldview which rejects the radical reshaping of what we can be or do. Rather than embracing revelatory new modes, (which would require us to be open to the world as it is) we retreat into human-shaped holes which, however claustrophobic, maintain our central importance to our own world. Only to come out the other side as a bunch of fucked up Junji Ito monsters.
By shying away from radical transformations, we instead bring about malignant ones; deprivations of the human form which lower rather than uplift us. Make us more amenable to the very things which bend and break us, like our current systems of exploitation. Because, once again, transformation is unavoidable. There is no such thing as a neutral medium, and even if there were humans are uniquely ill-suited to construct one. And just as millenia of shifting earth made the holes of Amigara Fault malignant, a mere few centuries of capitalism have made our own creations (technological, ideological, et al.) more than powerful and pervasive enough to reshape us to their dark needs.
Our impact upon the earth has bloomed, becoming truly tectonic in scope, while our ability to see beyond our own anthropocentric desires has if anything withered. Faded away to a mere tremor.
Thankfully, illiez’s recent additions to the archive offer up a salve to this sorry state. Both of their works, Memento Manducare and Telomatic, tap directly into this core theme of human absence / presence, quite literally coming at it from both ends. But rather than merely recreating it uncritically, each offers up a unique reminder (or perhaps warning) to the viewer. A playful slap in the face, at precisely the moment we risk getting lost in our own shadows.
To be blunt, they remind us that we are both edible and fuckable. That we, in fact, can’t not be reshaped by the things we interact with, including our own technologies; even when those technologies are as humble as a cup and saucer. Our bodies, whose likeness we can’t help but collectively recreate all around us, are soft and malleable. They can be broken down, chewed up, fucked raw, and shat out. Over the lips and past the gums, lookout ass hole here we come.
Of course many works, especially horror works, remind us of our vulnerability. What makes Memento and Telomatic special, is that they look at this vulnerability at a systemic rather than individual level. Rather than the bloody, slathering mouth of the cannibal or the looming shadow of the sexual predator, they give us a demurely laid out table setting, a brightly lit room of equally bright gadgets. While discussing the violation of our very personhood, they manage to be impersonal in ways that are fascinatingly (and frankly ingeniously) evocative. By removing the bodies from the equation, they make clear just how present they still are.
By taking a fresh, contemporary take on the absence / presence of the human form, they’re able to embrace an almost bureaucratic dread, unique to the neoliberal era. One which illustrates the horror of miles and years, rather than inches and seconds. The dark ministrations of brightly lit rooms, and the quiet harms of an unspoken expectation. They show us, plainly but playfully, just exactly what we’ve been doing to ourselves behind our own backs. And, perhaps most frighteningly of all, that sometimes we maybe even enjoy it.