roots: awe, obsession delierium

by kelly kong

On the center panel of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights stands a hollow fruit filled with figures wearing gratified smiles, surrounded by partners fulfilling their sensual and physical pleasures. The hollow fruit defies nature in its ability to serve as a vehicle for ephemeral desires, yet satisfies its purpose to serve human needs (in this case, acting as a medium of pleasure and communication). The concept of the “fleeting pleasure” resonates in this age of TikTok scrolling and information maximization—as James Bridle highlights in the New Dark Age, our over-competence to utilize technology has undermined our ability to seek true literacy in this new language. We pick up fragments, but leave no through-line, creating multiplicity without thorough immersion in our epistemological framework. A description from the archive for The Garden of Earthly Delights illustrates this on the nail: “Nothing flows through: everything interrupts. There is a kind of spatial delirium.” As an edible substance, the abundant and sporadic appearance of berries in the middle panel gives way to the very same delirium the painting reverberates. Those in the midst of pleasures take no notice of their spatial surroundings; those looking out to the audience are enclosed within a transparent cylinder—an illusion of clarity with no definitive autonomy towards what the figure looks at. As the painting voyages with time and the ever-changing world it resides in, the image remains stagnant. Those kissing are still kissing, and those looking out still cast their eye upon us through the chute: the image of inescapable obsession thereby arises. 
Riding along with the painting’s uncanny foresight, I interposed a fan art (by Shrinheart) inspired by Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet from INSIDE, where repeating lines of “Could I interest you in everything? / All of the time?” is spread out across the berry, signifying the lack of oversight we have over this entity. Arendt predicted that the issue with our technological advances doesn’t lie in its capabilities (as they’ve become limitless), but in our choices. William Mortensen’s photograph, Obsession, demonstrates the simultaneous fear and wonderment humankind felt towards our innovations before the boundary of human and technology merged, bringing us instead to the transparent image of Caravaggio’s Narcissus: a young mythological hunter besotted by his own reflection until he drowned to death, acting as a grim reminder of the consequences to our blind submersion in technology—the messier, modern day equivalent to our direct reflection. The naked baby in the foreground is confronting the Internet Host of the berries—that is, the overlord of all modern ephemeral pleasures—and tasked with creating a new character of citizenship—will he fall into the suction hole of relentless self-obsession upon the contemporary web, or will he behold it at a distance? 
The clouds and the words on top thus become a play on irony: the gray boundaries are perhaps as ineffective at limiting the spread of the Internet Lord as war stamps may save a child from autocracy and poverty. There is no straight, singular path towards problem-solving.