Spectrophobia
An encounter with Jimmy O'Neal's mirrored realities.
BY SOPHIA WRIGHT
Growing up, I had a distorted fascination with Angels. It began kneeling at my bedside with my grandmother, who bade me to chant alongside her: Now I lay me down to sleep / I pray the Lord my soul to keep / If I die before I wake, / I pray the Lord my Soul to take. She tucked me in, kissed my forehead, and told me that my Guardian Angel will watch over me as I rest.
I dreamt that an Angel with a thousand white and bloodless eyes reached into the open cavity of my chest and placed my glowing soul upon Her tongue and swallowed it whole.
From then on, I was plagued by nightmares of all-seeing creatures creeping into my bedroom and watching me as I slept. In the dark, I would project visions into shadow, sculpt them with my blind eye, and tremble at the almighty dimensions (read: dementions) of my mind.
Mirrors made it worse. My nighttime spectrophobia. Myth and folklore have oft posited mirrors as portals, as obfuscations of truth, and my child self intuited this sacred slant. I knew that if I stared into a mirror under the cloak of shadow for long enough, my face would warp and change.1 I would twist into a monster—an angel—with a thousand eyes, echoed through the long hallway of vision affected by facing mirrors. My unconscious mind had summoned the Biblically-accurate image of an Angel through prayer—a Jungian feat for which no child should be chosen. But it pumped something endogenous and charged and electric through my veins. Though an illusion—one allegedly manufactured by my mind—there has been little since then that I have experienced with such truth and visceral presence. It was a clarity that I have been chasing ever since, deadened by new mirrors and new myths fed to me by new, shadowy figures.
ENGELSSTURZ
I stand before a mirror. I am an adult now—I have stared into these portals with wizened eyes and witnessed an unchanged face and fallen into innumerable slumbers, undisturbed by the miasma of sinister Angels. In this mirror, I see my face and I see that it is distorted. I am pricked by that same viscerality that colored my childhood, and I welcome it; I have grown hungry for this air.
My face is not disfigured by the projections of my mind, but rather by a sinewing stream of silver. In this veined surface, I am dipping in and out of sight, lost and found within an alien topography of being. I raise my left hand to wave at my serpentine twin; she raises her right hand in response. My pupils expand—for it is here that the moment skewers me—a distinct, Barthesian punctum—that mysterious or fugitive piercing that lets the mystery of life press a sharp point against your emotions, your heart.
I turn, suddenly uncomfortable with the geyser that has built within me, and am confronted by a different scene entirely: a white cube gallery, sprinkled with the tell-tale personalities of arts connoisseurs.
(I remember myself.)
I take a step back with this mirror—this portal, this punctum—and view it for not its alchemy, but for its objective taxonomy. What hangs on the wall before me, technically speaking, is not a mirror, but a canvas comprised of sanded plexiglass. And upon that canvas: reflective acrylic paint that forms and un-forms bodies and figures until they dissociate into a tumbling cloud. All at once, these brushstrokes are nothing and everything, harkening in some ways to an Abstract Expressionist painting tradition—perhaps a twisted Franz Kline or a scopious and silvery Willem de Kooning or a figural Anselm Kiefer.
In fact, I am struck in that moment, spontaneously, by an image of Kiefer’s Engelssturz painting, where the Archangel Michael is rendered in hues of black and blue (like a bruise imprinted upon skin) falling through a field of gold leaf. Beneath that golden, shimmering sky: the dark and roughened surface of the material world. In Engelssturz, the Archangel plummets towards the world of illusion.
In Saccretion Disc (2025), I too stand within the world of illusion, accompanied by other rendered figures upon the picture plane. Behind—or within—this mirrored cloud, painted eyes poke through, along with a head stretching out near the top left, its neck craned, as if gasping for air (he, too, it seems was hungry for air; I feel an immediate kinship). Along the lower left quadrant, tentacles slither. At the top center, a hairy creature bares its teeth. While I write these creatures as distinct entities, they are remarkable for their indistinctness—not quite abstractions, but rather obscured identities seemingly rabid for breath, constrained by the reflective cloud.
My reflected eye layers over the eye of a beast. Suddenly, I am young again, and I’m playing World of Warcraft, of all things, fusing my identity with the animalistic avatar of my making (the Night Elf). It’s almost dizzying standing here, seeing memories layer on top of each other, in sedimentary distinctions: the acute receptivity to metaphysical energies; and the ceding of consciousness to a digital avatar.
Instead of a flat screen, however, the shape of the canvas curls into a quarter-dome (a parenthesis to your reflected gaze). That intentional, concave shape, I later learn, is what causes the phenomenon that triggered my punctum: when I wave with my left hand, it is my right hand that waves back. The inversion arises from the way the light rays are reflected. Rays originating from the left of the object strike the right portion of the mirror and, following the law of reflection, are reflected opposite. Conversely, rays from the right of the object strike the left portion of the mirror and are reflected opposite. This crossing of rays leads to the inversion of the image, with the left of the image corresponding to the right of the object, and vice versa. Saccretion Disc, thus, is a mirror that usurps all expectations that come with encountering your own image.
The artist of this painting, Jimmy O’Neal, has propagated many in its likeness—halls of mirrors that reflect his engagement with time and space. The first series, created in the early aughts, was simply layers of painted angels and demons, creating almost completely abstract figures. In nearly every interview of the artist that I’ve encountered and every conversation we’ve had, he harkens to the responses elicited by viewers: “Some people would sweetly say, ‘Oh, look—I see a beautiful angel!’ and others would say, accusingly, ‘so why are you painting a bunch of ole devils?’ I found this telling, as they were all looking into mirrors.” I wonder, then, what that says about me—for I saw an angel, but it was a beastly sight.
The symbolic meaning of mirrors both diverges and converges cross-culturally. In Lacanian philosophy, the mirror serves to locate the self among others because in the topology that Jacques Lacan makes of his abstractions, the mirror both refers to and “interprets” the self’s inclusion in the world. In the Indian Chandogya Upanisha, the soul (“purusa”) mirrors itself, as God mirrors Himself through man. In the Western tradition, the completed painting is a philosophical mirror too, as it arrests the viewer into contemplation and “doubles” the world, mimetically imperfect in its brushstroke.
“All artists have ever done is paint a mirror, really,” Jimmy O’Neal tells me.
It is months later now, and I am standing in his studio in rural, Upstate South Carolina. That affectatious encounter with his artwork at the Johnson Lowe Gallery (Atlanta) is now but a memory, but it holds me—arrests me—even now as I step into what feels like a Holy site. The artist has welcomed me to his home that doubles as a simulacrum that triples as a breeding ground for creative invention. The studio lies in the same county in which I was born, an uncanny connection, and I tread rather carefully on these grounds of genesis.
Jimmy and I initially connected over an old diary entry of mine that had evolved into a rather solemn text describing my psyche as one that is fragmented by the deluge of digital media, and one’s compulsive participation in it (see: delusions of being watched; the layering of memories into your present moment; the dissociation of perceived identity.) That essay, “Digital Diaspora”, was a phenomenological endeavor—as is most of my work—and as is most of Jimmy’s work too. In his graduate thesis, entitled What Essence Was It That Time Was Of: The Ephemeralization of Paintings Lens, he writes: “My art practice is one of phenomenological exploration, toward and in poetic search of a mark exemplifying new perspectives on the dance between life’s sense-data and the innate, empathetic self, ever-present within a physically disconnected ‘global society of self’ in the advanced stages of simulated circumstance.”
This simulated circumstance is of primary concern to me, as we continue to cede our embodied presence to technologies that numb our senses (the simulant is a deadening stimulant).
Critical theorist James M. Russell states, “[I]n our present ‘global’ society, technological communication has created an excessive proliferation of meaning. Because of this, meaning’s self-referentiality has prompted, not a ‘global village,’ but a world where meaning has been obliterated.” This aligns with Jean Baudrillard’s assessment—of whom both Jimmy and I preoccupy ourselves—that the excess of signs and meaning in post-modernity has caused a paradoxical effacement of reality. TLDR; we are so stimulated by digital slop that we are numb to lived experience.
Recognizing this impending doom—that is, a society soon to be arming itself with powerful pocket tools for constant manipulation of reality—Jimmy desired a painting sentiment to reflect these new conditionings, while also fueling the conversations with abstract expressionists in his head. “I wanted to make a mark that would contain a particular abstract reality in real-time,” he says. And thus, the mirrored mark was born. By sanding away at the surface of an acrylic mirror and chemically bonding a crystal clear acrylic paint, Jimmy developed a painted lens—a trompe l’oeil for the hypercontemporary.
Through this illusion, my own reality had been manipulated. The hypnotism of Saccretion Disc pulled me into the chambers of my mind, latching onto echoes of viscerality, and sent my heart pumping into a reflective adrenaline. Such a physiological reaction recalls the psychological aesthetics developed by Vernon Lee, who theorized that spectators “empathize” with works of art when said art elicits memories, causing often unconscious bodily changes in posture and breathing.
Stepping into Jimmy’s home certainly has the same effect—although I suspect, in this instance, it has more to do with that oppressive Southern heat and humidity. Jimmy, too, in his all black, has already begun to sweat, but he belies any indication of exhaustion with a natural energetic character. Born in 1967, he bears the countenance of youth. While many men I know tend to recede their consciousness far behind their eyes (a protective instinct against society’s harsher creeds), Jimmy’s consciousness sits on the very front of his gaze, eager and enthusiastic and earnest.
The home that encases our devoted protagonist feels haunted. The floors creak, and the walls shudder with all the ghostly visages of a Victorian, though anachronistic in its content: vintage ephemera from the American psyche pepper the space, destabilizing any sense of rootedness in time. “My dad,” he explains, “had this big warehouse that was connected to an antique mall where they would do auctions—and he was like, you want all this stuff?”
He apologizes for the mess; his family is in the midst of a move to Savannah, Georgia, a place with a very soft spot in my heart. He is quick to talk about his children, and it’s clear that they occupy, yes, a very soft spot in his heart. In fact, they inform a sizable background to his work, whether it be through means of collaboration or provenance. As I am swallowed into the belly of the beast, we pause in his hallway to contemplate Angels of Light (1996): many abstracted figures layered upon one another, centralized around a single eye. Painted in 1996, its creation preceded the birth of his daughter. “But the eyes,” he says, “They’re totally my daughter’s eyes. My youngest. Those are PINATOVA’s eyes.” He speaks with a sense of worship that he similarly extends to his other children, Chelsea and MezzMyrh.
The next room over, situated behind an antique dresser, to the right of an equally antique bed (sheets rumpled and half-made), hangs another mirrored painting for contemplation. This near-symmetrical diptych, Sympathetic Magic: A Lesson in Holographic Symmetry conjures a blotted Rorschach test, with its two sides separated by a cast plastic frame. “When you first glance at it,” says Jimmy, “the symmetry is there. It becomes asymmetry when you break it apart. See, here—some of these particles didn’t make it over here… this has different drips than that… but it was conceptually born as a symmetrical piece. I made it with my daughter, Chelsea, and I was explaining to her the problem of time in theoretical physics—she was like 6 or 7 maybe, homeschooled—and how general relativity regards the flow of time as malleable and relative. And she goes, ‘So it’s like when you enjoy something, time goes by faster and time doesn’t really exist, it’s just where you are in the present. Like a sloth with maracas.’ I loved that. So we went back and hand painted these guys in there—sloths with maracas.” I tilt my head and there it is: furry creatures shaking instruments, their figures flickering like holograms upon the surface.
Time stops for a moment as I bring my hands together in contemplation in front of the image. (A whisper: Now I lay me down to sleep.) As I assume this Anjali mudra of prayer—an act of touching and being touched—I consider the residue of touch in the paint before me: how its structure recalls the peaked lift of blots; or which canvas was the first canvas, the one that imprinted its mark upon the other. This notion was one philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty described as reversibility: the perceiver and the perceived in general are reversible. He often illustrates this with touch. When you touch something (especially a loved one, a caress to the cheek), it touches back. As David Morris notes, the “peculiar relation between reversible terms is such that they can reverse to one another: the toucher can itself reverse to being touched.” It is simply a matter of perception. Morris argues that the ontological relation between reversible terms can be best described by the relationship between right- and left-hands or gloves—incongruent counterparts as Kant would call them; enantiomorphs, as geometry would call them. Like enantiomorphs, writes Morris, “toucher and touched are incongruent because the one cannot be reduced to or take the place of the other; they are counterpart so far as they are made of the same stuff and are inherently complicitous. Yet a right-hand glove can reverse to its left-hand ‘incongruous counterpart’ when it is turned inside out.” The perceiver and the perceived are thus two ‘inflections’ of being.
When I lift my left hand to wave at my reflection here, in this strange bedroom within the body of a sloth, my left hand waves back. On a flat surface, the mirror works as one would expect it to. Now, recall the curved dome of Secretion Disc: when I wave my left hand, my right hand waves back. The math to this is sound. In differential calculus, a point of inflection is a point on a smooth plane curve where the function changes from being concave to convex, or vice versa. On an ontological level (and within a linguistic interpretation), an inflection point is the moment I catch a glimpse of myself, and instead of being robbed of my body—cast outside of it—I am instead grounded within my sheaths of existence.
VICARIUM
Jesus, it’s hot. It’s the only thing I can think about as Jimmy leads the pilgrimage across his Vicarium. We’ve been spit out into the high heat of the day. Sweat pools at the nape of my neck.
Nonetheless, we traverse across his Baudrillardian property. Our first obstacle is a tree that has fallen over the porch’s back staircase (his tiny cat meows at me) before we are soon wading through a sea of overgrown weeds. The property once hosted a giant mill—the home we were just in was the office and bank—and in the distance, I can see a chimney sprouting towards the sky, rising as an emblematic grave to an agrarian past.
“There was a photographer,” says Jimmy, “who would travel around the south shooting scenes of child labor. There were like twelve- or thirteen-year-old kids who worked in the mill. To save film, he would sometimes shoot triple exposure, creating this ghostly effect of kids who had their fingers cut off by machines.” I assume he’s referring to Lewis Hine, whose composite photographs of Southern cotton mill workers were created by purposely rephotographing several workers upon the same photographic plate, resulting in a haunting physiognomy.
We arrive to a new dilapidated building—what Jimmy believes was once the cooling system for the entire six-story mill building that burned down. It is marked by concrete and rust and vines. He leads us up an overgrown staircase to the second story that unfolds into an expanse view of the tree canopy—perhaps a couple hundred square feet in size. Along with the dangling shrapnel, light falls through the holes in the rusted ceiling, casting glowing squares upon the brutalistic floor. There’s a broom, a shovel, and other equipment leaning against the wall, with various misplaced objects strewn about—including, it appears, a discarded plastic frame similar to that from Sympathetic Magic.
I resist the initial instinct to pull out my phone and snap a picture; Susan Sontag’s argument that the proliferation of photographic images has begun to establish within people a “chronic voyeuristic relation to the world” rings in my head. I recognize it as an urge to assuage general feelings of disorientation, to take ownership of memory. I acknowledge the general irony of this recognition, due to the fact that I was comforted by Margot Suchet’s documenting presence with her own camera—a click click click that underscored every moment of this journey to enable you, dear reader, to vicariously experience this visit not only through words, but through images as well.
And it is this word with which we now occupy ourselves: vicarious. Defined as:
Experienced or felt by empathy with or imaginary participation in the life of another person, as in “read about mountain climbing and experienced vicarious thrills.”
Endured or done by one person substituting for another, as in “vicarious punishment.”
Committed or entrusted to another, as powers or authority; delegated.
Occurring in or performed by a part of the body not normally associated with a certain function.
Experienced or gained by the loss or to the consequence of another, such as through watching or reading.
Acting as a substitute; – said of abnormal action which replaces a suppressed normal function, as in “vicarious hemorrhage replacing menstruation.”
Through digital media, vicarious acts have proliferated to an exponential degree. Photography is one medium for the vicarious, converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Instagram influencers, for example, engage with the world simply as a strategy for accumulating photographs to share so that their followers can engross in the Platonic fantasy of profound adventure.
Recognizing this as a peculiar social context for our present moment, the Vicarium was born, living during the alienating period of COVID. An interactive piece inspired by Instagram live, participants can visit a website that has a remote control connected to an avatar. Rather than an animated Night Elf, expressed through bits of code on a screen, this avatar is a live actor—literally Jimmy on his property in South Carolina. As the participant presses left, right, forward, stop, Jimmy walks left, right, forward, or stops. The land transforms into a video game map, where the participant can explore the strange collection of early Industrial American ruins. Throughout the Vicarium, which consists of this husk of a building, abandoned roller coaster cars shaped like caterpillars, grazing goats, beehives, and tunnels that snake beneath the soil, Jimmy would stage his paintings, transforming the place into one part video game and one part virtual gallery.
“As you are controlling it,” says Jimmy, “you are the curator. You’re the curator of that perspective of seeing work. But also, it’s a reciprocal process. I’m the actor, the avatar. The person might tell me to turn right, which would technically be at a ninety-degree angle. But I want you to see that painting—or at least part of it to attract you—which is more at a thirty-degree angle. I would turn the view very slowly so you would end up seeing it. And I would turn in such a way that it feels like you turn all the way. So in that way, it’s like sleight of hand—if they’re the curator of the experience, I’m the director of it.”
But Jimmy foresaw a potential problem; if the player would direct him to a painting, they would see not their reflection, but his. “If I were to walk around as I am, it’s just me holding a phone camera—like, it just looks ridiculous. So I made avatars. Puppets, really, where the phone sits inside, where the eyes would be. So when the player would go up to a reflective surface, they would get to see who or what their avatar is.”
The Vicarium’s avatars fall into an iconographic lineage that is conceptual in nature. For example, Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (c. 1647–1651) depicts the goddess Venus in a sensual pose, lying on a bed with her back to the viewer, and looking into a mirror held by the Roman god of physical love, her son Cupid. Her reflected face is unnaturally enlarged, hazy in manifestation as if she were carried—awakened—from a passionate dream realm. While it appears as if Venus is looking at herself in the mirror, this would be impossible since viewers can see her face reflected in their direction. One consensus regularly argued amongst researchers is that since the viewer sees her face in the mirror, Venus is actually looking at the reflection of the viewer. With the sight of her face poetically decapitated from the sight of her body, the mirror acts as a severance point between what is embodied and what is perceived. There is an interrelation, but also an alienation to that enantiomorphic representation of oneself.
When players encounter their mirror image in the Vicarium, it is an act of both self-discovery and further disaffection from their embodied point in time and space; it melds them into the fantasy of the virtual. “Part of my reason for the puppet avatars,” says Jimmy, “is that when you play a video game for too long, and you get lost in it… the sun streams in, hits plasma, affronts you with your reflection, and it pulls you back into who you are. It’s jarring. And yeah, I mean, we do that in the morning when we look in the mirror anyway. I think we all have a question of like is this—oh, this is me? This is my avatar for life. I wanted to give the Vicarium that jarring effect—and also because it’s fun.” I think of my World of Warcraft Night Elf, abandoned in the virtual land of Azeroth, an empty husk waiting for me to return and reoccupy its pixelated entity. I picture the back-and-forth sway of its animated breath, starving for sentience.
PLASTIC CYMATICS
The sun scorches overhead. Jimmy leads me into an abyss. He warns of snakes, and clears the path free from thick, titanic spider webs. We encounter a mouth: a jaw unhinged wide, ready to swallow us whole. It’s a tunnel, but looks more like a hungry catacomb with its loose teeth-bricks and funereal obscurity. Hung across from it—upon what does indeed look like a tomb—is another one of his works: Scyring the Planetary Product depicts an oval of shimmering gold encased in a square, plastic-cast frame decorated with ghosts of Baroque filigree.
This medium of framing—seen earlier in Sympathetic Magic and upon the ground of the deteriorating building—is an intentional choice by Jimmy. Framing as an architectural elemental provides physicality to an artwork, engaging with an ornamental history in the decorative arts. The Western tradition of framing implemented borders between reality and the imagined. As trompe l’oeil progressed, the frame became a gesture or invitation for the observer to enter the painted scene. During the Rococo period, the framework would glean motifs from the era’s style, such as through organic curvature and undulating swirls. In effect, the frame functions as a corresponding portal to the human simulacrum.
Jimmy describes his own frames as “polycarbonate veils” that characterize our present moment in material history. The reflected image in the pool of gold (your eyes, your gaze) is thus framed within the context of discarded transparent packaging; the kind of packaging that often outlasts its products. It is also a material that has begun a slow merge with mankind as a substance that infects our blood on the microcosmic level.
In Scrying the Planetary Product, Jimmy layered three cymatic images from the frequencies of the Earth, Sun, and Moon in his mirrored lens paint. Cymatics is a subset of modal vibrational phenomena. Particle displacement (typically of fluids, powders, or liquid pastes), created by vibrational waves upon a surface, form fractal patterns often similar to that of a mandala. According to the natural scientist Hans Jenny, who conducted early experiments with cymatics, these patterns are manifestations of the vibrational energy’s particular invisible force field. Though the indicator material and the nature of the projected diaphragm are determinative factors in the final shape that these cymatics form, Jenny was nonetheless impressed by an observation that imposing a vocalization of Om (regarded by Hindus and Buddhists as the sound of creation) the lycopodium powder formed a circle with a centre point, one of the ways in which Om has historically been represented.
Like Om, Jimmy’s golden reflecting pool (here mirroring both sound and present reflection), is experienced by the viewer as a symbol that represents the celestial connection which produces the livable environment for humans to be humans rather than disparate atoms of carbon, floating untethered in the vacuum of space. Without these planetary orbs of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, humans would not be humans. Moreover, when framed in the context of the polycarbonate moment, where the world produces approximately 450 million tons of plastic each year with an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris in the ocean, how does our consumption with plastic products choke and suffocate the livability of these environments? Microplastics leech into our organs; individuals surgically insert silicone into their bodies; we gaze into plastic portals all day and night. Surely, our hysterical feed upon this substance must alter our underlying vibration as well.
I see the obscuration of my face in the mirror encased in plastic. And behind me, shrouding me like a darkened halo, that wide and gaping mouth leads to a subterrestrial intestine, sinuating beneath the dirt. We disappear into darkness. It is a blur of echoing voices, disorienting white flash from the camera, echoing frequencies plugging my ears, and total allure of what lurks in the shadows.
DIVINE MULTIPLICITY
“Your eyes are gonna change because the light is super different in here,” Jimmy says as he heaves the metal door closed with a clang, “but they will shift.”
We stand in a massive warehouse, perhaps the size of half a football field in both square footage and height. The smell is different from the mildew of the tunnel, from the humidity in the high-summer air, from the soil deep within the Earth. Out from the playground of Americana ruin, I am now enclosed in a metal box with fluorescent lights. It is a dazzling transition, and I feel as if my face has been drained of blood; it is even hotter in here than beneath the sun’s blistering glare.
This is where Jimmy stores his oeuvre. The hazy forms of masses upon masses upon masses of paintings beckon to me, but there is no greater force than the silver spherule into which Jimmy disappears. I draw myself to its threshold on shaky legs—and step through the looking glass.
I sway on the spot, and five bodies sway in response. (I wave with my left hand, and my right hand waves back). I become a hazy visage of many. I am Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, with two heads looking in opposite directions. I am Hecate, the Greek goddess of crossroads, night, ghosts, and witchcraft, with three heads or three bodies or three heads emerging from one body with six arms. I am Purusa, a thousand-headed Purusa, thousand-eyed, thousand-footed, pervading Earth on all sides.
(I dream that an Angel with a thousand white and bloodless eyes reaches into the open cavity of my chest and places my glowing soul upon Her tongue and swallows it whole.)
Divine multiplicity, while an established religious phenomenon, is bestowed upon me as I am swallowed by a mirrored ellipse. In the Rig Veda, “a deity associated with the act of creation on a cosmic scale is denoted with multiple bodily parts and/or forms. He may create the phenomenal world or the visible divine forms whereby he himself is apprehended in the world.” Scholar Coomaraswamy suggests that the imaging of Gods with several limbs in Hindu art alludes to the compound nature (i.e. uapadhi-, or the true nature of the self disguised within the body) of the cosmic divine which is “able by a division of upadhis, to function in many places at one time.”
As my incarnations spread out before me, I remember myself (my Self). I anchor my consciousness to my bones as Jimmy’s words float back to me from a time past: “When I was creating it, it really started to mess with my head. I was questioning everything. I wasn’t doing anything other than being in that room, and the sound in there… it’s different too. I spent too much time in there.”
And time certainly seems to stretch here, like a rubber band pulled taut. I stand in the center of an ellipse of mirrors. Disguise the Limit (2025) is constructed from nine concave panels of sanded plexiglass, each at least eight feet in height, forming a long, ovular room. Each panel is formally similar to Secretion Disc in the figural layering of mirrored paint that forms a kinetic cloud—a cloud that defies static resolution. Like mutated animals, the cloud-creatures gallop in perambulation about the oval, forming and unforming. The paint drips from their bodies, viscous even in dried form. Clinging to these shimmering, reverberant masses: bee-creatures who look poised to sting in the chaos of the mare’s nest.
The rendering of the respective cloud- and bee-creatures are discrete, with the former of virtual export and the latter of tactile import. The mirror, as the breeding environment for these entities, thus makes the reflex of art and reality join and split, on the conflux on body and spirit, flesh and gaze, digital and analog.
We concern ourselves first with the digital mode of production—that is, the germinating substance for the cloud-creatures. As part of the development for his project, Jimmy created a metaverse gallery (spatial.io) in which participants could enter a virtual map of the constructed art-environment of Disguise the Limit. Through a mirror (the screen), the participating human would create her allegorical creature (her avatar). She would encounter Disguise the Limit in the virtual space on its external skin; instead of entering into the oval-room, she would circumambulate it, watching the reflection of her avatar flicker in and out of reciprocity. She would pause in front of a selected panel (each numbered) and take a digital selfie. Her selfie—that is, the moving illustration drawn by a computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-optic cable—would enter Jimmy’s collection of metabodies—the references for the painted cloud-creatures. Working in the physical space of Disguise the Limit—that is, no longer the virtual facsimile, but rather the built environment in which I now stood—he would take the image of one selfie as a reference and paint it not on the outside, but on the inside of the panel, as if the metabody had bled through, leaving the residue of its presence like a stain. As more avatars of friends and families would make their digital pilgrimages, the selfies would layer and layer and layer, distorted by their accumulation, their transition from convexature to concavature, from pixel to paint, and their forced migration from the metaverse to the mirrorverse. In this start towards an infinite regress of relations between the real and the represented, the transitions are not distinct. But in the cloud-creatures’ eternal slumber within the reflective surface, they consummate their citizenship as mirror-dwellers.
In the vernacular of VR communities, a mirror-dweller is a person who, while ‘embodying’ their avatar, spends large amounts of time staring at their digital flesh in virtual mirrors, as their chosen skin seen in the mirror is deemed to be more desirable than the reality of looking at their physical flesh in a ‘real’ one. According to researchers Mattia Thibault and Mila Bujić, these virtual mirrors induce the body ownership illusion: “Synchronous motor actions between the physical and corresponding virtual parts of the body alter one’s body schema by augmenting it with the avatar representation in immersive embodied VR[,] demonstrat[ing] how under certain conditions our phenomenological bodies are not limited to our physical ones.”
In essence, the illusion that the player is one with their avatar increases as the reflection follows their actual physical movement. The virtual mirror, then, is a structural crossroad between the “specular self” (the optic and catoptric phenomenon that is perceived by the eyes of the child) and a “social self” (the understanding of how others can perceive our subjectivity “from the outside”). As media theorist Lisa Swanstrom writes, the avatar is “neither completely tied to the Cartesian model (which describes identity as an indivisible soul or mind encapsulated within a physical body), nor an excessively open model that treats subjectivity as a mass of societal affiliations with no roots or grounding of any kind, a subject in circulation is instead a complex, distributed network of embodied systems that exists in a flux of encapsulations, enclosures, ruptures, and flows.”
This is, in many ways, Jimmy’s intent with Disguise the Limit. While professing an intellectual fascination with mirror-dwelling, he was also interested in the closed-network effect of elliptical mirrors: a factory for the generative image. This is where we concern ourselves with the second mode of visual production—that is, the germinating substance for the bee-creatures.
Intrigued by the capabilities of generative artificial intelligence, Jimmy was also compelled by the glitches that could occur—especially in the early models: hallucinative horrors of garbled faces and eyes, the twisted, many-fingered hands, the alien script masquerading as language. He theorizes that it will become emblematic of early, democratized GenAI in the same way that film or VHS glitches have—and how many times have you seen someone add a fake filter to a photo or video to create that very effect?
The Johnson Lowe Gallery canonized his early experiments with AI imagery in Spittin’ Image, engaging image-to-image models to probe their interpretation of prompts like “spitting”––referential to the language we use when receiving an answer from a Large Language Model (LLM): “ChatGPT spit out a response.” From such experiments came the creatures that populated Saccretion Disc. Though I have outspoken criticisms regarding the use of GenAI, the basis of which stem from pervasive existential and environmental and technocratic anxieties, I found an ascendant value in how Jimmy used it. Also, I often frankly find AI imagery to be soulless, and the sycophantic personalities of LLMs to be unsettling. Nonetheless, it can be argued that the shreds of human craft that it pastes together to form a facsimile of creation are singularities of the collective unconscious, as documented by the Internet of Things. From this Jungian dream arises an intimate spectre deep within the human psyche, that familiar image of bloodless Angels which lurk in the hallowed grounds of my mind.
What sets Jimmy’s work apart from these soulless aggregations lies precisely in the soul of his work—and its ontological context. His mirrored works operate precisely to reflect the metaphysical fabric of our present moment, especially in regard to the revolutionary impact these technologies will have on our evolving consciousness. His work extends beyond the prompt and to the total physical presence he cultivates in building these monolithic milieus. It is a laborious craft, one borne from honest fascination with phenomenology, transcendence, and purusa.
Like the avatars of puppetry from Vicarium, Jimmy constructed a real-life puppet of cultural ephemera. It is an oddity to behold, fabricated with skeletal remains, an old globe, a South Asian show-puppet pleated in gold, a model pirate ship, an upside-down muppet, and other recognizable and unrecognizable objects, held together with zipties. He positioned the species of Things in the center of the oval, and then painted a fragment of its position on select panels; from there, he would paint those reflections and so on and so forth, so that the mirrored ellipse operated as a closed-circuit generative model, reproducing the species of Things through the filtered lens of virtuality.
I consider my own proliferation through the mirrors—if that skewed blink of my eye, refracted by ten zigzags of light through space, feels a sort of empathy or identification with the me, with my body. I wonder if it understands itself to be an echo of my soul or if it has a will towards emancipation, resentful towards the peg (the me) to which it is tethered. I contemplate the way identity (the me) is configured in relation and response to the network—the one that loops around and around me, corralling me into its expansive and seemingly borderless place. But identity—the ego, the identification with the me and with ownership—seems to dissolve into the waters of singularity here, into the hive mind that buzzes within the cloud- and bee-creatures. As access to human imagination continues to democratize through aggregate networks, where does that leave the individual?—especially as their DNA collectively structures the spit that dangles from the frothing mouth of LLMs.
I begin to feel ill. Combined with the heat and the dehydration, the metavirus called
me ee ę
coils itself about my human brainstem and programs my identity,
my subjectivity,
the cloud through which I gaze at the world.
I realize that I’m crouching, and so I move to
stand.
In that moment, I am
weightless:
the world be /// nds,
like a piece of wobbling metal, while the shores of unconsciousness roar in my ear. I fear the presence of
Her—the formidable Angel who once snarled in my psyche—
I cannot see, suspended in the
weightlessness of near-fainting,
suspended in the
abyss of pure presence and
non-presence01001001 00100000 01100101 01101110 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01110101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110011 01110000 01100101 01100011 01110100 01110010 01101111 01110000 01101000 01101111 01100010 01101001 01100001.
This has since been described as the strange-face illusion. While some may witness parallels to my own experience, others report seeing visages of deceased loved ones or even monsters.
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