Doug Lain

What I was looking for out on the dirt roads, in those alleys, was not some bedrock foundation from which to launch an attack on the unreality of my everyday life, but a way to break the boundary between nature and culture. To put this in Marxist language, my goal was to overcome alienation.

Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 book The Production of Space argues against the concept of empty or geometric space and in favor of social space. He was a committed Marxist and his idea that space is never truly empty but always filled in or mediated is perhaps just a philosophical refinement of the argument against neutrality or objectivity.

Over the last forty years the recursion Greaves employs in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm has become a Hollywood trope. The Simulacrum film (movies like the Truman Show or The Matrix) has become commonplace. And the power of this kind of film – the alienating affect that recursion and virtuality necessarily stimulates – has been diluted.