Death of the Player
2025
08:56
Subtitle transcript:
Who am I?
What does that mean?
In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: "It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling.”
Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero? Or is it the doll, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it Balzac, or is it me, Maya Iskoz? I’m quoting him in my own video, after all.
Literature is … the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes or acts or plays. Who is inside the doll and the avatar? What roles are these bodies playing? I was tempted to call them fake bodies, but I’m not sure they are fake. They mean something distinct even if I think of them as being myself.
You ain't fucked me, you fucked the old body
You ain't fuck Nicki, you fucked Nicole body
Ain't no miles on this here new body
Off with they heads, these bitches is nobodies
What necessitates role-play? I am choosing to role-play in a what is already a roleplaying game. Why does there need to be a fake social media? Who is it for?
Even my avatar pretends to be a unicorn with her mask. How many layers of pretend are there?
Once an action is recounted and no longer in order to act directly upon reality, disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.
Video recounts action over and over. I as the artist keep breakdancing and repeating the action, but even you, the viewer, can force me to repeat the action by rewinding and replaying the video. Actions become immortal and we all become artists.
To write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, "performs," and not "oneself"
These thoughts are no longer attached to me:
I’ve learned to sleep on my back only after taking out all the piercings that hurt from sleeping on my side.
I really miss vaping especially the blue razz ice geek bar and my teeth hurt after I floss.
I’ve been in my head a lot recently. There wasn’t time to think about how i feel about stuff until now but its is taking up precious space to think about art and it is really annoying.
I forgot better shit than you ever thought of.
They have really good ribs at Chili’s!
I’m not tapped into my feelings. I’m pretty unemotional most of the time until something really intense happens and I feel comfortable holding myself at a distance.
I am using a doll as a stand-in for myself, and my 41-year old friend Syan’s voice so I don’t have to speak this out loud. Is it still me?
But what? Who cares? The subtitles aren’t even accurate anymore. I, Syan, am making stuff up now. I am innovating. Maybe Maya will be mad at me.
Has Syan become a 4th avatar in this video? Am I him too?
When you think back to playing, do you remember yourself watching your avatar play, or yourself as the avatar playing? Can avatars help us understand ourselves?
The author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single "theological" meaning (the "message" of the AuthorGod), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.
Life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
In the land of Gods and Monsters
I was an angel looking to get fucked hard
Like a groupie incognito, posing as a real singer
Life imitates art
When you talk, it's like a movie
And you're making me crazy
'Cause life imitates art
If I get a little prettier, can I be your baby?
You tell me, "Life isn't that hard"
Narrative is never undertaken by a person, but by a … speaker, whose "performance" may be admired … but not his "genius”
So, who am I?