So,, I wrote an essay — I was going to cull it down a lot, but I’ve talked about things that we mentioned in class discussion in there, too soooo…. You can find my “working notes” on my etherpad as well.

INTRO

exitsense.net is an experimental website consisting of multiple pages, artistic mediums, and modes of user interaction created by artist, Exit Sense (Miami, Florida). In an interview with Tiny Mix Tapes we learn Exit Sense is of Cuban heritage, was raised Catholic, and identifies as queer. Exit Sense refers to the internet as a place to deal with the realities of everyday life - akin to Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism (2020)— who notes a similar experience of escaping from everyday life thru online portals. Both Russell and Exit Sense’s approach to the techno sphere is non-systematic, metaphorical a la the “critical conciousness” spoken of by Musiol (160, 2018).

Something that really spoke to me when reading In The Beginning Was The Commandline, was the focus on metaphors in computing. Being further reminded by Musiol (2018) to view “computational universe” as a metaphor or reflect ion of “natural and cultural processes”. In week three when we were discussing my own folder poem, the metaphor of the buttterfly was expanded upon, thru the chat log imaginal cells were referred to - the single cell organ isms which organise themselves to form a butterfly out of the caterpillar. This caused me to think about the i maginal cells which make up the cyber sphere - numbers and bits… data which is organised in certain ways to cr eate new meanings. Exit Sense has taken debris in the form of references to various social, political and cult ral ephemera and rearranged them to create entirely new meanings.

Each potential e-destination is demarcated by a symbol relating to video games, nursery rhymes, weaponry, or re ligion: the artist notes their intention was to create a shrine of sorts to symbols of masculinity (Lubner 2016) . Making reference to 2000s webapp Neopets, one item of the navigation menu is the “Void Plant”. It leads to a p age titled “Twin Death” (the html file for the Twin Death page is title twindex.html). In an interview with Tiny mix Tapes, the artist notes that the abundance of video game nostalgia is a reference to one of the few ways th ey were able to connect with straight, traditionally “masculine” boys as a kid. Beyond Neopets there is a broad er metaphor of weaponry as masculinity and sexuality - or tools of gender.

Through inspecting the code of the site, exitsense.net is revealed as totally creative - from file names to the use of the z-index to create digital space. The page titled puremovement encapsulates the artists consideration for time and space in the site’s construction (https://exitsense.net/puremovement.html). This page contains vi deo and audio overlayed by floating rose petals animated using javascript. If you were to watch the entire 28 minutes, you would experience a sonic journey of prayer, glitched vocals and industrial sound. The visual symb ols include a video of what appears to be an Hermann Nitsch ritual sacrifice, rotoscoped fairies of Disney’s Sl eeping Beauty, a pole dancer overlayed and archive footage from religious films.

—- CLASS DISCUSSION POINTS: to look more closely at the code, how does the artist draw you in?
in terms of the neopets changing over time, my untrained eye can’t see what caused that… I think I just got the m eaning of the page title “Twin Death”, tho. The two Draiks are the twins (Zschph and Svusk). I’m not sure how they die, though. Once I start ed digging into the code I found a lot of text which had been obscured before as well. There was also a lin k with in the icon below the Draik which led to a .pdf of a novella by Maurice Blanchot (which had also been quote d on the page), titled Thomas the Obscure.

SUMMARY

The messages and artistic expression of Exit Sense has not been sacrificed in the name of efficiency (Musiol 20 18). Harnessing code poetics and slow computing through appropriation, glitch, and creative coding, the way in which the code is in a state of constant flux synchronously with each webpage; “moving with the artist’s stroke” (Pequeño Glazier). While exitsense.net fulfills an element of slow computing, one downfall is the media-rich content and web animation using AJAX and Asynchronous Javascript libraries - which takes up a lot of bandwidth to load and view as well as increasing its data footprint and subsequent energy consumption (Arbabzadeh et al. 2021; Lialina 2015). However, the power consumed by the site is mediated by its disregard for traditional webpage layouts, the glitch (also dirtstyle) aesthetic it has adopted, and the aforementioned opportunity for respite within its pages. exitsense.net is a place to retreat to, to take a breath and tap in to your imagination. With the internet increasingly becoming a capitalists playground of data mining and productivity apps (Lialina 2015), stumbling upon a site which incites nostalgia for days of internet past is an opportunity for respite. Exitsense.net is a network of pages containing links to external websites - a beautiful and sometimes abrasive map of the author’s mind, as rich in metaphor as wordy prose (Daly, 2007; Musiol 2018;). It leaves me excited for the potential for self-expression that still exists in our hyper-surveilled digital existence (Lialina 2015;).