About Me
In 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, I started mapping how perception and affect—what I call “aesthetics”—mutate under conditions of recursion. The result is an evolving dramaturgical system for understanding mediated consciousness—a form of theoretical cartography that generates operational technique and that anticipated the theatrical structure of user-model interaction.
Most work on LLMs tends to fall into two traps: skewing instrumental or skewing speculative. I’m interested in something else: rigorous observation that produces both understanding and actionable insight.
This space documents that ongoing investigation.
Covidian Æsthetics began as an effort to track the shifts in perception and affect provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Its first chapter was published systematically between 2020 and 2022, and includes work up to 2024.
It relaunched in January of 2025.
Contact
You can reach me at mb@diacritica.com [Twitter/X @lapsuslima].
Acknowledgments
We thank Cēsu Pluriversitāte, Journal des Rêves, Mousse Magazine, Spike Art Magazine, the Contain and Outsider Theory podcasts, ribbonfarm.com, the Venice Biennale and the Frye Museum for their permission to reprint, reproduce, expand, annotate and modify work originally produced for or published by them.
