Harmony Korine’s had a hell of a time ditching the “enfant terrible” label. Maybe this made sense for a while. He did write a movie called Kids, after all. And as the nineteen-year-old screenwriter was propelled from Washington Square skate parks to late-night appearances, Korine soon developed a reputation for aggressive puerility in interviews, loudly amplifying his already-strange autobiography to Dylan-esque proportions. Consider the now-legendary David Letterman appearances. Over four years, Korine appeared on a semi-regular basis; his autobiographical assertions careened from implausible to ridiculous, at one point claiming to have purposefully capsized a sailboat in youth to drown a bully named “Barfunk,” at another that Gummo, his low-key directorial debut, cost a cool “80 mil.” Before his fourth appearance, Letterman finds a disheveled, drug-addicted Korine going through Meryl Streep’s handbag in her empty dressing room and throws him out.
A decade later, Korine had been safely recuperated into indie movie royalty, largely through a 2010s that, with Spring Breakers and The Beach Bum, channeled his loose, hazy anarchy into films with legible jokes and neon lighting and bizarre celebrity appearances, all bolstered by the marketing prowess of the then-nascent A24 and Neon studios. However, despite a less abrasive critical success, he has not been able to shake his status as a perpetual youth-in-revolt. A 2012 Guardian profile is titled: “Still an enfant terrible at 37?” A 2014 Esquire profile refers to him as a “middle-aged enfant terrible.” And a 2024 Hypebeast article calls him a “perennial enfant terrible.”
The answer to that first question, the one the Guardian poses is, I think, like, categorically––No. Right? Harmony Korine had, if anything, seemed ready to trade in his enfant terrible status.
Then, in 2023, he releases the maligned AGGRO DR1FT. Shot in infrared, edited like a Heavy Rain QTE, and employing generative AI to deepfry its image in real-time, AGGRO DR1FT is a return to the shit-throwing Korine of yore. And Korine seems glad to play the bad guy again. He premiers the film in a 3D-printed horned mask and, when asked about his approach to filmmaking, claims to “just make that shit based as possible.” Variety and Vogue reference Korine’s press-tour claims that he likes TikToks more than films––similar to a 2010 interview in which he claims that he’s “more excited” about 30-second YouTube clips and the “seismic shift in consciousness” internet video represents––before pointedly calling him a “former” or “one-time” enfant terrible. Paste likewise forces an autobiographical reading onto the film––an impulse endemic to contemporary criticism, in which any film produced by an established auteur is thereby made to be a self-reflexive allegory for its own production––arguing that AGGRO DR1FT’s genre-and-TikTok incantation is closer to being a “mid-life crisis” than an “artist entering a new creative era.”
I’d like to posit something. I think AGGRO DR1FT is an extremely intelligent film that has tricked many critics into thinking it’s the exact thing that, in their defense, it claims to be. Is AGGRO DR1FT one of Korine’s masterpieces? On the level of Julien Donkey-Boy and Spring Breakers? Well, no. AGGRO DR1FT is a little more fun to think about than watch, the infrared can become an unintentional mess, and it occasionally goes for the easy joke or obvious point. But the film deserves a more nuanced fate than its current one, which, from what I can gather, is to fester on Letterboxd lists called, like, “Dudes Rock: Vibes Movies From Vulgar Auteurs.” Though it masquerades as mere curio, AGGRO DR1FT is a legible evolution in the style of one of America’s most truculent auteurs.
I am specifically drawn to a phrase Korine repeats in interviews: he wants AGGRO DR1FT to feel like “aesthetic drugs.” Rather than taking him at face value (why start now?) and treating the film as juvenile psychedelia, it’s important to situate AGGRO DR1FT within a lineage of drug representation to grasp how Korine presents an experiential cinema. I am using drug representation here as a sort of synecdoche: by identifying the discursive tropes of drug representation, we can reach a deeper appreciation of experimental narrative art in general––and specifically, as with AGGRO DR1FT, abrasively contemporary experimental narrative art.
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Drug literature begins (broadly) in 1821 with Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey’s memoir of addiction. In describing drug effects, De Quincey deploys the requisite trippy imagery: “I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parroquets.” Repeat. More interesting is how De Quincey formally and syntactically represents these trips. His thorny, baroque prose—semicolons interrupt colons interrupt dashes nested within parentheses—creates a hazy plane in which figurant impressions enter and evaporate.
The formal representation of drug use is more deeply explored in De Quincey’s masterful follow-up, Suspiria de Profundis. Published in 1845, Suspiria is a series of impressionistic autobiographical essays that refract a life steeped in opium. The essays situate De Quincey’s autobiography within the structure of myth; a particularly haunting one relates his sister’s death to the Erl-king’s daughter, a folkloric phantom who takes infants to death but only if they share this “sick desire.” Suspiria’s loose structuring is predicated on De Quincey’s conception of the brain qua palimpsest, adumbrated in the collection’s first essay. For De Quincey, drugs are a “blazing rocket sent up from the brain” which reveal the “everlasting layers of ideas, images, feeling” inscribed upon your unconscious. Drugs are a way of accessing both one’s own past and the layers of representation that inform one’s comprehension of this past.
Ultimately, De Quincey’s most successful representations of drug experience are those encompassing formal experimentation. Words, after all, are paltry modes of representation, especially for states of consciousness that elude normative representation. “Writing is a form of capture,” Sadie Plant reminds us in her seminal Writing on Drugs, “and drugs are never easily tied down.” We can take this all together to understand that “apt” drug representation must account for formal experimentation. The trippy shit De Quincey describes is not nearly as effective as his alteration of autobiographical form. This alteration names a radical reorientation not of the “stuff” in the world, but of how the stuff in the world is represented to De Quincey. De Quincey’s cataloging of “parroquets” can read like the writing of someone with a particularly colorful imagination (it likewise frequently tips over into racist Orientalism). But his willed confusion of genre mediates the simple mush of self after eating drugs: it refracts the blurring of the formal edicts by which you understand your life.
Consider the relative lack of formal experimentation in contemporary drug representation. My Year and Taipei, Giancarlo DiTrapano and “alt-lit,” autofiction and its addiction to what Anna Kornbluh calls the “swelling of the abject”––if you keep up even a bit then you know all this. But what’s so weird is, when you think about these texts within the lineage of drug literature, how compulsory all the drug use feels. Ann Manov, in what is beginning to feel more and more like a shot heard ‘round the indie lit world, comments on this contemporary impulse:
men [now] write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.
Manov as such posits a subgenre of contemporary lit-fic: the man who does X drugs; the woman who does Y drugs. (This is the part of the essay where, if I was more of an asshole, I would name names and talk shit.) But by sheer dint of being a subgenre, these representations don’t encapsulate formal experimentation. For to constitute a subgenre is to establish tropic continuities across myriad texts, which crystallize into a formal legibility. Insofar as apt drug representation must constitute an experimentation with form, then legible fixity within a formal patterning cancels the possibility of this representation. That is, where De Quincey melted genre and form, these writers re-entrench themselves within it. The once liquid has ossified into familiar representation: into the type of consciousness loop that drugs are, classically, intended to break you out of. Representing drugs the same way as anything else reflects the new truth of drugs in the twenty-first century.
Which is this: As drugs are recuperated into normative life, they are likewise recuperated into normative narrative forms, thereby losing any lingering romanticism in the social imaginary. Pharmaceutical opium constitutes a national crisis. Weed is no longer the mind-expanding substance under whose influence Walter Benjamin wanted to write but is now something you put into a pen and hit before walking into a rep screening. And speed, rather than driving you to write your novel as one big scroll, just seems to, per Danielle Carr in “Tweaking on Main,” make looking at your phone really fun—a different kind of “big scroll.”
Drug-eating is now drug consumption. Where “eating” implies a loamy process of co-constitution, “consumption” is a rote expression of your identity, informed by normative capitalist systems. One no longer smokes weed and gets high: you are a type of guy who smokes weed and gets high, which means that you watch Rick & Morty, or you’re an arthouse stoner with strong opinions on ambient music, or you’re a WFH warrior who wake-and-bakes to keep yourself sane enough to wiggle your mouse on Teams every few minutes.
Drugs are normal. They’re boring. They’re secondary to the main activity. You smoke weed to go grocery shopping. You take adderall to catch up on work. You no longer ask someone where they got what they got. Insofar as the experience of drug ingestion is no longer an object of study around which you structure your time, their representation within narrative in turn no longer demands structural reorientation. Their very presence is a tic in contemporary fiction, which is almost a boring thing to notice insofar as it’s like noticing that books include descriptions of clothes, or food, or other books. Drugs have become the stuff of realism. Their narrative incorporation no longer demands formal augmentation.
But the most interesting representations of drugs are not when words are used to describe something totally, just fuckin’ radically psychedelic. Nor are the most interesting representations when a detached narrator describes drug-eating as any other act of compulsory consumption. The most interesting representations constitute a formal augmentation. They reorient our perception not of what a narrative text can do in general, but of what this text in particular is capable of. They, at minimum, break the formal rules that the text at hand has established for itself. For, as any drug-eater has experienced for themselves, drugs do not alter the world’s content. They alter how the world’s content presents itself.
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Film has had, if anything, an even more difficult time incorporating the formal rupture required of apt drug representation. The reasoning for this is, as I see it, twofold. The first is a matter of economy. Movies are expensive. American movies need to claim a profit, experimentation rarely engenders profit, and so the formal innovation needed is disallowed.
Second, the representation of altered states has proved problematic inasmuch as film is an “objective medium.” Narratologist Seymour Chatman, in Coming to Terms, argues that cinema “resists language-centered notions” of narrative and so does not have the same narrator, implied or stated, as fiction. Film cannot rely on language to express thought, it cannot gloss the passing of time with a paragraph, it cannot in and of itself tell you about the weather. Where the fictive narrator “slants” or “filters” the content of the text, suggesting “the narrator’s attitudes and other mental nuances appropriate to the report function of discourse,” the narrator of film is an “instantiation of the medium itself”; that is, where fiction “speaks,” film is non-discursive: it is not a medium of reportage, but one of experiential immediacy. Ultimately, this experiential immediacy makes it difficult to represent, for instance, De Quincey’s thorny prose.
But insofar as drugs are a reorientation of experience—and insofar as the successful representation of drugs must reorient how a text is experienced—cinema’s potential of experiential immediacy is uniquely suited to alter how we see the world by augmenting how the world is presented to us. To approach this immediacy, however, one must disavow the comfortable mediations of narrative and storytelling, fettered as they are to the traditions of the novel and theater.
Harmony Korine has long railed against narrative and its perceived inextricability from cinema. In a 1999 profile ahead of the release of his novel, A Crack-up at the Race Riots (not very good but a neat artifact), he argues that, though cinema is “still in its infancy,” our sensibilities are already “jaded almost beyond repair.” Thus, he arrogates upon himself the responsibility of exposing the “mediocrity of American film,” predicated as it is on the “peddling of lies and falsity and formula.” This mediocrity is heavily contingent on narrative, itself anathema to realism—which latter “America is not ready for.” His, though, is a cinema of true realism.
So then what does realist cinema, unmarred by the “Gumpification” of American narrative, look like? In a 2014 talk at the Harvard Film Archive, Korine enunciates his lifelongdesire for a film that’s just “the good parts,” ventriloquizing his adolescent self to exclaim, “Fuck, why’d they waste twenty minutes to get to that part? And then I have to waste another twenty minutes to get to that part? Maybe I can take [those parts] out and put them together.”
In a 1997 interview, he articulates what this might resemble:
It’s like looking at a book of private photos. There’s a picture of you in front of a monument. And next to that is a picture of your grandfather on the toilet. And next to that is a picture of Michael Jackson. [On] their own . . . they seem singular or random. But because one is next to the other, a kind of narrative comes through.
In Korine’s realism, narrative is an emergent property, rather than a mannered imposition. It is secondary, an esoteric thing hinging on the first-order concerns of image and character and (skate-video-informed) soundtrack. “Plotlessness” does not do the work justice, neither the earlier, truly syuzhet-less films nor the middle-era films, which Korine describes as having “liquid narratives.” They are not empty Vaudevillian successions. Rather, they simply work. They take advantage of the cinematic form itself to produce a meaning that is, ultimately, non-discursive, divorced from a history of cinema overdetermined by the novel and theater. His obliteration of traditional narrative results in films that suggest everything without ever needing to arrive at a concrete point.
Though Korine does not chase meaning, he crucially doesn’t gasp for an Artaudian high modernist nonsense, despite his art-school-dropout tendencies; he doesn’t gawk at poverty porn, despite his consistent representations of people bored and below the poverty line. His films are thick with conflicting meanings and takeaways, they flicker and promise and then disabuse at the crucial moment, always avoiding that easy moral frisson of a climactic epiphany so anathema to life as it is experienced.
There is an almost naive purity to how Korine discusses his work: he speaks often about creating a totally new cinematic language, unalloyed of traditional forms and images. This is the kind of thing you claim when you know very little about the medium in which you’re working. But Korine’s taste is deep and learned, and when you catch him talking honestly, his range of reference is often astounding, careening between Walter Benjamin, Satchel Paige, and Charles and Ray Eames. Korine’s intelligence and imagination ultimately produce a cinema appropriately weird enough to feel, as corny as it sounds, real.
Take Gummo. We are at one point presented a high-angled shot of the teenaged Tummler sitting down to write something. In voiceover:
His dad never gave a crap. Not even at the end of his game. It was scary to see him despondent like that. His dad didn’t care for mom much either, or the little doggy. He started going to church and he started listening to the gospels. It was expected when he robbed the neighbors. He took their wine and he took some rings and fine jewelry. I think he got a fur coat as well. When he had a kid, he didn’t think to watch his ways. He thought the same as his daddy.
We then track into Tummler’s pen, writing in deliberate cursive: “to Die cancer disease Dad,” before crossing out the “Dad.” The solecism revealed in close-up suggests a sort of automatic writing; the contrastingly legible voiceover is intended to convey a story burning within an illiterate kid—perhaps reflecting a belief in the spiritual paucity of our traditional forms, in meaning’s ability to transcend our petty, self-circumscribed legibilities.
However, this reading is undone by the fact that Tummler is writing in an extremely mannered cursive. This is not the chickenscratch of automatic writing; he writes carefully, almost delicately, suggesting thought and effort. This is not Deleuze & Guattari’s sloppy schizo. Korine is not interested in romanticizing madness as eliding normative representational thought and thereby getting closer to some ineffable truth: not interested in anything so rotely conceptual. So then why is Tummler writing in cursive? And the truth is: I don’t know. I don’t know why Tummler does this. And this is why I love Harmony Korine. He is one of the few living American filmmakers who makes choices I just don’t understand. For my not-knowing—for my not even beginning to understand: the work finally feels human. Why does Tummler write his nonsense in cursive? I don’t know. Maybe he just wants to practice his cursive.
This is what Korine means when he discusses making experiential cinema. It is not enough to evade meaning, to obliterate plot: for the meaning is always there, it’s just inscribed in an alien language.
There is an extent to which Korine feels primed to represent drug experience. By working in a mode at once realist and non-normative, Korine has spent a career not altering the real stuff of the world but altering how the world is represented to us, believing that traditional modes of narratival world-representation (the theater, the novel, the overdetermined film) have locked us into false stability. Expanding consciousness does not begin with trippy colors and cartoon hallucinations: it begins with breaking the forms with which we’re comfortable. Enter AGGRO DR1FT, the first film Korine has specifically cited as being informed by drug experience.
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AGGRO DR1FT follows Bo, “the world’s greatest assassin.” Bo gets hired by Pepe to kill the “big man.” This is Toto, a bewinged hulk who walks around shirtless in compression shorts, wielding a katana and either terrorizing or dancing with legions of strippers. In between this ostensible narrative, Bo shoots a sniper rifle (for some reason); shoots bodies on a pier (for some reason); claims that he needs a “division of ten men” (for some reason); kills Pepe (for some reason); and hangs out with Zion, played by Travis Scott, Bo’s former protege who spends his time in bacchanalia on a boat surrounded by women, moping like that one Simpsons joke with Smithers and the strippers.
I assure the reader that my string of for-some-reasons is not my being glib or trying to make the boring so-bad-it-actually-completely-fucking-rules joke the film goads you into making. One of DR1FT’s more exciting formal aspects is how it represents a further evolution in Korine’s narrative obliteration. The early work features an esoteric narrative, a treatment of character and theme determined by image rather than the other way around. And the middle-era work (Breakers and Bum) deploys that “liquid narrative.” In these liquid films, narrative progresses as a series of negotiations, developing chronologically on a sequence-by-sequence basis but atemporally within the sequences themselves. In Spring Breakers, a drive-by shooting is edited so that the audience first sees the aftermath of the shooting, before relaying the events prompting the shooting, and then cutting back to the aftermath, and then cutting back again to the gleeful freedom felt by the victim in the moments leading up to the shooting. In Korine’s liquid work, stuff happens which, and this is crucial, causes other stuff to happen, already a radical break from the earlier, collagistic work; but consequence and impetus are cordoned off from one another, reflecting how situation and arc become confused by immediate sensorial experience. These films become not a reportage of events as they have occurred, as with traditional realist cinema; rather, they are a transmogrification into events as they are felt.
DR1FT’s narrative disguises itself as this latter. That is, when stuff happens whose plot relevance we might ordinarily struggle to locate, we are lulled by the film’s editing rhythms and AraabMuzick score and, extra-textually, by Korine’s mature work into a state almost resembling belief. We believe that the middle-era Korine will, despite his trickster impishness, make it make sense. After all, the liquidizing of a narrative does not entail a complete formlessness—rather, it implies a narrative with inevitable shape, an outline that is only discernible by full engagement with its progression. It suggests that the film is a holism, not composed of discrete mechanistic parts but comprising something organistic. Just because you see things that don’t make immediate narrative sense doesn’t mean that they never will make sense.
The film’s genre trappings likewise promises legibility. As a one-last-job assassin flick, it’s Korine’s most genre-informed film yet. These generic elements present as a series of tendencies that we both meta- and intertextually come to expect. Korine takes advantage of our affective expectations of genre—formally normative modes—that have infected us. We know that noir-y assassin films present convoluted plots, replete with backstabbings and double crossings and psychological torture. Films as twisty as these even possess a reputation for their narrative unwieldiness. Thus, when Bo kills Pepe, for example, we don’t immediately go: Why? We have been trained by both genre and doubly by Korine into believing that sensibility will eventually crystallize.
In this sense, DR1FT ultimately posits a purgatorial narrative. While narrative elements may not always make sense where traditional notions of plot and genre (and the cross-over therein) are concerned, these elements do make sense where hazy “vibes” are concerned. That is, we can understand why Bo––as archetypal assassin within the one-last-job assassin flick––might insist upon a “division of ten men,” especially if he needs to kill a guy who became “too big, too fast.” Bo gathers these men and then they shoot directly at the Predator-vision camera (“These are my rainbow assassins,” Bo mutters in lugubrious voice-over) like a Chief Keef video. But when these ten men disappear from the narrative almost as soon as they are introduced––and when the climactic showdown with Toto becomes a stealth-mode solo run––we don’t notice. We simply let these images happen to us. For their bare appearance gestures to legibility. They are not plot holes or plot irrelevances: the film performs a minor miracle in convincing you its various aporia pattern into legibility.
Why does Bo need a division of ten men, why are five minutes spent gathering this division of ten men? Not only are we never provided the answer––but their disappearance is never even vaguely referenced. The ten-men are a kernel without impetus, a cause divorced of consequence. They are an imagistic micro-experience contained within the structure of the film itself. Where Breakers and Bum recuperate their chaotic temporalities into sequences, into beginning and middle and end, DR1FT upsets both conventional narrative and conventional narrative fragmentation. Like an acid trip inviting you to change your life in a way that feels deeper than a sober epiphany, it all just makes sense.
“In our own heaven-created palimpsest,” writes De Quincey in Suspiria, “the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there are not and cannot be such incoherences.” DR1FT presents a palimpsest of genre semiotics, a coherent discordance. The narratological approach peddled here is not the esoteric collaging of Korine’s early work, nor the liquefying demands of the middle work; it borrows from both, creating a dialectical narrative that invites the audience to consider the film’s raw possibilities. It is an exploration of the endlessly actionable potentialities intrinsic to narrative and genre and auteurism and the cross-over therein. It is hyper-cognizant of the baggage we bring to cinema, offering us an impossibly colored tincture to strip us of our fettering worldly concerns.
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Since the ‘90s, Korine has struggled for a cinema of “images coming from all directions”; this principle, he argues, reflects the “schizophrenic” mode of image-based exchange that undergirds every form of human communication. We understand ourselves in terms of cultural images we ourselves don’t fully understand. These images flicker, they gape, they toddle. They work and they create. They are a way of grafting one’s ever-shifting identity to something prefab and familiar. And, by attaching ourselves to a stable image, we can thereby––and it’s corny to say––build community, recognizing ourselves and our chosen images in the images chosen by others.
But our images aren’t as stable as they once were. Icons and symbols are evacuated of all meaning. Katy Perry wears Arca horse-boots and embraces the artificial rehearsed-camp imagery of PC Music, herself rehearsing queer hyperpop royalty without ever actually being assigned it in a sort of sick rehearsal of a rehearsal. Or take indie sleaze, the new hot shit: The Dare dresses up like LCD Soundsystem and sounds like Calvin Harris, Charli XCX takes photos of herself partying on palm-sized digital cameras; but it’s a series of generic signifiers that gesture to a very recent past that didn’t really exist, at least not in the commodified way in which it’s currently pushed. And pick any hot guy hanging out in the Lower East Side on a Friday night and there’s a strong chance he’s wearing a cross necklace because he’s seen other hot guys on Instagram wear wife-beaters and cross necklaces, a performance of cool without any original.
My point is that simulacra are no longer just vibes, a guy dressing up like Bruce Springsteen while the Boss himself self-consciously performs Americana. Rather, the obsession with signified rehearsal is now itemized and discrete. The TikTokification of the unconscious has made it so that every aesthetic choice we make about our own presentation and consumption broadcasts something legible about ourselves. Everything has turned into a type-of-guy-ism, with the type-of-guy in question an absent first cause. No one knows who this guy is; but it’s easy to put on, like, a long-sleeve shirt and a pair of jeans and imagine some perspicaciously witty TikTok teen taking a video of you on the train, captioning it: “POV: youre watching long sleeve shirt and jeans man drink a sparkling water and look at his fantasy football team.” (Top comment: “you know his ass got kyler murray!!”)
Rather than referring back to generic images––this means punk, and now I can be friends with you; this means prep, and now I can be friends with you––our self-representational simulacra have become too specific. Meaning abounds. The legibility of our presentation is overdetermined. Insofar as everything promises legibility, a way of telling people exactly the type-of-guy you are, everything is a cultural object, an image to be read and discarded or identified with.
This fluxity of our foundational images is represented within DR1FT with, yes––a generative AI that manipulates the film’s image. Tattoos and jewelry and beard stubble warp into anonymous psychedelic flux. In one scene, Bo and Zion speak and their faces flicker into various Snapchat filters, never fixing on one––a Watchmen-lookin’ smiley face, now an MW2 Ghost-inspired skull, now a Jetsons-esque retro robot design. This flux of image is not just there to be there, to add texture to the flattened thermal photography. It is a completion of Korine’s lifelong project to create a cinema of images from all directions, a cinema that refracts the “cohesive schizophrenia” of culture.
Images and our relations with them overlay our very self, inflecting the ways in which the world is represented to us: other people, their positioning in space, their relation to us: all is informed by image, an image that we ourselves can no longer fully grasp and comprehend. This likewise justifies the film’s pigment-pushing thermal cinematography. When you no longer understand your own representation, the only thing to take refuge in is your own solipsistic body. Plumb it for soul, the part that makes you “you.” All that’s conjured in this metaphysical realm is the deeper stratification of image and representation. The old world is no more. It has completed its spectacularization, become a representation of itself.
“From junk,” writes William Burroughs, “comes a heightened sensitivity on the level of dream, myth, symbol.” DR1FT’S AI, generating images familiar yet ungraspable, and its narrative structure, commandeering the comfort of tropic genre, reflect a cinema of pure semiotics, a cinema that engages with the representation of the world rather than the world itself. Moreover, it is an engagement with a world in which everything is legible. Everything is permitted. Everything makes sense, everything refers to something else. Everything is dream, all is myth, we are abound in symbol. The real is shrouded beneath a dense web of discrete association.
So how can you produce realist cinema where there is no “real” there? How do you engage with the world when there is no world there?
You take the AGGRO DR1FT drug.
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Now conflicting branches of forking paths open and never close, exposing infinite synaptic cross-temporal corridors. A kaleidoscope of mushy potentialities, informed by genre, by content, by entertainment and the endless palimpsest of palimpsest. A series of departures with termini that occur somewhere “out there,” points of flight deeply embedded within the essential mystery of infrared photography: within a biologic cinema that affirms the presence of the body and the invisibility of the sense-making soul.
Cobi Chiodo Powell
Cobi Chiodo Powell is a writer from Columbus, Ohio. He is a contributing writer for the Cleveland Review of Books.