Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the Flesh

Article

What distinguishes “authentic” desire from artificially mediated desire? In “Artificiality and Emotions: Beyond the Flesh,” Morgane Billuart revisits Klossowski’s “living currency” to argue that contemporary markets do not repress desire so much as they reorganize it through images and interfaces. Where mid-century imaginaries placed the body at the center of exchange, Billuart tracks a migration of erotic and affective value into a semio-capitalist circuit of NPCs, sex dolls, AI girlfriends, and screen-mediated fantasies, asking whether we have entered an artificial emotional economy and what conceptual tools make it legible.

Do not water me, I’m artificial

Article

What does it mean to choose fake plants over real ones: an embrace of permanence, convenience, and illusion, or a refusal of vulnerability? From gardens as liminal spaces to biophilic design and plastic houseplants, the essay traces how nature’s place indoors has shifted from living care to curated simulation. Fake plants, like faux books or painted lawns, embody a culture of appearances that can be seductive, soothing, yet ecologically and emotionally hollow. Ultimately, while technological nature may comfort and heal, the text ends with a return to the real by buying a living plant as a gesture of commitment beyond illusion.

Getting Blood Out of A Stone

Short story

A young woman, lost in the aftermath of separation, turns to the Glow Up Face Mask, which awakens not beauty but luminous cracks where grief has long been lodged. In a brutal dance of pressure and release, she forces out the glowing wounds, blood, and radiance mingling like a purge of all that rotted within. Raw and hollow yet touched by a quiet, yielding calm, she steps into the moonlight where, for the first time in months, a genuine smile takes shape.

Machine Learning and Meme-making: The Prerequisites of Generating Humor" for the Critical Meme Reader III

Article

When you want to say something about memes, it is impossible to escape having to situate them. What usually happens is that meme makers and thinkers fall back on two definitions: Dawkins (1976), Shifman (2014). How can memes be defined beyond their work in a way that is better suited to our current time? Building on this work – yes of course – but in a way that leaves space for the meme to breathe. Honoring its transgressive everchanging nature, instead of limiting it into a static framework it never chose to be in in the first place. For meme studies to truly theoretically evolve as a field, the meme needs many expanded definitions. The goal of Critical Meme Reader III is to break its definition open with different visions, and to keep it open – letting the meme choose for itself what it wants to stay, be and become.

Virtuality and Aesthetics, An Evening in the Void Club

Article

What draws us into virtual worlds: the realism of their graphics, or the imaginative space left by their imperfections? This text explores how platforms from Zork to VR Chat, Second Life, and Meta show that absence, gaps, and symbolic signs often engage us more deeply than high-definition simulations. As we scroll, these digital landscapes invite projection, creativity, and freedom, allowing users to become both actors and authors of their own narratives.

Cranberry Recipe

Short Story

Cranberryjuice is an action-based artist collective aimed at raising awareness about underrepresented subjects connected to care practices and sexual health.‘By merging artists and researchers with multiple experiences, bodies, struggles, and approaches, we strive to create an intersectional platform where the gap between art and activism, the personal and collective, and the public and private is blurred.’

Breed, Bread, Breath

Short Story

What does it mean to search for belief when raised without baptism or religious education, guided instead by curiosity, jealousy, and borrowed mantras? This short story traces a journey through encounters with churches, testimonies, and symbols, where the absence of faith becomes as formative as its presence.

The Hidden Implications Behind the Ideology of Passive Income

Article

A text that explores the rise of passive income dreams such as drop-shipping, e-commerce, affiliate marketing, and digital products, promoted as quick paths to financial freedom. While they can create independence and extra earnings, such practices also raise concerns about labor exploitation, sustainability, and ethics, since hidden costs remain.