✦ Haptic Mournings

A taxonomy of what never lived. A cabinet of ghosts. A refusal to resolve.

This work began with images that could not be touched: AI-generated chimeras, spectral taxonomies, anatomical hallucinations suspended in algorithmic mist. They arrived not as fiction but as misread instructions: artefacts conjured through prompt, glitch, and absence.

Affect leaked into latent space. Grief became procedural. I mourned a cat, and the mourning spread: to all that was never born, never held, never categorized. This was not a metaphor. It was a methodology.

Haptic Mournings is a reliquary for the never-made: a study of algorithmic affect, a theory of spectral presence, and a visual archive of colonial taxonomies reanimated through machine vision. Duchamp’s readymades dissolve here into the ungraspable logic of the latent. What emerges is a speculative phenomenology of mourning without referent: touch without body, grief without death, presence without ontology.

This is where my infrastructural research into mourning begins.

Italian translation published by Krisis Publishing (2025) "AI & Conflicts. Volume 02"

Note for curators, editors, publishers:

Theory as method. Mourning as epistemology. The never-made as infrastructural haunt.

Haptic Mournings is not a standalone publication. It is the initiating node of a larger research constellation encompassing:

→ multiple video works (including anatomical hallucinations and AI chimeras)
→ sound experiments (algorithmic glitch mourning, affective distortion)
→ extensive visual archives (taxonomical failures, para-scientific remains)
→ three unpublished theoretical drafts (on algorithmic phenomenology, digital animality, and spectral ethics)

It theorizes mourning as method within algorithmic aesthetics, centering questions of classification, refusal, and emotional latency. Tracing from 18th-century colonial Wunderkammern to contemporary machine learning datasets, the work excavates how the logic of sorting, optimizing, and naming continues to script affect, value, and disposability.

Through the figure of the never-made, Haptic Mournings formulates a counter-ontology: not what is, but what could never be and yet still insists on being mourned.

This is not a closed book. It is an open reliquary. Commissionable forms include:

→ site-specific installations
→ lectures
→ theoretical essays or hybrid publications
→ speculative archives for exhibitions or research settings

→ Full PDF, dossier of visual works, and additional unpublished texts available upon request.

To inquire further or to receive fragmentary dispatches from future iterations, see below.