Pixel Flesh is a love story and a pretty barefaced one at that, but in lieu of linear storytelling it progresses through a series of notes, snapshots, misremembered quotes, clues, and factoids combed off our culture’s trash heap. Everything occurs within a level of media saturation advanced enough to inhabit even the tiniest pockets of negative space. Information overload is a dizzying subject, of course. This nebulous swirl is common in concept art and sprawling research papers, but seldom more direct forms of illustration—not incidentally, either, since trying to capture it is like photographing ectoplasm, somebody’s aura, or some big blinding incorporeality.
For years Mallo has had a day job as an experimental physicist and is, I suspect, more qualified than most to revolve abstruse speculations slowly beneath a light and then set them down on paper. He’s also nothing less than phenomenal at only using the number of words necessary to do so. “There wasn’t any space to set my symbols on,” remarks the narrator in terms elliptical enough for “space” to be either like a refrigerator door with an obnoxious amount of novelty magnets, or totally non-existent. A formidable conceptualist who still has an eye for stray shades of experience, Mallo is an outlier among the writers scrutinizing our current media glut, who tend toward pastiche or other similarly pointed syntheses of high- and lowbrow. This very binary is arbitrary, however—the legacy of ahistorical and almost fascistically linear models of civilization. From what I can tell, Mallo doesn’t even entertain the idea of a culture with distinct poles and echelons and canons. Nor does his method overlap with that of artists who try to subvert such things, likely because their efforts are so often blatant. Instead he prefers a studied ambiguity whose effects are often imperceptible until they graze the hairs on your arm. He’s an Impressionist, in other words, albeit a hypermodern variant whose range includes the landscapes of cyberspace and information overload. As subjects these are slippery and mercurial, but Mallo adapts to unplanned contingencies like a plein air painter would to weather.
At the book’s very center is the pixel. Though nothing but a small square of visual data, it proves powerful enough to drive whole branches of physics, not to mention this slim book of poems. As an operative metaphor it supplies ideas as rich and stakes as high as Melville’s whale, and its presence looms just as large. “There’s something fleshy and abstract in the pixel,” writes Mallo, “a squared surface that contains all possible visual information, its meaning is exhausting, nonetheless, it’s a cipher, it’s empty. There’s a metaphysics in the pixel.” Our perception of reality has begun to resemble the digital image, presumably by dint of sheer exposure; or at least this is Pixel Flesh’s setup. These days we process experience as a big branching mass of elements and infinitely reducible semi-elements, and via manufactured, ready-to-consume patterns of information:
in every hotel in Naples I would steal toilet paper, a sample, let’s say, to scan upon returning home, to watch the ordered chance of an assortment of black points over white flow onto the PC screen, a map of pixels in which to read a cipher, an emptiness that, being profane, is in a certain way sacred, pixels guaranteeing that silence alchemy had sought in objects and that I looked for in you [your young retired-model hands, your tongue mute in a kiss]. The scan revealed maps, figures, things, reflections of what would come and what I never showed you, two Replicants in search of a more conventional life, mortals’ oxygen that wouldn’t suffocate them. I’ll call this scan pixelation no 1 . . .
Not surprisingly, the idea of poetry as an exceptional art form in and of itself has little purchase in Pixel Flesh. “Poetry-poetry” (i.e. arranged into stanzas and adjusted to the left margin) appears only as colorless scraps of quantum theory, which are about as instructive as they are examples of good poems. They’re probably parody, or a code indicating something to the effect of: “Poetry is here.” Exactly what’s what is hard to tell, since everything is an elusive, empty signifier, or a bottle of vintage refilled with bum wine and sold at full price. On a first read the subject already seems immaterial; by the third there is none. The narrator’s love interest, for example, has zero physical presence and rarely does more than provide a test site for the thesis that people, like memories, are fleshless vectors for ideas. “Your pointy boots on that trip,” the narrator says, “when you were still solid (but not lava), when, like in Low’s songs, your strength was an antigravity, a useless extravagance, a CD reburned a thousand times.” Does this qualify as a likeness? I would say barely, considering an invisible array of influences and interferences have compromised it, like a print developed in a semipermeable darkroom. One or two fugitive details do form every time an allusion lands—if, for example, you’re into a band like Low, who ditched the linear plod of tempo for a sound that levitates and at times even dilates in all directions, which fits into Mallo’s idea that “the arts developed with the sole purpose of nullifying weight.”
As a metaphor, though, it falls somewhat flat. It’s even a bit corny, which can be said for a conspicuous portion of Pixel Flesh’s motifs, metaphors, and conceits. Many come across as having been the easiest to hook, top feeders in the shallower strata of imagination. This isn’t to suggest the language is hamfisted or trivial, especially since the most egregious moments recur with a staccato-like regularity: lighting a Lucky Strike, for example, which lends certain scenes the oily haze of early Hollywood, or some other cliché of the lowest possible denominator. It's almost like a Godard movie, where Jean Seberg or Jean-Paul Belmondo live in a cycle of hackneyed film routines. This, I assume, is what Zachary Rockwell Ludington describes in his translator’s note as a “weird dead-pan quality” that flirts “winkingly at the edges of sentimentality.” Occasionally the effect is baffling: is Mallo’s taste really this bad? Probably not, but yes insofar as few among us have ever eschewed the subliminal power of a reigning culture, with all its simulacra and shams. We project, as Hal Foster puts it, our “vital force into these magical entities so thoroughly that there is now more life in them than in us.” Slaves to the spectacle, if you want to be all Debord about it. And I do, because concepts like reification and alienation are this book’s backlighting: nebulous and omnipotent and invisible agents whose major function is disorientation. They distract. They derail. They render incongruous. Any light of comprehension in our eyes fades in the glow of a 5.5-inch rectangle of silicate glass, which is also why we all get such poor sleep.
