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: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom and Things

image of Square Eyes: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom and Things

This paper explores Anna Mill and Luke Jones’ Square Eyes (2018) through the combined lenses of Thing Theory and Boredom Studies, articulating how the latent stuff of boredom might resist the anxious shocks of Surveillance Capitalism. A vision of a near-future augmented reality (AR) dystopia, Square Eyes focuses its gaze on the subject of distraction, ennui, and alienation in a city which is both concrete and virtual. By layering drawings, text, and transparent colour washes, and breaking the borders of the panel, Mill and Jones explore the interplay of vision and touch in representing a multimodal AR environment which is both stimulating and profoundly boring:

Fin: I’m just bored of looking… At all this stuff-

George: Um… Are you talking about… Reality?(2018: 2–3)

Mark Fisher argues that the mediating smartphone has replaced boredom with ‘a seamless flow of low-level stimulus’ (Fisher 2014). I argue our protagonist's resistance to this state of suspended affect allows for the radical disruptive potential of boredom outlined by Fisher and others (Kracauer 1929; Petro 2002).

In Frederic Jameson's words, boredom provides ‘a very useful instrument with which to explore the past, and to stage meaning between it and the present’ (Jameson 1991), and in this paper, I argue that the haptic engagement with the digital present and concrete past of the city in Square Eyes allows for a fascinating dialogue with urban materiality. If Bill Brown identifies a more-than-human world where ‘[objects] are tired of our longing. They are tired of us’ (Brown 2001), Square Eyes’ permeable gutter allows the subject and the thing to join in revolt, and experience radical boredom and thingness in multiple modes.

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Square Eyes: Augmenting Bodies, Boredom and Things
Intellect , 255 (2024); https://doi.org/10.1386/9781789389494_15
/content/books/9781789389494.c14
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References

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     [Google Scholar]
  2. Balzer, J. (2010), ‘“Hully goo, I'm a Hieroglyphe” – Mobilizing the gaze and the invention of comics in New York City, 1895’, in J. Ahrens and A. Meteling (eds), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, New York: Continuum.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Brown, B. (2001), ‘Thing theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28:1, pp. 1–22.
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  4. Campanella, T. (2004), ‘Webcameras and the telepresent landscape’, in S. Graham (ed.), The Cybercities Reader, London: Routledge.
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  5. Castells, M. (2016), ‘Space of flows, space of places: Materials for a theory of urbanism in the information age’, in R. T. LeGates and F. Stout (eds), The City Reader, London: Routledge.
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  6. Classen, C. (2005), The Book of Touch, Oxford: Berg.
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  7. Craig, A. (2013), Understanding Augmented Reality, Oxford: Elsevier Science & Technology.
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  8. D'Arcy, G. (2020), Mise en scene, Acting, and Space in Comics, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
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  9. Davies, D. (2019), Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives, Abingdon: Routledge.
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  10. Dieck, T., Claudia, M., Rauschnabel, P., and Jung, T. (2020), Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: Changing Realities in a Dynamic World, New York: Springer.272
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  11. Dourish, P. and Bell, G. (2014), ‘“Resistance is futile”: Reading science fiction alongside ubiquitous computing’, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 18:4, pp. 769–78.
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  12. Ellis W. (2009), Transmetropolitan: Back on the Street, Burbank: DC Comics.
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  13. Fisher, M. (2016), ‘No one is bored, everything is boring’, in D. Ambrose and S. Reynolds (eds), K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016), London: Repeater.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Gardner, J. (2012), Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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  15. Gardner, J. (2011), ‘Storylines’, SubStance, 40:1, pp. 53–69.
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  16. Geroimenko, V. (2018), Augmented Reality Art, Cham: Springer.
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  17. Geyh, P. (2018), ‘Urban grids and urban imaginary: City to cyberspace, cyberspace to city’, in R. Rose-Redwood and L. Bigon (eds), Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology, Cham: Springer.
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  18. Graham, S. (2016), Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers, London: Verso.
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  19. Gray, J., Palmiotti, J., Howey, H., and Broxton, J. (2014), Wool: The Graphic Novel, Seattle: Jet City Comics.
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  20. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. (2010), The Affect Theory Reader, Durham: Duke University Press.
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  21. Hague, I. (2014), Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels, New York: Routledge.
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  22. Hames, S. (2020), ‘Technology: Architecture in the age of augmented reality’, MGS Architecture, 24 August, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633672044/ITOF?u=ed_itw&sid=ITOF&xid=2659ba30. Accessed 31 January 2021.
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  32. McLuhan, M. (2001), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Routledge.
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  33. Merlieau-Ponty, M. (1964), The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (ed. J. M. Edie, trans C. Dallery), Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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  35. Miller, D. (2010), Stuff, Cambridge: Polity Press.
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  36. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2009), ‘Beyond comparison’, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (eds), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
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  37. Otomo, K. (1991), Akira, Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten.
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  40. Parrinder, P. (2000), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
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  41. Paterson, M. (2007), The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies, London: Bloomsbury.
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  42. Peddie, J. (2017), Augmented Reality: Where We Will All Live, Cham: Springer.
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  43. Petro, P. (2002), Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.
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  44. Pfaller, R. (2017), Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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  45. Schneider, G. (2010), ‘Comics and everyday life: From Ennui to contemplation’, European Comic Art, 3:1, pp. 37–63.
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  46. Schneider, G. (2013), ‘Resisting narrative immersion’, Studies in Comics, 4:2, pp. 333–54.
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  47. Shaviro, S. (2016), Discognition, London: Repeater.
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  48. Song, H., Srinivasan, R., Sookoor, T., and Jeschke, S. (2017), Smart Cities: Foundations, Principles and Applications, New York: Wiley.
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  49. Stephenson, N. (1994), Snow Crash, London: Penguin Publishing.
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  50. Suhr, A. (2010), ‘Seeing the city through a frame: Marc-Antoine Mathieu's Acquefacques comics’, in J. Ahrens and A. Meteling (eds), Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence, New York: Continuum.
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  51. Sutherland, I. (1968), ‘A head-mounted three dimensional display’, in Proceedings of AFIPS Fall Joint Computation Conference, vol. 33, pp. 757–64.
     [Google Scholar]
  52. Szép, E. (2020), Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.
  53. Thrift, N. (2004), ‘Inhuman geographies: Landscapes of speed, light and power’, in S. Graham (ed.), The Cybercities Reader, London: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  54. Thompson, Z. (2021), Lonely Receiver, Los Angeles: Aftershock Comics.
  55. Vint, S. (2006), Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  56. Wark, M. (2019), Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? La Vergne: Verso.274
     [Google Scholar]
  57. WePresent (2019), Anna Mill: I wanted to create the feeling that it had been crafted by hand, 3 September, https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/anna-mill-square-eyes/. Accessed 10 February 2021.
  58. Williams B. (2013), ‘From helix to vertigo: The unusual publication history of transmetropolitan’, in C. Nevett (ed.), Shot in the Face: A Savage Journey to the Heart of Transmetropolitan, Edwardsville: Sequart Research & Literacy Organization.
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     [Google Scholar]

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