Careful What You Wish For

Short Story

Hi Desirée,

Last Friday evening at the Intensive Care Café was a blast. So many up-and-coming artists together in one place at one time. Darting from topic to topic. The sting and itch of irritating ideas.

There was a buzz about that pesky infestation of bugs you mentioned last week—the Grave-hoppers. Why do they hover around graves? Are they watching and listening? Are they collecting data for sinister purposes? It reminds me of your recent nasty experience with the introduction of teleportation as a means of exit for MoHA (Museum of Hot Air) viewers. Is there a connection? It seems that even in the artworld there’s nowhere safe anymore, as surely art galleries and cemeteries should be.

Cheers,
T.C.

Hey T.C.

Tiny Bubbles is a great host, and more thanks to Tra Tekram, who picked up the tab just as I thought he would.

Yes, the glitches in MoHA’s teleportation system are nasty. They’ve let loose a veritable hornet’s nest of hassles for us. C’est la merde!

We were shocked when viewers stepping out of the teleport looked like the artworks they’d spent most time standing in front of. Often they’re quite unrecognisable, even as human. For example, a woman as she was leaving, caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror. She became hysterical.

She’d been re-constructed with her head resembling Picasso’s Weeping Woman. A man, spellbound by Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud, had an alarming effect on bystanders who were about to go up into MoHA. Another viewer who’d been rapt in Dali’s The Persistence of Memory with its melted clock could scarcely walk. He had to be supported by friends. His knees were bending backwards. His chin was flexible, it stretched down to his navel. We made frantic attempts to restore each afflicted viewer, but no-one knows how to back-track on the initial scanning process to re-assemble the dis-assembled. The variations on these human / artwork muddles seem limitless.

MoHA’s digital scanning system for image capture has been hijacked. The cameras that track the movement of viewers’ eyes as they look over the artworks, were meant to reflect, to capture what they were looking at, to provoke discussion, to produce more hot air to keep MoHA afloat. Now all the ports are open, the firewall’s useless. All the data’s been scraped. AI is imploding with this new flood of information (I think it must’ve gone M.A.D. already). There’s no doubt we have a bug in the teleportation system, and it’s not a fly!

Maybe all we can do is wait until the disruptions look normal, just like any other disagreeable idea these days. Knowing your expertise in Pest Control, can you advise us?

Btw, I’ve often wondered why the faces of ordinary people on the street appear mildly grotesque, as if they’ve stepped out of a Pieter Breugel or Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Does anyone else question this or is it just the way it is?

Thanks a million,
Desirée

This article was first published in Artist Profile, Issue 71, 2025 and is part of an ongoing series by Nola Farman.