I think about the Whittard Heineken. It’s there, somewhere, at the bottom of the Atlantic. A sad ready-made monument rolling around the bed of the Whittard canyon, pre-installed in the darkest geological crevasse.

The Whittard Heineken was discovered by a team of ocean researchers surveying the depths off of Ireland's coast. The only witness to this melancholic monument was a small submersible robot casting its headlights around in the pitch water. Our humble proxy reporting, via video link, what it had found. There amongst the abyssal tundra of perverted sea life and kinky nobjects was the Whittard Heineken, its flickering gaze glinting back at the researchers.

The problem with the subconscious is that its already full of your old rubbish.

The Whittard Heineken is a perfect quasi-object. Compressed and zipped. it's a tight package of capital, consumption, leisure, labour, politics, desire, technology, ecology and matter. It drags all of this along with itself as it slumps to the oceanic currents. Modernity's projects, projected, into the future, cast into our subconscious' like so much rubbish.

We are always preceded by our garbage now.

The Whittard Heineken is an object to be sure, but its also an abstraction. I can understand that it is there, but can only project myself towards it. I am only here. But as it draws a jagged line along the Whittard's abyssal plain, its abstracted doppleganger draws a jagged line along my subconscious. Its tentative drawing in the marine muck, is mirrored in the muck of my cerebrum. Do I have a Whittard Heineken neuron now? (see: Jennifer Aniston neuron)

- Image and text by Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline

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