“Where I shrinepost from”

Reality between Schizophrenia & Psychosis

Without dragging you all back to Philosophy 101, the basic “meme-Technique” involves exploiting the plasticity of meaning; the act of reframing an image, or putting words on an image, influences the meaning which is either calculated, determined, or short-circuited, by the subject. The context of an artwork often has more to say about a work’s meaning than the work itself. We must, then, look at the context within which the art of Eliška Jahelková circulates. Eliška Jahelková’s work does not just radiate light in the positivistic sense, it also negates something else, which is to say that it is not just bright, but that it is bright against a dark backdrop; this is a principle source of its affectivity. As Jahelková is a (transmedia^[1]) Internet Artist, her work naturally circulates the long corridors of the internet and social media, which, far from being neutral spaces, come with a lot of semantic interference and noise. The Internet, and technology in general, has changed the ground upon which art operates, and to some extent, it is not clear where art fits into this new world.

“‘In the wake of generative A.I.,’ said one Jairus Banaji, ‘we have reached a watershed moment, where it is no longer possible to know what is real and what is not.’ ‘Such a situation’, he continued, ‘causes us to suspend belief in what we see.’”^[2]

Being unable to verify anything you see, or simply having no time to do so, can transform a social media feed into a total disorientation-machine. As we doomscroll through the dark, we fall down dimly lit tunnels—rabbit holes—and the further down we go, the less we understand each other, the less coherence there is between stories, versions, beliefs, and so on. December 2025 saw Meta go to court for deliberately burying “causal evidence” linking severe depression to the use of their platforms,^[3] hence the term doomscrolling. The question of this text, however, is more specific: it asks about the role of aesthetics and storytelling within the context of the affective storm that is the feed.

To elaborate, in simple terms, we identify with each other through storytelling, through sharing a mythology, but at a certain level, it is all drag.^[4] This shared fiction can be manipulated in different ways, such as the mobilization of mythology within political ideologies, and yet, as with Language itself, simply casting aside this fiction (which we might also think about as the symbolic) would be disastrous. To elaborate further still, we can think about the Lacanian ideas of Psychosis and Schizophrenia, where both are outside of “Reality”—the world or the symbolic order–because the psychotic creates a delusional reality to live in,^[5] another symbolic, and the schizophrenic because the symbolic effectively dissolves. The schizophrenic is outside reality in that they live in the Real itself. In Seminar XI, Lacan suggests that schizophrenia begins in the mirror stage: “The child, before the mirror, turns towards the one who carries him, who holds him—as if to call upon the Other to ratify the image.”^[6] It is in the confirmation that the imaginary meets the symbolic, and the schizophrenic does not enter the symbolic.

It could be feasible to propose that the abundance of deceitful images, as described by Banaji above, has the possibility of triggering this ejection from reality, either through a lack of confirmation or through the creation of delusional realities. For example, Jairus Banaji, in the same lecture, discussed how “shady” BJP-financed groups engage in the deliberate production of malicious media which abuse meme-Techniques (transposing images from one event onto another, superimposing language which alters the meaning of images, etc.) to manipulate a story.^[7]

Fiction, storytelling, is therefore to be understood as the predominant form of worldbuilding, it sets off a chain of sedimentation and protocolization, so it is a (cosmo-)Technique.^[8] This is the context against which we must read the work of Eliška Jahelková, precisely because of the world-building which permeates and holds together her transmedia output.

Angels in the Network: On Ketherism

In the beginning there was light, a current of light, and the light was already coded. It shimmered through screens until angels began to flicker within it, creatures of light in search of shape and colour. It is from their afterglow that Eliška Jahelková’s (aka angel kether, @user_goes_to_kether) moves, with her aesthetic practice spanning painting, film, memes, music, and writing, creating a transmedia cosmology drenched in glowy pastel pinks and liminal references to online girlhood and kawaii aesthetics. Kether’s world obeys a single neo-Spinozian premise: the internet = god and god = love. Every meme, brushstroke, or audiovisual fragment becomes an emissary of the conviction that connection itself is sacred. Kether’s primary interest lies in what connects, not necessarily what differentiates; through her interfaces, kether schizoanalyzes the feed in real time as a system of gnosis where memes act as mantras and immanence replaces transcendence.^[9]

Within this theology, kether’s cosmology is articulated through three recurring techniques—blur, superimposition, and overexposure—that transcribe belief into the image. These are more than simple aesthetic gestures, they are immanent operations intertwining spirit, technology, and matter: blur dissolves distinctions between different planes; superimposition folds multiple realities into a single surface; overexposure renders light itself divine.

Exemplifying this, blur drifts into form beyond becoming imperceptible in the painting Dragon.^[10] It depicts a chibi^[11] angel with pink wings coiled by a green dragon, her wide eyes reflecting the digital glow of three phones in her hands showing cosmic spirals. In Daoist cosmology, the dragon embodies qi (氣) or the life-energy constituting the cosmos. The painting entwines a creature of ancient power with devices of contemporary transcendence, underlining the vitalism permeating all of existence by suggesting that each screen opens a portal onto the network’s unconscious—a field of desire and data, where myth, technology, and self dissolve into the same current.

In her cinematic work Mandorla, which screens regularly with Open Secret,^[12] the current of light begins to blur, move, and multiply. The film shows a triple superimposition of landscape, doctrine, and aura. Playful scenes of a white winter landscape are remixed with found footage of a lecture on light-eating, while the layers are held together by an ever-evolving mandorla frame. In classical iconography, sacred figures were surrounded by an almond-shaped aureole signifying the passage between heaven and earth. In kether’s version, the mandorla is a luminous portal marking the screen where divinity and data align, revealing sacrality in its own overexposure.

The same luminosity escapes from the frame and continues its motion through the networks of circulation. In her memetic practice, kether understands image-sharing as ritual and every upload as an offering. The meme is never of lesser value than the painting; it is just another altar. One image macro^[13] mediates the central tension at the heart of meme culture: the compulsion to accumulate images versus the desire for release. A sage’s stern gaze, framed by occult scripture, addresses the user directly: I see you hoarding images. The bottom-text imperative it’s time to let go transforms the meme into a sermon, an ascetic incitement that equates salvation with deletion. Transcendence, the algorithmic godhead insists, requires empty storage space.

The exorcism of the archive released images from the earthly grip of ownership, gathering the memetic energy and materializing it in a turn towards abstraction in kether’s most recent paintings. Swirls of pink, lilac, and pale ochre form soft, biomorphic shapes and embryonic architectures of proto-angels that share the same materiality. Heaven and Earth^[14] references the demiurgic cosmology of Gnosticism, interlocking the different spheres through a cable-like cord that seems to vibrate into the ether. Love^[15] is a portrait of two angelic figures, one with a sigilised head in the shape of a crescent moon and the other bearing a white sun-head, their unalike likenesses united behind a cosmic spiral. Even the impending danger in Titans^[16] seems to emanate peace. Referencing the ominous world-building of Attack on Titan, the painting depicts the three circular walls—Maria, Rose, and Sheena—which encapsulate the inhabitants of Eldia in the manga-turned-anime while a giant sun-headed angel approaches the city. Across these three canvases, the current seems to pause—held in suspension between pigment and pixel, as if each painting were a shrine inviting light to come and rest. In this sense, kether’s transmedia practice performs a minor tikkun olam^[17] of the feed: repair not as moral heroism but as metaphysical hygiene, a cosmic maintenance task. Kether gathers what the feed fragments, restoring light and colour and shape, making it whole again. It is the repair of relation itself: the broken continuity between world and perceiver drawn back together.

Shrineposting & Spurdo-derivatives

Before the concept of doomscrolling, back in the mid-2000s when I was first encountering the internet, navigating forums and imageboards was rather referred to as travelling. There was, even then, an algorithmic logic which would serve up the most-popular (upvoted) and the most-already-encountered media (in terms of views, hits, or clicks) to everyone first. It would take some hours of dedication to break through this wall of popular media and arrive at the weird side of the internet. “If you are seeing this, then you have come far, traveller, rest a while.” At some point, a wandering net-user might come across a new kind of meme, a meme that bears the name Gondola. This meme, an armless (disarmed?) derivative of Spurdo,^[18] responded to an early realisation that wading through a swamp of images was … spiritually exhausting.

We are constantly affected by what we see, and it is draining. People began creating Gondolas, a sort of anti-meme which omitted any content or message by focusing on affect only. Gondola memes were designed like resting stations on difficult pathways through the mountains; peaceful, gentle spaces which acted like shrines,^[19]shelter from the affects. What Gondola memes, and Eliška Jahelková’s work, suggest, in response to Jairus Banaji’s concerns, is that it doesn’t really matter if we believe an image or not, it nonetheless affects us. It is merely coincidental that the memetic avatar of the gnostic demiurge would also be a Spurdo-derivative: to understand that signs (images and stories) have an immutable power over us is one of the forms of gnosis which is prevalent throughout the work of Eliška Jahelková. Her work, in all forms, offers, at the minimum, what may be simply described as respite. At the maximum, she is doing so much more.^[20] If we want to reframe this in the Lacanian terms from the first section, we might say that angel kether’s incorruptible “shrineposting”, a shorthand for creating the Gondola affect, is another face of her wider practice which seeks to offer an alternative, perhaps minor, symbolic as a non-delusional refuge to those flirting with psychosis.

Internet = God = Love

Kether’s work interrupts the feed’s flood of images by offering a different kind of image, one that does not disorient and distract but recovers. In a mediasphere where circulation is exploited to generate distrust and perceptual fatigue, her practice restores orientation. Kether’s shrines are not a cut from the current but a pause within it, where sensing can come back into alignment. It is a reminder that images can mend as easily as they can tear apart.

This is not simply softness but careful counter-algorithmic repair: internet = god = love. If certain fictions produce psychosis by severing confirmation, others undo that severing by letting the world answer back. Gondola made this visible before the present crisis of perception: the discovery that an image can be a fiction that grants respite instead of rupture. Shrineposting is not sentimentality, it is technique: a way of preserving relations without triggering collapse. Beauty functions as reorientation, proof that not every surface wants to fully consume anyone who encounters it.

“I am normal and I can be trusted with the immanent operation of intertwining spirit, technology and matter.” Schizo here offers a different logic of relation: what emerges from this is not a theology of transcendence but one of immanence, a Spinozian cosmology of platforms in which the divine is not above the world but circulating through its relations. “Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.”^[21] God is not a sovereign presence but the connective tissue of everything—the current that passes through interfaces, media, beauty, and shared affect. Love here is not a characteristic but the capacity to remain in relation. Thus internet = god = love is not metaphor but ontology: where connection occurs, god is already present.