“My Pain is Real,” among other contemporary digital work, propels this elaboration of haptics and embodied spectatorship to account for the way “proxy poetics” imply touch and other senses to obviate their absence. This move invokes the viewer as an active and potentially limitless sensor. It summons through the imaginative capacity for hosting experience and for being hosted, coextensive with the material and existential limits of that which is called upon to witness and participate both. Framing himself as an onlooker who visually witnesses the progressive mutilation of his own face, Cherri evidences a lack of accompanying physical sensation in the act of viewing. As an actor, he performs his own defacing through facial expressions of shock and surrender rather than pain. On the one hand, he strikes the pose of a Christian martyr or practices the imagination of death during life that 11th-12th century Sufi philosopher Al-Ghazhāli recommends for an ethical life in On the Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife. On the other, he represents an intimate, incredulous, and numb relationship to mediated violence. As witness and artist, his implicit collaboration with the events onscreen unsettles any number of dichotomies, not least active-passive spectating and hosting. The performance suggests an ethics of hospitality for hosting traumatic memory and remediating the (un)dead.