Throughout The Pain Journal, an account of the year prior to his death from cystic fibrosis on January 6, 1996, the writer and performance artist Bob Flanagan reflects on his intimate and sometimes turbulent relationship with the computers on which he composes his diary. For Flanagan, whose brutal ly direct art employs a range of recording and display devices to explore the aesthetics of the suffering body, the computer occupies a middle position between companion and tool, a switch-point linking his work as artist and diarist to his family, his circle of devoted friends, his audiences throughout the world, and the medical apparatuses that treat, but cannot cure, his disease." I'm in the hospital," Flanagan writes in the entry for April 9, 1995:" So what else is new? Illuminated by my computer screen. I've been bringing computers to the hospital with me for more than ten years"(39). When he has a modem installed in his laptop in August 1995—a procedure he describes as an" implant"(100)—he is unimpressed with the chat rooms he visits, but finds the Internet an important way to keep in touch with people during his periods of hospitalization. At times, Flanagan connects computer breakdowns with the breakdown of his own health; when Photoshop freezes and the hard drive crashes, he remarks that his body, too," is still on the fritz"(102). At other times, this connection happens automatically: exhausted by pain and medication, Flanagan frequently falls asleep with his fingers on the keyboard, generating a stream of" d's" or a half-page of back-slashes—pre served in the printed text of the journal. Here Flanagan's body, the princi pal focus of his artwork and his writing, speaks for itself. Like Visiting Hours, his best-known installation and performance piece, Flanagan's Pain Journal, published posthumously in 2000, offers an unsen timental testimony of an artist's confrontation with illness and death. 1 But Pain Journal also documents an important moment in the history of the con fluence of computing and life writing. Word-processing programs have been