Edited by: Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich

English
600 pp / 235 x 170 mm / paperback
price € 39.50
ISBN 978 90 6450 725 0

Published by 010 Publishers, Rotterdam

Download Introduction from Deborah Hauptmann
Introduction: Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information

Download table of contents and feature essay from Warren Neidich
From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter (1.4 Mb)

Cognitive Architecture questions of how evolving modalities – from bio-politics to noo-politics – can be mapped upon the city under contemporary conditions of urbanization and globalization. Noo-politics, most broadly understood as a power exerted over the life of the mind, re-configures perception, memory and attention, and also implicates potential ways and means by which neurobiological architecture is undergoing reconfiguration. This volume, motivated by theories such as ‘cognitive capitalism’ and concepts such as ‘neural plasticity’, shows how architecture and urban processes and products commingle to form complex systems that produce novel forms of networks that empower the imagination and constitute the cultural landscape. This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which information, with its non-hierarchical and distributed format is contributing both to the sculpting of brain and production of mind. Cognitive Architecture brings together renowned specialists in the areas of political and aesthetic philosophy, neuroscience, socio-cultural and architecture theory, visual and spatial theorists and practitioners; the contributions elucidate original ideas for thinking the city as a framework for possible gestations of noo-politics.

Contributors:
 Éric Alliez
, Bernard Andrieu, 
Eric Anglès
, Kader Attia, 
Elena Bajo, 
Lindsay Benedict
, Nicholas Chase, 
Seth Cluett
, Zoe Crosher
, Krysten Cunningham, 
Yevgeniy Fiks
, Dan Levenson, 
Antje Majewski
, T. Kelly Mason, 
Michele Masucci
, Daniel Miller, 
Seth Nehil
, Warren Neidich, 
Susanne Neubauer, 
Hans Ulrich Obrist
, Chloe Piene, 
Sreshta Rit Premnath, 
Linda Quinlan, 
Patricia Reed
, Silva Reichwein, 
Barry Schwabsky, 
Gemma Sharpe, 
Amy Sillman
, Francesco Spampinato, 
Tyler Stallings, 
Laura Stein, 
Clarissa Tossin
, Brindalyn Webster
, Lee Welch
, Olav Westphalen
, James Yeary

Download Shifter 16 Pluripotential as PDF

We present scores, scripts, instructions, critical essays and more for Shifter’s 16th issue entitled “Pluripotential”.

Here we invoke a term, which describes the innate ability of stem-cells to differentiate into almost any cell in the body, to think through the possibility of criticality and cultural change through aesthetic strategies.

The skin that we are born with is transformed as a result of its life of touches, caresses and trauma and becomes flesh*. While on the one hand each of us experiences a unique set of circumstances, our common knowledge also shapes this flesh. Analogously, the brain becomes the mind through its history of experiences: A British child growing up in Tokyo speaks fluent Japanese, something her parents having arrived later in life to Japan may never be able to do. The brain is prepared for a multiplicity of cultural and linguistic conditions, within certain biological limits of malleability. Furthermore, as Agamben has noted, “the child [...], is potential in the sense that [s]he must suffer an alteration (a becoming other) through learning.”**

These limits of malleability may fall within the paradigm of what Rancièere calls the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception, that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common, and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”*** Does art have the pluripotential ability to produce events in the cultural landscape, which in turn produce a redistribution of the sensible: a shift in public consciousness concerning how and what we see and feel, and furthermore a reconsideration of who constitutes the public “we.” Here the contradicting ideas of a homogeneous people, versus the singularities that produce differences within the multitude become relevant.
This play between structural constraints and a potential for continuous change is seen in forms such as scores, scripts and instructions; and strategies including “detournement” and remix, which hold within them the potential to be performed and reconstituted in multiple ways. It is therefore through these forms that we set out to explore “Pluripotential”.

Footnotes:
*”The Merleau-Ponty Reader”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ted Toadvine, Leonard Lawlor, Northwestern University Press, 2007; Pg. 405
**”Potentialities”, Giorgio Agameben, Standford University Press, 1999; Pg. 179
***”The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible”, Jacques Rancière, Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, 2006; Pg. 12

DD: I think the deepest answer is that we don’t know yet. But I believe the best answer available is “no.” The whole of reality including the multiverse and all the “production”—all the creation—that has happened and will ever happen within the multiverse is in some sense already there. The trouble is that that answer doesn’t explain the fact that there is a vital distinction between knowledge that was already there but was merely transformed, and new knowledge being created. For fundamental reasons we know that there must be a difference between them. One of the symptoms of the fact that there is something missing in our philosophical understanding of knowledge creation is that we have so far been unable to produce artificial evolution. I know there are a lot of people in various fields of computer science who would plaintively reply that they are doing artificial evolution every day and that it’s already produced lots of useful results. But I don’t think so. I think that what is called artificial evolution today is nothing more than exploring a given landscape for the best its best features, rather than creating a new landscape. Real creativity is creating a new landscape. I went to a lecture a couple of years ago about making robots that learn to walk. When these robots start out, they’ve got no program for walking. All they do is wave their legs. You vary their program randomly and you measure how far each of them walked. From there you take the one that walked the furthest, which initially might be just one inch, and vary it. And eventually you find that, remarkably, just by these random variations and selections, the robot walks along quite well. At the end, they think that’s artificial evolution.

Learning…

Learning, perhaps, in that any useful change can be considered learning. But it is not artificial evolution. I think that all the learning and creation of new knowledge in the robot happened in the mind of the graduate student that created the evolution program. And the token that that’s the case is that once it has walked as well as I described, it never walks any better. That particular program will never, for instance, learn to walk up stairs. It’s not because the hardware can’t do it; it could be programmed to do so. It’s just that the evolutionary system can’t reach that particular knowledge. And that’s a token of the fact that our present conception of computation, knowledge, evolution and physics, is missing something. Thus, I think there must be such a thing as genuine creation. Whether you call that “creating reality” doesn’t matter much. The important thing is that there is such a thing as the genuine creation of knowledge, ex nihilo.

It leads to the question of what is missing in the “theory of everything.” You wrote in the Fabric of Reality that it summarizes a theory of “everything that is known” and that it does not mean “all the knowledge in terms of data.” That’s a very important distinction. We often have this idea that we can’t actually grasp the complexity of so much knowledge being around. You don’t necessarily agree with that.

I don’t agree with that because what has increased is merely the complexity of data, information. But since the Enlightenment, the complexity of knowledge, of understanding, has actually gone down over the centuries, just as its content has gone up. That is thanks to the great unifications that have happened—physics with chemistry, biochemistry with biology, or more subtle unifications, like the unification of the theory of evolution with evolutionary theories of knowledge, or the unification of computation and physics. As a result, understanding all that is understood requires less complexity than it used to. I think that the process will continue, so that when we start to understand new things, like the real nature of knowledge and consciousness for instance, it won’t be an extra thing that you have to learn. It won’t mean that instead of doing a three-year university course you have to do a fouryear course or anything like that. The course will be the same length, but the amount of truth, the amount of understanding you gain per day, will be higher.

That is what we mean when we say that “depth” is growing?

Yes.

In the theory of everything you have basically four main strands of knowledge: quantum physics, epistemology, theory of computation and theory of evolution. Could you explain those four elements a little bit? Also to what extent is your theory of everything different from those espoused by Edward Witten or Stephen Wolfram?

Let me answer the second part of your question first because it’s easier: the theory of everything in the sense I use the term in my book is not only the theory of physics. Out of those four strands, only one is reductionist: that’s the quantum physics strand. It tells us how large things are made up of small things, what the laws of nature are according to which the small things behave, and what kinds of small things exist in the first place. I say “small things,” but of course it includes also universes— parallel universes and so on. Now, theories like superstring theory, and theories of everything as they are known within elementary particle physics, are not actually theories of everything. They are simply attempts to give a complete theory of subatomic particles and forces, everything that is reductionistically fundamental. But in my view, that’s not the only way that a piece of knowledge can be fundamental. I think, for instance, that epistemology is also a completely fundamental field, even though from the point of view of physics it is the study of the behavior of very, very complex objects like the brain. Nevertheless, the fact that we can have a theory of epistemology shows that complexity resolves itself into a simplicity at the higher level, about which we can have knowledge that we cannot express with the form of knowledge about the lower level. Even if we could express it, it wouldn’t be explanatory. In my book I give the example: how do you explain the presence of a particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue of Churchill in Parliament Square? Even if you could write down the entire history of all the forces acting on that atom starting from when it was created in a supernova and how it was then put into a seam below the earth and then mined and so on, that still wouldn’t explain why it is there, because the explanation should include concepts such as “this was put up to honor a human being because of certain things that he did.” And that is, in one sense, already in the description about the atoms, and in another sense isn’t there at all. So to understand all that is understood, we need higherlevel concepts.

So it is the opposite of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning is invalid, but more importantly, it can’t take place at all. It’s an illusion. It’s just a description that people gave to the scientific process when it wasn’t understood very well. We now know that science is conjectural and creative, as creative as any human activity. The same is true with evolution. Before the time of Darwin, there was a mystery: how did the animals get their adaptive complexity? If you look at the eye, for example, it looks very much like a camera. We know the camera was designed, what about the eye? There was a religious way of answering that question, namely that the eye was designed too. But once reason became more established it was realized that this answer was no answer because it just says that a piece of complexity arose from a different piece of complexity, namely God, which by definition does not have an explanation. But if you’re going to accept that, you might as well say that animals don’t have an explanation in the first place and be done with it. On the other hand, a no-nonsense realist could have said, say in 1800, that an animal is composed of atoms, that atoms obey laws of nature and that’s the explanation. But he would have been wrong too, for although that would be a true statement, it is not an explanation. The explanation was Darwin’s theory of evolution, and you can’t express that literally as a statement about atoms. Of course, it underlies the whole theory that animals are made of atoms and don’t have immortal souls (or at least that they are not relevant to the evolution). But that doesn’t explain it. This difference between description or prediction on the one hand, and explanation on the other is central to my view of the world. And it’s why you need all four strands to understand the world, because to understand you need to explain what is actually there and how things relate to each other. You simply can’t do that entirely at the level of fundamental physics.

You need the four components: quantum physics, epistemology, theory of computation and theory of evolution?

Yes. And three of those four are emergent properties. But as I also say in the book, even that is a kind of biased way of putting it. You could say that any one of the four is emergent with respect to the other three. You could regard any one of them as being the basis of everything. Indeed, in all four cases there are people who insist that this particular strand is the real underlying truth and that the others are built on top of it. For instance Stephen Wolfram is one of those who believe that the computational strand alone is the real underlying truth.

There is a huge polemic against superstring theory at the moment. Peter Woit wrote a book called Not Even Wrong(1) which makes an incredible full frontal attack. The tide seems to be turning against the string theory and its speculative attempts to produce a theory of everything. How do you place yourself in this polemic?

I never joined in the enthusiasm about superstring theory. My personal thought was that it was unlikely to work because it was not motivated by trying to solve a problem within theoretical physics. It’s very rare for foundational problems in physics to be solved by first wishing you had a theory with a given property. Instead it’s nearly always the case that there is some problem within physics. For instance, Einstein’s general theory of relativity was trying to reconcile things like the constancy of the speed of light on the one hand with the existence of gravity on the other. And the answer was first conceptual and only later mathematical. Einstein was trying to get relativity to work for several years after he had the basic explanatory idea of what the solution was. He once gave a lecture that was attended by the great mathematician David Hilbert. The story is that Hilbert went home after Einstein’s lecture and wrote down Einstein’s field equations. Just like that, because to him, as a mathematician, it wasn’t that hard. To him, Einstein had already done the hard part, the physics part.

Einstein was unaware of what Hilbert had done and it took him, I think,
another two years.

It could have been a shortcut.

It would have been a shortcut if they had got together at that point. In fact some people afterwards even tried to say, “Hilbert discovered it first!” but Hilbert said himself that he didn’t discover what the equations he had obtained meant. He was a pure mathematician, one of the greatest of the twentieth century. Einstein was by common consent the greatest physicist, and the two disciplines needed each other, but, it almost never happens that an advance in physics is made by just looking for a piece of mathematics and seeing what application it has. So that’s why superstring theory is a worthwhile thing to explore but unlikely to work. And if people are beginning to see it won’t work, I’m not let down. Through it, we’ve understood a whole slew of things about how fundamental physics can be put together, how it can’t be put together, what kind of ideas can or can’t work. It is progress even if it’s not the
answer.

What about Wolfram?

You might think since I’m so keen on unifying computation with physics that I would be keen on Wolfram’s idea but I’m not. There are two reasons. One of them is simply that his type of computation is classical not quantum, and I think it’s a great mistake to think that there is anything fundamental about classical computation. It’s just an accident of history from the way we discovered things, and the accident of our own physical constitution that we can’t easily detect quantum interference. So we are tempted to think that the particular subset of possible computations that we call classical computations and which our present day computers can do, has a fundamental significance, that it sort of stands outside physics as a preferred set of operations in terms of which you can then try to build physics. I think the relationship is entirely the other way around: which operations we can and cannot perform, such as computations, depends on what the laws of physics are.

One of the elements of The Fabric of Reality that the art world has particularly found resonance with is the idea of multiverse.

Well the first thing to say is that the multiverse theory is only a minority opinion amongst my physics colleagues. Perhaps no more than ten percent of physicists would endorse what I am about to say. In my opinion the evidence is overwhelming that the reality we see around us—the stars, the galaxy, each other—is only one slice of a bigger reality which contains many entities of that type: the type that we call universe. So the whole collection of those entities, we call the multiverse. But as I said, many colleagues would disagree. Now, if you say artists are interested, there are two points I would like to make. One is that it is in my opinion hopeless to try to look outside the laboratory, for phenomena directly caused by the multiverse. People often ask me if dreams might give us a window into other universes, or if artistic inspiration comes from a collaboration of different instances of oneself in different universes. The answer to that is no, because the laws of quantum mechanics itself, the very theory from which we know that these things exist in the first place, says that this kind of collaboration between universes is not possible. So that’s the bad news. The good news is that the kind of reality in which we are, is one in which alternatives to the events we experience really do happen. Now, why is that important if they can’t physically affect us?

My best metaphor or parable to explain why is to go back again 150 years to the time before Darwin’s theory of evolution was discovered. At that time, there was a problem: Why do giraffes have long necks? So that they can eat the leaves. But is that providential? Is it divine providence that lengthened their necks or is there some other explanation? The thing is that for most of human history, we didn’t have the conceptual framework that Darwin had to answer that question, because all theories, including theories of astronomy and so on, were about the end result. They were teleological theories, saying that the giraffe had a long neck so that it could eat the leaves or so that God would be pleased or so that it would stay alive. Similarly, even in astronomy and the other hard sciences where they had real scientific theories, they were still in the form of predicting outcome and not predicting the process. For instance, [Johannes] Kepler’s most famous law was that the planets move in ellipses with the sun at one focus. He was saying that ellipses are the answer—not circles, not parabolas, but ellipses, with the sun not at the center but at the focus. So that’s how the world is. Now starting with Galileo or Newton, the character of scientific theories changed. Instead of wanting merely descriptive theories about what the end result is, we wanted explanatory theories about what produces that result. Newton’s theory, which likewise predicts ellipses, doesn’t mention ellipses. The word doesn’t appear in Newton’s laws at all, nor does the word “planets.” Nor does the word “sun.” None of that appears. It’s a general theory, not about outcomes but about forces, momentum and so on. It’s about the thing that causes the outcome. Now we can go back to Darwin. His key philosophical innovation, the thing that distinguishes him from all previous attempts, including all previous theories of evolution like [Jean-Baptiste] Lamarck’s, is that Darwin is all about the laws under which giraffes get their long neck. Again, Darwin’s theory doesn’t mention “giraffes,” “necks,” “trees,” anything like that. It’s a general theory stating what kind of a world makes a long-necked giraffe explicable, without a divine being having to create it by fiat.

That’s a toolbox.

Yes. The worldview of Newton’s physics was a toolbox that opened the door to Darwin understanding the theory of evolution. Now in the same way, I believe that the unsolved problems of the present day—such as the nature of consciousness and creativity—can only be solved within the worldview of the parallel universes. It can only be solved by somebody who knows that there are parallel copies of them, that they’re all doing different things, that the world is all connected together, just as Darwin needed the Newtonian worldview in order to understand giraffes. Note that Darwin never needed to use Newton’s actual laws of motion. He never needed to write down the formulae, the equations of Newtonian mechanics. Similarly, I don’t believe that philosophers —whatever philosophers or scientists solve the problem of consciousness — will need to use the equation of quantum mechanics. What they will need is the worldview that quantum mechanics tells us.

The concept?

Yes. The explanation. If you think in those terms you can be on the path to the answer just as Darwin had to think in terms of a Newtonian universe. If he had thought in terms of a Keplerian universe he could never have understood evolution. And if we think in terms of a classical single universe cosmology like that before quantum theory, we will not be able to understand things like consciousness and knowledge. There are some examples in The Fabric of Reality of what different things such as genes, knowledge or brains look like when you look at them from a multiverse point of view. For instance, although a gene is a microscopic object in any one universe, it is a gigantic object in the multiverse.  Because a gene is one of those very rare types of objects that get errorcorrected back to their original form if they change or mutate. So if you have a population with a certain genome and a mutation happens, a few of them have a variant. Then if you go on through the generations, the original form will be restored because the ones with the wrong form won’t reproduce as well. That means it will get set back to the way it was in most universes.

In the multiverse there can be change of scale: something small can suddenly be very big.

Absolutely. And the things which are big in the multiverse are the ones that contain a lot of knowledge or a lot of evolution.

Another key idea for the art and architecture fields is your conception of time. You said that the common-sense view on time as a flow is nonsense. Could you explain your notion of time played out in The Fabric of Reality?

In science we often find that common sense is wrong, but we very rarely find that common sense is nonsense. But in the case of the flow of time, common sense is nonsense. It contains an internal contradiction: time can’tpossibly flow because the concept of flow presupposes an externally existing time against which something is flowing. So the quantum concept of time is that other times like yesterday and tomorrow are just special cases of other universes. If you think about it, there are parallel universes in which you and I are sitting at a different place in the room and other universes in which we even fail to meet today and so on. There are also universes where we did meet, but on different dates. If you think about universes that just resemble ours, there are universes where we are sitting just a millimeter displacement from where we are in this universe. There are ones that are very like ours, there are some that are genuinely like ours but have significant differences. Now if you think about it, that’s exactly the same as in the flow of time, because a minute ago this room was in many ways just the same way as it is now, but we were sitting in a slightly different position and the contexts of our
brain were slightly different.

It wasn’t dark behind you but blue.

Exactly. So different times have a striking resemblance to other universes. And philosophically, just as with other universes, people often ask, when they’re trying to get their heads around these concepts: “Ok, if there are all these different instances of me in other universes, which one is the real me?” This problem has arisen in regard to time since time immemorial. People have wondered if the version of them who did reckless things in their youth was really them. For instance, if we’re thinking of crime and punishment: If a criminal has truly repented at a later time, is it worth punishing him? Is it still the same person? And even more, suppose the criminal has had brain damage since he committed the crime and can’t even remember doing it or why he did it, is he still the same person? So the issue of where, along this continuum of different versions of this entity that are continuously related to each other, you stop being the same person, arises in regard to time and parallel universes in the same way. And it turns out that this isn’t just an analogy. The physicists Don Page and Bill Wootters analyzed time in the quantum framework.

Is this recent?

No, this is quite an old paper published in the 1980’s.(2) It turns out from their work that the different universes and the different times just are special cases of the same thing. Think of the multiverse as a collection of snapshots. For simplicity, just consider the multiverse in regard to this room, all the configurations of this room in all universes at all times, and let’s forget about the ones where this room doesn’t exist at all. Well, some of those are other universes at this time, some of them are other times in this universe, and some of them just can’t be described like that—they are just elsewhere in the multiverse.

But they’re all snapshots.

Yes, and they’re all treated uniformly in quantum theory.

In your book you say it is a universe at a particular time.

I call that a snapshot. Although this metaphor connotes just a visual thing, I’m talking about everything: where all the atoms are and so on. To a good approximation the multiverse consists of a collection of such snapshots which are related to each other in different ways. Some of them are related because different objects in the different parts of the multiverse are part of a same bigger object, like a gene. The gene really extends throughout many parallel universes. Another kind of relation is that the laws of physics sometimes determine what is in one snapshot if you know what is in another, and those snapshots are called the past and future of each other. Those are only two kinds of the relationships that can exist between snapshots; the multiverse allows other more complex relationships where again it’s not really meaningful to say whether it’s past or future or another universe or a part of the same object and so on. We don’t really have the language to describe it.

What about time travel?

I’ve worked on time travel almost entirely from the point of view of quantum theory, and quantum theory doesn’t tell you whether time travel is actually possible or not. The issue of time travel in physics resolves itself into two almost completely separate questions. One of them: “Can you build a time machine?” The other one: “If you could, what would happen?”

It’s a “what if” scenario?

That’s right. Those are two different questions. And remarkably, the first question is dealt with almost entirely by the theory of relativity whereas the second one is dealt with almost entirely by quantum physics. And it’s the latter one that I’ve been concerned with. Most people are more interested in the first question: Could you build one and if so, how? But I haven’t worked in that direction. Basically the answer is it’s simply too complicated. For a while the experts were saying, “Yes, it is possible,” and then they slowly started changing their minds and saying that maybe it isn’t possible. We don’t know. The other question, the one that I worked on is pretty well worked out: If you had a time machine, what would happen? The answer is if you used it to go into the past, you would go into the past of another universe. Which other universe? Well, obviously the one in which you appeared in the past at that moment. That’s the answer.

That simple?

It’s that simple. But I just would like to point out that it’s not a matter of saying, “how can we resolve the paradox? Oh look, it’s resolved if there are parallel universes.” It’s not like that. What happens is you take the equations of quantum mechanics and you work out what they say will happen and it says that the time travel will happen. That’s equivalent to saying that the initial premise (that a time machine could exist at all) is consistent. But it could have said otherwise. We don’t have the freedom to tell the parallel universes what to do. The laws of physics already tell them what to do. And they either permit or don’t permit time travel. It turns out that they do permit it. But we don’t know whether general relativity provides a mechanism for actually doing it.

The possibility of an impossibility.

Yes, if something is forbidden by the laws of physics, then it definitely is impossible.

That’s not the case.

We don’t know if that’s the case yet. But if it’s not forbidden by the laws of physics then it’s just a matter of knowing how.

excerpts from Experiencing Hypnotism, 2009
published by Atomic Activity Books

SPEAKER: “Though we see ourselves as following completely in the tradition of the Annales School, a narrative account of one individual’s experience Can be useful in so far as it is symptomatic of the full sequence of events. As you surely already know, we supplement Oral history with Visual history. The abundance of cameras installed in the public and private spheres at the start of the century has provided us with material that can be edited into a film-like montage depicting past events. The film I am about to present is one of these films. While watching, please take into consideration that a) the material has been edited together by us, b) the image and sound quality is very poor at times and c) supplementary films are in the works that, for example, will show what was done in the Entity’s Pavilion under Yusuf Etiman.”

Each of us had to share a visor between two. As unaccustomed as we were to seeing 2D images without smell and taste, we quickly got used to it.

(2024)

We see a dark-haired, middle-aged woman asleep in bed. Subtitles inform us that what we are seeing took place on the 30th floor of the (unfortunately now destroyed) Friendship Tower. The woman’s name is “Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis.” Sunlight streams through the windows, her dimming system is apparently defunct. She opens her eyes and casts a worried glance over the objects on the walls and in the room, now bathed in bright sunlight. Among them: a woodcut by K. Utamaro (Beautiful Woman Cleans Her Pipe, 1805). On a small table, we see a miniature version of A. Jodorowsky’s orgasm machine that nods with tiny flags and opens at the slightest touch (after Montaña Sacra, 1973) across from The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (ca. 1455) by P. della Francesca.

Finally, her gaze settles on a framed, first sketch of the Entity by Antje Majewski.

NOTE

These subtitled artifacts, the images of which were inserted into the film in a far better quality than the rest of the material, are clearly reproductions of objects from the collection of the Museum for Applied Hermeneutics and could in fact obscure other objects in the space. On the other hand, other sources reveal that such artifacts were often kept in apartments, where their keepers saw to their preservation. Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis goes into the bathroom and brushes her teeth. She then chooses her clothes for the day, a white Salvar Kameez, fixes herself and looks for her handbag. She tosses her mobile phone in it and leaves the apartment. In the elevator, she talks on the phone (in Farsi). The sound quality is very bad here, we can only make out that she is worried about traffic and the possibility that she will be late. Maybe she would be better off taking the chute.

She picks up her car from the underground garage and drives over the highway. We can hear the radio. She speaks briefly on the telephone again. During the drive, we see historically very interesting shots of DD.

She arrives at Jan Wellem Maktum bin Buti Hall, where DD’s “art collections” are kept. A valet parks her car, and she follows another
server to a pavilion hidden in the greenery. It is a magnificent structure made of Lebanon cedar, the biomorphic walls of which are partially covered in malachite tiles. As soon as she reaches the door, she is greeted in English by a youthful-looking man in a very impressive coat (note: Tajik handiwork, ca. 1930) as “Mr. Pflugfelder”. She enters a hall where four small groups of people have already gathered and are sipping alcohol-free beverages around several bistro tables. A buffet is waiting off to the side. The hall is tastefully decorated with flowers. Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis gives a friendly nod to several acquaintances before approaching a bearded man that we have identified as the legendary Yusuf Etiman, the first director of the Pavilion of the Entity. He immediately begins his speech.

(In English)
Yusuf Etiman says a few general words about his delight that this day has finally come. He thanks Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis for her extremely generous financial donation, without which neither the Entity’s development nor the erection of the pavilion would not been possible, and gives her the word.

Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis thanks him on her own behalf, emphasizing that her contribution is only a small part, and extends her most heartfelt
thanks to Dubai Düsseldorf for its trust in donating the building plot and associating the Pavilion of the Entity with the “art collections.”

“What role will art play in the future?” she asks the audience. “Many science fiction scenarios reflect the fear of a world designed to the last detail, one
in which human beings are degraded to the level of will-less consumers in an aseptic, artificial paradise – a scenario not unlike the possible future of Dubai. The will to humanity in these stories is often in the guise of a desire for the damaging, such as alcoholic excesses and cigarettes; or also, as in P. K. Dick, in the form of Wilbur Mercer, who is endlessly, painfully pummeled with stones and therefore keeps the feeling of empathy alive among humans.

Time and again, the Western museum has supported artists willing to serve a cathartic function and exemplarily make the suppressed “other” visible – Joseph Beuys, for example, in Düsseldorf.

In the future, there will be a demand for abstract art focusing on non-consumable or applicable knowledge: repulsive, organic objects incorporating transience, death and perversion, similar to the technological reliquaries by Paul Thek.

And now I would like to introduce the artist Antje Majewski who, in cooperation with the biotechnology company MEL, has developed a completely novel work of art.”

Antje Majewski also thanks the collector on her own behalf for the financial support for her project: “What is unique about this new life form that we have created is that it possesses neither sense organs, nor reproductive organs, nor means of transport or a nervous system. The organism is life in the abstract sense; it has such low energy consumption that its metabolism is extremely slow. It can neither take in food nor eliminate waste and lives by self-consumption until his insides are completely eaten away, leaving only a dry shell. The artwork succeeds in complete selfreferentiality, something that has always been desired in Concrete Art. It is acceptable to the Muslim community because it doesn’t depict anything – it just is. At the same time, it introduces organic waste into the sterile world of the museum, something that people – like sexual organs or digestive waste – don’t care to see because especially in terms of its smell, it remains very foreign and therefore unattractive. At the same time, its only activity is slow self-digestion and therefore extremely slow death.”

Taking the word once more, Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis explains what she finds so fascinating about the project: “The artwork of the future reminds us of transience, and evokes empathy after initial disgust. It can therefore be ethically effective as an artwork across different cultures and religions. In the Kantian sense, it forces us to reflect on ourselves as human beings, encouraging a social bond by awakening new enthusiasm for our natural physical and mental abilities, admittedly limited as they are.”

Mrs. Armaghan bint Bilqis reaches inside a plastic box and pulls out a round object. Its surface shines in twinkling green to orange colors. She hands the object to Yusuf Etiman who carefully, lovingly takes it. A few people standing around the object, mostly other contributors or assistants, lean toward it with interest, then quickly pull back in disgust. Everyone present begins to clap.

End of the film.

At first it was hard for us to understand the onlookers’ reaction, but then a Museum for Applied Hermeneutics employee explains that numerous,
concurrent historical sources show that the object emitted an almost intolerable smell.

He continued to explain, occasionally punctuating his presentation with Vidisnaps as a visual aid.

SPEAKER: “We would be over our time limit, if I wanted to present the following events in just as much detail. Unfortunately we do not own
any documents about Antje Majewski from the time in which the Entity was developed, nor do we have those from the MEL biotechnology firm. We do hope, however, to have given you better insight into the original intention of those responsible for the Entity’s creation and presentation.

(2056)

Here we have a picture from the year 2056 (Vidisnap). Having developed far from the Entity pavilion’s early, idyllic beginnings, using plans developed by architects, Pflugfelder and Miessen, Dubai and Düsseldorf have built identical Kunsthallen allowing for the Entity’s cult-like worship. Long ago, the organism (now shriveled and wrinkled) (Vidisnap), ceased to encourage selfreflection and awaken abstract empathy. Instead, it stirs only state-controlled, nationalistic sentiment, since Dubai and Düsseldorf are the only two places that own the Entity. More than a few openly submit themselves in prayer to the object and try to touch the shrine with a corner of their clothing. (Vidisnap)

(2101)

After the catastrophic events at the turn of the century, the Dubai and Düsseldorf Kunsthallen were destroyed.

This Vidisnap is from the year 2101. A tourist took it by chance at a vegetable shop where the owner happened to have participated in the looting of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The disk is an element that once decorated the entrance to the shrine. The surface is dirty, but still glows with the Entity’s colors. Behind that, we see a glass cube on the floor that contains a small, round thing, similar in appearance to a shriveled fruit. It is the dead Entity, having consumed itself into a mummy.” At this point, several of us felt the urge to vomit and began looking for the nearest restroom. Others wept.

We highly recommend a visit to the Museum of Applied Hermeneutics. It evoked powerful, but also cathartic feelings within us and we extend our deepest gratitude to the Museum for its historical investigations.

SPECIAL THANKS

Models: Mathieu Malouf, Ralf Pflugfelder, Heji Shin, Oliver Helbig, Yusuf Etiman, Solmaz Shahbazi, Jana Petersen, Delia Gonzalez, Michael Waller, Julia Majewski, Zille Homma Hamid; Costumes: Antje Majewski, Ayzit Bostan; Architecture design: Ralf Pflugfelder / Noffice; Assistant: Katrin Vellrath

IMAGES
Kitagawa Utamaro, Beautiful Woman Cleans Her Pipe, from: Meishofukei, Bijinjuni (Famous Places and Twelve Kinds of Beautiful Women), woodcut, 1805
Alejandro Jodorowsky, La Montana Sacra, Mexiko / USA 1973
Anchor Bay/Starz Home Entertainment
Piero della Francesca, The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Fresco, San Francesco, Arezzo, um 1455

Antje Majewski, Sketch for the outer form of the Entity (2009), making use of Leonardo da Vinci, Mortars with Explosive Projectiles, from the Codex Atlanticus, 1478 –1519. Permanent ink print on paper, 10 x 10 cm, 2009

Noffice, Dubai, 2009

Philip K. Dick

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965

Paul Thek, Excursion (from the “Technological Reliquaries” series), 1964

Antje Majewski, The Donation (2024). Oil on canvas, 290 x 355 cm, 2009

Ralf Pflugfelder und Markus Miessen / Noffice, Kunsthalle Dubai, 2009

Antje Majewski, Decorative element that once adorned a passage leading to the shrine (2101) / Oil on Wood, Ø 200 cm, 2009

Entity (2101). Glass cube, 35 x 35 cm and organic remains, 2009

ALL IMAGES BY ANTJE MAJEWSKI‚ © ANTJE MAJEWSKI AND JENS ZIEHE

Poem

To set this timber straight:
The eyelid of art shuts slowly
a tear keeps the orb from getting stuck
no punch lines. Genius loves conspiracy.
Mondrian straightens out his branches,
saying, “You’ve got to dream the lie
before you live it,” then ducks
to avoid an oncoming sparrow.
“You’ve got to twist it to get it straight.”
He’s leaving all the lines but none
of the edges. Still the tree gets darker
at night so take your opportunity.
“Why date my works?” he keeps on thinking,
apropos of nothing. “I hardly feel I paint them.”
after Geoffrey Young

Poem

How many breathless
at the tiny golden flecks
like sunlight sticking onto my back & tongue finding love at the bottom of a bag
of personally-pan-fried parmesan & potato chips & fraught
with eyes wetting the grass
the sun made me hazy
knowing nothing of women
except in this poem & contented with shady places
death once removed,
fleeing all others, myself too
this woman alive showing in that view of me
the limestone flower
she comes always before me, a man befriended by
KFC boneless even on High Holy Days —a lover by name at least
nothing less.
after Tim Atkins (after Petrarch)

Poem

You know this has all been done before
in the age of monster trucks
when shapes were as close as the objects of love
and their shadows would genuflect
as they backed off, a cause
from which language has resigned

you know

this has all been done as a formal reduction
with respect to the limits of the picture plane
—its unassuming spirit, inherently graceful
and I take great pleasure, however cheaply,
in it.
after Richard Hell

The development of new biology(1) has opened up new possibilities for the question of what defines the nature of humanity(2) and the risk of biopower,(3)
to explore and develop endogenous capacities of the body. With the discovery of embryonic pluripotent stem cells, nanotech(4) and prosthesis
the old definition of the mechanical body was no longer sufficient for describing the plasticity and the reconfiguration of body agency. By body agency, we not only mean a human enhancement(5), but also the activation of the pluripotential body through its biotechnological performance. The matter of the body is the result, as Judith Butler has noted, of our performative action on it by our technological expertise. If the paradigm of technics was always based on the passive model of the stimulation of immunologic defenses like Koch and Pasteur had demonstrated, this conception of the body was related to a respect for the notion of cellular integrity resulting from an exploitation of mechanism. The reactive model is different from the performative model: the enhancement of the body, even if a new body-shop appears(6) , is not the same project of post-human(7) disembodiment because pluripotentiality implies and supposes not only the deconstruction of the body but also its reconfiguration. Enhancing me(8) is a hybrid solution and not a new eugenics for the production of better people(9).

The hybrid frontier

The disintegration of body defines a hybrid frontier at the intersection of biotechnology and nanotechnology. In the context of late industrial culture,
Ballard’s Crash-Body is a critique of “the old organic model of the body”(10): behind the surface of the skin, the speeding machine becomes the prosthesis
of the flesh. Against Cartesian mechanism, the prosthesis is an alternative of disembodiment with the possibility to neuromute the conception of the
living and the composition of body. The distinction between the body and embodiment disappears in the condition of the constant engagement of our embodied interactions with the environment.
The body agency in pluripotentiality affirms that the boundaries are illusory, because “ the body resurfaces as a discrete entity as it articulates a new
space, a revitalized subject”(11). The subject uses his body to mediate the embodiment of his interiority. The neuromutation is at the same time a dynamic for thinking about the plasticity and the mobility of biologic matter and the technological process for transforming the condition of life. Neuromutation is a conceptual and practical possibility because the development of life sciences authorizes now, with the epigenist development of genetic modification in vitro, and brain visualization, a new representation(12) and action on the body; one which is active at the interface of brain-body-mind.

For Bernadette Wegenstein, in the context of new biotechnology, “the holistic discovery of the body as constitutive mediation has converged with an age
of mediatic proliferation, such that what we are in fact witnessing in the apparent continuing fragmentation of the body is the work of the body itself as mediation”(13).

The neuromutation is described by a new step in technological evolution for the representation and the action of body motor schema. Without this
incorporation of technology in the body, the neuromutation cannot not realize the critique of dualism. Being miniaturized and biocompatible, technology lands on the body by implantation.

The Cyborg(14), without the hybridological interaction is still used to argue for the mechanization and the dehumanization of the living. The biological
body is repaired, dissected and implanted. Hybrids exist, they are among, with and in us, with our pace makers, our transplants, our hip prosthesis,
our cochlear implants, our glasses, our wheelchairs… Professionals are trained for this and the ethical foundations of their practices are linked
to bioethics: charity, non-malfeasance, common good, social justice and responsibility in the respect of human dignity.

Far from replacing mankind in a posthumanism(15) and disembodying the subject, the world and the technique co-construct the constitution of
a hybridizing body.(16) Whereas miscegenation and melting modify the social body, hybridization integrates the technical modification in the
professionals’ daily gesture. Technique is no longer an alienating and dehumanizing adversity, it obliges the medical and the social worker to
become each other; adapting rules and converting its functions to limits which are always beyond the other’s bio-corporality. The inequalities in the access to knowledge related to these new technologies of electronic surveillance, self-health and biocontrol has to be described through the meeting between social imaginaries and individual representations. Denouncing human mechanization, the dominant ideology does not conceive technique as a positive and constitutive interaction of a new identity.

Pluripotentiality & Reversibility

Natural reversibility depends on contextual interaction. The ecological underworld and corporal culture incorporate information likely to destroy
or to divert endogenous abilities. To become another, physiological hybridity has to stand solidly behind the biological program. After the plasticity period, the hybridization by the underworld and the culture of neurons, cells and genes will be possible only with respect to certain temporalities. The organism protects itself with the help of the immune system. The separation between the self and this non-self, which protects the organism from foreign bodies fluctuates between the potential self and the actual self. During physiological hybridization, in the case of a transplant, the actual self has to call upon its plastic potential in order to actualize new configurations. Thus, progenitor cells specialize by hybridizing the functional context of their implantation. The body’s plasticity triggers a recalibration as a result of hybridization by incorporation environmental information.

Technique doesn’t just inspect nature any more, but also diverts the course of natural selection into human amelioration. The new pluripotentiality does not result in becoming inorganic17 but rather a biosubject.

The performative doesn’t have the same logic as the performance. Performing one’s potentiality through the process of living uses a similar methodology as found in gender studies and the queer movement: shedding the representation of a body-machine to allow forms to emerge that are as yet unknown. The performance looks for overproduction within liveable limits, to reproduce the living in vitro and in creating species and beings that do not exist in nature. The performance tires out the living and denaturalizes it completely up to the point where its introduction into culture produces artificial beings, such as GMO and clones. The performative and the biological performance both entail that there is no definitive soul for the living, but for the performative the essentialist refusal lies in the living plastic recalibration as in the conatus. The living perseveres in its being through developmental biology and then the performative uses perfectibility as a biological conatus.

To improve the body implies a bionic performativity that comes from modifying the concept of disability in a transbiocultural18 specification. This
ex-utero living produces not so much bodies without organs as organs without bodies; each organ might be used outside its original body and might be
re-implanted into another body thus reconstituting personal identity. How to modify one’s body has become classical breviary, from body piercing to implants. Perfecting one’s body will prompt a refusal to die. While it is a living actualization, it is also an environmentalization through the interaction of techniques within it. Should the body only overcome its environment, disease and pollution without forcing back death’s limits?

It is less a post-mortal society than a trans-living community that uses technobiologies for actualizing new living potentialities. The “regenerated”
rather than the degenerated, pulls them apart from predictable death by encouraging living reorganization. In addition vaccination and hygiene have extended life expectancy, in the same way hybridization brings forward the average quality of life. If everything became repairable and each body part
could be modified, then to preserve a natural organ would condemn the subject to its entropy. Everything would become a handicap following an
extensive generalization of weakness research: through a permanent “autodiagnostic” everyone would likely practice auto-health, which will never end through the incorporation of new prostheses. Couldn’t there be self-improving ethics for the self-body within auto-health?

Somatechnics and Biosubjectivity

This urge to rethink the mechanical reconfiguration of almost all aspects of technical practice, as well as modes of communication and
interaction, through smooth and unbroken articulation with intelligent machines is the transformation of the human into a new construction called the Somatechnic(19).

The somatechnic implies in his principle the hybridization of technic in or on the body to constitute a new possibility of perception and action.
The body is not only natural or strictly reducible to a culture datum. The problem is the combination of nature and culture in the flesh and the
consequences for the lived body. The difficulty for the implementation of new technics is the resistance to the transformation through habits
and roles: the old constitution of body is composed of norms, which perpetuate habits. These limits can be an obstacle to subjectivation. Nikki Sullivan uses the term somatechnics “to think through the varied and complex ways in which bodily-being is shaped not only by the surgeon’s knife but also by the discourses that justify and contextualize the use of such instruments”(20).

The innovation with Nikki Sullivan is the performativity of technic in the process of the gender enfleshment of the self:
“Hearkening to Zoe Sofia’s claim that “every technology is a reproductive technology”, Haraway acknowledges the potency of myth-making, the fact that what is at stake are ways of life (1992: 299), modes of enfleshment, somatechnologies if you like. Consequently, unlike the feminist theorists discussed in the previous section, Haraway refuses the ((re)productionist) single vision which reiterates the same old story of technology as either good or bad, liberatory or oppressive. Instead Haraway deploys a “double vision”, a seeing “from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (1991/1998: 439)”(21).

Somatotechnologies are not only oppressive or repressive because this interpretation limits the power of trans-formation of the self by its new embodiment. If gender should be constituted as a restrictive condition for the use of somatechnology, we could return to the situation described in “The Technology of Orgasm” by Rachel Maines;22 of an instrumentalization of body, in for example the uterus of women. This ambivalence towards
somatechnologies, as differences of somatechnics which are internalized by the subject, is founded on the possibility of biopower taking control of the body in the name of safety and security.

An ontological pluripotentiality

After Bernadette Wegenstein’s “Getting Under the Skin,” where the transformation of body subjectivity was studied through three perspectives
– the deconstruction of body image, the existence of a lived body, and the modification of skin under the appearance and the surface of subjectivity – the new hybrid project is the continuation of ontological pluripotentiality in an epistemic pluridisciplinarity within techno-science studies, the history of
medical technologies and new media studies. The core of the new problem is  the relation between the possibility of technology in the medical entertainment complex and the evolution of the representation of body image in a mediatic society. For the modern subject the importance of the body’s image is first a condition for the constitution of corporeal schema and second the incorporation of a body norm in society.

The study of the cosmetic gaze establishes an intersection between the first and second points. The “make over” provides a possibility for the materialization of the ideal body’s image by the hybridization of natural matter with technical biodesign. Becoming hybrid23 induces a new ontological body agency. The patient becomes an agent of her self-health. This biosubjective norm is in conflict with bioethical advice because the body agent always hopes to find a technological solution for a better life. The redefinition of a conception of the disabled will be realized only if the pluripotential condition is a common reference point for the technical use of the self.

1. Bernard Andrieu, 2007, Embodying the Chimera: Biotechnology & Subjectivity, in Edouardo Kac ed., Signs of Life, MIT Press, p. 57-68.
2. Paul Jersild, 2009, The Nature of Our Humanity: Ethical Issues in Genetics and Biotechnology, Augsburg Fortress.
3. Jurgen Altmann, 2005, Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications And Preventive Arms Control, Routledge. Antoinette Rouvroy, 2007, Human Genes and Neoliberal Governance: A Foucauldian Critique, Routledge Cavendish.
4. Nigel Cameron, M. Ellen Mitchell eds., 2007, Nanoscale: Issues and Perspectives for the Nano Century, John Wiley & Sons Inc.
5. Julian Savulescu, Nick Bostrom eds., 2009, Human Enhancement , Oxford University Press.
6. Tony Santella, 2005, Body Enhancement Products, Chelsea House Publishers
7. Bert Gordijn, Ruth F. Chadwick, eds., 2008, Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
8. Pete Moore, 2008, Enhancing Me: The Hope and the Hype of Human Enhancement, Wiley-Blackwell.
9. Matti Havry, 2010, Rationality and the Genetic Challenge: Making People Better?, Cambridge University Press.
10. Paul Youngquist, Paul, 2000, Ballard’s Crash-Body, Postmodern Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, September
11. Allison Fraiberg,1991, Of Aids, Cyborgs and Other Indiscretions. Resurfacing the Body in the Postmodernity, Postmodern Culture, v.1 n.3 May, p.21-27, p. 25.
12. Lock M. 1997, “Decentering the Natural Body : Making Difference Matter”, Configurations 5.2 : 267-292.
13. Bernadette Wegenstein, 2006, Getting Under the Skin, Body and Media Theory, MIT Press., 158.
14. Jean François Chassay, Elaine Desprès eds., 2010, Humain ou presque. Quand science et littérature brouillent la frontière, Figura, n°22, ed UQAM.
15. Antoine Robitaille, 2008, Le nouvel homme nouveau. Voyages dans les utopies de la posthumanité, Paris, Boréal.
16. Hauser J., Ed., 2008, Sk-interfaces: Exploding Borders – Creating Membranes in Art, Technology and Society. An art and text book, Fact & Liverpool University Press.
17. Laurentis T. de 2003, “Becoming Inorganic”,Critical Inquiry, 28 : 547-565.
18. Kapchan D.A., Turner Strong P., 1999, Theorizing the Hybrid, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 112, n°445, pp. 239-253.
19. B. Andrieu, 1999, Médecin de son corps, Paris, P.U.F.
20. N. Sullivan, 2009, The Somatechnic of intersexuality, CLQ, A Journal of lesbian and gay studies, 15: 2 , p. 313-327, ici p. 314.
21. Nikki Sullivan, 2006, Somatechnics or Monstruosity Unbound, Scan, Journal of media arts culture, n° Technological interventions eds. Nicole Anderson & Nikki Sullivan, Vol.3, n°3. cf Sullivan, Nikki (2005) “Somatechnics, or, The Social Inscription of Bodies and Selves”, Australian Feminist Studies, 20:48. Sullivan, Nikki and Murray, Samantha. (2009). Somatechnics: Queering the Technologisation of Bodies. Ashgate: London.
22. Rachel Maines,2001, The technology of orgasm. Hysteria, the vibrator and women’s sexual satisfaction, The Johns Hopkins University Press
23. Bernard Andrieu, 2008, Devenir hybride, P.U. Nancy.

MASS VENTRILOQUISM was originally read on February 7, 2009 in San Francisco, California at Southern Exposure. The author approached
newly acquired friends from Portland State University, Otis College of Art and Design, old friends from California College of the Arts and strangers hanging out after their participation in SFMOMA’s “Social Practice West” panel discussion.
“Would you like to read a part in this play for the 2 Minute Presentation Series*? The part is less than a page and you don’t have to act. Just read the words as you understand them to sound in your head.”
The play was cast in under an hour.
MASS VENTRILOQUISM premiered when the panelists reconvened for the 2 Minute Presentation Series at Southern Exposure.
The script for MASS VENTRILOQUISM was handed out to one man and fourteen women. The parts were spot read in front of a small audience.
The portraits of AUGUST WILHELM MALM and CAROLINA (as shown on last page of the script) were projected on a wall. The readers stood in a semicircle in front of the projection, facing the audience. The play was read in roughly two minutes.

DIRECTION

The script for MASS VENTRILOQUISM should be handed out to people who are strangers or recently acquainted. Parts should be spot read,
out loud, and never rehearsed. There should be no direction other than, ‘read this out loud, un-theatrically, likeas words that you are first coming
across for the first time’.
COSTUME PLOT: No costumes should be worn other than the clothes that the readers wear upon arrival.

CASTING: Ideally, all parts but AUGUST WILHELM MALM should be read by female readers.

SETTING: An additional audience is not required, but in the case that there is an additional audience the photos on the last page of the script should be projected on a wall behind the readers.

BLOCKING: The readers should stand in a semicircle in front of the wall being projected on.

CHARACTERS

NARRATOR #1: The town adopts a whale
AUGUST WILHELM MALM: It is with great honor and pride
NARRATOR #2: The traveling host
NARRATOR #3: You give a centimeter they take a kilometer
NARRATOR #4: A much needed hiatus
NARRATOR #5: Some super-imposed character development
BARBARA JOHNSON: Thoughts on muteness envy
NARRATOR #6: Incredible shrinking women
NARRATOR #7: Speak when you are spoken through

FOOTNOTE #1: Homonyms
FOOTNOTE #2: One hundred thirty-two million, five hundred eighty thousand, ninety-six
FOOTNOTE #3: Role reversal
FOOTNOTE #4: Whales > dinos
FOOTNOTE #5: Long distance singers
FOOTNOTE #6: An ending
NARRATOR #1: There is a quiet whale in Sweden.
They call her Carolina.
She was named after the wife of a wealthy quartermaster, August Wilhelm Malm.
At a young age, she was taken from her home at the Isthmus of Askim Bay and was brought to Gothenburg.
Two gentlemen, Carl Hansson and Olof Larsson escorted her with three steamboats.
In a trade magazine dated August 13, 1892, Malm was quoted as saying,

AUGUST WILHELM MALM: “Everything, everything I have thus put at stake…Everything has gone on my risk. But now, thanks to Providence!, I also arrived at the truly great goal. Victory is mine. I share the honor with all the arms, assist, and to repeat some of the words I spoke to thousands of spectators: this equally wonderful, colossal animal may not only be the single most precious adornment of our museum; it is, if all goes well, to be a pride for our town, not to say our whole nation, Whereas, if I know, no museum in the world can produce anything in the way, or value to compare with as
this can to behold.”
NARRATOR #2: Aware of the responsibility that came with her approval, Carolina did her best to serve her nation.

Made herself utterly available to her people. Went to lengths to see that they were comfortable. Furnished a salon with benches and tapestries for their visits.

In the summer of 1866, Carolina traveled to Stockholm. There she attended the Industrial Exposition, where she hosted over 36,000 visitors. Hamburg
and Berlin followed.
In 1923, she moved into a new hall built specifically for her in Slottskogen.

She continued her role as a public host. Entertaining visitors; serving coffee. Punch.
NARRATOR #3: It was some time later that Carolina had to close down her doors and retreat to a more private life.
This was due to the indiscretion of some visitors who confused her hall for a hideout.
(Carolina’s place was later referred to as “… a hideout for loving couples,
and then a special couple were surprised in a too intimate situation.”)
Carolina could no longer host. She became publicly inactive.

NARRATOR #4: The transition was a pleasant one. It provided her the quiet contemplative time that her youth was lacking. She was no longer a public servant.

NARRATOR #5: In her seclusion, she became a bit of a mystery.

BARBARA JOHNSON: “Women with expensive and artsy tastes can, of course, be idealized, but probably only if they project an image of graceful muteness. One has only to think of the outpouring of feeling around the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to realize the genius of the adoption of
the role of silent image from the moment of the assassination onward. Prior to that time, the woman with a taste for French cooking, redecoration, and
Oscar Wilde was a far less idealized figure in the American press. And the contrast between Jackie O’s muteness and Hillary Clinton’s outspokenness
only served to give cultural reinforcement to the notion that grace, dignity, and class could only be embodied by a woman who remains silent.”

NARRATOR #6: In the same camp as Jane Wyman, Holly Hunter, and Samantha Morton, Carolina’s role as a mute should have brought her
an Oscar. But civic duty made her an exception. And although she was only acting as a medium, the fact that she wasis vocal at all disqualified her from the award.

NARRATOR #7: Carolina is silent and inaccessible for every day except election day. And on that day a small voting booth is erected inside of her
and citizens come to cast their vote. Sweden speaks through her.

FOOTNOTE #1: From Swedish, the word “valen” can be translated twice. It can be translated to mean ‘whale’ and it can be translated to mean ‘election’.
Both words speak of enormity.

FOOTNOTE #2: In the 2008 U.S. General Election, 132,580,096 voters left their house to voice their opinion in public.

FOOTNOTE #3: “In Book II, Chapter 2 of his book ‘The Spirit of Laws’, Montesquieu states that in the case of elections in either a republic or a
democracy, voters alternate between being the rulers of the country and being the subjects of the government. By the act of voting, the people operate in a sovereign (or ruling) capacity, acting as “masters” to select their government’s “servants.””

FOOTNOTE #4: The blue whale is the largest creature that has ever existed on earth. It is bigger than 25 elephants; bigger than a Brontosaurus and a
Tyrannosaurus rex combined. A blue whale calf is about 7 m (23’) long at birth.

FOOTNOTE #5: The sounds a blue whale makes can travel thousands of miles in deep water, leading to speculation that the whales may be able to
communicate across oceans.

FOOTNOTE #6: Whales have long been a source of food, oil, and crafts’ material. A famous Japanese Proverb quotes: “There’s nothing to throw away
from a whale except its voice.”

Left: August Wilhelm Malm, Right: Carolina