Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model

Jake and Dinos Chapman answer the question of telepathy in their twinned bodies through reference to the neurologist Paul Mobius. Maia Damianovic asked Jake and Dinos Chapman if they are “trying to structure a telepathic mode of communication that blurs the psychic barrier between the interior and the exterior and calls being into question?”¹ The Chapmans’ reply (together) interprets or suggests that telepathy is connected to the ability to collapse interiority and exteriority, body and mind, self and group:

The neurologist Paul Mobius suggested that the ‘self is only an organ.’ Using the topolographical figure of the mobius strip he described the cutaneous and the subcutaneous membranes circulating the body as a single continuous plane. While this spatiality dissolves the interiority and the exteriority it also democratizes the anatomy thereby disinvesting the brain of its sovereignty. What can be said about being after that?²

There is a telepathic dimension to being in this fluidity between interiority and exteriority, and in doubling, splitting and multiplication of organs, which also has precedence in the work of the Chapmans. The Chapmans address the question of telepathy in terms of the Mobius strip, a device of endless déjà vu that they render as an extreme psychosoma. Their work with mannequin work embodies the horror and violence of zombie capitalism, viral advertising and the contagion of conjoined and ‘incorporated’ corporate thinking and being. Jake and Dinos Chapman are in dialogue with the weird realism and technoccult ideas of Mark Fisher, who helped develop the term hyperstition.

1. Maia Damianovic, “Dinos & Jake Chapman in interview with Maia Damianovic,” Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc., 1999.
2. Ibid.