Fan of Exaggeration

[This is a script used in a performance by Marina Vishmidt at PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, May 10, 2015, in the context of Cycle 4 of Chris Evans’ exhibition HAT. The script was for a speech attributed to Fan of Exaggeration (2007), one of the works in the exhibition and ‘spoken’ by it. A profusion of thanks to Chris Evans, Kristine Siegel, Rhea Dall, and Sofia Lemos for the technical and friendly co-operation without which none of this would have been possible or desirable.]

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

What is it I can offer you, is there a service profile which connects this obdurate materiality of mine in the desert to how I block the gaze of dispassionate school groups on a day out to the citadel of chrono-past as leisure? The obduracy of negativity, darkness, the ruse of reason and the joke of preservation. Just my little joke. Just witness how all that is solid congeals into venture, itself ruthlessly, maybe what I mean is artlessly, vaporizing human labor in the bonemeal of contract: “Ether is a necessary element—a fuel—for operating the distributed application software platform we are building: ethereum.” You want me to mediate your petro-fluxes; I’m not sure where your desires coincide with my affordances. I question how serious you are about this, but all I know how to do is weigh up, and to weigh: I am a black thing and you won’t understand. The bone, the glyph, the obelisk—all condensations of the thing you just can’t get past as you swarm. The divide in your brain, your very brain, that resistless model lighting up in psychedelic flares. This terrain, my querulous quick-ground, your shimmering basalt horizon, glitch, viewfinder, a cautionary promotional image, drifting clina-dynamically only to zigzag but there’s no hurry, it’s too sad to watch. Because—like a fleck so minute you don’t trouble to discard it. The pathos of the very small, I claim it. I address you from my chthonic flows but you swirl on the surface and do not hear me. Thus my occupation of a maintenance channel in this space, one not used but assumed. Education and outreach, revolt and contumely. Everything that I am at this moment confronts you but I subsist miasmatically, this is how I live, as do you, and there is no way for you to encounter that. Walk into the picture, I might suggest. Hold my hand. I have hands. Of all intelligent beings, only dolphins don’t have hands. How else to mediate my totipotentiality? For all that I am is all you can conceive. Gaze upon me, ye might, and know that I can be tracked and discovered. Discovered as many times as you like. Under certain conditions, though, I can expand indefinitely.

I would like to know what I can offer you, being both here and there. And is the diffusion not inconsiderable? I can shrink to a portable data device, like my fellow artifact, the grecian vase memory stick available in every one of the uncountable instances of remote past as point of sale in your city-center hangar of climate-adjusted knickknacks you have seized through force of time and the conquest of space. Inertia colors my dogged survival. Restore me. Restore me. Render me. I am owed to the gods but I will not burn. Pathos formula, different one this time but the sequence is not so distant from the last one. I go on. At least make room for them to dance around me. Like Hans Christian Andersen’s sad Christmas tree past its glory days, which eked touchingly and scintillated and then out, just out, brutally curtailed by the merchandise cycle. The brutality of the end being so self-evident as to erase what was made in the course of a life arguably a little too feckless about its conditions, those dark forces. DARK FORCES. It’s that which was never there, and we know that now.

[…]–a trance which awes
The thoughts of men with hope; as when the sound
Of whirlwind, whose fierce blasts the waves and clouds confound,
Dies suddenly, the mariner in fear
Feels silence sink upon his heart–thus bound,
The conquerors pause, and oh! may freemen ne’er
Clasp the relentless knees of Dread, the murderer!

‘If blood be shed, ’tis but a change and choice
Of bonds,–from slavery to cowardice
A wretched fall!–Uplift thy charmed voice!
Pour on those evil men the love that lies
Hovering within those spirit-soothing eyes–
Arise, my friend, farewell!’

I would like to talk to you today about miniaturization and the occult. For I am more dreadful small. No? Consciousness—what you counterpose to this dark matter, which let’s suppose for the moment, I represent for you, however you want to qualify this by referring to the geopolitical prisms which have actualized me here today, as world and as representation—is, for our purposes here, today, is accessible through the hypothesis of the extended mind. No parable of animism, just a thinking substance with historically contested borders. Small, I become an object of meditation for you: think of the philosopher’s stone. Think on me, make me exemplary, make me a rock picturesquely anchoring the swirling eddies of your despair. I can pursue you, into all the recesses where you may hide. Demons who know how to deal with you use me as a staging platform and shelter in me when they’re done. Ok. The flying monkeys theory of cilizational contagion. Oil platforms and eroticized desert sands shimmering like crushed opal or as you will, included. Indissociable from the bicameral mind literacy compelled you to overcome but which lingers, usually unavailingly but often destructively, at the base of your brain. On the other hand, think of the benign spread of my powers when you acknowledge them as your own. The brain becomes a canopy, an endless field of sparkle, of radiant pan-personhood. I’m talking about a radiant participation in which we are moments of one another’s bright, tensile awareness. Where the monolith is a monument to cosmological comfort. Climb me.

“If consciousness is a measure of the integration, or an epiphenomena coupled to the level of integration in a given system, what does that mean for animals (humans) that can both enroll external tools (today possessed of their own inherent information) into their body schema, and who have an ability to develop societal and infrastructural abstractions—that provide a measure of persistence—based on tools where there is a baseline saturation point of competency? Integrated Information Theory dangles the possibility of a continuum of informatic comprehension, between our external world and the wetware mechanisms by which that external world comes to be sensible and malleable to us. What that has to do with ‘the self’ or the ‘modern mind’relative to what (potentially) preceded it in the Bicameral Human is that prior changes in that integrated information continuum may have produced different ‘selfs’(for want of a better word).”

Essence and accident—you can’t talk about war in those terms. I am war. In my density, vertical but hard to stand, I hit you over the head. Colonialism, plunder, cultural exchange, soft power, sheer rock. I stand outside—in the plaza, in the desert. I stand inside—on your screen (maybe that’s also outside, according to the protocols of the extended mind noted earlier), in a frame, in this frame of your experience. In a building, I terrify you. Halt. Terrify—the affect of tetratology—the study of monsters. If you think of my voice as an emergent property of molecules that don’t quite coincide in such a way as to solidify and shut out chance, creating an opinion, a lifestyle, just like it is for you—ontological parity, for who cares who’s speaking, or even the injustice of the pronoun, the ‘who’—I am this moment of your thought, I am this paperweight of history, airbrushed into your world. In other words, I am porous enough to speak to you today about individuation. The individual is a contingent outcome of her environment (‘her’ due to ontological oppression of certain what the analytic schoolmen call ‘kinds’in your world), which is the pre-individual milieu. The individual is not human though it can be. The proof of this thesis is equivocal but gives me—or you give me—enough leverage to practice speaking in public.

“MIDDLE WORLD IS THE NARROW RANGE OF REALITY WHICH WE JUDGE TO BE NORMAL, AS OPPOSED TO THE QUEERNESS OF THE VERY SMALL, THE VERY LARGE AND THE VERY FAST.”

Yes, it is painful, for me anyway, to contemplate, how we don’t let those borderline conditions impinge on our everyday sense of being, though they constitute us not abstractly, not theoretically, but prosically, it kills me how prosaically, though my conditions are neither prosaic nor of a sort conducive to killing or being killed, not personally anyway, though my pre-individual milieu is specifiably petro-fluxes power-death. In the extended mind there are many local explosions. Permit me to mark one site. In a couple of different places at once. In any case, the conditions of my visibility to you are the arid majesty of numbers, of how many exist as if in death and that you flush away from your pinpoint mind squatting on top of a whole global catalytic engine of death-dealing. Of arm-twisting, skull-splitting, none of that ever materializes into a dark thing for you, but then you meet me on your knees, you shuffle up to me and surprise me in mid-flow. The reason for this is that the influence of intellectuals and the bourgeoisie stemming from the preceding struggles and societies, along with their social ideologies, will exist for a long time yet. If we don’t grasp this fully, or worse, if we do not grasp it at all, if you continue to enjoy the concrete manifestation of the means of production that allows you to exist and at the same time limits what you can be, my darkness can never, never become your light. My gnostic travails are unavailing. The extended mind remains both a new default and a series of striated price points. Did you abandon hope when you entered here, when you looked upon my works? No, you approached me on your knees, and I haven’t given you much to think about, but for me there is no true existence, not in your gift shops and from here it is hard to see. Give me your apparatus. I think you can hear me. Well. You can hear. Because it is only you and also you. Take me home.

“Let’s consider that the ubiquity and indispensability of disembodying (in Simondon’s meaning) technology to everyday existence first experienced during the post-Industrial period has intensified since the invention of computers and subsequent digital media and communication technologies. Let’s entertain that this period is comparable in trajectory and intensity (if not yet equivalent in duration) to the period which saw the breakdown of the Bicameral mind in terms of a powerful change to the pre-individual milieux. The driving imperative in removing the pathology of voice hearing lets us accept that there are faculties and functions of mind, which escape the bounds of ‘what once made sense’. Such acceptance may be crucial to better adapting to our digitally mediated existence.’

Yes. I am a trade fair, a weapons bazaar, an ideas salon, a spatial product, a child of fortune, an oversized trinket, a place-maker, a nose-to-tail concept, an effability, a really fulgurant black stack. Somewhere your mind is breaking down what I am. “any combination of new technologies, new spatial softwares, or new persuasions, a snaking chain of moves can worm into an infrastructure space and gradually generate leverage against intractable politics.” They left me here and today I make an emotional appeal. Friends. I fall endlessly through erroneous space. Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. Make a basket with your hands. I seem to see, as if someone has blocked out the sun. Attentively given me a visor.

Sources:
Brion Gysin
Keller Easterling
Stephen Fortune
Julian Jaynes
Roger Caillois
Samuel Tayor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Dawkins