ON PLANET SNAUSERO THINGS STAY IN ANY ANGEL THEIR IN UNLESS SHOVED. MOVED. LIFTED HIS 130 TON CRAFT 40 INCHES UP OFF THE SURFICE AND IT JUST SAYED THAT WAY COKED OVER SIDEWAYS TILL HE REACHED UP AND PULLED IT DOWN ANY POSITION THINGS ARE IN IS WHERE THEY STAY EVERY CREATURE THERE HAD A SMALL THING IN HIS HAND BY WHICH HE USED TO DO ALL HIS MOVEMENTS SO THE LITTLE MAN GAVE HIM ONE. AND A EXTRY ONE. WITH A EXTRY HELMENT. SO FARSON TOOK THE HAND MACHINE IN HIS HAND AND ANY SIDE HE PUSHED OR SQUEEZE ON. HE WOULD START MOVING IN THAT DIRECTION SO YOU NEVER HAD I am the egg with film looped around it on the rectangular dish. I am the robot bomb detector. I am a whole airplane’s worth of I can’t quite see what. The buildings are burning. The buildings have been hit. I am as overexposed as the lower left quadrant of the Bible’s last photograph. The front part of the gallery — the foyer for the projected film — is a giant chess game, which functions as a collective space to develop a trompe l’oeil of the delirium. The patterns of the board — which also allude to a hospital floor — are invaded by a series of assemblages that function as the main organs of a sterile machine. Téllez asked patients from a daily clinic to imagine stories of the former patients who inhabited the deserted old cells, now closed and abandoned. 1816, for example, was the “Year without a Summer,” when temperatures fell drastically in many parts of Europe and North America. Climate researchers later blamed the massive 1815 volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia. In Bologna, an astrologist prophesized that the world would end on July 18, leading to riots and suicides. Due to the permanent bad weather, a group of young English poets sojourning near Lake Geneva gave up on going outside. They decided to write ghost stories and read them aloud to one another. We know about the career of nightly dream activity from romanticism through modernism in art, culture, and science. One of the first to problematize the dream text was arguably Nerval. For psychoanalysis, which arose at exactly the same time as cinema, the dream became a language requiring decoding, and like every interpretation, it reduced what was interpreted. The surrealists largely ignored the difference between dream and dream text. In “Dream Kitsch” (1925), Walter Benjamin’s first published commentary on Surrealism, the archaeologist of modernity clear-sightedly declared, “Dreaming has a share in history.” The path to the dreaming collective was hereby sketched out. In deliberate distinction from Freud, Bachelard placed reverie opposite dream. His gay, poetic science revolved around the border realms of rationality and their availability through images. The dark side of history can be found in Charlotte Beradt’s anthology from the 1930s, first published many years later: In The Third Reich of Dreams, dreams become historical documents. Sea World is a fucking horrible place. Fuck Sea World. I buy fluoride-free toothpaste because I’m trying to activate my pineal gland. I buy chocolate eggs and tea light candles. Everyone’s tongue is pink la-la-la. I do mountain pose in yoga and kill it. I kill that pose. I breathe out of my ears. Matter looks at the history of ‘charm consultants.” What does it mean to say that your mind and brain are ‘at rest’? Why Light Inspires Ritual. To get to brass tacks, Member is about a massive planetary-scale game called Chorncendantra that is ‘the human game’ but that involves multiple worlds both real and artificial. Our main character, Mr Thanks, is unexpectedly recruited into the game as a courier to deliver small cans of spells and prizes to a construction site. “Relaxing my mind had only brought about a causeless, meaningless sadness.” I mean, “Perched there, he aims carefully at something I have trouble making out. It’s a large, solid object that seems to be browsing along the sidewalk in its own special darkness; not a blob of shadow exactly, more like a dead, uninteresting haze of grey smoke that collects around it and projects out of it in a reverse spotlight. In overall shape, it resembles a human liver, all covered in imbricated scales. A felty, transparent caul seems to envelop the entire thing, and ripples out wrinkles and folds to palpate its surroundings, making the emitter seem both solid and liquid at once”. “In that faint, brief light, I see the tendrils of smoke from each little candle immobilized like ectoplasm calligraphy, trailing from the cake.” I mean, “Somebody left a salad out on the curb, with no bowl around it.” While on a residency at Machine Project in Los Angeles I sat with eyes closed and slowly, deeply chanted DRONE, DRONE, DRONE, feeling the ancient tone quiet me. After fifteen minutes I moved from a merely unflustered state to serenity. I chanted, DRONE, DRONE, DRONE. I went out to the corner of Sunset and Alvarado. Some people thought I was crazy, but MOST PEOPLE wanted to talk, already aware of the power of chanting OM. I asked them to chant DRONE with me, to chant. I walked into Echo Park and drew a target on my left palm with red ink. I put on headphones to listen to a recording of an Israeli military mission in Gaza called “Pillar of Cloud”, a fleet of drones BUZZING in the sky 24 hours a day mixed with bombs whistling through the sky, exploding targets. Listening to the recording as loud as I could, I chanted drone, drone, drone, taking notes at the water’s edge. DAY TWO: I took the ant map to a random part of the desert, followed it to a small rock, a kind of oblivion, unexpected but solid nonetheless. I sat on the rock like an egg, wanting to hatch the rebellion! How much straining! I drew the map on my naked body behind shrubs, my third eye the nest entrance, tracing the journey in reverse, taking notes of my every memory of doing what I was told, toward some standard of goodness. HOW do we create a kind, generous, but disobedient world? Later I took a strand of cooked spaghetti, arranged it in the shape of the ant map. When it dried I took it to the entrance of the nest. I said, “I DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE OF YOU GAVE ME THIS MAP, BUT I’M GIVING IT BACK!”
[Note: Sources: Howard Finster, VISION OF 200 LIGHT YEARS AWAY SPACE BORN OF THREE GENERATIONS FROM EARTH TO THE HEAVEN OF HEAVENS : HOWARD FINSTERS VISION OF 1982, at this is water, this is water, this is water …, 16 Apr 09; JBR (my first (mis)reading); JBR, ekphrasis practiced on the photos in Revelations, in Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Holy Bible; “Javier Téllez, Games are forbidden in the labyrinth”, at e-flux; JBR; “Touch of Joy: Exercises in Imagination”, at e-flux; Ashley Opheim, “Killin’ It”, quoted in Melissa Broder, “Sunday Service: Ashley Opheim”, at HTMLGIANT, 30 Mar 014; bits from Vaughan Bell, “Spike activity 28-03-2014”, at “Mind Hacks”, 30 Mar 014; Ben Woodard, and Michael Cisco, Member, quoted in Woodard’s “This World is Leaking: A Review of Michael Cisco’s Member”, at Naught Thought, 30 Mar 014; JBR; CA Conrad, “#101: FLYING KILLER ROBOTS PLEASE: A Proper Naming (Soma)tic Ritual”, “#98: Ant Cartography”, at (Soma)Tic Poetry Rituals, 30 & 28 Mar 014]