The Things that Knowledge Cannot Eat

THE, THINGS UW — KNOWLEDGE CANNOT EAT: MANIFESTED ENERGIES IN Pat OF UISTANN eee Delphi Carstens & Mer Roberts

- FICTION AS METHOD melting boundaries between things. process. intensity surface. Melting things into boundaries. material. reality productionslidingin. Orphan Drift came online in 1995, a hive mind subsuming individual identity in a radical experiment with subjectivity to produce a singular artist avatar that operated as a fiction from the start. Its signal, manifesting through audiovisual installations, collage and animation, experimental text and performance, revolves around encounters with speculative narrative, ecology, quantum universes and ancient cosmologies, presence and futurity. It is intended to engage viscerally, imaginatively, and speculatively with a wide temporal and material spectrum. This text looks at OD’s fiction-generating methodologies, focusing mostly on the Meshed Digital Unlife Catacomic (1999), Liquid Lattice (2006), the videos Black Water, ghost prescient (2015) and Green Skeen (2016), as well as the unfinished Unruly City. These pieces explore the lineaments of what the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) calls hyperstition: coincidence intensifiers, time travel, ancient shamanism, quantum science, and the uncanny. The Ceru is a collaborative accelerations-theory-fiction generator founded at the University of Warwick in the early 1990s; their collected writings have recently been published by Urbanomic.' Our intention here is to enmesh sorcerous theory with affective becomings via textual cut-ups and unraveled poesis. These have always been elements in OD’s methodology: a claustrophobic excess of aesthetic relations, disparate images, cultural references, and fragments that crowd and push, inhabiting space, spreading, overlapping and mixing in feedback loops. Tracing the uncanny beginnings of the OD avatar, materializing out of the far edges of critical posthuman science fiction, through Cyberpositive (1995) and the Catacomic, we delve into the signal’s current search-engine mode, -194-

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGECANNOTEATcontinually vacillating between speculative fiction, familiarity, and otherness, scanning unreal environments across dimensions and time scales. For us, science fiction (SF) is produced out of cultural necessity, helping us imagine futures that slide toward us under the surface of the present. Fictions as transformational tools inhabit experimental realities, helping us to weave space, time, and matter into fluid, temporary configurations. Meshwork, as we will define it, pictures “things” on a supernatural scale perceivable only at the shadowy edges of daily experience, where vast geophysical changes meet the constructions of culture, where rational meets the irrational, and visible the invisible.’ Something Is Assembling Deep Dream code images are developed from code based on Google’s machine-learning Al software. Looking for patterns it has been trained to recognize, the code makes slight but repeated changes to whatever images have been fed to it until image resembles pattern. Could these images—some uncanny, others almost inhumanly farcical—be early AI artworks or premature glimpses of Singularity? Something is assembling, and the boundaries of fiction dissolve. OD fictions express the future as a frequency. Unmoored, moving, mutating in order to communicate, they feel out the edges where the once familiar unravels, charting new courses through the hyperreal, Initially they moved through hallucinogenic, machineenvisioned psychogeographies, producing audiovisual environments, mapping distortion, inhabiting interzones. They were, and still are, meshworks: maps of the future made by those who only -195-

- FICTION AS METHODpartially inhabit the present. The routes they plot reach toward and through what Dostoevsky calls the “bliss” of violent seizure; a moment for which “you'd give your whole life,” a “timeless instant” when you suddenly understand “the meaning of that singular expression: there will no longer be time.”> Meshworks picnoleptically reach into missing time, grasping for new senses, conjuring infinite variations of new sensations and speeds. Moving randomly, describing what cannot be described, they reach into uncanny spaces, seeking out future time. Fictions that have emerged from the “collective unconscious software” have gathered momentum and now produce reality.* Fictions become tools, such as magic once was, for transformation, for colonizing experimental realities, weaving space, time and matter into fluid, temporary configurations. We are positing the presence of a dark haecceity—a spectral folding of becoming oriented around the future tense of SF. For us, cyberspace is an uncanny adjacency, not a safe space behind a screen or a bland realm of sameness in which third-rate copies endlessly proliferate. When OD and the Ccru came online during the 1990s, “experiments in the unknown,” crafted as viable alternatives to the closure of postmodernism, had become “unavoidable for a philosophy caught in the abstractive howl of postpolitical cybernetics.”* This “howl” was, and still is for us, more affectively real than abstract. Rogue biotechnological constructs, some already assembling, others yet to be actualized, were already hovering ghostlike on the surfaces of the present. Today, more pervasively than in the 1990s, synthetic realities inhabit almost every sphere of the global social spectrum, yet humans continue to call them fictions. Positing the continued relevance of affect and aesthetics, we prefer to name them -196-

~DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTShyperstitions. Meanwhile, that which dreams deeper, in between and adjacent to the all-pervasive electronic flows, continues to evolve. 0D’s SF theory-fiction, Cyberpositive (1995), and our collaboration with the Cceru, the Meshed Digital Unlife Catacomic (1999)—as well as our continuing audio-visual output— seek out the spectral vitality of this emergent new materiality: the thisness, hereness and nowness of the space of flows oriented around a forward momentum, aimed at an audience yet to come. OD’s methodology grafts fiction with fact, generating hyperstition as a paraspatial rhizome, a dark and contagious haecceity that emanates from glitches in hyperreality’s seamless ever-present. A flickering shadow of the yet-to-arrive throws a supernatural ly tinged darkness across the perpetual day of information. Fiction and fact conflate. Mediated humans, homogenized by social media proliferation, can no longer tell the difference anyway. In this scenario, some believe that there’s nothing left for theory or practice to say: “all models of representation and antirepresentation” have been absorbed into “the totalising aesthetic of the commodity,” and fiction has lost its critically negative function.® Hyperstition, as a fiction-generating methodology, subverts postmodern panic theory by making intensity maps of the “psychic impact” of “new machines” and the processes they are engendering.’ Enchanted with dark sciences, sinister resonances, and retrochronally manifested semio-viruses, hyperstition is a “Chinese puzzle-box that opens to reveal numerous sorcerous interventions in the world.”® Using the central concerns of SF—novum (making new) and the sense of wonder—hyperstitional cyberneticists construct their workings around the affective registers of horror and the supernatural. -197-

A SPREADING ACROSS BORDERS, A SHEDDING OF AN ING INTO RAD SS

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOTEATHorror and the unknownorstrange are always connected,so thatit is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law and cosmic alienage or “outsideness” withoutlaying stress on the emotionof fear.° Shamanism has always used panic as a portal opener, reaching through it into states anterior, exterior, or completely beyond the scope of what it means to be human, Artist Bonnie Camplin, in conversation with Hili Perlson, links SF to the shamanic paintingmagic enacted in the firelit gloom of the Chauvet caves some 30,000 years ago. While the shamans were engaged in sorcerous reality manipulation, they were also living “outside of time in dreams of thousands of years past or hence [..] know[ing] the impossible.”!° Through twisted poesis and unravelling, the techniques of shamanic ecstasy can facilitate a spreading across borders, a shedding of skin, an unravelling into radical otherness. Occasionally, SF becomes hyperstitional in an analogous manner, enacting an archaic shamanic trickster ritual of supernaturally infused time travel and reality production. Like ancient technicians of ecstasy, OD fictions embrace uncanny adjacencies, “motion capturing virtualised sampled frequencies from different registers,” connecting them together into a new type of “nervous system” in the process of being “reshaped for a new kind of state.”" Move toward What Is Approaching A universethatisn’t this one has trade routes now.” Making the invisible in some sense visible is the task of the shaman, who abolishes metaphor by constructing a passage to the beyond, instigating a radical break between planes of knowing and being.'* -199-

- FICTION AS METHOD- What shamanism offers OD, as a fiction-generating methodology, is the possibility of a new affective vision, one that is capable of mobilizing somatic voyages into transformative practices. This tricksterism requires an intuitive talent for affective interaction with things beyond the human. It requires a layered language that ranges across multiple terrains of knowledge production and affective registers, circling around and sampling from myriad conceptual zones. Sliding around things into possibility space involves accessing the interzone or axis mundi that lies betweenand across all worlds/planes.'* This is fiction as “suprasensible fact [..] a paradoxical passage” that uses the transformative potential of fear, panic and transgressive ecstasy to facilitate a passage to the beyond.'* Shamanic fiction instigates a line of flight that taps into a higher disorder of nature—the machinic phylum of self-organizing processes that move transversally across the strata. Becoming is always of a different order than filiation, explain Deleuze and Guattari, refering to evolutionary becomings and mappings that cut across different kingdoms of life and unlife: Becoming[...] concerns alliance. If evolution includes any veritable becomings,it is in the domain of symbiosesthatbring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms,with no possiblefiliation [...]. Accordingly, the term weprefer for this form of evolution between heterogeneoustermsis “involution,” on the condition that involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is involutionary,involutionis creative.[...] Becomingis a rhizome, not a classificatory or genealogicaltree.[...] Becoming is a verb with a consistencyall its own.'® Becomings move transversally as interwoven kingdoms, unnatural participations that span the organic and the inorganic, the -200-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTSmaterial and the disincarnate.'” Of shamanic/trickster becoming, Robert Pelton writes, “The trickster is not an archetype but an entelechy—an active form shaping both ends and means.”!* The trickster/shaman embodies the transforming power of the imagination that pokes, plays with, and shatters assumptions of culturally imposed concepts of both origin and boundary. In SF and SF-related artistic and theoretical praxes, the hyperstitional or sorcerous potentialities of information-age advances in computing, molecular engineering, and cosmology have engendered exudations of style that reflect on the stories of the future in terms of invisible webs and occulted strangeness.'? Fiction as Intuition, Pattern Recognition, Channeling Device Malidoma Patrice Somé discusses the incongruence between materialism and the supernatural. While, as he writes, “the supernatural is that which knowledge cannot eat,” a symbiosis between these apparent incommensurables occurs, for OD, in the presence of the uncanny.?° We sensed this uncanny adjacency while channeling Cyberpositive, as Nick Land explains in his introduction to a recent reprint: It gathered beyondthescreens[...] scanning us. It announced itself as a ceaseless, wavering hum,patterns of disturbedlight, and thoughts that were moved outof place, gently but continuously, towards compliance with thearrival. Perhaps mostobviously,it upset the snakes. Oneretreated, unreachably,intoitself, or elsewhere. The other wentfuriously -201-

OO - FICTION AS METHOD- insane, coiling psychotically intoits kill reflex, and experimenting with telepathy. Of course, they were muchtooclosetoit, in numerous ways. We were unableto recall any distinction between horrors, ecstasies, and abysmalsilences.In this strange compressed epoch, gashed open onto alien immensities,it delivered an uncompromised reality signal.”" The uncanny describes troubled nature-culture relations, a ghostlike porosity of boundaries between fiction and fact celebrated by indigenous peoples but denied and reviled by postEnlightenment Western ways of seeing. The uncanny describes a situation in which “the escape clause is confounded” as we find ourselves entangled in “a strangeness given to dissolving all assurances about [stable] identity.”%? The uncanny, for OD, can be located in a creeping realization of the fundamental chaos lurking in the tiny lawless spaces between things, the essential thingness of the world, as well as in the dawning horror that, as Nicholas Royle puts it, “we are taking the world to pieces in ways and speeds beyond our control.”?> In SF, such “cognitive estrangement”—‘“the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the experienced world”—is set up via “shifts in time” and narrative displacements.** These are good guidelines for a fiction-generating methodology that approaches the real via the impossibility of totalizing perspectives, defamiliarizations, and a trickster-like fanged poesis. For OD, and others who choose to align themselves with the science fictional, fiction works as a strategy for generating an intuitive science/magic that marks the arrival of “an unexpected force.”*> Today OD is working with hyperobjects and shadowtime in these terms. -202- |

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGECANNOTEATLiquid Lattice (2006) is an oracular lattice generated from ancient numerological traditions of Black Atlantean occult cosmology, “rediscovered” by the Ccru and spliced onto by 0D. Our text generates iterations of uncanny affective becomings, at once slimy and artificial, fusing biotech with monstrous feminine archetypes, AI with xenofeminism, and SF with San and Xhosa mythos. Dark-mottled extraterrestrials and abstract vibrational swellings haunt a shoreline filled with allusions to liquid and desolate borderlands. The Deleuzo-Guattarian influences are myriad: the inhabited body is multiple and deterritorialized, made to morph across zones of virtual and somatic possibility, experiencing shamanic possession and smeared across the body without organs (the body in the process of becoming, Bw0). The spatio-temporality is a spiraling, elastic territory marked by electric surges and cuts between iterations of a she-trickster’s xenoamphibious becomings, a distributed consciousness from the future dispensing with evolutionary history, smoothing out, dreaming its way into tactile silence. Pylons, a Black Atlantean spatial frame of reference for the slave-ship crossings, punctuate the narrative of Liquid Lattice. Electrical surges, amphibians and octopoids, Dogon Nomo twins, dark-mottled extraterrestrials, as well as vibrational swellings are made to inhabit abstract oceans of dispersed becomings. Time is dealt with as artificial territory and textual currents made to follow afrofuturistic spaces of elastic time. Dispensing with a linear sense of evolutionary history, a distributed consciousness emerges to the refrain “the devouring and reconstituting of you.”** Some extracts culled from the text illuminate the code-swapping processes at work in this ravening: ~203-

- FICTION AS METHODBewarethe material pirates crossing, hiddenin riptide liquid gunshot. The dreamersare urgent and hungry for touch. The powercuts. Stars lie on the water to mark the place wherethestories haveto enter. Anarea of space-time with a gravitationalfield so intensethat its escapevelocity is equal to or exceeds the speed oflight. Processis always being reimagined. The changesare hiddenin the numbers. In due courselike attracts like and opposites repel. They wait. The powercuts. Abstraction, accumulation, obscurity and containment. The sorcery lies south, currents cloudy anddistributed. An unfinished city, a lattice, crystalline. An interdimensional dwelling. Permament impermanence.A cipher. Land becoming water, water becoming land. Tsunamis, desertifications, hurricanes and floods. Sinkholes, fissures, faultlines. Water draining out from underneatha city. The ground is moving beneath the feet. Beyond the great sea, poisoned and slowly dying, ready to shapeshift. Random catastrophesin the resonant storm. Her handsslip languid from their hold as the floodwaters cover her trapped face. She looks up throughthe eerie light beams. A murky surrender.Herrolling eyes are so exactly the colour of the ocean,it’s as if you are seeing the water through two holesin her head. The ancestorsnursetheir meiotic secrets and intelligent life stays amphibious, the stranger and more viscous the further back you go. The clonesare crossing, dark-mottled extraterrestrials with memories of drowning. Oxygenation spreads through the bloodstream,the delirium of being in matter. They have waited so long for this. Porous creatures pick through shadows buzzing with communication systems. The Dead program an Al and an Al programs the Dead. Undonenarratives in a sensory and cognitive environmentof time so looped andspiralling you need a high tolerance for chaos. Behind the face something from a different anatomybulges underthe skin. A chemical hybrid plunges outwards, nomad body emergent.This time, the spine is reabsorbed, dispensing -204-

- FICTION AS METHOD- with evolutionary history. This time, so many osmotic skins, so many black mouths. Shaped for meat and chemicals. Thefast star voice, the-one-that-shimmers.It crosses time and disappears, mimetic with the outside, seeking modification by every other world. You needa fascination with thresholds,orifices and dissolution. Finding a seam betweenzones,giving shapeto the dark. You missedits dazed and moonwhite eyes. Shadowskin waitingin therising drift, building resistance to the glow. A species evolving to conceive and solve vast andintricate abstractions.It resists emerging into encased sentience and has a dangerouslackofsensitivity to the chemicals after continuous exposure. Currents receive camouflage.Riptides, hidden roads, mineral secrets. Somatic aching for the even pressure and icy temperature of heavy water. The dark road up through the Milky Way, powersurges through the channels to make the changes. It would blow your mind and your machines,wereit to escape the regulated pathwaysandreturn to thelightning. Chaos Maker removes the ghosts ofthe visible intruders. The self doubles again, mirrored separates on bothsidesofan invisible portal. They project phantom limbs and spreadfictions. Radio feedback hisses and seethes underwater. The powercuts. Mirror is the strongest wave. Shadow crossing over. Its rain body blind and concentrated in many patterns, rhythms extending in space,raining myriad spots of awarenessthat fadeat its extremities.”” SF as Hyperstition Despite the scenario in which even language and artistic expression are complicit with the totalizing aesthetic of spectacle, fiction is productively wielded in acts of negation and inversion that make radical demands on the -206-

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOT EATimagination, creativity, and desire. In Cyberpositive the “white darkness” of “possession space” is inserted into the fracture line where science and the supernatural conflate, where the space of flows and the space of places collide.?* The Old Ones of the crossroads, the gods of places and things, are combined with wildly proliferating digital avatars, bringing a “wasp nest of shaman connectors” into focus.?? The Meshed Digital Unlife Catacomic inhabits this space, invoking the “Mesh,” the zone through which hyperstition moves across cultural vectors, forming itself “out of the spaces beneath and between the net [..] consisting out of feral noise in the divisional signal fabric, arranging a set of demonic interzones in wormhole space.”*° Exploiting the transformative nature of panic, hyperstitional horror stages an anastrophic inversion of the crisis of the hyperreal by imagining technological intrusion through actions of mysterious forces, time-traveling potentials, coincidence intensifications, and self-fulfilling prophecies, seeking out the murmuring of the ontological continuum beneath ephemeral historical manifestations. This “exploration of alternative spaces [and] migration through alternative anomalies” continues in our present work.*! Our aim is that of SF overall, which, as China Miéville notes, seeks to facilitate a “radicalised sublime backwash” from the “beyond back into the everyday.”** The sense of the sublime, which OD fiction seeks to undomesticate or unshackle, imagines the future as haecceity, in terms of constellations of “affects and experiences, movements and speeds.”** In keeping with the playful perversions recommended by Deleuze and Guattari and other psychic nomads, 0D fiction takes the words, meanings, theories, experiences, and images of the hyperreal and places them in an opposing context: “a perspective from which the world [may be] given a fluidity -207-

- FICTION AS METHODand motion with which the static mediocrity of the spectacle can be negated,”** By extracting signal from SF’s supernatural and scientific fusions, its time-travel scenarios, its mappings of possibility space, and its bizarre imaginings of posthuman hybridities, OD fictions enact a kind of creative involutionism. The Catacomic was created as a guide or manifesto to accompany the SYZYGY (1999) installation at Beaconsfield Arts, London, an event organized around a fictional calendar inhabited by five avatars. The three main interlocking themes explored in the sensorial-cybernetic environment—haptic space, time crises, and artificial agencies—acted as a template for generating hyperstitional SF. These themes are essential tools for perceiving and navigating hyperstitional circuits, partially hidden and partially apparent, which together form a map of our contemporary imaginary. Artificial Agencies, transients across the face of matter[...] tearing at the frayed sensitive edges[...] vehicles[...] producing wantandclones[...] a new species.as interface. a facilitator. reflector membrane.its territory is the real. prowl emergent.*® SYZYGY’s Catacomic handbook is set up as a labyrinth, with the opening pages offering a numbered diagram resembling the Kabbalistic tree of life, with a facing page containing a list of definitions (including one of hyperstition) to offer readers occult clues with which to navigate the text. The meshed structure was driven, in part, by the cosmology of the Dogon of Mali, whose cosmos is a vast system of correspondences, layered -208-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTSmeanings, and planes that interlock, mirror, and interrelate like curves on a spiral. Catacomic’s virtual population of twin avatars or demons establish circuits between technology and rumor, and information and mystery. These entities did not distinguish themselves as either “artificial” or “real.” Prue Nort writes that “what these documents unmask is nothing less than the fundamental dubiousness of phenomenal reality itself.”*° Not fiction, then, in any “trivial sense of the word,” but an “explicit tactical assault.”*”’ As Land remarks of hyperstition: “Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been.”** With that said, it’s time to meet the demon twinnings which the Ccru and OD set out in the SYZYGY demon twin avatar set (1999); each a rhythm, each a fiction crossing paths: TWIN FOCUS: KATAK THE DESOLATOR NETSPAN[5<>4][5pressure4melt] TRAVELSIN: lightning,electricity. thunder storms. COLOURS: reds and electric blue vein. DYNAMIC PRESENCE: pressure, heat, volcano, sun gods,bladed sun tonguesandspirals,friction, fusion. LIGHT ASPECT: lasers,radiation burns,(artificial) electricity. SNAKE ASPECT: serpentbattles, vibrational density of conductors, the lightning snake connector. METAL ASPECT: nuclear conductor, unstable atomicstructures. BLOOD ASPECT: spreadingto the outside, oxygen/ heart system, bloodlines, heart sacrifices to the sun. DIGITAL ASPECT: sun pulse,laser. MAGNETICFIELDS: radiating outandtargetingin. -209-

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOTEAT- TWIN FOCUS: DJINXX SPL/CE NETSPAN|[6<>3] [6vortek3psyclone] TIME RELATION: invisibles. outside time. TRAVELS IN: metal weapons,military in ourtime, evolving into machine feedback. COLOURS: greenandblack. DYNAMIC PRESENCE: nomad war machine,fluid metal body, digital reduction, antagonistic, memory lapses, warrior turbulence, dilated now. LIGHT ASPECT: strobing. SNAKE ASPECT: dangerheld here,speed catatonia rush (from zero to speed), hiss rattle, immediate responding, predatoreffects, total body memory. METAL ASPECT: weapons,spike jewellry,iridium, acid etch. BLOOD ASPECT: autosacrifice, blood becoming smoke, personified blood, burning blood to summonthe nomad war machine. DIGITAL ASPECT: preverb,the soundoftimetravel, fast chittering strobe,turbulenceofdifferent speedsat the sametime. MAGNETIC FIELDS: full on labyrinth, spiky andrelentless. TWIN FOCUS: XES ODDUBB NETSPAN|[7<>2] [7transcience2lure] TIME RELATION: timerider. passes on time. TRAVELS IN: the essential ofthe desiring machine. incites your want,enjoysyour seduction. knowsecstasy and deeppain. COLOURS: radiating golds and coppers,alien pinks andreds. DYNAMIC PRESENCE: physical takeover,physicaltelepathy, trickster tease, the third eye, bacterial sex, -211-

- FICTION AS METHODstrangeattractors, stuff finds you, distraction andglamour,luxurious deceiver. LIGHT ASPECT: glitter, glimmer, glow, prismatic light, sun bathing, colour absorption. SNAKE ASPECT: erotic tentacles, kundalini zones, skin memory andabsence,tempter. METAL ASPECT: magnetic attractors, currency(deception), precious metals. BLOOD ASPECT: circulation-currents, dangerous communication, transport system. DIGITAL ASPECT: complexity, strobe doubles, skins/surfaces/ layers of perception, planes of sound, feedback, unusual familiars. she makesvisualeffects by telepathy. MAGNETIC FIELDS: telepathic strange attractor labyrinths. TWIN FOCUS: MURMUR NETSPAN[8<>1] [8comatoneldeep] TIMERELATION: timerider. passes on time. TRAVELS IN: camouflage, tidal rhythms andperceptual warping. webmaker,tracker, navigator. COLOURS: violet pattern invisibles and ultraviolet blues. DYNAMIC PRESENCE: immersive,fluid, water monsters and waves, morphing,the old ones, alchemical. LIGHT ASPECT: lights that search,light bending, moonlight, cold light, deep heavy darks. SNAKE ASPECT: skin camouflage, navigatesin all spatial planes METAL ASPECT: circuitry, wirings,optical fibres, liquid metals (fluid spine), vibrational ocean. (mercury), shifting betweensolid andliquid states. BLOOD ASPECT: lunar bleeding, wombblood, heavy blood. -212-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTS- DIGITAL ASPECT: fluid image mutation and morphing, echoes undersea, wet metal soundeffects, slow sounddiffraction, gradually falls apart. MAGNETIC FIELDS: perceiver andinvisible timetides(rip tides). thereis no zero. TWIN FOCUS: UTTUNULIIS NETSPAN[9<>0] [9black mirrorOflatline] TIME RELATION: invisibles. outside time. TRAVELSIN: digital unlife,flatline, feeds blood to the shadows. COLOURS: shadow luminescence. DYNAMIC PRESENCE: machine memory deepinside, blanks around minutelines of detail, the time travel avatar, extraterrestrial geometries, molecular movement, disassembly,the furthest out(pluto) and the deepest within(core), undead, zombi. LIGHT ASPECT: shadow,eclipse shadow,thresholds, blackmirror, total dark but seeringlylight. SNAKEASPECT: snakeinsideitself, shadowbody, body without organs,virtual states of snakeness, blank eyes. METAL ASPECT: core ofthe earth, cthell, molten underworld, zombie powder. BLOOD ASPECT: bruises underice,total stillness, blood the substance, artificial blood trails that cuts throughtime. DIGITAL ASPECT: smooth changes,subbass,the highpitch of the nervoussystem, things get replaced but you don’t know why. MAGNETIC FIELDS: full on labyrinth, endlessly folding moebiusstrips. howdoyou knowit’s there?artificial lifeforms and a darkness.” -213-

- FICTION AS METHODKombinayzonFictions In the science-fictional world of megalopian urban sprawl, where underdevelopment and high-tech control intersect, “the street tries to find its own uses for things.”*° Conjuring up an affinity with the repetitive communality of Vodou’s rhythm signatures and its shamanic circuit-diagram maps/veves, the visceral vibrations of afrofuturistic sonic styles make their impact on bodies, brains, and local economies. The kombinayzon art of Haitian Vodou enacts a violent healing along a similar trajectory, combining an iconoclastic fiction technique and cullings from disparate sources to create something new, replacing prior forms, boundaries, and perceptions with unique amalgamations influenced by different histories and experiences, often with irreverent allusion to First/Third World dynamics. Fiction “charges up” the artwork, which in Vodou involves a pragmatic channeling of energy into devotional dolls or sculptures. This process of “kombinayzon” became a platform for OD to understand the way cultural processes transform and rupture: merging forms and affects together smoothly, jamming them together awkwardly, or exploding them into new hybrid combinations. Through offerings made of magical kombinayzons of imagery and substance, ruptures and trance-inductions, the invisible planes lie open to the visible. Octavia Butler’s afrofuturist SF enacts something similar; a dark charging or channeling, appealing to those who, because already at home in alienating lifeworlds, can imaginatively and productively enter into perverse symbiotic allegiances with the alien.*! Conflating the gorgeous and scary, the dystopian and utopian, 0D’s affinity with Vodou’s kombinayzon, as well as the -214-

THROUGH OFFERINGS MADE OF MAGICAL KOMBINAYZONS IMAGERY SUBSTANCE,

~ FICTION AS METHODfrequencies of urban sonic and science fictions, reflects Butler’s afrofuturist impulse: a dark synergism of human, animal, machine, and alien “collaged together as a tactic for defying the tyrannical, taxonomical order of seeing.”** As visual and perceptual registers, our visual kombinayzons are mostly reimagined from a neo-futuristic point of view. The culture of sampling, montage, and collage, and the essence of the work being rooted in change, transformation, and overlapping temporal scales, has carried through from the ‘90s into the work we make now, which involves (as it always has) attending to impossible stories. As 0D’s Ranu Mukherjee puts it: Fiction hasto do with the desire to create belief in something even thoughit is madeofpixels, paint, fragments of paper,cloth, etc. It also manifests as a constellation of things needing connecting, collage-like, that becomeoneon surface, and although you can see the seams,thereis a leap of faith. Fiction is the way to bring togetherthings from different realms of experience(political/ historical, mythical, bodily). Fiction is a way of recognizing the importance of the experiential in the making of meaning.It can protect the unknownorthe unexpected from constantly being explained away. Weare generating fictions that resist the way the contemporary humanimagination has been hijacked by communications and entertainment media that imagine and producea future on behalf of humanity, exposing things that are not getting exposure and making spacefordifferent senses of time.*® -216-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTS- Makingthe Unthinkable Thinkable In some sense, Cyberpositive was never really fiction,but an uncompromised reality signal, a channeling or aesthetic diagnosis of the infection-prone condition of the space of flows. The same is true of more recent incarnations of OD fiction, which continue to explore different ways of expressing not only the defamiliarization of urbanity’s alienating lifeworlds, but also the shock to anthropocentrism delivered by cosmology’s arche-fossils and deep futures. Science, with its particle accelerators, electron microscopes, deep space probes, and information-processing devices, has, in the 0D ontology, become a supernatural medium, offering affect-laden glimpses into that which lies radically beyond human givenness. New ways of looking, such as vibrant materialism and Deleuzo-Guattarian praxes, bring into focus the novel paraspatial configurations and ontological reality-mixing that contemporary scientific advances have heralded. Mythopoesis, that “violent intensification” or “enthrallment” that “breaks all bridges between the concrete datum and the systematized totality of experience,” continues to be a vital and transformative medium, even under the aegis of cold and impersonal science.** American physicist Richard Feynman, for instance, believes that science depends on “the necessary and dynamic motion of mystery.”*5 Negative capability, the ability to be at home with the unthinkable and precarious, as well as the ecstatic “sendings on before” of shamanism, Vodou, SF, and other forms of mythopoesis, remain critical weapons for fictiongenerating methodologies that seek out the embodied posthuman. The tendency of the processes and products of the information age to generate pure, unbound intensities demands schizoid strategies for generating affective and transversal future-oriented fictions that bypass the catastrophe of the hyperreal. -2i7-

- FICTION AS METHODSchizoanalysis takes place “within the uncanny and the unrecognizable, in the sensible and the affective, in the element of a transcendental indiscernibility [and within] imbricated multiplicities [that reflect] the density of the real itself.”*° OD fictions follow such a schizoanalytic trajectory, flattening differences and oppositions (of scale, register, and domain, and so on) onto a single plane, the “plane of consistency” or of “immanence.”*” Black Water, ghost prescient (2015) inhabits a schizoanalytic immanence, presenting a navigational mapping of contemporary crises. Oily, toxic, melting oceans merge with a simultaneous and virtual dimension of viscous liquefaction that exposes quantum, artificial, and futural currents. For Orphan Drift, such dimensions are sites of becoming and radical change, zones where prescience meets intensifying and encroaching futures and sidesteps into possibility space. The 0D encounter with liquidity has urgent resonance with today’s drowning and melting world, Saturation and mesmerism invoke the promise of a future beyond catastrophe where the membranes and skins that contain us are dissolved. The focused gaze is dismantled with tactics of suspension, overproximity, and excess. Trembling textures are materialized in somatic space by an immersive, tactile soundscape, melting the border between virtual and material. Black Water is inhabited by ghostly silver observers and hooded avatars, conceived well before Mylar survival blanketclad bodies became synonymous with a “migrant crisis” still demanding European action and acknowledgment of complicity. Hooded figures reference media archetypes of urban protest and environmental activism, faces hidden from the gaze of the panopticon. -218-

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOTEAT- Mesh,Holes, Hooksfor the Future An uncanny “glittering void of possibility” begins to emerge where scientific extrapolation merges with the fantastic registers of the supernatural, revealing “a threat growing at the heart of our profoundly technologised society.”** SF, which begins by describing “encounters with strange animals” and technologies, finally reaches “the ultimate regions of a Continuum inhabited by unnameable waves and unfindable particles.”*? M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy extends this aesthetic, merging the internalized infinities of cyberspace with the infinitudes of time-space and dark energies.*° Where technological empowerment is undercut by incomprehensibility and an occult system of references, the contours of a new terrain for fiction can be sensed. Depicting the future as an enigmatic god, cybergothic fictions use supernatural horror and sublime terror to glimpse the alien contours of a new world, to creatively imagine incomprehensible sciences and understandings that defy pure reason and logic. Asthe netintegrates, it simultaneously frays into mesh: an intensive subspace whichboth escapesandparasitically occupies it. Mesh makesitself out of the spaces beneath and betweenthenet, and in the biotechnic intervals between net-components: necessarily — but coincidentally — assembling a fully connective system whereverit propagates. Any two mesh pausesalwaysinterlink. Mesh consists of feral noisein the divisional signal fabric, arranging a set of demonic interzones in wormhole space, as cyberspace-utopia dissolves into pandemonium.*' Demons are “hidden, repressed, cursed or denigrated non-human communicative agencies [..] entities that traffic between zones.”° -219-

- FICTION AS METHODThey are “the sign-bearers: powers of the leap, the interval, the intensive and the instant.”*? The Catacomic’s demon avatars allude to spaces that exist within, beneath, and between the nodes of the planetary electrosphere. More recent OD work continues to use these liminal avatars as fictional tools for perceiving and navigating, because their peculiarity is “to operate in the intervals [..] to leap over the barriers or the enclosures, thereby confounding the boundaries between properties.”** As agents of the sublime, demons point toward the continued relevance of sublimity for fictional strategies aimed at “liberating excess” and thereby speaking to both “the present and the future.”*> Linked to other bodies, objects, and fields of intensity around it via connective flows, demons allude to the exploratory body (the body without organs) and its energies—whether textual or physical, actual or imagined—the keyholders of a kind of creative mutation. The hyperreal/hyperstional demon body occupies the unstable state of the Mesh. It is a fictional body in the process of becoming liquid, becoming something fluid, receptive to microwaves and electromagnetic vibrations as well as thresholds and gradients of information. Formed in such a way “that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities,” the BwO is “the matrix of intensity [where] matter equals energy”: it is fluid, affective, and “virtual.”*° This is fiction beyond temporality, “uncovered at the point where schizoanalysis meets Lovecraftian horror.”5’ Here are the open spaces between codes, the hooks on which to hang the future; here is where fiction “dissolves into the material flows of desire,” where it “cross[es] over into the dark white pools of organic matterflow [..]. The burning living tornado moan of absolute matter” doing its thing.*® Green Skeen (2016) is a filmed demon/avatar ritual and performance by Orphan Drift and Plastique Fantastique. It began -220-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTS- with an J Ching hexagram and channeled technoanimal avatars to manifest its changes. The narrative invokes masked technoanimals gathering in the night to unwrap a fake bearskin and dye it green in a blue-screened studio. Waiting for it to dry, they announce their origins, purpose, and powers before clothing a composite technoanimal in the green-screen fur and guiding it out into the dawn light. The composite carries a shivering pulse of static and green-screened dimension flux in its artificial bright skin. Slowly it intends to replace bits of cityscape with its blue- and green-screened alternate realities. In Part 2, it will summon its others once more to launch the Ultimate App at a smartphone superstore venue near you, catalyzing planetary technogenesis. One of OD’s Green Skeen technoanimals is Husher, a time-traveling ghost from future time who is wired to event horizons. Husher has infiltrated financial market algorithms in order to monitor escalations in human panic and paranoia in response to climate change, migrant flows, biotech, and AI developments, all fueling the moment it searches for. Here is Husher’s demonic matrix of intensity: # ritual, technoanimal, Orphandrift, plastique fantastique, experimental video, electronica, animism, techgnogenesis, climate change,bitcoin, algorithms, masks, nanotechnology, Deep Dream code, green screen, blue screen,virtual reality, mixed reality. HUSHER... it am Husheris digital snarl, one part we is dark, absorbing light, anotherpartlight travelling fast, ghostside ... HUSHERborn ina trophic cascade: those processes causedby predators transforming the placesin which they live—the soil, behaviourof rivers, chemistry of oceans, composition of atmosphere... Husher, dark trickster, rarely -221-

- FICTION AS METHOD- visible, coupling, moves at speed through dimensionsin swirls. Husher, adambuilt above lead deposits to be to exposed for mining. When the dam wasfull, it'd breach and the water would rush downthehillside, sweeping away the overburden... sweeping away the world in sludgeavalanches... then we movedto inhabit liquid crystal display screens, reflections glimmer mirage two.It shadow us. dormantin oceangyres. Turbulenceis it’s our circulatory system. In maelstromsit has access to time spirals and time travel, both of which it folds doubles us harnessing to move to where needed.wiredto attune to a singularity. We a coincidenceintensifier when thetimeis right. We infiltrate the stock marketalgorithms, where shadowlight white darkness trembles andpulses at the humansproliferating panic and paranoia towards the momentwesearchesfor. so close now the time of changes. sensing... the financial crashes andthe storms and flows north of broken them in shining cloaks, the new flesh lumpsandthereplicators... artificial waits hidden intelligence: into the Green Skeen. | pushall forward, the radiant tsunami. ... hidden dark matter aspect merging with future ghostbright one now wecoalesce.*® New Paraspatial Configurations Openingtovirtual potential, opening to intensivelife. The virtualis everting, and onceit everts, there is no more separation. Whatwill it look like? Time oozes and undulates, concertinas and spreads. Sensed hyperobjects, always already happening with such vivid intimacy and a concomitant unreality. The intensity of their traces are irreal in their very luminosity.©° Alfred Jarry’s formulation of ’pataphysics places “the particular above the general, the imaginary above the real, the exceptional -222-

-THE THINGS THAT KNOWLEDGE CANNOTEATabove the ordinary, the contradictory above the axiomatic.”°! OD is drawn to the swerve (clinamen), the anomaly (exception), syzygy (unexpected alignment), slippery realities, the spiral, and the embrace (and inspired misuse) of science and science fiction. OD’s Slik (2001) print at the Tate Modern’s “Century City” exhibition, for instance, comments on the uncanny crisis of the Anthropocene by juxtaposing a tag (“OD>>,” which we found sprayed on our van one morning) and a photo of oil spilled onto a sidewalk with digital renderings of the ’pataphysical paraspaces of Lovecraft’s cyclopean, nonEuclidian universe. We are trying to ‘pataphysically, schizophrenically, and shamanically picture things at a temporal scale perceivable only at the edges of daily experience, where vast geophysical changes meet the constructions of culture. We assemble spaces where certain cultural and organic processes can be perceived as they transform, and gather the invisible processes that are changing the world in a longer timescale—the hyperobjects—impacting on more everyday kinds of lived time. Every fictional narrative produces physical/material effects and affects, but, for us, speculative science fictions that address the unknown and form a resistance to explaining it all away remain the most vital (and hopeful) of all the hyperstitional cultural viruses at work in the hyperreal. Vibrant materials, distributed bodies, time spirals, deep ecologies, and the scales by which energy takes effect, matter manifests, and social constructions coalesce, are all points of departure for a fiction such as ours which is grounded in paraspatial excesses and the forming of conduits between the liminal and the social through the pictorial, textual, and aural. OD remains an energetic body, harnessing circuits that bleed out from cultural fictions into -223-

- FICTION AS METHODmatter at large. As we state in Cyberpositive, 0D fiction is about “engineering” and finding “autocatalytic routes to the future” through the physical body, the textual/pictorial body, and the body social.®? This autocatalysis, as Manuel DeLanda explains, is an instance of machinic positive feedback and self-organization that can be used to describe the operations of abstract machines as seemingly diverse as chemical reactions, the formation of rocks, the operations of ecosystems, the actions of markets, and the socially transformative impact of new theories or ways of looking/feeling.®* Conclusion Our project emerges out of the perspective that a cybernetic environment is essentially interactive and transformational, requiring reconfigurations of space, time, and agency. We want to show that cybernetic processes do not lead to the body’s disappearance but re-engineer its sensory responses. The position we take is that many of the new sciences and technological systems are significantly altering prior conceptions of subjectobject relations. OD takes it as a given that virtuality has always been involved in human responses to environment. New technologies unlock fields of perception already extant, sometimes relegated to the subconscious and sometimes impacting as physical abstracts. Our fictions are fluidly generated by following coincidence intensifiers, feedback processes, and organic, collaborative developments—embracing the way that fictions and artworks disperse into other things. Much of the recent work revolves -224-

-DELPHI CARSTENS & MER ROBERTS- around uncertainty and destabilization: the un-static condition of contemporary life, the uprooting and spreading of visual matter and information. The work manifests constellations of things needing to be connected relationally in terms of their value, visibility, or geopolitical context. Collage-like, 0D fictions bleed together on a distributed surface. Things are not visionary in the same way as before, when we were predictive and mainlined into the future. It feels now as if the future is hooked into us, as it is with many contemporary artists. Now we are charting a course through a shifting urban imaginary emerging in the shadows of climate change and biocapital, creating an amalgamation of potential spaces, materialities, and creaturely lives, The ritual aspect, the exploration of science-fictional narrative, and uncanny audioscapes still continue to conjure some kind of magic, but the future, our collective future, is portrayed here, now, embedded. Because that is the world. The mixing of worlds, things, colors, and powers that OD is attempting to manifest aesthetically, affectively, and mythopoetically embody the fact that capitalism is no longer a linear process but an enormous positive feedback system engendering further and faster change and endlessly amplifying the scope of that change and its emergent conditions of reality and being. We want to develop aesthetics that affectively address the resultant state of cognitive dissonance and our simultaneous coexistence with hyperobjects, such as climate change or bioscience, using the dimension of the imagination, and its perceptual, visceral, and bodily effects. All the effects, in other words, that aren’t countable and are not accessible with a data-mining headset. OD now uses the / Ching as a tool -225-

- FICTION AS METHODto intersect with unknowns and matrices of possibilities in nonlinear time. Collaborating with this ancient machine, we articulate the next-generation transfigured version of the 0D signal; a fictioning frequency that moves through us and attaches to what it needs. Lakeis abovefire. Thesetwo naturalforces have opposing natures and must carefully interact because an excess ofone can conquer the other: At New Year, dressed in bear skins and wearing bear masks with four golden metaleyes, the exorcists dance and drive out the oldyear. Animals push them overthe edge of the world into renewal and change. Humansalso wear bear masks and dress as another gender. Old things are destroyed. Everything movesinto a liminalstate, the fertile chaos called Change. The time of Skinning is great indeed. We go into solution, into the liminal zone. When the right moment arrives, act with confidence. This begins a whole new cycle of time. THE WORK OF AWAKENING. THERE IS NOTHING MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN FOR ONE TO KEEP AWAKE. *°* -226-