Paratext #37 by Marzia Matarese

Paratext #37
July 24, 2019
By Marzia Matarese

Jeanine Verloop (Summer Sessions 2019 exchange scholarship)
Julia Spínola (International residency)
Lara Fluxà (Long-stay residency)
Sandrine Deumier (Exchange grant Casa de Velázquez – Hangar)

The last Paratext before summer break, the last act before the Polivalents, and the summer drift. We gather once again in Ricson, our black cube that when lights are turned off, becomes a space
of possibility, where many things take place in one, a teresacto of visceral and “weird” experimentations. The one which, on some occasions, has been affectionately called “the largest dark-room in southern Europe”.

With the lights turned off, different set-ups can be glimpsed in semi-darkness distributed throughout the space. This time it seems that we are about to witness the meeting between the
survivors of a collapsing civilization, adrift, in the process of disintegration and of a vertical downfall. As well as their forms of resistance: through recovered memory and the gaze of others, through the subversion of the fragment, through love in times of ecological devastation, through the fragile and cutting force of contact, through the sacrifice of what is bodily…

The spotlight is turned on, we are witnessing the first materialization in the western sector of this
multiverse.

First contact – Jeanine Verloop (exchange residence between Hangar and V2_Lab)

A shiny and transparent-looking exoskeleton awaits immobile, leaning on top of a table, perhaps remotely activated. Fragile, quick-touch fingers are held motionless in a retracted, uncertain position. A voice echoes from an intercom speaker:

– Imagine that you have never seen a human being before.

The alien perspective is infiltrating among those present, gently shimming its bluish-colored prisms.

– Their devices look all the same. Shouldn’t there be more imagination surrounding them?

A laser cuts through a writing device. Laser eyes outline gray hands approaching a (human-like) body and reconstructing it. The hands hesitate, try to follow the confusing designs: files decrypted by future archaeologists, compiled on transparent methacrylate hard disks.

Next to them, piles of prototypes pile up. There are so many that they could fill an entire Hangar: what remains of a redesign process of a partially recorded anatomy, incomplete renderings refined with alien dreams.

– Each arm has an independent motor. They have to organize and coordinate.

An assembly of arms, a council of recovered intentions and desires.

– Technological progress incentive the psychosis around the autonomy of it from your body.

A holographic image is projected a few meters from the operating table: a young Gutenberg, with his back turned, attaches a mobile type Ouija board to the device in an attempt to speak with God. On the floor, sketches made by previous machines recreate abstract paintings, approximations of recovered backgrounds.

Darkness falls again, screen leap.

Second contact – Júlia Spínola (national and international residency at the stand)

A flow of light half-floods a blank sheet of paper. FRAGMENTS are grouped around an assembly of voices. The idea of red. How are ideas formed? Do fragments think? MULTITUDE. Details fill the
stain at the same time. There are no representational models for the viewing experience. An external memory that captures and erases sequences of objects is listening. A voice declares: – the possibility of erasure makes it possible to see all objects in their entirety. Errors of visualization occur in the memory. Bodies and shadows pile up in a convulsive barrage of images until they disintegrate in a complex and obtuse way. Again, a voice emerges:

– The ARTIFICIAL OBVIOUS is hard to see, I am bony and dense; I see what I expect. We must learn to observe without scruples!

The debate opens. Technologies of the gaze: phármakon, color, drug, writing… A thought imposes itself, interfering in the dialectic battle:

– Don’t blink!

To train the length of appearance: FLASH VISION. Greasing the interaction between objects, light, and the visual apparatus. A false sun dazzles and causes an uncontrollable evolution of shapes. The solar speed generates VISUAL METASTASIS. The ocular bulbs are entertained waiting to capture a variation, a signal that confirms that the image is still alive, that there is in its duration and durability, that it does not disappear in a flash of which we do not conserve memory.

Space contracts and unfolds in a toolbar: technologies of visual decomposition. Another FLASH of light, everything vanishes. Black screen, wait, fear. Yet again the hands operate again, now as working pincers of the image. In their production process, they break, get dirty, accumulate, graze the remains. They make and unmake. They erase, they make mistakes, they dump the scum of this process in the cumulus of waste that continues to accumulate in the hangar.

FLASH. The image tries to rebel, resists the forced manipulation, goes on hunger strike, freezes. The faithful tool returns to the operating table. It dissects it until, in an act of last resistance, the molecules of the image react by generating a new metastasis.

– I don’t worry about what I am.

She speaks. And in a last act of revenge:

– I do not have to decide who I am.

Fade to black.

Third contact – Lara Fluxà (long term residence)

Once again, a voice, this time provided from a friend. A stubborn fire accompanies her, accompanies us, lets itself be enveloped. It tells us:

– You must get your hands dirty.

Expert hands form with affectionate touches the fragile, shy and transparent matter: glass, crunchy mineral, mute testimony. Shards of glass beneath the nails. Their nails, but also ours, in an exercise of collective catharsis.

We immerse ourselves in the story: DELU. The breath of fire shapes the altered glass, of an incandescent red. A camera silently spies.

The material also has some voice, it expresses its enjoyment in these hands that took years to getto know it.

– Just because it’s you! I let myself be rendered just because the touch is yours.

The story invades us as a song heard in adolescence, it smells of tamed memories. Between the unfolding of the story, the movement of the hands insinuates:

– Awareness makes you wonder about boundaries.

What is outside the camera’s field of vision?

– Fear is learned.

The remains of a factory are hurled into the sea. Someone justifies herself by appealing to the memory of water: she knows what to do. The Black Sea is the rebellion that takes Delu and Mineral, swallows them, carries them with force into the past, along with the ruins of their timid existences. These coagulate with animal blood, shaping them into slimy limbs. Around the island, madness, lies, and domestication are concentrated. The environmental consequences are not easily seen, obscured by the technologies of progress and money. From the depths, a stain stands waiting, ironically watching the irreversibility of the process. The slimy limbs mutate, become fragile, subtle and thin, to break through the stain. Delu and the Mineral decode themselves in the disappointment of pure, youthful love.

The exoskeleton reappears, it transforms, disfigures itself to continue dreaming, the memory of a happiness that no longer is. The fragile body also becomes a tool, it shields its eyes to protect itself from the massa forta albiro of a process of constant acceleration. The fragile body becomes inert, metallic, mineral, it allows itself to be hardened by fire: an armor.

A few sparks bounce off the walls: faint light and darkness again.

Fourth contact – Sandrine Deumier (exchange residence between Hangar and Casa de Velázquez)

The voice and the fire leave the room together to go out for a smoke. They leave behind the main floor in the shadows, waiting in silence. This time their gazes are oriented towards the northern sector of the Ricson, locked on another viewing device: some OCULUS illuminated by a white light bulb.

In the blink of an eye. A few seconds or perhaps years have passed. ElegidX gets up from his seat, slowly walks to the stage, and puts on the vision mask. An opportunity that only one gets: the chance to overcome the body barrier, privileged access to another layer of the multiverse.

Here it was lottery day. ElegidX was the lucky winner of a private tour of the world after the luxury neighborhoods for the elite of the future. There resides a new generation of humanoids who managed to escape from the prototypes stored in the Hangar, emancipating from the material limits of the flesh. A white space of bodies in constant transformation.

A shudder shakes the audience. The suspicion of a possible margin of error in this journey, since those of the world before us still have bodies and the glasses cannot neutralize the responsibility
of matter. Maybe it’s safer to sit here, watching the live broadcast on the mobile app -thinks ObserverX1, a cathartic tool provided by the engineers from the after.

Behind the prisms, ethereal, smooth, and shiny beings fall like flies. It seems that the contact with ElegidX’s body has provoked an uncontrollable epidemic. Perhaps in the utopia of the, after there were no antibodies for the desires of the before, its vices deeply rooted in the flesh, in what corrupts, palpitates boiling organs.

FALLING. Ethereal beings begin to fall and dismember. Their forms create a descending vortex that incorporates everything they find around them: animals, objects, code. They blur to form new trans humanoid constructs, in collision with virtual space. The collapse reflects the perfection of their remains. Noble ruins envelop ElegidX, they try to engulf to satiate the unexpected desire awakened by the collapse.

Despite this, ElegidX’s body resists, hesitates for a second, but finds it impossible to detach itself from matter. It looks around in the temptation to lose itself in the vortex, it wishes to let itself be scrubbed, to merge with it, to mingle in the collective movement. The responsibility of matter does not allow it to forget itself, its specific weight. It remains separate from the collapsing medium,
porced to be a silent witness, an impotent observer of this mute catastrophe, the memory will be partially erased from its mind, in a flash, when it takes off its glasses.

The other spectators watch the virtual cataclysm through the screen, spy the irruption of the body in the world of the after, the body collapse. Until the screen goes blank.

The light turns on and white floods everything. We come ejected from the Ricson multiverse, back to our homes, until the breach is reopened. Until the next Paratext.

1 A tesseract (hypercube) is defined as a cube out of phase in time, that is, every instant of time for which it moved through all of them together.