Touching the Gooey Beyond
John Cussans

"WHAT...

IS...

THIS...

THING?

WHAT...

IS...

THIS...

THING?

WHAT...

IS...

THIS...

THING?”

Through a cloud of incense smoke and sonic cacophony he screamed at what remained of the audience. Some had patiently watched this multi-layered, techno-delic and mytho-poetic collective construction of a sci-fi ritual/machinic-sex sacrifice slowly unfold over the last two hours. No doubt some of the visitors who passed through the Reactor Halls that evening had asked themselves the same question. But in the end, as “THIS THING” drew to its mad climax, no one seemed compelled to proffer an answer. It had all become rather intense.

In fact I’d asked myself a similar question when I arrived, having expected to find the listed artists sitting in a circle sharing their thoughts on myth-science with the dual-core processors of Plastique Fantastique. Instead I noted the quiet hypnotic hum and tell-tale signs (masked figures standing to attention and placed strategically around the room) of a PF ritual about to commence. I should have read the blurb more carefully: ‘Myth-Science operates as Fictioning-Technology … The Colloquium will seek to accelerate and decelarate myths ... It will itself be a grey zone inhabited by drone drenched avatars’. “It’s just started”, I was told politely as I entered the room. Duh! What was I THINKING!? I settled on the floor and watched the proceedings unfold. 

A skinny, barefoot person in black, head bedecked in ribbons, sat on the floor, their back against one of several blue-grey plinth-like wooden structures connected together by a network of 2x2 timbers. Over the gentle waves of a harmonium a well-spoken woman’s voice slowly intoned something about a swarm of a thousand eyes, swimming into all her orifices. A big masked man dressed in blue pushed a phallic microphone into the mouth of Ribbonhead, now unmasked, who began to read from a manuscript:

"three cylinders of cast plaster stacked on a marble slab ... doubled ... six ... Further  away: a stack of three very large cement tubes mirror this formation in the high  bleach sun at the base of the Oroville Dam on the Feather River, South California.  Imperceptible to the naked eye there are spider cracks forming on the main wall of  this colossal  dam and in less than four days the cement wall will yield to this  immense power that it is holding back, the water will gush forth climactically with  exhilarating speed and terrifying freedom."

Ribbonhead then handed the microphone to Blue Man (aka Kaosmeter), who continued:

"Further up above ribs, corrupted by the chaos of the extended arc of breasts  pushing underneath, loosening the weave of brass Samson-like hair, pattern  bulges, losing its repetitive design of vertex, flexure and osculation to disruption and  meat  interference. On top of the dome of very special flesh held high in firm and  plump skin, a smaller cupola, budding nipple, pushes further out from behind the  hair veil, parted till the structure of the weave is revealed"

For twenty minutes or so Kaosmeter and Ribbonhead passed the microphone between each other, reading from a shared script. Ribbonhead told us about his skull and the grey matter inside it, the length of synapses, the optic nerve. About a mirror placed beneath his feet, of the wildest of wild reflections blinking back at him and a lens behind the mirror that transmits information to a specialized database called the server farm HDS Yokohama Green Data Center.

Kaosmeter told us about a big butter-nut stud, and how, some time ago, in the passenger seat of a white Fiat Lux he had an ecstatic-traumatic encounter with his mum’s breasts pushing hard against the taut yarn of a woven peach dress, the rattle-snake in the paradise of his childhood. As the harmonic drone slowly amplified Ribbonhead told us that the first cut is the deepest, describing in delicate detail how a large sheet of rusty metal comes down forcefully into flesh, piercing through the initial resistance of skin, rhythmically tearing the tender pale skin of the neck, how blood, darkness red, flows like ribbon.

As the light began to fade Kaosmeter’s voice began to sound like an Anglican vicar reading at a church service, though the content was somewhat different.

"From looming darkness I look down and see my beautiful cock. It really is  extraordinary. It’s quite large compared to my small stature. It has a very pleasing  curve when erect. It is very proud-looking and smooth, it flops, circularly, from one  side to the other and it swells, alive of its own spectral accord, like a pink  flesh baby  Frankenstein."

A ritual attendant in black, standing close-by, shifted her weight uneasily between two black Dr. Martin’ed feet, as an angelic voice now commingled with the accordion drone. As if trying to extract some infinitesimal fossil-fragment of lost time from the shattered  temporal remnants of Ribbonhead’s ritual obliteration, Black Dr. Martens intoned:

"Cutting thresholds between here and nowhere, oblivion the monolith, a wonder of  the future that holds no more secrets. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The sound of one-plank  time, the indivisible time unit. The time required for light to travel. The universe is  now running at zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero  zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero  zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero zero one six slash two nine nine seven nine  two four five eight frames per second.”

Kaosmeter (now in Subkast Kofke mask) and Torch Mouth began tinkering with various projection devices. On the back wall the image of a crudely animated face began to flicker. When a second projector was turned on a horrible abrasive electronic hiss filled the room. Finally there were four projectors each showing a different image: three heads - one human, one rock-being and one chimerical glitter-entity - and a layered image of dissolving blossom shadows in sunlight. Some people in masks, some without, began to reconstruct the lattice of 2x2’s and plinths turning them into stands for the projectors, while others tinkered with a meshwork of mixing decks. New voices begin to emerge from the barely bearable hiss. On the wall the glittery chimerical head with two mouths began to rant about Pimpz and Hookerz. “Pimpz do not understand their power” it insisted. “THEY IS PIMPZ!” A team of musicians and sound technicians generate a continuous hypnotic drone from the balcony above the performance.

Kaosmeter gently strokes Ribbonhead’s head:

“Whilst in transit there are strict rules to protect the pig from any unnecessary  suffering. These rules equally apply when using a living pig in any type of  performance or film. Anybody can own a pig. It can be kept in a house. It can be  kept in your garden. But if you were to perform with your pig, prior to the killing, you  would have to ensure completely that it was not subjected to any unnecessary  excitement, stress or pain.”

A man begins to draw a sequence of comic-gothic hands and abstract signs on large sheets of paper, which another person attaches to the 2x2’s. Another draws sigil-like glyphs on the plinths as the room fills with smoke from large bunches of incense placed on the floor. Indecipherable chants and a regular drum beat now. It’s like being in a mad Tibetan temple at the climax of a ritual sacrifice. The Pimpzhookerz starts to rant again, something about “bureaucrat rapists”. A junglist bass note sporadically pulses through the pimp rant and hiss, as clattering voice-noises issue from the Rock Being. Black Dr. Marten strolls casually around the space, seemingly looking for something. The sound of a super-distorted reggae tune drifts in through the sonic mayhem. Now there are more unmasked participants, silhouetted against the projections, who start to suck-feed on a red liquid from a stainless steel bowl, mounted in one of the plinths. They feed it to the now untied Ribbonhead  through clear plastic syphon tube.

Now Ribbonhead, for the first time, is standing. Kaosmeter hands him the microphone as a deep electrified bass note hums through the space. Ribbonhead’s voice, fed through an echo box, begins to shout:

"WHAT...

IS...

THIS...

THING?

WHAT...

IS...

THIS...

THING?

WE HAVE MADE THIS.

IT LOOKS BACK AT US, AND TEACHES US, AS IF IT CAME FROM AN UNKNOWN ART FAIR."

Kaosmeter starts to whip Ribbonhead with some kind of strap. But Ribbonhead keeps chanting, louder now, as the undulating, groaning drone continues, drum crash and bass note after drum crash and bass note, as the sound of the moaning monks gets insanely ecstatic. Pimpzhookerz and Rock-being mouth on, unheard beneath the din.

"WHAT...

IS...

THIS SCIENCE?

WHAT...

IS...

THIS SCIENCE?

WHAT...

IS...

THIS SCIENCE?"

And, for the first time, now I can see.

What we had witnessed was the simulacral-sacrificial distintegration of Ribbonhead’s subjective ego, its prismatic ritual de- and re-composition, each bit of text the shard of a shattered, temporal mirror in which the event we watched had been frozen and defrosted “outside of time”: the ritual slaughter of Ribbonhead, scapegoat-without-horns, pet-pig, in quantum communion with some Outer God, a hydraulic, sacrificial machine-being that was, at the same time, the supplicant’s collective body-ego in kathartic ekstasis.