Published by Trocadero Art Space and the Bus Projects Stall at the NGV Art Book Fair [2020]

EXCERPT

CHAPTER ONE: IMPROVISATIONAL MAP MAKING AND BLACK MAGIC

Allegedly located in the western region of the North Atlantic Ocean is a seemingly malevolent energy that has ruptured the fabric of our known universe. Atmospheric anomalies and a swarm of ominous clouds herald its presence as mystical forces proceed to splay this rupture open, luring unsuspecting travellers and objects into and through an inter-dimensional passage way. So what lays on the other side of this portal, afforded by the sublime powers of the Bermuda Triangle? To those gifted with psychic abilities, allowing one insight into these invisible worlds, the Bermuda Triangle offers transit to a chaotically atemporal universe where the laws of time, space and matter are left unhinged. One can perhaps visualise this secret dimension as a noisy and feverish bricolage of legend, myth, speculation and fantasy. This is a world where angelic mermaids and nightmarish sea monsters populate the oceans, the ethereal voices of dead slaves reverberate in the air, prehistoric dinosaurs roam the land, tribes of mythic civilizations armed with futuristic technologies battle for sovereignty and spacecrafts operated by perverted aliens hover in the sky. According to various accounts, all this unfolds in front of the unwitting foreigner in a flattened, panoramic perspective; akin to the scenic view that Bosch grants his audience in his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights or the swooping tracking shots that open Stanley Kubrick's The Shining . Unlike the spherical nature of our earth, this world figures itself as a sprawling and singular plane that compresses perspective, depth and space into one bizarre surface. Accepting this notion of a 'flattened world', one could quite easily posit this secret universe as a ballistic stage set or screen that frames and elicits all the sensational absurdities and hysterical perversities enacted within it. This consequently casts our discombobulated traveler as a passive audience member, a benign and ghostly presence condemned to watch, in silent confusion, this squabbling ensemble of cartoonish characters for eternity. In order to break out of this paralysing barrage of spectacle an esoteric school of thought must be summoned, one that practices both improvisational map-making and black magic. Here, we arrive at the term scat-tera/tology – a bastardised neologism that combines the words 'scatter' (thrown in various directions), 'teratology' (the study of monsters and abnormal psychologies) and 'scatology' (the study of shit). .


Crawling out from a postmodern plasma pool of sorts, 'scat-tera/tology' is a mutant progeny borne out of Fredric Jameson's Signatures of the Visible. In the text Jameson advocates for a strategy of cultural analysis that reads "high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under capitalism." Jameson's use of the words "dialectically interdependent phenomena" is something to be stressed here. As film scholar Joan Hawkins points out, Jameson is invoking 'dialectic' in direct relation to Hegel and Marx's use of the word, who refer to it as a "collision of two antithetical terms…. creating a third term that includes all the elements and contradictions of the original terms, as well as a new possible meaning." Therefore, we can understand Jameson's quote as a call for a 'synthetic procreation' between objects or fields of study that have opposing hierarchal positions in culture. Scat-tera/tology is very much a product of this heated postmodern orgy that Jameson so enthusiastically endorses. But how does this operate in the realm of research?


As scat-tera/tology is a hybrid form not belonging to any one field, it makes sense that it functions in an omnidirectional and undomesticated fashion. The term 'rhizomic' is particularly helpful here. First coined and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , rhizomic research appears as a nonlinear meandering that continually detours and zigzags across and through differing arenas of cultural production. Resisting a chronological mode of research, rhizomic learning embraces an endless array of multiplicities by mapping out a variety of semiotic linkages. In the style of the Bermuda Triangle, this methodology views cultural objects (be it film, text, theatre, music or art) as an interconnected complex of portals that can jettison us forward and pull us back in time. In this way, scat-tera/tology is a ruthless form of tunnelling between objects that attempts to find oblique passageways that can connect to one another. However, for the rhizome to operate at its most unruly, a necromantic spell needs to be cast. For those unfamiliar with the dark arts, necromancy is a dangerous form of magic that practices the revivification of the dead. In the context of scat-tera/tology, necromancy is particularly valuable in the way it can resurrect the cultural dead (more commonly referred to as shit) from their ignored and forgotten graves, murdered by contemporary tastes, fashions and definitions of 'valuable content'. By doing this a rhizomatic reevaluation can occur which can illuminate previously undiscovered routes, leading to wonderfully deranged and unexpected insights.


But how does this relate to the plight of our lost traveler, ensnared in an inter-dimensional overload of hyperbole? As described before, the perspective of this universe is completely inverted which subsequently squashes its inexplicable inhabitants into a singular and infinite epidermis. Whilst it is easy to be stupefied into a paralysis by this muddled surface, scat-tera/tology acts as an instrument to pierce and flay this fantastical crust open, revealing the hidden network of meaning wriggling beneath. This flings our once frozen traveler into this free-flowing network of hidden semiotic streams, carrying them beyond the confines of the Bermuda Triangle universe. However, in order to execute this mission successfully, one must permit an unadulterated flow of thought to occur. By allowing oneself to be directed by these Joycean currents of association, our brave traveler must be prepared to encounter all kinds of unsightly monstrosities believed to be dead and buried long ago.


This text places you, the reader, in the position of this inadvertent traveler who has suddenly been teleported to this obscure world by the celestial forces of the Bermuda Triangle. Do not despair though, as you are a student of scat-tera/tology and are experienced in wielding this feral sorcery to combat such situations. Using the irrevocably wild magic of scat-tera/tology you rip through and dive into the spellbinding screen world of the Bermuda Triangle. However, in doing so you become caught in a nauseating state of free fall as a vortex of images, texts and sounds churn and morph around you in a deliriously cyclonic momentum. Riding this trans-dimensional express is no easy task; the trick is to accept your absolute nothingness in the face of this interstellar constellation that currently engulfs you. By embracing it, you find your mental and physical mass transmutes into a malleable substance, licensing your being to be fluidly atomised and then re-molecularised into an array of incongruent zones that exist outside of the Bermuda Triangle. This paper will chart your progression through these various zones, the creatures that you encounter within them and how, through scat-tera/tology, you may use them to unlock a surge of seething signs that propels you into other unanticipated territories.


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