22
Marc received an email from Sandra today. They haven’t seen each other in a long time. She writes that London is an incredible city, that her research is going very well, but that the best thing is the pace of life there. She has met an artist from Eastern Europe called Jodorkovski whom, she says, Marc would love. “He’s a genius.” She began noticing colored circles on the pavements around her neighborhood, polka dots the size of coins. The more she looked, the more she found. Some, perfectly circular and gently rounded, were black or white, whereas others, with more broken, uncertain edges, were miniature representations of colorful men and women walking hand in hand, of animals grazing, of houses and palaces, of cars driving along, and many other kinds of urban scenes. The phenomenon interested her so much that she came up with an excuse and stayed behind late at the museum one night so she could monitor one of the few sections of pavement that did not yet have any polka dots. She had prepared a thermos of coffee, some biscuits, and a Beta Band CD whose melodies emanated from the small speakers on the PC to be absorbed by fossils and Victorian bricks. At about 11:00 p.m. she parted the curtains and stole a look out into the street; behind her in the Main Hall, T. rex, all 18 meters long and 9 meters high of him, stood watch over a darkness that was virtually solid. She waited but saw nothing. Tired at 3:00 a.m., she removed her dress, turned off the music, put the compass down next to the keyboard, and, now in her underwear, lay down to sleep on the mattress her colleague William had brought in one day, in case anyone should have to work late. This sequence repeated itself until the eighth day, when a silhouette that had gradually been growing less faint took form at the end of the street pushing a shopping cart ahead of it; it was around 1:00 a.m. It halted more or less directly outside the museum. A corpulent man, taking cans of paint out of the cart, knelt down and began to spatter the pavement. And Sandra, suddenly and unexpectedly overcome by prudish feelings, couldn’t bring herself to look any longer, put the compass down next to the keyboard, and got into bed. Sleep would not come until she heard the creak of the cart’s wheels as the man moved off. She looked out the next morning to find monochrome dots on the pavement, none decorated with any figures or designs. A few days later, arriving for work in the morning, she came across the same man in the same spot, and stopped beside him. He looked at her. Do you like it? he asked. Well, I mean, it’s … What is it? I hate chewing gum, he said, eyes fixed on the pavement, I’m finishing off the job I started the other night. She said nothing for a moment, then asked: What do you mean, chewing gum? He looked up and held her gaze for a moment before answering: There’s a café over there, buy me breakfast and I’ll tell you. My name’s Jodorkovski, but I like to be called J, the first letter of my name, J. Once they were seated he told her, in grave, confident tones, that he had become fed up with seeing the pavement plastered with chewing gum and taken it upon himself to paint it. Taking in the words of this fair-haired, blue-eyed man, his fingers fat as cigars, she asked: But what’s the reason for doing the perfectly round ones black or white, and the ones with uneven edges in color? Do you know what cancer is? he asked. Of course. Do you know what melanoma is? Yes, of course, I’m a biologist; melanoma is a cancer that manifests in a kind of mottling on the skin. Exactly, he said, cutting her off, but I wonder if you know that in melanomas the edges around the spots always have irregularities—that’s why I do the uneven edges in color, to beautify this London cancer of chewing gum on the pavement. I didn’t have a chance to finish that night because I was on my way to the cinema, a late-night screening, that’s why I’ve come back to do more painting today. I see, said Sandra. Neither spoke for a few moments, and then she asked: Which film did you see? Rossellini’s Journey to Italy, he said, it was on at the Royal Box. “After that, Marc, I found out that J was from a city named Ulan Erge, which is in Russia, a region called Kalmykia to be precise. I’ll send you a photo of him, he’s very good looking. I’m really taken with him. Tell me your news. Did you listen to the Sufjan CD I sent? Is the hut still standing? Write soon.”
23
From inside all you can hear is the wind outside as it buffets the wire fences. The books line the shelves, programs are loaded on the computers, the plates in the kitchens are clean and neatly stacked, the meat in the walk-in freezers remains intact, board games are in display cabinets, counters and dice shakers encode hypothetical games. Somewhere a radio plays. A laborer left it switched on … “the address by His Majesty the King. And in Lugo, citizens have woken to the deplorable sight of the city’s Roman wall having been desecrated; at some point during the night someone painted a yellow line the entire length of the ancient monument, which dates back to the third century and encircles the city. There are no clues as to the identity of the culprits. This is Radio Nacional de España, Radio Five, stay tuned…”
24
Night falls. The site manager has gone home. Ernesto, from the cabin at the top of the crane he works at the downtown port in Lower Manhattan, lowers an empty, uncovered freight container into the harbor water. He waits for a few minutes, looking at the horizon, today slightly hazy, before working the lever to raise the container, which, attached to the boom by straps, emerges full to the brim with water—like a dirty swimming pool. Water streams out through the joints and through holes in the sides of this metal cube, as through a colander, and in the end the bottom is left littered with a few punctured buoys, some pieces of wood, empty cans, broken lanyards, various other objects, and the fish. There’s always some leftover food substance, and the fish amass around it—wheat they avoid, salt beef they love. Ernesto grabs several that are still flipping about and puts them in an ATLANTA ’96 sports bag; the rest he puts back in the sea. An operation he repeats every 2 or 3 days. Ernesto comes from Kodiak Island in southern Alaska. In 1957 members of his family were the first Puerto Ricans to emigrate to the Alaska Territory, initially to work as fisherfolk there, though they later set up a Puerto Rican bar-restaurant that quickly became a modestly profitable chain with outlets throughout the polar territory. Already interested in technical drawings and buildings at the age of 7, Ernesto decided he would enroll at Columbia University in New York when the time came, with a view to majoring in architecture. So it went: Ernesto moved to Manhattan when he was 17, took some courses and did quite well, until he tired of that and took work operating this crane, in the same port where, on April 17, 1912, the survivors of the Titanic arrived aboard RMS Carpathia. A very well-paid job, a top job in dockworking circles. He still has a passion for architecture but he pursues it now for fun, not out of obligation. He lives in a modest apartment in Brooklyn, so that every day he has to cross the bridge of that name, the one that connects Manhattan to the continent, and each time he does so thinks of the Bering Strait. And about the fish inside the ATLANTA ’96 bag whose deaths are announced every now and then by 2 or 3 thrashes of the tail.
25
In 1998 the State Museum of Technology and Labour in Mannheim, Germany, displayed a striking and controversial exhibit called Körperwelten, or “The Human Body World.” 200 body parts and life-size figures were in the exhibit. They were not exactly sculptures; nor were they conventional body casts. They were real human corpses or parts of real bodies. The artist, Gunther von Hagens—also a physician and anatomy lecturer at the Heidelberg University—preserved and prepared the bodies through an embalming process called plastination, which provides the body tissues and organs with firmness and fullness so they can be displayed in a true-to-life manner. Von Hagens arranged one startling figure with all his organs and bones exposed, and his flayed skin draped over his arm like a robe. He stripped another corpse of his skin and flesh, leaving only bones and muscles. The dangling body of one man was dismembered with the parts suspended on nylon strings. Another body was that of a 5-month-pregnant woman, revealing the foetus inside of her … Von Hagens continues to plastinate bodies for exhibitions throughout the world.
BODY BAZAAR: THE MARKET FOR HUMAN TISSUE IN THE BIOTECHNOLOGY AGE BY LORI
ANDREWS AND DOROTHY NELKIN
26
J and Sandra usually meet at 7:00 p.m. in the pub he has frequented since his arrival in London. They drink beer and chat with the regulars. It is here that Sandra first learned of J’s nickname among the artists of the city: “the Oncologist.” One night, after several drinks, he became nostalgic and began telling her about Parchís, his favorite game; in the region he hailed from, he had played it professionally. He told her about a great glass palace dedicated to this sport—”this science,” as he put it—built a number of years earlier in the outskirts of his native city. He spoke of an immense dome there, impervious to the cold and heat, a sublime sight—the kind of thing, like vodka, only possible on the Russian steppes. He expanded on the different types of dice shakers and dice, the boards and counters, and the application of tactics and psychology: A complex world, Sandra, out of the simplicity of just 4 colors—that’s why I painted the gum these 4 colors, Parchís colors, because Parchís and the evolution of the species you study at the museum are intimately connected, each is based upon 3 or 4 very simple rules, and each, all the same, constitutes a sophisticated exercise in survival, and, you know what, chess is actually a very simple game in the sense that all the possible permutations of all the possible games are already written, you just need a computer and you can break them down, whereas Parchís rests on the roll of a dice, and this—the emergence of chance into the real, I mean—is the most complex thing imaginable. She raised her glass to that. That was the first night they laid the mattress down under the belly of the T. rex—the first of many such nights to come.
27
If we ceased looking at land as purely something to be exploited, we would suddenly be confronted with a large number of undefined spaces, not serving any particular function, difficult to name with any accuracy. Together they belong to neither shadow nor light. They exist at the margins of things: at the forest edge, along main roads and next to rivers, in the most forgotten corners of culture and in places where machines cannot go. They sometimes cover modest areas and may be scattered as wide as the remote corners of a field [ditches]. They have in common that they form a privileged area of receptivity to biological diversity. Cities, farms and forestry holdings, sites devoted to industry, tourism, human activity, areas of control and decision permit diversity and, at times, totally exclude it. The term Third Landscape does not allude to the Third World, but to the Third Estate. It refers to Abbé Sieyès’s question in 1789:
—What is the Third Estate? —Everything.
—What role has it played to date? —None.
—What does it aspire to? —Something.
GILLES CLÉMENT, “MANIFESTO OF THE THIRD LANDSCAPE” [GILLESCLEMENT.COM/ART-454-TIT-THE-THIRD-LANDSCAPE]
28
It was a warm May morning and Marc was sleeping when he heard the door to the roof terrace open. At first he did not react, just shifted the sheets a few centimeters in response to the alert stimulus. Then, after a few moments, he heard footsteps, but not moving closer, instead seeming to walk back and forth, and at times in circles. He got up and threw open the hut door. At the far side of the terrace, through the intervening formula-covered papers that hung from the lines, there to meet the weakly figure of Marc in boxer shorts, was a man. They looked at one another in silence. The man was tall, very tall, bearded, and with eyes set far apart like those of a fish; he thrust his hands into the pockets of his thick tweed jacket and advanced toward the hut, ducking under the wires as he came. Hello, said Marc. The man did not reply, merely raising a hand in a heavy sort of gesture before changing tack slightly so that he ended up not at the hut but at the edge of the roof. How alike everything looks from up here, he said, as though addressing the air. Hello, Marc said again, is there something you want? Marc saw that the man was much taller even than he had at first appeared, an impression intensified when he took a plastic chair Marc had salvaged from the scrapyard of a chalet and sat down, looking like the oldest child in school, having to squeeze into it. He lit a cigarette—offering one to Marc first, who declined—and then sat staring at the weathered sides of the hut. Marc went inside, found something to wear, and took a drink from a carton of milk before going back out, hastened by the man’s voice, Know what, young man? Marc, holding the carton and leaning against the door, said, No, what? Well, I remember a morning in my home in Paris, I’m talking 1961 or thereabouts, and I was in bed, half sitting up, leaning back against the wall, I know I also had the radio on though I couldn’t tell you what program, and I was staring at the opposite wall, at a plank of wood I’d put up, bit of a shoddy job, I was using it as a bulletin board for photos I liked, press cuttings, stubs from the cinema and concerts, food offers from all kinds of different brands, this kind of thing, I was poor in those days but didn’t concern myself with thoughts of the future, we expats lived pretty well in Paris then because we could pass ourselves off as students, and Parisians were always kind to students, but anyway, what I was saying: that morning I was gazing at the wall, distractedly, thinking about goodness knows what, a woman maybe, maybe nothing at all, and then out of that jumble of photos and cuttings my eye alighted on a line, invisible until then, which ran the length of this collage, meandering from top to bottom, passing through certain photos, words, and snippets, so that if you followed it you were presented with a composition that had, until then, been entirely invisible. And it was this supreme image that turned out to link my two masterworks, Hopscotch A and Hopscotch B, or just Hopscotch, and my Open Ball Theory. Hopscotch B, Marc immediately said, Open Ball Theory, what’s that? Well, the man said, during the writing of a book called Hopscotch I came up with a parallel theory which gave a mathematical account of each of the book’s fragments, and later called it Open Ball Theory, or Hopscotch B. That’s right, young man, working on the basis that every person comprises not just their body but also the space immediately surrounding their body, a sphere susceptible to all kinds of empathic flows, whether sympathetic or antipathetic, just like the coming and going of breath, like the intrusion of other people’s breathing, the sounds of people around you, smells and primary intuitions, et cetera, it means we can define the human species as a whole made of open balls, at times intersecting, at other times repelling one another. But Hopscotch B, that I keep to myself: that one’s not for teaching. Marc thought for a moment, and the man got up and said, pointing his cigarette at the hut, Take a proper look, young man, you’ve got a great deal of material right there, a prodigious amount, really. Marc, excited now, took another drink from the milk carton and said, Hey, sir, do you know anything about Fermionic Solitude? And the man, calmly, also unhesitatingly, said, Don’t wind me up, young man, at this particular moment winding up is not what I need. And with that he left, ducking the wires as he went. He raised the collar of his jacket and was gone. Marc stood for a long time watching the rear portions of the cars as they advanced down the wide one-way street to the waterfront shipyard. They can’t, nor will they be able to, come back along it, he thought, and he also thought about the World Cup we’ve never won, about the fact that the score to Battleship Potemkin, studied correctly, is a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” He was disappointed not to have shown the man the Philips Agricultural Guide: 1961, which has the instructions for how to build huts from used tin.
29
Alan Turing, who would go on to take part in making what were really the first computers, described the principles of another machine that was both similarly hypothetical and “single,” with no other function than a quite philosophical kind of order. But, as well as posing certain questions that to this day remain relevant in the field of machine intelligence and the axiomatic fundamentalism of symbolic logic, Turing was ahead of his time in proposing an extremely simple theoretical model [based in yes/ no, 1/0 decisions] for a “universal” machine capable of emulating any other kind of machine. What has gone on to be called a “metamedium”: a medium that [without being one itself], according to the instructions
it is fed, has the capacity to simulate other media of the past or indeed media as yet without any physical incarnation.
EUGENI BONET, “EL CINE CALCULADO” [“THE CALCULATED CINEMA”], REVISTA ZEHAR, ISSUE 45, 2001
30
Q: Sometimes the rhythms in your songs relate to ambient rhythms, whether from nature or the city. Others are very intimate and seem to accompany the rhythms of the body, of the heart …
A: There’s something in that because lots of my songs are at 80 bpm, which is how fast the heart beats when a person is walking. I write almost all my songs when I’m out walking, so, yes, there’s something in it. [Laughs.] But it isn’t something you’d want to do deliberately, it isn’t conscious.
BJÖRK, INTERVIEW BY PABLO GIL
31
Maleva’s house was in the city center, on the third floor of a building indistinguishable from the buildings on either side. Mihály briefly contemplated the screen of water coming down over the bare brick façade, then rang the bell. He straightened his thick sweater, patterned with red and green lozenges; something he had kept from the consignments of Soviet goods. His feet were cold inside his new boots; rubber outside, fleece lining. Because it was a first date, a litmus test, he thought it would be a good idea to dress normally. Since that first encounter, the previous week in the Dialectical Medical Studies room, he had not seen her again. He tried the bell once more but nobody answered. He sheltered for half an hour in the doorway of the building opposite; maybe she hadn’t heard, he thought, maybe she’d been in the bathroom putting on makeup, or maybe he made a mistake when he wrote down the address. He tried the doorbell once more before giving up. Pulling his jacket close, he walked back to the hospital. On the way he felt, with a kind of surgeon’s intuition, that his first chance with Maleva had in fact been his last.
The Nocilla Trilogy: Nocilla Dream ; Nocilla Experience ; Nocilla Lab Page 14
