I find that is it decidedly rare that new Afro- or African futurist narratives, histories, speculative worlds make it onto screen, possibly because they exist separately as music videoclips or stand alone movies without literary support. While I do not think in any way that rarity or scarcity makes things automatically more precious, I find it always an incredible surprise to see such a movie being made and circulated. You could call it an extended videoclip, but this is just the more reason to watch it. It is clearly an ode to Luanda city, but also, for me at least, it gestures towards the perfect mix in the sense of teaching us true cosmpolitanism while never giving up on the cosmospolitics of that particular place. Good riddance to the Euroamerican certitudes & obnoxious art house pretense.
It is a universal or dispersed planetary decrepitude, without pushing for the universality or for the so-called atemporal qualities. It speaks of weather, or climate change as it is experienced by a majority in an unmistakable way nowadays. It is climatic without spelling out climate crisis commonplaces. It is ultimately a drift or drop into high weirdness climax that never comes (to pick on a term from Erik Davies picked again from the High Weirdness by Mail catalogue), a jumble of vacous feelings of things liveliness or expenditure, changing natures that leave nothing unturned, including our dreams that seem to escape us & leave us stranded.
A prothean unforced becoming of outer and inner states, of moods like weather reports, or what recently in his last book Michael Taussig has termed Mastery of No-Mastery(MNM) or the ‘metamorphic sublime’. The people all around are changed without showing any significant changes on the surface, yet there is inexplicable things falling, while the representational bankrupcy is even more evident. Evidently Weather charts say nil about this. Climacteric scales have long tipped over and the rigorous and dire reports of the hottest year on record is falling on deaf ears each year, even if suffering and innumerable species (including human lives) are lost as each heat wave strikes. There is ample evidence yet there is also an inability and we seem ill equipped to gauge its full blown swipe.
Harshness does not exclude trembling atmospheric effects.
Air Conditioner starts almost in a pedantic way with a series of dictionary definition of Air, as flow as manner even as style and condition/conditioning – all of which seem to need redefinition according to new events, conditions and dysfunctionalities. Ie what the Global North bombastically deemed merely functional, highly competitive, adaptive and relentlessly improvable – turns out not to be. There is also a lack of ill intent, and the characters responses seem to always have some puzzled, semi-speculative understanding of this unusual situation. I said that this small movie does not claim planetary relevance, yet is speaks globally without shouting, directly murmuring.
It this the hum of the intelligent or sentient thermostats? Is it the dreams and longings of desperate attempts to repair what is un-repairable? You could blame anyone and find culprits, scapegoating is always on others, yet this does not lead anywhere. Or where it leads is one incredible meta-repair shop (not ‘charnel house of history’) – something that is both media museum, hacker lab etc Or a true semi derelict cyberpunk venue (not its Silicon Valley or maker space incarnation) where the mysteries of black-boxed technology don’t get just fixed but somehow scavenged and re-assembled in new and unsuspecting ensembles. Time travel might mean something completely different, it might mean to feel a gush of air, a fresh breath from a broken car AC or wash in the water condensed by all these ACs. The movie is local without being nativist, still it speaks in mysterious names, without explanation, yet it speaks to all – although the security guard is just a security guard, he is a sort of West African griot, a silent bard, a survivor scarred by wars of liberation of events that never get mentioned in the news and only obliquely adumbrated.
Somehow the ordering of events are all about violent interactions of people and objects or rather objects suicidal falling down to earth ground. A rain of suicidal ACs and dazed, always wary humans trying to disentangle and solve enigmas. Even if blaming the AC of ill intent, of exhaustion seems appropriate, one risks acting like a executor of the eternal boss command that just wants his AC back in good order and get on with the job. I cannot praise enough the wandering, meandering soundtrack which makes it even more of a contemporary desert of reality oasis.
A terrific debut. I have read a free sample of the book via NetGalley in return for an honest review. It is important for me to place Strange Labour within the vague contours of Eastern Europe for some reason. Eastern Europe, if such a thing exists, feels post-apocalyptic precisely in the sense that it does not fit with various standard post-apocalyptic tropes of existing SF. It feels like all the imaginings, fabulations, extrapolation of post-apocalypticism did not prepare us for this. Maybe in the same way that Laurie Penny wrote about the inability of ‘catastrophe porn’ or post-apocalyptic entertainment to prepare us for the new reality we are living at this moment.
The world-building – and this is not a building (but a world to be built?), is a work of Strange Labour that exposes us to the effects of abandonment, to the shadows of massive labyrinthine earthworks that suddenly ungrounded everything. I am maybe wrong but I feel there is a deep affinity with the outcome of rapid de-industrialisation, privatization, the dismantlement of welfare systems and abandonment of everything that happened after 1989 in Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland etc And I say this trying to avoid here the entire charge of Tarkovsky’s “The Zone”. The Zone appears as something immutable and thus zoned-off behind the specifics of a certain time and place, or even cordoned off by a particular historical chain-of-events. In a sense, Penner introduces us to something else, the dispersed drop-offs, the neurodivergent that cannot join the immense Stahanovist Çevengur voluntarism that has suddenly pushed the majority of humanity into a febrile and inescapable activity. Strange Labour has some affinity to most of what the best recent new weird (I am thinking about the works of VanderMeer – Borne, The Strange Bird) tells us – that definitely, something major happened, that it affected everything that came after, we just do not know exactly what. It does that without appealing to a biotechnologically-enabled posthuman frame, but at the same time, all the epileptics and the dementia nurses already inhabit that strange space. In a way, if we try and inhabit the world of Robert Penner it will not save us from disaster, it will maybe spurn us to appreciate its inchoate beauty and scavenge our own cosmology out of its shipwreck entrails. Such a world is not the wasteland of cannibals, murderous mutants and exotic dangers that most of post-apocalypticism abounds, but of care-work to be done, of temporary respite and mutual associations that do not settle into predictable patterns.
Somehow it makes us perceive the strangeness of that absent work. There is something else besides all the brutalist petroglyphs, cosmist mountain top sublime. Yes, the impossible monuments of Communist heyday – hold an almost intangible (for now) finality. At the same time, as a good friend wrote about The Monument House of the Bulgarian Communist Party on Buzludzha Peak such remains became very quickly quite alien, almost unintelligible, its purpose unknowable or aims completely and increasingly irrecoverable. These are just the most scenic ruins apt for majestic ruin porn tourism – but what about this labyrinthine goings-on? What about the various lives, the experiences of people who live amongst such ruins, en route towards something else? What about that something that is being slowly digested and is digesting these natural-industrial habitats. Environments and habitats are indissociable from an entirety that is not larger than its parts. Many have made a home there, masses of people that once called it a place of work, are now rambling, searching, almost shambling but there is incredible wayside beauty. It is enough there is an after – but this after – has fused so seamlessly with what came all of a sudden as to be unrecognizable.
This is a visual essay exploring the future technology of synthetic biology. In recent years there have been major breakthroughs in DNA editing. Making it inexpensive and precise to modify and or combine living organisms to our design specifications. Through the combination of organic and mechanical archetypes into new forms, we wanted to stir the imagination of designers and engineers. The goal of this project is to spread synthetic biology into the sci-fi communities. To help us visualize the design and engineering possibilities that this technology can bring to us in the future. https://www.behance.net/gallery/66208181/Synthetic-Biology
Virtually Asian is a short video essay that looks at how white science-fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures — in the form of video and holographic advertisements — while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
With examples from major sci-fi productions spanning four decades, the video reveals this trope as a poor attempt to mask white supremacist imagination and casting. This well-trodden shortcut is meant to create the appearance of a diverse world without hiring non-white people in any significant capacity (in front of or behind the camera).
With a soundtrack by Vietnamese French beatmaker Onra, which deftly blends traditional and pop Chinese music from the 1960s with hip-hop, Virtually Asian is Thai American artist Astria Suparak’s first video. Itis part of Suparak’s ongoing research project, Asian futures, without Asians.
ARTIST BIO
ASTRIA SUPARAK is an artist and curator based in Oakland. Her cross-disciplinary practice often addresses urgent political issues and has taken the form of new tools and publicly accessible databases of subcultures and misunderstood histories. Her current research includes linguistics, diasporas, food histories, and sci-fi.
I wanted to start with a critical quote by celebrated author and Sci-fi feminist Ursula K Le Guin as an entry point to something quite different: the new Chinese movie Monster Run taking risks. Indeed, we hear it more and more often: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks”.
a screen within a screen within a screen
21st century blockbusters tend to adhere piously to this dogma. Apart from instances of tokenism, it is less about world building new worlds, but only about propping up the old ones. Banking on previous successes is what big franchise do nowadays as a matter of good economic course. This stale creative output (i mean here mainly Marvel capitalist superheroines and superheroes) can be sure entertaining, yet incredibly predictable. And yes maybe they are not cinema and this for good reasons(and not especially becose M Scorsese sez so). I am not going to rehash old/new media-technologically significant histories of why the first half of XX c was ruled by cinema and why cinema gave way in the 1950s to TV in the US, or why 1970s Godfather gave way to the The Sopranos. The debates around post – continuity cinema from a few years ago, theoretically mapped by Steven Shaviro in his Post-Cinematic Affect have been stimulating to everyone, including me. What I’m trying follows up on those fruitful debates but also keeps an eye of fan studies and fandom in general. Cinema is not cinema anymore because it also commercially engulfed like a process of phagocytosis – all these previous non-artsy core fandoms, especially older comics/male-dominated geek cultures – that were already contested & blasted from within. Ursula K LeGuin is herself part of a generation of radical women writers (together with Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ & others) that actively & successfully challenged the most cherished ideals of Golden Age Sci-fi establishment in the 60s &70s & 80s that went hand in parallel with developments within comics. IMHO we are just entering a phase of truly global fandoms & one more diverse (artists, authors, publics, critics) than ever & completly bonkers in the best sense – one that the titans of media struggle to keep up with or try to ignore at their at their peril. Marvel nowadays exemplifies a sort of mise en abime mediatic spiral, the rush of older (retro) canons & fanon (full of contradictions & unsolvable antinomies) carried along and modulated by always mutating & rapidly changing technologies.
binging your way trough the time warp
New “structures of feeling” manifest as current meta- series reflect and build on our own binge status – #fullretromania churned by streaming giants (the Netflix Apple+ Disney + era) under Corona stress loockdown conditions. The soap opera TV series mass appeal success – gets to be lionized within the confines of streaming services such as Netflix. Importantly, and out of the Anglophone bubble – not everyone is Netflix & chill. There’s also in Eastern Europe (especially Romania satellite TV multi-channel bonanza) an acquired post 1989 TV taste & fandom of an older generation (those in their 60s or 70s and still quite gendered – say the generation of our moms) enjoying a whole array of Turkish dramas or Korean historical k-dramas. Otherwise no accident that some Marvel series and movies are self-reflexive, self ironic (postmodern cultural logic at work) chocke-full self-referential digital products. WandaVision is practically one single (and quite unsettling) uninterrupted history of home entertainment in a screen whitin a screen within a screen shot. To me they are like Nam Jun Paik art installations assembled for stay-at-home public in a serial form. Audience is akin to the special agent- (SHIELD-like?! NSA LOVINT?) pay-per-view binging and media analyzing to death 1950s 1960s 1970s US drama universes. The Marvel prosumers live within their screens and pay with their distracted & highly trained attention or continue tele- working uploading new YT replies or reaction videos about their favorite shows. For me it is not important to condamn binging or to relegate it to the addictive. Even if addictive it should still teach us something about our current status – of beings living trough very fast technological change, while almost doing the equivalent of a inter-planetary (or inter-galactic) trip. Binging feels almost like a trance state where nothing is portioned, where supposedly you get the whole season in one gulp. It is the media equivalent of constant guilty pleasures – basic ally what woman audiences have been been accused of all along. Binge and bulimic habits converge and a moralizing attitude akin to the moral panics of the 1980s has been internalized & casualized.
embracing the comics no risk formula
Hollywood embraced the comics majors formula AFTER independent comics artists (especially IMAGE comics) started their own publishing, changing and countering such formulaic franchise monoliths to start with. Comics Marvel or DC where pretty much over-extendeding themselves in a gamut of remakes of remakes BEFORE they ended onscreen. They were always banking on their wide distribution and wide readership by indulgin into canonic fan service, killing various titles ritually, constantly burying and resurrecting their stars, cashing in on the formulaic, extracting value from their pedigree pop iconicity. TimeWarner has been shrinking DC comics division – after it merger with Telecom+ Before this cinematic conglomerate – comics merger, there were re-issues and re-adaptions of previous 50-60 years of lesser or bigger successes – all ij tow with their widening readerships, stagnating sales and diversifying sub- audiences. Various pop cultural aspects were infinitely debatable & exciting with endless discussions even back then via letters from readers or during face 2 face atComic Cons etc Although Ursula’s insightful rant aims at heroic fantasy & space opera (mainly resuscitated by SW) tired tropes (culminating perhaps in ridiculous 1987 Masters of the Universe movie) , it still cuts across everything that is most despicable nowadays; entire media empires as an extension of global theme-parking. Now one single Marvel blockbuster makes as much box office money as the whole US comics industry. The gold is in the ownership and control over the characters – the milking of old & established caped hero brands. Cutting costs and pension plans has become a priority in comics industry, especially since blockbuster movies became so profitable. Yes, there is incredible reductionistic ‘toyfication’ going on – changing and reversing the flow of production chains, so that movies get made ONLY in order to sell more plastic merch and build even more experience economy parks.
world-building and world-playing
While this has been our lot since at least the 2000s, I would like to try and recover at least a certain uninteded effect of toyfiction. There is defintely a golden age of Chinese sci-fi going on – kehuan – uses original concepts, images, constructions, techniques sometimes derived from classical or ancient times to surprising effect. In view of Chinese 2020 Monster Run movie – all religions might have thus a bottom-up cosmological readiness, practicing their skill with various toy universes. Thinking this way makes a lot of ancient sacred artefacts – revered in their time, seem very much like sacred toys, and I am not saying this in order to belittle religious experience or draw attention on the ‘infantile’ aspects of religion or in order to draw ridicule at their attempt to world-build and world-play. Toys also have to do with models of the world, with the speculative capacity to model the universe. What is basically that essential Ptolemaic instrument – the armillary sphere, or what is that Antikythera mechanism but a long series of elaborate pre-electronic cosmic toys?!
toyfiction: lively automatons and religious toys
It is maybe useless to see toyfication and toy-fiction as anything but as further attempt to sanitize, to cutify, to subsume all creativity, to repackage innocence and ingenue aesthetics into further expansions of capital. But toys have lead us in other directions as well. Well, if we regard the first lively automatons as religious toys participating in a theo- robotic history, then they are all expressions of a certain restless (neo-vitalist?) mechanistic mystery play. More often than not there is the possibility that any cheap toy u buy might be poisoned or produced under inhuman forced labor (laogai) conditions and thus be the preferred vehicle & embodiment of the darkest toxic forces of capital. With that in mind, I consider Monster Run a new example of how toons and toys blend into religious mechanisms and Escherian geometrical puzzles – mystical complexes reinvented as weird playgrounds of Spirits, Demons, Monsters, Gods.
faux gold auratic glow of the bloody fun fair parks
Such a natural philosophy of toys would regard humankind itself as human toys of elemental forces(or humans as playthings of the Gods). I say this in order to reverse engineer their infantile consumerist function and cautiously map their preternatural cuteness across an unexpected both sacred&profane terrain. Aberrant toys, cheap copies, fake plastic artefakes, lucky cat faux gold do have an unsettling auratic glow even as they are mass produced and easily reproductible. They also end up on the same mall stall – the golden plastic toothpick box next to the electoplated orthodox incense burners (both made in China btw). In a thoroughly commodified fantasy world, of Spirited Away theme parks abandoned and new ones being built, heaps of plastic toys, puppet limbs on beaches and microplastic slowly filling our oceans, toys become harbingers of ‘numinous’ doom. On the more auspicious note – there is a link between ancient Chinese lucky cats, old sayings (recorded in The Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang) about feline behavior and good omens that announce easy commerce or are supposed to ward off evil. Our 21 c plastic temples in contrast are left floating under more or less murky waters. Yet, they are more strange, more weird than your usual place of dedicated prayer. They are generally scary fun fair theme parks like party clubs mimicking Egyptian glitz or Las Vegas pyramids as sold and Made in and increasingly Created by China.
new elasticity of time & space in the 21st century
Monster Run could be one such backdoor entry, a portal towards the 21st c inter-dimensional thinking & feeling. Onr that id still at odds with 20th c notions & certitudes. Thinking about the MULTIVERSE or about PARALLEL DIMENSIONS, PORTALS – has become pretty common, even maybe a signature of 21 c century spatial and temporal restructuring under both unbridled speculative daredo & as insidious algo-capitalistic means of reproduction. While most non-essential dream-workers work from home(ones that David Graeber hoped to wake up from their productivity slumber) bouncing off the four walls (and sometimes singing from their balconies). These dream workers are also exposed to time warps and bouts of binge-induced non-locality. We are always elsewhere, on The Expanse riding together with the Rocinante crew or chased by mutant monsters on K-drama hallways or deep inside a game level. This restructuring usually arrives via Sci-fi tropes but is also felt as the accretion of a condensed all embracing atmosphere precipitating from our daily experiences under lockdown. Binging on series, YT or TikTopk videos, or reading various lenghty novels is not just a time filler – it also explains something universal about sentient beings. Either cyborg or human they might be spending their long pod-status onboard life under lockdown crunching trough and enjoying media. This has been one of the universal constants of COVID time – something that would feel familiar to (Martha Wells’s) MURDERBOT onboard the long stays in between the landing stations. We are not alone even when alone or most solipsistic, but surrounded by various invented, imaginary creatures, attachments and life support systems as well as very material cloud computing infrastructures burning a lot of fuels that keep us glued to the ultra-HD streaming. We are closely interdependently enjoying various cultural serialisms at a time of general distress. This basic mediatic serialism (with healthy interruptions) during COVID pandemic staycation exhibits a new chewy elasticity of time spent mostly inside closed, built environments. An elastic time best expressed by the Indonesian notion of rubber time jam karet (check interview with Riar Rizaldi by bv film critic Łukasz Mańkowski ), one also taken up by Irina Gheorghe in one of her lecture- performances in Yogyakarta.
homemade creepiness and animatronic mystery plays
What would such a sacrificial rite (sacrificing childhood dreams, naivete, plain fun etc) look nowadays? Toys (animatronic ones especially) offer bloody movable spectacles – empty (abandoned) creepy temples where few make it out to tell the gory tale. Under their healthy, family-oriented innocence, what lies beneath amounts to a splatter grand-guignolesque childhood spectacle where a ham-acting Nicholas Cage plays along. Material toys do take part in a larger creep that includes a longer trail of various creepy digital objects. In fact this homemade creepiness is key nowadays. From creepypasta to YT toons – we unwind a disturbing children’s world gamified, exploited and uploaded by automated editing toolz that push non curated content under ur nose to ur toddler. These creepy hard-to-follow (for adults) content loops have been explored in the essays of James Bridle and their follow-up of rules and manic content filtering.
Chinese Boxes and Matryoshka universes
To go back to Monster Run in spite of what critics have been calling a mess and “salad script” -you can just mainly watch it for fun (if you find a good subbed copy of it). On one level it is just a very fresh Cantonese Taoist Ghostbuster story. My interest was the setting of this monster hunt conflict between worlds that wanders between sino-futurist city cyperpunkish back alleys, CGI interiors etc New Chinese construction sites (including the Belt & Road Initiative). They are the current inter-dimensional nexus hiding in plain sight but also offering the comfort of tiny houses or private otaku room interiors that offer respite from very brutal outer worlds. In this movie backgrounds are morphing, being constantly remade almost in a Minecraft way and with a view (for me) for neglected aspects of the Chinese 21 c miracle – (as opposed to the NY skyline of Nolan’s Inception kaleidoscope let’s say). Of course there is a lot of shamanistic goings on, gate-keeping, sliding and hiding in-btw worlds and worlds that are nested inside worlds like Chinese boxes or Matryoshka universes.
convenience store gate-keeping & monster rampage
The convenience store is integral to this border crossing. It is the place where the young Jing Mo (Jessie Li), the movie’s heroine and future inter-dimensional gatekeeper works. She works at the convenience stores at a dead ends job(a typical experience of pre-Corona youth no?) after being diagnosed, medicated and separated from her mom (who seems to be her only living relative). She is transformed into a patient because she sees invisible entities that influence and affect our world in very material ways. She also gets paid to dress up as a furry – in a monster costume that looks very similar to the real monsters in the movie. She has to try hard and ignore otherworldly creatures (monsters), beings that are oblivious to everybody else but her in the beginning. Later on she finds out that she is part of a group that have made a living out of hunting monsters that wreak havoc to our world. Monster do stick to her, and she attracts some gigantic hairy creatures (akin to kinda cute Yeti’s) that seem to freeze their victims (but not kill them). This convenience store is almost a mythical place in itself. Very colored, overly full of all sorts of specific Asian packaged products, bright stalls with products that get chaotically thrown around and misplaced after consecutive monster romps.
maximalist space, armilary spheres and Egyptomania
Another scene is set in the backside of a street vendor’s shop called uncle Ping. In fact this very amiable street vendor is a mythical creature; a shape-shifting half-lion half human. He could be part of a long series of wondrous antique shop owners or your favorite from the nearest China Town. I also saw him like one of the Ming dynasty scientist. He could also remind us of the Zicawei portrait of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci maybe because of the armillary sphere (no mother Mary thouh). There are all sorts of exotic artefacts in this liminal space, from Armillary spheres to incense burners. Egypt also plays a role too, although it is again almost a theme park show of Egyptian antiquity. Of course ancient Egypt was part of Imperial Orientalism and of course it became such an important iconic treasure trove to be ripped off by incipient European secret societies and even masonic iconography. Maybe indeed the Mummy’s curse was of course a memetic artefact of such British Imperial fears and hubris after pillaging most extra-European cultures, a process of appropriation that went unimpeded till recently. But this ‘hodgepodge’ is almost like an contemporary alchemist’s room, an unusually crowded, non- Ikea furniture space. No room for Marie Kondo, this is a non- minimalist maximalist environment akin to the setting of a Korean female shaman ceremonial or the dense arrangement of a Chinese pharmacist shop. Young Jing Mo is the next in line shamanic traveler & inter dimensional gatekeeper and the true battle of the movie pits her against an older, more power hungry (?!) matriarchal (shaman) generation.
There is also an incredible chase that feels like constantly folding space inside the lower lever of a construction site or parking lot. I really liked how the construction boom (cement) molded space is somehow itself folding and refolding into new temporal configurations as the monster hunters car tries to loose some pretty pesky nemesis. Importantly – folding paper is key in Monster Run.
folding space-time while folding paper
Somehow this topological art of the foldable translates perfectly into portal openings and folding space-time. Paper was invented in China and the main non-human character of the movie is Paper the sidekick of 2000s HK heathrob Shawn Yue – literally an animated spell (a piece of written paper that has taken a life of its own). The Chinese craft of paper sculpture is directly linked to the after-life and nether world. There are elaborate paper copies of golden ingots, paper money, paper humans, paper houses (even paper VHS or paper cars) also included figures of paper gods that were made (and sold) all over the Chinese diaspora, including Taiwan and Singapore. All these paper objects were intended to be ritually burned and thus mainly de-materialize HERE and re-materialize THERE in the great beyond. They are intended for the after-life and the ancestors cult. Recently this art form – as most of our paper products got replaced by (cheaper but much more noxious) petrochemical plastic replicas. Monster Run features some really nifty tricks involving recycled pop ephemera as idol posters, while -Paper- the Daoist side-kick appears to be made out of single use coffee cups or tetrapack packaging.
sentient flower portals
The novum of Monster Run is an inter-dimensional tunneling that is quite organic. I was totally surprised by this since it is not at all what inter-dimensional wormholes look like in usual Sci-fi settings or scientific illustrations. Monster Run spins these wormholes almost like the silk moth cocoon is spun. It almost fells like a soft funnel spider web without the poisonous arachnid chelicherae waiting for you. This inter-dimensional labyrinthine silky structure I dare say is quite different from other architectural mazes (as in The Maze Runner series for example) I have seen in movies, Sci-Fi books, science experiments (the famous maze solving slime molds!), comics or even speculative scientific renditions. This human-sized inter-dimensional spider web or silken cocoon blooms flowers portals at its ends. In fact these incredible moving gigantic peony(?!) flowers (see screenshot below) are the portals – like undulating, sentient fleshy sea anemones of sorts with moving, unfurling petals and feely touchy stamens. Peonies have been called “the longest-used flowers in Eastern culture” and they have such a diverse morphology ranging from your garden variety to 3 m deciduous shrubs! Last time we counted Paeoniaceae compounds it included 262 phytochemicals. What more do you expect of botanical alchemy? This amazing list include compounds that have shown antioxidant, antitumor, antipathogenic, immunomodulative, cardiovascular-system-protective activities and central-nervous-system activities (in vitro). Peonies are a cocktail of monoterpenoidglucosides, flavonoids, tannins, stilbenoids, triterpenoids, steroids, paeonols, and phenols. Monster Run CGI giant peonies are the first floral ‘sentient portals’ I have yet encountered in movies. Flowers of course are very important in Buddhism and Hinduism, and giant lotuses abound in Buddhist cosmology with a predilection for the floral as the seat of myriad Buddhas (such as the iconography of the Prabhūtaratna and Shakyamuni in the jeweled stupa wall painting from the Yulin Caves) or as spatial representations of various Buddhist realms. Hutzul minority in Ukraine & România also identified the lucky 4 leafed clover as a model of the universe. The various Lotus petals surrounding the central Pistil (mount Meru of Hinduism) are the various regions/cultural centers/worlds (Lokas). But you don’t need all these references – the CGI makes it something sui generis, aptly transporting us between computer game worlds and a backyard globalized reality. Anyways, the takeaway is that Monster Run, even without a big release is well worth watching even just for seeing these portals bloom!
I read Clifford D. Simak’s 1970 Out of their Minds in its Heyne Verlag German 1971 edition (translated by Birgit Ress-Bohusch). A trashy sleeve with properly garish art by C. A. M Thole: a small blurry red convertible (a Matchbox-sized vehicle) is being threatened or burped by huge fiery looking winged dragon and a ludicrously huge demonic creature with a red fluttering cape. The demon almost looks surprise about what is about to happen in front on him. The German title “Verteufelte Welt” (more like Bedeviled World or Infernal, Devilish World) does not really help to attract more attention from its readers. The appeal to Christian demonology or Satanist plots, sects etc falls short. The following is an attempt to see how and why Out of Their Minds takes further all the recent discussions about tulpomancy, meme magic, ‘thought-forms’, egregores etc As to why all this perilous policing about various intrusions(escapes?) from the imaginary worlds into our own. Minds – locates the human mind as the major culprit and by extension only the human central nervous system (head) as a laboratory of the mind. I think here we have our difficulty dealing with something else than the imagination of certain portion of a certain species (even mindfulness apps are still not full because they are very selective in how they locate minds and place them only into overworked westerner skulls). We live in a lively (and deadly) exciting time where minds (and imagination by extension), reason (as Moynihan puts in his X-Risk “To realize that reason was at risk was also to realize that reason just is the ability to risk new ways of seeing the world”) jeopardize various other settled opinions about what minds are and how mind came to be. The evolution of all sorts of minds seem only partially settled inside the cranial case spacewhen we consider that there is all these minds that are not encased, that developed inside non-skeletal, non-vertebrate, ‘soft’ underwater bodies (especially thinking about certain convergent trends within Metazoa multicellular evolution – multicellular minds that would ecompass both vertebrate and non-vertebrates – Peter-Godfrey Smith is a good place to start).
Clifford D Simak’s book has a much wider scope imho beside the most obvious one: the dangers of wishing or calling imaginary things (not excluding various very helpful abstractions) into reality and overcoming the ill-effects of such releases into the world, effects that have a tendency to get externalized on others (*least protected). More importantly there is an ambiental, environmental sense of these intrusions – where nobody seems to be immune to these intrusions). Nowadays it is almost impossible to ignore this simple fact. There are many good takes on why so many of these self-fulfilling hypermediated prophecies are at work all around us. At the same time the most obvious (so as to be ignored) is maybe that such intrusions have stopped being the obscure realm of mere specialists (philosophers, futurologists, cultural critics, cognitivists, media gurus, technoshamans etc). Almost everyone is part and parcel of it, at we can agree that we are all the time being exposed to various disruptive fictions and for-profit imagineering/innovation.
So this becomes a common task – to see why and how this hardcore ontological oscillation plays out and where does it lead us. The spillover has not only been the fact that a lot of imageeneering has always been employed and involved (thinking how Scifi writers in Japan have been involved in World Exhibtions in the 1070s), but since Sept 11 at least, different imagineering efforts (I use this both in it’s devious Disney sense as well as a general term for cognitive labour) from professionals (be it the movie industry Ridley Scott – Pentagon Pentagon interactions etc or known postcyberpunkers such as Neal Stephenson consultancy for Blue Origin/Bezos sub-orbital spaceflight company) etc have been directly employed by governments and the private sector to lot out future catastrophist scenarios. The miltiary-entertainment continuum would go so far as to even endow a certain cinematic aspect to all preemptive action against various so-called ‘rogue states’ or even allow for institutionalizing our current 6th Extinction via X-risk imagining and management. Imagination does not create or speculate in a vacuum, it is a way to bridge the gulfs btw the stars. It allows flights-of-imagination where there is no data available or even a sort of feed forward that can call upon elements of sensibility that lie beyond perceptual consciousnesses, and even allow for things that can estrange us, delight, entrance or heighten our lives or express what has become unthinkable or unreachable nowadays.
Why is this book on top on my obligatory ‘imaginary ecosystems’ reading list? I will not do a regular review of the book or try to bring it into the orbit of Simak’s larger oeuvre. The one other book I explored on Goodreads is Way Station. Out of their Minds – his 1970 book maps out impossible border-crossings, btw what is considered the imaginary proper and the real, btw fictional and the hard facts, an illegal border crossing that has become very casual, increasingly acquiring agential character, operativity and universality. What is most endearing about it – is that this book does not make any grandiose theoretical claims. Also, it is not the first piece of fiction to incorporate a theory about fiction in its fictional story mesh, even if it still is a first person POW witnessing weave. Above all, such alarmist blurring of real/weird/strange is incredibly exciting and disturbing. Today we hear it everywhere – ‘meme magic’ is omnipresent, and it is almost immediately related to some trauma linked to toxic meme wars or the rise of the most unsavory NRx neoreactionary doctrines. From payed troll factories, Reddits to 4chan dunk memes, everybody is thrilled to be playing a speculative sorcerer’s apprentice – while reality keeps unwinding, with everybody either profiting or decrying the banned and orphaned creations taking over their creators (with a caveat – that almost all pop imaginary characters are now owned by a few humongous IP franchises). Even before all that, for Simak’s very human heroes and heroines, it is a dangerous and mortal time. They are almost accidental suffering the effects of this unhuman encounters. They are mostly agnostics, convinced materialists and what one might call practical people. Outer dimensions (in both Lovecraft’s or Simak’s) in keep naturally endangering very down to earth non-fictional human creatures.
While clearly being a non-believer is not an option, then not being one of those creatives of franchised worlds, or crackpot speculators or a purveyors of incensed theories about the world becomes life-threatening as well. Trying to keep factual, grounded, mechanistic-materialistic is risky as hell and seem to be part of a certain post-truth naivete. One does not have to strive for a poor imagination today, since for many it is still a question of a collective incapacity to imagine the effects of inequalities. Imagination is always under “crisis”, there is always a threat to imagination – a threat of both “not imagining” the horrendous effects of climate change as well as the “lack of imagining” a better, less damaging future.
Maybe the difference btw getting burned by dragon fire or squashed by a Godzilla, blown by a tornado or suffering a radioactive meltdown was never so clearly drawn. Since the stakes become so large, the scale is so spread-out, the situation already hyperobjectual, the choice of being a superheroine, a Pokemon monster and/or a supervillain is almost a requirement. Being mere mortals means being dis-empowered, exposed, unemployable, red-lined, or uninsured against the most obnoxious threats that do not figure on any insurance policy. Outside the incredibly remote (and quite horrifying) existence bubble of Norman Rockwell’s 1950s whitewashed suburbia, an increasingly less and less idealized Western contemporary reality abounds, blocking out all those unthinkable truths, where very real ‘only imagined’ (imaginary just for the privileged few) lives and dystopian neverlands abound. Imagination in fact is very important not in its selective capacity or (like consciousnesses) but like reason able to unsettle – the old opinions. It is actually the only possibility to experience (even relate to) what is beyond the experiential horizon. It can offer you a relatively safe passage trough a Black Hole, or ascertain what might happen when jumping btw Star-Gates. It can even allow to metamorphose into a bug, an impossible insectoid other. It is also not just an easy reversal phantasy – permitting someone privileged to easily exchange places and face the terrors felt by those whose very lives are a constant struggle to make by and support their livelihood however they can. Mind you – these expunged ‘outer’ is only ‘other’ for the minds of Western Euro-American gated mental worlds. It is not just a matter of exchangeable perspective and of consciousness, that one cannot approach easily such scifi Nigerian reality as the one aptly described by Tade Thompson in Rosewater (Wormwood Trilogy). This one will stay as unreal, safely tucked away ONLY if fortified and encased withing the ever more selective – transmedia bubble. Imagination is infused by very real realities that one dares not think of, not only with ‘fabulous beasts’, and all these movements and border crossings, larger realities insist on everybody with a life of their own and even with a politics of their own.
While action-packed – Out of Their Minds speaks powerfully and cogently about how all existing (no just simply mind- based) creations past, present or future were never our own. The lack of control over our lives is mirrored by such inner mental permeability that was always there. We only know dare talk or allow for a wider, much more unstable (panpsychist?!) world. And this does not singularize human reason – it just brings the same wider response-abilities into cosmic play. In a way for Simak it is exactly the opposite of being locked-in, quarantined imaginary creations can never stay locked for long. They swap genes & mutate almost at the expense of every other living beings. Simak opens up the question of how we might bear response-ability for animating such slippery imaginary surfaces. Out of Their Minds – makes clear that there is no brain-barrier to keep things out or permanently in. Yes, minds are just a station, busy hosting a wider world, not just passive replicators of memes, since they do physically suffer the effects of these imaginary fevers good or bad. Minds are not boxes where mere ‘ideology’ takes place, where superstition or for that matter artistic or poetic creation abounds. What Out of Their Minds offers us is a pervasiveness of such imaginary proclivity, a tropism of what was never confined to minds (or human minds). We get this by following the mis-behaviour the misadventures of non-containable non-self-contained or impermeable processes that allow impossible combination, that shout each other out (like Godzilla monster during nuptial season), carrying with them sense-surround of unhuman-mindfulness or what does not get carried into minds.
This maybe extends to various historical constructions, the invention of tradition, official accounts of the way it played out in various periods of human history. Not to slip in cultural relativism, realities escape minds even faster than they escape history book, taking a life of their own – becoming extremist revival paradises (or hells depending). The abuse of historical middle ages is such a case in study. A reality stocked up by national feelings, money & grandiose monuments of a fabulous past, ethno- glorious fantasies enlivened by movies, fiery speeches and historical novels – do cut, burn and slash.
Historical reenactments (what is normally not regarded as mere cosplay) recruit volunteers, perform and do search for extras to engage them in imagining various battles (such as the American Civil War in Simak’s novel). People do dress up willingly for various historical occasions playing their favored version (enemy or friend), giving their own ethno-political spin to local medieval history. What was disregarded as poorly researched Christian Neo-Templar knighthood gameplay (as in Breivink’s manifesto’s) or puritanical Moslem Wahhabite return to Islam’s origins has a life of its own, it feed-fwd into the present. A new book (which i have no read) – The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (2020) by Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant practically takes the preferred versions of today’s nationalistic Middle Ages at their face value, although, as mentioned above, I would not put the blame just on experts or just the Devil’s historian masterminds.
Firstly Clifford D Simak does not separate older from newer imaginary (past and present fabulations) creations (in a sense I would not even call them creations since this always presupposed a creator or a clock-maker) and this I find intensely attractive. These past fictional productions are never past, they do not just peter out. Following the book’s trail, one might say they just have difficulty intermingling, niche-sharing and coexisting with the new imaginary. There is definitely a social life of imaginary beings (what one might call today call tulpas, egregore or thought-forms), busy vying for attention and energy input. Simak in fact takes good old Devils – in a sense key trickster players of Christian demonology (Satan, Baphomet) and searches for their feelings and thoughts about revolutions of the mind, older worldviews being upended. What are the hegemonic imaginary battles that we ignore? Simak makes their position heard about, it makes them whine and be reproachful (to humans), complaining like border patrols or populist politicians about the unregulated flux of new imaginary migrants/aliens (the initial complaint is about UFOs).
Why does ‘ancien regime’ fabulation resent the new UFO or extraterrestrial beings, that steal the limelight? One has to speculate on that.
If there are rules in the out-of-the-mind realms, and if somebody refuses to play along with the old rules then there is a revolution that keeps on fomenting and spilling over. One might even say we see just the smoke trail of the imaginary happenings with very real stakes already going on (with new speculative fiction by non-European, trans, non-binary writers leading the way) fronted by Thade Thompson, Rivers Solomon, Sofia Samatar, Nndi Okarafor, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Arkady Martine and many others. One can say this is just one of very few places where the good and the new seems to prevail. In a sense the conspiracy of “out of the minds” is not of mindful of things (altough that maybe also it) but the fact that nothing stays long in the mind, and it seems to speak about the all-out influx that feels partially motivated by the same belief in (big ‘T’) Tradition. The Devil of Simak is the deviltry of “perennialism” and of harkening back at the top and repackaging any new as same old same old same old.
It feels as if only certain imaginary worlds got right of passage and they want to make it exclusive. There is this desecrated and maybe redolent imaginary realm that cannot keep up with itself. The artificial mock-outrage of Devils that are fighting for order and respect holds such ironic justice is very close to home. What cosmic joke! The continuous production of new and more outlandish imaginary denizens has swamped the old segregation fiction/non-fiction apartheid. Clifford D Simak’s has this imaginary ecosystemic cross-over and Great Faunal Floral Imaginary Exchange spill over from the ‘outer’ into something else, here ‘outer’ and ‘else’ can both mean the unthinkable and post-probabilistic. Instead of the Copyrighter’s Inquisition and controlled usage, we have a place where Pluto Disney dogs, Tasmanian devils or Ren’s and Stimpy’s might run amok and disturb the golden sleep of dragons, no matter how much IP and fines are unleashed by the IP owners.
We could also say that the worst of the current toxic imaginary climate stocked up by online hate, let’s say the most horrific creations of racism and antisemitism can end up swamping minds (jumping epochs). The worst of Middle Ages, child sacrifices, etc vampirism, etc ends up possessing not only minds, but circulating outside of skulls. We see how they are literally taking over the most placid and seemingly naive Internet cartoon creatures, weaponizing the blandest and most dunk elements out there. Low-brow vs elite culture wars are no more ‘outer’ than say the most ludicrous and sadistic bot-edited Peppa the Pig entering your child’s YT search. They are as vivid and offer the same proclivity as the so called- fixed theologically verified hierarchies of archangels and heruvims of old. That is why, at this particular turn of events, the forgotten gnostic proclivity of rearranging worlds rings familiar. The gnostics are an early (almost since the beginning branded as ‘dangerous’ by the crystallizing proto-orthodoxy) expression of such counter-expertize, of such unseeming reversals, unsettling temporarily all the hierarchies of heavens (call the unreal or what lies outside of immediate experience). This is why in Simak’s story, the Devil seeks some sort of truce, some sort of economical exchange of the imagination with their mindless host humans that should be made response-able as potential allies in damming and dampening this all-out disruptive imaginary. The main character cannot but accept and diplomatically deal with the unruly material imaginary beings or events of the outer-realm when he is exposed to their action, to their overflow. He is listening only when he is swamped by the invading imaginary hordes that make havoc waking world, bending his reality from the outside in. ‘A crisis of imagination’ in this restricted sense might mean exactly this – the fact that only certain visions and imaginative futures gain upper hand at certain historical turning points or get right of transit from one side to another. As reality became stranger than fiction, none of the damaging fictions retreated peacefully, letting themselves exiled or mercifully euthanized. On the other hand, clearly, since at least 1989, certain forms of utopian thinking have been slowly petering out, while other forms of repressive imagineering have been gaining currency and even financial support, crowding and blotting out any alternative. Things are hopefully changing with a new generation of freshly unreal ideas, with pessimism of the mind and optimism of the deed cooperating for a less oppressive world building.
Out of their Minds also makes clear that the rules of the imaginary world do not stick to just the flat-eartherish variants, or the anti-Newtonian or even anti-Einstein kinds. They mutate and release their consequences onto the creatures that inhabit such worlds. There is a chance for the endangered humans (and many other more-than humans) critters that enter in and out of the imaginary realm that they must obey its rules. Both real and imaginary beings must make sure they survive their own sometimes arbitrary and aberrant rules. Always good to feel the G pulling even when leaving earthly gravitation. If in fairy tale world you can ONLY make three wishes, then 3 wishes it is. If Superman is vulnerable to Kryptonite, then so be it.
Fictionalization and hyperstition under capitalism (aren’t financial abstractions a painful and very effective way to see terrible capitalist imagineering or meta-fictions at work?) have channeled libidinal forces, extracted value and secured an increasingly powerful role by actively devaluing all other value forms (call them virtualities, utopian flights of fancy, reveries etc as u want), basically pushing to extinction (or at least in very restricted reservations) all other ways of imagining otherwise. On the surface at least this is nothing particularly new, one can say that in the past, imaginary beings, spirits, sprites, various entities have always had to play it out against newer or former brethren although some form of symbiosis was always present (sic how Buddhism integrated older Bon nature spirits or Christianity the pagan deities and calendrical annual celebrations). The history of religions calls it syncretism and it is none other than (also) a symbiosis of the imagination. At the same time in late capitalism there has been always a more monopolistic, corporative and insidious way to incorporate and centralize older more heterogenous local animisms. A pluralism of spirits and multitude of demons gives way to prefab imperial personality cults. One such XX c transformation is the ominous Emperor cult of Japan – its construction specifically linked with the destruction of local shrines and their efficiency-trimmed reformatting, remolding the old chaosmos into a nationalistic weaponized matrix able to accomplish inhuman feats of violence and suffering.
Well, in the view of Out of Their Mind and Well and its fictional theory of an animated imaginary worlds – weird, shape-shifting realism is here to stay. Even being exposed to such theories accomplishes the unspeakable (here he joins Lovecraft and the Yellow King). Once thinking and playing with the idea that there might be intrusions and that imaginary friends (Slender men creepypasta) you’re done. The imaginal theories empower imaginary intrusions. Far from the Stanford – Rand Corporation – Arpanet early stirrings of Internet and networking, this book does not make an appeal to any notion of virtual reality or a simulated universe. In fact, Simak’s version of the imaginary – barely escapes the ruthless Selfish-Gene evolution, a sort of stripped neo-Spencerian Social-Darwinism of the unreal. Luckily, imaginary creatures do tend to cooperate and even socialize with us and even strike a truce, even while exchanging pieces of themselves at the moment mostly seems in our disadvantage, they are not really trying hard to make us memetically -replaceable.
As an addition to “OUt of THeir Minds” I find excellent a recent book by Jimena Canales. Enlarging the scope of imaginary beings to including the scientific imaginary – she includes daimons that have been plaguing and animating thought experiments since the Greeks, non-superstitious imaginary beings that enliven the works of Descartes and Maxwell. Here we have something else indeed it seems, demonic creatures that have been lured by science and that can teach us something about physics and cosmology no matter how inhuman and more-than-human they might appear. Beguiling guiding spirits that can even fool our sense of consensual reality, reshape philosophical questions and change statistical odds in ways that never seemed possible before. They threaten the energetic and informational conservation laws of the universe and by so doing teach us something of great survival value. I have not read Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science (2020) but it seems such an important addition to this ongoing discussion. Let us take a cue from such imaginary – but thoroughly- scientific beings, adept at making their devilish predecessors permanently retire.
Black Holes are the most extraordinary phenomenon in the universe, but they are a riddle that confounds our intuitions.
Anything that enters them can never escape, and yet they contain nothing at all. They are bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. They are dark on the outside but not on the inside. They invert time into space and space into time.
Black Holes are found throughout the universe. They can be microscopic. They can be billions of times larger than our sun. Our solar system is currently orbiting a Black Hole 26,000 light years away at a speed of 200 km per second.
In Ten Tips for Surviving a Black Hole physicist and novelist Janna Levin takes you on a journey inside a black hole, explaining what would happen to you in there and why. In the process you’ll come to see how their mysteries contain answers to some of the most profound questions ever asked about the nature of our universe. (Goodreads)
TimeSpace Warps 
