At Six o’clock the next morning I was woken by the noise, the statue was now fifty feet long and crossing the flower beds on either side of the garden. It sounded as if a complete orchestra were performing some Mad Hatter’s symphony out in the centre of the lawn. At the far end, by the rockery, the sonic cores were still working their way through the Romantic catalogue, a babel of Mendelssohn, Schubert and Grieg, but near the veranda the cores were beginning to emit the jarring and syncopated rhythms of Stravinsky and Stockhausen.
I woke Carol and we ate a nervous Breakfast.
“Mr Hamilton!” she shouted. “You’ve got to stop it!”
…
The metal was soft and the blade sank through it quickly. I left the pieces I cut off in a heap to one side, random notes sounding out into the air. Separated from the main body of the statue, the fragments were almost inactive, as DR Blackett had stated. By two o’clock that afternoon I had cut back about half the statue and got it down to manageable proportions…
…At two o’clock that night I woke as a window burst across the floor of my bedroom. A huge metal helix like a claw through the fractured pane, its sonic core screaming down at me.
…”Get rid of it. Bury it somewhere, or better still, have it melted down. As soon as possible.”
At the preliminary hearings we soon realised that, absurdly,
our one big difficulty was going to be proving to anyone who had not been there
that the statue had actually started growing. With luck we managed to get
several postponements, and Raymond and I tried to trace what we could of the
statue. All we found were three small struts, now completely inert, rusting in
the sand on the edge of one of the junkyards in Red Beach. Apparently taking me
at my word, the contractor had shipped the rest of the statue to a steel mill
to be melted down.
…The court building was a new one and by an unpleasant irony ours had been the first case to be heard there. Much of the floor and plasterwork had still to be completed, and the balcony was untiled. I was standing on an exposed steel crossbeam; one of two floors down someone must have been driving a rivet into one of the girders, and the beam under my feet vibrated soothingly.
Then I noticed that there were no sounds of riveting going on anywhere, and that the movement under my feet was not so much a vibration as a low rhythmic pulse.
…Carol was patting the girder and listening to it. “I think it’s humming,” she said, puzzled. “It sounds like the statue.”
… “They did, angel. So it got back into circulation, touching off all the other metal it came into contact with. Lorraine Drexel’s statue is here, in this building, in a dozen other buildings, in shops and planes and a million new automobiles. Even if it’s only one screw or ball-bearing, that’ll be enough to trigger the rest off.”
“Did you say it was all over? Carol, it’s only just beginning. The whole world will be singing.”
J.G Ballard – Vermilion Sands [Venus Smiles – excerpts p122-6]
***
Deconstruction and reappearance of the cathedral – or in the
work of Ballard, a resurrecting statue – or the Arch
of Triumph which had been destroyed by the Islamic State in Palmyra, only to re-emerge
as a digital print in the West.
Institute of Digital Archaeology Digital of Institute of Digital Archaeology of Institute.
As Hamilton and Carol dismantle the statue, they find in appropriate time that the partial fragments they have filed away have grown significantly. To the time it takes to dismantle the statue, they discover quite soon that the metal is constantly expanding into corkscrew-like elongations.
The hyper-libidinal tornado of death that is the Islamic State – who aim to escape representation, who may as well follow on the Italian Futurist Movement rather than the Quran, a radical ‘futureman’, disjunctive nonsense of bodies piled up parallel to fragments of ancient artefact – pathing the speedway of the future in the filament of human bone and remnant of history.
The Islamic State over a week long siege, self-politicised,
hand-crafted and deliberately infantile radicals execute the abrasive in a type of destruction that can be propounded to the
Italian Futurism of Marinetti. Particularly in the Fascism and nihilistic
glorification of war and destruction. In an apparent point where the ambiguity
of the extremist vision pairs with the furthest revolution of meaning – they
caused significant damage and infantile vandalism to the cultural heritage of
Syria.
In condolence – or perhaps in apology – it appears in
London, the Arch of Triumph – coming to Trafalgar Square, April 2016, onto New York
September;
"By
using digital techniques to map and preserve monuments and other aspects of
shared human history, we are able to ensure that nobody can deny history or
dictate that their narrative or ideology stands above the shared story of all
humanity and our shared aspiration to live together in harmony."
The misery of digital hypermedia now takes action outside of
real time; whilst ISIS cleansed the site of polytheistic monuments, the West
summoned it back to surface in an act of heteroglossic mimesis.
The ‘Black Gold’ revenue of oil smuggling with peak demand, a market devastated by secular decline, the impending turbulence has become a catalyst of recurrent defeat. A sharp fall in international oil prices make smuggling and the ISIS-controlled market towns such as al-Bab and Manbij unprofitable. However, this blood-supply of the Caliphate [fundamental for the insurgency and finance] is a reflection of the central role of oil within international power structures. And this is where the potential integration of corruption enters the global economy in a state of resurrection, through exchange – from destruction to illicit topological assimilation.
Islamic State exist as extra-terrestrial parasitic creature
absorbing into the ground and materialising as a state of paranoia and a state
of regression in the West – through digital cosmic-schizophrenia –
Europe on the embankment acting as a transcendental speed-camera.
Calling for attacks on the West during Ramadan through ‘the-voice’,
the virtual sublime and inner-schizophrenic soliloquy which is echoing the
cortex of Europe. The month of calamity. It's symptoms will rise to the surface - it will leave its claw marks on the flesh of the mothership;
Somewhere between the horror image, there is a distinction to be made between the reality of a secular radicalism and the analysis of a political extremist unconsciousness. Our heads, still, rotate 360 - we can only turn-the-other cheek so much until we face the same direction - or stare back.
Where do we start
with history, according to Deleuze – in the middle. Now we have a misplacement –
although its demolition is abhorrent, it is also hard for me to say that its renovation
is not equally as monstrous. There is no reset to the computer, its cruelty
leaves marks upon the body – the open wounds are distracting – we cannot seal
them with PLA 4043D or thermoplastics, they cannot reorganise themselves – it
is not apathy which brings me to this point but sheer deprivation from
rationality, to allow for symbolic flow in which we recognise ISIS as a real accelerating
force. Rebuilding the past, through a
complete allowance of an ontological metamorphosis.
