OFLUXO

This isn’t a script. This isn’t a script for a film or a TV show, or a play or an exhibition. It’s not a screenplay. But there’s always a sliver of reality in which one could argue that it is, and so it would look a little like this:

1 EXT. LEIPZIGER STRASSE 1

A group of objects, previously movable, are now installed as static scenery. They set the stage behind a glass fiber bodyshell. Some are as tall as a human figure, others large enough to enclose one, some smaller than the average human head; one of these objects consists of a body so flat, some people would call it ‘immaterial’, of course we know no such thing exists, there’s always some(repressed)thing outside of
what we see required to inspire sense certainty.

NARRATOR (O.S.)

Brackets are symbols that wrap around words, phrases or sentences in a piece of writing. They mark what should be considered a separate organ to the main body of text. Most machinic screen readers will gloss over them, meaning a. they will just leave the brackets including their contents out, or b. they will read the contents without hinting to the existence of the brackets, all that (in text) is hugged in by
the brackets then swims (in speech) in the same soup as the remaining text.

It’s not just machines though, because a human translator from text to speech encounters the same issue. [To open and close brackets, or not to open or close brackets? (In speech, that is.)]

2 INT. RIGHT SIDE WALL 2

From afar, it looks as though someone took a pair of scissors and cut three openings into the wall. They look like cave entrances, only they’re teeming with alchemical branches, self-generating codes, mutant [tree(mountain)]landscapes.

SENSORIUM (freshly risen from the grid)
Everything you see hanging vertically now first saw the light of day lying on an operating table. Their soft sulfate mineral bodies so dry, if you’d eject a pool of spit on them, they’d soak them up instantly, like a drop of sweat rolling off the forehead of a desert wanderer losing itself in the heat before it reaches the ground.

A common misunderstanding is that one can’t cut (with) paint. The organisms before you prove you can: particles suspended in a liquid substance are applied to coat the gypsum body board, layer upon layer deposited, forming sediments. A
sharpened tool slides into these sediments, turning time into a grid, imitating the process of etching copper trails onto a circuit board.

CAMERA zooms in on one of the trays. It turns into a handle of a window, opens itself into its surrounding.

SENSORIUM
Oh! A living organism spilled all over the ground, hope no one minds.

CAMERA rotates, zooms out again. Instead of hanging on the wall, the triptych now appears to be lying on the floor, posing as a triadic salt water lake, the density of which makes swimming feel more like floating.

3 INT. PILLAR 3

The face of an aquarium is set into the wall, faces the window. A shipping container floats inside of it. Its side plate reads: “Approved for transport under customs seal”.

JOURNALIST (V.O.)
There are about 5-6 million, if not more, shipping containers being hauled across the surface of the ocean at this very moment. Once an hour, one of them makes an escape, perhaps because a bracket has loosened its hold, and falls into the ocean.

CONTAINER
(to the snails, tunicates, hermit crabs, scallops and tubeworms) When you’ve made a nest of my tears, you will have proven the ability of the corpse to continue living beyond death. Exact a last revenge upon the treasured deceit of trash…

Cycles of compression and expansion of air convert heat energy to mechanical work. There’s something inspiring about seeing an engine run on the heat of a cup of hot water.

JOURNALIST (V.O.)
Like brackets or containers, a capsule encloses something. It preserves what it contains in a stable environment by cutting it off from another. It remains to be seen whom or what this tendency serves. Escape fear, escape hope!

4 INT. HYPOTHETICAL BACK WALL 4

An ogival arch holds a labyrinthian profile, unveiled in a process of virtual dissection and simulating the properties of glass, aware of the need to please expectations given the shape of the arch.

ARIADNE’S THREAD (confused by the concept of “solution”)
I’ve tried the art of a consistent, contingent, ordered search, all available routes return time and time again to the bulbous extensions strung up in this velvet structure of mine, this aggregation of cells forming a shared record.
Stroke me and you’ll see webs used by astronomers in their search for dark matter.

ACTUAL BACK WALL

A symbiotic organism poses as a drawing. It sits inside a frame made of T-Slot aluminum profiles with grooves to move bio/mechanical components through.

FRAME (starts an internal dialogue with its post-metabolic
pellicle gut)
You can force some substances to melt by placing them in a crucible. Others remain defiant. For example, the substance of symbiosis and the substance of cost-benefit might appear to be physically connected, but only so by a metaphorical trick. Control the body, invent the mind.

Something starts to move through the grooves: a viral medium undergoing mutation.

ONE OF THE 300 HUMANS INSIDE LEVIATHAN’S TORSO
Nothing to decypher. No enigma to resolve today or any other day.

5 INT. DIAGONAL AXIS 5

Two corporealities are resurrected from a sleeping stockpile of industrial debris. You can tell they are distant relatives, and yet the distance between them remains ambiguous and arbitrary, it could be a few Gregorian years, the measured distance of two meters, a geological era, 8.3 light minutes (the distance between the Earth and the Sun, in that case one of them would burn up).

THE CORPOREALITY THAT WOKE UP SCREAMING (lids pluck open like shutter blinds)
Alive! Still Alive!
Oh, the joy of working on a warm body.

CHORUS (V.O.)
Oh, the joy of working on a warm body.

THE CORPOREALITY THAT WOKE UP SCREAMING
The organized self spilling its organs, sloshing in electric brine.

THE OTHER CORPOREALITY
There’s an aspect to the concept of “complex”, which indicates a complication, and then there is another which composes it of interconnected parts. And then there is the
psychological construct which makes a [person] feel the need to save other [people].
If you’re willing to stay sober, you’d say sacrifice is abused as a veil for distraction.

THE OTHER CORPOREALITY
(sighs and takes the deepest breath so far)
Now, replace the word in parentheses with system/systems, machine/machines or reality/realities. Science is nothing but trash before a dream.

6 INT. CLOSE TO GREY SWING DOOR 6

The distance between the bed and the desk shrinks to 0 on all coordinates (X,Y,Z,t). Full shot of custom built water cooled computer built into the frame of the bed, a 32:9 ratio 45”

monitor on a custom built retractable wall mount, two regular pc monitors mounted to wall, split ergonomic keyboard, streaming mic, multiple webcams, LED lighting, humidifier with AntiAnxiety scent, weighted blanket.
[With or without artist lying inside.]

[With or without livestream running.]

ANTI-ANXIETY SCENT (expands slowly to fill the room)
Leave society, leave all of it behind, the imperative to not sleep where you eat or not to eat where you fuck or not to play where you work or to chat while you’re stuck on top of this mattress wearing the tunnels of heat escaping your graphics cards fans spinning a little less frantically thanks to hydro loops, or are they wearing you?
You’re worn out, so wired, tapped out.

Three versions of the Self walk into a stream. No server there for nervous banter.

NARRATOR (V.O.)
You can always find some treasure in excrements. Just switch the way you think about it…

WEBCAM (agrees with THE OTHER CORPOREALITY)
While some expect the delivery of a commodity, others expect the delivery of a bed. Though the bed does sleep a force of living as commodity form, that is the force of labour, and so it also sleeps the engine of a waking dream, the defiant construct of the brain: No world but for the living, nothing but a world of chains to lose.

7 EXT. PICO BLVD 7

PARKING METER
No beauty for the profane. In mathematical operations, brackets determine the order of those operations, meaning brackets are algorithmic devices. When brackets are nested, the rule is that you must work from the inside out. Some
birds work differently, often dropping stuff into a chosen tree, relying on spider silk and saliva to make it stick. As we know, trees grow leaves, but so do brackets. At least that is one possible scenario in the not-so-distant future.

NARRATOR (V.O.)
Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.