OFLUXO
Shedding the Third Skin
Justin Ortiz, Ivan Perard, Daniel Stroh
At Final Hot Desert, Minersville, Utah, USA
Curated by Ben Sang
November 5, 2020
My skin is cracking, as the snake
Inside me lusts, as if it had
Not eaten enough earth, to slake
Its thirst with more earth. Between blade
And stem I crawl, far from the beaten
Track, hungry and yet full of mirth
To eat what I have always eaten:
You, fare of snakes, you, earth!
– Friedrich Nietzsche
The earth is hollow. We live on the inner crust of an air pocket of another dimension, in which this body’s volume is limitless, containing the entire universe in its center. Dig, and you will never finish. You can dig further than you can fly. Petroleum cesspools and fossils, pressed into haptic sediment, squirm between endless piles of tectonics – somewhere between this plane’s intestines and womb – that carry laborious geotrauma.
Trauma is a body. Ultimately – at its pole of maximum disequilibrium – it’s an iron thing. At MVU they call it Cthelll: the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than the surface of the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma flux, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. (Negarestani et al, 2012, pp.1-37)
We are of the dust, not descendant from the sky into which we spiral in “progress”. Humankind exists as the product of traumatic pressure crafted by a sly, twisting mating ritual between the whole and ( )hole space as they dance in snaking spheres around our air pocket, breaking its filmy surface to spit oily geysers like a whale breaking surface to breathe and remain mammalian.
The tunnels they carve with their serpentine bodies, eating themselves as well as the sun, create a network of plotless dynamic narratives, interrupted by inquisitive and soon-abandoned mineshafts, shedding light onto an ancient creative orgy as a plot hole missing out on the context of granular lust. A timeline which equated the ability to create with goodness peers down upon genius malevolence, locked in eternal, earnest, self-mutilating, orgasmic desire: intra nihilo.
Nietzche, F., & Kaufmann, W. (1974). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (1st ed.). Vintage.
Negarestani, R., Thacker, E., Keller, E., Bratton, B. H., Mackay, R., Wark, M., Andrasek, A., Blas, Z., Doherty, M., & Sciscione, A. (2012). Leper Creativity: Cyclonopedia Symposium (1st ed.). punctum books.
