Fear-Virus
Arman Selahvarzi
A late night. Walking along a forrest path, you come across a pond. On its surface the shape of something (is it a human head, a frog, a killer robot) reflects the light of nature and you, the vessel of light, are gripped by doubt: what is concealed under the surface of natural light? If you were an omniscient being, the concealed would appear to you as if revealed by the highest of lights. But you’re not. So you shine an unnatural, a flash-light, over the surface of the pond. On the rays of light returning, your sensors (e.g your eyes if you’re an animal) receive traces of what is concealed. Call these traces the revealed. Let’s say your flashlight has battery ticks and goes on and off regularly. What is concealed remains the same but the revealed, colors and morphemes distributed on a ground, varies each and every time. The invariance is their relations. In between two levels of certainty, e.g in between the truth and what is merely believed, there lays a good stratum of fears for growing fear.
But do not fear. For, still, to harvest and record a modicum of what is concealed from constraints, consistencies, and invariances of the relations holding between the revealed instances, remains possible. The negative between open claws of our pliers carry information about what we used to ply, and by studying this negative, the archeologist-to-come can guess at the quantitive composition of the plied. In the same way, every frame here can be a solution to the “concealment equation” such that the quantitive composition of all revelations is conserved. Are you any wiser as to what floats in the pond at this late night?
What drives the dynamics of change in this synthetic/unnatural “chiaroscuro”? Think of biological morphogenesis. In life-processes, going from one form to another follows an algorithmic path. What drives the change and determines the shape of growth and reproduction, is the chemical interaction, excitations and inhibitions, taking place across the ecosystem. ‘Morphs’ are selected according to their fitness for self-stabilization. But here, the algorithmic path is invasive, and success is good camouflage. In perfect camouflage, what is revealed “belongs” to a perceivable lifeworld so fittingly that exudes no doubt, no hint of any concealment. There are no perfect camouflages. As you receive the revelations, something remains off, off your world, something eats away at the ground to produce figures, a liar principle forbids certainty i.e the complete closure of the revealed onto itself. With every flash of unnatural light, the possibility of “something else”, a better camouflage, holds you at the edge of the pond. But do not fear, X is our pattern.
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Universal crystallisation commences with the minutest of seeds, a cell with disastrous geometries that can turn (metamorphose) anything into a cell of the same stone. Those high ranking killer robots that give birth only to explosive placentha lit a wedding: blood lining a negative womb, the positive galvanic thrust into electrorganism, an insubstantial godhead is conceived.