Matthew Sloly

Rolling Calf & Scapegoat in the Putrefying State

chimera

SYLLABICATION:              chi·me·ra

PRONUNCIATION:                                k-mîr, k

VARIANT FORMS:                 also chi·mae·ra

NOUN:                                    1a. An organism, organ, or part consisting of two or more tissues of different genetic composition, produced as a result of organ transplant, grafting, or genetic engineering. b. A substance, such as an antibody, created from the proteins or genes or two different species. 2. An individual who has received a transplant of genetically and immunologically different tissue. 3. A fanciful mental illusion or fabrication.

 - The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000. (http://www.bartleby.com/61/63/C0296300.html)

“Rolling Calf and Scapegoat in the putrefying State”, is part of an ongoing project aimed at developing and exploring semantic spaces as metacognitive constructions. The title of this iteration, like its forerunner “crystal/slur/constellation” (2002), acts like a program that draws together the disparate elements from which the work is articulated.

The “Rolling Calf”, a type of shape shifting ghost, is said to be capable of taking on a variety of appearances, both human and animal, such as cats, dogs, hogs, goats, horses, cows, etc., changing its state at will. In their animal form they are often described as three-legged, and for this reason their movement is ungainly and noisy. Some say they are the spirits of African slaves, hungry ghosts wondering the earth by night, dragging their chains behind them, which also explains their noisy shuffling. Other accounts explain the chain motif as originating in hell, from whence the demonic Rolling Calf comes to stalk the earth. They are said to lurk at night along roadsides, near bridges and at river crossings. Because Rolling Calves are shape shifters, they may appear as a small animal blocking the traveler’s path. However, when the traveler attempts to shoo the beast out of the way, it may grow very large and frightening. In other accounts, travelers may mistake the Rolling Calf for a human being, and attempt to befriend it, until the mischievous stranger cracks a smile revealing its burning teeth and eyes, “knocking” their victims senseless, or frightening them beyond reason.

Stories featuring the Rolling Calf are likely to be vestigial fragments of an otherwise vanished Ashanti oral tradition brought to Jamaica by African slaves. By the early 1930s Rolling Calf stories were already becoming the stuff of children’s stories rather than active folk belief. Yet perhaps the Rolling Calf survived centuries of cultural suppression precisely because it existed at the outset in the interstices of the social constructions in which it functioned, and so may yet remain, at the periphery of rational thought, something, the existence of which can neither be affirmed or denied.

The “Scapegoat” was one of two goats that were sacrificed on the day of atonement, one was slaughtered and offered as a burnt offering to Yahweh, while the other was marked for Azazel, which is both the name of a demon and for the wilderness to which the second goat was sent, carrying the collective sins of the people out beyond the city walls. The Scapegoat was a vehicle by which sin was cast out, yet it also established a formal relationship between the sacred and the execrate.

It could be interpreted that the scapegoat took on the collective sins of the people by being cast out into a demonized wilderness, symbolically returning sin to the “nature” from whence it came. However through a metaphorical slight of hand, scapgoating both reveals and veils, and thereby camouflages, the internal logic by which it, on the one hand, sanctifies the space of the city and nation-state, purifying, defining, and figuring it against execrated undifferentiated and uncivilized nature on the other. Yet these two hands are of the same body, a system of opposites through which the sacrifice, and a movement between a sacred inside and a execrate outside, artificial and natural, is transgressed paradoxically by the very act which affirms it.

In modern times “scapegoating” has become a term for an all too common occurrence in human history,  in which a group of people demonizes another person or group in order to justify disenfranchising, annihilating, or otherwise cleansing their society of the “others” presence. In all instances the scapegoat, though it may be embodied in an individual, may be understood as a transpersonal structure that enforces a dualistic ontology, a symbolic holder of a collective projection. As such, the scapegoat is a store of value within a larger socio-political economy which exploits it for a variety of ends, ends which as we have seen, often have both personal and public, local and global ramifications.

Both the Scapegoat and Rolling Calf are shape shifters in the sense that they are able to store, simulate, or assimilate the external or internal properties of something else. The rolling calf is a metaphor for something that comes from the outside into, and the scapegoat stands for that which goes from the inside out to, places which might be characterized as interstitial or de-territorialized zones – between cultures, locations, recognitions, states of mind and geography. Passing through this interstitial zone, these two figures become merged, are drawn together, and are reconfigured through this drawing.

This project redeploys the Rolling Calf and Scapegoat as transcategorical agents in the exploration of the latent or repressed semantic space of paranoia regarding the transitory nature of bodily and political states, by tracing the lexical vectors through which “the state’s” many potentialities are cognized and structured. Monsters such as this Chimera have always been encountered at the edge of history, or rather the edges of histories, contorted faces in the marbled strata in which thought is materially embedded, and so bound to be amalgamated within the irrational other from which it is emergent, and to which it must return. Here it continually reveals and veils itself.

One part of the work is a virtual ecosystem comprised of simulated A-Life invertebrates engaged in a rudimentary flocking behavior, served to randomize a database driven recombinant poem that enacted formally and through its content an abject geological, chemical, biological, and mechanically derived poetics.

The virtual ecosystem is a hack, a technical chimera. It uses resources from two separate VRML clients: Blaxxun and Bitmanagement, each of which does part of the work of interpreting the contents of the virtual world. VRML stands for Virtual Reality Modeling Language, and is meant to imply an analogy to HTML, which stands for Hypertext Markup Language. Just like an HTML browser such as Netscape or Internet Explorer is required to interpret HTML files and output them as a readable pages, a VRML browser or client is required to view VRML files that reside on an internet server.) The Blaxxun browser was developed as a multi-user virtual worlds platform, and so allowed multiple users to view each other’s avatars and interact with each other and the contents of VRML worlds. The Blaxxun browser supports live text chat, with voice synthesis. The voice synthesis function was appropriated for the purposes of this project, but the more advanced graphical features of the Bitmanagement browser were needed to animate the invertebrate slugs that congregate within the world.

Circulating randomly, a herd of these slugs tend to congregate between two dark stains, festering regions in an otherwise featureless expanse. The invertebrates are attracted to each other yet also repelled, a standard procedural method in simulation of aggregate flocking and herding behavior. In turn this behavior randomizes the exposure of texts within the world from a database archive. 

The database was comprised of found texts which contained etymological cognates and/or lexical synonyms of the words, “putrefy” and “state”. Among these texts were reports by forensic investigators who were attempting to reconstruct body fragments from a mass grave in the former Yugoslavia. Many other texts concerned changes of state; chemical, biological, computational, and political. At the time that I was compiling the fragments the vast majority of texts containing the word “state” tended to be concerned with threats to its integrity and continuity. Hegelian rivalry would appear to be the medium in which the concept of the state congeals in the body of these texts, hence the paranoid logic of those who scapegoat as a means of maintaining the continuity of states.

A voice synthesizer read out the texts as they scrolled above the slugs, homogenizing the disparate fragments into a droning monologue, an ad hock narrative, emerging as a counterpoint to the nervous perturbations of the slugs below.

A second aspect of the project was a set of digital prints (dimensions variable) derived through a recombinant process which draws from and proliferates a database of source images. The iterative method used to generate the prints is a means of decomposition, and composition, digital putrefaction.

state

PRONUNCIATION:                                stt

NOUN:                                    1. A condition or mode of being, as with regard to circumstances: a state of confusion. 2. A condition of being in a stage or form, as of structure, growth, or development: the fetal state. 3. A mental or emotional condition: in a manic state. 4. Informal A condition of excitement or distress. 5. Physics The condition of a physical system with regard to phase, form, composition, or structure: Ice is the solid state of water. 6. Social position or rank. 7. Ceremony; pomp: foreign leaders dining in state at the White House. 8a. The supreme public power within a sovereign political entity. b. The sphere of supreme civil power within a given polity: matters of state. 9. A specific mode of government: the socialist state. 10. A body politic, especially one constituting a nation: the states of Eastern Europe. 11. One of the more or less internally autonomous territorial and political units composing a federation under a sovereign government: the 48 contiguous states of the Union.

ADJECTIVE:                           1. Of or relating to a body politic or to an internally autonomous territorial or political unit constituting a federation under one government: a monarch dealing with state matters; the department that handles state security. 2. Owned and operated by a state: state universities.

TRANSITIVE VERB:               Inflected forms: stat·ed, stat·ing, states

To set forth in words; declare.

- The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000. (http://www.bartleby.com/61/51/S0715100.html)

The word “state” is etymologically related to words such as arrest, instant, understand, static, stasis, status, statue, ecstasy, solstice, and system. Their common root means “to stand”, and is often inflected with the sense of placing of a thing in a standing position. This etymology would appear to indicate that the conceptualization of states consists in the marking of time in space, by setting something to stand apart from its context, in such a way that it endures.

Time and space are interdependent concepts. Time can not be imagined without reference to space, special structures being the metaphors by which concepts of time may be abstracted from experience, and as such, conversely, time consists in the registration of difference and demarcates space thusly. Phenomenologically, time and space are mutual abstractions, beyond which experience can not be cognized, and so the realization that they are dimensions of an ineffable singularity demarcates a blind spot in the scene that language constructs.

But space consists in the mark of time, of countless events large and small which have marked space, such that it can be read as a record of past events, consisting of patterns from which we can extrapolate future events. Yet since the mark of time is in space, and space consists in the mark of time, every mark is also an erasure. Presence is thereby haunted by absence, or more to the point, present states are haunted by absent states, as is evidenced in the very origin of the concept of a state as such. 

The chimera coalescing in the context of this work has become an agent and creature of a process of putrefaction, serving here as a metaphor not only for the digital processes through which the work has taken (and given) shape, but also as a model for the transitory “state” to which it alludes. The project treats these two once discreet entities as if they are aspects of single entity within a previously inaccessible semantic dimension. A “fanciful mental illusion” perhaps, but one which carries forward a metaphorical process that can be used to reexamine and rethink the cognitive space in which ontological abstractions of its “state(s)” are still subconsciously embedded.

The “putrefying state” that the work alludes to is already suggested in the aggregate body of texts concerning the state, even in its most abstract sense. The project assembles a body that is haunted by its mortality, a presence that is haunted by its absence. In this process of putrefaction, the state appears to be loosing coherence, returning to its origin. Bones, sinews, and any vestiges of the anthropomorphic dissolve during a metamorphosis in which Leviathanesque hierarchical organizations and categorical determinates dis-organ-ize, becoming radically horizontal, melting, flowing, seething, bubbling, and oozing in all directions (potentially), yet even as the appearance of the “state’s” dissipation is evoked by referencing material processes, this abject liquid state, the metaphor of hybrid materiality with which it is characterized, allows it to approach another, many others, lurking on the periphery of thought, and the histories it must continually reconstruct from the mark of time which obscures as it reveals. Liquidity is the prevailing metaphor through which this imaginary state slouches towards recognition.

Invoking figures from Afro-Jamaican folk tales and Old Testament animal sacrifice ritual, “Rolling Calf and Scapegoat in the putrefying State” is a project aimed at imagining a methodological and conceptual chimera: in this case, a “fanciful mental illusion” that amalgamates figures from the periphery of history, creatures that still inflect the numinous present, as if drawing themselves along the surface of a dark and turbulent mirror.