SPLASH

You are listening to TAPE 9 - Splash.
This is Archipelago. No one is an Island. You are Archipelago as we are Archipelago.
Today let’s try something different.

Time as an indicator of position is irrelevant.
Where you are now, exists only as velocity.
Not as situation, not as navigational point.
Not duration either.
Nor lapse.
Only ever here-ish or now-ish.

Only speed and connection.
Pulse and im-pulse.
Slippage.
Fragmentation.
Fractalnoia.

Binary selection upon binary selection upon binary selection upon binary selection.
Ad infinitum.
Symmetric calculuses darting through the cables at such tremendous speed.
One - zero; opened - closed; left - right; up - down; dark - light; red - blue; yes - no; true - false.

The same binary selections, run through an infinite number of selective renditions.
Quantum-mechanically.
Ternary systems.
Infinite values of negation.
Altering synapses.
Exponential superpositions.

Mushrooming cerebral network.
Metastasising cancer.
Not complex, complicated.
Not myriad, labyrinthine.
Not vast, oceanic.
Splash.

Or the teeming  chaos of a forest floor.
An ecology of decisions.
An O Horizon with all its turmoil of processes and connections.
Microbially permutating dirt.
Alien soil.
Exponential excrement.
Opaque dark pool.
Black goo.
Starless sludge.

It is immanent.

And when you’re ready.
Come out.

The Algorithms in the Strange Chamber
In horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s short story The Sect of the Idiot (1988) an unnamed protagonist, well-traveled in the membrane between awaken and dreaming realities, ventures into a dark and brooding dream city landscape. The dream traveller wanders deep into this odious labyrinthine medieval town. Here, the traveller finds, and is strangely teleported into, a unreal architectural chamber. In this strange chamber a group of unfathomable draped contorted figures, seated in weird tall angular chairs, is undertaking a ceremonial congress of sorts. Their voices form a soft buzzing noise and from ‘the bulky sleeves dangling at each figure’s side were delicate appendages that appeared to be withered, wilted claws bearing numerous talons that tapered off into drooping tentacles. And all of these stringy digits seemed to be working together with lively and unceasing agitation’. (Ligotti, 1988) Upon the sight of these creatures and their strange hand-contraptions, wriggly working together. The traveller immediately understand their purpose. These entities hypnotically control humanity, yet they are still themselves hypnotic servants to some far-greater force. With this apprehension the traveller’s heart sinks. He recounts: ‘I did not feel myself to be of any consequence in this or any other universe. I was nothing more than an unseen speck lost in the convolutions of strange schemes. And it was this very remoteness from the designs of my dream universe, this feeling of fantastic homelessness amid an alien order of being, that was the source of anxieties I had never before experienced. I was no more than an irrelevant parcel of living tissue caught in a place I should not be, threatened with being snared in some great dredging net of doom, an incidental shred of flesh pulled out of its element of light and into icy blackness. In the dream nothing supported my existence, which I felt at any moment might be horribly altered or simply ended. In the most far-reaching import of the phrase, my life was of no matter.’ (Ligotti, 1988) The traveller visits this strange chamber once more and now finds the angular chairs empty. The seats of the chairs filled with a dark liquid pool. He touches the inky substance carefully and instantly he senses a tingling sensation in the entire arm. After this his hand no longer seems to belong to himself. And gradually it transforms into the same tentacle-like withered claw as those seen on the bizarre hooded creatures. The account of this takeover must be hurriedly written down. The time, of hands being capable of writing, is running out: ‘Let me write, while I still am able, that the transformation has not limited itself. I now find it difficult to continue this manuscript with either hand. These twitching tentacles are not suited for writing in a human manner, and I am loosing the will to push my pen across this page. While I have put myself at a great distance from the old town, its influence is undiminished. In these matters there is a terrifying freedom from the recognised laws of space and time. New laws of entity have come to their work as I look helplessly on.' (Ligotti, 1988)

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