JAKE STARR
11 MAY 2024
1 JUNE 2024
… Eventually, this would require a conspiracy between the anonymous materials of the planet and their partisan agent on the inside, a host so embedded in the fabric of this most recent sophisticated stage of capitalist colonialism they are indistinguishable as a security threat.
It cannot begin just anywhere; the host itself requires an environment prone to counter-infection, already ragged with decay, an immune-compromised city weakened by the most sophisticated stage of colonial capitalism, comforted by its own environmentalist LARP, somewhere on the inconsequential limits of the world. Make the individual host there seemingly docile enough to be permitted access to more sophisticated aesthetic training, where a fugue-state of university largesse induces an unhealthy familiarity with the biological abject. After years of spiralling around the point, they should fall wholeheartedly into contemporary, defanged, post-humanist discourse, where terms like ‘infection’ and ‘dehumanisation’ are raised but never embodied.
Eventually, a ‘chance’ encounter (activation code) begins the sequence of events for which the host has unwittingly been trained. They will coalesce a parasitic point of view by reanimating scrap footage of security cameras, bodycams. Everything comes from somewhere else: the voice is not the host’s own. It imitates, like a lyrebird or the bear from Annihilation. Echoes. Taunts. This is a documentary with no host and no camera. It has formed with all the idiosyncrasies of natural selection. The planet has no mouth, but it evolved a way to scream.
It screams in laser sights on writhing hide; strands of fur matted by blood to broken windows; the ringing of cloven hooves on lino floors. This torturous speech is inelegant, almost unintentional, like the first few words of a new language, but this is why it is poetry; the familiar made alien makes us see the familiar as new again. It would have been most effective as a kind of early warning, and perhaps the planet would have had time to sophisticate their speech enough to negotiate. Unfortunately, evolution only happens after the fact; the infection is already dangerously progressed and becoming resistant to less invasive treatments.
A warning which comes too late must function as a threat.
In their increasingly infrequent moments of distinction from the planetary organism, the host will remember that dehumanisation, infection, and disorientation are as useful to the terrorist as the post-humanist.
Eco-horror.
Eco-terror …
HARRY DE VRIES
2024