Zahir: a technoanimal avatar developed for 0rphanDrift/Plastique Fantastique 2017 film in progress Green Skeen

Green Skeen is a gathering and ritual to create a new technoanimal that is released into the city.

 

 

Zahir monologue transcript and film stills below.

I am Zahir: a mindworm shifter.

Blazing golden light striped with deep shadow, Savanna-stalking camouflage. Magnesium euxanthate, Cadmium(II)-sulfides, Anhydrous iron(III)-oxide, Iron oxyhydroxide, 1,2-dihydroxyanthraquinone, 1,2,4-trihydroxyanthraquinone, Titanium dioxide, Iron(III)-oxide, partly hydrated + manganese oxide + aluminium oxide, and calcium phosphate + calcium carbonate +carbon. Oily, shining fur, thick with linseed and poppy; dappled, rippling, luminous. “Dripping with basic drives.”

Now, immaculately reinvented in digital unconscious - a mind without intuition - I become pure concept: a fire burning away the tangible sensory. Earth-bound pigments translate into intensities of light as fluctuating outputs of RGBs, chromacity-defined, hex-coded; detached from palpable origins. I circle continually.

I slither through the disembodied passages of digital archives, absorbing masses of floating information in the gothic spaces of virtual stacks, shedding rays from my internally burning light. I socialize, camouflaged by the squirming shadows I throw - diminutive representational echoes concealing relentless orthogonal desire beneath - of contagious, compulsively circulated cat videos. I lurk, creep and burrow through machine minds, hiding ferocious claws and teeth behind captured performing kittens.

An infinite tiger. I am made of many tigers; I contain many things resembling tigers: expanding oceans of tigers; armies of refugees marching in tiger-formation; dizzyingly crisscrossed, striped, falling tiger-bombs; false tigers of sentiment.