We gently lay the chick down in the bathtub. It rolls up into a little yellow ball of down in all our blond, brown, and grey hair and immediately falls asleep. The down pixels glitter like diamonds. We place the paint brush cross in the middle of the tub, like a mast with flaming sails, and send the tub out to sea, from the seawater pool, toward Hoved Island (ENTER, SPACE). The hair burns and the chick burns. But it’s a magical chick, and it’s been brought to life by the words and the image and it’s not the same as a chick from reality.
This chick didn’t come from an egg, but from Skype. For all we know, this chick is flame resistant.
For all we know, this floating bathtub exists, on its way out of the Oslo fjord. For all we know, it’s the real chicks, and the real internet and the real rituals and the real fjord and the Barcode buildings deep in the fjord’s armpit and the real black metal bands, that aren’t here.
The Magic
In 1989, I love connect-the-dots. I’m really too old for them, and should be doing my own drawings from scratch, but I only do that on the computer, where everything becomes abstract and weird. If I draw on paper, the pictures just turn into horses, or boring humans and houses. I like that the lines between the dots make little cartoon characters, plants or animals appear on the sheet. I’m drawing them, but I could have never drawn them without the dots. It reminds me of how I will later imagine the internet. I’m just a hand. Like the hand that summons the words of the dead on a Ouija board.
Have you ever thought about how the Norwegian word for hand, HÅND, contains the whole word for spirit, ÅND?
Connect-the-dots drawings mimic the act of establishing contact with the spirits. We’re dots, and the lines around us complete the connections between us and all others, humans and Gods, spirits, the magical beings and the underground creatures and the otherworldly beings. Before we connect the dots with lines, it’s impossible to see what shape anything has.
Consider how in Norwegian the word bond, BÅND, contains the entire word for spirit, ÅND.
Let’s leave this community in the witches’ den once again and rewind a little, back to the time before I meet Venke and Terese, the time when I still work alone and do what I call art. On a tour, my stage makeup streaks in the summer heat and someone in the audience throws a roll of toilet paper on stage. I start to wipe my face, and then I wind a little of the paper around myself and continue doing other things, the roll still on the stage edge. An audience member grabs the roll and wraps TP around herself, too, before passing the roll to the person next to her. For a while the roll simply passes from hand to hand, but then more audience members start twisting a bit around themselves before sending the roll on to new hands. Finally we’re connected, all of us, in an abstract starry constellation, on and in front of the stage in that grubby gallery in Richmond, Virginia.
The act makes me happy. I realise that what the audience is doing with the loo paper makes me happier than the art I’m trying to create onstage. Maybe that’s how they feel, too. There are so many dots in the world, and so few of them get lines drawn between them, so few drawings are given a shape. Far too few bodies are connected. We think we see the world and its shapes in what we call reality, but we actually just see the dots that are chosen for us, the same identities that a CCTV-camera sees, lonely identities, identified and alone in the universe.
CV Dazzle is a particular kind of makeup that’s used to confuse TV cameras. It can take the shape of series of dots on the face, without lines between them, or of lines in illogical places, preferably made up in colours that reflect light, to prevent cameras recognising you. It’s a connect-the-dots drawing in reverse, removing the connections in a face. Human faces are reduced to dots for the camera and perhaps only then can they remain human for themselves. No camera algorithm has the settings to register the loo-roll drawing. The audience creates a collective CV Dazzle, a network constructed of the cheapest and most primitive material, a roll of toilet paper.
The experience does something to me: it’s as if the loo roll has created a new organism, a new life that I never thought art could create. Maybe that’s why I cancel the tour, leave Virginia and travel into the wilderness. Aimlessly, I drive through Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas and finally end up somewhere south of New Mexico. The desert air up here in the highlands is thinner and clearer, the sky wider, the ground, the earth less significant. New Mexico is 80 per cent sky and 20 per cent scorched red mountains, cacti and tufts of grass. My feet only barely hold on to the ground, my fingers barely reach down to the keyboard. No wonder the people around me wear thick boots and stiff, heavy hats. They’ve got to keep themselves grounded.
I’m so limited here. My eyes aren’t enough, or my feet, or my lungs. I can’t take it in. The sunset is bloody. The earth is red. If I empty my water bottle by the roadside, it dyes the sand blood-red. The laptop is full of radioactive red sand. The buttons spark.
The sounds of barking dogs, lightning strikes, and chirping birds are heard more precisely through the clear air, projecting unobstructed from beaks, snouts, and clouds straight into my ears. The sound sends impossible line drawings to Mexico, a stone’s throw away, and back
