Fishing for Zebadee

Performative presentation paper in the Material Others and Other Materialities symposium, 30.09.2016, Iklectik Art Lab 20 Carlisle Lane London SE1 7LG.

I am becoming animal, a rocking horse, a ventriloquist’s emu, a felt frog who will never be a prince. The labyrinth I inhabit has multiple exits but only one entrance. How you come out of my maze does not depend on how you enter, you will be morphed. Charged by the planes of immanence your lines of flight will electrify and animate you. Suckling and entangling you become; bag puss, zippy, muffin the mule, bill and ben, lady penelope, lady lovelace and finally zebedee, boing! You fight the forces of abstraction to distraction and it is a draw. You perform, you happen, you dematerialise, you objectify, you are the subject, you are not. You will evolve, revolve, and dissolve some of those images of thought you have explored by constructing fleeting imaginary worlds. What will pull you back to the memory of crossing the singular threshold? Will it be through rosebudishness, madeleineness, or by the encounter with the idea that forces you to think differently? I will bring a spring, a wooden ball, a moustache, red, blue, yellow and black.

Taking in Vilem Flusser and Louis Bec’s Vampyroteuthis Infernalis as a ‘line of flight’ this paper uses the characters from the Magic Roundabout as luminaires in, ‘The eternal night of the vampyroteuthis [which] is filled with colours and sounds that are emitted by living beings-an eternal festival of colours and sounds, a son et lumiere of extraordinary opulence. The ocean floor is carpeted with red, white, and violet stone; there are dunes of blue and yellow sand, sparkling with pearls and fragments of molten meteorites. Forests, meadows, and plains of plant-like animals, beaming with colours, sway in the current with fanned tentacles. Wandering in their midst are giant iridescent snails, and whirring above them are swarms of crabs, flashing in silver, red, and yellow. It is a luxuriant garden that the vampyroteuthis can illuminate, on a whim, to enjoy its desserts in splendour.’ (Flusser & Bec 2000:35)

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