Pyramid = pyramid
A four-part narrative for a Netflix
script about a story already in the making.
By Alberto Duman
1 July 2020
‘Netflix is the world's leading internet entertainment service with over 148 million paid memberships in over 190 countries enjoying TV series, documentaries and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages...’
The Elevator Pitch
A: #COVID-19 #Pandemic Memorial #Redemptive Culture #Vaccine #Pyramid #Mass Ornament #Public Art #Utilitarian Land Art #Egypt Tourism #Anthropology of Revolution #Netflix #Data Harvesting #Affective Feedback Loops #General Intellect #Vernacular Uncertainty #New Religion #Predictive Hypertext #Stuttering Mythology #Prefigurative Oracular Agency #Prophetic Culture #Archaic Adolescent #Storytelling #Blessings #Venice Milleniale
A: ‘Right...that’s it! Is that clear?’
B: ‘Wait...What??’
A: ‘Ok right, this is not really a pitch for a Netflix series of course...’
B: ‘So what is it then...?’
A: ‘Well, for me this all started with a question about the way in which the narration of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic will be written, remembered, memorialised, serialised...
And truly, we know that a diversified array of potential scripts for a Netflix series about COVID-19 is being written as we speak, don’t we?
Just as any other event, news, occurrence, utterance, performative action that produces data is harvested as raw material for media content in a loophole of reality and reproduction that mutually infects and blends together both categories, the content of a Netflix’s serialised narrative of contagion is already over us in the General Intellect, only a few hypertext jumps away.
And so... I started to think of how a ‘surge’ of unexpected power within the General Intellect vulnerable regime of interdependence and intertextuality could became the holding concept for a ‘revolution’ as much as a ‘new religion’... and thinking about how public art and architecture would be implicated in the memorialisation of a revolutionary segment of history opened up by a non-human agency – rather than a specific event enacted by human agency.
The whirlpool of life producing itself under the banner of Zoom, Teams, Skype, Hangouts, Houseparty and all other channels into which so many hours of our working, family and leisure have been poured for necessity, pleasure and emotional needs in the last three months is stored and geolocated in a server, waiting to be aggregated meaningfully by an eager editor/actor.
In 1974, Ted Nelson, the man behind the earliest notion of hypertext – also interviewed in Werner Herzog’s ‘Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World’ which of course you can see on Netflix – described ‘zippered lists’ that would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, and eventually arrived at a place-concept named Xanadu, defined as a centralised source of information, or what he called a "docuverse".
In trying to mine a possible version of a ‘docuverse’ for the present – whose parts are already existing – I have used the Netflix portmanteau format to actually write a science-fiction novella in four parts, serialised over a period of four months, in which the combined affective powers of machinic intelligence and biological power of a runaway organism would produce something too complex to be contained in any socio-semantic category... if not exploding into a neo-religious planetary experience, for lack of better social formation being available. See what I mean?
I mean, perhaps we are all now ‘just neurons in the goddamn global brain’, hopping stations in the endless movements of hypertextual passages towards the next connective step of the General Intellect, but the privilege of storytelling lies exactly in using the neurons’ capacity to speak in order to tell other stories than those the global brain has fed into them... right?’
A: ‘So... got that now??’
B: ‘Can you repeat all that?... Your connection was breaking up...’
The Script: Part One
A New Religion Was Born Then
‘Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You should be living free, fair and alive while you live already in the Day To Come, when the cells of your body will be attacked and the constitutive elements of your molecular biology will give way to other tendencies. But in keeping with this promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells’ —2 Serageldin 3:15–20
Think of it as a fading from black into another black on your video screen.
A different black. One that you must take notice of.
A black that will forever retain the memory of his previous lightness but will not show it to you as actual light, rather it will tell you of its inherent properties in stories about light.
An artfully engineered phantom space animated by latent images oozing forth, eerily but not unsurprisingly gifted with a retrospective, as much as a prefigurative, oracular agency.
Until the stories about light are not enough to convince you and everybody else that that light ever existed.
And at that point, when you've lived in total darkness for some time, the smallest beam of light becomes a thing of fascination and beauty (1) that exceeds its physical properties: it becomes endowed with a mysticism that only scholars would know the name of but they would never tell you of it because they think you will not get it.
So you have to claim it as your own and build a stuttering mythology over it.
That space, captured across the divide between the pre-cognitive affect and the post-retinal afterimage remnants of the things we said and the people we saw, is where the emergent prophetic culture found the imaginal politics of our minds ready to be taken, like gifts to ourselves waiting to be redeemed as blessings.
Blessings: free cosmic vouchers with the power to remake time, like low-resolution golden coins in obsolete videogame arcades on a perpetual lockdown, freed into a new spatial hierarchy of cosmological significance.
Maybe that’s what the looting of the Black Pyramid pop-up shop in Giza during that global day of Cultural Remembrance and Brand Pilgrimage was all about: a manifestation of irrepressible images impossible to be contained in the phantom space within the belly of the Khufu Pyramid, once it was ‘remade’ as memorial art for the Spectacular Cult of The Ethical Disease: The Ultimate Object buried deep within The Ultimate Architectural Object as the Ultimate Utilitarian Land Art Formation as Mass Ornament.
A redemptive planetary culture’s attempt to memorialise its possible annihilation as material storage as well as symbolic display burst out into an emanation of its actual destruction, not on a material but on a semantic level.
The levee of an untenable language of visual culture propping up a world’s stage of reality broke, and with it, all other tendencies of social formation broke loose, untethered by worn out rhetorical devices of rational admonitions, ushering in its stead the coming out of the medieval within.
After being trained to look in the same direction for years by the global engagement industry, the archaic adolescent in us woke up, switched on a more powerful interpretative machine of affect, and in its inchoate voice it begun to spool the metaphysics of the new religion.
The bodies of the General Intellect saw it in a slightly asynchronous mode, partly because of the time-dilation of the muons particles in the COVID chamber and the interference caused in the VoIP transmission, but the message was nevertheless clear: for all those lined up in retrograde position within the range of the planetary transmission, the unclouded aesthetic impression was that they were no longer observing a work of public art in its ceremonial recurrent anniversary, but instead measuring, more concretely than ever, the borders of their world.
In a metaphysical sense it was a worlding event without an actual one, and for that reason, a more powerful one.
And yet, this blasting of the not-yet-there, the leaping back and forth into a non-linear historical time of renewed mysticism did not bear the expected fruits of secular demands: the syncretism that flourished in the wake of that worlding surge, bifurcated into a different future.
I have seen it happening, I'm here: just another neuron in the global brain.
(1) Lona Lee (you know who you are)