by Jenny Hval
The nipples poking out of Venke’s jumper are no longer just nipples, but also buttons, doorknobs, corks or the heads of plastic screws. Like characters on a keyboard, they can be pressed, held and combined, creating various syntheses. The strings twist them in different directions, and suddenly we hear this growing, piercing metallic sound, like what you hear on the underground before trains arrive in the station. Two thin metal threads then emerge, pushing their way out from each tip and flowing down her upper body like a set of glistening train tracks. Just as we understand what’s going on, they disappear again. The magical moment is over. But maybe the threads are still there, stretching around us, around me and Terese too, as if from Gus Gorman’s uncontrollable machine, the one that folded its thin copper wires around our faces. The atmosphere in the room is still electric. This is the extension, this tingle, and the glow we’re looking for.
This moment is the first we’ve seen of a different set of connections. We keep looking, in all the forgotten Wi-Fi connections, the ones that don’t make sense. In all the connections that don’t involve a lonely subject under God’s gaze. If we can hex Oslo, we can dig up whatever it is we’re looking for from the internet too.
What began as a mere sensation is beginning to take form, the form of another internet. We’re starting to hear the drone more clearly now, inside echoing sound effects and programs with compilation errors, far down the deep web. And we hear it from other places too. It calls to us when we water the tomato plants near the modem. We’ve started to notice little formations and signs in the steam from the teakettle, not so different from the threads growing around Venke’s jumper, as if all around us new life forms are emerging. We notice that when we see these signs, the ordinary internet becomes difficult to use. The router blinks yellow, is interrupted or made useless by a hellish mess. Spam flows unfiltered into the inbox and videos we didn’t search for start playing on the screen, like a poltergeist throwing things around inside our machines.
Terese, Venke and I christen this internet the cosmic internet.
Dear god, you can’t touch this, says Terese.
And then we switch the internet off. We imagine that the search will be easier without it. Instead, we daisy-chain our computers and create a communal text document, a hex dialogue between them. This time we’re going to track down the cosmic internet ourselves. We’ll summon it side by side, at the kitchen table in the witches’ den.
The cosmic internet communicates through noise, we note in our dialogue. It creates confusion, poor connections, pixelated images and digital one-way streets. If it’s discovered, it’ll be banned immediately, but since the government will never be completely sure it exists, within the existing definitions of existence, the legislation will have to be abstract and ineffective, incorporated with grey writing in the documents’ annoying and disruptive grey areas, meaning margins, notes and footnotes. It will remain unexplored bonus material.
The cosmic internet can hardly be used for money transfers, shopping, credit checks or advertising, Venke writes.
But it will be possible to transmit cosmic internet signals through the bank’s fibre optics, making money straight up disappear from their numeric systems, I argue.
Or maybe transform the numbers to a stinking mass of fat, oozing from the USB ports, Terese suggests, inspired by her sourdoughs.
USB-pores, I reply.
The cosmic internet is an ancient witch commune, don’t you think? Venke writes.
Sounds a little esoteric, I type back. Couldn’t it be for everyone?
It’s an open network, Venke replies immediately.
It can be fuelled by human matter, and the electricity from our own bodies, Terese replies, and I add that that’s at least how my hands feel right now.
We agree that in the long run, when it trusts us, the web will evolve into a fleshy peer-to-peer network, where a small part of your flesh is always seeding.
It won’t hurt, but you’ll feel it in the form of connections and sensations occurring in the body.
Collective phantom limbs, Venke fantasises; anatomical phantom eyes, Terese suggests; portals, I hammer on, where THE SPACE BAR ejects us into space. The temperature rises in the witches’ den.
It shouldn’t distinguish between body and data, or living and dead, Venke writes, and presses the point even though she can hear Terese giggling next to her.
We agree that in the most extreme instances, you should be able to log on to the cosmic internet and exchange small pieces of flesh with other bodies out there in the hereafter, and then feel a leg or an arm snatched at, as your body comes into contact with the half-composted dimensions.
A carnal version of how we first perceived the internet? I write.
It could be a carnal version holding the possibility of contact with the hereafter, the spiritual. Like that time when electricity felt so new that it gave us the sensation of extension into new dimensions, proof that there’s something out there. The cosmic net could be a place where you actually get there. Where you type into the search bar Is anybody out there? And then press ENTER and SPACE.
That’s where we can meet. That’s where we can write. That’s how I want to write. Now, I’m writing.
We’re writing. As we write, the click of the keys sounds more and more like the cracking of little bones. As we finish for the night, we joke about how we can see constellations of stars and bits of skeletons glittering in the black screens that sleep in front of us: little dots from the universe, and pieces of ourselves. Later, back at mine, I can feel the jerk of a leg, or is it an arm, the way my body jerks when I dream I’m falling. At the same time I hear a noise, like the short echo of an old modem that is dialling and connecting. It’s the call of the cosmic internet, or the dial-up. Maybe I’m logged on when I sleep, when I let myself scroll down my consciousness, let go of my waking existence. When I’m free to search for you. ENTER, SPACE.
It’s day again. Our witch’s cauldron, a private Google doc we share, is seething and boiling with ingredients found in deep places. It’s a red herring, deployed to distract the ordinary internet from our actual task.
Somewhere else, on other screens, far from the reach of the algorithms, magical image searches are scrolling hurriedly past, with their tidy rows of tiny little preview pictures:
One of us, wearing a mask that obscures her face, holds the sun in her hand.
Another, painted like a Munch figure with eyes like deep dark holes, grips a paint brush in her hand.
Someone, face painted like a panda with deep dark holes for eyes, grips her pubic hair in her hand. Glitter, or glittering dandruff, drizzles to the ground.
Two paint brushes dripping with black and red paint are held one over the other and taped together to make a cross, perhaps an upside-down cross.
One of us holds the other’s hair in their hand.
The one who is painted like a Munch figure chews on her hair.
We cut each other’s hair. Blond and brown hairs, as fine as dog fur, fill a bathtub to the brim.
Imagine. This is our ritual, my ritual, your ritual. Imagine us as layers and layers of fabric and textures, layers and layers inside my film, portals to other places, Venke inside Terese inside me and all deeper inside the deepest web, where the electricity prickles.
The scrolling continues, and now the pictures form an unbroken shooting script.
A hand holds up a little pixelated chick, transferred via Skype on a terrible mobile network, giving it a blurry beak and only half a left wing. The chick shakes a few water droplets off its fur and then it settles in the hand, silent as a cutlet. Then we let it slide from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, from armpit to armpit, between us. The chick is cradled in our bodies.
Imagine that this is a music video but that the only movement in the picture is vertical scrolling. Your own index and middle finger dragging themselves down the screen.
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 again. The clear air constructs layers of ancient borderlines and crossings. From the roadside overlooks I can see the curve of the earth. The horizon is the longest line of writing.
The mountains, the clouds, the sound, the borders, everything feels more soluble. I’m closer to the sky, this immense space, and at the same time, at 1,350 metres above sea level my own spaces, the smallest spaces, blood vessels and nerves and cells, are expanded. Everyone has to breathe more heavily here; the air molecules are bigger. When I breathe more deeply, I think about the world BREATHE, and how close it is to WRAITH, because with that extra force, I inhale something unknown, something extra, perhaps some local Jumano spirits. Outer space includes the sky too, I think: it begins all the way down on the ground.
I wish I’d thought that sentence in Norwegian, but the most common Norwegian word is VERDENSROMMET, meaning world’s space, implying that space itself is part of our world, which doesn’t sound right. I could of course just translate outer space directly; outer’s a Norwegian word, too, but the phrase isn’t in everyday use and I don’t remember it until later. Perhaps intentionally; perhaps I’m trying to get away from my own language. OUTER SPACE couldn’t substitute for WORLD’S SPACE anyway, a word that doesn’t exist in English. In English everything is outside of the earth, and the atmosphere is a separate space. The English language looks past the world as we know it, while the Norwegian language is actually capable of calling outer space WORLD SPACE, forcing the unknown into itself, into its silent letters, into the white. Here in New Mexico, using the Norwegian word feels ridiculous. The sky is too alien, and Mexico is too far away, fenced off behind a tall wall. Both are outer space.
A small sandstone building in the middle of no man’s land is flanked by telescopes and plaques that hint at UFO sightings. In front of the building is a dark blue minibus full of metal scraps and fabric that seems to be parked there more or less permanently. An old striped cat rests in the car’s shadow.
Voices sound through the clear air. A group of girls stand behind the building, looking at the sky through the telescopes. They’re excited, pointing and discussing. Far up there, you can make out a tiny white dot. It moves steadily closer and the girls try to zoom in on it with the telescopes, but like most things that are free and public here in America, the lenses are low-quality, too weak to really magnify anything. Several cars begin to park and people step out to look at the dot.
The Norwegian South has its own history of white dots in the sky, retold as ‘The wonderful heavenly vision above Grimstad centre 15 June 1934.’ From out of a blurred white spot, far out above the fjord, a figure of Christ appeared between two puffs of clouds, first with its arms raised to the sky and then with them stretched out gently, palms facing heaven. According to witnesses he looked like Bertel Thorvaldsen’s famous sculpture, as if even Christ understood that it’s art and not religion that expands human space, the place that opens up imaginati
on and faith.
In the desert by the sandstone buildings, the group of girls and a few families in cowboy hats and I stand in a circle waiting for the white to appear. We’re a band now. We look in the same direction; we talk about other celestial bodies we’ve seen, about what we think it might be. We hold on to the same fence and pass around the binoculars. It turns out to be a border patrol drone, a modern UFO (or Christ), one of the scouts of the establishment in search of modern aliens, a plastic bone in the bone-white American police state’s skeleton, with its little helicopter arms raised from its body and up toward the sky. For a while it circles us, scanning us, then it gradually shrinks into the sky again, as if it, too, is slowly devoured, slowly loses function until it’s a completely ordinary balloon, rising and rising into the atmosphere’s thinner and thinner air. Finally it just blinks in and out of sight, like a mirage, or the reflection of a moving lens. Around it, clear skies in every direction, if only eyes could take them all in, or if only there were other ways to float up there, deeper and deeper into the cerulean body.
From El Paso in southern Texas I drove along the border fence, then north across the state line and into New Mexico, to a town called Las Cruces. After the drone surveillance incident, I move on to Alamogordo, an old military barracks town, and finally to insignificant little Carizzozo with its empty streets and burnt-out gas stations. Carizzozo is right next to Carizzozo Malpaís, a dark belt left by a lava stream from the volcano Little Black Peak, 5,000 years ago. The earth in this belt is completely blackened and barren; it’s like walking across the remains of a burnt-out witch’s bonfire. The local camping site is called Valley of Fires Recreation Area and is on a small island of rusty desert dirt surrounded by black. Most of the buildings are closed for renovation, and when I turn on the camp’s standpipe I hear only the sound of a faint wind in there, like the drain into a tomb.