“Swami Gremlins Retreat”, Fraser Anderson @ Darren Knight Gallery, 2019.
Author: S.T. Lore
Client: Darren Knight Gallery
Pages: 3 pages
Format: Fictional Excerpt
Year: 2019
Its 1993
Finally, after two claustrophobic years, the resident crew of eight "bio-spherians" exit the domed structures of BIOSPHERE 2—site of the largest artificial and materially closed ecological system on earth. Outside the glassy and corporate visions of Buckminster Fuller, the crew acknowledge heavily publicized reports of problems with food and oxygen, radical die-offs of animal and plant species, invasive pestilence of ant and cockroach that exacerbated a tense group dynamics and caused two factional splits. In the end, complex social incest and outside financial politics compounded a power struggle with management. The result is another failed experiment for ‘a closed ecological system’ to support and maintain human lives. In the same year, government officials stormed a religious compound in WACO, Texas. In the recollection of over one-hundred Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents—only one—who leapt from the reinforced balustrade of a borrowed cattle trailer, told the Texas Ranger investigators that the first shots heard that fateful morning [Feb. 28, 1993] came from ATF agents shooting Branch Davidian dogs. The tragic event and resultant cock-up incinerated approximately 52 people [including infants] but excluded a mortally wounded canine tally—'the dogs’—our loyal and secular beasts if ever there was any.
Its 1952
The first mechanical heart, constructed of artificial pumps, valves and levers is being plunged into the chest cavity of a human patient. As this miraculous medical transformation is deforming an ‘inside out human being’ the first British nuclear weapon is quietly detonated. The destructive resonance is absorbed by the expansive, yet socially rich interior desert environment of Australia. Although confirming the UK as only the third nuclear weapons state, at the same time, in the fall out [north of the desert containment] a reclusive bearded man, dressed in the bewildered and tattered garb of a beachcomber, squats on recycled planks of timber lashed to three Japanese aircraft petrol tanks. Quietly launching his hand built vessel from a sheltered Darwin beach [timing it with an elusive ‘king tide’] he pushes it loosely in the direction of East Timor. Taking minimal provisions he straps himself to the raft and drifts across a black ocean but also the deeper recesses of his mind. He sails out of geographical orbit and into cultural obituaries. Lost and alone, swept out of social responsibilities, he begins to hallucinate surrealist grids and dancing figures ‘a vision of the best companions he has ever known’. He misses his destination, lands elsewhere, and is imprisoned.
Its 2020
Piles of rubble, burned-out buses, bullet-holes and concrete foundations are all that remain of the WACO compound. BIOSPHERE 2 houses research facilities, a museum and tourist paraphernalia. A replica of the Timor Sea ‘raft’ sits in Queensland to honour ‘gift-giving’ and existence of non-monetary economies. Among other evidence of isolated ecological and human social experiments, rich psychological studies are archived in well-wintered Antarctic research stations. Catalogued as "confined environment psychology", they may ignore other ‘fridge-dweller lifestyles’ where refrigeration to control temperature is essential to the domestic and developed human. Lowering the spread and reproduction rate of bacteria and chance of spoilage brings notable improvement to home environments and transit of goods from distant places. But in the benthic zone where ‘domesticity of the dog, and of the human’ becomes essentially useless, we discover a variety of grimy exploratory techniques to mine our subversive yet collective autobiography. In thawing the slow-creep of societal processes of control and high-technological modulation, is a virulent strain of ‘psychobiological’ companionship. When visiting a decrepit warehouse above CENTRAL STATION, ignoring a network of graffiti-proof and air conditioned trains ferrying people west and east [to airports and to wilderness] a man wearing a dust mask, manicures replica poodles and strange nomadic miniatures.