LOG05042021:Brutalism, Holotrop, Cryosleep


January 2020.
I received a cautionary message from someone in China while in Taiwan
but didn't take it too seriously. Hours later in the middle of the
central railway station, the airplane arrivals and departures started
blinking red.
All the China inbound airplanes cancelled. Months later I found my 
way to China, around March 2020.
Everything was dark, empty. Arriving at my place instead of rest, I
found a health committee knocking at my door. Explanations were
given. The next day following a commotion, the entry hallway  was
covered in white plastic all around, and two women in full biohazard
suits swiftly  demanded samples for Covid19 testing.
With the benefit of insight, we can see it wasn't an over-reaction.
Months later in June 2020, everything started to open, and I had to 
leave again.
Guangzhou airport. The economy had more or less reopened, thanks to
contact and trace applications. QR codes, thermal cameras
everything. In shops, everywhere.

The local travellers went their way, and I turned left, towards 
international flights. The entire area ahead was dark. All the shops
were closed, most with their windows covered in paper. The corridor
lights off. The only lights provided were provided by automatic
sensors in the travelators when you approached them.

As a result, as you walked, the sections ahead of you were
illuminated dimly, courtesy of the sensor triggered lights, and the
sections behind you went dark. No living soul. After ten minutes in
those corridors, you can't shake off the impression you're in an 
underground floor of a car park, illuminated with neon lights, 
casting a scintillating green veil everywhere with a 50Hz hum, and 
the lights suddenly started going off one by one.
Approaching you, until there's nothing around you except pitch black
darkness and a vibrating square of neon light above you, projecting a
oscillating vertical shadow on the brutalist concrete pavement. 
There's a shadow of a moth orbiting your own, but you can't in fact
perceive it.
No one. Ten more minutes and the cycle of sensor lights, humming,
solid darkness cycling ahead and behind you start placing you into a
mild trance like state. The sound of my steps seems to fade into
nothingness and I loose my balance briefly. The illusion your body is
moving but isn't really going anywhere, stuck in the same routine,
the same limbo of automatic unconscious motions.
My vision a tunnel, where a scanline slowly glows as it moves down,
synchronized with my arms, the weightless needles of a clock whose
spring is winding down.
My footsteps are silent, muffled, as if buried in a long tapestry
woven with the darkest and softest velvet.
At the distance a clash of orange and magenta LEDs fighting for
supremacy. It looks like a security checkpoint.
It definitively is a security checkpoint but there's no one there.
Behind it another series of gates and security checkpoints and 
everything is closed, and no one is there. Nothing but orange light
and signs everywhere reminding you of what's forbidden, and somehow
in spite of knowing you should be there, the spectre of the thought
that perhaps you shouldn't be there at all makes itself felt.

To the left another series of corridors. Series of doors to the left
, with "entry forbidden" signs. One of them is open, and a x-ray
machine is visible.
I enter. An officer is sleeping with its head over the x-ray conveyor
belt, his dreams irradiated.
It seems no one has been travelling there. They call someone to
unlock a gate after filling in some declarations. They inform me that
after opening the gate they won't allow me out, but there's no
alternative at this point. I enter and for the next seven hours I
wait for my flight. In the morning, 2 more people arrive. The flight
departs out of Guangzhou with three or people aboard, minus the crew.
Everything now looks distant, isolated fragments, like a picture had
been shattered, and you're assembling the broken pieces, but the 
pieces all seem to suddenly correspond to separate and uncorrelated
images and their shapes start to gradually shift in your hands as you
try to assemble them, and they start melting away. You desperately
try to hold them, you clasp your hands, but they drizzle out of your
hands down your fingertips.

Senseless.


Music for your cryosleep chamber.

Holotrop: Manifestation de l'antinatalisme
01. Born Out Of This

Holotrop: Rites of Natena
03. I saw the death of the world in the eyes of the jaguar


Links on the WWW:

[1] https://holotrop.bandcamp.com/album/manifestation-de-lantinatalisme
[2] https://holotrop.bandcamp.com/album/rites-of-natema