Artificialia EP

Four new tracks, and what is likely to be the penultimate release from Diagonal Science, or at least this incarnation of it.

Section EP by Diagonal Science

Posting this on the offchance that anyone still reads blogs...

Black Helicopters have mutated into Diagonal Science - partly because there's other bands called Black Helcopters, which was causing confusion, but also because anything related to conspiracy theories seems so toxic at the moment. There's a new EP up on Bandcamp, four new tracks, one of which features some pretty extraordinary guest vocals from Rose Niland (Poppycock, Rose and the Diamond Hand). There's an album on the way, or at least there will be if we ever manage to pin someone down to play drums on it. And here's some videos of us (well, 3/4 of the band) playing last month's Manchester Meltdown.

Broken Knowledge EP

New Bandcamp release: Broken Knowledge EP. Two radically reworked tracks from the Diagonal Science album, plus two outtakes (one of which is a fairly blatant tribute to/pastiche of a certain post-rock group), so these were recorded back when it was still just myself and Whitney, and once again they were mixed, mastered and made shiny by John Tatlock.

Collages

A pair of Angela Carter-inspired beasts

Black Helicopters - Strip Back EP

Black Helicopters - Diagonal Science LP

Black Helicopters Facebook page cover image 

The Atrocity Exhibition (J.G. Ballard)

A Scanner Darkly (Philip K. Dick)

So this was supposed to be an illustration blog, wasn't it? I've barely had a chance to think about this over the past few years, but I have just about got to the point where I'm happy for my work to see the light of day. After frantically trying to make illustrations that looked vaguely "normal" in order to get through my degree, I decided just to make personal work for a while. What I don't have as yet is any idea what potential uses this kind of stuff might have. I really should try and get a full portfolio together, and I'd still like to incorporate drawing and painting into my work again… In the meantime, if anyone out there wants to commission any weirdo collage/painted images, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Diagonal Science, the new album by Black Helicopters now available

I can't quite believe this is finally done - I've been working on it off and on with Whitney Bluzma (who's also a member of ILL) for I don't know how long - but we have an ALBUM. Hoping to get it out on vinyl and/or CD at some point but for now it's pay what you want on Bandcamp.

Thanks to Luca Corda (who we borrowed from Locean and Groves) for some inspired drumming at short notice, and to John Tatlock for doing a great job of mixing, mastering and generally making the thing cohere. 

I realise it might seem a bit lazy to re-use the artwork from out first, deleted EP, but all the tracks from it reappear on the album, albeit in much-evolved forms. The lyrics were very much influenced by some of the things I've been writing about on here lately.

Inverted Anthropomorphism, Part 2: Jean Painlevé

Roger Caillois wasn't the only figure involved with Surrealism - however peripherally - not to concur with Breton's insistence that the marvellous and scientific research were incompatible. Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) made over two hundred films during his lifetime, mostly natural history documentaries, many of which were aimed at scientific audiences rather than the general public. He was one of the first to film wildlife underwater, and his best-known film captured male seahorses giving birth. In 1924 he contributed a brief article, "Neo-Zoological Drama," to the journal Surréalisme, a "surreal melodrama" of marine organisms described in impenetrable scientific jargon, and Man Ray used footage of a starfish taken by Painlevé in his 1928 film L'Etoile de mer.

Painlevé believed that there was a risk that understanding nature could potentially "strip away its miraculous qualities," although that needn't detract from its "poetry" which "subverts reason and is never dulled by repetition." He argued that the human imagination produces "weak revelations" in comparison with nature:

We see offspring who slowly substitute themselves for their parents by resorbing them; elsewhere, we see parents decompose in their children. We witness organs of propulsion becoming jaws, an eye passing from one side to the other or fusing to the one next to it; in some, all the organs disappear. While some young begin with identical forms, they grow into adults who look nothing like each other. So wildly different are the stages in such a species that if one does not closely monitor their transformations, one could easily be fooled into believing these two individuals are not even related. Indeed, a dully coloured, carnivorous larva might grow into a dazzling coloured vegetarian who, when fully grown, no longer has a mouth and fasts until death.

In Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, Ralph Rugolf writes that Painlevé's films are "spooked by the spectre of the inhuman"; the disconcertingly mindless movement of microscopic cilia disturb because they are "functional and reflect an intelligence - environmental and evolutionary - that is far vaster than our own puny claim in that area." The uncertainty as to whether or not something is sentient is, Rugoff points out, one definition of the uncanny. Painlevé's work leaves us "with a haunting sense of our own strangeness even as we gape in wonder at nature's bizarre marvels." As the narrator of Acera, or the Witches' Dance informs us, for the aquatic molluscs that are the film's subject, "as for other animals, dance is a way to find a partner." This isn't an inappropriate projection of human qualities onto another species, but an observation of how we resemble the rest of the animal kingdom: once again, it's a case of inverted anthropomorphism.

In his 1947 article "Science Film: Accidental Beauty" the critic André Bazin wrote that "Tanguy, Salvador Dalí and Buñuel have only distantly approached the Surrealist drama in which the late lamented Doctor de Martel, preparing for a complicated trephination, first sculpts on the nape of a neck - shaved and naked as an eggshell - the outline of a face." For Bazin, the "inexhaustible gift" of the science film was that "[a]t the far end of inquisitive, utilitarian research, in the most absolute proscription of aesthetic intentions, cinematic beauty develops as an additional supernatural gift." Painlevé's 1978 film Liquid Crystals documents the effects of temperature and pressure on the molecular structure of liquid crystals found in caffeine, urea and acetic acid. Initially made for research purposes, Painlevé re-edited it for a general audience. The result is, as Scott MacDonald has noted, reminiscent of abstract animations by the likes of Oskar Fischinger and Harry Smith. Painlevé found a score he had previously been given by François de Roubaix to be a perfect fit; it was, he said, "a cosmic coincidence."

Painlevé did not attempt to exclude aesthetics or morality from his scientific vision, and was well aware that science could not be fenced off from other areas of life: At the end of The Vampire (1945), its Chiropteran star, the "brown pest," carrier of diseases, gives "the salute of the vampire," and consequently Painlevé had to escape persecution by the Nazis, fleeing to Spain using self-invented scuba-diving gear. Nature could also serve as an example to humanity - the fact that it was the male seahorse that gave birth and looked after the young was, Painlevé said, "a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father, while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to re-establish the balance between male and female."

Inverted Anthropomorphism, Part 1

Prior to his departure from the Surrealist group, in 1934 Roger Caillois contributed an essay to the journal Minotaure on the praying mantis and its "objective capacity to act directly on the emotions." Researching the insect's etymology, he finds that it may be regarded as sacred ("pray-to-God") or diabolical ("pray-to-the-devil"), but that even the scientific terms for the various species are "on the whole, purely and simply lyrical." He also examines some of the stories and mythologies surrounding the creature, such as the belief that if a lost child asks it for directions it will point the way, that it is an infallible fortune teller, that it is creator of the world and owner of the moon. He concludes that "mankind has been highly struck" by the mantis, and, seeking to account for "the lyrical objectivity of certain concrete representations," he proposes the existence of "objective ideograms" which correspond to aspects of human psychology. This would, he argues, allow for the possibility that mythography is to some degree innate. He suggests that research in comparative biology could potentially shed light on human psychology, and even that the "castration complex" in humans might represent a "vestigial residue" of behavioural patterns common to other animals, i.e. the fear of being entirely consumed during coitus (while mating the female mantis may decapitate and begin eating the male, which continues regardless).

Caillois thought that the adaptive mimicry of certain types of mantis "illustrated, sometimes hauntingly, the human desire to recover its original insensate condition, a desire comparable to the pantheistic idea of becoming one with nature, which is itself the common literary and philosophical translation of returning to prenatal unconscious." He would develop this idea in a later piece for Minotaure, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia" (1937). Here Caillois provides a brief overview of animal mimicry: a caterpillar that can imitate the head of a snake, insects with wings adorned with "eyes" which supposedly startle predators, seaweed-like fish, mantises disguised as flowers. He finds accepted theories of mimicry wanting, and concludes that it is inefficient either as an offensive or defensive weapon, citing, for instance, the fact that most predators do not hunt by sight, as well as the case of the Phyllidae insects, which mimic leaves so convincingly they browse on each other. Instead, he turns to an unlikely source for an explanation: mimetic magic, and the principle of correspondence:

The law of magic, Things that have once touched each other stay united, corresponds to the principle of association by contiguity, just as the principle of association by similarity precisely corresponds to the attractio similium of magic: Like produces like. Hence, identical principles govern, on the one hand, the subjective association of ideas and, on the other, the objective association of phenomena; that is, on the one hand, the chance or supposedly chance links between ideas and, on the other, the causal links between phenomena. 

Mimicry must be, Caillois argues, "a disorder of spatial perception" or lure of space, which he terms "legendary psychaesthenia." He compares it to the dissociation between mind and body in schizophrenics, for whom "space seems to constitute a will to devour." (Caillois would later write that he found these ideas far-fetched.)

In natural mimicry Caillois saw equivalents to human fashion, carnival theatre and ceremony, but denied that this projection was a case of anthropomorphism; rather it was

exactly the opposite. It should be realised that the point is not to explain certain puzzling facts observed in nature in terms of man. On the contrary, it is to explain man (governed by the laws of this same nature, to which he belongs in almost every respect) in terms of the more general behavioural forms found widespread in nature throughout most species. This attitude prompts one to greatly vary the principles of biological explanation and to assert that nature (which is no miser) pursues pleasure, luxury, exuberance, and vertigo just as much as survival.

In her introduction to The Writing of Stones, Marguerite Yourcenar describes Caillois' theories as "an inverted anthropomorphism in which man, instead of attributing his own emotions, sometimes condescendingly, to all other living beings, shares humbly, yet perhaps also with pride, in everything contained or innate in all three realms, animal, vegetable, and mineral."