m. n. hutchinson
the book of the damned
Charles Fort wrote in the early twentieth century an accounting of meteorological events and fanciful theories and expounded on them in a collection titled The Book of the Damned (1999). He may have been called the father of all crackpots, but he used these alternative theories to point out the absurdities in then current mainstream scientific explanations about anomalous meteorological phenomena. The book can be read for both the first-hand accounts and the critique of contemporary scientific research, or more properly the lack of it, when confronted with confounding human experience. Fort was an avid collector of testimonials about rare and odd occurrences of objects that fall from the sky, and I have quoted twelve of them on text panels in the piece. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, he supposed the existence of extraterrestrial visitation decades before man’s first heavier-than-air flight. The “damned” in this instance is the evidence that the scientific community would prefer to ignore, and as many of the testimonials do indeed reveal themselves to be errors of perception, Fort recognizes that the explanations we seek may reside in “our slippery brains.”
The images from The Book of the Damned are loosely derived from a close reading of the history of Western philosophy. They focus on twenty-eight moments from that history that I felt needed embodying, with titles like Logos, The Suspicions of St. Augustine, Res Externa, or He Started Practising His Alien Face. I shot them using ultra-rare infrared four-by-five-inch sheet film, which necessitated several creative tricks to hold focus and achieve the desired composition. This project also marks an end to a two-decade project of self-portraiture, just in time for selfie culture to take over, with the difference being that technical constraints required a much more rigorous construction of the image than is promulgated by the simple cellphone camera.
Each photograph is mounted between a sandwich of aluminum, felt, and Plexiglass that creates a Reichian Orgone Accumulator, which supposedly concentrates and stores free-ranging orgasmic energy when packed in their specially designed wooden crates. Wilhelm Reich was a Viennese psychoanalyst who trained with Freud and became convinced that orgone energy stored in the accumulator could cure cancer and bring rain. Censured and imprisoned by the US government, he was a substantial crackpot.
I’m reminded that, unlike the present climate of noxious widespread conspiracy theories that are surely originated by non-believers with the intent to deceive, Fort said he didn’t believe anything he wrote and didn’t expect anyone else to either. While there is evidence that Reich really did believe in what he proposed, he at least had the background and training for the more credible to entertain his ideas.
My original proposal for this work was an attempt to bring about some critical views on theorizing in general. These critiques reside mainly in the domain of human bias, and while bias is present in everyone, it often presents itself in a dogmatic adherence to a traditional or established belief system. Fort pointed out that this dogmatism was as prevalent in the scientific community as it was in everyday life, and that this community encapsulates a system that requires faith when comprehension is hard to come by in a complex world. This faith works in opposition to a true scientific method and thus creates a bias that leads to anomalous eyewitness accounts being discounted out of hand. The Book of the Damned merely pointed this out.
As always, damn the anomalies.