s.t. lore

Author: Nicholas Mangan (with S.T. Lore)
Client: Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney Australia)
Format: Storyboarding and Script Development for Video ‘Core Coralations’
Published: Part of ‘A World Undone’
Year: 2024

VIDEO SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

This project was an invitation by artist Nicholas Mangan to help him develop a script and to storyboard a video project called ‘Core Correlations’. We began by looking at images of the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland filmed both underwater and filmed from the air by drone - as machinic vision; impassive; and emotionless. The Great Barrier Reef appeared to us curled into the coastline as through it was contorted into a foetal position - but not the result of juvenille behaviour, but the inverse product from suffering severe trauma inflicted on the largest living organism on earth. And in some ways this is true. Historical and mythical narratives have shifted to transition ‘from viewing reefs as mysterious, powerful, resilient, and treacherous geological barriers … to viewing them as fragile things … as living colonies that are susceptible to being harmed.’

Legal philosopher Jedediah Purdy articulated this mode of thinking: “The natural and the artificial have merged at every scale: macro, micro, past, future. Climate change makes the global atmosphere, its chemistry and weather systems, into this giant Frankenstein’s monster — part natural, part artificial”. Osha Davidson once observed that plunging into the underwater world of a reef “is like being dropped into the center of a huge city on an alien planet.” This otherness is central and one of the defining characteristics of coral reefs in the way that they blur assumed boundaries - barriers between individual organisms and collective colonies; between the land and the sea; harmonious life and territorial death. And in the case of the Great Barrier Reef the largest living organism is now part grave-stone, is part skeleton, and is part sun bleached calcium boned archeological device that records devastation that human populations have and their influence on and within the planetary environment.

These speculative concepts and ideas underpinned the early manipulation and creation of images that Nick shared with me as I wrote furiously using different narrative angles: dialogues; trauma poems; therapy sessions with stones; and dense lyrical passages about coral fighting each other and defending themselves against toxin, heat, acidity in the changing ocean. We attempted to establish communication channels and strategies for his video project that did not try to pre-categorize a taxonomy of the other— into underwater alien beings, amphibious cities, voyeuristic sea oddities, phantasmagorical creatures, or mythical deities—but from qualities of being and time (also inherent to the qualitative medium of film) and to bounce ideas that worked beyond science fiction, fantasy, nor of categorical political rhetorics or apocalyptic histrionics, but with vast correlations that occur at the level of colony with human ecosystems as well as at the intersections of culture, science, and of law.

EARLY NARRATIVE OF A POST TRAUMATIC CORAL INTERVENTION

The room was like any other waiting room: a cruise ship lecture hall; a tourist waiting room; a dental chair; a treadmill. Perhaps, a dentist’s office; a PTSD group therapy room; an education informational evening for shitty parents. There was a stack of diagrams pinned to whiteboards; a stack of chairs in a circle and though listening to local diving safety instructors. This was not your regulation medical or scientific facility tour.

Outside a panoramic window a coral reef was visible. A barrier to an expanse of rough water and ocean; but also to our understanding. Around the walls were HD flatscreens. The shelves and cupboards had been emptied of their contents, which were piled into heaps, with office furniture blocking the way, and two overturned coral heads buried beneath a heap of periodicals spilling out of a bulging brief cases that had burst open:

“I received samples of corals in the Caribbean that started to

undergo bleaching. Everyone was puzzled by it and by what it

meant. No one knew anything. It was 1982–1983. Reefs in

Florida went bone white, and people were sending samples to

us, asking what was going on. Was it a disease, was it natural?”

There was also a story about an ecologist who thought he had found a way to decipher the coral reef.

He believed that all he needed to do was to feed the known data about reefs into a huge supercomputer, type a few commands, and push ENTER and out would come the secrets of life on the reef. He gave it a whirl. But what issued from the computer was not the reef's trophic pyramid, the intricately drawn food web that the scientist had dreamed of, but an expulsion, an explosion of machine and data into billowing clouds of smoke.

During my research on how endangerment is calculated by conservation scientists, I stumbled upon their use of sophisticated models and data algorithms developed by scientists to calculate what they refer to as “fuzzy numbers” and “unknown knowns.” For a detailed discussion of fuzzy numbers in the context of threatened species lists, see Irus Braverman, “Anticipating Endangerment: Biopolitics of Threatened Species Lists.”In the scientific warnings that we daily receive - among the statistical spreadsheets and the fuzzy numbers - it is clear we need a better feeling for this organism. For if humans are the weather makers ‘and our bones are coral made’ then a reverse is true: what happens to coral happens to us.

If we listen closely they are speaking in chorus … singing the signals of historical interventions into the world. I can hear the Ice Age. I can hear Krakatoa. I can hear the Atomic records. I can hear them sing their own loss and destruction. As Les Kaufman stated in 2017 “we're listening to the corals this is how they talk. Coral whisperer means I’m whispering to the corals, but the coral is whispering back!” But if we don’t arrest ourselves in this moment we’re going to destroy the earth - a bit like an alcoholic planet. What we attempted is a post-traumatic intervention.

[1] Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Harvard University Press, 2015), 15.

[2] Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1984. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: Henry Holt and Company “Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock in A Feeling for the Organism (1984). Studying the genetics of corn, McClintock described the need to “listen to the material” and, because the complexity of nature exceeds one’s imagination, one should “let the experiment tell you what to do” (Keller 1995)

 [3) Irus Braverman, “Anticipating Endangerment: The Biopolitics of Threatened Species Lists,” BioSocieties 12 (2017): 132–157.