Before your eyes unfolds the manifestation of possible encounters that never happened. Or perhaps they are happening right now in a psycho-geographical elsewhere whose yet to be traced cartography spells the words "As if..."

The power "As if..." The power of subversively mixing and merging that which, precisely because it cannot be in reality, can instead gather momentum and acquire the consistency of the free unravelling of imagination.

The liberation of dreams.
The materialisation of the fantastic.
The power of "Why not?"

This is not science fiction. It is fiction perpetrated unscientifically through the extraordinary visions of the cohabitants of worlds where history explodes, its deranged fragments reassembling into slightly-twisted-yet-still-familiar scenarios.

Always the unexpected. It grabs us by the shoulder, a cold wind at the base of the spine, blowing certainties before it, as it travels towards the centre of the skull.

The hinge between different temporal dimensions is so smooth that it implicitly forces us to question the hold of this very dimension we call reality. Spatio-temporal dimensions lapse into each other, absorbed by the black hole of n-parallel worlds. Regurgitated, they resurface with fantastically bewildering warped appearances.

Bodies appear. Transfigured, transformed, metamorphosed; they are possessed by a subtle oddity that demands a second glance. These bodies shapeshift through time and space, short-circuiting expectations, causing erotic fantasies to erupt, triggered by a higher order of desire.

New bodies for a new desire. The disruptive joy of BarBelle. The beautiful Madonna-like face of Echo. They surface through playfulness, ripping apart conventional models of feminine beauty. A new mythology is built on the foundation of existing imagery.

Contrast these with the splendidly haunting feeling of Summer's End, filled as it is with the thrill of an impending, dangerous-yet-longed-for menace. As if that broom carelessly abandoned on the floor was the trait d'union with another world of mysteries accessible only to those with eyes to see it and small hands to reach out to it.

Desire.

Desire for a beauty manifested in unconventional and subversive shapes. A nymph with strange fleshy excrescences growing undisturbed under her skin. A dreamworld.

Desire to connect with invisible realms of possibility, where incongruity becomes the trigger for time-travelling and shape-shifting.

By mixing bodies far apart in time, by juxtaposing their flesh, their shape, their physicality, their texture and their corporeality, invisibility and visibility merge and detonate. They induce cracks in the assumptions of embodied time, conventional beauty and libidinal desires. Ruptures and raptures appear, erratic electric lines converge in the creation of new worlds, new bodies, new desires.

This is a "new" no longer opposed to "old". It is rather a "new" which belongs to the domain of multiplicity and becoming, the restless unfolding of bodily force into the territories of the possible.

Far from being mere phantasmagorical experiments in the mastery of digital technique, these images pierce through the structure that values linearity above randomness and visible rationality over invisible connection.

Across spatio-temporal dimensions nothing is fixed. Everything forever moves and mutates. Hence, there is no single history to recall, no single frequency, no single sound. Entire soundtracks must be invented to accompany this dance that breaks the rigors of linear time, to plunge it into circular, looping temporal machines populated by encounters of an absolutely random order.

Here we are presented with at least as many possible histories as there are images. Here is proof that with an imagination that knows no bounds, the challenge lies in letting the power of corporeal metamorphoses expand to become utterly visible.

Betti Marenko
London April 02

© Betti Marenko 2002