The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

The most foolhardy UNIVERSAL EAR preconstruction project to date has resulted in an artist residency, movie, an art exhibition, a paperback, a font, and various other bits and bobs.

The book contained Byrne’s memoirs concerning his struggle with the eponymous curse and was available to buy in a temporally-limited edition, for just 21 days from 12th November-2nd December, 2018.

The written memoirs and the movie version of this episode were (p)reconstructed as part of an EMAP/EMARE artist residency at Bandits-Mages, Bourges, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The exhibition took place from November 16th-December 2nd 2018, at Le Haïdouc, on the premises of media arts organisation Bandits-Mages.

SHORT SYNOPSIS

Time-travelling record producer Harley Byrne crash-lands in a virtual reality heritage theme park in 22nd-century France. Corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and sentient statues haunt an absurdist Super-8 universe, digitally re-colourized for your pleasure!

MAIN CREDITS

performers

Harley Byrne… Stewart Lockwood

Being/Mrs Coeur… Tuesday Betts

Brieanne Morelle… Josephine Martrou

And guest starring Felipe El Morenito

Written & directed by Graeme Cole

Art director Aleksandra Niemczyk

Music by Nina Queissner

Sound editor Michael Cacioppo Belantara

Edited by Graeme Cole

Co-produced by Isabelle Carlier

While working on his escape from slavery in the reverb mines of 32nd-century Detroit, Byrne is tipped off to the existence of a form of ‘rogue sim electroacoustic pop’ created by a pair of sentient statues in 22nd-century Bourges.

But when he arrives in the historical city, he discovers it to be an ontologically dubious virtual heritage site, overrun with corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and the occasional native telling fisherman’s tales from deep VR.

Here follows a brief excerpt from the written memoirs, to illuminate interested parties as to the nature of the adventure.

We join Harley Byrne in the 32nd century, where he has been enslaved by an entity or entities he describes as ‘sentient music’; having recorded this very music, he is preparing to be zapped back to his 2012 home and safety, when an intriguing conversation occurs between him and the slave boy with whom he has passed his days.

“The smell of the 32nd century American Midwest was perhaps its most memorable feature, and I mentioned as much to the slave boy in the moments before my brother Santiago whisked me back to Manchester, 2012. (Why is there always a lag when I am in potential re-enchainment scenario?). A society in which music, however jaunty, has tainted the aural sense with an undertone of enforced servitude, a society in which rhythm and melody – however freed from the bounds of human imagination – cannot help but recall the factory muzaks of the mid-twentieth, 28th, and 38th-41st centuries, a people like this, must find their other senses over-compensating in the formation of a nostalgic attachment to a way of life.

The boy’s foot stopped tapping, although he continued working on the springs. He took a long deep breath of the awful air and, as if suddenly remembering my presence, looked me dead in the eye. The smell, he confessed, would be the thing he’d miss the most should the Music ever fall, or get the place cleaned up. Waking to that putrid odour each morning reminded him who he was. It was something human, imperceptible and utterly useless to the Music. It was indivisible from those aspects of the slave boy’s way of life which remained his alone: the machinations of his gut, his glands, and the filth that caked his skin in patterns whose daily evolution were a kind of living diary of dirt.

All the same, he dreamed of having a good old wash the day his chains were loosed. He had no intention of keeping even a vial of the scent, nor to capture and archive the smell’s digital odour co-ordinates as I suggested. Such paths, he mused while tracing the contours of the spring in his hands, invariably lead to madness.

The boy was unusually insightful about such things, and I found my attention drifting as irrelevancy piled upon irrelevancy. However, one detail did snag in my mind. His ruminations lead to the disclosure that he had enjoyed a serious education in the years before the event known by the slaves as ‘the Overture’. He specialized in what we might call, in our own proper time, ‘virtual heritage’ (being the use of thinking machines to preserve, mimic, or otherwise misrepresent the prevailing outer manifestations of our species’ collective inner lives).

In particular, he now recalled a moment in 22nd century Bourges of particular note to heritage students. The zeal of successive generations of culture ministers, panicked by the reflection of their own mortality that they perceived in France’s diminishing ‘Frenchness’, had resulted in the commission of virtual restoration projects in such ubiquity and of such sophistication that the city’s present was all but invisible beneath its veneer of vivid historical reconstructions and a rising underclass of living monuments. The wretched things were everywhere.

Deep within this tiresome historical sub-note of the lad’s ex tempore memoirs, appeared a reference to a form of rogue sim electroacoustic pop – the illicit beats and melodies of a duo of off-duty virtual waxworks whose artificial intelligences brimmed over their strictly utilitarian boundaries.

The boy’s voice rose, echoing meaningfully around the supercave as his cocky inner scholar awoke. The hybrid reverb chamber had become a powerful space over the past months, and I did not feel that my enforced labour had been wasted. Now, it lent the details of his anecdote undue gravity - and I must admit, I was drawn in.

The sims, he told me, were religious characters; or more accurately, the same religious character doubled, for Saint Ursinus of Bourges was honoured with two living statues in that time, and they fell quite in love with each other. They also cultivated the kind of rare musical chemistry enjoyed by only a handful of romantically-involved double acts over the centuries. The popularity of the duo was no doubt attributable to their outsider status as much as any musical originality or finesse. These have never been considerations in my work, however, and it was the precarious existence of their outlawed music that convinced me I should pay them a visit.

The slave boy begged me not to leave, but the process had been triggered. In any case, as I told him now, living in a gaseous cocktail of your civilisation’s waste matter - while in many eras unavoidable - is far from advisable. I shook him firmly by the hand, and we enjoyed together the fruits of our labour as the sound of his chains jangled unmusically around the cavern. I was not looking forward to laundry day.”

The thumb of Henry Berlot of Bourges, and the skull of the beast what ate him. [credit]