Saline Shock!
The biomedical industry runs on horseshoe crab blood. Within extraction warehouses, horseshoe crabs are rowed in tourniquets and scoured, their powder-blue blood drained into glass milk bottles and used to test all vaccines, medical devices, surgical implants, and intravenous drugs before they can be used.
Saline Shock! is the sci-fi crescendo of this real-world practice. Recalling the mid 20th Century ‘Creature Feature’ films that allegorised cultural paranoia and shared apocolyptic anxieties, this set piece speculates a near future where current prognoses of high-frequency epidemics – agitated by rising eco-fascist ideals – are taken to their illogical conclusion. The horseshoe crab is captive in privatised clinics which proffer direct crab to human blood transfusions, surrounded by public health agitprop and flanked by hooded workers in protective wear.
The viewer is invited to examine these ‘living fossils’ closely. Having existed unchanged for over 440 million years but now in steep population decline, the horseshoe crab’s (or helmet crab in Japanese) physiology is petrified; a synthesis of toy shuttlecocks, rawl plugs, and cocktail forks of prosaic, immortal plastics. Crab specimens and staff clinical uniforms are fabricated from deadstock consumer, marine and construction paraphernalia; building site hard hats, saline eye wash pods, children’s stocking filler toys, 1970’s decorative cake toppers. These everyday throwaway items are defamiliarised and reanimated through various processes of bricolage, presented as anatomical evidence of the absurd and uncanny in our industrial processes and patterns of consumption.
For our forensic purposes, Saline Shock appropriates microscopic imaging aesthetics. Deceptive sets of colour relationships are fabricated to more clearly see the subjects in question. Just as polarising filters and stains are used to engineer chromacity in the viewing field, the works’ colour palettes use the ‘absolute fake’ to better reveal facets of latent ‘truths’. Through disruptions of macro and micro scales, the visual language collapses the animate, inanimate, artificial and hyperreal, in a desire to interrogate our extractivist systems of excess. We are looking at the chaotic, invincible impacts of conquest capitalism on every ecosystem.
We live..under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. The job of science fiction is at once to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum…and to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.
- Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster, 1965