Insiders

Chapman, Neil ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8253-0256 (2015) Insiders. E.R.O.S., 2015 (7). pp. 295-303. ISSN 2048-8352

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Abstract / Summary

Rumors persist that the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey is based on the work of Californian artist Jan Check. At an event organised to celebrate the artist’s life a technician sheds light on the problems involved in fabricating Check’s work. The suggested link with Kubrick’s film is revealed to be more plausible than previously thought.

The story is told of a 17th Century physician and his experiment into the question of consciousness carried out on a head in the moments after a convicted man’s execution by guillotine. A new embellishment of the story is proposed in which the assumed blank expression of death turns out instead to be a stealthy communication built, somehow, into non-signifying gestures of the face.

This piece is organised as two texts in parallel. In both cases they are factual accounts compounded by fiction. The piece approaches the theme of the Interior obliquely, as the not-stated concern of (un)related narratives. Both parts of the text are written in a concise and direct style allowing the registers of their engagement with the Interior to remain distinct. The challenge for the reader is to find the theme in implicit relations; the piece performs the complication of interior and exterior addressed also on the level of content.

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