Jogging With Roussel 21 (Part 1)

          It was in the 2010’s that things began to pick up for Welles and Canterel along the main timeline. Creating a strange contemporary art collective called “Ratlines Mirror Invective”, they turned their dabblings in alternative universes / timelines into a contemporary art sensation. During the Venice Biennale of 2011, gorgeous green skinned Chlorlock supermodels of every conceivable ethnic and gender hybridity performed guerrilla art actions within the environs of the Biennale, and around the city at large. Leaving one-way, hovering, immovable,  trans-temporal view-screens, they created a real-time temporal vista of the site going back nearly 40 million years.

 Receiving some criticism for their use of hegemonic codes of mediatized beauty, Welles and Canterel commenced a press conference where critics were allowed to reprogram the appearance of the guerrilla chlorlock models real-time, and gave them a demonstration using Google’s image search and an Iphone photoshopping app that broadcast genetic reconfiguration files to the models based on image selection.

The first critic to try his hand turned one model into Flemish artist Quinten Massys’ 1513 ‘Ugly Duchess’, but with a perpetually foaming headdress, and skin blossomed out in Digitalis purpurea, a ‘biennial ornamental’ which itself was being devoured by larva of ‘the foxglove pug’, a moth of the family Geometridae. As a joke, or comment, “The Ugly Duchess” went about for the rest of Biennale wearing a campy Arabian Nights veil, all the while good-naturedly giggling and dropping pug larva into passersby’s drinks. Another model was turned into the American comic book character called “The Hulk” except that inside his chest was a replica of a scene from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly delights populated by the Chlorlock’s own eloi miniatures. A third model was only given a rude forehead and chest-tattoo reading: XENOPHOBIC (forehead), and FLIGHTS OF FANCY (chest); this somehow fulfilling an idea of a ‘punk’ aesthetic, or ‘anti-aesthetic’, it was explained to Canterel, who commented the words seemed to be metric rhymes.

          Ratlines Mirror Invective had successfully introduced the world to the madness of genetico-temporal modulation without so much as a quip from the global regulating bodies. People stood rapt before the Venice of 114 BCE, 308, 1000, 1506, 1609, 1712, and 39M BCE, among others.  In the following years, Canterel and Welles opened up their RMI galleries in every major art center in the world, and began to peddle not only trans-temporal antiquities, but lo-tech nostalgic art from the future, paintings from the Paris of the 2830’s, a particularly beautiful era, and genetically altered wood carving from the Samarkand region of 5700, especially the luminous wooden hats, or helmets of the Peshaw sect of Zoroastrian woodsmen who tended the synthetic forests. These were the products of alternate time-line universes whose access only the RMI controlled.