The Material: Art & Technology Research Group,
Bath School of Art, Film & Media
Fiction Machines IV - One-Day Symposium: 20th July 2023
Strand: Personification and Voicing As Method

When We Were a Child, We Were Hypnotised By Our Dentist

In 1982, the child Jane Topping was hypnotised by her dentist, Dr George W. Fairfull Smith. Simultaneously – and unbeknownst to everyone in the dental surgery - the alien nou left her home planet on a mission, was drawn off course and became trapped beneath a filling in one of the child Jane’s rotten pre-molars. And so, the alien/human hybrid nouJane came into being. Though the whole thing was recorded for the BBC and broadcast as the documentary Hypnosis and Healing (dir. Michael Barnes, 1982), it is not until today that we hear nouJane speak…

This performative reading develops the idea of alien invasion as an alternative mode of reproduction while giving voice to a new kind of being, by drawing on my film nou (2018), my online artwork www.rabbitcottontoothcottonrabbit.com (2018-ongoing) and the correspondence of Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison, unearthed from the archives of The National Library of Scotland. As mentioned above, this session is performed by the alien/human hybrid nouJane.

The conference Fiction Machines IV (Bath Spa University) is part of a long-term research strand which is interested in methods of fiction and personification within art practice research to engage with and give voice to more-than-human lifeforms and materials. The conference is interested in fiction and method within art practice, ‘Far from being an escape from the world’, as Shaws and Reeves-Evison have argued, ‘fiction takes us to its symbolic centre and might allow us to establish some leverage within the tangled contingencies and hidden conventions that lie there.’ (2017:7). For Fiction Machines IV ‘I’ will perform a reading with AV which develops the idea of alien invasion as an alternative mode of reproduction by drawing on my film nou (2018), my online artwork www.rabbitcottontoothcottonrabbit.com (2018-ongoing) and the correspondence of Scottish writer Naomi Mitchison, unearthed from the archives of The National Library of Scotland. Crucially, this session will be performed, not by Dr Jane Topping, but by the alien/human hybrid nouJane. The short film nou (2018) is a tale of space travel, hypnosis and transformation in which the protagonist nou leaves the alien world of her home planet and travels through a kaleidoscopic tunnel, emerging in the tooth of a child who has been hypnotised by a dentist. At the end of the film, nou the alien and Jane the child are one – a hybrid named nouJane. www.rabbitcottontoothcottonrabbit is an online artwork - a self-generative digital wunderkammer - a cut-up, intertextual cabinet of uncontrollable curiosities. By performing as nouJane, the being ‘born’ at the end of the film nou, the performance channels the innermost concerns of a hybrid – a being who seeks answers in the interstices created by the self-generating (self-aware?) www.rabbitcottontoothcottonrabbit.com. This performative reading addresses two of the conference strands: Machine Futurisms (as it gives voice to a speculative alien/human hybrid and draws from a generative online artwork) or Personification and Voicing As Method strand (as it collages autobiography, sci-fi meanderings and correspondence to and from Naomi Mitchison).