The video installation Dragon Hunt is the museum version of the eponymous film, which uses a chapter from Samuel Delany’s science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand as a point of departure. In addition to the film, the exhibition in the Museum of Fine Arts also showcases props from the production – a conch (sea snail shell), and a publication featuring the chapter that inspired the film.
Delany’s evocative language, which conjures a series of mental images for the reader – cliffs, boulders, valleys, and stone slabs, representing the distant future landscapes of the world of Velm – is interpreted by the artist through the use of machine learning algorithms. The film’s landscape is animated by an algorithm that converts Delany’s descriptions of Velm, frame by frame, into a moving image, an erratic and flickering scenery merging with the peculiar terrains of the Dalmatian hinterland through which the story’s protagonists travel.
The film, with a semi-linear structure, follows the journey of a transgenerational couple as they set out to hunt dragons. The elder of the pair (DISKOlektiv) serves as the guide, an experienced motorcyclist who is well-acquainted with the terrain. However, it is through the perspective of his companion, a young man dressed in a pale blue shirt (Nika Pećarina), that we perceive the flickering landscape. As they ride through the scenery on their motorbike, a Dragon emerges, dancing. The Dragon’s dance mimics the quivering effects of the Machine Vision’s moving image, but is also propelled by the dancer’s own pleasure in movement and sensory interaction with the surroundings. This echoes the novel’s depiction of dragons as beings whose ‘nerve endings, concentrated in the flesh below the joint of wing and body is of the same order as those in the human genitals or the lining of the human ear’.
Replacing the piercing association of the arrow with the announcing sound of the horn, the cybernetic crossbow from the original text has become a low-tech instrument in the film – a conch shell. The conch sounds constitute a major part of the film’s soundtrack: fragmented, pitched, and looped, accompanied by a saxophone that shares a similar tonal quality. The disorienting spiral shape of the shell’s hollow body, activated by the hunter’s breath, becomes a sensory surface upon which the dragon’s dance is reproduced. This leads the travelling pair, along with the Old and Young Hunters – whom the protagonists have just met – on a dragon hunt. The hunt is experienced as a melding experience of becoming each other, becoming the dragon, becoming the landscape.
Drawing on his own rich experiences of gay cruising in New York before the AIDS crisis, Delany describes the Dragon Hunt as an outdoor ritual where various species experience each other through their own senses. While the dragons are hunted by humans, the Evelmi, residents of Velm, hunt the human hunters who are ensnared in the chase. At the end of the day, all the hunters gather to sing about their hunting experience. With its long tradition on Velm, the Dragon Hunt acts as a technology of peace and friendship among different species.
The politics of friendship, as manifested through song and dance in the film, also mirror the actual process of creating this work. The Dragon Hunt aligns the concepts of inspiration, contribution, and collaboration with the notion of friendship. In this context, filmmaking, artistic creation evolves into a technology of friendship and comradery, with friends-collaborators including the artists, the landscape, Machine Vision algorithms, and Samuel Delany’s novel.
This opens and broadens the context for interpreting this work. Both Samuel R. Delany’s novel and Marko Gutić Mižimak’s free interpretation affirm that queer experiences inspire us to envision alternative worlds, different places, and future times yet to unfold. In these imagined realms, the aspirations of our present era might be fulfilled and the difficulties of the “here and now” transcended. In his book Cruising Utopia (2009), J.E. Muñoz extensively discussed cultural production based on a concrete queer utopia that emerged following the Stonewall riots. The interest of younger artists in queer utopianism underscores its importance and relevance today. Amid the heart-wrenching reality of our times, the Dragon Hunt provides a vision of friendship, camaraderie, a sense of merging, shared experiences, and artistic creation as a beacon of hope for a better “then and there.”
Tonči Kranjčević Batalić
Marko Gutić Mižimakov (b. 1992) is a visual, performance and text-based artist. He is interested in shaping sensory materials through intimate, collaborative and social processes. Often borrowing from queer science fiction, he choreographs bodies along with digital and tangible objects into structures that defy conventional forms of presentation. He views his practice as a speculative technology of mutual transformation. From May 2022 to September 2023, he participated in the a.pass Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies centre in Brussels, and he is currently working as an external associate in transmedia arts at Paris College of Art.
The exhibition was realised in collaboration with the queerAnarchive collective.
The exhibition has been made possible with financial support from the City of Split and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.
The work of queerAnarchive collective is funded by the Kultura Nova Foundation.