The following presentation was created by Adam Ragg, formerly of the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, just prior to his mysterious disappearance on May the 6th, 2014. He referred to it as “A Chocolate Autopsy”. It is the only evidence remaining of his tenure at the University – his present whereabouts, and whether he is even still alive, are unknown.
The presentation, and the blog that accompanied its development, is a remarkable document of his mental breakdown. Whilst attempting to explore what he described in his writings as a “theoretical meta-library” or a “total library”, in reference to Jorge Luis Borge’s Library of Babel, he began to source material from the University Library building, which he rigorously (some might say obsessively) transcribed, before radically re-ordering and re- editing it into what he described as a “word hoard”, a technique borrowed from Dadaist practitioners and writer William Burroughs.
In addition to this, he created, as part of the documentation process, a series of fake journal entries and email correspondence between his imagined author surrogate – Adam X. Smith, an “operative” of the Hammerspace Corporation – and his handler Dan [Expletive Deleted], an obvious reference to his Module Tutor. He would use real-world websites outside the confines of the University-run blog page to continue these psychodramas, with those who read his posts as both unknowing audience and test subjects in his experiments. It appears that Adam was able to produce this work through misappropriation of University equipment and funds, without any outside assistance.
As the work progressed and the strain on his mental faculties demonstrably increased, Adam’s posts became noticeably more obtuse and alarming. He began to engage in bouts of paranoia in which he was followed, threatened and victimised by invisible enemies. The intangible but ever-present Hammerspace Corporation – in his mind, a grotesque caricature of the clandestine surveillance arm of the military-industrial complex – merged with notions of meta-textuality and transhumanism. Then, after a series of lengthy and increasingly unhinged videos on his Youtube page, he went missing two days before his piece was due to be presented, and hasn’t returned to work since.
Some of the material in this presentation is of a highly disturbing nature, but we have made the difficult decision to leave it both uncensored and unedited, for educational purposes. Finally, it is unclear to the University whether this piece was intended as a therapeutic or educational exercise, or with some other purpose in mind. If it was, the question remains – for whom?