Rebel Fux is a series of mini-zines with a fragmented metaphysical soul. Created by Kate Huh, you can listen to their voice through the orchestration of images and words they unify for us. Each edition of Rebel Fux consists of a different theme and lies in a different node of abstraction depending on the chosen topic. Rebel Fux is a perfect name for the series as it encompasses the rebellion of the spirit through the way we perceive the world in our subjectivities. We f*ck what has been given and shown to us by f*cking the rebellious spirit itself. In disintegrating images of the topic through poetic collages, we feel the aftermath of the spirit’s intercourse as it passes through us.
I will be focusing on Rebel Fux #4 for this post, on the violent creation of nature and the nature of violent creation. Some of the editions in the archive combine figures of the fragmentation and unification Kate uses. This time the words of Mary Shelley and J. Robert Oppenheimer danced about the page of Lynd Ward’s eerie woodcuts. The connection between the modern Prometheus myth and the creation of a weapon of death is the overarching thread here. A deep sense of questioning the ethics of the creator’s intention, actions, and results of what their hands were involved in conducting. Either way, we immediately know the feelings of the creator of this zine about these questions, light-heartedly on the first page as 1931 Frankenstein’s Monster presents Kate’s formidable voice:
“In this issue it becomes clear; if you fux with Nature, Nature fux with you…”
Nature is capitalized and fortified in a conscious way which I highly appreciate. An autonomous spirit of choice and marker of vengeance for any disrespectful alchemist efforts that do not withhold and honor the balance of our elements. Grounded by reality, this could not feel more poignant and demanding than today as according to new research, the vast majority (over 99%) of the 281,000 metric tonnes of CO2 emissions estimated to have been generated in the first 60 days of Israel’s genocide on Palestine were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. In clear connections to our presents, pasts, and unfortunate futures, in Rebel Fux, we see the becoming and unbecoming of creator and creature as demise descends for the mortal price of fuxxing with Nature.
Quotes from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein spiral into the ultimate point of magnetization and explosion, such as the atom bomb itself, into his creator’s words. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, is a Prometheus-Frankenstein figure and we see in his creation and words how so.
The fuxxed creator’s journey vacuums alongside Lynd Ward’s woodcut prints. In an extreme black point contrast, the direct lines set a scene for the poetics. Ward illustrated a 1934 edition of Frankenstein, published in New York by Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. These are outstanding, not only for excellence and power of design but especially for insights into a disturbing and powerfully poetic solely in the visual plane. Makes me wonder about the process of these woodcuts, and the type of creation into nature’s skin, the wood of a tree. Which then this zine integrates back the words of Mary Shelley into the visuals for the nexus point of bearing witness to the birth of a creation that you know in prophetic unfolding will mass into death and destruction.
The integration of such distinct acts of creation insights wonder into the possibilities of the animativity of the creation itself. Frankenstein’s monster while considered an abomination, was only through tragic self-undoing, was there actual violence in response. Oppenheimer’s atom bomb has no consciousness, in its inanimacy, the consciousness is of its creator and user. So therefore the consequences and material actions that come from such creations come from the intentionality and unintentionality of their creators.
“I shall not be merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors.
The great discoveries of modern science have been put to horrible use.
Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than myself
your anguish,
is dear to me,
a single bomb.”
Oppenheimer’s pure curiosity is creation with the matters and physics held carelessly on the other side of its coin. As we create, the spaces left out in our creation are still real and will be held captive and used by successors. Oppenheimer was a seeker of creation, not death. Frankenstein was a seeker of transmutation, not monstrosity. Prometheus was a seeker and holder of intelligence not the horrors of mankind. Nevertheless, their hands lead to such events. They did not think of it. And in the divine humbling that the balance of nature does to all of us: what they did not pay attention to, what was left uncalculated, calculated itself into a haunting in the shadows. To be the effect of the cause they created. As for me, I am not sure I blame the creator for the destruction creations caused and keep on causing, but I sure do blame their lack of care. Being lost in the fullness of the thirst, a wonder of wonder is intoxicating, but remembering where you stand is integral. The earth that gives you the materials off her back for the projects. The atoms, the organs, the fire.
The climax of the zine is Oppenheimer’s words bearing witness to the destruction of his own creation. The mass blinding event of witnessing shot him towards the future of the scale of what he had done. These pages in full depiction of this moment as it shows us Frankestein’s monster, Lynd Ward’s woodcut, and an indistinct man in pain, is reminiscent of Junji Ito’s methods of somber horror. In his manga, he circulates the reader with images of dizziness into a trap of a double panel of your own turning. The spiralization into the concise moment of inescapability for what you have been led into, and this moment… for the creator of pain: they lead themselves and everyone down such a spiral.
Throughout this post, I have been using the word “creator” instead of “scientist” even though throughout the zine it focuses on scientists and their creation fuxxing with nature. However, I think any form of creation can fall victim and perpetrator to this violence, in different forms. Technologies and their consumer, politics in societal structures, art in culture, and more. Not all creation is of this sort. When we go outside of the bounds of the bounty that nature gives us. When we do not honor the flow of intuitive creation in balance with our place within it.
In the end, Rebel Fux gives the voice back to the creation. A being or unbeing that is condemned, because of the carelessness and oversight of their poisonous curious creator, to the undoing of the ethics of their future and present users. The dysautonomia of their free will results in this inescapability.
As humanity seems to be in a dizzying repetitive violence of history, genocide on top of genocides, are we not Frankestein’s monster? Have we been removed from our autonomy because of the conditions of our creation? When the alchemist that melded our clay into our human bodies and granted us life, did they too exclaim “And I am Death, who taketh all, who shatters worlds…”?
Valeria is interning at QZAP this semester. She is in her senior year at University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Gender & Women’s Studies. She was born and raised in Valencia, Venezuela and now lives in Teejop land (Madison, WI).
