Abstract

This article combines situational analysis with situationists dérive to weave a seemingly disjointed series of historical tableaux, materialities, marginalia, combustion and corporeal techniques in embryology, chemistry, geology, synthetics and magic. The double locus structuring this constellation is Hilde Proescholdt (1898–1924), a gifted German experimental biologist; and Abraham Gesner (1797–1864), Canadian physician, geologist and inventor of kerosene. Following Adele Clark’s SA research programme, I attend to situational maps recurring the experimental repertoires Gesner and Proescholdt with the material, social and artefactual historicities they environed. Through dérive, I narrate by displacement, cutting along the bias, rather than with the historical fabric. My aim is to contribute media ethology as variation on Robert Logan’s call for a broad spectrum media ecology that is agnostic to stable distinctions between content and container. I pay special appropriation to the signalling dynamics of the Spemann-Mangold organizer as an active media or, in complimentary phenomenal guise, Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of acoustic space as ‘all centres and no margins’. Proceeding through double-locus and doublemethod appropriates what Proescholdt’s supervisor, Hans Spemann, would have cautioned us against as bad magic by co-inducing interference between primary and the implanted organizing centres. Within the chapter, media ethology contributes a complex sum of SA+ dérive as a symmetrical mappings and non-obligate appropriations across inquiry and technique in the arts and the sciences. My discussion more broadly offers to enter debates on the relative merits and stakes for performative knowledge production and communication through the nexuses of art, science and technology studies.