Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro: Cheese Grease Geomancy.

The tools of divination have always been sourced from readily at hand items, for instance: Tasseomancy is the reading of tea leaves or coffee grounds; Haruspicy involves utilisation of animal viscera to predict the future; Ornithomancy consists of seeing omens within the flight patterns and calls of birds. These tools are a reflection of quotidian life. It is interesting that objects of the everyday can be supernatural. In our exhibition Cheese Grease Geomancy  the mystical can be used to describe ordinary life.

Tea, gristle, birds: these objects are the stuff of pre-internet life, if a new language of divination were to sprout up in our age, what would it be derived from? Our contemporary lives revolve around convenience. Foods that can be consumed without the need for cutlery use skills are double-plus-good. Burgers, hotdogs, pizzas and french fries are emblematic of our culture that doesn’t have the time for utensils nor excessive mastication. Our proposition that dirty pizza boxes may be used as a tool for divination is a reflection of our present state of being. Tomato, cheese, oil, olives, etc pasted upon cardboard can be employed like the lines in the palm of your hand: predicting the events of the future. With pizza divination, you don’t even have to get off the couch to get your fortune told.

The idea that pizza can be used as a tool for peeking into the future is not confined to the walls of this gallery. Only this month the Pentagon Pizza Report tweeted via Xitter- a large uptick in pizza orders within the vicinity of the Pentagon just prior to the IDF’s bombing of Iran. This is not an isolated incident. Similar spikes at Domino’s and Papa John’s Pizzerias occurred just prior to Iraq’s invasion in Kuwait (1990) as well as the USA’s interventions in Grenada(1983) and Panama(1989). Known by the portmanteau Pizzint (Pizza Intelligence) during the Cold War, Soviet intelligence agencies saw abnormal sales fluctuations at Pentagon adjacent pizza purveyors as an early warning signal pertaining to American military actions.

Cheese Grease Geomancy is not a critical evaluation of occult divination practices. Who are we make judgement upon the efficacy of any particular mode of future reading? Just look at the School of Economics. Some folk say there are about 150,000 economists living in the world today1. And yet only 12 economists sounded the alarm prior the 2008 GFC2. ) For any of those who are interested, that’s 0.008% of economists predicted the greatest financial disaster of our times. We are more interested in the idea of Confirmation Bias. It is a guilty pleasure we all indulge in. It doesn’t matter what part of the political spectrum you subscribe to. Nobody likes to be called out for having wrong-headed ideas, so we naturally seek out data that confirms our own mode of thinking.

In our algorithm-led age, the pool of information we use to support our world view gets more and more narrow. We end up creating our own ridges and lines upon the palm which we read our future. Cheese Grease Geomancy uses food stains like stars in a constellation. Each pattern created by the remnant food informs an image that relates to a card from the Rider Waite Smith Tarot deck. A tarot reading generated not via the shuffling of a deck but through sloppy consumption of a pizza pie. These greasy constellations can be used to predict our future! A future that we are sure will be easy to swallow.

1 Say 500 decent PhD programs in this world. Say each produces 15 grads a year (this is WAY over). Say, 10% of economists die a year, then the upper bound of economists in this word is 15*500/(1-0.9)=75000. If 5% of economist's die it's 150,000.

2 Dirk J Bezemer: "No One Saw This Coming" Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models