Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin III

Friday 12th Feb 

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, vocal contaminations, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan on Holloway Road London.

Full address will be released soon, check here for updates:
https://www.facebook.com/events/160736174297009/

Acts:

Jose Macabra
http://soundcloud.com/josemacabra

Martin Palmer and Angela Edwards
http://xenogenetic.net/
http://www.angelacarolinedwardsart.com/

Douglas Park
http://douglasism.blogspot.co.uk/

CAO
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6
http://www.cao-music.net/

Richard Crow & Carmelo Bene
http://soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm

KALLA
https://www.facebook.com/kallanoise/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel

Neo Fung
http://neofung.tumblr.com/

House of Health
https://www.facebook.com/houseofhealthcollective/?pnref=lhc

Astaroth
https://soundcloud.com/astaroth29
https://vimeo.com/129025026

The Flesh Gallery (video installation)
https://vimeo.com/150777402

Event: Two Knocks For Yes

In October we’re working with Curtis James to curate a series of events that explore the link between photography and film and the paranormal. Join us as Miniclick contacts The Spirit Side…

Shrouded in secrecy, Two Knocks For Yes will incorporate talks, music, theatre and photography.

“In every story of things that go bump in the night, there are two possibilities. One, that it’s a hoax. Two, that there is something going on beyond the grasp of the human mind”.

And so begins Black Channels’ radiophonic exploration in to the poltergeist phenomenon that forms part of this evenings immersive entertainment, alongside a talk on the folklore of death and water by James Burt, ghost stories and archive video footage and photographs, all hosted by paranormal enthusiast, Curtis James.

Real life reports of paranormal activity, otherworldly vibrations and oscillations, chilling accounts of nocturnal visitations and strange activity in the most mundane of suburban surroundings will echo around the 19th Century stone walls of Saint Andrews Church, Brighton. There are tales of hauntings in the venue itself (no longer used for worship), and it is certainly true that the burial vaults beneath the pews have yet to be removed.

Doors open at 7:30pm. Performance starts at 8. There will be no admittance after 8.

Tickets are £6 and available here...

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/two-knocks-for-yes-tickets-18501509513#

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Friday 23rd October. Doors at 7:30pm, kicks off at 8pm.

Saint Andrews Church, Waterloo Street, Hove, BN3 1AQ

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(all money from ticket sales go to the performers and creators of this piece)

https://www.facebook.com/events/1476101159360253/

Event: Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Chronic Illness of Mysterious Origin

Saturday 10th October, 
 
The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan, Holloway Road, London

19:30-22:00 

https://www.facebook.com/events/907740049263314/

Join us for an evening of experimental ritual performances, noise, ceremonial electronicks and esoteric post-industrial techno-primitivism which will take place within an exploratory environment, forming in the depths of The Dungeons of Polymorphous Pan in Holloway.

Please RSVP and we'll send the address.

Acts

Neofung and Cao
"Trans-Trance Vol. II. Intra-telluric Transplant"

Following from wasteland embodiment act “Trans-trance”, a performance that proposed savage physiological strategies to incorporate nature into the city environment, re-appropriating base-materiality through the transformation of the performer into an urban-feral agent, “Intratelluric Transplant” seeks to reframe the act within the space of an underground realm, evoking the symbolism of the telluric interior of the earth. Here, the act executed by the urban-feral character will serve as a rite for the opening of a new abstract space: the entrails of the wasteland, the intimacy of the wasteland. A transplant onto a different symbolic realm would take place as the performers oscillate between the opening of new possibilities of rooting and uprooting, and the mute encounter with groundlessness.

http://neofung.tumblr.com/

http://www.cao-music.net/
http://www.soundcloud.com/cao-6

Luke Jordan
"Unclean Spirits: A Transformative Lecture"

An absurdist action installation of ritual uncleanness, invoking the visual and sonic informe.

Within, cacophony, biotic painting and sculptures of detritus and rot, occur in an affective flux.

Functioning between the urge to communicate and its failure; feedback, spoken words and unintelligible vocalisations are channeled and distorted through sculptural objects within the environment, further obscuring any rational meaning therein. The objects animated and possessed by the disembodied voice, and materials interacting with and manipulated by the body become transformed in an assemblage of the human and non-human, each taking on aspects of the other.

http://lukerichardjordan.blogspot.co.uk/

Richard Crow (Institution of Rot)
“Live De-composition with desiring assemblages for Les Hommes n’en sauront Rien (Of This Men shall know Nothing), 1923, oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 25 1/8 (80.5 x 64 cm) by Max Ernst (1891-1976)”

The back of the picture is inscribed with a mysterious and enigmatic prose poem (Ernst only confirmed in 1970 that the poem was written by himself), which can be translated as follows:

OF THIS MEN SHALL KNOW NOTHING

The Crescent (yellow and like a parachute) prevents the little whistle falling to the ground. The whistle, because people are taking notice of it, thinks it is climbing to the Sun. | The Sun is divided into two so that it can spin better. | The model is stretched out in a dreaming pose. The right leg is bent (a pleasant exact movement). | The hand hides the earth. Through this movement the earth takes on the importance of a sexual organ. | The Moon runs through its phases and eclipses with the utmost speed. | The picture is curious because of its symmetry. The two sexes balance each another.

Ernst’s occult symbolism (depicting the sun, the moon, rays and human organs) can be related directly back to Daniel Paul Schreber’s Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of my Nervous illness) 1911. Crow has been obsessively working with this text from as early as 1992, the year he opened up the Institution of Rot.

THE INSTITUTION OF ROT (A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY)

In history as in nature, the rotten is the laboratory of life. Karl Marx

The wonderful Schreber...ought to have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital. Sigmund Freud

There are many aberrant 'histories/herstories/heresies' of the IOR, therefore you may not recognise/identify yourself with what is written below.

Speak (and listen) according to the madness that seduces you.

The Institution of Rot (IOR) was founded by artist Richard Crow and writer Nick Couldry in 1992 as part of London’s Secret Spaces. Situated in a Victorian House in Finsbury Park, North London, Richard Crow's working and living space, the IOR has been (from 1992 - 1996) an active artist-run space dedicated to performance, audio works and site-specific installations. Rooted in a mindset of do-it-yourself production and collaboration, the IOR significantly contributed to the extraordinary dynamism of London’s artist-run spaces phenomenon of the 90's.

IOR’s specific concerns (and obsessions) were the privacy of the human body and its public transformations (ingestion, expulsion, cleansing, confessions, rituals and taboos).

From 2002 (until July 2009) the space of the IOR remained 'open' as a point of contact for international collaborations and occasional (unofficial) artists’ residencies in partnership with the curator in residence Lucia Farinati.

At present the ‘remains’ of the IOR constitute a ‘living archive’ – a kind of uneasy hauntology of recordings, objects, texts and images, people and places.


RICHARD CROW/INSTITUTION OF ROT

http://www.soundthreshold.org/season2_session3.htm
https://soundcloud.com/richard-crow

Gérard Courant - Michel Nedjar's portrait (1978 - silent)

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness lectures series presents: Talking with the spirits: Mediumship and possession

The Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon presents:

TALKING WITH THE SPIRITS: MEDIUMSHIP AND POSSESSION

Jack Hunter & Dr David Luke with special guest Don Santos

Tuesday, 29th, July, 2014. Entry £7 /£5 Concessions (on the door) Wine available October Gallery Theatre

Anthropologist Jack Hunter and psychologist David Luke will be discussing some of the material from their new edited book, Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from Between the Worlds – a collection of a dozen ethnographic studies of trance possession cults and mediums from around the world.

Talking With The Spirits: A Brief Introduction To The Anthropology Of Spirit Possession - Jack Hunter

Jack will give a brief overview of the historical development, and contemporary state, of the anthropology of spirit possession, exploring the many theoretical paradigms that have been applied (not always satisfactorily), to this perplexing human phenomenon.

Psychedelic Possession: The Growing Incorporation of Incorporation Into Ayahuasca Use – Dr David Luke

Shamans the world over use mediumistic techniques and commune with the spirits of the dead, and many use psychedelic plants, but strangely rare is it that anyone ever uses psychedelics and spirit possession together. David will explore why that may be, and why this unique practice is now growing in parts of the world.

Huichol Cosmology: A Mara'akame Shares The Wirraritari Cosmovision And Mythology - Mara’akame Paritemai (Don Santos)

In Wirraritari society the Mara’akames are medicine-men and leaders. There are different types of Mara’akame; those who simply sing and communicate with the spirits, those who do treatments with energy, extracting disease and materialising it as it is sucked out by the mouth, and those who sing and heal as Mara’akame Santos does.

Please RSVP on Facebook (afraid so) so that we can anticipate numbers:
https://www.facebook.com/events/241539126052207/

Free entry for anyone buying a copy of the Talking with the Spirits book (at reduced price of £15) at the door!

More here

Danse Macabre

La Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, janvier 2004
Film réalisé par Jérémy Nedjar - www.jeremynedjar.com
Poupées et Voix - Michel Nedjar
Conception et Mise en scène - Allen S. Weiss
Bande sonore et Voix supplémentaires - Gregory Whitehead
Marionnettisme et Scénographie - Mark Sussman
Marionnettistes - Claude Bétron, Souleyman Sakho, Mark Sussman
Eclairage - Boualem Ben-Gueddach
Productrice - Holly Golden
Remerciements - le French-American Found, la Directrice de La Halle Saint Pierre Martine Lusardy, le Great Small Works (New York).

More here

Read more here

Richard Crow - Imaginary Hospital Radio

Imaginary Hospital Radio mimics and subverts conventional hospital radio and its aim to relieve its listeners/patients through the collaging and dissecting of the visceral and surgical sounds associated with illness and disease. The hospital’s unwanted sounds and noise provide an unexpected artistic source, as a kind of sonic tableau – an invisible operating theatre in which the sonic/audio auscultation/surgery occurs ‘live to ear’.

Richard Crow is an inter-disciplinary artist with a strong background in experimental audio work, photo based media, live performance and site-specific installation. He utilises sound and noise in a performative way, for its spatial and subjective qualities and above all for its psycho-physical implications for the listener. Over the past two decades his solo and collaborative site-specific installations and performances have consisted of highly conceptualised interventions into base materiality, investigations of alternative systems of organisation and research into a certain material decadence, most notably with the project The Institution of Rot.

Crow has collaborated, performed, and recorded with many leading musicians and sonic artists including Joe Banks, Adam Bohman, The Hafler Trio, Clive Graham, Michael Prime, Dean Roberts, Kaffe Matthews, Michael Morley, Sandoz Lab Technicians, & dy'na:mo.

Listen here

Electronic Voice Pheneomena

Electronic Voice Pheneomena is an experimental literature and new media project for 2013, exploring contemporary approaches to sound, voice, technology and writing, brought to you by Mercy and Penned in the Margins.

The EVP programme takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious ‘Breakthrough’ experiments of the 1970s, where he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Themes of otherness, the profane and divine join with new approaches to writing and performing on this website built around our platform of new commissioned works.

The commissions are based on the premise that both artists and audiences of inter-media art join in a process of divination, belief and association similar to that employed by those finding ghost messages in early tape recordings. This thinkspace links to the paranormal, while also suggesting ways for properly contemporary performance and writing to form connections across electronic interface, human and spiritual other.

More here

(Gregor Schneider) Bleak Houses by Deborah Ripley

Upon entering Die Familie Schneider, visitors walk down a narrow, darkened hallway to a series of doors and a staircase. One door leads to a cramped kitchen where a woman dressed in brown and wearing rubber gloves is robotically washing a dish. Behind her is a grimy little sitting room devoid of decoration except for a curious, small 19th century landscape painting leaning against the wall. Back out in the hall and up the staircase are two more doors. One leads to a brightly lit bathroom, in which a man, behind the shower curtain, is masturbating, breathing heavily, apparently oblivious to visitors observation. The other door leads to a seedy, motel-like bedroom with a fake white fur bedspread and mirrored wardrobe doors. The air is oppressively hot and smells sickly. Slumped beside the bed is either a child or a small adult -- it is difficult to tell because the person is hidden beneath a plastic garbage bag. There is a sense that some unspeakable crime has been committed here. From the inside, the room appears to have no windows, even though windows are visible from the street. Clearly this is a secret inner room that Schneider has constructed.

Read more here

Mike Kelley & David Askevold - The Poltergeist (1978)

The Ectoplasm series is linked to a project made in association with artist David Askevold in 1978, titled “The Poltergeist.”  David and I shared an interest in the aesthetics of the occult which led us to make a series of photographic works that addressed that history.  We did not work collaboratively, though we had numerous discussions about the project as it was developed.  Each artist’s works were produced independently, but with the intention that they should be seen simultaneously to inflect the reading of the other.  My portion of the project includes faux spiritualist photographs of a “medium” (myself) exuding the mysterious ethereal substance ectoplasm.  The photos mimic the look of period spiritualist photography from the early part of the 20^th century; they are grouped with texts and drawings (also presented photographically) that relate to this theme.  David assisted me in the photo shoot and one of the photos (of a sock monkey wrapped in gauze) ended up being used in his half of the project.  Only four of the ectoplasm images were included in “The Poltergeist;” the photos selected for this exhibition include never-before-printed images.

From  http://mikekelley.com/

Ryan Jordan - DIY Hypnosis and Hallucination Machines Workshop

This workshop will focus on building simple hardware synths and controlling lights with 555 timer circuits. Once the circuit has been built the participant will then construct a wearable set of goggles which will focus the lights directly into their eyes. The rate the lights flicker and the frequency of audio are synchronised and controlled by the participant so they are able to fine tune the device in order to reveal some unusual visual patterns. For example, you may see psychedelic patterns when the rate of the light approaches flicker fusion, or perceive circular motion when the position of the lights are offset from one another.

Saturday 10th May 2014 

13:00 - 18:00 [workshop]

19:00 - 20:00 [public performance: open to all] 

nnnnn, Unit 73a, Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, Hackney, London, E8 4QN 

More here

Leif Elggren & his characters

Leif Elggren talks about Queen Christina, Charles XII and Emanuel Swedenborg at the opening of his solo exhibition "MOVEMENTS IN THE DUST"

Media Mediums

The research project Media Mediums (1) is focused on the history of transmission at a distance and includes two objects of study : Firstly, a long series of technical objects, machines and devices, both implemented and speculative, which have as a foundational principle the transportation of information, and secondly, much more mysterious and less well-known phenomena such as telepathy, telekinesis or teleportation.

On first glance, these two objects might seem to be in total opposition with one another. One situated within the extreme rationalism of technical or industrial contexts, anchored within the rigor of scientific method and its theoretical and applied fields : physics, chemistry, electro-magnetics, etc. The other gravitates towards the inexplicable, “aberrant phenomena that when held up to our cultural background of accepted truths... go against common sense and institutionalized (scientific or religious) knowledge” (2), lining up on the side of the occult, spiritualism, and the paranormal.

The prefix “tele-”, or “at a distance”, paradoxically tends to link these two fields, to create lines of communication between them. But this proximity is not only lexical. For example, at the end of the 19th century the word “television” was synonym to clairvoyance in spiritist circles. “Clairvoyants were capable of transcending space and time. They could describe ancient edifices or objects with so much precision and detail that it was as if they beheld the place or the object before their very eyes” (3). Yet at the same moment, “television” was but one of dozens of words used in technical fields populating the imagination with a horizon of objects to come.

Read more here

GHost

As a visual arts and creative research project GHost takes on and explores the conceit of guests, hosts and ghosts, both metaphorically and practically, in its activities. Functioning in its capacity as a supporting platform (or host) GHost aims to enable invited guests to visually and conceptually manifest and interrogate the idea of the ghost.

Read more here