Horror and the Art of Noise, by Philip Hausmann

Fifty years ago, on September 20, 1963, director Alfred Hitchcock shocked movie-goers with his thriller that showcased killer birds. Perhaps even more than the images of assaults by seagull and crows, it was the birds' chilling screeches that worked themselves into cinema fans' collective consciousness.
It's a jarring story with a number of surprising elements: after a brief encounter in a pet shop, Melanie Daniels follows attorney Mitch Brenner to the California coast, where Brenner wants to spend the weekend in Bodega Bay. There, Daniels is attacked and injured by a seagull. More attacks occur, and increase in intensity, until some people are killed. Huge swarms of birds begin terrorizing the town. Many residents flee; others barricade themselves in their homes.

In his film, Hitchcock manages to transform seemingly harmless and familiar creatures into deadly beasts. But for the soundtrack, his audio crew was originally only able to come up with the quaint tweets of backyard birds. "I hear sounds like that all day long. I need something that is really coming to shake people up!" the film king told them. Hitchcock saw the soundtrack as integral to his 1963 movie.

 The trautonium

When Hitchcock met Remi Gassmann, a former student of German composer Paul Hindemith, for the first time, Gassmann said he knew the right person for the job: his former fellow student from Berlin, music pioneer Oskar Sala. Hitchcock didn't hesitate for long.

And Sala placed his bets on an unusual instrument: the trautonium. Named after its inventor, Friedrich Trautwein, this electronic instrument resembling a little organ is considered a predecessor to the analog synthesizer.

Hitchcock had heard sounds from the instrument once before: on Berlin Radio at the end of the 1920s. But for the film, Oskar Sala used the instrument to create all sorts of noises: the cries of the birds, the slamming of windows and doors, even the hammering by the people wanting to barricade their homes to protect themselves from the flying fiends. All of the sounds were created in Sala's little studio in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg in 1961.

read more here

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

The Company You Keep, by Shruti Ravindran

Hallucinated voices can be helpful life guides, muses of creativity, and powerful agents for healing the fractured self.

Rosie’s marriage did not last long. But many months after she returned to her parents’ cottage on a south Indian tea estate, her husband’s voice rattled around her head like a vengeful earworm, berating her for her dark skin and overall worthlessness. One day, another voice spoke up. It was gravelly and hoarse, like a grandma who had chain-smoked cheroots for half a century. ‘There is a goddess within you,’ it rasped. ‘She can make you fairer and prettier. Listen to her instructions.’ That is how Rosie arrived at the beauty regimen she followed every day for the next 10 years: collecting excrement at dawn, and carefully smoothing it across her limbs and face.

The regimen caused her father, a widower, to eject her from his home. Rosie eventually found herself in a shelter on the outskirts of the city Chennai. Here, a kind young man informed her that she suffered from schizophrenia, and that the old lady didn’t exist. Rosie listened to what he said, but she was not sure she believed him. After all, the old lady said only what Rosie had been hearing all her life, from her mother, her friends, her husband, and her television set. They all spoke in one voice, telling her that dark skin was unlovable, that fairness was synonymous with femininity, and that she should whiten her skin at any cost.

 I first heard about Rosie from the social worker Vandana Gopikumar, co-founder of the Banyan, the shelter in Chennai where Rosie lives. She said hers was one of the most extreme cases she’d seen. ‘But what struck me then,’ she said, ‘was how much the voice reflected her socio-cultural background.’ Like many epiphanies, Gopikumar’s sounds startlingly obvious. It seems natural that imagined voices reflect the fears, anxieties and desires of their hearers, and for these emotions to be shaped, in turn, by the pressures and expectations of local culture.

more here

Exhibition: The Book of Evil Spirits, Chiara Fumai

28 January - 23 April 2016
Private view Wednesday, 27 January, 6-9pm

waterside contemporary

2 Clunbury Str, N1 6TT London, United Kingdom

waterside contemporary is pleased to present The Book of Evil Spirits, an expanded video installation by Chiara Fumai, and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery.

The Book brings together a number of characters whose narratives Fumai has embodied in her performative practice to date. In creating this catalogue, Fumai enlisted the help of Eusapia Palladino, a 19th century internationally renowned psychic and medium whose séances were attended with conviction by the likes of Nicholas II of Russia, and Nobel-laureates Marie and Pierre Curie.

Participation in the séance requires a departure from the rational and the conscious; by calling on a medium - and becoming one herself – the artist bypasses cultural structures, and her own narrative method itself. Fumai has borrowed from an array of historical characters, often women in history who from marginal positions gained recognition for voicing their dissent. They have included the writer and activist Ulrike Meinhof, bearded lady Annie Jones, philosopher Carla Lonzi, and indeed Palladino, the artist’s muse. Fumai allows herself to become ‘possessed’ by them, and under the comfortable guise of re-enactment, hijacks their narratives for her own purpose.

In The Book, Palladino convenes the spirits of Fumai’s motley crew of evil spirits – activists, terrorists, freak-show performers, philosophers, all at one point alter-egos of Fumai herself – who collectively represent the fears of a bourgeois society. The artist’s camp parody is itself obscured by knowing anachronism and occasional bursts of uncontrollable stage violence.

The events are observed and narrated by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, Palladino’s contemporary and a scholar of mediumship, who takes turns with himself in affirming and discrediting what he sees. This place of misunderstanding and fragmentation is at the crux of Fumai’s production: presented with the sitting are various paraphernalia relating to the ghosts and the medium herself – a spirit board, collages of automatic writing, an anonymous message of warning spelt out in International Sign alphabet. ABCDEFGHIJLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Arrivederci.

Chiara Fumai (1978, Italy), lives and ‘unworks’ in Milan. Recent one-woman-shows include Der Hexenhammer at Museion, Bolzano, 2015; With Love from $inister at A Palazzo, Brescia; I Did Not Say or Mean 'Warning' at Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 2013.

Her recent group exhibitions and performances have been presented at David Roberts Art Foundation, Contour Mechelen, CA2M Madrid, 2015; Whitechapel Galley, De Appel Amsterdam, Nottingham Contemporary, Fiorucci Art Trust, London, 2014; MUSAC, 2013; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, 2012; Nomas Foundation, 2011.

more here

The other KKK: how the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift tried to craft a new world, by Jon Savage

George Orwell thought they were ‘sex maniacs’. They thought they were spiritual samurai, rebuilding Britain after the Great War. With their magical rituals, outdoor living and utopian vision, they are the most fascinating of forgotten youth movements – and their ideas still resonate.

Young men and women strike ritualistic poses on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington and the Long Man of Wilmington: stark figures wearing strange, hieratic clothes in the elemental landscape. Taken in 1929, there is something disquieting about these black and white photographs. You feel as though you have intruded on the rites of a secret society that may or may not be benign, that indeed intends to be ambiguous and unsettling.

In one image, a young woman in long belted coat and cap is captured raising her arm by a standing stone. It’s an echo of the salute that would sweep Germany only a few years later, and it jars the viewer back into a time between the wars: a continent destroyed, and a desperate search for new solutions that often took curious forms.

Annebella Pollen’s The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift is a revelation. This scholarly book explores England’s most fascinating and forgotten youth movement. Through a detailed examination of the highways and byways of esoteric thought and alternative politics in the early 20th century, as well as plentiful photographs (many taken by a young Angus McBean, an active kinsman in the late 1920s), it reconstructs a radical moment lost to history, a future that never happened.
Formed by John Hargrave in 1920, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were an extraordinary mixture of the archaic and the hypermodern. A back-to-the-land movement that used the techniques of contemporary advertising, it offered a holistic, dazzling vision. As Hargrave wrote in 1924: “The method of the Kibbo Kift is based upon a direct appeal to the senses by means of colour, shape, sound and movement, that is, by every form of symbolism.”

more here

Exhibititon: Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred

10 October 2015 – 13 March 2016

This archive display features rare woodcarvings, furniture, ceremonial dress designs and photographs of the English organisation The Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1932).

Formed by the artist, writer and pacifist John Hargrave after becoming disillusioned with the Boy Scout movement, the Kibbo Kift philosophy was based on a shared appreciation of nature and handicraft, as well as a commitment to world peace. Though small in number, notable members of the group included suffragettes, scientists and the novelist H.G.Wells. A 1929 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery was a way of spreading their ideas, and this display reveals their remarkable aesthetic drawn from ancient Egyptian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Native American crafts, dress and language.

Through revealing photographs and footage of the group on parades and camping trips, this display presents not only a forgotten moment in British social movements but a futuristic vision which continues to resonate today.

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

more here

Documentary: Investigation Into The Invisible World, by Jean-Michel Roux

The Countries that Dont Exist, by David Robson

When I first see Nick Middleton, he is surrounded by globes and atlases showing the most exotic places on the planet. We are in the basement of Stanfords, London’s largest travel bookshop, visited by such intrepid explorers as Florence Nightingale, Ernest Shackleton and Ranulph Fiennes.

Middleton, however, is here to talk about countries missing from the vast majority of books and maps for sale here. He calls them the “countries that don’t exist”, but although their names may seem fantastical – Atlantium, Christiania, and Elgaland-Vargaland – they are all real places, occupied by fervidly patriotic citizens. In fact, you have almost certainly, unknowingly, visited one.

The globe, it turns out, is full of small (and not so small) regions that have all the trappings of a real country – a fixed population, a government, a flag, and a currency. Some can even issue you a biometric passport. Yet for various reasons they are not allowed representatives in the United Nations, and are ignored on most world maps.

Middleton, a geographer at the University of Oxford, has now charted these hidden lands in his new book, An Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist (Macmillan, 2015). Flicking through its pages, it feels like you have entered a parallel world with a vibrant, forgotten history and a rich culture.

Read more here

quote

“There is no present which is not haunted by a past and future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come.” – Gilles Deleuze

A magical glimpse into the Tudor imagination: Lost library of John Dee to be revealed

Treasured books from the lost Library of Tudor polymath John Dee will be revealed in a special exhibition at the Royal College of Physicians Museum in January 2016

No figure from the Tudor world better exemplifies the diverse and apparently contradictory intellectual and social preoccupations of the period than John Dee.

At once deeply religious and fastidiously superstitious, Dee was a scholar of mathematics and magic, a keen historian and courtier and tutor to Elizabeth I and a polymath whose interests included astronomy, astrology, exploration, the occult, alchemy, spying and imperialism.

Little wonder this extraordinary man has continually fascinated and served as inspiration to artists from Shakespeare and Ben Johnson to Derek Jarman and Damon Albarn.

Now, the intriguing and mysterious Dee, who survived the machinations of the late Tudor period only to die in poverty in 1608/9, is to be revealed to the public through his remarkable personal library for the first time in history.

Read more here 

Royal College of Physicians Museum info here

Event: The EVP Sessions

The EVP Sessions
Saturday 14th November

Start time: 8pm
Tickets: £11
Book online

Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street
London EC1V 9LT
Website: shoreditchtownhall.com

Electronic Voice Phenomena returns with a series of electrifying live sessions featuring the very best in hauntology, spoken word, glitch noise and performance. The EVP Sessions takes its inspiration from Konstantin Raudive’s notorious Breakthrough experiments of the 1970s, in which he divined voices-from-beyond in electronic noise. Enter the labyrinthine basement of Shoreditch Town Hall and experience a “mind-boggling”, “perplexingly good” avant-garde cabaret of human, ghostly and machine voices.

Featuring

EX-EASTER ISLAND HEAD
LAURA BURNS, TIM MURRAY-BROWNE & JAN LEE
ROWAN EVANS & MAISIE NEWMAN / DUNCAN GATES
LUKE JORDAN / GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN / NICK MURRAY
NATHAN PENLINGTON / JOANNE SCOTT
ANTOSH WOJCIK / NICOLA WOODHAM

with special guest
S J Fowler

Full programme of works: http://www.electronicvoicephenomena.net/index.php/shoreditch-town-hall-london/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1639973726274802/

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/

The Reality Show, by Mike Jay

Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras – and make a lot of sense

Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled ‘The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village’, published in the May 2012 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its authors, the brothers Joel and Ian Gold, presented a striking series of cases in which individuals had become convinced that they were secretly being filmed for a reality TV show.

In one case, the subject travelled to New York, demanding to see the ‘director’ of the film of his life, and wishing to check whether the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in reality or merely in the movie that was being assembled for his benefit. In another, a journalist who had been hospitalised during a manic episode became convinced that the medical scenario was fake and that he would be awarded a prize for covering the story once the truth was revealed. Another subject was actually working on a reality TV series but came to believe that his fellow crew members were secretly filming him, and was constantly expecting the This-Is-Your-Life moment when the cameras would flip and reveal that he was the true star of the show.

Few commentators were able to resist the idea that these cases — all diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and treated with antipsychotic medication — were in some sense the tip of the iceberg, exposing a pathology in our culture as a whole. They were taken as extreme examples of a wider modern malaise: an obsession with celebrity turning us all into narcissistic stars of our own lives, or a media-saturated culture warping our sense of reality and blurring the line between fact and fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales for an age in which our experience of reality is manicured and customised in subtle and insidious ways, and everything from our junk mail to our online searches discreetly encourages us in the assumption that we are the centre of the universe.

But part of the reason that the Truman Show delusion seems so uncannily in tune with the times is that Hollywood blockbusters now regularly present narratives that, until recently, were confined to psychiatrists’ case notes and the clinical literature on paranoid psychosis. Popular culture hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more sense than they used to?

The first person to examine the curiously symbiotic relationship between new technologies and the symptoms of psychosis was Victor Tausk, an early disciple of Sigmund Freud. In 1919, he published a paper on a phenomenon he called ‘the influencing machine’. Tausk had noticed that it was common for patients with the recently coined diagnosis of schizophrenia to be convinced that their minds and bodies were being controlled by advanced technologies invisible to everyone but them. These ‘influencing machines’ were often elaborately conceived and predicated on the new devices that were transforming modern life. Patients reported that they were receiving messages transmitted by hidden batteries, coils and electrical apparatus; voices in their heads were relayed by advanced forms of telephone or phonograph, and visual hallucinations by the covert operation of ‘a magic lantern or cinematograph’. Tausk’s most detailed case study was of a patient named ‘Natalija A’, who believed that her thoughts were being controlled and her body manipulated by an electrical apparatus secretly operated by doctors in Berlin. The device was shaped like her own body, its stomach a velvet-lined lid that could be opened to reveal batteries corresponding to her internal organs.

Read more here

Event: Consciousness as Interface Workshop

Consciousness as Interface :: Workshop ::

Full information :: http://ryanjordan.nnnnn.org.uk/doku.php?id=consciousness_as_interface

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$Pay what you want$

Saturday 10th October & Sunday 11th October, 12 midday - 7pm.

Room 18, Floor 19, Block B, Wah Tat Industrial Centre, Kwai Hing, Hong Kong.

Booking and info email ryan@nnnnn.org.uk
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This workshop explores the idea that human conscious experience functions as a virtual reality interface with the external world.

The workshop includes an introduction to theories related to this idea in combination with practical experiments.

Participants will build a variety of experimental electronic circuits using materials such as amber, copper, zinc and iron pyrite, as well as more standard electronic components.

These circuits will create experimental audio-visual instruments; with the audio played through loudspeakers, and the visual generated via a combination of the physiology of the eye, electricity and flickering light.

The results from these experiments will (hopefully) generate experiences akin to hallucinations which will be controllable, therefore offering a navigable passageway through the holoflux.

Artaud, Deleuze and The Will to Nothingness, by Cengiz Erdem

I close the eyes of my intelligence, and giving voice to the unformulated within me, I offer myself the sense of having wrested from the unknown something real.
I believe in spontaneous conjurations.
On the paths along which my blood draws me, it cannot be that one day I will not discover a truth.[1]                     

Antonin Artaud does not call for destruction of reason through the imaginary but an affirmation of reason’s self-destruction on the way to self-creation. There is a knowledge which Artaud is in pursuit of without knowing what that knowledge is and what purpose it serves. Artaud is always in pursuit of this unattainable and ungraspable knowledge and he knows that, as he is trying to give it a voice, he is moving away from and towards it at the same time. This movement of the action and the intention in opposite directions, that is, this turning against itself of desire, is a thought that Artaud feels with his body but cannot express through articulable forms. Artaud makes the inarticulable visible through costume, lighting, etc., and tries to create a psychic materiality.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom,
then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out,
as in the frenzy of dancehalls,
and this wrong side out will be his real place.[2]

Artaud feels the body as an externally organized structure and experiences existence as pain because he feels his body to be restricted and subjected to forms it is not willing to take at all times. By disorganizing the body through putting its organs to different uses, to uses other than they have come to be put, within the organizing structures, Artaud induces agony in himself. Desiring to become inorganic, and this is a desire for an impersonal death, an “ungraspable” knowledge, this striving for infinity within the finite, is, paradoxically, at once the product and the producer of his affirmation of life as it is, that is, as “a process of breaking down…” as the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald puts it in his The Crack Up. In The Logic of Sense Deleuze reads Fitzgerald’s The Crack Up with Kleinian eyes and says that identification is peculiar to manic-depressive states. In The Crack Up Fitzgerald says,

I only wanted absolute quiet to think about why I had developed a sad attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion… Identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure…[3]

Deleuze affirms Fitzgerald’s manic-depressive attitude towards the relationship between life and death in the Porcelain and Volcano chapter of his The Logic of Sense.

If one asks why health does not suffice, why the crack is desirable, it is perhaps because only by means of the crack and at its edges thought occurs, that anything that is good and great in humanity enters and exits through it, in people ready to destroy themselves—better death than the health which we are given. Is there some other health, like a body surviving as long as possible its scar, like Lowry dreaming of rewriting a “Crack Up” which would end happily, and never giving up the idea of a new vital conquest?[4]

In a world ruled by fools full of ill-will war becomes inescapable. Since war, conflict, violence and destruction are interior as much as they are exterior affairs, it is hardly a matter of bad luck that we will be wounded at some point if we haven’t been already, not that I wish it to be that way. An injury either creates a possibility of relating to the world as it is, or turns into an obsession with the self, into a delusional and rigid vision of existence projected onto the real, giving birth to neurosis or psychosis.

Read more here

Bataille and the Surrealists: Is Pineal Eye an Organ Without a Body? by Cengiz Erdem

The pineal eye is not the organ that turns two different perspectives into one. It rather attempts to turn the reality inside out so that the objects, instead of becoming visible through reflecting light, themselves overflow their objectivities and generate light. The Surrealists aimed at precisely this kind of a process through automatic writing. They aimed at replacing the objective reality with another subjectivity that would go beyond the polar opposition between the subject and the object. Surrealism tries to attain inorganicity through becoming inorganic. It desires nothing, rather than willing nothingness. It is a movement governed by the death drive rather than being the governor of the death drive.

Bataille at first looked at the Surrealists with sympathy, but before long he came to understand that it was nothing other than a false pretentiousness. Bataille says,

If we were to identify under the heading of materialism a crude liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive, indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts, and ridicules spirit, we could at the same time identify surrealism as a childhood disease of this base materialism: it is through this latter identification that the current prerequisites for a consistent development may be specified forcefully and in such a manner as to preclude any return to pretentious idealistic aberrations.[1]

To understand why Bataille is so angry with the Surrealists, and especially with Dali, we have to go back to the roots of this distress caused by the attempt to show that the subject and the object are one. Bataille compares the prefix Sur at the beginning of Surrealism and Nietzsche’s Surhomme. For Bataille, what is common to both Nietzsche and the Surrealists is that they both in vain strive for a higher world, and yet since Nietzsche at least inverts his attitude and attempts to revalue all values including his own. Whereas Surrealism is a hopeless case in that all they do is to devalue everything valuable. For Bataille, the Surrealists are merely a group of people making themselves ridiculous and being the objects of nervous laughter.

Read more here

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

The Sun Does Not Rise by Andrew Crumey

How magical thinking haunts our everyday language, and fossilised ideas live on in even the most sophisticated scienc.

Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific? The question was asked in a survey in the United States, and according to Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 ‘slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific”’. The rest, almost 50 per cent, were willing to grant it credibility, a higher proportion than in previous surveys. Perhaps that indicates a decline in rational scepticism, but an alternative interpretation suggests itself: many respondents had simply confused astrology and astronomy. It’s a common enough mistake: when the Daily Mail profiled the ailing Patrick Moore not long before his death in 2012, they dubbed him an ‘astrological legend’. One can only hope the error did nothing to hasten the great man’s demise.

As an amateur astronomer myself, I’m used to the mix-up, though to be honest, the confusion doesn’t particularly trouble me. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to suggest there is any plausibility in the idea that the gravitational field of Jupiter can stimulate life-changing tidal forces in my head. But while the boundary between science and pseudo-science seems clear enough in theory, it’s not always so straightforward in practice. The reason, in many cases, is that both draw on the same recurring set of ideas.

 I would like to propose what I shall call the principle of eternal folly. It states that in nearly every era there arises, in some form, nearly every idea of which humans are capable. Certainly, there is the emergence of new ideas: technological ones are the most obvious, but there are others, too. I do think it fair to say that Jane Austen, Beethoven, and even the occasional entrepreneur have invented radically new things. However, the vast majority of ideas are recycled – and it is when we fail to recognise this, as we eternally do, that we commit folly.

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