Fissure is a durational, site-specific, mixed-media piece that will unfold in the Yorkshire Dales over 3 days in May 20 – 22, 2011. It is an extended, participatory performance, both epiphanic and investigative, in which the artesian continuities of life, death and love are affirmed. Louise Ann Wilson is collaborating with writer Elizabeth Burns, composer Jocelyn Pook, choreographer Nigel Stewart, leading neuro-scientists, neuro-imagers and earth scientists to create this uniquely conceived and created work.
While reading a transcript from a talk given by Baba Rampuri at the 2008 World Psychedlic Forum in Basel this process was given a broader context. Rampuri talks about the role of the pilgrim, and the responsibility of the pilgrimage, in a way that shows how each of us traveling the course of our lives can share our stories to bring about meaningful change.
"Those who go on a pilgrimage become witnesses of mirrors.The main reason for pilgrimage is for darshan, The Beholding, and the resulting blessings. Darshan derives from drsh, ‘to see’, and is The Beholding, not ‘the looking’, as a tourist might do, but The Seeing. And, as the mirrors continue to reflect images deeper and deeper within, Analogy operates reflecting the macrocosm and the microcosm.
The World must benefit from his pilgrimage, so having had darshan, the pilgrim brings something back to his village. Pilgrims return with more than memories, something auspicious, that brings magic and prosperity home."
“Narrative can be used as an ‘act of resistance’ to mainstream social science and philosophy which is often insufficiently attentive to the stories that cultures and subcultures tell about themselves...to think about the self in this way is to open up questions about the political realm which are often suppressed in mainstream political thought”
- S. Stephenson. “Narrative, Identity and Modernity”
Dr James Gemmill, Sepa's radioactive substances manager, said: "The concentration of iodine detected is extremely low and is not of concern for the public or the environment."
However, Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland and a prominent critic of nuclear power, has complained to the HPA about a delay in informing the public that radiation had been detected by the Glasgow monitoring station on Friday.
Salmond said the HPA had been expected to release the Glasgow readings on Monday morning. This had been agreed with Sepa but it did not do so. Sepa officials had then been told it would be disclosed on Tuesday morning, but the HPA statement was released after 1pm.
Salmond said he suspected this information was delayed to avoid clashing with the release of a report calling for rapid investment in new nuclear power stations from Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, headed by Prof David King, the UK's former chief scientific adviser.
Roseanna Cunningham, the Scottish environment minister, is writing to the HPA to protest, Salmond said. "When these things happen, our obligation is to tell people frankly, clearly and concisely as soon as possible. We're extremely angry and suspicious as to why the pre-arranged statement didn't appear," he said.
James Curico dicusses the battle to create new stories and the background of the Citizen Y project...
Citizen Y and Independent Media Production From The Trenches
There’s always a side of the creative process that remains in shadow. We used to call it “behind the scenes,” but the angle shot from behind the scenes has become the new normal. The actor playing the character is, if anything, more at the forefront of the viewers consciousness.
As an example of this, here is me playing the actor JC, who played the character JC in Clark:
(More on that project in a second.)
Maybe we can see “behind the scenes” if the project has not yet been produced. I want to share a bit of a project with all of you that, so far, has not seen the light of day.
If it hasn’t seen the light of day, why should you care about it, you might ask?
Because it is a story more common than you might think. Because it is the norm rather than the exception. The number of things you haven’t seen far outweighs what you have. For every Picasso there are millions of other painters, some excellent and some awful, that you never happened upon. And of the artists you have heard of, except for when they are put under the microscopic scrutiny of historians, there are probably works in progress that never made it.
Some of these projects are abortions, some are miscarriages, and some, fighting all biological possibility, simply remain in a kind of limbo space, maybe to manifest at some point in the future, and maybe not.
The project I’m talking about is Citizen Y, and it is an example of the latter case, neither an abortion nor a miscarriage, but instead, as the blueprints of the experience we developed are soon to be released, it is something that exists as many ideas and myths exist, an unmanifest possibility. Time will tell, as it always does.
This is how conception went. In 2007, I went to the first Esozone in Portland. At the time I was senior editor of Alterati. I had the chance to meet a number of people I had been talking with online, even working with, but who I had never met in “meat space.” You can write a book, produce an album, or talk for hours with people halfway across the globe. But there is something unique about being in person with them. Something very different about the experience.
After seeing FoolishPeople perform, Joseph, John and I talked and we decided we wanted to work on a project together. Probably a live event slash film. We didn’t know what yet. We just knew we wanted to do it.
A year of writing and bouncing ideas around later, John and I had a workable script. The script itself was futuristic in content but written with a tone that is almost reminiscent of Greek tragedy, if it was parsed through the brain of someone like Philip K Dick. It is not a tone that I usually use. To an extent I was taking John’s lead with that, and to an extent it was just what came out of the chemistry of that moment and that interaction.
We had a few concept artists onboard, and we were in the process of planning the event. First we had our sights on LA. At the last minute - though thankfully before we announced, if memory serves - that angle fell through. We then spent some more time refining our creative materials, regrouping, and we conceived of doing it in London, after FoolishPeople pulled off yet another successful event there in the Abattoir.....
Will you turn to ridicule the experience I have acquired with so much dilligence?”
- from Paracelsus’ Credo
Discussing the use of conjuring and sleight of hand in the ritual context of healing with John Harrigan from Foolish People and Weaponized, and the musician Thomas Jude Barclay Morrison, provided an opportunity to work through some fragments of thought that have been bouncing through my brain recently. I’ve been reading Arthur Versluis’ upcoming work, Mystic State: Politics, Gnosis and Emergent Culture, along side SUNY’s latest reprinting of Christopher Mckintosh’s Rose Cross in the Age of Reason, and Jake Stratton-Kent’s wonderful Geosophia from Scarlet Imprint, and pondering the place of Mystery in the development of culture. It’s something that is all to often passed over in a world immersed in the marvels of μηχανή (mekhane), a word which has both the meaning of machine and trickery, from the root word magh which means to be able, or to have power.
“”Everything that occurs in conformity with nature, but of whose cause we are unaware, provokes astonishment; as does everything, that when it occurs in a manner contrary to nature, is produced by technique (tekhne) in the interest of mankind.
For in many cases, nature produces effects that are contrary to our interests, for nature always acts in the same way, and simply, whereas what is useful to us often changes.
David Metcalfes 'The Eyeless Owl' is an incredible site, there's a wealth of articles to explore and David's writing is elucid. It was a pleasure discussing this subject with him and Thomas, highly recommended.
A writer, possessed by a terrifying fiction hunts for the heart of his story in a pagan landscape, haunted by the infamous hum emitted by a Strange Factory.
Strange Factories is the first feature film produced by FoolishPeople.
1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus; an old English circus lost in the shadows of the smoke stacks of Calder Hall, the world's first commercial nuclear power station.
Athalia the ballerina waits in the ring for Loudon the clown to return with directions to the Black Pool, the mythic site of the Home Sweet Home, the final show of the season. Join her as she begins a bizarre and wondrous search for Loudon through the irradiated secrets of Cirxus, where she must face the macabre atomic menagerie, haunted by circus animals and navigate her way through the maze of strange, hallucinogenic sideshows to the other side of time.
Cirxus defies genre and form and offers a literary experience like no other. A combination of hallucinogenic novel and blueprint to a physical experience.
A rowdy gang of Tracey Emins wrestle half a dozen dazed Andy Warhols to the ground. IT IS THE FUTURE AND ALL FORMS OF ART ARE FREE. Perfect replicas exist of every masterpiece ever created, artworks and ideas are stolen from the mind before they’re even created.
Copyright or ownership is meaningless. FLESH-WORTH is all that matters. Arm yourself with weaponised art and explore the notions of open-source myth. What are intellectual rights worth in a decomposing culture?
Featuring full archival material from FoolishPeople’s performance run of Dead Language at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
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