Friday 20 November 2009

hyperstition feedback

Julia Usher wrote

I had lots of thoughts about Hyperstition, and enjoyed the very interesting talk with Paul afterwards .

I loved going in subterraneanally at the start, and it was quite awesome to get the warning about the dark etc.

Then I had a series of adjustments while I went round, or tried to sit ( at the start).

I somewhat regretted that the guests were a bit noisy, so that the atmosphere and music in particular was obscured at times.
As I mentioned, I also felt that we needed longer to adjust to it, and indeed, to start reading the ultraviolet pages in the dark,
instead of on the bus all the way home!

I early on decided I would create my own "safe distance" from objects and revelations, til I felt i could take it in;
so in the first room, I wasn't awed by the Magic Circle bits, and didn't study the objects - which I guess were the Schrodinger objects or whatever they were called.

But I did sit and watch the beautiful cardboard revolving light/shadow display, when fellow guests got out of the way.
Dan's music created a breathing atmosphere.

It was amazing to come into the big Slack Space, and take time to acclimatise, first to the "working laboratory " atmosphere of Costa cups and left meals,
along with more sinister experiments. Again, it was possible to take close note of the more ordinary earthly artefacts and clues, while keeping whatever
distance felt appropriate to the heavily disturbing side; at least until one had put oneself in Da Vinci Code sceptical mode.

I loved the big map, and the ultraviolet lines; especially the red laser that went in the wall and behind. the objects in filing cabinets;
all this I have seen at various times at the Venice Biennalle, and like very much.

The code symbol table was also intriguing.
The grotesques and formaldehyde jars, with stem cell research could touch a bit nearer, and was naturally uncomfortable.

Stuart's music was hugely effective, and full of the mystery the installation needed; I thought it contributed very much to the atmosphere.
It worked so well in the space; I was at just the right place in the room when one of the "music of the sphere" sections came through.

I was very amused by the 14 page brief, with its learned tone and research-based references; it was so convincing, and you only slipped in learned tone
a couple of times......Hilariously funny at the end where the VAF is revealed as a cosmic analyser of some kind. If only.

Astonishing that it was uninfluenced by Depot. I liked both in different ways.

The detail and intricate "research" behind this one was different from Depot - where I most liked the slow participation in what someone recently called the "oppressed" people
of Colchester; and the vast size of the space.

For Hyperstition, what is fascinating is the level of elaborate and painstaking "research" behind this one;
and the systematic transformation of Slack Space, a true Installation.

Just a cautionary thought from me. More a wondering speculation. What is the effect of the subject matter on the artists, when you pore over so much dark stuff for months; dreaming up and disturbing and unsettling material. I think in a way the stem cell bits, and the gentler archaeology reality, including beautiful doorways,
kept the feet on the ground; and there are three sentences or so in the long blurb about our not being able to comprehend the universe from our narrow earthly view, which
is definitely what I believe.

Thank you all for a very surprising and memorable evening.

hyperstition feedback

Julia Curle wrote

I had never been to an installation before and had not known what to expect but was fascinated by it. I love that we explored the space with torches as it really made it such an individual experience and made me feel like I was investigating the room and looking for clues.

The thing that most occupied me was the characters of the scientists who had been there. I don’t know if I particularly focused on that because I am an actress or if most people do, but I was drawn to the post-it notes that gave clues to their personalities and little bits of humour amongst the research.

There were so many other touches I loved and I could be writing all night if I go into all of them. I felt like I was on a film set and my boyfriend felt like he was in a computer game and should have a riffle with him, so we experienced it very differently and both really enjoyed it.

hyperstition feedback

Mixmage wrote

The installation was genuinely unsettling: it really did feel like a scene of crime after the cops had taken away any living (and not so living) bodies, leaving us (the investigators) to piece together just what the very fuck had occurred. I thought the "leaked MOD timeline" was an excellent preamble which had my mind whirring, trying to imagine what I was about to witness. I was glad that I didn't read the concept document until after my viewing, allowing the installation to speak for itself. Bringing us in through the service area, the whole raising of the shutter, all served to heighten the anticipation. Sending us directly into the viewing room-turned-altar was a kind of psychic slap.

I didn't trust my companion from the moment we got in there. I suspected her of being "in on it", perhaps leading me or serving to highlight important fragments that I might have overlooked... mostly, I had to keep an eye on her in case she suddenly went batshit and started picking up rusty tools.

So... genuinely unsettled.

The sounds emanating from the Cthulu plinth were extremely disconcerting, I was too (I admit) scared to approach the altar until the half hour was just about over. It was the sudden sounds that caught me off-guard and made me think the statue had moved in my peripheral vision. That said, the one aspect that sold the scene more than any other was the smell. As soon as I walked in my hackles were up: the combination of smouldering incense and putrefaction (is that shit? have they used real faeces?) hit me like the word "Newcastle" to John Constantine.

This is bad. Really. Bad.

Add to all this the fact that the torches only gave a very small circle of light, and were off by default... well...

I've worked in FX a bit, done make-ups and gore for fun (I'll link you to my flickr below) so I was quite ready to have to suspend my disbelief. Instead, I found myself using it as a shield. The altar was quite clearly an altar - not just a bit of set-dressing of what an altar *might* look like. The books and documents - all real. The smell, the flesh, likewise. I had to analyse the way the blood was settling, examine the contents of the backlit specimen jars, note the Futurama cypher, dwell on the pop-cultural references (all work and no play makes jack a dull boy), translate the inscriptions (If you can read this you're too weird)... basically tread water in this immersive installation. Both my co-investigator and I tested every door - a clear indicator that really we wanted more - I think we were both relieved and disappointed that the other toilet cubicle turned out to be unused... the fact that she came and got me before she opened the door didn't do anything to allay my suspicion of her, but perhaps hinted at her own disquiet.

To sum up, I would use the word "dense": so much detail, so many cues, so much deeper and broader than a mere set-dressing. I regretted not having brought a camera. Please tell me you took some photos!

So... what next? Is that it for the Hyperstition installation, or do you plan to recreate it elsewhere? I know it's expertly and inextricably tied to the location and its history, do you think it could work elsewhere? Or perhaps keep it in Colchester, but weave it into a larger event...

Facebook | MAGUS

Facebook | MAGUS: "Brian Boyington I'd just like to say that Hyperstition was excellent on Saturday night. I have always suspected a great evil lurks within the bowels of Colchester, and now I have seen it's effects upon the minds of investigators into the strange and unexplained."

Facebook | MAGUS

Facebook | MAGUS: "Dave Plumb writes 'you know me like a bit of gore cannot believe how scared the girls were. They were so funny. thanx that made my Saturday evening! The funny smell and darkness made it work!! Coming in fro the rear of the building made it spooky too!'"

Facebook | MAGUS

Facebook | MAGUS: "Ciara Jack Hyperstition had to be one of the most clever, inventive and terrifying things I've ever been to! The amount of effort that obviously went into it is staggering, and the creativity of it all is mind-blowing. Everywhere you looked there was something you hadn't seen before, it also had it's own creative beauty. Magus are officially the shiz :D :D"

Sunday 8 November 2009

hyperstition references

Vysparov had sought out Burroughs because of his evident interest in the convergence of sorcery, dreams and fiction. In the immediate postwar years, Vysparov had convened the so-called Cthulhu Club to investigate connections between the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, mythology, science and magic6, and was at stage in the process of formalizing the constitution of Miskatonic Virtual University (MVU), a loose aggregation of non-standard theorists whose work could broadly be said to have ‘Lovecraftian’ connotations. The interest in Lovecraft’s fiction was motivated by its exemplification of the practice of hyperstition, a concept had been elaborated and keenly debated since the inception of the Cthulhu Club. Loosely defined, the coinage refers to 'fictions that make themselves real.'

Kaye drew Ccru’s attention to Burroughs’s description of viruses in Ah Pook is Here: 'And what is a virus? Perhaps simply a pictorial series like Egyptian glyphs that makes itself real.’ (AP 102). The papers Kaye left for Ccru included a copy of this page of the Ah Pook text, with these two sentences – italicized in the original text - heavily underlined. For Kaye, the echo of Vysparov’s language was ‘unequivocal evidence’ of the Russian’s influence upon Burroughs’s work after 1958. Whether or not this is the case, such passages indicate that Burroughs, like Vysparov, was interested in the ‘hyperstitional’ relations between writing, signs and reality.

In the hyperstitional model Kaye outlined, fiction is not opposed to the real. Rather, reality is understood to be composed of fictions – consistent semiotic terrains that condition perceptual, affective and behaviorial responses. Kaye considered Burroughs’ work to be ‘exemplary of hyperstitional practice’. Burroughs construed writing – and art in general – not aesthetically, but functionally, - that is to say, magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality.

Kaye maintained that it was ‘far from accidental’ that Burroughs’s equation of reality and fiction had been most widely embraced only in its negative aspect – as a variety of ‘postmodern’ ontological skepticism – rather than in its positive sense, as an investigation into the magical powers of incantation and manifestation: the efficacy of the virtual. For Kaye, the assimilation of Burroughs into textualist postmodernism constituted a deliberate act of ‘interpretevist sabotage’, the aim of which was to de-functionalise Burroughs’s writings by converting them into aesthetic exercises in style. Far from constituting a subversion of representative realism, the postmodern celebration of the text without a referent merely consummates a process that representative realism had initiated. Representative realism severs writing from any active function, surrendering it to the role of reflecting, not intervening in, the world. It is a short step to a dimension of pristine textuality, in which the existence of a world independent of discourse is denied altogether.

According to Kaye, the metaphysics of Burroughs’s ‘clearly hyperstitional’ fictions can be starkly contrasted with those at work in postmodernism. For postmodernists, the distinction between real and unreal is not substantive or is held not to matter, whereas for practitioners of hyperstition, differentiating between ‘degrees of realization’ is crucial. The hyperstitional process of entities 'making themselves real' is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already-active virtualities – realize themselves. Writing operates not as a passive representation but as an active agent of transformation and a gateway through which entities can emerge. ‘[B]y writing a universe, the writer makes such a universe possible.’ (WV 321)

But these operations do not occur in neutral territory, Kaye was quick to point out. Burroughs treats all conditions of existence as results of cosmic conflicts between competing intelligence agencies. In making themselves real, entities (must) also manufacture realities for themselves: realities whose potency often depends upon the stupefaction, subjugation and enslavement of populations, and whose existence is in conflict with other ‘reality programs’. Burroughs’s fiction deliberately renounces the status of plausible representation in order to operate directly upon this plane of magical war. Where realism merely reproduces the currently dominant reality program from inside, never identifying the existence of the program as such, Burroughs seeks to get outside the control codes in order to dismantle and rearrange them. Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion … (WV 253-4). Even representative realism participates – albeit unknowingly – in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality.

From the controllers’ point of view, Kaye said, ‘it is of course imperative that Burroughs is thought of as merely a writer of fiction. That’s why they have gone to such lengths to sideline him into a ghetto of literary experimentation.’

http://www.ccru.net/archive/burroughs.htm



In a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered, psychologist Jeff Zacks (…) discussed his new study exploring what happens in the brain when we read a book. In the study to be published in the journal Psychological Science, Zacks and lead researcher Nicole Speer utilized brain-imaging to look at what happens inside the brains of participants while they read. What they discovered is that as people read, the creation of vivid mental representations activated the same areas of the brain that process similar real life experiences.
In other words, you are constructing a virtual reality of your own inside of your head every time you read.
According to Zacks, “We’re used to thinking that virtual reality is something that involves fancy computers, helmets and gadgets, but what these kind of data suggest is that language itself is a powerful form of virtual reality. That there’s an important sense in which when we tell each other stories that we can control the perceptual processes that are happening in each others brains.
The results indicated that specific actions in the story, such as performing a motor action, activated the relevant area of the brain associated with performing that action in real life.

http://psychology.about.com/b/2009/02/06/want-to-explore-virtual-reality-try-reading-a-book.htm



The commonsense distinction between fact and fiction melts away in the conspiracist world. More than that, the two exchange places, so that in striking ways conspiracists often claim that what the world at large regards as fact is actually fiction, and second that what seems to be fiction is really fact. The first belief is a direct result of the commitment to stigmatized knowledge claims, for the acceptance of those claims rests on the belief that authoritative institutions, such as universities, cannot be trusted. They are deemed to be the tools of whatever malevolent forces are in control. Hence the purported knowledge propagated by such institutions is meant to deceive rather than enlighten.
Conspiracy literature is replete with instances in which manifestly fictional products, such as films and novels, are asserted to be accurate, factual representations of reality. In some cases, they are deemed to be encoded messages, originally intended for the inner circle of conspirators, that somehow became public. In other cases, truth is believed to have taken fictional form because the author was convinced that a direct representation of reality would be too disturbing and needed to be cloaked in fictional conventions. In still other instances, fictionalization is deemed to be part of the conspirators’ campaign to indoctrinate or prepare a naive public for some monstrous future development.


from Michael Barkun’s A Culture of Conspiracy p 29




Hyperstition


fictions that make themselves real

Concept:


Ever since the dawn of time a Great Old One (see Cthulhu Mythos) has slept deep in the earth beneath the site of the historical town of Colchester, Essex. Magus, a group of ontological terrorists, will reveal the evidence of this fact.

The evidence takes the form of an installation within Slack Space Colchester, which depicts the work environment of an ad hoc band of investigators. Artefacts, materials and media suggest the 'true' historical time line of Colchester, taking into account the the alien's presence and its effect. This will include biological, historical, architectural, social and occult themes, depicted at the workstations and throughout the space.

The investigators have been driven mad in the most Lovecraftian sense, the work that they conducted has begun to affect their dreams and waking consciousness. In an attempt to reconcile this they leave evidence of their own desires to realise and manifest the Great Old One. Obsessive and detailed empirical study becomes infected with arcane memes and primordial sciences. Resulting in one final act of insane idolatry.

The audience will be invited to take a tour of the space and witness the final outcome of the research/madness. An immersive quasi-theatrical showing that places the viewer within the visceral arena of the art and challenges them to engage with the their fiction, narrative and the reality.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos

http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html