Phase III – Stealth Is.

FoolishPeople present

Cirxus

Written and Directed by John Harrigan

25 May – 13 June 2009 Arcola Theatre

Press Night Thursday 28 May 8.30pm

LONDON 14/04/09 – FoolishPeople present Cirxus an immersive, promenade performance in Arcola’s new industrial space, Unit K for three weeks only.

1957- Seascale, the North of England. Cirxus is 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 Athalia in 1957 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 on the other side of time.

Immerse yourself in the world of Cirxus, where theatric arcana and Atomic fallout irradiate the sawdust arenas of our inner worlds.

FoolishPeople will use mythology, shamanism, music and dance to bring the darkness of an atomic circus to life. The performance will allow audience members to step into the world of an old English circus lost in the 1950s, explore its sideshows and meet extraordinary characters from the past and future.

Cirxus will be FoolishPeople’s first London performance run since their critically acclaimed ‘Dead Language’ which was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2007. ‘Dead Language’ was part of the London Lates season of cultural events and selected for the Times top five events.

FoolishPeople’s core creative team for Cirxus consists of John Harrigan, Lucy Allin, Victoria Karlsson, P. Emerson Williams, Claire Tregellas & Tereza Kamenicka.

Listings Information:

‘Cirxus’

24 May- 13 June 2009

8.30pm & 9.15pm entrance times

£14/£10 concessions

Pay what you can Tuesday (tickets from 7pm, subject to availability)

Free tickets are available for under 26s on Monday-Thursday evenings for the first 2 weeks

Book online: arcolatheatre.com

Box office: 020 7503 1646

Arcola Theatre Unit K, 27 Arcola Street, E8 2DJ

Notes to editors:

• The German Bremen University confirmed that radioactive contamination by Americium-241 found in some soil samples taken by Greenpeace 11.5 km south of Sellafield, were 400 times higher than those taken 11 km from Chernobyl. 51 years on, the villagers of Seascale still live with the ramifications of the accident at Pile 1 of the Windscale Works Atomic Energy Factory.
• FoolishPeople are currently in pre-production with Mythos Media and DPRGRM for a feature film entitled ‘Y’, which is being shot in Los Angeles CA in July 2009. ‘Y’ was written by John Harrigan and James Curcio and to be directed by Joseph Matheny.
• FoolishPeople create art, theatre, film, books & collaborative events to raise a numinous experience within the witness for positive change.
• Arcola’s Unit K will officially launch in July 2009 with Create Festival 2009.
• ‘Cirxus’ is sponsored by The Movieum of London, Chisenhale Dance Space and The Courtyard.
• For further information, please contact:

  Lucy Allin, FoolishPeople art@foolishpeople.org

  or visit: foolishpeople.org

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A protester throws a computer terminal taken from the Royal Bank of Scotland offices at the smashed windows of its branch near the Bank of England

“Many City workers have dressed in casual clothes after banks and other institutions were warned they may be targeted.” – Setting up an “Us Vs. Them” mentality to isolate the working class and keep them in fear while idolizing their protectors – the police?

Whether that was the intent or not it seemed to work:
“Fearing they would be targeted by protesters, some bankers swapped their pinstripe suits for casual wear and others stayed home. Bolder financial workers leaned out their office windows Wednesday, taunting demonstrators and waving 10 pound notes at them.”

On a Similar note:
“Five people are being held under the Terrorism Act.“ from the arrest made prior to the protest and linked to it. – More fear mongering by the press in their hyping this story? It’s somewhat reminiscent of the treatment received by the RNC protest organizers here stateside.

“Royal Bank of Scotland is at the center of protesters’ anger because it had to be bailed out by the British government after a series of disastrous deals brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. The bank is now majority-owned by the British taxpayer.
Despite that, its former chief executive Fred Goodwin — aged just 50 — managed to walk off with a tidy $1 million annual pension for life, while unemployment in Britain now tops 2 million and is heading towards 3 million by the end of this year. Goodwin has been vilified by the British press.”

“Police have turned their attention to the masterminds of yesterday’s violent G20 protests. At 12.20 today officers raided two squats in east London that they say where headquarters for several groups involved in organizing. Officers are pouring over CCTV footage and shots by Met photographers as well as monitoring internet chatter to identify known troublemakers that were at yesterdays demonstrations.” – Technology is awesome for catching yr political dissidents.

“Demonstrators hoisted effigies of the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” representing war, climate chaos, financial crimes and homelessness.”

Various tidbits from Gaza Solidarity:

This man died during the protest, denied attention by the medical police services in the wake of the chaos. His name has not been released.

Protesters are let out of the pens one by one, but only after they’ve been photographed by police Forward Intelligence Teams.

Police are using anti-terror laws to force people to delete pictures from their cameras.
Police have arrested six demonstrators they describe as being in an ‘armoured vehicle’.

fuckthepolice

Some Condescending-ass reporters:

“Globalization is, in ways, helping out even those who are against Globalization.”
“I don’t know what they were mad about.”

The bottomline price tag on the G20 summit:
a total of $1.1 trillion
Number of Arrest? Alot of different numbers handed out by the media and alot of references to people being “driven away”
G20 will be meeting in NY in the fall and will hopefully be greeted with greater levels of chaos as people see the ineffectual nature of this current consolidation of financial power.

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Via Danny @ Chaosneverdied.com:
more mythos context for the AAAZ. [http://is.gd/enql]

So that had me dig up what I could from James Koehnline. [http://www.koehnline.com/ He was the artist who made the more spectacular collages within the AAAZ zine, and also did the cover for TAZ, among other awesome things. After the AAAZ was over and done with, he moved on and tried to get folks to start meeting on Asteroids. [Picture highly related.]

Link dump :

http://www.koehnline.com/6a01.htm

http://www.koehnline.com/6a02.htm

http://www.koehnline.com/cal05.html

Full Text Archived below for posterity’s sake.
continue reading…

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Equinox Festival

a Festival of Scientific Illuminism

London, June 2009

An unprecedented 3 day festival of spiritual discovery the Equinox Festival exists to provide a cross cultural platform for the exhibition of creative and innovative approaches to transcendental thinking. By presenting, producing and commissioning an annual art and media festival focused on theoretical and practical approaches to new forms of spiritual self expression. Bringing together a diverse group of academic theorists, historians and authors with contemporary composers, filmmakers and artists to converge for 3 days of cross cultural lectures, performances and screenings. Offering an exciting look at the need for universal understanding and openness to new and historic approaches to perspectives on the experience of the beyond. Interest in the beyond, its influence and power over our lives, is growing. Many of the practices of traditional experimental spiritual discovery are being looked at by an increasingly informed society. Our perspective on the state of human conscious continues to increase in resolution as man moves forward in its spiritual evolution. The contemporary ardour that has driven man to seek a more individual path toward spiritual discovery has existed for as long as the written word. As society evolves intellectually it seeks a path that may provide some insight into the broader situation of mankind’s universal soul and a more individual approach to transcendental thinking. The Equinox Festival provides a broader base of exposure for the examination of diverse forms of spiritual expression and to support active cultural diversity in all its forms. By bridging the gap between traditional and contemporary models of spiritual discovery at the frontiers of human knowledge, presenting academic approaches to historic ideologies, and cutting edge new media research into modern forms of transcendentalism. Each night live ritual performances will take place, presenting a cultural model for the expression of spiritual discovery. Haitian vodoun performances, Indian sacred dance and Mevlevi sufi Whirling Dervishes open a night of live music with acclaimed experimental musicians, composers and collectives coupled with transcendental cinema screenings and performances. Art and the creative process as contemporary mystical experience.

Three days of Illumination. The Method of Science – The Aim of Religion

Raymond Salvatore Harmon

Director Equinox Festival

equinoxfestival.org

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

A new collaborative media performance presented by Pan:

September, 12 2008 – 8pm – London

On Insects: or Why Do Humans Exist?

A media collaboration with
Raymond Salvatore Harmon + Dave Phillips

with Mlhest, Lee Gamble, Mark Durgan

Divus Gallery Unit 30,
30 – 37 Cremer Street, London

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Raymond Salvatore Harmon is a cross genre media artist and
experimental filmmaker. He has collaborated extensively with a wide
range of of composers and musicians, including Wolfeyes, Magik Markers,
Exploding Star Orchestra, Rob Mazurek, Chicago Underground Trio, Alan
Licht, Spires that in the Sunset Rise, Blood on the Wall, among many
others.

“For Harmon, the visual density of the abstract imagery used will
enable the viewer to enter an almost hypnagogic, liminal state, and
become perceptually distant from the sense of the real. Once the
enveloping visual content has become the landscape of the mind to the
viewer, the subliminal content will have access to the subconscious
mind.” – Jack Sargeant

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Dave Phillips is a founding member of Fear of God,
Schimpfluch-Gruppe, OHNE, and dead peni. DP researches and ponders
existence, behaviours and value-systems, in a way that, most
unscientifically, could be termed humanimalistic, or intimate. Using
sound as main catalyst, his re/search is for improvement, raising
awareness, finding meaning, tuning senses, seeing the big picture, and
some form of release – a release that often is polemical and cathartic,
and one that opposes the omnipresent reduction of existence, that
desires to cast aside artificial arrangements and constraints.

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By Wes Unruh
(Note: This is the Appendix for He and Edward Wilson’s ‘Art of Memetics’ book)

Studying occult arts is dangerous only to those who have a vested interest in seeing you remain the same. There isn’t any such thing as supernatural – all things that occur happen within the realm of the natural. So the occultist’s task is puzzling out the secret knots by which this reality is bound – understanding both the mechanics of reality and the mechanism by which mind, unfettered, can untie these secret knots or bind up new ones.

The adaption of satanic imagery to magic is a relatively christian phenomena – but the supplication of a parishoner to a saintly or divine force is just as magical. Transubstantiation is socially acceptable cannibalistic theater and this kind of theophagy occurs in many different traditions. This is quite possibly the real reason that our culture has produced vampire and zombie archetypes, the symbolism of the blood of Christ has cast a shadow. Any ritual theater gives its shadow equal power, so these doctrines writ large on a society produce a corresponding harmonic negative manifestations can utilize.

I believe the soul you possess is determined by the path you walk, and to alter your course requires that you sacrifice who you are to who you can become, or it requires you to subsume yourself to some greater archetypal force and act as its avatar in the phenomenal world. The pragmatic approach is to engage with experience, then apply experience to signifying intent. If it can be used, then it can be understood. Knowledge, information, is a new ordering, or a reformation, of ignorance. Ignorance can be thought of as a formless void, a place of not-as-of-yet. When knowledge takes up space inside, the ignorance is re-arranged to be meaningful.

This formation is a physical reality, and takes place within the protein strands that make up the cell walls of neurological tissue. Cab drivers in London have been shown to manifest larger sections of their brain because they have to memorize such an impressive array of bewildering and contradictory information, then navigate through it. That which is known never becomes unknown, but it can become inaccessible. The brain being what it is, a crucifixtion of matter and energy upon which consciousness writhes, it can move along axis in time that are un or pre-physical. But how do you get there, and what do you do there once you’re there? Kundalini yoga promises to make the bio-energy field of a mortal some kind of super-conductor, and the easiest way to understand any of this is to look at Alex Gray’s Sacred Mirrors.

There are assumptions we make based on our previous experience, one of which is that 2+2 always equals 4. Another is that 2+2 immediately equals 4. A friend of mine (with a mental clarity I myself lack) pointed out that 2+2 is only 2 2′s until they’ve been rectified to 4 (or 10, or 11) through the passage of time. But 2+2 is equalling 4 on paper, and continues to do so over and over after it is written, wherever it is written, for each and every incident in which 2+2=4 is signified. Thus, the period, or time blip of 2+2 equalling 4, is happening in a concurrent abstract imaginal time which shadows our time stream, much in the way the electronic reality of telephones, telepresence, and the juggernaut meant by thee “world wide web” parallels our own malkuthian physicality. If this shadow time exists, and it is the place where math occurs, then it must also be the arena of bind runes and logograms. It is the sphere of logos, the eighth sphere of the ancient’s heaven.

Another friend of mine would argue that 2+2=4 (or 10, or 11) happens instantaneously, that a numberline is essentially one-dimensional space, and only in the most arcane religious sense could one expect some underlying parallel reality to exist where numbers play with each other. As a materialist, he’s convinced that if something occurs, it is in no way related to some abstract world of forms riding concurrent to our malkuthian realm, but instead comes about through some primary purpose, along with a host of secondary agents all quantifiable by physical measurings. 2+2 equals 4 because 2+2 always is 4, there is no prior point to 4 during which 2+2 is in the action of becoming 4.

To begin, time moves in periods. A period is a “place” of occurence. The period is what is initiated in a ritual setting, for the ceremonially minded. From opening to banishment is one period of time. It can help to understand ‘where’ imaginal time occurs before we progress, which brings us to the concept of the perfect world of forms – the idea being that there’s only One of any one group of like things, and that it isn’t there in the mundane world, only in the abstraction thought of when we reference a specific noun in conversation. This perfect form existed in Mind alone, where Mind is the perfect mind of all those thinking about that perfect form.

Imaginal time, or ‘shadow time’ as some writers have referenced, occurs in this perfect world of forms. It is through operations in imaginal time that new One things are created, other One things are comprehended, and even more important, some One things are cut away. Everyone has their own private time, their own private symbolic garden in which these One things are clustered, and careful preoccupations can direct the inner gardener to the imagos which to water, which to cut apart. But to engage in magic is to find the collective source from which mankind culls meaning, and directly applying sigilic techniques to the energy of the as-yet-unmanifest. Using certain substances has the effect of placing any random individual, prepared or not, into a place where they are effective magicians until that particular state of consciousness fades. However these states of consciousness are accessible through a number of techniques, and often what we think of as magical texts are instructions in achieving these states of consciousness through different methods.

There are demons who have become so through renaming of gods… thus Astarte becomes Ashtoreth, boshet (or shame) bestowed upon her by magicians (priests, not evil ones but levi ones) and the same happened to Baal become Beelzebub by adding zebub (or flies) to his name. Essentially, they dipped into the imaginal bubble where Baal meant lord, and garbled the code to make Baal unworshipful. Yeah, I know I’m playing with semantic fire here, but the cultural effect is now that by calling upon Ashtoreth you are communing with a decadent godform, a godform mutilated by opposing forces. You’d be better off trying to commune with Astarte – only she’s mostly gone, all her energies subsumed by Ashtoreth in the collective unconsciousness.

(click below to read the rest)

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