HAPTIC-HYMNS TO VOTIVE-FLUX (2022) Ceremonial Armour, Audio Electronics, Case, Found Objects.
Commissioned by Elizabeth Tomos and Cavan McLaughlin. Presented live at the 2022 Trans-States Esoteric Arts Conference, UK and as documentation at the Astro Magia International Astral Magic Conference curated by JD Kelley.
This non-denominational, devotional ritual unfolds via improvisation atop a retrofitted rectangular flight case, splayed open as a book. One side divided between a light box, topped with a sheet of opaque white perspex – as a frozen pool of glowing milk, that shifts through spectrums of colour, alongside a twinned rectangle of black perspex – as the protean oil of unremembered flora and fauna. Secreted contact microphones amplify the arrival of combinations of objects arranged on these surfaces. The other side of the flight case houses a pedal-board of audio electronics, alongside a cornucopia of chromatic objects, whose individuality processionally arrives to populate the brief collectivity of the arrangements displayed.
This ritual performance is a möbius unfoldment, that persists through a dismembering and remembering of non-human fetishes, as transient artefacts of ambiguous presence. Briefly enthroned and engodded through haptic-hymns to votive-flux. Each object exists in entwined and dislocated relationship to the esoteric technē of the body that moves them, and the hands that orchestrate their agency as alchemical apparatus. The delicacy and aesthetic pragmatism of refined ceremonial formality, enunciates the intuitive choreography of their arrangements.
The performance invokes the transient magician whose arrival briefly punctuates the normality of locality with luminous moments of non-understanding, through obfuscation and revelation alike. Each object at once invokes referents, collective and individual, that mirror the prismatic particularity of each audience member's. idiosyncratic cognition’s, search for and generation of meaning and its absence.
A psalm to the numinous non-human eroticism of being, to give voice to the mouthless things, was voiced over and under, through the improvised intonation of mantric glossolalia, prose and poetry.
