We discuss at length the origin, form, function, and intent behind the largest Wik your path to ADVENTURE on the internet.

We close with out-takes from the Blame Anonymous album that have until now not been heard.
 

DOWNLOAD

"We like our art dangerous. We want to be provoked, shocked, teased. We like our public art big, brash and spectacular. But, it turns out, no one told the artists that "dangerous" was a metaphorical term. When councils all over Britain called up sculptors and said "surprise us", they didn't mean "drop steel spikes from a great height".  

Water

A cold and wet feeling, darkness and thickness and motion, purifier rituals to cleanse, symbol of purification. Phlegm, liquid, apparent timorous types with a capacity to overwhelm and engulf. Waterborne diseases and the absence of sanitary domestic water are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Less than 1% of the world's fresh water (or about 0.007% of all water on earth) is readily accessible for direct human use. From the western point of the compass comes winter and cold, darkness, night and the colour black

The cup runneth over, Undines gain souls through union with men, who find control of breathing is lost. The flight of the eagle starts from the upper right point of the pentagram.

kkoagukkastt Aurum Nostrum 3.33 water mp3

About kkoagulaa

A convergence of creative paths crossed in the final days of Manes, pointing to the inevitability of the birth of kkoagulaa. The projects inception is an answer to the restrictions placed upon bands of any genre. When it comes to stretching out beyond genre considerations, kkoagulaa represents what happens when the walls between modes of expression are forgotten. Central visionary ccernn, began with gathering the kkoagulaa kkollektivv of likeminded creative people: eemersonn (Choronzon, Veil of Thorns) and vvindd (Atrox). The next layer to be added around the kkollektivv is the kkontributorr kkaball consisting of hatlen, hoemsnes (The 3rd and the Mortal), trstn (Chton).

The mission of kkoagulaa is to work in an expanded range of media and even to step outside conventions of what constitutes avant-garde art and music. The art of kkoagulaa is the embodiment of art called into question, and the answer. Brought into focus through a heaping of phases of history, kkoagulaa is the deconstruction of art and a distillation of the soul found at the creative center. As the canon of rock music and prevailing sub-genres crushes the possibility of revelation, and certainly any pretense of revolution, the ubiquitous elements of the medium are examined.

Emerging from a history of leading and defining genres and movements like Avant-Garde Metal, Post-Blackmetal, Psychedelic Industrial Blackmetal and Post-Rock, kkoagulaa has truly moved beyond genre, genre hybrids and the now common game of the mix-and-match patchnwork approach so often called progressive or avant-garde.

More kkoagulaa:

kkoagulaa Journal

last.fm

myspace

nrk/urørt

virb

The Gspot 45: Nemo and R6XX

It means that you have made an assumption that these words are leading somewhere, that they are not simply words spat out of a keyword generator.  You are assuming that there is some intention behind these words guiding them toward a revelation, a meaning to be imparted, a technique described, or recipe presented.  That's taking a lot on faith, that's making the assumption that I am both sober and sane enough to present a viable and actionable set of perspectives, beliefs, and anecdotes that can deepen your perception profitably with a scant few electrons and a few moments of your time.

Slapping a website together and getting people to it, let alone convincing them to read it, or engage with it, is a massive investment of time, energy, and emotional baggage.  A few hours perusing most personal web pages, blogs, journals, profiles, and videos reveal a maddening white-noise of self-indulgence, in many ways a vampiric or parasitic manifestation of data fungus, in the terminology of Steven Johnson.  Creating change, real vibrant spectral change on many layers of reality simultaneously, requires one hell of a set-up.  Sculpting existing data fungus while simultaneously initiating noise and vibrations around the semantic web that fungus has accreted around, now that's fucking magic.

See, I've already lost 80% of you who were drawn in by the title that were unable to click the more link and make it to this page...  likely the few who made the jump did so in part because you are thinking, at least preconsciously, WTF is this Zen Werewolf character rattling around in your head doing like that that he has acquired layers of voice through words on a screen...  and perhaps ever more gently the whispered question follows like a thread: what about the QR Code square that started this blog post?

To begin then, I ask You: What is a Word?

While you are thinking about that question, planning to state your opinion in the comment box below, let me hit you with a few unrelated thoughts.  First off, you are not an individual.  You are a component in a metabiological organism which seeks only to grow outward from its edges, at least up until the point where you begin identifying the contact points between you and the hive mind outside of physical constraints which is guiding every aspect of your development.

And it all began with the cruel mind-trap of literacy forced upon you by other sufferers early in your development.  The very fact that you are revivifying the internal dynamic I as writer experience in laying down these tarnished imperfections of constraint before you, that the entities firmly enshrined at the white-hot crux of thought and meaning can maintain their stranglehold on culture by having evolved alongside our species in the spaces in between flesh, indicates how diabolically enslaved we are to these watchers, these forces embedded at right angles to malkuthian space. 

In sigilization, and in bind runes, in veves, in iconographic declarations of purpose outside of language and with passionate focus, entire semantic signifiers can be built which impart knowledge alongside the violent, literary dominion of thought.  Perhaps the unmooring of  literacy evangelization protocols from the new mechanisms of history will follow, but for now we can come together in the shadow of the classifiers, the spime wranglers, the watchers, and use the very systems of technological control to communicate in other ways, to assign meaning and memory to icons that deepen the textual aspects of those icons, and in so doing to reroute thought, bypassing the suspect and controlling nature of dominator language structures and rely on the adaptive and intuitive nature of private symbolism and technologically generated machine code.

If you did not get that, then read very closely - WORDS are EATING your THOUGHTS.  Words are that which devour the pure thought and the letters on a page, the text, is the shit words streak out behind in their passage.  Words are no more thought than nails, hair, skin, and teeth are you.  These shapes that can carry content across gaps through optic radiation, these letters and statements and paragraphs, they're an action that need only be observed to be complete, and by littering an area with this potential act of meaning, and then filling that same area with observers equipped to complete that meaningful act, observers who then become the space acted upon, you have created a microcosmic psychodrama beyond the grammar of the mundane, and in so doing to touch and manifest the pure thoughts unclothed by words.

QR Code initially made me very excited, but the barriers to immediate interaction left me frustrated.  It is easy enough to generate QR Code for a URL or other bit of meaning, statement of intent, declaration, etc. with Kaywa but they do not provide support for my blackberry or my friends iPhones, which makes me wonder if they're even bothering to keep up. 

 Instead, I've found a lesser, yet accessible, barcode generator reader at ScanLife that uses what they call EZ Codes - however these codes do not retain information in themselves, they instead rely a mobile device to a url via a database ScanLife maintains.  Point your mobile phone at GetScanLife.com and you can photo a scanlife glyph and your phone immediately pulls up a url.  Applying a little ingenuity to this and a steady supply of stickers and you begin layering a space with anchors out into the virtual.

While there are problems with both QR Code and EZ Code, both of these represent technology developed primarily to catalog and observe, to regulate and restrict, and ultimately to replace human cognition with machine precision.  Faced with the tools and the implications, we must adapt for you and I, as mad as we all may be, are still here - and if we aren't using what comes to us through serendipity, through the contacts and networks we are emerging from, then we are little more than data fungus waiting to happen, a data footprint we manifest yet to which we remain oblivious.

I prefer ScanLife's EZ Code, even though it does not retain the core message, because it is easier to memorize the shapes - memory is not moored in grammar and word, it is instead tied to patterns, and the patterning of EZ Code is more visually apparent.  That said, these codes have a long way to go to be as accessible to the creative side of the brain in the same way a properly constructed sigil or sigilic web can convey data.  Currently I am incorporating both into a space designed specifically to open new doors into favorable places.

I invite all of you who have made it through this entire mind-trap riddled article to do the same, find inventive new ways to combine scanning technology, web-based content, and sigilic art to overlay a private or public space.  Monitor the interactions that take place in that new space over time, and watch for seepage of thought, the vibration of intention, to manifest.  Remember above, when I asked you what a word was? 

I'd love to hear your answers.  Me, I think a word is a parasite.  Comment now, and tell me what you think, and come back after you've done some work related to the above proposal/incoherent rant as well -- let me know your results.  This is experimental - I'm still finding out what happens.  Comparing notes speeds up growth!

Torrent of an MPG RIP of the DVD

Pilotlite "Press to Play" Version

Podcast version

Also: Greylodge podcaster Tracy Twyman http://greylodge.org/gpc/?cat=36 on Coast to Coast AM Sunday night. http://tracyrtwyman.com/blog/?p=419

Click here for more videos from Vote For Change

Thanks to James Elphick.

In this very special edition of The GSpot, Joseph Matheny talks to Raymond Salvatore Harmon about the special release of his movie, The Philosopher's Stone on Greylodge as a torrent to be followed by a "Press to Play" version being released on Altertube.tv and Pilotlite.com, and then a podcast edition to be released on Alterati, Greylodge and Pilotlite. Joe and Ray discuss art on the fringe, how Ray came to film making, the Chicago art scene, and why the economy means nothing to artists working on the fringes.

Subliminal Films present:The Philosopher's StoneDirected and produced by
Raymond Salvatore Harmon
featuring the music of Bogstarring Jacob Andrew Myers
introducing Isobel Julianna HarmonThe Philosopher's Stone tells the story of Jacob Fausstman, a scientist and early alchemist who searches for the key to curing man of the disease of death. In his frustration Jacob stumbles onto another path to achieve his goals. Turning to the dark arts Jacob conjures the demon Mephistopheles and is given the key to eternal life. But his perceptions of 'life eternal' and the nature of his existence comes into question once he has obtained his desire for true knowledge.

Base in equal parts on the Faustian archetype and the biographical story of Dr. Albert Hoffmann's accidental discovery of LSD, The Philosopher's Stone is an homage to early German Expressionist cinema and the psychedelic visualizations of drug culture.

Courtesy of Greylodge.org

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What critics have said about Harmon's work:

'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

“Accentuating the trio's vibrant performances with colorization, layered collages, dense textures and split-screen effects, Harmon becomes a virtual fourth member of the ensemble.”  - All About Jazz, on Chronicle

'The subdued flame-like flashes and sounds reinforce the feeling of quietly smoldering passion. Together, these elements come together to create a delicate composition which is abstract, yet full of feeling.'  - FilmThreat.com on Tiny Inconsistencies

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The Philosopher's Stone will be available (via bit torrent) for full download FREE Oct 31st 2008 at GREYLODGE.ORG, subliminalfilms.org, and streaming at:

www.philosophersstone.org

for more information please contact:

stone@subliminalfilms.org

or visit

greylodge.org
subliminalfilms.org
raymondharmon.com
philosophersstone.org

+++

A letter from the director;

In choosing to distribute this film I have decided to skip the theatrical presentation stage and go directly to sourcing the film via the bit torrent network. By giving the public full access to this film I hope to encourage other filmmakers to realize the potential of their audience by abandoning the outdated model of cinematic distribution in favor of an open relationship with the viewers themselves.

After years of struggle with the format of distribution cinema has found an ever evolving platform of distribution on the internet. Years of so called  'format wars', first between film gauges and then between dv formats, have ended in the wake of widening broadband access for the average person.

The ability for anyone to simple download and watch a film already exists, as does the ability for anyone to make a film and allow the world to experience it directly. The filmmaker has a wide range of encoding practices available that allow them to maximize video quality for each project's distribution on the web. As further technologies and better codecs are develop the filmmaker will be able to expand on the available sources for the cinematic presentation.

As much as the Philosopher's Stone visually represents a historic period in early 20th century cinema it looks forward to a future unfettered by lack of distribution and a platform for broadcast that gives everyone a chance to experience cinema to its fullest.

This film is meant as a mirror, reflecting what has been onto what will become.

Obviam lux Lucis

Raymond Salvatore Harmon
October 3rd - 2008

Download a PDF of the PR

Download Torrent of the movie: The Philosopher's Stone

Download the special GSpot interview with  Raymond Salvatore 

When I first heard of Esozone it was still just an idea and a desire. The idea was simply the event itself. The desire, for me, had more to do with the ephemeral community seeking to give birth to the event and in a sense to itself. A community I often find myself at odds with, but with which I am deeply in love. The great magic of Esozone 2007 was not that it happened at all, but that when it did happen the idea and the desire became inseparable. The manifestation of Esozone 2007 was the transfiguration of the transient into the transcendent and I am blessed to be able to say I was there when the word became flesh.

Esozone 2007 was a life changing event for me. Realistically I wouldn't even be writing for this site if it hadn't been for Esozone. I think there are some folks who felt irrevocably changed by Esozone 2008. I know there were, at the very least, people who had a time the likes of which they had never experienced before. So, while it's absolutely unfair for me to expect this year's Esozone to stack up to 2007, having been at both, I have to compare them. For me, in 2008 the idea and the desire were on wildly divergent paths and it came as no real surprise that there was a fair amount of turmoil, even predictions of catastrophic failure leading up to the event. Because the idea and the desire were so wildly divergent it is perhaps best for me to treat them separately in this review.

Despite an "edgier" venue with a more underground feeling the event itself was decidedly more polished and less fringe than 2007. A great many of the topics covered were crowd pleasers but were also well covered terrain; the eight circuit model, canonical futurist pablum, and well tread conspiracy theory for example. The speakers themselves were often another example of this trend. Speakers like Ben Mack and Antero Ali who I enjoyed speaking with when things were casual often irritated me (in the case of the former) or bored me (in the case of the latter) when they adopted their predictable stage personas.

There were also moments that were painful for me to watch; moments that came across as perverse attempts to steal last year's magick. Portions of the mass, as an example, that seemed in some way to be seeking a lineage with Dead Language, a lineage they had absolutely no claim to. The mass in many ways is a symbol of all the things I hated about Esozone 2008; from bad acting where I would have expected magicians to be inflamed in invocation, to a focus on completely unmoving lecturing intellectualism, and a seemingly out of place eulogizing of authors and artists halfway through. The latter requires a special bit of attention.

This portion and indeed the whole of Esozone once again showed a distinctive lack of women, something I found heartbreaking after some of the discussions and events that occurred in 2007. This section too was symptomatic of the tendencies toward a cult of personality and enshrinement of ego structures that hamstrings magick today. Many of the ideas these people had are good and useful ideas but they are also dead horses I'm tired of seeing beaten to fierce applause. Enough with the third generation Crowley and Leary clones. Enough with the artists. It is the art that matters.

Perhaps the most disheartening trend was the way the I saw the people and ideas that made the first Esozone possible pushed aside in favor safe bets. For me the standout example of this was watching Philip K Nixon and Ikipr (representing the multi dimensional open source art entity Man Machine Drum) pushed off stage for a local act. That act while clearly a tight outfit who had put a lot of work into what they do, was not doing anything I didn't see every Friday night in art school. In contrast, as anyone who has seen them can attest, Philip K Nixon and Ikipr are at the forefront of the exploration of the magical potential of soundscapes. Really that sums up a lot of what left me wanting at Esozone, a lot of very tight, very dedicated, but ultimately uninspiring and unmagical acts.

There were some great things too of course. Ikipr's EEG workshop was a stand out and luckily is available in full here. Many of the less structured conversation based workshops evolved into sometimes inspired round tables that caused me to fall in love with the community all over again. In the end that community was Esozone's saving grace. Despite all that was bad about the event, I had one of the best times of my life. I was afforded the chance to speak with magician artists whose work I have a profound respect for, like Lillizen. I met folks like Chris Titan, Brenden Simpson, and Duncan whose passion and irreverent probing made me realize that despite the backdrop I was around my kind; a feeling I'm not often afforded and so treasure when I find it.

Like a band whose first album made you fall in love with music, but whose sophomore release was only tolerable because of the ways it kind of reminded you of what they were capable of, Esozone stands at a significant point in its development. When 2009 rolls around Esozone will have to make a decision; push forward further into the fringe that made it stand out out as something special in 2007, or abandon its core audience for the glittering possibility of becoming a respectable money making occultnik happening. While I don't suggest that one choice will be better than another for those holding the egregore's reigns, I do know which I'm pulling for, and I am certain it cannot survive another year struggling with that choice.

Julia and I built the first Newcomen II many years ago. Whether that's many years in the future, or the past, or some other more sideways distance of time is anyone's guess; likely it's a bit of all them. A hyperdimensional machine is not built in a string of linear moments.  The pieces, by the very nature of the machine, must be spread out through various dimensional spaces, times, and places. When all the pieces are set in place the machine goes live. The bulk of the engine sits outside of time; only ever breaching our temporal universe when it is set into motion. To our flawed perception this can sometimes make it feel as though the machine had beem completed even before work had started on it.

Constructing the Newcomen II was not a very complex endeavor; in truth we've always disdained overly elaborate ritual, preferring instead the beautiful and brief explosions of intensity one finds in a perfect punk rock song, or a really good orgasm. Each piece of the Newcomen II was constructed through a series of simple but highly intense ritualized experiences. For the sake utility we will attempt to place the construction of each piece in a linear framework. In order to avoid the sort of gigantic text block that turns minds high on the internet to mush, we will be breaking this up into several pieces which will be posted over the next several weeks.

We encourage you to build each piece as the instructions are posted instead of waiting for the full text to be posted. Each step will be accompanied by personal accounts of our own construction process. This will hopefully illuminate the process as well as inspire would be hyperdimensional tinkerers. These recollections are not simply historical documents however. They are potent artifacts of the memories and experiences used to build the first Newcomen II. With this in mind, Cell 144 will take all the credit but none of the blame for any hyperdimensional shifting resulting from exposure to these documents.

The Assembly And Operation Of A Newcomen II Type Hyperdimensional  Engine

A Newcomen II is not strictly speaking a physical machine; unlike like your car you can't go buy parts for it. The machine's pieces are built from experience, memory, and a created narrative which binds them all together. This narrative is like nuts and bolts; while vitally important it is not the machine itself and should not be the most engaging part of the machine. For example, the narrative which will hold your engine together is this instruction manual. The machine you will eventually create exists because of what you're reading right now.

You can thank us later.

Step 1: Creating The Temporal Engineer

For those of you who have no experience with hyperdimensional engineering, certain aspects of this project will seem confusing no matter we try to simplify them. This is because, as a wise person once noted, the map is not the territory. Once you begin construction a degree of clarity otherwise unattainable will settle in. While it's entirely possible a future or past version of yourself is responsible for your decision to build this machine, it's still up to the you reading right now to do something that will pass for a beginning.

Tomorrow you will be someone else. Though you will remember the person you were when you read this document, that version of you will become increasingly unfamiliar as who you are right now becomes a story passed down through various temporal iterations of yourself. The Temporal Engineer breaks that cycle by creating a version of you so specific and so defined by function that you'll forget your first love before you forget The Temporal Engineer.

While drawing up the blueprints for the first Newcomen II Julia said to me, "The day we start we have to be like pieces of a machine, not like people." I understood exactly what she meant; I was like that when I was skating. I became an extension of the board. I did not have hopes or dreams in those moments because only the next line, the next trick mattered; in those moments I was not a person, I was an experience. Most people have secret places they go to cast off the detritus of the world and after a time emerge a new person. Those of you who have no such place will need to find one before you can continue. When Julia and I were building our machine, my secret place was an abandoned incinerator building in Framingham Massachusetts. (Julia’s note: I have decided not to make the details of my involvement in this part of the process public.)

Many nights had been passed in that building, usually drinking with friends, but being there alone always seemed to make it an entirely different place. I spent the week leading up to the project start date sleeping there. Every daylight hour was spent in an altered state of consciousness, turning myself into a piece of machinery. (Julia’s notation: There is no proscribed length for this stage of the process.)  Each night I laid out my blanket and rolled my clothes up into a makeshift pillow. That summer had been brutal and those nights were no exception. Sleeping completely naked was the only thing that made the hot, still air in that place bearable enough to lose consciousness. Laying in the darkness I would imagine myself standing on my skateboard before a park of endless possibilities, and struggle to push away any other thoughts until at last sleep overtook me.

The appointed day broke like lightning; a flash of consciousness, and a sense of alertness that had not had to wind its way through the labyrinthine corridors of dream. A brassy light filtered through broken windows casting shadow sigils across my pale skin. I looked around at the hollowed out building for the first time consciously understanding how perfect it was that I had chosen an incinerator building as the place I went to rise from my own ashes. I was sticky with summer by the time I finished dressing and collecting my things but the juju of that place, conjured by my own memories of it, energized me with a sense of purpose normally unknown on days ruled by summer sun and black asphalt. I was no longer a man with a past or a future; I was simply the man who builds the machine.

(Next up, Step Two: Creating The Temporal Anchor, likely to be posted once I’ve recovered from esoZone)

The Lords of Bakersfield. Until recently, it was a little remembered local legend, of interest mostly to conspiracy theorists. But in the aftermath of Stephen Tauzer’s Sept. 13 murder and the subsequent arrest of his former colleague, Chris Hillis, the legend has resurfaced. Some of the facts of the Tauzer case appear similar to aspects of the Lords legend, which goes like this: For more than a generation, Bakersfield was run by a cadre of men who led double lives. To the public these men were members of the community’s most visible institutions, its justice system and the media. But in truth, according to Lords lore, these men — a sprinkling of county executives, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, even the newspaper’s publisher — were part of a loose-knit, secretive network.

Joseph Matheny talks to author Nick Belardes, in this second part of a recent interview. They discuss the legend of the Lords of Bakersfield and Nicks novel about the subject, The Lords: Part One. Also, music by Bakersfield bands Lost Ocean and The In Denials.

Gspot 41

Guaranteed to be an overview of the pack of lies which constitutes much contemporary art, Jon Purnell has selected 15 video and performance artists to play with our perception.

All day screening and monitor presentations: 13 – 21 September, Wed – Sun, 11am – 6pm (Saturdays 12 – 6pm).

SPECIAL LAUNCH EVENT WITH PERFORMANCES: 13 September from 3 – 6pm. Contributing artists: Antoine Catala, Erica Scourti, Alex Staiger, Beagles and Ramsay, Adam Fearon, Jason Dee, Jonathan Trayner, Calum F. Kerr, Jim Hollands, Cack-U-Like, Simon Reuben White, Karen Russo, Dave Ball, Mark Brogan, Rose Eken.

Cafe Gallery
By the lake, Centre of Southwark Park, London SE16 2UA. Tel: +44 (0)20 72371230. click here for map http://www.cafegalleryprojects.com/html/Location.htm