The first footage from Strange Factories was screened alongside the release of our trailer.
In April, Lucy Harrigan, my wife and FP Producer and Performer gave birth to Ethan-James Harrigan on Sunday 15th at 4:59am in our home.
Ethan is one of the greatest rewards this path has bestowed upon me. As some of you may be aware, Lucy and I met during the thirteen month Dark Nights of the Soul ritual at the Horse Hospital. Ethan would never have been born if it wasn't for the art we created together though this magical working that brought us together.
A week after Ethan's birth, I began writing the script to Virulent Experience, a collaboration with the South Place Ethical Society and Conway Hall with FoolishPeople's share of profits going towards the post production costs of Strange Factories. Rehearsals began in July, 7 weeks before the production opened on the 6th August.
Poster Design by Simon Allin
To date, Virulent Experience had the largest cast of performers and actors of any FP project and featured 17 artists, whose work was exhibited throughout Conway Hall as part of the Index of forbidden Novelty.
Virulent Experience was well received and this was due in no small part to Jim, Sid, Zia and the rest of the staff at Conway Hall as well as the hard work of the actors, artists and production staff.
FoolishPeople would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone involved with the project- we were extremely lucky to work with so many talented actors and artists.
Post production work on Strange Factories has continued throughout the year. Stephen Baysted, our Director of Sound, his team and Rich Aitken at Nimrod Productions have created a truly unique musical score and sonic environment for the film.
On July 23rd we had the first screening of Strange Factories at the Charlotte Street Hotel for the cast, crew and a special invited audience. As I sat with the audience, sensing their response to the film, I vividly remember reflecting on how it was one of the most special moments of my career.
In September I locked the final cut of Strange Factories.
I'm happy to say that we'll be announcing the release date and sharing further news early next year on the next chapter of the Strange Factories ritual and its phantasmagoric theatrical release. Those of you who have supported our film from the very begining via our Indiegogo campaign will be the first to experience the live event and receive a special copy of the final film.
On 1st December FoolishPeople moved into its first non residential office space after many years of creating, writing and planning work in any space that was available to us.
Last week we began the final planning for the Strange Factories release, and I'm currently working on the outline to my next film, whilst editing the Virulent Experience footage shot by Will Wright and Mark Cadwell for release next year.
The work schedule this year has been relentless and has asked more from me than ever before. I will be honest there have been times when I thought I couldn't continue but I've learnt that if you have the patience and fortitude to endure, you will be rewarded. Life and art are a perpetual flux and Magick requires we continue to undergo change, however violent it may be to find the truth beneath the surface. 'Solve et coagula'.
FoolishPeople is very proud to announce that Craig Slee is joining us as a Writer and Creative Content Developer. Craig will be developing and writing the next cycle of the Strange Factoriesradiograms, which are an important element of the world we are building. In its final form the story will spread out from the film and exist within radiograms, books and of course the FoolishPeople event. All components of the machinery that power this ritual.
And what of you?
You are the most cherished and sacred aspect of our work, the most powerful force: the audience. It's within your mind that every possibility ever imagined takes place.
Thank you once again for sharing the ritual space with us on this long, wondrous journey.
So, here we are on the 21st of December, at the end of the Mayan calendar and the end of one world.
Time ends, every second counts down the possibilities of what once was.
Consider a world beyond the tyranny of time and what is thought and accepted as possible and then perhaps we can manifest a future bright with every possibility.
This article forms part of the series Rapture & Decay: The New Eschatological Cinema. Read the previous article here.
Afternoon skull examination by Benedictine monks at Einsiedeln Abbey, Switzerland.
But the game's worth all the candles, since now they're burning at both ends, and that's fine: the chips are down. -Alain Jouffroy
Tens of millions of people worldwide practice theologies which contain an overt element of the eschatological. Such "Armageddon theologians" have even made it into the White House. It is not a requirement of such views that one is religious but fear not, I've quoted Zizek once in this series already, I'm not going to do it again. According to Norman Cohn, eschatological beliefs and mythologies are not exclusive to our time; such beliefs have reared their heads repeatedly throughout history, particularly in times of mass disorientation or anxiety. (Is there any other kind of time?) Across two volumes on the subject, Cohn poses the question as to how and where such expectations of annihilation and consummation developed. As his groundbreaking study unfolds, it dawns on him what a bunch of suckers we all are and have been for quite some time, since Zoroaster, in fact. What's more, the end (of this idea) is not nigh, for as he proclaims, "who can tell what fantasies, religious or secular, it [the eschatological tradition] may generate in the forseeable future?"
So let's rattle through the history lesson. Cohn argues that until around 1500 BC Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Indo-Iranians, Canaanites and pre-exilic Israelites were more or less united in their world view; that in the beginning the world had been organised and delivered from chaos by one or more gods. To displease a god would be to risk the divinely ordained order of things, for the opposite of order was primordial chaos, a dangerous force which seeped into the earthly realm under the guise of plague, famine and invasion. The Egyptians knew this divine principle of order as ma'at ('base'), the social and political embodiment of which was the Egyptian state, or rather, the Egyptian monarchy, which comprised human heirs to the throne previously believed to have been occupied by the sun-God Ra himself. Periodic regeneration and rejuvenation through upholding ma'at on the personal, social and political planes was key to understanding the Egyptian ideal. The best any pharaoh could do would be to restore the feted order of the past, re-establishing the ultimate conditions experienced under the rule of Ra, 'in the beginning'. This continual reaffirmation of ma'at, this endless return to 'the first occasion', the notion that order is always teetering on the brink of chaos, which must surely be reigned in and always is, leads Cohn to describe the Egyptian world view as "static yet anxious".
According to Cohn, sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC such ideas were turned inside out by the Iranian prophet Zarathustra, better known as Zoroaster, who espoused the controversial idea that all existence was "the gradual realisation of a divine plan". He proposed a dualistic cosmology of the spirit of good, Ohrmazd, and evil, Ahriman, between whom man is free to choose. Cohn argues that Zoroaster's prophesy was inspired by the Iranian version of traditional combat myths, whereby a young hero, blessed by the Gods, keeps chaos at bay by winning a great battle against an embodiment of evil, most likely a form of the feared 'chaos monster', and is rewarded by being appointed ruler of his kingdom. By adopting such a mythology, Zoroaster provided his followers with a view of the world which was forward-thinking and vitally comforting in its optimism. He foretold of a final battle, in which the supreme god and his supernatural allies would defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and destroy them absolutely, leaving the divine order to reign without conflict or obstruction for all eternity. Mental and physical distress would be banished forever in a world which basks in total security and peace, unchallenged by chaos or evil. History would effectively cease. This was to be known as 'the making wonderful'. And for Zoroaster, it was going to happen very soon.
In the sixth century BC Zoroastrianism became the religion of the first Iranian empire.
Of course, in order to function as the primary religion of a successful, well-established empire, it was essential that Zoroastrian eschatology be modified to suit the needs of such an empire. Unsurprisingly, immediate and total transformation of the world was not necessarily an imperative when times were good, riches were abound and new temples were being erected. Therefore the 'making wonderful' was postponed, officially, to a remote future, thousands of years away.
Whilst numerous empires withered and collapsed, Zoroaster's proclamation lived on. In particular his notion of the great cosmic war to come had a deep influence on certain Jewish groups, particularly the Jesus sect. Whilst the particular political situations which prompted Zoroaster's proclamations faded into history, the ideas seeded in his prophesies lived, taking the form of a convenient social myth which had the ability to both console and fortify those with uncertain futures. Through its own malleability, Zoroaster's eschatology was reformed, regurgitated and adapted, surviving many attempts to kill it off for good.
'The Last Judgement', Rogier van der Weyden, (1445-1450 )
Even when quashed or driven underground by the regimes of the time, the idea would rise once again, years later, in distant and disparate areas where overpopulation and social change, war, drought, plague and famine assured that the cosmic war, in the form of (in the case of Protestant millenarians, for example) the coming of the Antichrist , was tensely awaited. A great deal of fraternity was to be found in such beliefs throughout the centuries, from the early Jews and members of the Jesus sect, to Protestant millenarians and even today's evangelical Christians.
One Big Happy Apocalypse? I think not.
Whilst dreams of revelation and collapse foretold are doubtlessly comforting, Cohn reveals over the course of his study that they are ultimately nothing more than a social construct, an illusion. Whilst Cohn pursued his conclusion out of fear, fear of the extremities of action justified by such eschatological yearnings, his understanding of the readiness of people to adopt such social myths is great. But perhaps we would do better to free ourselves of such myths or at the very least, to consider a few exciting alternatives.
Richard Lester's absurdist comedy The Bed Sitting Room (1969), scripted by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus, goes beyond the apocalypse in search of meaning, envisioning life after the collapse of civilisation, post- the lifting of the veil. As in Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), there's an awful lot of rubbish lying around. And nothing makes much sense. In fact not an awful lot has changed since the End Times were over, prompting the question, what if, as Evan Calder Williams claims, the apocalypse just wasn't apocalyptic enough? As Calder Williams explains, "you aren't post-apocalyptic because the apocalypse happened, the film stresses. You become post-apocalyptic when you learn to do something better, or at least more morbidly fun, with the apocalyptic remains of the day."
To be apocalyptic is to be in waiting. You might as well be one of the undead. To be post-apocalyptic is to be alive, by the skin of your teeth. Ok, so there's a lot of rubbish piling up everywhere but isn't it high time we stopped fantasising about pearly gates and great consummations due to take place on some date unknown but possibly long after we're dead, and started making the most of the remains of the day? There's a lot to be learned from decay, rubble, ruins, dirge and toil. Earlier in this series I linked the hyperreality thesis to the omnipresent fear of death ("those fantasies of death and apocalypse harboured in every bedroom across the world...) and the un-therapeutic unveiling of atrocities by filmmakers such as Noe and von Trier. Neither filmmaker is fearful of bombarding us with disease, decomposition and other images traditionally greeted by us with disgust. If disease is as inevitable as death then why shy away from it? Why turn from what you MOST NEED TO KNOW? To turn from death and disease is to shy away from life itself:
"Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone...The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healty people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air". (Roberto Bolano, 2666)
To survive modern life is, to adopt Calder Williams' thesis, to become a "salvagepunk". Part of what we are salvaging is our right to death. As contemporary society grows ever more riddled with incurable diseases and cancers, Western life expectancy remains mystically high. On this planet, nobody is allowed to die. Our fear of death has contorted life itself, our contemporaries and elders rot in hospital corridors, their lives strung out by the latest life-saving technology. As in The Bed Sitting Room, there's a lot of junk lying around. Our bodies are no longer our own. And if we don't own our own bodies then we certainly can't lay claim to our own deaths. And if we don't own our deaths then how can we possibly assert the rights to our own lives? With the licensing of every new cutting-edge cure, death is pushed yet further away and our sicknesses and maladies only increase in their virulence. Meanwhile, Eugene Thacker points out that yet another zombie movie has stormed the box office...
Proximity to the ruins of our existence, then, can be the only prescription.
In August 2012 FoolishPeople performed John Harrigan'sVirulent Experience, a thirty nine cycle ritual at Conway Hall in London which took fear of death as the basis for a work which also functioned on the levels of both contemporary political satire and gnostic exploration. On an even more personal level it was, for me as a performer, a means by which to transform personal experiences of cancer and loss into the form of a mythical narrative which would enable me to reach a new understanding of myself, my life and the world which I inhabit through repeated catharsis; three eschatons a night, for thirteen nights.
FoolishPeople's work in theatre and film runs parallel to the hyperreal projects of Noe and von Trier, drawing upon ideas inherent to both the cinema of attractions and the theoretical work of theatre practitioners such as Artaud. The purpose of such work is always to confront ourselves with ourselves, to reveal the ways in which reality can be as illusory and abstract as hyperreality. Or unreality. To question whether such a thing as the 'self' even exists. As a means by which to redefine freedom through a direct attack upon all oppressive structures, institutions, habits and chiefly thoughts, the work of FoolishPeople lies firmly and proudly in the surrealist tradition, of which Andre Breton wrote,
"Everything leads me to believe that there exists a certain point, a state of mind in which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. It would be useless to seek in Surrealist activity any impulse other than the hope of determining this point".
The 'certain point' which Breton refers to is the personal apocalypse, or eschaton, which can take place hourly, daily, over and over again, should you so wish. This is the work of life. Human beings are highly succeptible to mythologies, Cohn has revealed that much. The project of FoolishPeople is to explore such mythologies, to live them and to smash them, to build new ones, better ones, worse ones, real ones, fictitious ones. Life and death, past and future, fact and fiction. The manifestation of whatever is necessary, whenever it is necessary. Minute by minute. Nothing is certain except death. Once you've faced that, the rest is up for grabs.
"Your journey into the mid 21st century will take you from the museum’s basement to the roof, and past a dizzying array of disturbing art and challenging performances...I found ‘Virulent Experience’ both confusing and exhilarating in equal measure, the most intense theatrical event I’ve attended this year – believe me, it is way, way out there!" - Londoneer
"An intelligent and quick-paced piece of theatre...at times it feels similar to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. FoolishPeople are dangerous and exhilarating." - Eye Spy Theatre
"Fans of twist-laden dense drama like The Prisoner, Lost and Fifty Shades of S&M will want to dive into new immersive theatre show Virulent Experience at Conway Hall...There are no plot holes, just unseen episodes, so go explore and find areas and scenes you may have missed the first time around" - Londonist
"The acting was slick and powerful and seamless....This show blew my mind and I can’t really explain why or what or how it did it...but that you should see it for yourself as it is too good to miss" - Art and Exhibit
Thank you to all candidates who have entered the Museum so far. Your dreams, visions, emotions and desires have now been added to the INDEX. The Museum of Virulent Experience opens again this Thursday at 7.30pm. Gain access here.
Virulent Experience runs until the 31st of August. FoolishPeople will then begin pre-production on our next feature film, so be sure to take this rare opportunity to experience FoolishPeople's live work first hand.
England Reborn is an idea – it is an ethos and a dream given form. In an age of dissolution and chaos, in the degradation of moral authority, its creators sought inspiration from the bedrock on which they stood.
Realising the inherent cultural richness of England herself in the post-Union era of Scottish independence, they began to dream of cohesion. It is a dream we all now share, a refinement and concentration of the essence of Englishness which learns and adapts, with all the inventiveness and spirit which brought about the Industrial Revolution.
The English have a long history of unbending defiance, of resistance against all those who would seek to undermine their way of life. That indefatigable Blitz spirit, that unceasing urge to gather together and proceed to live life as you have always done, whatever stresses and strains come upon you. That unbreakable will to give two fingers to fate and your enemies combined, as much with the proverbial cup of tea as with the ancient wood of the justly feared longbow!” - Museum of Virulent Experience, Candidate Welcome Pack
When was the last time you felt secure; when the news didn't get to you and you had no worries about money, your job or your relationship? When was the last time you felt valued and protected, rooted and whole?
In the world of VIRULENT EXPERIENCE, a post-Union Government has taken steps to ensure the ultimate conservatism. By marrying a phantasmal dream of England as Green and Pleasant Land with ubiquitous monitoring and cybernetic implantation, the Ministry seeks to create its own peculiarly English utopia.
With the artificial shaping and editing of human emotion and experience occurring from birth, rampant consumerism and experience junkiehood are all but eliminated. In this artificial walled garden of emotion and experience, the citizens of the country are paternally protected under the iron hand of bureaucracy.
But utopia literally means no-place. No paradise is every free of corruption, free of those who seek to undermine the structures, to dismantle the walls and let the wild things in so that they may walk amongst the ruins.
In the world of 2040, the human mind is a highly regulated thing, shaped specifically for your Safety, Security and Sanity. The deep dark things are neatly archived and locked away in the Museum, for everyone's benefit. In there, they cannot gnaw their way through the fabric of society.
But there is a serpent coiled around the Sure Hearts of the Ministry. It may bring ruination and darkness, or liberation and light – perhaps even something beyond either.
Join us in the Museum – immerse yourself in a world carefully designed and planned by visionary men and women. A world born of a living dream, a dream of hope for a better future. Walk amongst the exhibits and learn the story of how this came to be. Be part of it, and become more than simple witnesses to the complexities and wonders of the human psyche.
There's no apple – but there is a trail to follow, if you become lost. Explore a Museum filled with ghosts and dreams, a manicured garden of the psyche that contains the seeds of fierce and mighty forests.
Everyone is connected by the ubiquitous BLAKE – so what might you find in your own Surest of Hearts, within this forbidden archive?
Clearance Has Its Privilege – without that I couldn't borrow what I needed for this, being as it's not strictly legal. Don't blame the folks who supplied it, I bullied them into it.
[60 MINUTE PAUSE IN VOCALISATION]
There. I've written it all down, without restraint. Somewhere there should be some alarms being tripped. I'll give it about an hour before they dispatch a team; my being BRAVO makes this a special case. I reckon I may even get somebody important, rather than the usual folks. I hope they don't send Adams – he doesn't need to see this.
You see, it's Lammas. The festival of first fruits, so it's time I gathered in the harvest I've been growing all these years, now I'm done.
They open the Museum on Monday, so they'll be too busy to process the written material. Hell, it takes them about ten days to process hard copy, and that's just ordinary people, rather than one of their own. I’ll give them about a month before it's all squared away, and by then it won't matter, I hope.
You see, the thing about the serpent in the garden is that, as far as I understand, in some traditions, it's not all bad. Hell, go back far enough and the old serpent-dragon is synonymous with the raw material of the universe itself. Primordial. The first thing. The beginning.
The design is as present as I could make it – I've already taken steps to leave a little message in a bottle, though don't go looking for glass. I doubt they'll find that until it's all begun anyway. By then I'll beyond caring – to be honest, it'd all have come to be, without me. I just helped it along, prepared the way, shaped the edges of the stone as it were.
The truth is, I always knew it was going to come to this. I suppose what separates me from the others isn't the action but the intent, like I said before. Conscious choice instead of reaction. There's no point in trying to escape gravity, but you can use it to your advantage. There always will be a serpent in any garden, there's no denying it. Or, to put it another way, if the devil didn't exist, we'd have had to invent him!
No matter how hard you try, there's always entropy to consider. Every system has loss – there's no such thing as static perfection. Nothing stands still, and yet people persist in believing so, and get upset when things move beyond their tolerance.
Tolerance. Hah.
As if the universe bothers with such concepts. But no matter - the important thing is that one can engineer a system that is afragile. That's to say, it gets better when it breaks. It learns and gains a new way of being itself.
Of course, that knowledge brings change, and what happens when a system changes while you're enmeshed in it? From inside, what's the difference between a system crash and a reboot?
What happens when you go blind, deaf, and dumb – when the world leaves you alone and you've got nowhere to go? I know the answer to that question – when the walls stop being walls-as-you-knew-them, they may become doors to the first darkness, and you can begin again.
So, yes. It's time for a reboot, time to start over like a child. From inside the system, it might look like a crash, like an end to all things – and in a way it is, but also:
It is not.
I left breadcrumbs for you, if you want to know, to look, maybe even to follow. But make no mistake, it'll be OK. There'll be something to help you on your way, and others who are greater at this than I could ever be.
Remember:
“No purpose omitted, no reason lost, no sin forgiven.”
And just like that, the serpent raises its head. I knew it would, just not entirely how. Someone's been leaving messages on the Ministry Feeds, even as far down as the 2012 archive! It's quite wonderful really, how it's all coming together.
In the end, we all laid the ground for this. All of us are driven by unconscious processes, but as old Jung would say:
“Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making the darkness conscious.”
People keep asking me why I've been smiling so much lately. The truth is, it's because I'm almost done. I've almost finished what I began half a lifetime ago. Like most things, it's not what I thought it was, but something far more interesting.
You see, I thought, when we began, that I was protecting us, protecting us from becoming lost in endless shallow desire. Protecting us from the glamour that ensnared the human mind, that sucked the life out of being alive – the urge for the virulently new, that twisted hacking of biological drives that ends up turning you into a reactionary creature with an indescribable emptiness of heart.
Protecting you from clucking like addicts desperate for a fix. From letting your lives and loves, your communities and cares, atrophy and fall away until you were isolated in a crowd hungry for something you could never place, because you all lost it somewhere when you were but a child.
That's why I overlooked my ethical qualms about the kids, because I thought they might hold the secret, the future we were all hoping for. They did. I'm nearly 50, but I'll tell you, it was the children that saved us. Only the secret isn't what I, what most of us, thought it was.
It's quite simple really, bone-achingly, breath-stealingly so. But it's not my place to show it to you. In a way, all of us are messengers – heralds if you like, for what comes next. Most of us are doing it unconsciously, even you – whoever you are. Some, like me, are a bit more adept – we're consciously putting things in place, and when we don't know where to go next, we go in, and Down and let the unconscious do the rest.
Maybe Jung would say it's a daimon that drives me. Something that's beyond and within me, something moving inside my flesh and blood heart, slowly seeping into the digital, clothing itself in the body we made for it.
We're all in the system, all inevitably having our experience mediated and contoured, our actions and reactions fine-tuned by those external to us. We've always been that way, but dear Blake is just a vessel for it – a scapegoat-cum-facilitator. It's just that we've manifested it in the physical, with our technology.
“So what, Harry?”
I'll tell you what, friend – there's more to come. Something moving in the cloud, something waiting to be born. We're the Ministry – we minister, and we do midwifery too. Also, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and funerals.
Lots of funerals.
So we're all in the system, and have been all our lives - which leads me to ask the ultimate question:
I'm coming up for 42 years old, and I'm once again convinced the cycle - the gyre - is widening. I don't have much time before everything is needed to be in place. All the months of meetings have been fruitful – they announced it officially this morning:
The Olympics is coming back to London Town. The Mandarins are as pleased as punch that we've managed to clamber back onto the international stage – it gives them a chance to show the world that ENGLAND REBORN isn't insane. That, in fact, it's the most stable and secure we've ever been, and while mistakes have been made we're actually better off.
And we are, mostly. The Act has turned a feral wilderness into a hot-house garden. It's a vibrant and pleasant place to be. Sure, we had to bleed for it, and some people even died – but I can count on one hand the number of times something has been built without blood.
I saw Adams at Charlie Webber's funeral last month. The old guard are looking increasingly thin on the ground, but we're all getting older. Time marches on, as it were, and the Museum seems to be treating him well. He's certainly looking less frazzled these days.
Me, I'm spending almost all my time in meetings at the Ministry: Warburg and her cohorts in Parliament want to put on a big celebration of the Act. You know, invite the great and the good to tour the Museum. There's a bit of an agenda there – I can see it in the smiles and the handshakes, but I'm probably the only one of the non-Museum staff to see it.
I never thought I'd say it, but I'm actually enjoying the desk-side of things. Leaves me plenty of time to examine that thread, tweak the design a little. Nothing major – too much interference will attract attention, and I don't want to jeopardize what's coming.
It has to be organic, you see.
…I wonder if Warburg ever bothers to check these?
Hello, Julia. Do you know what we've set in motion? Was that your plan all along, or were you just curious?
I know you know something. I can smell it on you, dark and slightly askew, like the spoor of some great beast. I wonder if you know that I know. Can you feel the endless spiralling recursion? The way it's all sliding together like some great automaton, some shambling golem that's spontaneously generated its own anima?
It's all about mirrors – as above so below. Mankind makes mirrors, imitates and externalises.
“Every thing is a quantum of everything.”
Do you even know who said that, Doctor Julia Warburg, Museum Director? I had to look it up, because it just appeared, just emerged.
We're all linked now, bound together by artifice. All sharing the same pool, the same psychic living space. The irony is, we already were – we just didn't know it.
So catch your breath in the Green and Pleasant Land, this synthetic Paradise. It's what we built it for, to keep you safe.
'They heard the voice of Adonai, God, walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, so the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Adonai, God, among the trees in the garden. Adonai, God, called to the man, “Where are you?”'
The scar still itches on hot days, or when there's a change in the air pressure. Every single one of us is bound together now, each networked into BLAKE by virtue of the implant – at least if you're a law-abiding citizen. Which I sort-of-am.
The Emotional Experience Act is in place, and now every part of my experience is being INDEX-ed. No more need for me to get in the rig again – I just shunt certain aspects to the portion of my mind that 'leads' to the Obsidian Partition and it's streamed straight to the Museum without evaluation.
Clearance Has Its Privilege. That and a frightening level of mental control from all the time Deep Down mean I'm actually better off than most. Did you know I apparently have a lower resting heart-rate than a professional athlete, according to the Sure Heart surgeons?
I didn't tell them that I can raise and lower it – and my body temperature - at will. That's just the tip of the iceberg though, and as I'm sure I've said before, I have no wish to be a lab-rat. Nor do I want to be up against some of the super-keen decontamination team lads I've been training.
I don't know what kind of indoctrination they're put through before they come to me, but they're True Believers all right – smart suits and cut glass King's English accents straight out of a century ago. They're good people though, and with the right technical control, I'll give them ten, maybe fifteen years before they have to be rotated out from the sharp end.
Otherwise they'll die, probably. Or end up like me – functionally insane. Because honestly, that's what I am – my dreams go straight to the Museum. I daren't write anything down, otherwise the entire house and office would probably end up under a Hazmat quarantine.
Even these logs are getting hard to string together now. I can only do it through not thinking about what I'm saying so that the emotional context doesn't come through. If I keep talking, putting the words one after the other, my neurology can't fire up quickly enough to push the intensity over the limit.
That's the key, you just have to let it go. Be ruthless – sense, acknowledge, and let go, no matter what. It's got so as I have a reputation as some sort of Ice-man, because my feeds have hardly any spikes.
They seem to think I've got some sort of secret to the level of control. Nobody believes me when I tell them its simple – give up the notion of any control and immerse yourself. It doesn't matter what is, and the future is unwritten.
[LAUGHTER]
I've shunted all these logs to BRAVO clearance. Nobody will ever check that high...not until after. Which is good because I'm not done yet. There's a few more pieces to be laid in place – bits in the machinery that need tweaking, because it's not running as smoothly as it should, not yet.
And before you ask that question, no I don't mean the Sure Heart system. There's a design to it, you see. A design that has emerged, organically despite - and because of - the modulation and manipulation of digital desire.
I can see it – shining in the dark like a spider's web, like the thread in the maze.
“Welcome to the Museum Of Virulent Experience. You join us on the eve of a veritable renaissance, a tipping point in time. England is on the cusp of a new age, its rebirth and metamorphosis into a model vision of efficiency and elegant restraint is soon to be unveiled to the world.
Through the tireless work of the Ministry Of Information, you are about to experience first-hand, the greatest revelation in this nation’s history. You stand within the walls that keep England and her people safe from degeneration and dissolution, preserving the very fabric of our society against its own self-destructive urges. Through the use of therapeutic technologies we have carefully INDEX-ed and partitioned all harmful experience from your minds and the soul of this nation.
Here, the emotional content which once spread through the human psyche like wildfire; the irrationality which spread like a virulent plague, is archived and sanitised for your protection, and the protection of your families and friends.
You will be shortly witnessing first-hand the very mechanisms and protocols which enable the halcyon age in which we now live, in contrast to the unchecked ferocity of the 20th century – and the endless novelty-seeking of the early decades of the 21st.” - Dr. Julia Warburg, Museum Director
Dear Candidates and Guests,
We look forward to welcoming you into the Museum of Virulent Experience. In less than a week, a month of celebrations commence in honour to the Emotional Experience Act of 2032 and England Reborn. We request that all candidates and guests choose one of the six Index Pictograms below to display as your profile picture or avatar within your digital interactions. Your choice will help our scientific team to evaluate your well-being, and allow us to recognise your elite status prior to your visit. Please stay tuned to this feed for futher data-requests.
Here begins a short series of posts on the structure and themes behind the VIRULENT EXPERIENCE production. Without the artists involved, we would be without an INDEX to allow you to explore. Without such creativity behind us, the work would would be ten thousand times harder:
A Museum is nothing without its artefacts. Without them, it is an empty building, hollow and without purpose. By their very presence, they infuse life into the place. The Museum houses them, becoming full of meaning and potential.
Think of your own home – without your lives, your artefacts and thoughts, it is merely a building. It is the specific arrangement of those things that makes it what it is. Each portion triggers memories, thoughts, ideas and dreams – your personal history, the fabric of your life. Full of markers of experience and the traces of the things you have achieved, it forms a world-in-and-of-itself, a place to rest and to draw strength and vitality from. It is a castle, a fortress that defends you and displays your desires and hopes, because it is the the place in which you live rather than just being a place where you are alive.
Each artefact is the crystallisation, the manifestation of an idea, thought, concept, or dream. Each artist has put their will into shaping a particular medium, in making something that stands as an engine of creation. Whether it be words or film, sound or image, each of those things are the culmination of a process.
From the initial seed, by skill and talent of the the artist, something is brought into being – an artefact which takes a particular subject and gives it form. In that form, that particular arrangement of matter and information, there is an evocative power which works upon the human mind.
It is this power which leads to its prohibition in the world of VIRULENT EXPERIENCE. The power to manifest certain kinds of thoughts and emotions, which inevitably lead onward to other memories, emotions and experiences – ones that cannot be controlled or regulated.
VIRULENT EXPERIENCE is a product of Foolish People's Theatre Of Manifestation. It is not, and never will be, a passive thing.
A Museum may, at first glance, be empty corridors and glass cases. Yet, if you take a moment to think and wonder, perhaps you might hear the signal, the ever-present thrum behind the silence in that House of Memory. Somewhere behind the noise of the world, you may catch a ghost of it:
The ceaseless running of those same engines of creation, amidst the falling feathers of scavenging angels.
In the archive of forbidden things, the artefacts are the map and meaning that presses itself into the building's stone flesh. Make no mistake, the Museum is a living thing, and you may interact with it as such.
Come walk with us and hear the songs and thoughts. Feel its engines and architecture bring to life a future that need not be, and yet is born out of all-too familiar echoes.
What kind of seeds lie within, for you to discover, and bring to birth? Accept our invitation, and find out.
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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