“Possession Trance” by Ryan Jordan

Title:

Possession Trance

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Performers:

Ryan Jordan

Symposium:

ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art
More artworks from ISEA2016:

Creation Year:

2016

Medium:

Live audiovisual performance

Duration:

About 30 mins

Artist Statement:

“…there appears to be a complicated set of rules for computing with neurons which prevents many of them from working at once. The neurons are electrically triggered, and if the rules are broken we get an electrical overload. This is the cybernetic explanation (in brief) of what we usually call epilepsy, or (perhaps) what our forefathers called ‘possession’”. Stafford Beer, 1965.

Possession Trance is a live performance project spawned within underground D.I.Y. rave and experimental music communities. Slowly mutating for the past nine or so years the performance uses a combination of minerals, metals, electronic circuits, high powered stroboscopes, dense smoke, high volume noise and ritual incense in an attempt to create powerful, hallucinatory phenomena within audience members aimed toward provoking a liberating, communal and shared experience.

Initially using Nicolas Collins CMOS synthesisers in combination with stroboscopic light, the project has developed by examining the core underlying structure of electronic and computational circuitry. Currently this performance utilises self built crystal amplifiers constructed with iron and chalcopyrite, copper-oxide and copper solar cells, and will be soon incorporating magnetite and maghemite audio “tape” to create recorded feedback loops live.

Possession Trance tends to spirals sideways into bastard tekno, burrowing through noise infested cybernetics, crude neuroscience and distorted physiology in an attempt to piece together our fragmentary daemons and split the nine-fold reality layers of human perception; from communing with the dead to disturbing the holographic brain; from trance states to opening flicker portals in optic nerve fibres; these practitioners practice a dark hypnosis in psychoactive hyperventilation clubs. This is far more potent than those Burroughsian opiate dreaming machines. These are the dank back alleys of the contemporary Core clans; turbo charged amphet-psycho-triptamine splittercore; highly potent chemical potions releasing anxiety ridden, fraudulent time-travel. We live on the peripheries of our own being. The veil is removed. Portals are opened. The superimposed fluorescent grid clamps the mind like thousands of splintered fingers sinking deep inside the brain and pulling out neural pathways in all directions. The pathways split into rotating cylinders folding in opposite directions spiralling into infinity. The holoflux is engaged as Purkinje shifts in his nauseated hallucinations, Fechner lurches into view weaving his pattern induced flicker colours in Helmholtz’s face.

They all dissipate in photic voltages tracing themselves into oblivion through rods and cones penetrating dank neuronal alleyways at high velocity running unstoppable into head-on collisions with particles swarming from the OI! factory and binding with tactic centres of the inner muscular shell. The signal is now at the level of internal mineral solutions performing ionic transfers causing electrical lightening storms shooting through cells. Axon hillock is firing like a spasmodic machine gun spewing out incandescent howls and screams of white noise automatically reloading the onslaught continues as possession trance is manifest. Believe you are possessed by a god or deity. Something other has entered you, nonhuman. It is the nonhuman we are now in communication with.