BECOMING DEMONIC

Please play both videos at the same time.

Becoming Demonic Part Nine.

It’s my pleasure to announce that Myrna has joined Sharon and me in our sorcerous endeavours. Myrna took part in the ‘Star and the Beast’ rite a few months ago, but this is our most committed collaboration yet.

Think of the video as a means of counteracting the passive consumption of media images by disrupting them and imbuing them with new sorcerous meaning and agency. At the heart of the piece is Myrna’s dance, which resonates with the fire of an assaulted sky during a rocket strike. From the outset, our aim was not to develop an elaborate choreography, but rather to saturate the body and allow the accumulated energy to erupt at the decisive moment to transform something destructive into something creative. But just like the images of the bombing, those of the dance are only raw material. The true nature of our spell is videographic and it aims to transplant the image directly into the viewer’s eyes and nervous system.

Images can never adequately convey the raw horror experienced by people living through war, and no art or magic, no matter how powerful, can banish the terror of the real. What sorcerous art can do, though, is to impact our perception of the world. We are touching here on the very essence of digital sorcery: cutting into the original video material, turning it inside out and exploding the pixels. It’s about creating shock waves and cracks through which the media poison is pushed out to make room for something else. Something ambiguous, expressed in the dirty video images of a contaminated sky as well as in Myrna’s fire dance, which is both assaultive and shielding. The piece is electronic, but saturated with a visceral energy heralded by the howling of jackals that Sharon recorded near the wrecked house where she works. Although it sounds like the wailing of air raid sirens, what it does has more to do with biosorcery than with the mechanical spells of the war machine.

There’s more to come.