“According to the investigation files made available to the public, the members of the group claimed to have conducted collective therapy sessions during which they attempted to reconstruct the rites and customs of their fictional ancestral land. The mnemonic functionality of these exercises remains dubious at best but they seemed to have effected a modification in their mode of interaction. Apparently they have abandoned conventional speech (other than lip-syncing) in favor of a highly complex system of body language according to rituals, cybernetics, and the interference of sound waves broadcast from various sources.

The activities of the group at this stage border on subversion since they consciously emulated/recreated the mytho-genesis of a nation. As far as the exact nature of the sessions in question, we have very little actual evidence of what happened there. The exhibit below is footage clandestinely shot by an undisclosed agent. The agenda of this agent is to be further examined since the camera adopts an angle favored by the group itself in their research – the slant in-between the horizontal gaze (“our daily bodies in space” in the language of the group) and a vertical observation from above (“the imagined supremacy”). This idea resurfaces across their publications:

“...lays between the single geographic dimension of a territory and the stereophonic depth of a national myth” (The Land, The Flag, The Dimensions)

“…perched onto an Oswaldian(*) perspective: neither the sea-level of a Zapruder spectacle, nor the omniscient Eye in the Pyramid” (Conspiracy Thinking and The Loss of The Real)

“The explosion of kitsch in a 99 Cent Store blows us into an excess territory – not enough to seal perfection in the vacuum of an Eden, but not quite in-and-of this world either. That’s where we find the collision of body and consumerist ecology…”(The Super-Mall of Jesus)

It still remains unclear how these experimental sessions lead to the choreographed events that followed a few months later. It is a strong possibility that the group was involved in retroactive alchemy (‘alchemy’ here is used in its strict etymological sense: al-chemy – ‘the art of transformation’) and sought to alter the interface between body, media, space, and culture. That would explain the cryptic symbolic code ubiquitous in their files, their obsession with melting wax and embedding objects in it, as well as the slogan “We Are The Future of Medicine“(**) that made headlines recently.

While very plausible, this theory fails to address the nature of the footage – is it something akin to a peepshow or underground boxing clubs?

Or is it a staged reenactment of a torture session?

An instructional video or a real-life video-game?

A ceremony, a performance, a medical procedure?

A possession?

A sacrifice?”

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(*) Reference to Lee Harvey Oswald and his position on the Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository;

(**) The slogan was used during the guerrilla advertising campaign that proclaimed that ecology and global media meet to create a planetary synaptic entity – not an Artificial Intelligence, but a “Global Subconscious”. Links were made with satellite hacking and subliminal advertising but no evidence was ever found to support the outrageous claims that “The planet is a psychic bomb”

Exhibit A

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I found this on Wikipedia:

Choreography (literally “dance-writing” from the Greek words “χορεία” (circular dance, chorea) and “γραφή” (writing), also known as “dance composition”), is the art of making structures in which movement occurs. The term composition may also refer to the navigation or connection of these movement structures. The resulting movement structure may also be referred to as the choreography.

A few months of collaboration with the choreographer have shown me that ‘navigation’ is the key word in the definition above. Choreography is the art and science of navigating the unfamiliar. In its broad sense then choreography exhausts all human activity – from the child learning to move in a new environment, to the land-mine victim regaining awareness and control of limbs. In an even broader sense though, choreography can be attributed to life in general: evolution is exactly the “connection of these movement structures” among gene pools. Finally, any motion, the very fabric of space/time can be perceived as a universal movement structure beyond the cliched dance of the stars. In a choreographed universe one moves with care and attention – attention to movement, to time, to sound and light, space, architecture, rhythm, anatomy, texture, population, intensity. One moves somewhere different from the everyday world. One starts with the black hole somewhere around the sternum and follows the chart of its vibrations all the way back to the Big Bang. Navigation requires intuition, reading the subtle, relying on fuzzy experience, admitting the fallibility of perception and the cloudiness of ideas. One becomes wiser and more naive, at once super-sensitive and handicapped. 

You might say one is blindfolded to find the way.