Using an app designed to replicate the stroboscopic “flicker” effect of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s Dream Machine, I begin my journey. I pass a semi-translucent energy field shaped like a dog. Trails lead to experimental grammars and readings in phenomenology. Friends and I over drinks speculate about socialist strategy in light of the strike in West Virginia. During brief lulls in the conversation, or while friends and I renew our drinks, I wonder about non-player characters and the representational challenges posed by collective subjects. Tools, remember, enable a prosthesis or “doubling” of the self. While Cluster & Eno’s “One” keeps me awake and hopeful, Jack DeJohnette’s “Aho” is what finally takes me beyond my skin.
Aggressive, utilitarian: the commodities that populate today’s indoor capitalist shopping malls no longer possess an erotics. Fonts and signage aim for instant legibility, leave nothing to the imagination, all artifacts and all actors of this world turned exclusively toward securing of utilities. Yet hypnotic props remain essential to the mall’s magic. Mirrored surfaces, confusions of scale, multiple conflicting pop songs played simultaneously: these and other methods induce a trancelike readiness to consume. Thankfully, “I AM THAT I AM” can escape these self-made confines. We can teach ourselves to race at lightning-quick speed up the inner canal of the optic nerve, thus allowing consciousness to awaken in the space behind the eyes a new era of sensitivity and interior vision, somewhere between heaven and earth.
Trance-Scripts 