Time to blow the dust off this old place; to walk again amongst the electronic megaliths that lie here like a ruined temple to a forgotten universe. Or, to put it another way, CA is back up and running after some code mishaps and, I can blog again. But it\’s more than a blog, it\’s a living, breathing concept that\’ll be extant long after the world has burned itself out. The blog is just a door.

The main reason, code aside, that this place has been so very silent, is that I\’ve been busy. Busy working with, and becoming part of, Foolish People. To quote directly:

FoolishPeople create film, theatre, music and books. We curate and engineer immersive experiences that have the power to raise the numinous within the spectator. Over a number of years, we have developed a unique practice, Theatre of Manifestation. We combine mythology, shamanism, drama therapy, strategic forecasting and open source collaboration in the creation of this work. Each piece takes form by merging text, performance, sound, art, light and the building itself to create a unique, dreamlike world that living characters inhabit.

Since around about May I\’ve this year, I\’ve turned my talents to helping craft a world  which was designed to grab people by throat and gut, and shake them about a bit until all the encrusted bits fall off, to reveal the skin beneath. That world was the world of VIRULENT EXPERIENCE:

The Age of Emotional Prohibition has begun.

THEN: London, 2012: CCTV on every corner, missile batteries on the roof of council blocks for national security during the Olympiad. Every moment of your life logged and regulated by governments and corporations trying to sell you things through your smart-phone and browser while people you haven’t seen in years can follow your life moment by moment online.

NOW: London, 2040: The Ministry of Information’s Emotional Experience Act is in force. In an effort to stop the nation tearing itself apart, the government has instituted ENGLAND REBORN – for your Safety, Security & Sanity. Thanks to the Sure Heart implant technology gifted to newborn citizens, all disruptive, antisocial and negative emotions and rogue experiences are now prohibited, isolated and catalogued within the Virulent Museum of Human Experience via real time analysis of your lives. No longer do the self destructive impulses of the nation manifest in the phenomenon known as Virulent Novelty. Always connected, never alone – watched over by the ubiquitous BLAKE. Truly it is a Green and Pleasant Land.

Helping craft the transmedia narrative for the production along with the rest of the team,  as well as writing much of the in-world text and other things that needed words to make them live, I\’ve been on a long strange trip.

A trip that rquired every ounce of textual, storytelling and magical nous that I possess. A trip that culminated in visiting Conway Hall on the 23rd of August 2012, to meet those with whom I had been sharing ideaspace for months end, and to investigate its physical manifestation through the primal ritual of theatre.

That meeting may very well have changed my life on its own, being the culmination of years of synchronicity, occult social connexions and directed magical work. Only time will tell what that mutual contact may spawn in the years to come, but that\’s neither here nor there. What follows below, is on the other hand, a direct recounting of the experiences and thoughts raised  within me during  the ritual production itself. I hope you enjoy it – I have many more tales still to tell, after all.

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There\’s a lot of assumptions you know.

Things that everyone carries around without noticing – weights and baggage heaped upon us changing how we grow, like Bonsai. Things that we accept because we have no way of knowing that our only sources of authority are also operating on received wisdom.

Culture\’s built on Chinese Whispers – or what\’s the other name for it? The Telephone Game. Crackle down the line; spectral phonemes hissing along the copper wire amidst the white noise. Maybe now it should be phantoms and apparitions dancing down the fibre-optics? Emergent properties, fractal fragments and seeds of Rainbow Bodies surging along at the speed of light.

Accelerate those fast enough and time begins to dilate, space begins to curve in on itself. Everything warps subtly, twists like a snake eating its own tail. Think about those serpentine coils as an electro-magnet for a second – it doesn\’t matter that we\’re back to the simple motif of copper coils and radio.

It doesn\’t matter that fibre-optics evoke analogue systems, that the digital binary pulse leads to a weird organic clarity emerging from the background. Doesn\’t matter that the electro-magnet hums with power as it accelerates particles – as it sings in cyclotrons and smashes open the secrets of the universe.

Doesn\’t matter that the future and past are looping on, forming a toroid event horizon about the black hole of the Now. Beyond that threshold, everything is super-dense – the All-At-Once. Beyond the threshold, the limen, everything is liminal. Light folds back on itself, everything folds back on itself. Opposites become their own origin.

The multiverse thrums with a deep magnetic pull, the highest gravitational energy. You could call it a machine, a construct. You\’d be wrong, because it isn\’t anything. It\’s the All-Thing. The All-Thing which is Nothing, Nobody In Particular.

It\’s endless flux. Endless play. They say the mask has no back, that there is nothing behind it. They\’re right – there are no phenomena, only the unknowable noumena from which arise apparitions of things.

All that humans create, from architecture to machines to other humans, is this enacted.

Crystallisation of the imaginal. A manifestation of the Way Back Home via the terrific and inspiring faculty of the imagination. Everything the species has ever done, is this. Manipulation of phenomena to re-create a memory of the Dream-Time. This is Art. This the primal sorcery which built the world.

Manipulation and modulation of phenomena – arrangements of experience and matter which propels one beyond the faculty of knowledge into the glorious gnosis of agnosis. Socrates was declared wisest of all by the Oracle at Delphi, and yet he claimed knowledge of nothing.

Socrates is ever in the basement of my mind, as he was in the basement of Conway Hall. Biding his time in the bright darkness of Blake, as the ghost of a wilful harlequin named Harry led me down the corridors of the Museum.

Surrounded by words; twenty-six things of ink and thought arranged upon the page so as to conjure remembered experience and rearrange them in other minds. People can be portals, did you know that?

Gateways – their flesh living thresholds across which the liminal, the All-Thing may come, in all its absent fullness, all its incomprehensible profundity. In all its primordial potency.

We\’re all fictional, all made up – acting like we think we should.

\’I\’ was a ghost prowling the corridors of Mind, dancing as it slips and sings between the membrane of so many personal cosmoses. It\’s still doing it – deus ex machina.

Someone once said that human beings are machines for making gods. Maybe. Maybe gods are machines for making humans? After all, they, and we, are peculiar arrangements of matter and energy.

VIRULENT EXPERIENCE is a machine. A carefully crafted creation made of flesh and blood and word. Of thought and memory, humour and madness. Its design acts like a certain particle accelerator that is searching for, and has probably found, the figuratively named God-particle.

Except that there\’s nothing figurative about it here. Foolish People have manifested the numen for you. The quality of all the gods that ever were, has been brought to you. Cycle after cycle, forming that gate – that way to touch the All-Thing, to hear it behind the words and actions, to enable you to re-cognise the fact of its existence.

To know that you are a thing of dreamflesh; a precipitated and concentrated child of the All-At-Once. A manifested moonchild, a living, walking embodiment of the agnosis. A literal incarnation of wonder.

How many names and identities do we bear that are not our own? How many creations have been layered atop us, how many impressions have been inscribed in our clay?

VIRULENT EXPERIENCE is a machine, an arrangement of matter and energy which gives you a glimpse into the notion of tabula rasa. A doorway into the infinite potential of the blank page; that which contains all words, all states of being, and yet is none of them.

A machine that invites you to see the power of what you may be, if you choose to be.