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The festival is apt to end frenetically in an orgy, a nocturnal debauch of
sound and movement, tranformed into rhythm and dance by the crudest
instruments beating in time.[1]
or
Where were you in august '96 ?
THE SUMMER OF CONFUSION.
Record levels of apathy; we have been convinced of the senseless
objectivity of the world. The black magic of the media is in effect to
maintain the status quo, to manufacture normality and reality, to propose
how things are, and how they shold stay.
As a last locus of freedom migration into cyberspace is offered, but
"cyberspace" is not a place.
A summer of confusion. Everything is vague, people numbed into
submission... an appalling situation that demands a crisis.
TIR NA NOG.
Logistics: In a strictly military sense the avant garde is the shock
troopers who invade or clear a territory first for the main army. July 26:
The convoy of cars is moving from the meeting point to the site. Two police
cars on the way, but the authorities have nothing yet to move in against,
and no territory to defend. Half an hour later the quarry is in our hands.
Sound systems are set up, the first beats are thundering through the
desert: Are you ready?
The festival (...) is always defined by dancing, singing, excitement,
excessive eating and drinking. It is necessary to go all out, to the point
of exhaustion, to the point of sickness. That is the law of the festival.[1]
Drugs and repetitive yet broken up music, the staying awake for days and
nights corrode the perception of time. In the crassest opposition to the
restricted Now of the objectified, commodified, banalized system, a
different time-space is developing:
"The whole universe was plastic, fluid and inexhaustible"[1]
Only suitable that the site is locally called "Hell's Gate"
RESISTANCE OF THE CELL.
After returning into the world-upside-down the order of things brings
itself to one's attention again.
Survival, going cheap these days in what is left of the exchange market, is
the everyday production of misery, a totalitarian industry.[2]
This may work in two ways: new acceptance or new resistance. There are
small pockets of resistance across the globe without adhering to any sort
of unity, an anarchic, heterogenous situation, which makes the struggles
remain introspective and small, at the same time however a resistance that
is so decentralised, it can't be stopped. New Networks are developing that
are providing a necessary flow of information and goods.
While the fluidity of the excess hardens and inspirations are translated
into new projects, there is a necessity to draw conclusions, and to take
further action that goes beyond the production of 'alternative culture'.
The world of imagination is the exact science of possible solutions, not a
parallel world granted to the mind in compensation for its real failures.
It is a force destined to bridge the gap between internal and external. A
praxis condemned to inaction.
With its phantoms, its obsessions, its outbursts of anger, its sadism, the
interworld is like a cage of wild animals driven mad by their imprisonment.
Anyone is free to go down there by means of dreams, drugs, alcohol or the
disordering of the senses. Its violence asks only to be freed. A good
climate in which to steep oneself if only to reach the consciousness that
dances and kills - [3]
[Note: This text was written/mixed/compiled in aug.'96 between teknivals by
cf not without stray bullets from Debord, Baudrillard, Bataille, and
especially Caillois >[1]Festival. in: College of Sociology. Denis
Hollier,ed. Minnesota. and Vaneigem > [2] Book of Pleasures. Pending and
[3]The Revolution of Everyday Life. Rebel Press. Just as important were
discussions with Nomex.
Dedicated to those whose
Intellectual despair results neither in weakness nor dreams, but in
violence.[Bataille: The "Lugubrious Game" (1929) in Visions of
Excess.Minnesota]
...to be continued... |
