Esozone 2008 (Part 1)

On The Road

Wes Unruh

Only @ Esozone:

Chris Titan Discharges Deadly Orgone into EEG

Yes, it was that kind of weekend.

The best coverage of the weekend I am only now recovering from is here ==> portlandtribune.com (by the gods this was an actual event and had real journalists) Someone called it Burning Man for people who don’t like crowds. It should also have added and that were running chronically behind schedule – the new god of time was fucking around quite a bit – but in a good way. Things happened when they were supposed to, in retrospect, and there was a lot of great energy for the 2012 egregore to munch on as we spiral to our certain apocalypse. Read on!

Personally, I saw the first aim of Esozone as creating an emergent superstructure that fosters propagation of reactions to the frustration with the conventional forms of race, culture, and class hierarchies and attempts to stimulate simplification of virtual substructures. Esozone brings people to question established structures and their relationships within those institutions, and there were some killer presentations I don’t even begin to cover in this post – Antero Alli, Dennis McKenna, Bill Whitcomb – all of that has to wait until the video gets online – for now this is just a glimpse into the back room of Esozone 2008.

During Esozone 2008

Temple of Damaged Equipment

St Mae of Discordian.com Strapped into IKIPR EEG Device (seen here videoed by St. Fox) is creating those waves of sound you hear in backroom of Esozone 2008

According to the OregonLive.com website:

Fringe thinkers, visionary artists and occult musicians from around the world will gather at Watershed, a rambling, ramshackle building near Sellwood for a weekend of . . . well . . . the inexplicable. Noah Mickens, who will take part in the festivities, defines it this way: “Esozone is an exhibition of scientists, philosophers, magicians and performance artists, gathered together by a subculture of young radicals who don’t recognize the distinction between the four.”

I think it was certainly that, but the location of The Watershed helped it be a whole lot more. Different types of spaces allowed for a dynamic range of interaction, an aesthetic that was lacking in the first event. Little touches, like crouching around a fire in the night in between panels and sets, or walking across wooden bridges to get to the event – eating at places like Chaos Cafe with Miqel from miqel.com and Paul Laffoley one table over – it was a remarkable weekend.

Here’s the full video session of the Aleph9.com Workshop:

Ikipr Workshop @ Esozone 2008 (1 of 3)

Part 2

Part 3

Rex Church of diabolusrex.com gave a full presentation of the construction of his Ragnarok Engine, a military grade black radionic device, at Esozone 2008 in Portland. This is only a small part of that presentation.

Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule’s performance of Oedipus Rex was phenomenal and had me in an altered state of mind for a solid forty-five minutes. It is rare that I am overwhelmed by theater, but Orryelle’s work activates atavistic consciousness in ways that no other mediated experience could achieve. I did not get video of his performance, and am eagerly awaiting seeing it pop up online. I did get his presentation of his new book CONJUNCTIO, which presents mirrored pairs of Sacred Twins and Divine Lovers from various cultural pantheons coupled on facing pages.

Here’s video from that session:

Because people are not used to seeing emergent technologies or concepts so powerful and immediately usable, frequent and novel encounters provoke optimism and empowerment, nevertheless reawakening criticism of complexity and a desire for simplicity in most of the participants after the event had concluded. In short, people broke open their heads and re-evaluated what they believe possible coming out of the three day nexus that was Esozone 2008

On the day after Esozone, Rex Church, Clyde Lewis, and Freeman discussed ‘Goddess Columbia’ Day at Ground Zero tying up some of the threads that ran throughout the ES020N8 Event: As Seen on Technoccult: