The Non-Trivial Goat and the Cliffs of the Universal:
A Topological Fable on Navigation and Synthesis
Doors open at 7pm. Seating is limited, and available on a first-come, first-served basis. No RSVP required.
Chimeras are integrated bodies that synthesize incompatible modalities, surpassing their respective particularities without fusing them, finding a common ground, or reducing one to the other. Chimerization, a recent work by Florian Hecker, uses psychoacoustics to compose such creatures from readings of a libretto penned by philosopher and novelist, Reza Negarestani.
Expanding on this work, Hecker and Negarestani come together in a live experiment – less a collaboration between philosophy and sound than a synthesis of the two. In this abstract performance, recalling Artaud’s theatre of cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives, the participating elements will be chimerized through their mutual immersion in the abyss of the universal, and thereby revealed, in turn, as nothing other than local guises of this abyssal continuum.
The performance opens (Part 1: Descent) with a theory-fiction-mathematics manifesto that introduces the dramatis personae and abruptly drops the goat of philosophy into the abyss. This prologue of a mangled philo-fiction or ‘philosophy on acid’ is followed (Part 2: Navigation) by a performative gluing of philosophy and sound in which the auditors become the goats, each completing the chimera according to their localization and navigation of the space. In the final movement (Part 3: Alienation) this personal experience of local synthesis is replaced by an estranging immersion into the impersonal experience of the global, synthetic environment as the intensifying, sonic chimerization moves beyond the sphere of the knowable.
An exercise in deregulation of the senses, this unique performance brings together two ambitious thinkers and practitioners in an experimental surgery that opens up their respective fields onto unexplored grounds.
Florian Hecker lives and works in Kissing, Germany and Vienna. Notable, recent work among his numerous exhibitions and performances are: Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; MD72, Berlin; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; and Nouveau Festival, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Hecker has an extensive discography with works released on labels such as Editions Mego, Pan, Presto?!, Rephlex, Warner Classics and Warp.
Reza Negarestani’s philosophical writings have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press 2008) and The Mortiloquist, forthcoming from Urbanomic/Sequence Press in 2013.
