Mythologies
Reflections Collection

Points from today:

The discovery of formulating the sign and its signifying as a body system. Feels more integrated as an anchor to assume and assimilate, from which the associating/excavating has a base to develop. Gives the fundamental-code/language a vaster territory which can proliferate. What are the qualities of this body-system? How does it operate? How does it relate to the Source? How can we find a greater sense of malleability, playfulness, nuance, versatility, etc.? (Six Viewpoints)

The moments of transitioning from one sign-code (mode of signifying?) can feel awkward and, as the ability to code-switch is crucial and the potential pathways aplenty, deserves exploration.

Fungal-thinking, cross-pollination. The desire to participate in the symbolic order. The need for a semiotics for it to become more communicative and interactive, real. Meanings to appropriate, forms to wield.

At some point, thoughts of compositional tools of time and space. Perhaps starting in a circle is necessary. Hopefully giving attention to composition would add a layer of creative play, and aesthetics to find flow in relation to (success and failure).

There was a vitality to the Tarot Game which was later more difficult to find in the more complex two-card-duets, and which we later felt was necessary for the images to have density and dilation to negotiate the signifying through.

The great moments where it feels like we are enacting a collective, embodied hermeneutics/interpreting. When you “magically” understand a new perspective on the sign through the interplay of bodies, experiences, and expression. We should seek how these occur with multiple-sign-trios. Perhaps how they happen in attempts to create collective sub-codes / sub-primary-codes. Also in seeing the development of a sub-individual-code, essentially an permutation which was affirmed, and enjoying its cleverness.

How do we perform the negotiation of the primary-code? I feel there’s something wonky with imitation as mirroring, it’s nicer as echoing. How does this negotiation also happen on the levels of intention and fantasy? Perhaps less through shape-oriented forms/signifying, but rather through a “body-system”, (state?).

At first, repetition is a process of iterative stabilization of the code/signification. Happening both as it passes between bodies and as a body-system is sustained in spacetime. With every iteration there is a desire to further de/refine the signifying, asking what its qualities are and what does it mean?” – what can be thought of as design via-negativa, finding the essence of the thing. How can we more elegantly perform this process and arrive at the embodied-core (“essential” anchor) of the code? This can be thought of in terms of repetition-leaps (Meisner).

Later, repetition is a process of iterative expansion. It is trickier to keep track of the code, and participate in the code-making, as it expands, becoming more nuanced and complex.

Shower thoughts from right after the rehearsal on the 24th:

Starting from the ability to generate and observe embodied mythic speech – to sense, and describe, and interpret, and discuss it. That holds in itself the more fundamental: Generating and observing the body as a text, a language, a matrix of signs and a sign of its own. Essentially, we are taking an idea and allowing it to infest many embodied meanings and forms, to grow and become a common-sense, to brainwash the space. Then, perhaps, the idea becomes a myth. What then motivates it? How does it relate to other mythic concepts and systems? Which already charged mythic forms did we utilize and reappropriate ourselves? How is a myth embedded in the body on the level of practice and sensation, our body’s perception of itself?

We are still far from asking how to “liberate” that body from some more Eldritch myth, one that is lurking in the little things, innocent and ominous. In other words, to invite the audience to see the stories, fictions, narratives, myths that participate in their reality, and to negotiate their place from a place of encountering reality.

Maybe that Augusto Boal “Theater of the Oppressed”, which I can see echo in comedy-nights and improvisation comedy, is an exciting entry point into thinking of a more audience participatory approach. Taking the mythologies of and from the audience as a base can help make the forms and meanings familiar, and thus aid us in making them alien – defamiliarize.

Another interpretation I see forming is that harkening to ancient myth in two ways. One, where contemporary myths are traced back through time and thus stripped to their bare essentials; also involving thoughts of how the body has been subjected to mythology through time and the practices involved. Two, aligned with thoughts of Witchcraft and Magic – or occult, orthopraxical beliefs – where the focus is on how the common-sense of the past seems foreign, so what if we examine our own as foreign to another humanity.

Hopefully, these options will gradually unfold and sort themselves out as we continue working.

It feels to me like a lot of the things we discussed today are clearer, but still very Azathoth. A variation where we collectively stay within a far more decided and clear set of archetypes, individually keeping a more active accumulation of states and motifs, which are weaved together in interesting ways.

What I feel is necessary is a quicker and adamnt insistence on collective codes. I feel it would be far more powerful to anchor the multiplication/abstraction of the card in a collectively agreed on primary-code. What I see in the run in mostly proliferations of the collective primary-code, which unfortunately has the effects of sometimes seeming like variations of two caricatures. It does also highlight the power of individual dramaturgies, here individual code-making and the proliferation of that code from within and in interaction with the space.

The same rises from watching the three two-carders, I want us to place greater emphasis on the collectively code-making and branching from it. I think that would be beneficial for the interactivity and readability of the soft-score/practice, and therefore allow us to play with furher understandings of more complex codes. Just as well from within the practice, where it feels increasingly difficult to "play the code game" and interact with the others as more variables are added.

Could be good to trace in tomorrow's Signification Game how a primary-code is stabilized when it is imitated-repeated-participated by anther practitioner. How a core-signifier, or fundamental system of signification for a certain symbol, is established. Theoretically, a very basic symbolic order. Then the branching from that new signification: as the initial source is blurried/emptied and the new system-of-forms becomes the new anchor, which will then expand into a language and unfold the meaning of the now latent (mythic?) Source. Would be good to be able to also track this branching of the others from inside, and for more of the branching to happen on a collective imitation-repeation-participation, mythic reality-making level.