‘The Abattoir Pages’ photo album

Written & Directed by John Harrigan
Produced by Lucy Allin, James Elphick & John Harrigan
Artistic Directors: John Harrigan & James Elphick
Sound Designers: Victoria Karlsson, P. Emerson Williams & Antoine Bertin
Graphic Designers: P. Emerson Williams & James Curcio
Program Editing & Layout: Tovarich
Set Design Team: Emma Tompkins, Ryan Laight, Greg Simpson, Sam Newman, Abbie Yaxley, Hannah Druckes, Guy Burnett, Faustine Leverbe, Anne Bengard, John Harrigan & James Elphick
Lighting Design by Big Bean Productions
Costume Designers: Syban V, Katie Beves, Johanna Elf, Charlotte Tofield & Tereza Kamenicka
Choreographer, ‘The Procession’: Ria Whitton
Production and Creative Team: John Harrigan, James Elphick, Lucy Allin, Tereza Kamenicka, Victoria Karlsson, P. Emerson Williams, Ruth Middleton, Ivan Tanda, Jan Kamenicky, James Curcio & Joseph Matheny
Stage Managers: James Elphick, Emma Tompkins, Hannah Drukes, Abbie Yaxley, Ivan Tanda & Jan Kamenicky
Treasure Hunt by Hunter-Gatherers & Emma Tompkins
Producer of Online Strategic Development: Joseph Matheny
Photographer: Yiannis Katsaris
Director’s assistants: Ivan Tanda & Kat Gillet

Sponsors:
Space Engineering
Big Bean Productions
Alterati
Grey Lodge
Mythos Media
Dark Mills Festival
The Slaughtered Lamb

From the new Hukilau blog

Since prehistoric times, people have huddled together around
campfires and told stories to each other. These stories have served the purpose
of entertaining (taking our minds off of the brutal realities of survival on
this planet), educational (teaching us how to better navigate and survive some
of the brutal realities of survival on this planet), and remind us of the goal,
which is namely to stay bound together as a tribe, family, nation or similar
social units to hopefully aim for the ideal of collectively overcoming the day
to day drudgeries of simple survival and achieve the status of heroes and gods.
(Well, one can dream!)

The stories that have survived the test of time and become
the most repeated, were the ones that resonated with our collective natures,
taught us the most enduring and valuable lessons or lifted our spirits through
the vehicle of mirth or hope.

Somewhere along the way, there arose a class of people who
saw that as technology evolved and story telling and dissemination more and
more became reliant on these changes that the profitable position was to set
oneself up as a gatekeeper to the means of production and distribution. We
eventually came to know these gatekeepers by names such as; scribes, priests,
printers, publishers, newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television
stations, record companies, movie studios, et al. As you can plainly see, this
model was profitable and even beneficial to the public and to artists for a
period of time, but that time has come to an end. Everywhere you look,
traditional publishing is upside down, the music industry is upside down, the
movie industry is upside down, and mostly due to their own myopic tendencies.

Read the rest on the Hukilau blog

The GSpot: Antero Alli

Joseph Matheny in conversation with Antero Alli about all sorts of tasty subjects. Also, JM discusses the changes occurring at Alterati, et al.

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No homegrown music this week, just some blatantly ripped off Cheech and Chong.

Antero Alli was born November 11, 1952, in Finland. Alli currently resides in Berkeley, California, where he conducts workshops and stages theatrical productions, some of which have been released as films. Alli is also a professional astrologer and has authored books on experimental theatre, astrology and Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of consciousness.

Links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antero_Alli
http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0021334/
http://www.verticalpool.com/us.html

I will be posting a longer statement concerning my new venture and my new direction in life. For now suffice it to say, I am working on writing another novel or two, in pre-production on a few independent films and plays, and am working on Project Hukilau.

“Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds. These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative. Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

The GSpot: Kristopher Young- Another Sky
Joseph Matheny in conversation with Kristopher Young of Another  Sky talking about the exciting new model of “pay what you can” for works of fine modern  literature.  Also another In Your Ear, reviewing Sundown Lounge, the podzine.

No homegrown music this week, just some more blatantly ripped off semi-commercial stuff.

Kristopher Young was born in 1974 with roots in Philadelphia and New York City. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004 to focus on his writing.

His background is diverse; he’s vegan, is trained in branding and scarification, put himself through school designing databases and has a Master’s Degree in Media Ecology (the impact of mass communication on society) from New York University.

Kristopher founded Another Sky Press in 2005 and continues to play a significant role as chief editor. Click was his debut novel.

Big changes coming here to this network. A complete rewrite and redesign of Alterati, Piltolite, Greylodge, and PODLAFF is coming this winter. We will probably be off-line for a month or so as we roll it all up and begin to roll out the new stuff. Alterati, PodLaff and Piltolite will be merging into something new, currently code-named Hukilau.However, right now, we can say no more. We will continue to put out GSpots every 2 weeks, and will leave up an archive page of the last 4 0r 4 episodes, while we hammer and saw behind the curtain. We are aiming for a 2010 relaunch of the new project and we think you’re going to LOVE it. Until then, be well and we’ll see you in the new year.

I’ve heard great things from the folks at Foolishpeople about the Abattoir Pages and the staging and presentation of the scene/installation I wrote for it.  If you’re at all capable, get on down to: The Abattoir Pages

The GSpot:Chris Arkenberg

Joseph Matheny in conversation with Chris Arkenberg about everything from the future to music and technology.

All music provided by N8UR (Chris Arkenberg)

Songs, in order:
Babylon System
Nude Dressed
SmiteDemDub

BIO: Chris Arkenberg is a strategic researcher and futurist watching for patterns at the intersection of human culture and technology. He’s currently working as a visiting researcher at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Ca., where he’s researching the emergent field of Brain Computer Interface for the Institute’s 2009 Technology Horizons program. He did undergrad in psychobiology at UCSC, then worked a 2yr stint at Gateways metaphysical bookstore, followed by a 10-year stretch working 3D & management for Adobe Systems, Inc. On the side, he’s an electronic music producer under the moniker N8UR, while also enjoying and engaging his local community in Santa Cruz, Ca. His blog is URBEINGRECORDED .

The Gspot: John Harrigan

In anticipation of the upcoming performance of The Abattoir Pages, Joseph Matheny in conversation with John Harrigan about anything and everything that comes to their mind.

All music provided by Veil of Thorns

Songs, in order:

• And the Beast of the Vision Still Roams in Dream
• Intellectual Institutional Object
• Thought Pollution Evolution

In Your Ear: Reviewing Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story

Guerrilla Zoo and FoolishPeople present The Abattoir Pages, a terrifying immersive Halloween experience, hosted in a vast, secret subterranean landscape that was once one of London’s largest abattoirs.

The Abattoir Pages combines immersive performance, art installation, haunting and treasure hunt-style activity to form a labyrinth of mystery and horror, exposing the earliest Gaelic and Pagan rites. Once inside, audience members will be free to explore the abandoned underground chambers, join the secret party or may be caught in the middle of the most terrifying of puzzles.

This Hallowe’en, the infamous horror author Helen Mayer will hold court at a debauched secret party. She will share the perverse and warped research conducted inside the old abandoned abattoir, which was the genesis of her greatest work. In this dark playground, the very nature of human terror has been tested, abused and fed into the living story ‘The Forest’.

The author invites you to solve the puzzle and unlock the terrifying history within the old and powerful pages hidden throughout the slaughterhouse. Each holds a key to learning the truth of an ancient tale, which will ensure your survival.

Tonight, a debt will be repaid to blood dishonoured. An eternal nightmare rises up from the depths of the dark boreal forest, in the shadow of the mountain. It comes to feed on new meat inside an old abattoir.
http://www.apocryphon.org/

The Gspot: Esozone

Joseph Matheny in coversation with Klint and Jillian from Esozone, talking about the new “open source and unconference model” being used this year.

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After EsoZone Portland 2009, we will release the “EsoZone Protocol,” a set of guidelines similar to an open source software license that will enable organizers to host an EsoZone in their own city as long as they are free and follow the “unconference” model.

Portland’s weirdest event just got weirder

This year EsoZone – an annual Portland conference dedicated to the occult, fringe science, and other offbeat topics – is forgoing a pre-planned schedule in favor of letting attendees create their own agenda.

On October 9th, participants will arrive at Watershed PDX and collaboratively create the schedule. The event will be free and open to the public, and anyone will be able to propose a session, lead a workshop, or suggest a group activity. The approach is called “unconferencing,” a technique pioneered by tech-industry events.

Portland has played host to a number of unconferences in the past few years, including BarCamp, WordCamp, and CyborgCamp.

Event organizers Klint Finley and Jillian Ordes-Finley were inspired to transform EsoZone into an unconference after attending CyborgCamp in December of 2008.

“I was amazed at how quickly the schedule was put together at CyborgCamp, and how smoothly the event ran. We’d agonized over the EsoZone schedule for months and were still changing things at the last minute. I was really impressed by how the whole unconference model worked,” Finley says.

The pair hope this new approach will help EsoZone better reach is goal: fostering connections between its eclectic and oftentimes outsider audience. Finley says “This should be a better platform for getting people to interact each other, and making sure the event centers around the subject matter the attendees really want to discuss.”

EsoZone will use the same scheduling system used by CyborgCamp and BarCamp. Participants will propose sessions on 8.5 x 11 pieces of sticky paper and place them on a large schedule grid on the wall. The sessions can then be rearranged as necessary as attendees negotiate times and spaces for each session. New sessions can be added to empty slots at any time during the event.

In order to give people an idea of what to expect, the organizers are encouraging likely participants to propose subjects on their online forum in advance of the event. However, nothing will be decided until the actual event.

EsoZone will also be exhibiting esoteric art by a variety of artists. “Watershed is such a cavernous space, we have room for a staggering amount of artwork,” Ordes-Finley says. Although artists will be allowed to hang art the day of the event, they are encouraged to check in ahead of time if they have questions or could have any logistical issues.

More information, and contact details, are available at esozone.com