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    It is certainly not trivial to claim a connection to ritual and avoid association with social media self care celebrities or cosmetics industry advertisement slogans. Sungazing by Labour gathers enough escape velocity by engaging in interdisciplinarity—another cliché, and yet here it becomes operational rather than ornamental. It works.

My only motivation behind this text is to attempt engaging in a process similar to theirs but in the domain of writing, in order to find out what is at work here and what exactly are its workings.

 

    How to depart from triviality by engaging in work specifically in the german sense of Wirkung, effect or effectiveness? I mean this in the scholastic sense: how to move away from the realm of words and language operations: the sequential domain of making sense and figures of speech?

The immediate answer, albeit requiring further unfolding, would be hinting at articulation of the steps or gradations between mimicry and direct performativity, which perhaps explains the aesthetics of Sungazing in the most compressed way. It is an articulation of the process of generalization, the gaining of agency through encapsulation, the seemingly paradoxical sacrifice of specificity for application, a kind of folding. It is making of a tool.

 

 

    Sungazing begins with a recognizable “ritual,” complete with all the expected markers. It emerges from within the audience gathered in the foyer, utilizes “ethno” parafernalia: loud drumming and dramatization of gestures. It is a representation of what one would associate with a ritual when attempting to mimic it as a child. Approximating forms and hoping to achieve something is of course equivalent to mistaking the actual food with the menu, in Bateson’s sense. A reverse cargo cult of a culture which has lost it’s common ground.

What follows, already on stage, is a network composed of seemingly ‘disciplinary’ nodes: live music, cgi projection, choreography. It is resonant.

We are required to abandon what Eshun termed “rearview hearing” in More Brilliant than the Sun, as there are no representations here, only renderings. Labour insists on precision of the contours, of the affective envelopes, simultaneously signaling departure from signification. This does not stop them from pointing at references, which however do not assemble into anything meaningful, but rather work like fairy dust. Glittering is certainly much more advanced than narrating as it requires engaging in multiple frequency bands. Analog synths spiky sawtooths are equivalent to 3d meshes shading artifacts.

 

    The final, third chapter, not coincidentally requiring technical equipment, is objective in the sense of irrelevance of subjective interpretations. With eyes closed, we are left with only contours or activation curves, sometimes converging, amounting to an exhilarating feeling of a possibility of unification. Symbolization in the sense of integrating discrete parts. Yet it has nothing to do with “blurring the boundaries” or revitalization of meaning, but rather requires making bridges between domains considered incommensurable. Technically we are given a rare insight into what integration is all about: a phasing spiky pattern blasted at the audience with the use of strobe lights confronted with our nervous system inertia gets smoothed out, yet it accumulates. It is just waves of stimulation and decay, but they are structured. There is phasing and rhythm to them. An invitation to land wherever it is that one is currently seeing only obstacles, with a set of newly found bridges.

 

    My stated attempt to engage in work that is actually working clearly fails. I keep hiding behind the words. I am fully aware of the trap exposed so touchingly in the famous letter of Artaud to Henry Parissot: that on the other side there are only resonant syllables, the consonants and vowels, the guttural murmurings pointing at nothing in particular. The trap which Labour gracefully avoids.

 

 

    In conclusion i claim the right, typically reserved to the artist and rarely used in these times of paninstagrammability, to insult the audience, due to the rather indifferent reception of the piece. If anything, this to me indicates a lack of belief in, or perhaps defense against a hope of shared experience, making one out of many.