The “compendious and occasionally accurate, glossary” of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy handbook offers some information and advice on how to live in the universe. This includes four key points, listed under “Area” (infinite), as well as “Imports” and “Exports” (none), and “Rainfall”—also non-existent, citing that “rain can not fall because in an infinite space there is no up for it to fall down from.” Omsk Social Club and Joey Holder explore other logics and their oppositions through their “The Waxing” event, taking place at Zeiss-Großplanetarium on October 26. Happening as part of 3hd 2022: “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” and following from its own moon-phase motif, the work reflects on how our world is founded on cycles, spirals, and feedback loops that aim to hack radical communication in order to produce a functional equilibrium.
The immersive audio-visual performance launches from the festival’s expanded ideas of “space,” by exploring and studying the notion of embodied knowledge, collective hallucinatory experiences, and communing with aliens. Using the full dome projection at one of Europe’s largest planetariums, the work builds on the collaboration between Omsk Social Club’s Real Game Play concept, and Joey Holder’s xeno-ecologies, inviting minimal viable audience participation, as fact and fiction begin to loosen between worlds. Featuring live musical interventions from composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, alongside interdisciplinary artist Dylan Kerr, “The Waxing” questions the link between the supernatural and the real, underscoring the central importance and political significance of the social imagination in earthbound-alien worlding, beyond the cyborg and the machine.
Prior to the event, participants are invited to prepare through two optional deeper paths of immersion. A voluntary workshop at Callie’s on Sunday, October 23, at 1pm, will hone tools of enhanced interpersonal sensitivity, somatic insight, and alien perception, to find radical sociability when controlled with care in the Xenophilic-Theatre. Register via this link.
Participants can also spend 23 minutes listening to a track remotely to condition their sensory organs for the journey.
Credits
Directed and conceptualized by Omsk Social Club and Joey Holder
Live music by Dylan Kerr, Ernstalbrecht Stiebler, 00 Zhang
Audio visual soundtrack samples Alexander Iezzi
Make-up by Nadia Kosh
Subtitles produced by Jonas Schoeneberg
Commissioned and produced by Creamcake
Flyer & title by Jon Lucas, featuring art by Nina Sarnelle in “collaboration” with AI & S.A Mayer’s main poster assets
