Twice Upon A Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the Senses

 

 

Vol. 2 No. 1

 

ISBN 978-1-873352-10-6
ISSN 2059-2582

 

 

In this, the third volume of Zetesis, a neatly packaged Molotov was launched into the ‘out-there’ of art, of science and of life in the disguised form of an international call for papers.

 

 

The Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) and the Research Centre for Creative Making (S.T.U.F.F.) based at the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media

(ADM) joined forces at Birmingham School of Art – BCU to welcome papers/ performances/exhibition installations that responded to magic/alchemic practices in all their forms, including but not limited to the origins of alchemy and its contemporary relevance in science, magic performance, illusion, automata, the sensory in artificial intelligence and radical thinking in relation to conceptsof time. We invited artists, scientists and philosophers to explore again the threshold between these paradigms, dwelling on curiosity and the tradition of scientific questioning.

 

This bold and viscerally complex conference, laid the groundwork for this volume 3 of Zetesis: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the senses. The exhibitions, artwork, papers and prose contained in this volume include some of the best international practice-led and theoretically emboldened research on this topic today.

By foregrounding the alchemist’s vision, we now present here in Zetesis our initial findings: a profane renegotiation of the very boundaries that seemed heretofore always insistent upon separating into binaric unities the so-called texture-realities of representation vs thought, sensation vs logic, image vs text. In challenging those easy divisions, we celebrate the (re-)turn to a ‘twice upon a time’ when transubstantiation, metamorphosis and morphogenesis gives succour to this energy we so nonchalantly call art.

 

-Johnny Golding, Editor-in-Chief

 

Contents:

 

Once Ever After: Twice Removed | David Cheeseman

Spirited Away | Martin Reinhart

Clone | Gregory Leadbetter

Fatima, 2014 | Jakub Ceglarz

Creole Portraits III | Joscelyn Gardner

Mobilising Mob Mentality: The Miracle of the Relic of Saint Andrew | Susan J. May

Escamotage ~ Sleight of hand, Trickery, Conjuring, Vanishing | Grace Williams

Rosa Rubea Homuncula | Jivan Astfalck

Self Obliterations I&II | Ron Athey

Hegel and Hambone | John Mowitt

Spurious Luxus | Rachael Colley

Sound, Audio, Music // Physics, Imaginaries, Intentions | Micah Silver

Palimpsest | Russell Nachman

Eleven Theses for an Initial Degree of Roughness: Transubstantiation, Materiality and Art | Mattia Paganelli and Dane Worrallo

Phantasmagoria Electric | Irene Brown