A Space Opera in Three Acts

Captain’s Log -Wednesday 25 October 2023

Moon Waxing Gibbous, 11.03 days old and 88.15% illuminated with a tilt of 140.749°. The approximate distance from Earth to the moon is 364,920.31 km and the moon sign is Pisces.

I wake up with a jolt from a wild dream, into a nightmare that is even wilder.

It has nothing to do with the state of the world.

The world keeps on turning, as always, around itself, around the sun. Now and then bright and beautiful, full of sunlight and vivid colours and rainbows. More often frowning and gloomy and bleak, drowning in a myriad shades of grey.

You, you always loved grey…You loved the rain and the traces that the memory of water leaves upon the Earth. And you never, ever chased after the pot of gold at the end of elusive rainbows, sparkling under the sun.

You always preferred the silver of the Moon -each night you took off to meet her, a Beloved as ethereal and enticing as she was distant, flying on the back of your magical Phoenix bird.

Word had it that your pen was made of Phoenix bone, was given wing by a Phoenix feather. That was why you always rose out of your own ashes. Cheated death over and over. Styled yourself an angel, out of the darkest places of hell.

He had been through a lot, that Phoenix of yours. He’d been burned in hundreds of fires, been killed by so many Suns…

You were alike, you and he. That’s how he had become your familiar.

This time, you two flew far too high. Travelled way too far.

25th of October 2023 and my phone’s screen lights up. No good mornings.

My own little world catapults into darkness.

‘’I don’t know how to tell you this…Atsushi is no longer with us. Atsushi passed away on the 19th of October. They wouldn’t let us know until now.’’

It’s my best friend, Karen. My sister messaging from the land of the rising sun, on the other side of the world, the same corner of the Earth where you live, where you write your poetry, where you sing your songs.

Lived. Wrote. Sang.

I blink — surely, I’m still in the middle of my nightmare.

It must be one of those where I realise that I’m dreaming and try to wake up, only to find myself ‘waking’ inside yet another dream, darker and worse than the first.

And if not, there must be some other explanation. Surely, one of the trolls that swarm the forest perilous that is the internet, felt like it was time for horror stories and decided it would be a great idea to spice them up by making you the protagonist.

After all, you are only 57. Nothing on your face or body betrays your years. And as for your soul, that was ancient and full of secrets to begin with. One has but to read your lyrics. You have stared straight into the eyes of the sun of this world. Turned around it so many times. Sojourned here on this planet for countless moons.

You got to know this world and its ways by now, like the back of your hand.

You were tough enough to stand on its stages, in the middle of arenas, heart on your sleeve, scars like medals of honour on your chest.

In the face of fear.

‘’I can’t feel the passage of time. I don’t understand what ‘35 years’ is supposed to mean’’ — wasn’t that what you said hardly a year ago, on the 35th anniversary of Buck-Tick, the band you still front since the very beginning? You had no intention to stop. To leave. Your soul, deep like a still lake, yet burning volcanic, was too restless. Your spirit ancient yet eternally youthful, you intended to keep on tearing your shirt, offering your heart to the crowd forever. For as long as it lasted. As long as the Phoenix kept returning to take you on its wings and journey on a moonbeam road, made of words and music.

No more.

The words on the digital, heartless pages are like bullets. Each one straight through the heart. Upon the stage, under the lights, as the smoke was going down, you faltered. You fell.

It happened in Yokohama. On the 19th. Holding on to the mic that was always your sword. On the stage, the place where you found your voice and you became once and for all your Self — the stage, that from a battle ground between the old you and the new, went on to become your Home.

Tonight, you had not been yourself. You sang the first song. Sat down to perform the second, visibly unwell. Your head was splitting. You could not go on. They rushed you to a nearby hospital where you died at 11:09. The cause of your death was revealed to be a brainstem haemorrhage.

You didn’t stand a chance.

The condition ‘’caused bleeding into that area controlling many essential bodily processes, known as histiocytes. Functions like breathing and heartbeat. Its abrupt manifestation during your performance was devastating for you, as well as traumatising for thousands of fans, who witnessed such an unthinkable tragedy first hand’’ read the bullet words.

They couldn’t save you.

There is a void in my heart where your voice was, where your smile was, in my darkest of darknesses for over ten years.

Where did they go?

Why you, why now, when your light was so bright, when the world grows darker and darker?

Where are you?

In a daze, I stare at your recent videos. High up on the stage, your pale face shines like the moon, framed by the ink of your hair. You have always been like the moon –half of you forever hidden away.

Envious, the shadows rise to deface you, swallow you up — an obliterating, total eclipse.

Captain’s Log -Thursday 19 October 2023.

Moon Waxing Gibbous, 4.79 days old and 23.87% illuminated with a tilt of -174.34°. The approximate distance from Earth to the moon is 380,693.80 km and the moon sign is Sagittarius.

Somewhere Nowhere.

You are void of course.

Doko da?….Doko nan do yo? Docchi da?

Wakaranee…

…

Kanzen ni mayotta, kuso..

Dochi da? Doko da? Dochi da?…

Wakaranee…

Dou sureba ii?…

Doko da, docchi da, koko wa?…

Koko wa, doko da? Dochi da? Doko da yo?

Dare ka? DARE KA?!?

Where am I? Where is this? Where?

I don’t get it

I am completely lost, shit

Where is this? Where am I? Where is this?

I don’t understand

What should I do?

Where, where the hell is this place?

Where is this place? Where?

Where? Somebody? ANYBODY !?!

Drifting.

Cast adrift in a red sea, and the sun is setting. You can’t remember how long you’ve been fighting to stay afloat.

At first, the maelstrom threatened to annihilate you. The water, crimson and salty, choked you, its taste like blood. When the winds stopped howling, you were barely there.

Lonely and freezing cold.

It must be days now. It could be forever now.

Where is everyone? The sea you loved, the sea of faces, what happened to it? They’ve always been there to catch you. Raised towards you. The arms of strangers.

Nowhere to be found now. When you need them the most.

Someone had warned you that this would eventually happen.

And the Phoenix, where is he? He had promised to be back for you until the bitter end.

When, if not now?

‘’You ask the wrong questions.’’

There he is. Suddenly, for the first time since that night on the stage, when your voice was taken from you, you feel lighter as he rises out of the water like liquid silver. Your breath eases out in one go. As if you had been holding it in for days. Trying not to sink.

‘’It’s not about when anymore. Time is but a mortal device. Here, it has no dominion.’’

‘’Where is here?’’

‘’Good question. Here is a Choice.’’

‘’Choice?’’

‘’You can go back to that broken body in that broken place that you have always tried to make into something more beautiful than it really is, mixing raindrops and moon dust and blood and mud. But your fingers will not be able to hold a pen and weave worlds anymore, phoenix feathers or not. Your voice won’t come out. You will no longer command melody. Your thought, your memory or both at once, might leave you. Your feet will not dance again. Your heartbeat has no rhythm. You can go back there, and lose any and all of these things. Or…you can come with me one last time.’’

You nod silently and let him help you climb up on his back out of the blood red sea. You don’t need him to explain to you.

You have a choice, he said, but there’s no choice. Not for your soul.

To sing. To draw tears from stones, to make the birds and beasts and even the trees move to the rhythms of your lyre -to be Orpheus or nothing. This is what you came for.

To return as a stone, as a tree — that is no return. No gift to bargain for.

It took you years to learn how to win. But you were born knowing how to lose. At one point, you even thought you were born for that.

‘’Here is when the gods demand their gifts back,’’ whispers the Phoenix in his solemn voice that has murmured so many lyrics and melodies to you before. ‘’Those gifts are never ones to have and to hold. And everything that has a beginning has an end. And the end is always chasing after that which has began.’’

Nodding, you caress his shimmering feathers -made of stardust and moonlight, like your songs. Its tail a blazing shooting star as you ascend together, fast, lighter and lighter.

The sea of red, your pupils dilating behind closing eyelids, the broken shell, the hospital, the oceans of faces, the kindness of strangers, the cruelty of strangers, neon dreams, the orb in the sea of space, a bright emerald and azure jewel against the dark, grow smaller and smaller.

You let your voice rise, one last goodbye.

Taiyo ni korosareta

Sayonara wa

iu mae ni…

I was killed by the Sun

Before I could say goobye

The curtain is rising on the night stage

Time is halted

I can’t stand up

I can’t move

Don’t look at me

Ah, the embalming makeup that I put

on for you

Is wearing off

In the applause

It feels like my ears are being torn off

‘’Is it beautiful? Is it ugly? Try to answer if you can’’

And I can’t laugh, and I won’t cry

alone in the shadow play

deserted

‘’It’s the truth, it’s a lie, it makes no difference at all’’

Soon, the curtain will close

amidst melancholy

‘’Is it alive? Is it dead? What are you searching for?’’

Taiyo ni korosareta…

‘’That’s it.’’ The Phoenix turns his head and smiles at you, in approval. ‘’The gods will be pleased to receive back what they gave you, honoured and multiplied. You will be able to stand proudly before them and say that you are empty. That you have given your all, every drop they once infused in you, just like you were meant to.’’

‘’That’s only half the truth.’’

For the first time since you left Earth, you protest.

‘’My glass was half full still. There were hundreds of songs left in me, one for each and every soul that was willing to listen, and join me, and sing. If the gods had only given me a warning…I’d show them.’’

‘’Come now…You know better than that.’’ The firebird laughs. ‘’You out of everyone, should know better…When your number is up, it’s up. ‘’

‘’I get no encore?’’

‘’You get no encore.’’

Captain’s Log -Friday, 27 October 2023

Moon Waxing Gibbous phase. 13.1 days old and 98.85% illuminated with a tilt of 154.811°. The approximate distance from Earth to the moon is 367,074.55 km and the moon sign is Aries. Visible through most of the night sky, setting a few hours before sunrise.

You can’t tell how long you have been flying. All sense of time, of place, lost. It could be an instant. It could be forever.

‘’Where we go, none of that will matter anyway,’’ says your familiar and you wonder if it is your lost senses he is referring to, or your songs. ‘’Look at the Moon. You’ve always worshipped her. She is waxing -her belly grows fuller, all the more bright now, in harvest time. She calls back to her those souls whose time has come. Come tomorrow, Samhain in mortal time, she will be full and partially eclipsed. A Hunter’s Moon -did you know they call it that? You were a poet, after all…’’

You narrow your eyes, uncomfortable. Up here, away from the sea of blood, you no longer feel resigned. You are weightless and feel like starfire -the tail of the Phoenix, his wings, are your body now, are they not? It’s your own soul you are riding, is it not? And there is no time -only the speed of light…

‘’Once a poet, always a poet,’’ you say, defiant. The Phoenix sighs.

‘’Ah, yes. Always the rebel. But where we’re headed, that won’t matter either. In the Gardens of the Moon, you will drink from the Water of Lethe. Like all souls do. All pain, all rage will be forgotten. Every word you never said. Every kiss you gave, and those you regretted not giving, and those kisses that you regret giving, too. The songs in the half filled glass of blood your heartbeat didn’t get to sing.’’

Increasingly uneasy you shift on his back. His words freeze you down to the core.

‘’That was not…That was not what you told me. Not what we agreed upon. I never ever signed up to forget that.’’

The Phoenix turns his head, his eye piercing through your soul, and you notice for the first time how much his eyes resemble yours.

‘’I am afraid you have no choice in this. This is what all mortals have to go through. Surely, you have always known this. You and your band mates had a whole album out called Memento Mori. You wrote another one, with your other band mates, called I am Mortal…You knew about Lethe. Better than anyone. You have always known. All singers do — the line of Orpheus…And you chose to die a singer.’’

‘’Once a singer, always a singer.’’ You raise your voice. ‘’And no, I won’t take ‘’it doesn’t matter’’ from you. We chose it because it did.’’

‘’Would you rather you went back to that body then.’’ The firebird’s eyes blaze. ‘’You know it would be useless to us now. I would never let you imprison me in there. Besides, there is no way back. It is too late for you to make me turn back. There is only one way. On to the moon we go -second star to the left and straight on til morning, or whatever it was that that tale your mother read to you once upon a time said. The moonbeam roads are clear. On the day of the Eclipse, the Sun, the Earth and the Moon will be ever so slightly imperfectly aligned. The Moon passing through only part of the Earth’s Umbra.

‘’It is not a perfect alignment, same way your mortal life has not been perfect. It is still a great honour. It will ease our passage. The veil will be thinner than other times. The gods want you to be able to travel back and forth in dreams for a little while. So you can say goodbye. It pleases them to grant you all these privileges, because you pleased them with your song. You are still mortal though. You still have to return your gift to them. Be blank once more, waiting to be reborn upon the wheel of the worlds…’’

For the first time since you departed, sheer terror takes hold of you. The light from you is flickering frantically. To those down below, it’s like a twinkling star, among myriads of stars on the milky way, on its perilous journey home among the unfathomable realms of space.

How — how can you ever dispute Them?

‘’No encore…You said I get no encore.’’

‘’That’s right.’’

You smile. ‘’That’s impossible.’’

‘’Oh?’’ Your Phoenix chuckles. ‘’How so? Are you so special that you have drunk from the elixir of immortality? The mead of poetry was not enough for you?’’

‘’You can laugh at me all you want -but the best laugh is always the last laugh.’’

‘’The gods always have the last laugh.’’

It is then that you summon all your light.

You raise your voice again. With all the star fire burning in you, you turn your gaze back in the direction of the little planet, now a dot in the expanse behind you. And you sing.

Calling out to them all. All those who would raise their glass for you and toast your name. All those who would run out to join you like a pied piper under the stage, a sea of faces, a sea of dancing shadows and smoke and strobe lights. All those who would raise their voices and sing with you, in the life that is now passing by fast before your eyes, leaving you behind.

You have to reach them. Call them to you. You need them now more than ever before. Last curtain call.

The night I met you

Was the night I was born

We’re lost in the dreaming Cosmos

In the Milky Way

For an instant or forever

we are driven mad

We are turning and turning and turning

waltz of the night and the moon

Lost in dreaming Space

Shall we dance?

Both joy and sorrow so dear

My dear, we two can’t return…

Dance with me…

Down here on Earth, I re-member you.

I follow you breadcrumbs in the songs you left behind. The guide to piecing you back together.

That boy whose name was Atsushi Sakurai — a name like a poem. Foreshadowing what was to come.

Atsushi — compassionate, industrious warrior. A lover and a fighter.

Sakurai — cherry blossom well.

That boy who was, by all indication, born to lose. Be a nobody in his hometown of Fujioka, Gunma prefecture, somewhere nowhere, under the looming shadow of a raging, alcoholic father.

That boy kept to himself, drowning in fear and ennui and sorrow -unless he was hanging out with the bad kids.

That boy contemplated death in a darkened room. Sang No Future.

He didn’t know it then but fate had other plans. The gods smiled upon him -those gods that favour song and dreams.

Those gods that bestow beauty. Enchant the eye of the beholder. Obliterate fear.

This one was not meant to go out with a whimper into that good night.

By coincidence or by design, his soulmates were not far away. They all sojourned in Gunma. Waiting.

They talked big and dreamt even bigger -the captain of their starship, visionary music genius Imai Hisahi. His trusty, gifted lieutenants, guitarist Hidehiko Hoshino and bassist Yutaka Higuchi. Drummer Yagami Toll, fuelling the engines.

The stars would align. Against all odds, the boy that was Atsushi Sakurai would become a man and move with them to Tokyo. From Kansas to the land of Oz. Together, they would eventually form what became the permanent line up of Buck-Tick, their band that would pass from dreams into the stuff of legend, going on to release 23 studio albums between 1987, the same year I came to this world, and 2023, when you departed from it.

All of them conquered the Japanese Oricon charts, eventually crossing all language and cultural barriers and reaching the West — and me.

Baku-chiku, stylised as Buck-Tick, means firecracker.

That boy that was you had fireworks in his lungs and eyes ever since he grabbed the mic and insisted he would sing, pilot the ship, stand on the stage and reign over it. Seize the throne, because he was destined to become who you became.

Your story, and that of your brothers in arms, will be retold over and over by music critics and journalists in your native land, but also elsewhere, by those like myself, who had the honour to hear your voice and sing your poetry. Your story now belongs to time for all time. Until the names of the players become but names, like those that came before them. Their faces distant icons, staring down from a galaxy of static stars, their smiles trapped in amber.

The destiny of names and faces. No encore. Your number up. Curtain close.

But see, that was not your true face. Your true story.

It was those songs. Outside of time, out of the void and into eternity.

Up there, light years away already, drawing closer to the dark side of the moon, you weave a web out of blood red yarns, and each thread reaching down to Earth is a song. Your song cascades down the threads of memory and down the centre of the labyrinth that is the deep, dark Space we call consciousness and you find me there. You find us all, all of those you claimed as your own — your crowd. Your people. Your pack scattered across the winds, all points of the rose compass.

My dear, we can’t return

Palm to palm our fingers touch

And you are a mirage dancing into the sky.

Dream, dreaming Universe I love…

For an instant or forever

driven mad

We can’t return

so dance with me

At the end of our goodbye

I’ll hold you

When I close my eyes

Say good night

Dream, dreaming Universe

At the end of our goodbye,

I’ll hold you…

We are that family that is not of the blood, but of the soul.

We are not allowed at your funeral, that took place silently, days before your passing was announced to us.

But that doesn’t matter so much.

Because you see, we can still hold you.

Like we always have, we will come find you in Space, while it’s dreaming its endless dream and hold you, because we remember.

In the Milky Way, on this small speck of emerald and azure, in an instant or forever, I re -member you.

Now the Moon is rising fast, too fast to greet you, her arms open, her belly full of lost souls, drinking the sweet milk of Lethe.

There is a web of red yarns, around your soul, around ours.

Her face grows paler. Her shadow darkens.

You won’t move closer.

You change course. Ever so slightly on your almost perfectly aligned road. 45 degrees. It is enough.

She panics. She thought they owned you, those Lords of Time that cut your thread, she thought she had you where she wanted you — didn’t you always gaze up at her, howled at her, sang her your songs?

‘’Come to me,’’ she commands. ‘’It’s time. You know it’s time. For you to be eclipsed. For your spark to be returned to the sun. To be weightless and bare. Come at once.’’

I look up at her through the window, the branches of the trees tracing a ladder to the stars.

‘’Not so fast’’ I chant. ‘Not yet. He is not yours yet.’’

The crowd demands an encore.

I pull out one of your last records. Your last trick, out of its sleeve.

Out of the corner of my eye, behind the thinning veil, I can see you winking at your Phoenix, suspended on the crossroads of time, a fixed star.

‘’Never trust poets.’’ Your eyes smile at me from the album cover. ‘’You never know where the next turn of phrase will come from. We won’t stop weaving until we get…poetic justice. Never trust stage -men either.’’

I press play.

Moon, say goodbye to me

Moon Sayonara Wo Oshiete

Oyasumi no kisu wo

Suite yume no hajimari ne

A goodnight kiss is

the beginning of the dream

Me wo tojite soshite

Close your eyes and then goodnight

Nugaigoto wo kanete nagarete wa kieru

Grant me a wish before I disappear.

I sing for you.

I re-member you.

Piece by piece.

One footprint on the snow after the other.

One song after another.

One album after another.

I break into dance, last number

The shards of glass, la-la-reflect me

ESCAPE

MOONLIGHT ESCAPE

Oh please God forgive me for everything

ESCAPE,

MOONLIGHT ESCAPE

Wrapped up in my cloak

Good night, into the dream beyond my dreams…

I flutter and dance

Embracing love until it spills out of me

To a world without sadness, an eternal ESCAPE

Before this night is over and dawn breaks, ESCAPE

Please don’t forget about me

With a wave of my cloak

Goodbye, higher and higher

I flutter and dance

Up there in the sky, over the mountains of the moon

Beyond the valley of the shadow

You ride

Having the last laugh.

28 October 2023 00:59

In loving memory of

Atsushi Sakurai

7 March 1966–19 October 2023 — Forever

Ride boldly

Wherever you are, my precious,

Guide.

心の底より感謝申し上げます

For everything.

Song Credits:

-Taiyo Ni Korosareta (Killed by the Sun)

Buck-Tick album: Kurutta Taiyo (1991)

Lyrics: Sakurai Atsushi

Music: Imai Hisashi

-Somewhere Nowhere

Buck-Tick album: Six/Nine (1995)

Lyrics: Sakurai Atsushi

Music: Imai Hisashi

-Yume Miru Uchuu (Dreaming Universe)

Buck -Tick album: Yume Miru Uchuu (2012)

Lyrics: Sakurai Atsushi

Music: Imai Hisashi

-Moon Sayonara Wo Oshiete (Moon Say Goodbye to Me)

Buck-Tick Album: №0 (2018)

Lyrics: Sakurai Atsushi

Music: Imai Hisashi

-Moonlight Escape (2020)

Buck-Tick Album: Abracadabra (2020)

Lyrics: Sakurai Atsushi

Music: Imai Hisashi

A phantasmagoria of visual art, sound, interactive tech and performance, Kimatica’s Transcendence aims to create altered states of consciousness in the audience combining the means of post modernity with those of ancient shamanism and ritual. This is a portal to a world where the line between inner and outer reality is blurred and the boundaries of time and space, the real and the imaginary, the conscious and the unconscious are breached to be transcended. Enter, trespass, and emerge forever altered.

To create today is to create dangerously and Maria Almena, Kimatica Studio’s Creative Director, is acutely aware of that.

‘’ My intention is to channel and to manifest, tap into other dimensions’’ she says determinedly as we explore the visual artists’ latest immersive experience Transcendence, which combines scientific, anthropological and psychological research with visual arts, interactive tech and live performance.

A cocktail that sounds potent and avant garde enough on its own, but Kimatica’s intentions are even more ambitious and radical than that: Their art attempts to create an experience that activates an altered state of consciousness in the audience. To achieve that, the collective works with contemporary media and technology to take viewers into new places or states, constructing parallel realities through light and sound, in a digital performance context.

This is no artificial thaumaturgy, however. Immersion here does not have mere entertainment as its object. The overstimulation and hyperstimulation of the senses aims to bring the audience to a meditative state of the here and now, reinforcing strong links with the Shamanic cultures of the past and exploring possible relationships between live digital performance and ritual. For Kimatica, Almena insists, computer and virtual tech simply push forward, trying to bring the soul into visible manifestation.

‘’We always say that with Kimatica we actually do portals. We make experiences that give access to other realities. I am very inspired by shamanism. The mission of the artist is the same as that of the shaman –that of a healer. And at the same time that of a revolutionary who dares to subvert the status quo.’’

She definitely looks the part, her electric blue hair adorned with a handmade feather headdress, her attire a cross between a glam rock character straight out of Velvet Goldmine and an alien elf of her own creation. What does art mean? Artists and audience regularly ask of themselves. What does it mean to us is probably the better question. Art is an act of intention — and like many radical artists before her, from Kahlo to Bowie, Maria fashions herself so that her mirror reflects a living embodiment of her art, her intentions evident from the first moment you set eyes on her: She has absolutely no desire to ‘’fit in.’’ Just like her art, she makes a spirited declaration against conformity embracing rainbow colours and polyphony. Her vision is decidedly futuristic and ‘anachronistically’ romantic at the same time.

‘’It is the artist’s task to heal, to save the soul of mankind,’’ she echoes Terence McKenna. Only, where others, of a more materialist and rationalist mindset insist on biochemical modification as the only ‘legitimate’ means of achieving an altered state, Kimatica proposes a multidisciplinary art-tech-science collaboration with a unique artistic approach that takes us back to roots, with the artist as medium and seer and art as the only ‘drug’ you need. Technology is the contemporary medium used to pass the message across more efficiently, but in this case, the medium is categorically not the message.

‘’I like to use technology as a magical medium,’’ she says. ‘’It helps me bring art out in life. When you show people things that they haven’t seen –that’s magic. For me, the conciliation of all these worlds is my vision and I try with this project to bring all these things together.’’

Overflowing with primordial, archetypal representations despite the modern tropes it uses, Kimatica’s art is unfashionably symbolist. The symbolism comes from inner experience, Almena points out — her magical encounters in her subconscious mind. ‘’I go into trance and explore many different methods of achieving altered states. This is what transcendence is, for me –you transcend when you alter your consciousness. I focus on mantras, meditation, dance trance, shamanism, light therapy –those are my main research tools to create an art that is magic.’’

It’s been a while since claiming art’s magical essence and origins as openly as Almena does was ‘’in vogue’’. In an age where the focus is increasingly taken away from the creative powers of the mind, and where science and technology are hailed as the new religion, her words sound almost heretical. Perhaps this is exactly where the transformative, radical nature of her art truly lies. If the true artist has always been the one who expresses what others cannot, who raises their voice and dares to criticize social ills where others do not, flaunting the rules of power, and refusing to go gently into that good night, then Kimatica indeed ‘’create dangerously’’. For Camus’ quote perfectly describes our own era even though it was written about his own.

The idea of art as the distilled essence and manifestation of an altered state of consciousness is nothing new in itself. The art of our ancestors originated in ritual and visionary trance and for a long time was used to revere the sacred and explore the shadow, the profane. The techniques of ecstasy have travelled for millennia and have been carried over from shamanism to the recent comeback of psychedelia and its ‘’rockstars’’. What is new -or a regression, depending on which way you look at it -is our culture’s refusal to give art its rightful place as a transformative tool for consciousness, opting for an increasing reliance on external “aids” for finding transcendence. We live in a culture that seems to be waging war on dreaming.

What was occult is rapidly becoming ‘disenchanted’ as everything from trance to ritual to ancient symbols to psychedelics is repackaged as memes and fads ‘’revealed’’ in plain sight. Meanwhile, visionary art (as opposed to mere entertainment or the abstract and cerebral art increasingly favoured by curators and collectors) is occulted, hidden under a shroud of invisibility which is usually imposed and not chosen. Forced underground, it is associated with outdated concepts in the popular imagination. To speak of visionary artists, creative geniuses, muses and revelations received through an inner voice that transcends the mundane self, to speak of art as that which is conceived as a result of “a powerful overflow of feelings …” will usually only solicit bemused looks of irony or confusion, at best.

Kimatica’s art bravely stands at the intersection between creativity and ritual. It does not deal with the realm of culture but that of occulture, in Carl Abrahamson’s definition –the luminal space where art and magic meet and blend. The artist, just like the magician, sees what others do not. Kimatica aims to part the veil and allow the audience to glimpse that world — a world which is most often seen when the eyes are wide shut, in dreams, or meditation and trance states -and perhaps take the magic passwords to it with them after they leave the auditorium.

‘’I think there is a lot of looking outwards today, especially in western society. A lot of ‘outscourcing’ –reliance on drugs, technology and other external ‘aids’ as escapism. Fragmented, detached from our spiritual side, we focus on what is outside rather than our inner resources. Because I am aware of that, I am trying to use and subvert it. I play with multisensory overloading to induce a sublime experience because we need the sublime experience to break through. Art is –or can be –sublime. I want to reclaim the sublime –the sublime that real art makes you feel. We don’t need more of art as mere entertainment. As an artist I feel I have a responsibility to create something that is needed and I think that meaningful experiences help us reconnect to ourselves and others, and transcend our selves –that is what we need.’’

Consciously subversive, Kimatica aim to help their audience look inwards as art’s erstwhile essence (effecting magical change through personal expression and enhancing our experience of life) is pushed to the margins by artificiality and mass market adaptation. Art has always been the main carrier for human mythologies. But turned into a commodified arena, mere entertainment, it is used to disenchant and demythologize the world stripping it of its creative power while at the same time, on the chessboard world of curators and collectors (versus that of visionary artists)emphasis is placed on the rational and abstractions to understand (or dissect) even the unconscious/ emotional.

Kimatica’s art, evocative, intelligent, thought-provoking, beautiful, seeks to transcend temporal and special limitations imposed by cultural fads. It is not a Babel of abstractions and explanations. Instead it serves a potent archetypal mythological potion as an antidote. This is great art, therefore does not need an externalized context –it speaks directly to the unconscious, retaining its mythology potential.

Entering the auditorium, the spectator / initiate is greeted by a hooded figure who offers them a piece of chocolate –a nod to the usually entheogenic concoctions that have traditionally been a part of ecstatic ritual everywhere, from the Eleusinian mysteries to Crowley’s notorious Rites of Eleusis –a series of seven public invocations that combined ritual and performance making them a direct precursor of experiences such as Transcendence. What follows is a thaumaturgy of light, sound and body movement aimed at triggering intense emotions as the denizens of the subconscious and the imagination blaze onstage, creating visuals that alter the space’s meaning. Lovecraftian creatures rise from the depths of the sea or outer space, Chinese dragons morph as they glide, Fata Morgana conjures the aurora borealis and uses it to dance the dance of the seven veils, elementals rage as Shiva and Kali dance creation or destruction into the universe, the firebird embraces the world in flames only to be swept away by a snow queen’s blizzard. A red light demon reminds me of Jean Cocteau’s drawings of Orpheus –the constellations that shape him made of connected laser dots.

This is only one interpretation of what is happening onstage. One experience among dozens of others. No one else has seen what I have seen. No one else can. The experience is designed in such a way that it can’t be replicated and is purely subjective, just like a real visionary experience. It is as individual and unique as the fingerprints –or thought forms –of the audience’s members. Predominantly imagistic, Kimatica’s art only provides you with visual representations of archetypes arising from the collective unconscious. What spectators do with them is entirely up to their inner experience and the iconography of their own subconscious minds. One’s celestial angel is another’s mechanical elf, my Cocteau drawing could equally be a goetic demon, witches dancing in the dark forest could be aliens making crop circles with arcane technologies or nymphs wearing furs and masks in the Cure’s ‘’Hanging Garden.’’ In Kimatica’s Walpurgis night, anything’s possible as they dissolve the boundaries between fantasy and reality.

This is a magically strategic art which challenges us to immerse ourselves in something else, something different, the unexpected, the other –and realize the uncanny, sometimes sinister shadowplay on stage is in reality a projection of what takes place on the stage within, rather than without. What has depth, what is unconscious, and unknown. The auditorium is a confined yet endless space in a space/time warp, where we can share with others a process that usually takes place in creative isolation.

Myths and archetypal images are expressions of fundamental psychological truths. We used to actively take part in writing our own fiction/ history, our own future. Now we passively live by fictions created by others and (force?)fed to us through the silver and big screen, the internet, and the culture of social media and its rapidly multiplying small screens reflecting other screens. Our culture encourages the narcissistic fictionalising of avatars and commodified, disposable identities instead of active, creative imagination that deeply transforms the self and the world within us as well as that around us. Without any connection to active imagination art stops being a therapeutic, transcendental experience and becomes mere escapism instead of active myth-making and remagining. You cannot transcend, you cannot even survive if you are unable, or worse not allowed to, dream. Contact with deeper layers of the psyche is essential.

‘’Different things happen to different people when they look inwards, and I want to leave that possibility open, ‘’ Almena emphasizes. ‘’I am asking for connectivity, connection with the inner self.’’

The world of the inner self, of spiritual knowledge, the imago mundi, is one where the image is ‘’acted from within’’ as the meaning of the words themselves discloses (Imo ago: I act from the depth). It can be known through its symbolism/ images. Mapping it is not a matter of discovery but revelation –a transcendental experience of communion with underlying forces that go beyond reason/thought.

For a poet, images are more important than abstract concepts –poetry connects images rather than signs/ defining terms. In order to understand the abstract we need images. Kimatica’s art is poetic as it focuses on the creative imagination using symbols and images, the language of archetypes, but provides no linear ‘’plot’’, no context, no definitive narrative or explanations. The spectator’s intuition, imaginative faculties and capacity for introspection are meant to actively engage with the material and provide the context by themselves and for themselves. Filling the gaps is essential for the creative imaginative process. Image interpretation and dramatic ‘’action’’ take place within the perceptions of the audience as well as the auditorium. Seeing the median universe of the imaginal realm demands our active participation as it can only be achieved through the faculty of visionary intuition. The world of archetypal figures is one that the active imagination alone is able to apprehend. This is exactly what Kimatica’s art is intensely aware of. It does not construct something unreal but unveils a hidden reality.

Of course, the involvement of the audience in the drama, actively engaging them rather than allowing them to watch passively, is not new. It has been a theme running through the avant garde in the last hundred years and has been reflected in the work of many of the most influential, cutting edge dramatists of the 20th century.

Enfant terrible Antonin Artaud called for theatre to become a magical ritual that both reflects and creates psychic change in audience and performers — a definition that comes as close to that of Kimatica as they get. Others spoke of a ‘’paratheatre’’ (Grotowski) where there are no actors or audience but instead a creative communion that has theatre as its source and ‘’disarms’’ participants of their social defences. The aim of such developments/ currents is to immerse the audience in the fiction they are creating , casting them in a role. Kimatica, however, strip their audience of all roles instead, even that of ‘’mere spectator’’. Immersion is a necessary requirement here too, but it is achieved by different means: There is no role for the audience to play on stage, because the plot takes place within rather than without. To ‘’view’’ and ‘’participate’’ you have to take your gaze inwards and let your own archetypes emerge and invest with their own meaning the images on the stage.

‘’I don’t do much research,’’ says Almena when I ask her about her influences. ‘’I see myself as a visionary artist –I channel. But I would like to be more connected with what has been done in the past. I am a contemporary artist so I use what is around me. But through my spiritual experiences I connect to ancestral messengers. It’s a totally subconscious process. Recently I wrote a paper about this that forced me to look at similar artists, shamanism in contemporary artists, that I’d say is my new bible.’’

Looking into what has been done in the past, trying to distil the ingredients of Kimatica’s intriguing magic potion, I find a similar desire to activate the audience in the work of Punchdrunk , an immersive theatre in which audiences experience epic storytelling inside sensory theatrical worlds (Firebird Ball, Faust) and of DreamThinkSpeak, who create site-responsive work that combines live performance with film and installations to create extraordinary journeys (Before I sleep). However, the experience Kimatica offers is entirely unique and its closest ‘’relative’’ and precursor seems to be the Black Theatre of Prague, another portal to the unconscious which predominantly uses images and audiovisual effects playing with, and revealing, inner processes.

The main key seems to be found in the experience’s name itself –Transcendence. It doesn’t only link back to shamanic ecstasy and ritual but to Jung’s ‘’Transcendental Function’’ which suggests that creatively mediating the conflict between archetypal characters allows a new way of being to emerge in the psyche in the form of a new symbol. The ability of the psyche to do this of its own accord, is the ‘’transcendental function.’’ We have lost this capacity, rather unwillingly (unless silence, complacency and blind conformity to trends makes us guilty by association). Kimatica’s art, with its emphasis on healing the soul, acts as dramatherapy –or rather its own unique twist on it.

Dramatherapists work with the relationship to the inner realm, characters as aspects of the psyche. Dramatic images are projected outwards from the individual’s psyche and are finally owned as part of the self. With Kimatica the healing process takes place in reverse: The images are channelled on stage, reminding us what we have lost, what we fail to embody. What is projected or rather channelled, is collective archetypes subsequently integrated by the spectator — a ritual, taking place on a stage that functions as a middle realm between the experiencing self and the Other. It requires of us that we reverse the process, shift our perspective and see ourselves as within these images that appear to be outside/ fractured fantasies of the self and the world. It requires of us to become a ‘’container’’ of archetypal entities, as the audience and performers come together to form an ‘’arc’’ for lost myths and images/ symbols. It relocates experiences, places, characters previously thought to be outside the individual –demons, gods, monsters, aliens, witches, nymphs, holy guardian angels and so on –within, and intensely envisioned images blaze out from our own minds investing the ones embodied by the performers with our own qualities.

This is an art that is collective yet has a highly personal nature –it goes beyond the rational and individualistic mind and produces a sense of being ‘’taken over’’ by passionate feelings or modes of being –just like in mediumistic trance or channelling. It is therefore unfashionably and unapologetically Romantic, as it requires a spontaneous overflow of feelings, with no interference from the rational mind.

‘’ We have shamans,artists, healers and science/ tech people working with us, and we also have all those people in the audience drawn to come here –which proves the healing power of art. There was someone in the audience, of a scientific materialist mindset, who found it to surreal to understand –I don’t mean for you to understand it (with the abstract, dissecting, analytical intellect.) I just need you to feel it. Many science people try to analyze it but at the same time are intrigued by it as they don’t know how we do it/ our methods of creating,’’ Maria Almena explains tellingly.

You can only recollect these feelings in tranquillity and begin to process what you saw building your own narrative. The reality of these images is that of the human psyche and through them inner experience is translated into visible form. In this lies Kimatica’s transformative impact.

Concepts such as that of Henry Corbin’s ‘’mundus imaginalis’’ raise more confused eyebrows today than quantum physics. But it is almost impossible to write about Kimatica without mentioning the very discarded world their art tries to bring back to the public consciousness. Art is the intermediary between the intelligible world and the mundus imaginalis –the world of the archetypal image/creative imagination which is as real as the world of the five senses and the intellect. To be experienced, that world requires its own ‘’super-sense’’ : Imaginative power. A real faculty, a door of perception, not just an artistic/ poetic invention. This faculty is the only appropriate one for perceiving dimensions of being beyond our sense perceptible reality –the dimensions we enter through transcendental experiences. A world that can be revealed only through a radical shift in the viewer’s cognitive register –an altered state of consciousness. Kimatica’s art is radical because it aims to –and successfully achieves to –produce such transformative shifts, and is a tribute to imagination and dreams, a world that can be entered when images are allowed to speak instead of concepts.

The Greeks believed that myths are the activities of the daemons, the gods, and that they shaped our characters and lives. If that is true, Kimatica’s Transcendence is daimonic, in the ancient Greek sense of the word. It conjures ‘’daimons’’ on the stage –beings that are somehow inner characters and yet external and archetypal. Transcending the individual and yet paradoxically projected from the depths of the individual psyche at the same time. With one foot in the ‘’real’’ world of technological innovation and the other in the disputed world of that which is not literal but imaginal, the mesocosm that mediates between the personal and collective unconscious and has a reality and rules of its own, Transcendence is the daimonic theatre of the soul. This is how we experience our imagination, encountering fictional characters in dreams, myths, literature –or the stage, as the known self and the uncanny, unknown other, meet at the crossroads and intersect within one mind, one body ‘’channeling’’ the world. To do this is for self-knowledge –it is not done for an audience in the traditional sense of a ‘’show’’. To do this in front of an audience in this case, means to recreate on stage the creative process, demonstrating the means by which transcendence and transformation of the everyday self can be achieved. It activates something vital in the watcher and In this way it resembles ancient Greek theatre although it has very little in common with its dramaturgy. It is awe inspiring and catharctic as it re-invests the creative imagination with meaning and purpose.

Ancient Greek theatres employed elaborate mechanical stage devices to amplify the gestures of performers and enabled them to portray those ‘’daimons’’ , the divine messengers, trespassers of the boundaries between the material and the numinous realm, ‘’dei ex machina’’. Kimatica does the same using the interactive tech available today, allowing the viewer to experience multiple hyper-realities representing the complexity of perception and human consciousness.

Ancient images are infused with new breath and life and gain greater numinous power through a performance that is a ritual act of resurrection and transmutation. Using images as metaphors for the psyche they express, it manages to relate the personal to the collective, the inner to the outer, the human to the transcendental and sacred.

It is said that the quality of the silence demonstrates how deeply one is listening: Deafening silence permeates the audience during Transcendence. Lost in their own subconscious journey the audience are listening to their own heartbeat as they follow the performers into trance and astral flight, immobile, enveloped in primordial darkness and complex, entropic rhythm sequences. The forces of Dadaist chaos clash with those of harmonious order. The cosmic balance is eventually restored, the ritual is over, and that deafening silence is followed by an equally deafening, rampant applause. We are here, at the same place at the same time, in the now, connected by the images we watch or enact. Both fragments of the whole and wholes containing fragments. We are what the modern world doesn’t want us to be –we are present, and we are dreaming.The transformation (or alchemical transmutation) has begun. Within the containers that are our minds, the personal dramas unfold. Silent watchers, we have witnessed the flame raging, dangerously–it’s time to take it home.

Never before has popular culture been so explicitly in love with dystopia. From Black Mirror to Humans and Westworld, and from the Matrix to Ghost in the Shell, Blade Runner 2049 and Ready Player One, we are increasingly bombarded by bleak, if magnificently realized portrayals of the future.

In recent years, the big and silver screen –and what seems to have largely replaced both in the form of Netflix marathons –consistently demonstrate a fixation with scenarios taking place in alternative hyper or meta realities where the rampant technological and scientific advancement has altered humanity to such a degree, that the term human has lost its meaning giving rise to societies where dehumanization reigns, and where more often than not humanity is replaced or annihilated by its own ‘’progress’.

What is perhaps even more unsettling than the scenarios themselves is their allure -the magnetic pull they seem to exert on us as we run breathless down fascination street, hungry for the next dose of dystopia, almost as if it carried with it a utopian promise. With Black Mirror, one of the most acclaimed modern science fiction series recently back on our screens with the interactive special ‘Bandersnatch’ and with Netflix announcing its interest in producing more interactive video content allowing viewers to be the invisible hand behind the main character’s life (a potentially dystopian science fiction scenario in itself as Charlie Brooker subtly hints at in ‘Bandersnatch’), so returns the debate over the not so distant future.

While the rich thematic concerns over consciousness, AI, the importance of privacy in the digital age and the consequences of tech advances on humanity are some of the elements that have earned these shows critical acclaim, along with the undeniable dose of escapism that makes audiences flock to them the same way they did to space-themed films back in the 60s and 70s, there is also something new this time around.

It’s been a while since Orwell and Huxley committed their dark prophecies to paper. The century has turned. The mirror’s other side has cracked open and our reality is increasingly invaded by its denizens: Androids, neo-matrix ‘cyber warriors,’ trans-human hybrids with prosthetic devices, holograms and virtual reality headsets have all arrived to a research lab, if not home, near us.

And it seems they are here to stay. All seeing-eyes behind screens are no longer scoffed at either, unlike the little green men of past decades. There might still be sceptics over the moon landing –but paradoxically it is often the very same people that subscribe to conspiracy theories about an upcoming age when humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious will be uploaded to a microchip, our senses permanently ‘’re-engineered’’ and out of sync with any notion of ‘’reality’’ (blurred lines between the real and the artificial and constant questioning of the very validity of these terms is another common characteristic shared by recent popular cultural products such as Westworld and Ready Player One).

What has changed is that the technological advancements seem to be here, no longer on some distant star. These are ‘near-future’ fictions –albeit dystopian ones –that seem possible and within the grasp of everyday reality. They begin on the pages of Wired and the New Scientist. Their desolation, angst, labyrinths and dead ends feel familiar, recognisable. So do their fascination, the sense of standing on a threshold waiting for the end of the world as we know it.

In Westworld affluent humans have the opportunity to ‘’vacation’’ in a western-themed adventure park populated by robots that look and act utterly human. In this Sadeian world they enact their most perverse fantasies –it is a hybrid reality where you don’t even need wearable gadgets and headsets, an alternate world with its own rules away from you ‘’real’’ self: What happens in Westworld stays in Westworld. Meanwhile, the robots, who suffer having developed their own consciousness , are trapped in a world of shadows with no apparent way out of Plato’s cave.

Spielberg’s latest film Ready Player One depicts a humanity living in slams, under the control of ruthless corporations that dazzle them –or rather literally blindfold them –with a virtual reality game which serves as an escape from an unbearable existence, to a world where they can be anything but themselves. The digital avatars they embody in a world of shadows are far more appealing than the world around them in merciless, cold light.

Sounds familiar? It seems new science fiction takes today’s actual, real-world developments in science and technology and shows how deep the rabbit hole can really go, following them up to their darkest conclusions. Can those ‘’virtualities’’ actually be real, and if they are indeed materializing at such a fast pace, should we be fascinated or mortified?

‘’A lot of the stuff that you see in the movies is indeed happening. Through the use of new perceptual technologies such as VR, AR and MR we can now adopt radically visual or auditory systems and spend time ‘out of body’, in the ‘3rd person’, ‘body swap’ or focused in peripheral vision’’ says Carl H Smith, director of Ravensbourne University’s Learning Technology Research Centre (LTRC), evoking the stuff science fiction is made of.

Ravensbourne University, in London, the real world, even possesses the UK’s first ‘holoportal’ — a facility which captures still or moving objects and generates 3D virtual doubles placing them into virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) worlds.

Working on the 2.8 million Euro Horizon 2020 project WEKIT, which uses the latest wearable tech to create ‘wearable experience’, as well as on ‘Code Reality’, the world’s first dedicated mixed reality course for teaching augmented reality, Smith believes the explosion of hybrid and perceptual tech can lead to new cognitive and creative insights about the nature of the world we live in.

‘’You can’t predict the future but you can invent it,’’ he says. ‘’Detractors see the new technologies as distorting innovations that actually bleed your reality dry despite their promises of ‘plugging you into an alternate dimension’. A lot of the appeal is due to people feeling powerless in the modern world and seeking an escape from their limited identities. So there is a clear link with unhealthy escapism that could lead to the body becoming a mere carrier disassociated from the senses, for a mind disassociated from reality. But the new tech could also strengthen our capacity for meta-programming and self transformation, allowing us to grow collectively.’’

To what direction? It seems the compass for the transformation of the senses through technology, for better or for worse is already pointing North: The North Sense is another project Smith is involved in, one which brings the opening of the film Ghost in the Shell directly to mind, its characters purchasing and adopting new senses every week. Change channel to the here and now, and a new sense is available from the aptly named Cyborg Nest. A tiny silicone gadget that is attached to the chest with two titanium bars that sit just under the skin, it is an ‘exo-sense’ that allows a person to sense the electromagnetic field of the planet, vibrating gently when a person faces magnetic north. Optimistic, Smith hopes this could help undo the damage caused by constant GPS use, training the average person’s sense of direction that has been decimated. Either way, with North Sense sold out on Cyborg Nest’s website, it’s official: Cyborgs walk among us.

German Dr Fridolin Wild, leading researcher of the Performance Augmentation Lab (PAL) of the Oxford Brookes University as well as numerous EU, European Space Agency and nationally funded research projects, is another man who delves daily into the futuristic worlds of virtual and augmented reality. Cinematic scenarios are fast becoming the truth out there, he confirms.

‘’Just a few examples: Minority Report –smart glasses interaction is quite commonplace right now. Suits with biophysical feedback and speech recognition –all these things are pretty much possible, taking the Tesla suit as a starting point. I think that every single Black Mirror episode that I’ve seen so far is within reach or has been done already. Without science fiction we would never learn how these visions can turn dark very easily –the dangers that come with new technologies can only be avoided through societal discourse. We have a choice as humans and societies, and can, and should, regulate how our markets or certain corporates act,’’ he points out.

Like with most technological advancements, the key word around the current favourites of both sci-fi and research, VR and MR, seems to be ‘’markets’’. Much like with Ready Player One’s OASIS it all started off as a game, or ‘’gaming platform’’ through Sony’s Playstation VR. Since then the market has been flooded, with Oculus (property of Facebook) and HTC following shortly after. The end game was never gaming. Back then, market research company Markets&Markets predicted that the VR market would touch $10, 06 billion in 2018. That future is now and according to statistics portal Statista the AR and VR market size worldwide is currently 17, 8 billion U.S dollars and expected to reach 143.3 by 2020. Anyone who’s anyone in business seems to be investing in the new technologies, with the likes of Apple’s Tim Cook claiming that mixed reality ‘’amplifies human performance instead of isolating humans’’ and Jeff Bezos showcasing how the new technology has dynamically entered daily reality through the Amazon Sumerian platform which brings together all the elements programmers need to create AR applications.

In agreement with Tim Cook, Dr Wild finds that the most interesting developments currently are wearable tech and AR, because these can foster engagement –a new area he calls performance augmentation where humans are helped to achieve higher levels of performance. He explains how the new technologies can help industries overcome the skills crisis providing training to people quicker, in more engaging ways, while the new generation of personal and and wearable computing fixes the errors of the technological evolutions of the past. ‘’A device that can be worn, such as haptic gloves, a belt or smart glasses,’’ he argues, ‘’is far more ergonomic and humane than something that keeps you bent over a desk.’’

For both Smith and Wild, such advances have the potential to get us back up and active after decades of deprivation locked in offices staring down tablets and phones. They are a response to an urgent need rather than a fake need created by ruthless marketing. The new products can only be a bad thing if they are glossing over the problems that we have, satisfying them with an escapist replacement. It’s neither black nor white –grey is their answer. They echo each other, insisting on ‘creating innovative technology for the good of all.’

It’s a tough call in a world where corporate and military interests never seem to stay out of the picture when it comes to shaping the future though: In a twist very much like the ones of dystopian scenarios Dr Wild reveals the military has repeatedly knocked on the door of his lab with seductive offers.

‘’We are building, for instance, a wearable solution that allows to capture what an expert does and then makes this re-enactable by a trainee by mapping the recording and the instructional annotation. You can wear the necessary vest and smart glasses and record what the expert does and then analyze the data mappings to a visual representation where you have an expert ‘ghost’ with you. We are also working on medical feedback movement, providing dexterity training for surgeons using wearable tech. Weaponizing such technology is not an option for me, ‘’ he emphasizes.

‘’I want to create ethical technology that is used to everyone’s benefit. But certainly they do realize, for instance, the possibility of getting indoors scans of virtually any place around the world using the new devices. This is something they are quite interested in and I think that certainly in the European parliament and the national parliament this needs a debate. Things need to be regulated here. Otherwise we’ll end up in a few years time with a scandal similar to the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook one, surrounding one future company that has collected an amount of people’s indoors scans of their homes and can use it to manipulate us –or for scenarios of police or military interventions.

‘’There needs to be a discourse, also a legal discourse, around some of the new technologies. That hasn’t happened yet. For example if you wear a pair of smart glasses that scan the environment to allow you to interact with it, what data security should be provided to protect your home? There isn’t much regulation surrounding that. At the moment it’s the Wild West out there.’’

Post Snowden and Cambridge Analytica, this seems to be the very much dystopian age of the surveillance wars more than anything else. Dr Kim H. Veltman, Scientific Director of VMMI (Virtual Maastricht McLuhan Institute); author and consultant on implications of new media for scholarship, culture and society, does not mince his words on the darker implications of current social media exhibitionism that walks hand in hand with shady financial and political agendas. VR, MR and AI may be the world of the future but they are still in experimental stage. We need not look so far for ‘’virtual otherworlds’’. Social media, where your masterpiece is ‘’yourself’’ in the form of an avatar, are already a form of virtual world, with friends you may or may not actually know and pictures of you that may or may not correspond to reality –a life depicted and told rather than lived.

It was Veltman’s friend, Warren Robinett (who was honoured in recent film Ready Player One) who put the virtual reality glasses and gloves together at NASA Ames in ‘86 with a system that cost about 3000 off the shelf, starting the modern fascination as a way forward. But much like Dr Wild, Dr Kim Veltman finds the new technological advancements could take an Orwellian turn and emphasizes the importance of privacy in the digital age.

‘’ As with all things that are at the frontiers, all these new technologies can be used for the good or the bad. The real problem is who is making the decisions and who is funding these things. There is certainly considerable reason for being concerned. The ones most interested in this, who have funded both Facebook and Google, are people like the NSA,’’ he points out.

‘’People that have interest other than the public’s good are positioning themselves to take over many of the new technologies. This is the real dystopia. If we don’t have real control over our data, then somebody else will have that control and they will do with it what they want, unless we have clear rules to say this is not allowed. It’s disturbing that the same advertising or PR company that was behind bits of the Russia scandal, the Trump scandal, the Brexit scandal and the whole Ukraine problem is all one company in Texas. We urgently need legislation in place to protect us from people who give us one message on the surface and then do something else under it. They are not allowed to do what they are doing. Freedom and truth are the things that have to be our priority and we can’t have people who have hidden agendas determine our reality and the one of those that are to come.’’

In the Wild West out there, the battle over ‘storytelling’, of envisioning the future and acting in order to bring it into reality is still the ultimate battle it seems. The stories we tell ourselves, the stories we let others envision for us, and whether we use the new tools to write our own dystopian or utopian future will determine the outcome. One thing is for sure –as we ride the 4th wave of the digital age, armed with headsets and donning Tesla suits, we’re in for a rollercoaster ride into uncharted territory. One that perhaps even Westworld’s robots would fear to tread.