ATHANOR (2023 – ONGOING)

Play, as philosopher Eugen Fink observed, reflects humanity’s “cosmogonic impulse” —a primal drive to order chaos through creative engagement (Fink, Play as Symbol of the World, 2016). This notion resonated deeply as Dark Wood began to take shape, not as a didactic project but as a site of intuitive assembly. What I was seeking, in retrospect, was not clarity but immersion —an experience where creative process overrides rational articulation. This impulse sharpened after an encounter at the Best Kept Secret festival, during Aphex Twin’s long-awaited return to the Netherlands. His set, paired with Weirdcore’s morphing, chaotic visuals, suspended linearity. For a moment, the performance space became something else entirely: a technoid temple, a theatre of the sacred disguised in noise and light. An emerging of an awe-inducing “biblically accurate angel [1]”. The atmosphere wasn’t just immersive —it was ritualistic, even initiatory. Weirdcore’s cut-up imagery and Aphex Twin’s arrhythmic breakbeats coalesced into a kind of techno-shamanic grammar, bypassing language and flooding the nervous system (Aphex Twin & Weirdcore, 2023). This wasn’t “about” something; it was doing something. The message throbbed in my chest: Now is your turn. As Žižek (2018) reminds us, “there are never perfect conditions for an act – every act by definition comes too early, but one has to begin somewhere” (p. 37). In other words, waiting to perfect ourselves before we engage only perpetuates the vicious cycle of inaction. Though I remained convinced that inner disruption was vital, I realized it must be followed by intervention in the world— to open spaces where others could experience their own “cuts” and fissures.

This critical shift seeded what would later become Athanor, a collaborative project with musician and sound designer Niels Lockhorst [2]. Our work was not a reaction to Rotterdam’s nightlife per se, but to a broader disenchantment we both sensed in contemporary experience —marked by predictable line-ups, glowing phone screens, and performances detached from audience presence. Instead, we looked to forge a reactivated zone, one where intensity could return without collapsing into spectacle or ego.

Our methods borrow heavily from diverse but interconnected genealogies. From Jung, we took the idea of the artwork as a bridge to the unconscious— a product not merely of self-expression, but of something archetypal working through us (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933).

From Campagna, we found affirmation in the call for a metaphysical alternative to Technic’s “mechanistic utility.” His notion of magic is not nostalgic —it names an epistemology, a mode of worlding where things have aura, resonance, and potential for transformation (Campagna, Technic and Magic, 2018). If Technic flattens reality into quantifiable functions, magic reintroduces mystery and meaning through symbolic operations—ritual, rhythm, relation.

As a visual artist steeped in montage, I was drawn to VJing as a natural extension: live editing becomes a form of alchemical modulation. The screen is not a surface— it is a membrane. In this work, software and code function like an alembic, where images are transmuted in synchrony with sound. The grid-based interface of Resolume software appealed to my obsession with structures and sequences, allowing improvisation within a structured environment. Yet our early performances —at venues like Club Centraal and Worm —remained partial. We were always bracketed: an interlude between sets, not the environment itself.

The turning point was the decision to stop performing in events and instead create them. This shift in methodology was crucial. We moved from insertion into existing contexts to producing the total frame—from decorators to architects. Inspired by Heidegger’s notion that art “sets forth the earth” by “setting up a world” (Heidegger, 1950/2002), we designed immersive installations where form, space, sound, and interactivity cohere. Not an exhibition. Not entertainment. A constructed world.

We call it Athanor —the alchemical furnace, the “third mind” where transformation occurs. At its core is an audiovisual “idol” of pulsating light and spatialized sound, a feedback body that responds to presence and proximity.

In creating this space, we found ourselves drawing unconsciously from Huizinga’s idea of the magic circle (Huizinga, 1949): a bounded space “marked off beforehand,” where different rules apply. This is not metaphorical. The work installs a world where trance, play, and improvisation supersede analysis. Within Athanor, time stretches. Frequencies take hold. Images throb. Meaning is not given —it is allowed to emerge.

While in the process of designing our first fully immersive environment, together with Niels, I attended an introductory evening at the Rotterdam Freemason Lodge “De Drie Kolommen” (’s‑Gravendijk & Hipke, 2024). Though the true rites remain hidden from non‑initiates, the lodge staged a “mock ritual” that felt palpably charged —an occult microcosm enacted within the walls of the sanctum. Over beers in the canteen afterward, Niels and I spoke with two members—whom I’ll call A and B, in keeping with their own tradition of discretion. Curious about the solemn intensity with which they had performed the mock rite, Niels asked A how the seriousness of the ceremony fit into their practice. A told us that, for Masons, ritual is above all a game: “Each player has a role, and for the pattern to hold, everyone must play their part with full commitment in order for it to work —yet we never forget it’s ultimately a game.” In that comment, I recognized the same dialectic at work in our own installations: a crafted worldbound macrocosm that only works when participants accept its rules wholeheartedly, all while maintaining an underlying awareness of its artifice. This blend of earnest play and reflexive seeing became another thread in Athanor’s tapestry, reinforcing the idea that ritual—and art—can function simultaneously as microcosm (a self‑contained, rule‑governed realm) and gateway to broader transformational potentials.

Like Burroughs and Gysin’s Third Mind (1978), Athanor generates a logic beyond intention. The live interplay of machine, viewer, and artist creates a constantly shifting experience —no performance repeats. The work exists only then, only there. This is by design: recordings are prohibited, a refusal of our need to grasp experiential reality. In this way, the project resists the flattening of ritual into spectacle. Presence becomes the medium [3]. Athanor’s refusal of documentation is both aesthetic and ethical. To record it would reduce its ritual ephemerality to a consumable artifact—a betrayal of Campagna’s “Magic” in favor of Technic’s “metaphysics of measurability” (2018). Like the alchemist’s furnace, Athanor’s power resides in its dissolution: its impermanence mirrors the transformative act itself, resisting commodification and the tyranny of “finishedness.” Participants are not spectators but co-authors; their somatic memories—the shiver of light, the hum of feedback—become the sole relics of the ritual.
As one visitor reflected, “everything glitching and vibrating, somehow revealing the matrix of the universe”, another said: “I lost track of time”, “The visuals and sound were breathing with me” and “it was showing me that another life-experience was possible”. Here, the unrecorded moment becomes a radical act: a refusal to flatten wonder into data, and a reclaiming of art as lived encounter, creating a living archive, replacing documentation with witnessing.[4] In its evolving iterations, Athanor aims not just to replicate the shamanic, but to re-ritualize art through form, feedback, and embodied intensity. We borrow from club culture’s kinetic urgency and fuse it with contemplative pacing. In Furnace, participants trace glowing sculptures or clench wooden obols while moving through layers of fog and sound. As they move, the system react—not theatrically, but organically. What resulted was not a “performance,” but a field. We —the artists —merely seeded conditions, as participants become co-authors of the ritual. This participatory framework—dissolves hierarchies: we, the artists, recede as facilitators, while the work itself becomes the “fire” of transformation.

[1] The term “biblically accurate angel” has recently gained traction in online meme culture, referencing the often surreal and terrifying descriptions of angels in scripture—beings with multiple wings, faces, or wheels of fire (Ezekiel 1:4–28; Isaiah 6:2). These depictions diverge dramatically from sanitized Renaissance imagery, and have been embraced by internet communities to signal encounters with the sublime or the uncanny. The phrase became viral shorthand for anything spiritually overwhelming or viscerally alien. According to Know Your Meme, its usage peaked in 2021 and 2022, particularly in reaction images and TikToks exploring theological absurdity or cosmic horror (Adam & Caldweld, 2020). Weirdcore’s visual work channels a similar iconography—dense, uncanny, and kaleidoscopically divine.

[2] Having both witnessed the Aphex Twin & Weirdcore performance together, and were altered by it. The experience became partly our daemon, a guide in navigating the possibilities which multi-sensory rituals had to offer.

[3] The prohibition of photography in this work aligns with Alan Watts’ critique of the camera as a tool that “distracts from actuality” (Watts, 1971/2023, 06:10). In a lecture later transcribed as Transcending Duality, Watts observes how the impulse to photograph—to “grab life” with a “little box”— paradoxically removes us from lived experience, substituting direct engagement with a mediated replica. This tension mirrors the alchemical solve et coagula: the ‘documenting’ photograph fixes and preserves, while the ritual demands surrender to impermanence. For Watts, true presence requires releasing the need to reproduce; here, the prohibition invites participants to imprint the experience not on film, but in the mutable medium of memory.

[4] This privileging of the “lived encounter” over representation echoes the Situationist International’s practice of the dérive—a purposeless drift through urban spaces aimed at rupturing commodified experience through unmediated, embodied engagement (O’Rourke,
2021).

References:

Aphex Twin, & Weirdcore. (2023, June 11). Live festival set [Live performance]. Best Kept Secret.

Burroughs, W. S., & Gysin, B. (1978). The third mind. Viking Press.

Campagna, F. (2018). Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Fink, E. (2016). Play as Symbol of the World: And Other Writings (I. A. Moore & C. Turner, Trans.). Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (2002). Off the Beaten Track (J. Young & K. Haynes, Eds.; J. Young & K. Haynes, Trans.). Cambridge University Press.

Hipke, J., & ’s-Gravendijk, J. (2024, November 21). IKON Lezing | 18 jaar later! [Introductory evening of the Rotterdam Freemason Lodge]. De Drie Kolommen.

Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo Ludens. Routledge & K. Paul.

Zizek, S. (2018). The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously. Penguin UK.