Labyrinth III

CIX gallery, May 27 - June 6, 1998

BETWEEN FETISHISM AND DEMONISM

Coming out of the monumental, mimetically conceived Labyrinth, Ramicevic, through the process of creative economy, generates additionally two similar, yet differently structured concepts. The thread of Ariadne, absent in the initial project, appeared modified in the video performance Ring Shaping. By changing its mythical archetype function, Ramicevic changed also the course of its path. The synaesthetic principle, conducted through the manual kinetics, is synchronized with musical rhythmics. The spiral thread/tape, upon which illegible records are impressed, cut out, is modified in a monumental diskette. The endless revolving around its axis refers at the same time to some other, essentially different, but technologically same info-media information.

The following question is imposed on us as a crucial problem: How to find a balance in interpreting information, while not touching the extreme, frontier points of its setting? The rigid determining would direct us, either toward demonizing, or toward making fetish. The only interpreting and understanding would destroy, cancel the other one, or like in a mirror image, the thinking about the only information on salvation would be doubled. Hakim Bey maintains that in the field of information theory, there are some theoreticians/neognostics who consider themselves to be 'virtual Manichees who suggest that we accept virtual reality as cybergnosis'. Their religious, preaching role, suggests that we free ourselves from the body and find the salvation 'in the spirit of information', in the info-dependency. According to them, 'the machine is the Holy Spirit, the supreme medium who will spiritually' transport us in another reality. The striking force of information is, no doubt, the image. In spite of its presence, this 'sacral and iconic' collection/mess of data ultimately denies the material/body principle, and substitutes it with a surrogate ecstasy, which is denied of carnality/livingness. On social level, the preaching of such paradigms unavoidably generates the rhetoric of the spirituality, of the incompleteness. Contrary to the neognostics, Bey considers that 'out parameter should be the body'. Historically (excluding prehistory), from the Crucifixion, to, say, nowadays, the body has been sanctioned, satanized, despised both by the Biblical (mis)perception of the whole, and by the authority of the spiritual rulers. Perhaps, the cause for the atrophy of the language of the body lies in such historical heritage. By not considering it the house of our Being, we sacrificed the wholeness, the truthfulness. In the Western tradition, attempts are being made for establishing the whole, for equaling the self with the body, agreeing finally that the body is also a spirit. Already, one need not be a disciple of some Eastern mystical order, in order to understand that the body and the spirit are a whole, a base for reality, for life.

Following exactly the line of some universal harmonic patterns, as well as the path of his personal experience, this multimedia concept of Ramicevic tries simultaneously to find a balance between the body and the spirit, and to establish, if one may say, the unique Eucharistic logic between the daily bread and the inebriation from the chaotic audio-visual information. By establishing the interaction between the supply and the demand, between the economical presentation of the uneconomical Babylonian info-product and the recipient/the consumer, this author, with the gusto elements of his concept, relaxes us through the principle of seduction. By consuming his spiral pie/food for the body whose morphology in a multiplying way repeats itself as food for the spirit, he leads us into his CD collection. Moving unsteadily on the surface of different info-discourses, 'slipping' and 'tripping' over the misinformation, the recipient is caught in the trap of this archive.

The broadcasting of aggressive, edited voices from the audio channels, synchronized with the info-disks, refers to the psychedelic ideology of infolatry, of the surrogate of the certainty, of the fetish of a new dogma of our time. In such a chaos, perceiving for Ramicevic means a spontaneous subordinating to that chaos, while the courage and the freedom of manipulating information present the subtle poetics of his relaxed inventiveness and spontaneousness.

Konca Pirkovska