‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ is a black and white film-essay comprising of many still images and narrative voice over, inspired by Chris Marker’s poetic exploration of tragic romance and möbius temporality ‘La Jetée’ (1962) and Andrej Tarkovsky's psycho-geographic odyssey ‘Stalker’ (1979) whose protagonists self-reflexive search, quests through a post-cataclysmic landscape, pregnant with perilous psychic portent.
‘Mercurial-Mecha-Morphius’ sings a cosmogenic swan song of a histories end, before speculatively exploring fictive tableaus depicting ritual technologies of stellar theurgy, whose reliquaries, figurative sculptures and votive altars are imagined amongst post cataclysmic urban environments, re-membering the techné of a once embodied Astral Magic.
By collaborating with Ai to ‘dream-into-being’ these images, I invited ambiguity, adaptation, chaos, chance, symbolism, synchronicity and the celestial into my creative process. When fed poetic esoteric prompts, Ai offered me oracular visions of the mystery’s architecture, which inspired in me a recognition of magic's insubordinate atavism and irrepressible perennialism.
Ai can impossibly illustrate the irreconcilable complexity of as yet un-arrived contexts, in ways that may move me beyond the depthless spectacle of its artifice, but can it inspire our creative capacity to create new stages, doors and thrones for the stars and planets that dance us through the metamorphic dreaming of our world?
Gnostic Animist, Artist and Astrologer Ben Jeans Houghton’s multidisciplinary practice spans votive sculpture, architectural installation, oneiric film essay, self-reflexive writing, ritual-costume, improvised performance, mantric-glossolalia and esoteric lectures. The work explores and expresses magic; the art of transformation and its methodologies, technologies, agencies, and implications, through art-praxis, as-gnosis, informed by astrological, philosophical, and metaphysical perspectives.
Ben has delivered exhibitions, screenings, presentations, performances and publications internationally in Germany, Greece, Africa, Japan, South Korea, and America and nationally across the UK with CCA, Gymnasium Gallery, Bloc Projects, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Generator Projects, Whitstable Biennale, BFI and Channel Four amongst others, alongside writing and presenting lectures for esoteric conferences: Trans-States; Esoteric Arts - UK, AstroMagia; Art of Astral Magic - INT, and Occulture - DE.