Azguyaenquainan! is a force, a metaphysical technology, and it is a waterslide, a river, and a carnival of nuance. It permeates into everyday life, creating slippages of uncanny intimacy where the nonsensical, deeply personal, mytho-fantastical, and the expected forms of social presentation are found slipping and sliding all over each other. It is an adaptogenic space as much as it is an ethos or the weather systems of an avatar too big to embody. It is the most intricate game of peekaboo (one that even surprises me) as much as it is a swarm of bees.
The most official presentation of Azguyaenquainan! was within the UCLA Game Lab, where some part of it still resides. It took the form of a talk, some moments of the talk were actively chosen by the people, but all of the talk was responsive to the energy, participation, and presence of the audience. In this way, Azguyaenquainan! if very much about creating a space of uncanny possibility, embedding countless secrets into a space, so that when we access a place that we think is familiar, myself included, the secrets have made more secrets in the wake of our leaving them, and soon infinities are ripe for beholding as a group. I simply dig up the buried things as we all explore what worlds they made in places that others know better than I. Many times, the presence of each individual in the room changes the flavor of these hidden things once they appear, and I do my best to tune them to the emerging energetic fields that our collective story-organ is sounding together.
Above, the UCLA Game Lab created space for me to present perhaps the most explicit form of Azguyaenquainan! to date. It was scheduled as a talk, and titled as such. At different sequences within the presentation, audience members made conscious and unconscious decisions about what they were interested in, which I stewarded to help us communally “tune-the-story-organ” collectively around the space we were all creating through the cognitively-adaptogenic framework of Azguyaenquainan! The walls were covered in flow charts about the nature of archetype, virtuality, reality, interface, cultural fields that try to make overarching statements about what these terms might mean, and many secrets and surprises were set up in the room over the course of two weeks. At several points in the talk/performance, scripted events were triggered by the desires of the audience, and at other points, space was left for relational improv. Featured with the tangley 3D drawing above is Eunice Choi, and also Tim Tsang joined in at a point to help synchronously read in duet a text called “The Humming Fate Game of the Mystic Flame” that was written in response to being in the Lab itself in weeks leading up to the presentation. for more pictures from that event and the press release, there is a LINK HERE.
In this situation, Azguyaenquainan! became a streaming performance within my home where, like Yesterday is Still Today, uncanny secrets were orchestrated into an environment that otherwise seemed totally off the cuff. In the above image I, channeling a character, revealed the daily planner for the entity that was tangled in striated thoughts, trying to untangle from the time it unwittingly made in the structure of its own actions. I would slip between character and self, creating fluid capacity for the story and the real to become marbled like wagyu beef.
Sometimes I bury it in drawings, and sometimes It changes the lines I make in my own mind. I try to bring it everywhere I go, but I often spill some and leave it behind. One thing I know is that it takes an entire lifetime to tune it just right, and it is altered by every environment that it encounters, often causing the tuning process to become more complicated. It can show up in living rooms, birthday parties, parlors, lawns, streets, pockets, caverns, schools, online, and sometimes even mutates the nature of the other “discrete” works I make.