Target Practice. Intuit rather than think, then think. That’s phenomenology. Attempt to track audio and visual as linked. Concentrate and try to discern which determines the other: is visual reacting to audio or is audio reacting to visual. Admit defeat in the face of kettle logic (see Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams) and metalepsis. Don’t underestimate the possibilities and aptitude of peripheral vision and staring, fixing your eyes like locking out your knees. Concentration can have its side effects. Breath through the onset of nausea, quickening heartbeat, and retinal exhaustion. Grip arm rest or pencil for support. Conditionally, Optic Force Trilogysimulates a drugged state, a future state. Be warned and proceed with caution and abandon. There are secrets of form layered within and on top of each other which reveal secrets of meaning: Step away from the Others and I shall tell you the mysteries Of the kingdom. It is possible For you to reach it, but you Will grieve a great deal. … Look, you have been told everything. Lift up your eyes and look At the cloud and the light within It and the stars surrounding it. The star that leads the way Is your star. Judas lifted his eyes And saw the luminous cloud, And he entered it…* Optic Force Trilogy 1: Geomagnetic Mind Feeed 2: Max Force Vision Phaser 3: Day-glo Supernovea __________________ Hyper color, neon rainbows, fuzzy bleeds and sprays, heat vision, bright acid flashes. Optic Force Trilogy traffics in saturation and over stimulation set spinning at a frenetic speed: Speed, speed, speeding. Acid, acidic, hallucinatory: acidic colors, acidic sounds. Distortion turns everything, auditory and optical, into patterns and repetitions. The patterns contort, reflect, mirror, oscillate back and forth, drift across the screen, different ones rotate at different velocities. Colors and images flash rapidly: subliminally. Warnings, alarms, and alerts shoot through the trilogy in rapid fire. The warnings are explicit, the cautioning exclamatory is implicit throughout. There is some kind of scheming math and suspicious Gematria at work: 3 parts, each made up of 3 sections, each pressed on 3 inch DVDs, each 12 minutes long (3x4, four being the number of bars in a measure). This frenzy is deeply ordered; it wants you to plumb its structure. Geomagnetic Mind Feeed forms around a persistent image of a pyramid beyond reach crowned with an eye above a pixilated skull. The skull is key. Simple blocky form and low resolution, a prevailing mode here, marks these videos as the mutant offspring of early video games and just-past technologies where the pixel is the icon. The skull radiates its outline like a pulsing alarm, a beating heart, signaling some catastrophe – nuclear meltdown? Many competing neon signs are plugged in at once, overlaying each other in palimpsest. Parts 1 and 2 reverberate with expanding rings of the bulls-eye, and the latter, Max Force Vision Phaser, is utterly absorbed in a hypnotic obsession with concentric circles and spinning orbs. The target is central. After-images multiply. Balls begin to suggest eyeballs with branching nerves making up the infrastructure of sight, or eggs and yolks, or plasma lightning globes, or a rare Pandora’s ball leaking out lots of ominous things and mesmerizing patterns. They flicker on and off in spasms: there is a warning, “Don’t watch if you are prone to seizures.” Flashes fire like synapses trying to jump electricity between axon and dendrite. A wormy squiggle burrows across the screen in a path that traces brain-like clumps of gray matter. Part 1’s book insert has drawings of conduits and channels that double back on themselves, making the connection between intestines and the soft stuff of the cerebral cortex visual and distended; there is a drawing there of the brain with one region labeled “parietal lobe.” The flashes of sound and image could be firing or misfiring, given that sudden pauses freeze the frenzy on screen every so often, as though the DVD were scratched or jammed. Skipping, double-takes, and doubt enter. In this trilogy, optic force circles around a central malfunction. Break downs expose mechanics and mechanisms taken for granted, bodily or otherwise. Malfunction is so insistent because robotics, machines, synth, and digitization are so present, especially in the videos’ sound, much of which comes from live performances and ocean recordings. There is distortion, feedback, whirring, revving engines, wind, buzzing, drones, frantic synthetic sci-fi things gone haywire. There is static gun fire. The poetry of malfunction is turned into (and found in) repetitions and beats. Max Force Vision Phaser (phased energy rectification) is a dangerous weapon used at such high intensities; it can kill and vaporize, as demonstrated in the accompanying book insert that, like a flipbook, shows drawings of the progressive freak-out break-down destruction and explosion of a man’s head…mind blowing headplosion of the viewer, a bystander, the unwitting, the knowing. Similarly, Geomagnetic Mind Feeed can lead to tumors and extra limbs (and extra e’s), as well as crystals in the blood stream and warping of the hippocampus. Feeed emanates from a central pyramid monad. The pyramid returns in Part 3, this time dialectically coupled with an abundance of explosions inherited from Part 2. The trilogy ends in destruction and spectacle: a climax of self-destruction. It appears to be a danger of the future.