Transdimensional Archiving
the path is art and healing, queer ceremony and neo-mysticism, spirituality and divine devising. learning from teachers so I can hold space safely and without appropriating
The observatory - Transdimensional archiving - Liverpool
An Immersive experience of autoethnographic documentation and practice
I feel strongly about holding onto The Observatory as a TRANS WORLD —> I conjured it/connected with it, as it is an actual quantum universe that now exists because I OBSERVED IT==> as a Trans world, and I really need to protect it as a space by and for queer and trans people
>Maya viewfinder, McKenna’s quantum Meso-Greco universe but with Irish paganism and queer/trans theory and ecology added in.
>OOH - Trans* ecology as a new evolution of paganism/shamanism - talk to Dr Kashian about this
THEATRE NOT AS A VOCATION BUT CEREMONIAL PRACTICE - DIVINE DEVISING
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CEREMONY - this is the anchor of life and practice. it is how Indigenous cultures live, the cornerstone of art and healing, and the type of life I’m calling in. We call it escapism in the West - but this is LITERALLY WHAT LIFE IS FOR in other cultures.
don’t make it a job or duplicate the work — like Richard said — don’t make the rubble bounce, kid.
My autoethnographic praxis and spiritual/mystical practice is anchored on my daily ceremony, which involves sitting at the altar I’ve built, calling on the guides, meditating through various methods, channeling the other realms, and documenting what I receive.
How are other people doing this? How have other cultures done this?
Research is backup
Kim Robertson - plant medicine - TA
Engage everyone in a conversation about auto ethnographic documentation - in the paradigm of my research and language > then document this and use it in my language
Doing the same thing over and over is part of the practice - what opens up in that process? > Brady drawing the same thing as part of exploration
>it's a trance state
Notes from call with Ali on the way to the queer cacao Equinox circle of sychronicity
Presentation -
Take people through a practice of connecting to the other realm - workshop
Present specific parts of the auto ethnographic work for the exhibition - journals, drawings, transcription, etc
[3/18/25, 6:07:44 PM] Ali Transart: https://landing.vda.lt/journal/announcement/view/1
[3/18/25, 6:17:33 PM] Ali Transart: TRANSDIMENSIONAL ARCHIVING | The Observatory: An immersive experience of autoethnograhic research + documentation
[3/18/25, 6:28:26 PM] Ali Transart: bradycsmith@gmail.com
[3/18/25, 6:29:11 PM] Ali Transart: +1 (720) 387-5278
[3/18/25, 6:31:11 PM] Ali Transart: “interior investigation” (observatory)
[3/18/25, 6:37:27 PM] Ali Transart: Summation! My suggestions…to keep or discard.
Part I - Presentation: 45 minutes. A workshop of ONE of your Transdimensional Archiving practices.
A) Present/contextualize “Transdimensional Archiving” (10 mins)
Lead workshop (15 mins)
C) Post-workshop discussion/Q&A (10 mins)
**Leaves you an extra 10 mins buffer time for any/all portions!
Part II - Exhibition: An open call for autoethnographic research & documentation in the form of visual/material, textual, sonic artifacts
This could be pages of a journal, or portions of a journal torn out or blown up; scribblings, doodles, illustrations, photographs; sonic/field recordings, voice mails/messages; video documentation.
[3/18/25, 6:45:55 PM] Ali Transart: What does it mean to / How do we document and/or present autoethographic research?
[3/18/25, 6:46:50 PM] Ali Transart: This could be called “The Observatory” OR another word that reflects “observatory,” “interior investigation,” “sur-veillance” > I need to preserve The Observatory as my own name/world. No QT appropriation pleez
**Feel free to use the language/structures I have outlined here for your submission forms!
[3/18/25, 6:49:33 PM] Ali Transart: **Also, if you don’t want to put forward or manage the call for autoethnographic work, I am happy to do so, and to provide attribution to you that this concept evolved out of our dialogues - without using your terminology.
[3/18/25, 6:51:00 PM] Ali Transart: I think “an autoethnographic portion of our residency exhibition” will be something we will receive in submissions anyways - so it’s just about whether or not you want to take ownership of curation in terms of your research interests/questions.
Workshop submission:
Title: Can I get a witness? Transdimensional archiving as ceremonial practice
Description: My autoethnographic praxis and spiritual/mystical practice is anchored on my daily ceremony, which involves sitting at the altar I’ve built, calling on the guides, meditating through various methods, channeling the other realms, and documenting what I receive. This workshop will lead participants through one of my transdimensional archiving practices and document as much of the process as possible. I will lead participants in a meditation grounded in shamanic and pagan practices: orienting ourselves in time and space (calling in the directions, invoking our current position on the Wheel of the Year, in the Maya calendar, and in the Western astrological framework). From this receptive state we will engage in a journaling practice about what it means to be seen, approaching it as a channeling/mediumship/automatic writing session where we are receiving information from the other realms and parts of self (inner children, alter egos, ancestors, archetypes, animals, nature, mythological and cultural figures, the collective unconscious, etc). We will have a group discussion about what we received and our experiences of being seen and unseen, both positive and challenging. If anyone or anything needs to be witnessed in what was received, we will hold that as a group, offering support and reflection.
Goals: To test the transpersonality of my autoethnographic methods; to explore and document others’ practice and experience for the archive my research is creating. Part of my research involves tracking and archiving syncretism and I am very interested in the phenomenological experience of others who follow these practices. It will inform research questions: whether elements can be isolated from the larger ceremony and still provide the desired connections; if the same morphic fields can be opened and accessed across contexts, mediums, and vessels.
Format: is 90 mins possible?
Present/contextualize “Transdimensional Archiving” (10-15 mins)
Opening ceremony (5-10 mins)
Journaling/writing (10-15 mins)
Group discussion, witnessing and contextualizing (15-20 mins)
Next steps, close ceremony (5 mins)
Post-workshop discussion/Q&A (10 mins)
The group exhibition: Surveillance, exposure - under the microscope? The Observatory is Trans, Trans is about the telescope, going out to the stars and the astral > art and research is grounding it, it’s about the microscope, the subjective that becomes objective, looking closer to see the real story (which is in itself a key concept/component of my research > new tech developments that let us see what ancient people were doing with substances and ritual). All of it is correspondence, understanding the universal through the personal
Not monologue, dialogue
In a house that I’m pretty sure is full of mold and making me sick, because once again, I said yes to something because they put me on the spot, and I liked how much they liked me.
This will be an interesting one. Ha! I just realized there is a giant Holly tree outside the window.
Is the dance to see if I can alchemize it, transmute the energy, and stick with my commitment? Or say, I’m sorry, I can’t do it, my body is more important?
I will do the latter if it turns out I can’t live with it. Funny this is what happens when I take the thing that I thought was better for me—more stability by being in the same place longer.
Funny also how both owners are named Liz. I can’t express how much I’d rather be sitting for the other. All I can do is wait it out and make sure this is a reaction and not a cold, but I’m pretty sure I know my body. It’s feeling like autumn is coming and my system’s all discombobulated anyway.
In the meantime, I do feel like I’ve been having some good raps and connections both with Kit and Maya astrology. I finished Mark Elmy’s course on the calendar and started figuring out everybody’s Maya crosses, and on Saturday, Jess, 1/3 of the first Holy Triumvirate that helped save me from my family and the church, the one I’d call my best friend if I had to hand someone that designation, was the first of all of us to turn 40, so I did a reading for her, and then for all three of us, and it totally blew my mind.
Turns out that all of us have known exactly what we were doing this whole time.
and that when our energies combine, it makes 8 Imox, the dream, the collective consciousness, cosmic amniotic fluid.
the eternal love we’re always swimming in.
you’re already doing it, you’ve always been doing it.
people just want to know they’re not alone, and it’s never over. that they are not wrong, but good. that they will be redeemed, one way or another.
today in therapy, during the part where I was supposed to comfort my child self, instead they comforted me, and told me that we have always known.
* * *
what dropped in during practice, during communion with Kit and the other realm, is that this work, these projects, this PhD, it’s not a monologue, and that’s what so much of academic discourse and art has been throughout history: gatekeeping. withholding. privilege. doling out information, access, experience, to those paying admission. I have always wanted to throw open doors and build bridges. let everyone in. connect the silos. the aim hasn’t changed, the scope is just widening. now it includes the dead, plants, trees, animals, minerals.
the ones whose voices aren’t very loud.
at least not in decibels.
this work is a dialogue, it’s not a monologue. it’s communion, channeling, amplification, mutual upliftment. and I think it all keeps coming back to titration, in my conversation with Rebecca doing exit interviews for DMTx yesterday it came up again. The real work of this lifetime, of being a person, is this dance, this titration, dual awareness: it’s the theme of the integration work I’m being called to and my service at EDUK, dropping in and dipping back out again to check with the physical surroundings, your body, the other bodies. to make sure everyone is safe and has what they need, then dissolving back into the collective consciousness again. letting the play unfold, channeling the characters, but remaining the director, only momentarily losing that first-person perspective altogether, retaining the ability to reconstitute it.
this is what is meant by radical subjectivity. I’m learning Kit’s work more deeply and why we were all called together, along with Michael and Laura, I see how everyone brings something interrelated yet unique and beautiful. phenomenology, full-sensory, it’s all different pathways to the same thing. but I think part of my work here is to bring it back to the people, free the message from the gatekeepers, pry it from the jaws of academia and release it from the galleries studios, back into the round, the fringe, the pound theatre, the zine, the blog and newsletter, these new old fashioned forms of communication.
I don’t know what place, if any, there is for alcohol. But there is something important in the continued exploration of the artist/mystic/alcoholic archetype.
all is unfolding. time for more learning.
Thesis Notes
Ontology/interbeing/phenomenology +
Hauntology/gHosting/possession - hysteria/psychosis
Woodruff: The Moon and the planets are physical presences; they move around, and their motion impacts the biosphere on Earth, of which people are part and parcel. Astrology is an elevated, more complex form of meteorology with a psychological chaser.
Knowledge of being includes experiencing everything as a being, including planets
Kit’s thesis: Cosmology as part of the ontology of African religions
The first-person perspective - what is it like to be this thing? Experiencing FROM the perspective of the OTHER is how we awaken
There is no hero/villain/victim, they are everyone, you are all of them
Laura: from the perspective of Freud’s analysis, while I bring the Jung
His analysis of “hysteria,” mine of “psychosis” and how this relates to mysticism > Kit and I bringing the Indigenous/ancestral perspective, you’re not crazy you’re channeling/talking to the spirits
The 13 Kan, the spirits speak to you, how do you tell who’s who?
Laura channeling the “hysteric” patients
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE TRANS/QUEER? The psychologists who couldn’t embrace or capture this and even tried to psychologize it out of people–including Ram Dass?
The new thing being created is the queer perspective, even traditional cosmologies are still so binary, it’s not duality it’s hyperdimensionality > the psychedelic
Mind-manifesting, what model are you driving?
Minds are part of the vessel of being a human
**In all of our cases - the practice IS the work - how to present it?
The PhD journal > Kit and Laura channeling work > as it was received
Laura, me - recording to myself what is coming through, reading it back or remembering the same bits over and over > ask her about this
“The ghosts speak through me and tell each audience member the story they told Freud, in the first person. I do not offer an analysis or hint at Freud’s view of the cases. Only the patients’ words (although of course those recorded by Freud) are uttered. First, I read Freud’s writing with attention, carefully. On my second re-read, I re-write by hand the words I hear from the patient in the first person, erasing the voice of the doctor. I then record a reading of this new case history in my own voice and, instead of rehearsing the performance, I play it back to myself repeatedly, over several weeks. When I perform, I remember, rather than recite, what I hear, in the way the patients might have remembered occurrences or incidents when they told them to Freud. Thus, every one-to-one performance is different, an encounter created with the specific audience member in the room.”
Ecstatic interactive performance/ritual
Theatre in the round and in the woods - back to the people
I bring the perspective of also hosting plants and trees, not just people > interbeing > what is the phenomenology of a tree?
gHosting
“ In This Little Art, Kate Briggs compares the act of translation to Robinson Crusoe making a table in his island. He is not inventing the concept of table, but has to make one, himself, for the first time, from trees. ‘When it comes to translation (…) there’s never a question of what to write (…) because the work has already been written. What matters is how to write it again’.”
Intersemiotic translation is the process of transferring verbal texts into other systems of signification, such as visual, oral, aural, gestural, or kinesic. Roman Jakobson coined the term in 1959. Some examples of intersemiotic translation include: Translating words into images, Translating words into numerical code, Translating words into non-verbal sounds, A verbal rendition of a pictorial message, and A screen adaptation of a novel.
Anthi - drawing as writing - this is what she means
Translation - it was already translated from German to English - then from the experience into her performance. staging, creating the one-to-one durational setting, omitting the doctor’s voice and switching the patients’ words from third to first person – a powerful act of disguised writing
Who sits around the table once it is built? How does it change the island? Me: what changes in the trees becoming a table, trees becoming people, then us all changing back again? Can we?
“Traits of the hysteric:” body, mimesis, mystery, disappearance and voice
Embodiment, somatic, mystery
These are all traits/components of the mystic, artist, and alcoholic as well - POSSESSION
Breathing trouble in Freud’s patients > keep coming back > I CAN’T BREATHE and the PANDEMIC BEING A CATALYST TO CONSCIOUSNESS EVOLUTION, ALL OF US EXPERIENCING THE SAME TRAUMA AT THE SAME TIME EVERYWHERE, AN ACCELERANT FOR EXPANSION > SUFFERING TOGETHER > crying also eased symptoms of hysteria patients yet they would hold back
Mimetic quality “causes symptoms to mutate” > memes - AI/
“Well-known nineteenth century convulsions are unlike the symptoms of demon possession presented by earlier hysterics, and also different from eating disorders, epileptic fits, delirium, the inability to speak or sexual voracity.”
THIS IS INTERESTING - THE TRANS* EXPERIENCE - PARTICULARLY FOR AFAB - Did we want the men or just want to BE them?
Just liking how they were attracted to us
Mutation as doppelganger, read Naomi Klein
“in the nineteenth century, hysterics at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris took on epileptic symptoms, copying those with whom they shared a ward, and whom they perceived as being taken seriously by doctors.”
Wondering how much of this ADD/ “eating disorder” stuff is me channeling Callin because her “problems” were taken seriously
“Archetypes of hysteria” - all with elements of mimesis - and WOW - these are all parts of ME at war
“The beautiful soul” - the MOST VICTIMIST - betrayed, misunderstood, humiliated
“Sublime / belle indifference” - wants to keep desire unsatisfied - the longing for the longing- bittersweet? “Anesthesia of the body, … demonstrate the futility of desire” > you will always be longing
The mystic and the alcoholic - nothing will save you from the bottom of your glass - you’ll always long for divine reunion until you die
“Sleeping Beauty” - the lover will redeem me - “sleepwalks” through life waiting for someone to save her
This can also be the men - and we think the men are going to save us only to realize we’re saving them, me and mom Maya astrology > somebody save me, somebody has to save me - looks like a man but he’s a baby
The beast, or ‘that which opposes itself to her alter ego’: the unstoppable death force. The villain you internalize until you become it. The one who entertains everyone with their stories of suffering
Hysteria not used as diagnostic category since 1952- DUDE WTF this JUST POPPED INTO MY HEAD AND FUCKING A!!! IT WAS THE EXACT SAME YEAR PSYCHOSIS WAS INTRODUCED!!!
“The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) first included psychosis in its first edition, published in 1952. The DSM-I defined psychotic disorders as diseases that included: Personality disintegration, Inability to relate to people or work, and Inability to correctly evaluate external reality.”
The concept of psychosis was introduced to psychiatric literature in 1841 by Canstatt, who used the term synonymously with "psychic neurosis"
BEFORE THIS IT WAS CALLING PEOPLE WITCHES, WIZARDS, HERETICS, APOSTATES, AND BURNING THEM AT THE STAKE
THIS IS THE EVOLUTION - THE SHAMAN KNOWS HOW TO TRANSMUTE THEM - THE ALCHEMISTS CAME UP WITH THE SECRET SOCIETY - YOU HAVE TO USE SIDE DOORS AND HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT. THOSE WHO LEARN THIS CAN BECOME MOVIE STARS AND BARDS TO THE KINGS. THOSE WHO DON’T DIE OR GET LOCKED AWAY.
Ram Dass vs his brother, Cain and Abel
Well fucking A!! Then I read this! Directly tied to persona, the mask we wear and character we play: “In 1980, the third edition of the DSM further buried hysteria and only conversion and dissociative disorders remained, with hysterical personality transforming into histrionic personality disorder, which, as Johanna Braun notes, comes from the Latin histrio, actor/actress, diagnosing the hysteric as performer, and moving beyond the limits of medical discourse.”
Trauma release > somatic work > theatre/performance/channeling > ecstatic dance > psychedelics > IFS/CI - it’s about rewriting the story and listening to what the body is saying
“ narrative gone awry which shows up as mysterious symptoms forming a body language. The task of psychoanalysis is then to interpreted the body, translate it into words and create a coherent narrative of the patient’s story.”
“The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s anti-novel which she envisaged as an image, setting off circular rhythms … a rhythm of words with which Woolf articulates the tacit knowledge she calls ecstatic. … it is a language of relations.”
Interbeing, ayni, everything is relational
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of the novel The Yellow Wallpaper > diagnosed as hysteric and “treatment” was to leave a successful writing career - she “cured” herself by doing the opposite. These are the modern day witch hunts and attacks against the herbalists
“writing is a poison as well as a remedy, because to cure the woman, it must kill the hysteric. Writing takes the place of the hysteric. And leaves the subject’.” - it’s DEFINITELY a poison but idk that I agree this is why. It channels!
“To become herself, she is not allowed to do any work, any writing, which, much like the author, she does, as we are reading her diary. But she is writing to no one, thus is no longer a speaking-subject … A diary to no one was the beginning of the end of incarceration. … Writing in the first person … shows the mystery … without demands for a release.”
what happens when you start making the journal public? >> this is partying from the inside out, reclaiming hysteria/psychosis/witchcraft
JUNGIAN CONNECTIONS - “the unlived life was held in the throat” > children live the unlived lives of their parents, Jung
An invisible globe is placed in her throat. The suppressed cry. / Where do words go when they cannot be uttered? / The repressed always returns, that is a certainty clearly articulated in the hysteric. / Perhaps it returns in the form of her insistent question: What do you want from me? / The secretion erupts from deeply embedded systemic pressures, removing life’s potential and its authentic voice, making it incomplete as the folds close over it.
‘My idea of heaven – a place where one need not breathe’, from a diary entry by Winnie Seebohm, October 26, 1895, 2:30am
Kit - workshop
if I am writing for you, so that you know I am now writing from this or that method, then I’m not really writing from a radical subjectivity, I am already writing on a mirror, writing to an Other I can’t see. The question might be, rather, how do you write the interior so deep inside that interior that interior becomes Other? And what does that look like?
Can a text for a journal, for an art research journal, be constructed so that it might resemble madness, to represent madness that comes on the evening of a breakthrough? I had a breakthrough. Because I had a breakthrough. Because I really really had a break through.
THIS IS THE JOURNAL - THE JOURNALS - THE PERSONAL MADE PUBLIC VS THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE - SOMETHING V IMPORTANT ABOUT THE PROCESS AS PRACTICE AS WORK RE: JOURNALS/JOURNALING
ZINES, JOURNALS, FRINGE THEATER, THE ROUND AND ORAL TRADITION, I MUST HELP RETURN CEREMONY, ART, COMMUNICATION, DIRECT EXPERIENCE TO THE MASSES
An option: Make up a fake theorist we can write about, because we need some kind of documentation that exists outside this text, and we need a documentation that is too hard to find, but too sensical to refute.
But now we have a body, we have always had bodies of knowledge, they just live in the jungle and don’t have university funding
The reason we might invent an imaginary source is, for one, it is much easier than having to bother to look for sources when we know they are already there somewhere … we are making our own claims self-consciously suspicious, putting ourselves in the role of an unreliable narrator, and all authority needs to be undermined.
The point is to show people how easy it is to manipulate them
if I perform the role of narrator/researcher, and take on multiple roles, to perform the multiple methods, offers a grounding to the performance and the interviews
Also video of the trance performance and interviews with people talking about their trance experience > how these elements might add up to a vocabulary for exposition in my practice, and whether these multiple levels of inquiry might not themselves take form as performed research. The exhibition of the work is something other than the work itself, creating meta-narratives … This text is a construction of multiple narrative voices speaking to and against each other
Problematic terms when talking about other cosmologies/cultures: i.e., Lukumí/Yoruba colonialist roots
oral tradition in this case is not only based on the spoken word, but on signs and symbols within the oral teachings. In some cases, the oral transmission of knowledge falls outside the academic definitions of oral tradition, because rather than transmission of knowledge from the mouth of an elder to an apprentice, this is transmitted in dreams and trance, through visitations from elders who are dead.
Did they know their prescience when they said this? Was it always intended? “I have yet to come across a study that allows for the dead to participate as subjects, and practitioners know that the dead are more active subjects than the living, because they speak through the living.”
I wonder about how to cite claims that are based on secrets. And I wonder about the necessity for documentation of the history of a religion that is already well-established in ethnographic literature
Different takes/framing when writing from ethnographic, psychoanalytic, and radically subjective perspective (“on the edge of madness”) >> this is what I have been doing, the not quite chanting/rapping/poetry/stream of consciousness stuff.
I want to consider writing, research writing about art as research, as montage, in the way that Eisenstein considered montage: ‘an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another’
Anthi, writing as drawing
How is/can writing be embodied?