The Northern Charter
5th Floor
Commercial Union House
39 Pilgrim Street
Newcastle, NE1 6QE

thenortherncharter@gmail.com

Project Space open during events only

BLUE MOUNTAIN EQUALS ARCTURUS

ALLAN HUGHES & MARK JACKSON

Coming soon ... Wednesday 27th September - 6pm

BLUE MOUNTAIN EQUALS ARCTURUS
ALLAN HUGHES & MARK JACKSON
Northern Charter and Gallery North @ Manchester Contemporary

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out.”
– William S. Burroughs, Naropa Institute 1976

There's someone you've just got to see. The first step in bringing about a change in the human condition is to allow it as it is. That’s the starting point. Watch Christopher Walken as Whitley Strieber in Communion (1989), hypnotised to uncover the source of memory loss and wild hallucinations in a log cabin. Nothing matters except for WalkenStreiber to be well. And the motivation has to be to help.

Now look carefully for a short edit embedded within memories of WalkenStreiber, under hypnosis, talking to camera. WARNING: The edit is from a later event! This may NOT be a continuity error. This may NOT be your imagination getting the best of you. This edit may be a FLASH FORWARD. This may be a SUPER DUPER LOOPER; an electronic think. We’re producing electronic thinkers who cannot think sequentially anymore because their lives are monitored by TV and Internet and films, pulling in pictures from all over the place. So one of the things that happens is, you look at a cup of tea, equals this particular cup of tea, equals a blue mountain, equals Arcturus, equals the little green men, equals… you understand? Everything’s fine and then one day a little bit of elf dust gets precipitated out of the fatty tissue for no reason necessarily and *POM!!* a SUPER DUPER LOOPER through 180 degrees and you're looking at the Martians.

Now. The question is what was WalkenStreiber doing? Take WalkenStreiber’s hypnotic trance, answering questions about a traumatic memory. Cut up WalkenStreiber’s past to write WalkenStreiber’s future.

So, here's something for your eye: Alan has built an e-meter to help locate that which is just below the level of consciousness and we will use it to determine edit points and make something happen for the future to leak through. We made a robot, quite soft not like the hard robots of Earth, and we filled it with elf dust. We panic the world because we use our noodle.