THE RAGE AGAINST KINETHOSIS AND DICHOTOMOSIS
Premiere of the short 3D film
The fact that transmedia activist Raul Rajangu, a.k.a. Luminoso, has, after some large-scale projects in recent years – bushenwald.com (2008), Russkiy Razmer (2010), Bedrooms Show (2005) – turned towards 3D is quite understandable considering Rajangu’s change over time – from medium-sized to large and extra large panel paintings and then on to photo, audio, video and room installations and mixed media. And now 3D, which could be regarded as a virtual remix of actual reality or a perfect simulacrum – it/he is almost more ‘alive’ than ‘life’ itself.
The premiere 3D project “Superluminous Darkness”, produced in cooperation with cinematographer Kaur Kallas and composer Märt-Matis Lill supplies certain phenomena, which have always interested Rajangu, with a unique dimension – aspects and details that can go unnoticed even in room installations (speed kills!) are ‘superluminously’ on the foreground. The Zen-aesthetic of a 3D camera scanning bodies and atmosphere (a super performance by Kaur Kallas) enables us to feel the ‘superluminous darkness’ of reality, this paradoxical (white darkness!) metaphysical texture, which seems to be the constituent element of our sensually perceivable world, while also adding something absolutely non-sensual or supra-sensual, which is simultaneously one and the other, brightness and darkness, existence and non-existence. And this all happens within minimal esoteric sound arrays of Märt-Matis Lill.
The film examines the metaphysical action spectrum of any ideological monomanias – ‘Freedom’, ‘Body’, ‘Sex’, ‘Democracy’, ‘Religion’, etc. – and emptying of such banal master-signifiers of all meanings, as well as invalidation of them as a result of the crippling impact of one-dimensional reality.
Western culture is incapable of perceiving the psychoactive and spiritual profile of multidimensional/non-dualist logic and, in its inadequacy, has preferred to rationalize – i.e., to ‘explain’, ‘solve’ – the contradiction and paradox. Rajangu reminds us of the futile and suicidal nature of such efforts. We are helpless victims of our collective apparition – we cannot wish away the summoned ghost of rationality by telling it, “You cannot harm me, because you do not exist!”
Rajangu offers an opportunity – ‘superluminous darkness’ (Doctor Seraphicus Bonaventura), where the sick are healthy and the healthy are sick, where wheelchair is a victory chariot and victory chariot is a wheelchair, where man is woman and woman is man, where any logic of the signifier/signified dissolves and loses its phallogocistic power, where nirvana is samsara and samsara is nirvana. Seems enticing!
Written by Kalev Rajangu