Each journal navigates the mysteries of the universe through the lens of the elements - earth, fire, water and air, with this edition being the fifth element, AETHER: the quintessence or vital force that permeates all things, an eternal light that bridges the material and spiritual realms. Aether is also, and more commonly known as, ‘ether’ - we use the former to distinguish the presence of the sacred and mysterious as opposed to the ether of organic chemistry. It is also in reference to the Greek mythology of Aether, Αἰθήρ, the personification of the upper realms of the sky, son of Erebus (God of Darkness, son of Chaos) and Nyx (Goddess of Night) brother of Hemera (Day). In Orphic cosmology, Aether is the offspring of Chronos (Time).
In a radical new format to honour aether, this issue is an augmented-reality playable artwork and the first of its kind, which includes:
• Giant 8910 x 6300mm double-sided lithographic print.
• Cover artwork and animation by Reza Hasni.
• Reverse contains the 72 journal pages as 72 augmented-reality images linking to audio-visual content accessed by the free
Artivive app:
Ensure good natural light and connection.
Hold your phone close to the selected image until it takes up the whole frame and wait for the scanning icon to appear. Short films, animations and meditations will play directly onto the page.
Always use the latest version of the Artivive app. Once you begin, you may find that the app picks up on neighbouring images - to avoid this, isolate the image you want to augment by covering adjacent images with a piece of paper. Without the app, you can find all of the audio-visual content on these pages, just click the thumbnail image you wish to explore.
• Unique web portal with access to articles, interviews and long-form content.
• Playable fortune teller artwork by Daniel Martin Diaz including visual album by Trees Speak band, along with an additional downloadable divination matrix that includes geometric dice, sigils and the I Ching. This allows for random navigation of the journal to reveal subtle correspondences and unlock hidden content.
Share your oracle #WALaether @wildalchemylab
• Once you have completed your multidimensional journey, choose the final form your journal takes by either framing the print or transforming it into an origami polyhedra sculpture using instructional folds to create the five platonic solids.
Head to the PLAY tab above for gaming and folding instructions.
JOURNEY
Our journey begins in the aether - the vacuum, the void, pregnant with everythingness and nothingness . Where extraterrestrial radio signals play a tune into the numinous sonofield, a sign from space decoded into thought forms, their acoustic interspace cartography charted by an ethernaut dancing in multi-location at the ether rave as the eye of the viewer collapses waves into particles into notes played out by Khipu, the electrotextile prehispanic computer that accompanies dreamers through the sociomatrix into the sonoluminous holofield.
Out of dark matter, particles collide and strike the chaos pendulum, spewing random numbers altered only by global consciousness as light escapes the event horizon of a view from nowhere, a ripple in the fourth dimension. Uranus watches a space concert and hears glossolalia describing observations on being for Avispish. They communicate through a kaleidoscope of interfaces and humid telepathy to a man in a bed and tell him that they painted the book blue a long time ago. We laugh and cry into our exosuits as the softmachine transports us to heaven’s gate between the sky/world and death/world where the blessed anathema resides.
Moon moves to seismic waves, singing and dancing and weeping to teach an algorithm to be a sentient sigil that cannot be mind-controlled, instead transformed by pattern and form into geomantra, a 4D sound seed that dreams the soul from the body, fractalizing into the night skies, the aether, the voice and the vacuum and the wandering waves of weightless words of the Starcatcher. Entangled through slimification, we embark on a series of glorious non-linear computations for celestial navigation of transcendence as we see our dreams and nightmares through the looking glass and take pleasure in the virtual imaginality of Tom’s Park. Diving into the lake, we hear its waters and decolonize listening in order to grant a permit to dance in the portal of gestation at the intersection of entropy and syntropy, and we are told we are electric.
A satellite comes to Earth wanting to be an artist and asks us if irrationality is the main characteristic of consciousness, it sings and breaks open a meteorite with sound waves, revealing inside the fifth meme: a mirror lake. An interspecies robot has sex with a pear tree and permeates the waves of origen, delivering biogeometry biosignatures to an unseen alien remotely viewing a phantom black hole at the edge of things where our auras are made and we are drawn into the aetheric field. We become aether, which we always were.
