GONE TO THUBAN (2017-) — sarah falkner

GONE TO THUBAN is an interdisciplinary multimedia project. Objects created as part of the project are usually stimuli and props for--or remains, residues and documentation of—experiences and durational and transformational processes.

Sonic Sigils are a personal practice developed out of a response to the visual sigil method devised by Austin Osman Spare and Brion Gysin/William Burroughs' Cut Up methods and a variety of adaptationspopularized by Chaos magicians. Sonic Sigils work with spoken language and its sound to take a prayer, mantra or poem from grammatical language through polyphony and cacophany to a place of abstraction and refined to a vibratory essence. The Sonic Sigils in Gone to Thuban are original texts but that draw from traditional grimoires such as the Greek Magical Papyri and the Hygromanteia, as well as vajrayana liberation songs. Practicing a Sonic Sigil also involves a full ritual context with props including Flags.

Shrinelabs are micro-scale configurable architectures and artificial landscapes—dioramas and diagrams —and other objects influenced by historic magical practices such as magical circles, tarot cards, effigies, talismans and power bundles as well as pop culture formats such as board games, puzzles, dollhouses and educational toys. Varying from single-purpose to polyvalent shapeshifting, some are used for decisionmaking and divination, or for designing a microcosm upon which to game-play ritual a desired influence upon a specific macrocosm. They are small and portable or storable within an ordinary domestic setting or traveler's kit—harking back to a heritage of kitchen witches and nomadic tinkers who plied their arts often in secrecy and after finishing their more workaday tasks, and a deliberate counterpoint to the grand private dedicated spaces of Ceremonial Magic only available through privilege.

Flags' structure and use are informed by both nautical semaphore and signaling, as well as prayer flags--modular systems of sending symbolic communications in translanguage codes through the elements and across distance, frequently to request help, or warn of/ward off danger. The seafarer is similar to the sorcerer in their enthusiastic entry into a liminal, highly unpredictable space/medium where strange and often dangerous entities are frequently encountered who must be communicated and negotiated with; at one time, both would have used the heavens to navigate their courses of action (one for navigation by constellations, the other for planetary influences).

Sonic Sigils and Flags incorporate a melange of various specialist language and image systems old and new from alchemical symbols to Morse code. The sending of motley assembled messages and petitions to unknown/able intelligences at unknown/able locations feels akin to the SETI experiments to transmit a mishmash variety of forms of information into outer space, in the hopes of something somewhere understanding something as a communication.

“Gone to Thuban” refers to personal mythology and practices on a variety of levels. As a child I was fascinated by a Weird Tales comicbook representation of the Lost Colony of Roanoke who in the comic book were depicted, as they were also frequently historically inaccurately described, as having disappeared leaving only the words “Gone to Croatan” inscribed on a tree (the historical truth was that they left only the word CROATOAN); I resonated with the notion that some of the settler/colonists abandoned their former lives to integrate into indigenous society rather than continue the project of Empire and colonization. Thuban (“serpent's head”) is a star in the constellation of Draco, and was the north pole star from the 4th to 2nd millennium BC; as the precession of the Earth's axis continues, in 20346 AD it will again be the pole star. Draco, its adjacent constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, and the pole stars play important roles in a variety of mythologies and magical and energetic practices throughout the world, including some of the indigenous peoples of what is now known as Northeast North America, who built stone earthworks in the region I lived in for many years.

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Gone to Thuban