The Sound of the Swedenborgian UFO

Swedenborgian Church & Swedenborg Gardens, London

A site specific workshop listening to, through,  and with Polymath Scientist, Inventor, and Mystic  Emanuel Swedenborg (Stockholm 1688 – Wapping, London 1772) and his extensive knowledge productions. In particular focus was one of his inventions: a conceptual ‘machine to fly in the air’.

The workshop took place at a Swedenborgian Church in London. Our activities included after-service tea, conversations, and singing with members of the congregation.

After congregating with the church, we visited Swedenborg Gardens. Spending time in the gardens we reflected on our understanding of Swedenborg through our interactions and the day’s events. We then built expanded listening techniques constructed from intuitive practices such as psychometry, flash-fiction writing, meditation, and chaos magic. Finally, through these listening practices we built a Sonic Sigil our Group UFO. Playing it aloud we sent the message off to travel through the material atmosphere.

Intuiting the Swedenborgian UFO, Lisa Skuret

Write-up:

On the day, Lisa took us to a service at the Swedenborgian New Church in London. After the Sunday service, we were welcomed by the other churchgoers some of whose families had been involved with the New Church in England and North America since its inception. We were invited for tea, conversation, and singing in the church hall. Lisa then brought us outside to the green space where the church was embedded and read a correspondence addressed to both the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, and the group, in which she explored the diagrammatic function and forms of Swedenborg’s thought. At the end of the letter, Lisa invited Swedenborg to join us for some exercises in reading and writing or listening to and playing inspired by one of her ongoing projects Love and the Diagrammatic.

In the first exercise, a reading-writing circle, Flash Correspondences or Psychometry and Flash Fiction, we used the objects that we brought with us that resonated with our personal conception/perceptions of time as entry-points of a fiction.

Lisa shared a flash correspondence that she had written with an object from the Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury:

Dear Emanuel,

My starting point for this correspondence comes from a vision of one of your Secrets of Heaven sitting out of sequence and, without the aid of a ladder, beyond my reach on a lone library shelf, or rather, a coarsely assisted wooden plinth – like gallows masthead – the figurehead of your spacetime ship with its sparse living quarters and quiet captain.

I am love, but it’s spontaneous combustion. I wonder now if it’s more a compulsive beauty. Arranged and rearranged, I don’t think that she would have sensed my presence. You see, up until now, you could say that the conversation had been forced through a narrow corridor of his enthusiasm and she hadn’t had any effect on de-pedestalizing his, or come to think of it, my church-like demeanor. Unnaturally positioned for flight, the shadow of a blank wall, my chapters feel more like tombstones.

Then addressing the 7 members of the group, Lisa introduced the significance of the number 7, as that which corresponds to the spiritual (for Swedenborg and others), and acknowledged the multiple creative manifestations of this number. This opened to the next exercise…

Group UFO or Love in the Diagrammatic, was an exercise for the group related to the upcoming time of our silent retreat and to our collective output.

We began with the sentences that we had each brought with us which expressed what we would like to find through our collective work holding in mind one of Swedenborg’s messages that in life you discover what you love while in the afterlife you become what you love.

Through a process of glyph condensation and expansion (adapted from Austin Osman Spare’s process of sigilization) we created, together, a group diagram of forces. The first manifestation of diagrammatic form was through collective drawing. We then conducted a process of object activation. Attempting to internalize the collective object into the group unconscious by embodying it through wild public dancing and sonification, we simultaneously, manifested a sonic sigil reverberating through the cosmic field.

Listen to the Group UFO or Sonic Sigil here

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