The Journey of the Mandragora Officinarum

13

Category : Entertainment, art

To my readers.
You knew this article was coming!

I hope that by this time, all of you have seen the last spectacle. And thank you for reading my thoughts, they have not always been what you might expected. But then again maybe that’s the point. This is a long post. I hope you enjoy.

A person in a white overall walks through the halls of the hotel, closely followed by the cameraman. Doors open in front of her, she makes her exit and reveals herself: JL. She gets to a car and opens the back door for the cameraman. Sure, we know who this amateur film maker is. But we wait.

Cameraman enters the back seat and we immediately see a man with a camouflage mask in the driver’s seat. Cameraman tries to make himself comfortable and as he arranges himself we immediately notice everything in the car is wrapped in plastic. He follows MO as she takes her place in the front seat, then he remembers his purpose and starts showing us the things around the car. Among so many, a couple of keyboards, a synthesizer, speakers, many many wires. Right in front of him, on the back of the driver seat, a funny looking doll portraying a funny looking man, apparently naked, looking at the camera upside down. CU?

Cameraman starts observing more and on the right side of the car, he shows as a whale taped to the windshield. He moves the camera back on the driver’s seat and we immediately see the source of energy that feeds the entire musical instruments in the car. Funny how it is placed right above the driver’s head. If you take a closer look at the driver seat itself, it certainly looks like an artificial ‘brain’, all wired up, connections everywhere. Is this the brain of it all?

Camera films foreword and we now see the neon lights in Y, illuminating the entire car, we see a lot of tape, some not used yet, and we see a goat on the board of the car. A toy goat, right in front of the driver. As the driver turns, we observe a wedding ring on his left hand (4:03). Yes, CU.

To me, this car is the palpable iamamiwhoami concept itself: all things are crammed up in a small space, just like all ideas in their minds. There are no expensive looking materials inside, but look at each item and tell me it doesn’t have a rich meaning!

We’re still inside the city by the lights on the buildings outside. But where are we heading to?

Suddenly, MO begins to manifest some familiar symptoms. She’s reiterating the B men falling asleep under the influence of her music. Her head drops and bounces, as if she’s entering a state of trance and she starts singing.

You… gave me life.

Ooooh, U-1!

In return I’ll torch … You can watch it burn… Beautiful!

We appear to be entering a hilly terrain, the driver drives in reverse for a minute. And we are greeted by a set of headlights. The car finally stops and we exit the back seat cameraman’s view. We’re now seeing through the eyes of the professionals.

Ah! And look at what we’re seeing! The car: an apparently non-valuable container carrying the immense value of meaning. It’s a simple vehicle. But high quality charged concepts/values are kept in common-looking containers because they offer the biggest surprises when revealed. By means of antithesis. ‘Men of the forest’ appear, some carrying wires, and begin unraveling the things on the top of the car (musical instruments and speakers), plugging them in, wiring this microcosmic energy to a cosmic one.

[This act of 'plugging the wires' really made me laugh because while we were waiting for the videos on the youtube board, I would sometimes say I'd go into the forest - that being me visiting my grandparents - and people would tell me "ooooh, you're going to plug in the internet cable so that iamami would have internet access and upload yet another video". Now how hilarious is to see this actually happening LOL]

A man is carrying a microphone, another wipes the shield of the car in order to prepare us to see what’s inside, MO gets her piano ready. They show us everything. They show us how they do it, they show us cameras, microphones, the people who carry these props, everything is TRANSPARENT. They want us to see this process of creation and they want to show us that the act of creation is not a surreal act, only belonging to an entity like God, but a congregation of normal, humanlike acts, like holding a mic, a cam, playing the piano etc, synchronized to create harmony. The abundance of tape and plastic foil represents the link keeping everything together. We’re being shown the road of conceptualization: all these great ideas linked together, intertwined and connected to energy to make them act in harmony. How beautifully they are rendering it!!! And the real spectacle hasn’t even begun!

Begins B. Oh, how wonderful it sounds! Camera approaches the car and we see MO in her splendor. She’s so beautiful! The way she sings, smiles and moves shows us a playful woman. As she exits the car, the camera moves towards the back seat and there we have him, our Volunteer! Might I say they certainly made him look good too, haha! The epitome of innocence!

The beat suddenly turns new for us and it does sound awesome, another version of B. Our eyes remain on SUTS as MO and CU prepare her trunk station, ha! She has put on a strawberry necklace, what a cute way of rendering that motif! And she sings and she dances her hypnotic weird moves! She’s left her gloves aside and she’s making music with her hands, as we speak! And she’s playful again, playful and beautiful, all glowing!

B ends and the camera shows us the surroundings for a moment. Into the darkness of the field, we can distinguish white crosses. MO opens the door for SUTS and invites him out. As he exits the car, we see his entire outfit, a mixture of sobriety and playfulness. MO takes his hand and they both start walking, shoulder to shoulder, entering what appears to be the entrance of a concert, iron fences included. The road is immediately closed behind them. No turning back. It has started.

On both sides of this imaginary road, people laughing, their faces covered. Laughters. As if this marriage of true minds between this new artistic product and masses (represented by Volunteer) would be impossible. A fools’ dream. This to me is a sign of how the team symbolized the first reaction they might have gotten from viewers and producers in the beginning, when no one believed this could be possible to come to an end. If you take a closer look at 15:34, on the left side, that’s JL herself and her doubts. Against all odds and fears, MO and suts continue walking this road.

MO stops for a moment and they both turn right, looking at the field. What a setting!!! Far away in the distance, a masked man runs among what appear to be tents, spreading smoke all around. Surely, a sign of the uncertainties this campaign faced in the beginning. As she starts moving her hands again, MO commands these tents and we now see they are light sources. As she imaginatively presses them, they light themselves in a sequence accompanied by bell sounds reiterating ‘terrified, what have we done?’ MO leaves Suts, she crosses the fence and enters the beams field. The laughter stops. The team doesn’t hear it anymore. It doesn’t even matter whether it is still there, they now have the necessary confidence not to hear it anymore.

The smoke/fog is also a sign of danger coming. The fog has the power to conceal what is behind it and he who enters a fog must walk carefully, as he does not see what lies in it. As far as I have read, the appearance of fog has to do with the appearance of magical creatures, mostly demons. Fog is also encountered along the river Styx, and you know what I’m referring at by Styx.

I know that beat! It has followed me all around since day one it has appeared! Begins T. Aaaaaamazing! Lights follow the base and MO enters her trance again.


A backwards march…
Oooooh, so it was a backwards march in the lyrics! How great! And there she goes, actually marching backwards. Because this was one of the fans’ favorite thing! And they had to have it! And Suts watching her leave is really sweet and gentle. I feel the love in your eyes, SUTS, haha! Wedding bells all around!

A nervous smile from suts, a look downwards and we know trouble is near for him. MO approaches him and she woes, she starts her seducing moves, you’re a lost man, SUTS! You should run, but how wonderful this is, it makes you stay! So painfully beautiful it makes you follow!!!

Might I say I am really waiting for the correct lyrics of all songs. I’m surprised to see how far we were with some of them!

MO exits and SUTS does follow, and us with him, accompanied by two persons carrying white balloons. And there we have it, another astonishing setting. The imagery leaves you breathless! We’re in front of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, Mo’s long hair its branches and her beautiful dress its trunk. She opens her bark for SUTS to enter. That is the exact opposite action of what MO does when she is born (getting out of a tree). Is SUTS heading in the wrong direction?

The symbolism of the forest is very interesting, especially if we think of its functions in our childhood’s fairy tales. He who enters the forest leaves everything else behind, his old self, and embarks on a journey with the specific purpose of changing his destiny. The forest is the realm of the unknown, of magic, of knights and mythological creatures, and a hero must face them all on this road. Death is part of a hero’s journey of discovering his own self,  as well as resurrection.

The Volunteer just stepped into another world (probably one of the nine worlds Yggdrasil supports in Norse Mythology), his journey is accompanied by the Volunteer song, his path guided by a small light, similar to MO’s exist from the tree in Y.

The forest suddenly gets animated and N begins. The camera follows suts and guide and hides nothing from us, not even a man carrying arranging the wires around. As I said: transparency, naturalness of the process of creation.
In a small open space, a familiar face: fierce looking Mandragora doll in u-1 and U-2. As the guide places the small source of energy above her Medusa like head, she gets animated and starts lip sinking under the skillful hand of a ventriloquist. An automaton. Acting by itself, by the will of itself. She asks suts how the story would end. Of course! The camera quickly moves deeper into the forest and there we have a beautiful shape, also familiar, MO wearing an amazing costume, wedding dress like. As she calls for suts, he approaches slowly and touches him.

We push the boundaries so the rules are bent. Rules are bent, that means time is bent also. We’re now in mythological time (read about it at the end).

This touch is now possible. And they dance. They dance just like in the Initiation video. And they bow and curtsy, just the way SUTS has learned. You did such a wonderful job! This scene was so pure and innocent and flowing just the right way! A lot of emotion in their gestures, Jonna throwing glances of encouragement, SUTS receiving them in silence and with humility, yet braveness. Becoming ONE. Acting in concert.

The walk together through the forest, hand in hand, bits of MO’s outfit falling from time to time, MO dancing her twisted moves one more, SUTS struggling to keep pace and conform. Dress gets caught in a mighty bush, but who cares, they keep on dancing, not sketching a sign to give them in. LOL! This part has been fun to watch actually. They curtsy and bow again, SUTS more clumsy than ever, the words on the youtube board coming back in my mind “no, you BOOOOOW!!!” Sooooo wonderful!

Camera leaves them and starts marching in the forest and we can now see what appears to be a CU, totally doing his thing with a tree. A treelicker, I’m sure, haha! Oh, how I love their humor! Anyone can be a CU, remember?
N ends and just now SUTS is in front of another setting: the paper wall house in N.

Begins O. How amazing IS this setting?! Paper walls to render an imaginary tunnel at the end of which MO sits in front of what appears to be a sun. As we walk in this ‘room’, a cardboard box sits in the middle. A container waiting for its content. Two CUs are working on the props. MO, looking more radiant than ever in this artificial light, sits on a tree-stump, just the way she does in O. She’s the Queen of this land. She’s part of it and knows how to use and control it. It’s twilight. Right in time for the light to turn blue. And more and more smoke fills the forest.

All of a sudden, MO raises on her feet and literally drops her white wedding like outfit and reveals a black Mandragora. Or is it? And if it is, what is it about it? Don’t tell me ‘it is what it is’? Look at her neck! That is the collar of a priest and it has been shown to us before, on the black pot in Y I couldn’t make the most out of. Do we reach religion matters? Maybe… maybe not. We’ll see. So much fog behind her, what is there, hiding?

Camera turns 180 and there we see SUTS in front of the cardboard box, the two CUs opening it. Fog literally crawls behind the Volunteer, traps him inside this limited space, like the door of a cage. Camera comes back again and there we have MO, suddenly becoming lusty and sensuous.  She dances her magical dance breathing her smoke all around. She’s DEATH. A trick. And SUTS is doomed. He should have run. But Death is so beautiful and her song is making him so let go to his desires of leaving!

The sound of letting go a side of you that we all set aside when the world was new. There are only two sides in a person: a good side and an evil side. What side is she talking about I wonder? And is that absence of your heart referring to the loss of faith? Religious again? Maybe, maybe not, we’ll see, but there she goes, Judas, giving the Lamb a kiss of death and showing him the way into dark emptiness!

Yet maybe this is necessary. Maybe what happens in the end (you’ll see) is necessary for the purification of the soul. Traveling to hell and back. Why not!

SUTS enters the box, surely his symbolical coffin, and the CUs immediately seal it with… well… tape. The sound of that tape sealing the box! Like nails being nailed into a coffin! As fog takes everything over, MO exits, O runs towards its end.

Camera perspective changes and ta-ta-poo begins. The coffin is now sealed with the help of 6 CUs. A set of sexually charged moves take place and MO has changed outfits again, looking, once more, breathtaking. She’s a bloomed Mandragora, white flowers on her chest and hands. On her chest, also a picture (ha!) of the late SUTS. As she lays on her back on the box, the CUs continuing their sexual moves, we clearly make the connection.

And the battle goes on and the love that you have will begin when you are all gone.

This image is, if you want, the image of a coffin covered with a wreath of flowers. You’ll see it makes sense in the end.

As fog starts to thicken, a familiar powerful beat begins. One of the most beautiful parts is the following one, where the CUs start singing as if they were a choir: you can’t be the knight! The team has done a beautiful job on this piece! It’s like an incantation. Even the cameraman joins! This is an universal incantation!

And they’re carrying the coffin on the beat of u-2! I’ve always loved this piece because it sounded wicked! And that’s the feeling I get from watching these images. Wickedness. The procession starts moving, MO (the crown of flowers) in the lead, the others following her intricate dance, fog literally drawing the road. This looks like a military procession for a hero. They cross through the tunnel of light in Y and on a floor of wood, just like in the last prevideo. How wonderful they know how to include EVERYTHING in this short movie!!! And how amazing it is for us to re-discover all those bits and re-construct the path! At the end of the artificial bridges (rite passages), the procession reaches the creation car and now we see three men are entrusted with this part in the project. One provides direction, one plays the music and another releases its energy (sound waves).

After listening to their music for a second, procession moves on, U-2 ends and MO reaches a cardboard boxes building. The famous forest labyrinth in u-2.

On the sounds of the Llama prevideo, the CUs raise the coffin and carry it into the metaphorical tomb, placing it in the middle, on a bed of tinfoin and wood, just like MO in N. They then return to MO and they take her outfit out (again, the naturalness of the footage, you can see it in some of their clumsiness, yet how does that JL manage to stay sooo serious for the sake of art!!!) and also put it in the tomb, along with SUTS’ photo. On the coffin, of course, the wreath of flowers. MO is now pure white. The CUs build the missing wall of the tomb, caging themselves in as well.

New born MO seems to be testing her voice, humming on high and low inconsistent, yet daring pitches.

A swishing sound and shockers! Fire bursts inside the tomb! Ha, I remember last night on the board people going crazy ‘they killed suts, they set him on fire’ and me saying in my mind ‘no,no,no, don’t tell me, I haven’t reached that part yet, people’ LOL! Well as I was saying, if you think of it, this is a natural course of events and this fire is the fire of purification. I have been beating the horse about how one must die in order to re-born itself and this is what fire does. Burns the Old Self and lets the New One be born.

Anyways, MO’s humming now turns into moaning and WAILING!!! Bits of dark ashes are thrown in the sky by the bursting fire, sound increases and the inside explodes in revelation, letting fire consume its uselessness.


Begins Y.

Little Hope…

MO leaves the fire setting and we’re introduced to another amazing setting, at least from my point of view. Because I don’t just see MO performing an act of self satisfaction upon herself. I see levels and worlds. Vertical, mirror, broken mirror, upside down mirror, then horizontal, I see a natural gliding through these levels, yet one which is rather difficult to follow. Just like the human conscious. We think we know what it speaks to us, but we have no idea. This is not the exploring of the body, but the exploring of the mind and soul. This is letting the fire burn your insides to purify yourself. The gasping is not an orgasm, it’s the struggle to contain the pain of losing yourself, your old self. How courageous to have included these images in this short movie!

Hey, if you want to look at things in a different way, think of this act as the team enacting the fan’s ‘little whore/hoe’ mock thing, but I doubt it.

MO literally crawls towards the pile of ashes, see? There, in the beginning she appears to cry over them, but then she dances a dance of victory. She acknowledges purification, she welcomes change, she WEARS it on her. How hard do you think it was for Jonna to embark on this voyage? Mmm?

I’ve seen the truth and it’s nothing like you said I’ve seen your picture of a perfect world, now you can touch the halo around my crown head, so many questions, so many things unsaid. Saints have halos around the crown of their heads. Who exactly is speaking these words?

As she gathers around ashes of her old self (the ash of Yggdrasil) in a tinfoil ball, she heads for the field of white crosses, looking for an empty tomb, singing the amazing track we’ve all been waiting for, the Whale, Like Hell track. She speaks how carrying her head with her new mangled body (read  Tracy’s comment about shamanism and also philosopher Mircea Eliade’s opinion upon it, in my reference at the end of this article) hurts. She speaks how nobody is at home even though the lights are on. Her home is her new body. It first has to be populated with new feelings. She talks about the longest sleep and hardest moan. How heartbreaking this deconstruction and reconstruction of this body must have been!

The halo on her crown head and her mangled body definitely remind me of how she used to wear that collar in T and how I said that one of the function of the collar was to draw a definite line between the sacredness of one’s mind/immortality of one’s soul and one’s sinful, perishable body.

When she finally finds a tomb, you can notice a change in the way she sings and acts. It’s like she understands she has to bury what it is to be buried (her deconstructed body) and she’s sort of angry, but this anger will help her fulfill. In the end, when she covers the tomb, she’s almost detached, she uses her feet in a chill way and she lets the shovel drop, as if she didn’t care anymore. In a somewhat contrary gesture, she sits herself at the piano, singing a goodbye song, and wearing a black cloth over her face, in mourning.


‘We run, we run’ begins
and what a wonderful track!!!


I am fire, I am damage in the making.
– look at that field, how many damages an artist has to undergo in the process of creation in order to confirm and confirm and confirm?

I need the exact lyrics of this song because I think they hold the answers to all our questions.

Oh, here we go, possible lyrics (bear in mind bits are missing and some words I might have understood in a wrong way):

I am fire, I am damage in the making
I am an army set out to control your every ticking

I am a giant, stepping on the tiny world you live in

And you shake and you shiver
As the roof is coming down
And the walls grow out in your hair

Shadows show dark as the river ….
Turn knights into stone
We run, we run terrified
What have you done?
Is this how it goes?
It’s how it goes

Mass confusion, never been so damn exciting
When your hearts fell for us was never dandy. Unrequited
And I shake and I shiver aaaah
As I cut through skin and bones
Can you solve the riddle?

Shadows show dark as the river
Turn knights into stone
We run, we run terrified
What have you done?
Is this how it goes?
It’s how it goes

You see what they did there? They just cast us back into the riddle!

At a first look and a billion listens, I believe these lyrics are referring to TIME – mostly historical. Here’s why:

I am fire – time goes like fire goes, burns like a fuse, in a fast pace and without the possibility of turning back

I am damage in the making - this refers to time’s characteristic of making things grow old, it is connected to a thing’s quality of being perishable. Time passes, body is irreversibly damaged.

I am an army set out to control your every ticking - an army of seconds controlling every beat of heart in you. When you say ‘tick-tock’, you suggest an end is coming.

I am a giant stepping on the tiny world you live in … - I cannot make the exact words, which is a pity, but this refers to time’s quality of being infinite, enormous. And also an antithesis between terrestrial time and cosmic time. I just love the way they use the antithesis and the oxymoron here! Giant vs. tiny, step vs. world. And giant step, when step is something so tiny compared to the world and the world is something so giant, compared to the step. LOL! Somebody is a genius of lyrics.

And you shake and you shiver, as the roof is coming down. - this refers to the human being’s fear of historical time. That is of life going towards the end. The roof coming down is a metaphor for death enclosing, getting closer. The roof also could refer to one’s head, case in which the image of an old man, hunchbacked by the burden of so many years, shaking and shivering towards the end of his life comes in my mind.

And the walls grow out in your hair. – this is connected to the roof coming down and it refers to the human body growing old. White walls growing in your hair. Even more, the walls could be the walls of a tomb. Just imagine it. Another things, the walls of one’s body (where body is the house of the soul).

Shadows show dark as the river turns knights into stone - this is clearly a reference to historical time and to time’s quality of turning ancient times into stone. Roughly said, after a hero has died, history takes its right and what remains of him is a statue. Time has turned a knight into a statue. The river refers to the flow of time.

We run, we run, terrified what have we done – humans’ fear of historical time again. Historical time can be visioned as a straight road, no turns and definitely no turning back. This we run is we forget about everything valuable in life and we just go through it in a fast pace. Shadows sow dark refers to how future looks in perspective, should certain changes not happen or it could refer to the  prolific/valuable past being forgotten.

Mass confusion never been so damn exciting – this I believe refers to how time is regarded nowadays. We seem to be speaking a lot about the end of time/ the world. I remember how conspiracies used to say that 2000 is the end, now that 2012 is the end, when in fact, come on, time is never going to end, right?

And I shake and I shiver As I cut through skin and bones. - This is related to death as well and how the body transforms, for example, after death, under the influence of time. Process of decomposing.

If you think of it, the answer to the riddle could easily be DEATH as well. Think of death when you read those lyrics, you’ll see it makes perfect sense. It really does. Everything ends in death after all.

As this song ends, we’re heading ourselves towards an ending, but not before what I would call the genius of humor.

MO puts on a costume. More precisely a monkey’s ass and tail and face. Then starts walking towards a table, where other two familiar figures await: a goat and an owl. Three are missing, right? Not for long as they appear and believe me I have laughed hard at the sight of them: the llama, the whale and the bee. All costumes look hilarious and the humor of this image raises from the ridiculousness of their gestures as compared to the seriousness their actions is supposed to imply. Look at that bee! Look at how it cannot sit because of its big bottom!!! This is genius, really!!! This is everything we used to talk about those animals on our blogs and on the board and everything exceeds with how they reiterate the animal sounds and join them into our baaaoooouuuunnnnteeeeee!!! This has been beyond amazing!!!

They share a glass of Champaign, like we all said we’d be drinking wine during the concert and they salute baaaa-oooo-uuu-nnn-tttttts-eeeee!!! They bow to eachother, congratulating each other for all the work and for this accomplishment. I bow to you as well!!!

GENIUS!!!!!

Now, what have we learned from this spectacle? That you don’t need expensive resources to make something look expensive, you can just make it look rich by carving it in the right way, shaping it with your hands and mind in the same time.

If this is the way in which a ‘commoner’ like Jonna can pierce into the high levels of the music industry, then it is what it is and it has just BEEN.

Last, but not least, the reason for which SUTS doesn’t appear anymore after the box episode is because, if you think of it, SUTS never existed, conceptually. He was just a sign. He stood for something, for the fans/community/etc. We’ve been burned! Do you feel the change?

As a recommendation I would personally give to anyone after seeing this concert and seeing where the campaign has managed to go, have a read on Mircea Eliade’s wiki page. Maybe some of you have even heard about him. Read especially his work and philosophy part, mostly this.

In Eliade’s view, traditional man sees time as an endless repetition of mythical archetypes. In contrast, modern man has abandoned mythical archetypes and entered linear, historical time—in this context, unlike many other religions, Christianity attributes value to historical time. Thus, Eliade concludes, “Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of ‘fallen man’”, of modern man who has lost “the paradise of archetypes and repetition”

Even more, about the ‘terror of history’:

Modern man displays “traces” of “mythological behavior” because he intensely needs sacred time and the eternal return. Despite modern man’s claims to be nonreligious, he ultimately cannot find value in the linear progression of historical events; even modern man feels the “Terror of history”: “Here too [...] there is always the struggle against Time, the hope to be freed from the weight of ‘dead Time,’ of the Time that crushes and kills.

If you don’t want to read into it, for short, this artistic manifestation iamamiwhoami has presented us with is meant to ‘change history’ -  which is mere chronological display of events, dead time – and show us that time can be bent, as in becoming mythological/archetypal, thus the actions one does (the concert for example) gain and produce meaning. Any artistic product is meant to provide us with the possibility to leave historical time aside for a moment and enter the mythological time. Only the mythological time can offer us the impression of immortality.

This is dead/historical time:

DSC06967DSC06984

This is immortal/mythological time:

DSC06985
mandragora

Eliade’s also the one who wrote La Tiganci (With the Gypsy Girls) and believe me, symbolically, SUTS’ journey into the ‘magical forest’ is what the main character does in that novel. Also, read this part about shamanism (death, resurrection and functions).

Given the fact that we’re dealing with Swedish artists, we shouldn’t be leaving Norse Mythology aside, and, as I mentioned the Tree of Life, it appears many elements of Yggdrasil are present in the iamamiwhoami concept. Here’s how Yggdrasil is constructed:

yggdrasil1

The Upper Level

* Asgard - Located at the very top of Yggdrasil, Asgard is the home of two races of Gods, the Aesir and the Vanir. All of the Gods in Asgard have their own great halls. The greatest of them is Valhalla, the hall for slain heroes.
* Vanaheim – The Vanir lived in this realm while they were at war with the Aesir. Since the Gods made peace, the Vanir have lived in Asgard.
* Alfheim – The land of the light elves.

The Middle Level

* Midgard - This is the realm that we all know, the land of Earth and mankind. There is a bridge of a rainbow between Midgard and Asgard, called Bifrost.
* Jotenheim – An icy land of the frost giants.
* Nidavellir – Realm of the dwarves.
* SvartalfheimLand of dark elves.
* Muspelheim – The fire giants live here, and it is one of these giants that will set the world ablaze at Ragnarok.

The Lower Level

* Niflheim – The roots of Yggdrasil emerge in this cold and dark underworld. The goddess Hel rules here, from her hall Eljudnir. Sometimes this realm is actually called Hel, and some sources consider Niflheim and Hel to be two distinct lands of the underworld. This is where Nidhogg (”tearer of corpses”) lives, a monstrous serpent that gnaws almost perpetually at the deepest root of the World Tree. Source

Give this a read. It’s almost everything you need to see to understand.

I must say… Many, many, many familiar elements, wound’t you agree?

For example this funny thing: Heiðrún – the goat that feeds itself with the branches of the tree (that is feeding itself with deity matter – Valhalla). This goat is said to produce mead, that is the beverage for those who died in battle (knight?).

Anyway, the final result is one fine mixture of myths!!! Mind blowing!!! I don’t want to imagine how long this took to achieve!


4.5.4.9.3.1.20.5.4.

It is said that rebirth is a slow, very painful process not many dare to undergo. It all starts with a plunge into the dark depths of Death followed by an explosion, continued with a long journey alongside universal molecules and ending into the brightness of a single most powerful atom with a shriek.

reborn

Towards the Star,

at the speed of sound,

you listen

to other stories of becoming

for years and years

until you make it

yourself into the light.

In the end,

you cover your eyes

and push through the door,

preferably in silence,

as if.

reborn1

reborn3

And so it begins…

Heiðrún

Thank You, Iamamiwhoami!!!

4

Category : art

I think I just watched the most amazing thing in the history of music: the final development of the Iamamiwhoami saga. How should we call it? What should we call it? The epitome of creativity would be too small of a name.

This truly left me speechless. THANK YOU, IAMAMIWHOAMI, for sharing this part of your twisted creative minds with me, minds which I have loved from the beginning of this campaign! Thank you so much for offering this artistic spectacle willingly and for free. Your hearts beat in music. This only tells me about your REAL intentions and believe me, my friends, you HAVE TOUCHED THE CONCERNED and have forever changed their view upon what ART can be all about.

This historical display of complex imagery was amazing to watch. To see all those little things we thought about materialized in this final video, carefully crafted by ingenious hands and sprinkled with a little bit of humor by inquisitive minds, to see how every fear we had during this campaign burned, simply burned its way into our hearts as we were watching… That is art! That is the power of imagination and creativity and that is what is going to save us from the danger of… becoming empty cardboard boxes. Those who have ears to listen will understand.

Jonna Lee, you have been beautiful! You have touched my heart in a way in which only the accomplishment of creativity does. You have evolved, I’ve seen it and I hope the concerned have seen it too.

SUTS, thank you too! I do not know the level of involvement you have in this campaign, but you are part of it now and I thank you for representing us well. You know better what this has meant to you and the way in which it has changed you.

That’s about it for now. It won’t end though. Impressions on this footage are to come in the next two days.

Until then, see you soon!

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