9 Sum Sorcery
2017 - ongoing
9 Sum Sorcery is a free-form game system; a single-player occultural study; a ritualized re-negotiation of post-consumer packaging and retail detritus (cardboard backing, foam packing, clamshell casing, box inserts, rubber bands, tagging barbs...).
9 Sum Sorcery is a platform on which The Player pursues the old alchemical goals, across, beneath, and within the deconstructed space of vintage board games (Chaos and Merlin). These archaic modes of entertainment are seized by the imagination in an exasperated attempt at the regeneration and renewal of self and world through intuitive play.
9 Sum Sorcery is a multimedia work comprised of video and sculpture. Nine screens depict The Player performing with an assortment of augmented found materials within the framework of a board game. The Player continually re-organizes and de-organizes the components of the game-space in an attempt to come to terms with their place in it. In addition to appearing in the videos, the game's components are present physically, enclosed in a vitrine. Each video offers first and third-person perspectives of The Player in various states of communion with the game system. This system complicates itself through The Player's desire to simultaneously project narrative onto, and remove narrative from, the components of the game.
9 Sum Sorcery encourages engagement in a spiritual ordeal, where the potential for transformative power can become an ossifying psychosis in the absence of The Player's capacity to de-code and re-code meaning.
________________ stills __ installation __ document __ video (single channel edit)
2017 University of Waterloo MFA Exhibitions—Alexis Hildreth from Terry O'Neill on Vimeo.