"Epekeina" (ἐπέκεινα) "beyond" or "further on"
Epikeinaphor
Inspired by François Laruelle’s mystique-fiction, but not circumscribed by it, Epekeinaphor heads beyond the idea of representation that is built into the system that dominates our culture and communication. Epekeinaphor, for Laruelle, in contrast to metaphor with its referential figural frame, operates as an active and creative embodiment of the transcendental.
It is a part of my "Eremos", and a precursor for my ongoing research project “U” (see it's sketches below)
It was recorded with a pair of mics using sounds of self-reinforcing feedback, emerging in the space of a staircase, and amplified by its reverberation and resonance, accentuated by my presence, observation, and movements.
“U” is an acousmatic multichannel performance coiling with and around streams of feedback, both technically and conceptually. As a system that never resolves into a finished state, the feedback loop presents a framework through which reality itself may be seen as an open ontogenetic process.
The title of this inquiry comes from an iconic U-shaped diagram, created by physicist John Archibald Wheeler to inscribe his provocative idea of the procedural and always becoming Participatory Universe as a self-synthesising system, which actualises itself on the fly in a closed loop through the eyes (and the ears, I believe) of observers.
“The Universe is a self-excited circuit”, as he famously noted.
Pic 1
Pic.1 presents my version of Wheeler's glyph
These are sketches from the very first rehearsal of the "U" project with the three microphone array.
Please note, they are unpolished, there's no attempt at spatialisation, the effects are not thoroughly chosen or elaborated, being adjusted on the fly, the flow is fully spontaneous.
My approach to the compositional structure of the performance within this project may evolve over time, but at present, I anticipate it to be unfolding through six sections, each lasting between 5 and 10 minutes.
Every stage involves working with a specific frequency range by activating a pair of microphones entangled in the frequency domain and dedicated to their corresponding speakers, which are positioned opposite each other.*
Sound generated through this interaction moves through the whole system while other microphones are switched off.
Within this matrix, microphones set up possible spectral bounds for the feedback, defining the character of the flow at each stage, while speakers form a spatial sonic field through which it can circulate.
A video from a performance that took place at Etr'ange in Dock11, Berlin, 28.03.2026 as an example of my work mixing live-electronics and acousmatique approaches.
There, together with visual artist Mike Iv, we (Zero Night) navigated the domain of alterity through the lens of speculative angelism*, understood as a heretical tool to introduce foreignness into the systems dominated by power struggles and capital. The presented performance, AngelNetz (meaning “fishing net” from German), unfolds through the pressure and stress, bringing into play magnetic fields, radio waves, electrical discharges, feedback and objects, and opening onto an anisotropic terrain of interrelations.
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*A “speculative angelism” referred here is neither a manifestation of the denial of the body nor a set of rules: for François Laruelle and Anthony Paul Smith, an angel is a Stranger who refuses to be defined by the world’s categories, be they biological, linguistic, or political. Speculative angelism presents a figure of the angel as a "rebel", a structural anomaly that exposes the world's laws as arbitrary and contingent.
2026 © Alienation Index Lab
