How can we speak of You, who has no form, no taste, no colour, no odour, but permeates all beings as life’s essence, a worlding omnipresent everlasting..
Without You, what have we?
How would the sea look without You? Would we be able to cry out
since only salt and sand remained from the tears..
(a voice in the wilderness..)
E r e m o s
a sojourn devoid of place
Eremos (ἐρημος) is a Greek word
meaning "wilderness" or "desert”
From Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁mós (“dark”)
from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁-(“to separate”)
(Wiki)
Welcome to the desert of the Real.
(Slavoj Zizek)
At last all wells were poisoned, all rivers ran with filth,
all seas were dead; there was no land left to grow food.
Some of our wise men turned to the contemplation of deserts. …
Stay in the desert long enough and you could apprehend the absolute.
(Margaret Atwood ‘Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet’)
For here is the desert propagated by our world, and also the new earth.
(Deleuze & Guatarri “Anti-Oedipus”)
"What can we do when war overshadows the social imagination? The only thing we can do is to desert."
Franco "Bifo" Berardi
Eremos is an audiovisual set and installation by intermedia art duo “Zero Night” (Snezhana Reizen and Mike Iv) that voices out the crises of our time that we experience on so many levels - from ecology and extinction of species which can lead to the global extinction as well to the socio-political tensions and stagnation of the “world which is slow to change”, till the point when it is too late.
Yet, beneath the surface, Eremos speaks about water, and nothing else, but does it apophatically, starting from its absence. *
“The figure of the desert is an ambiguous terrain of both loss and salvation, - as Aidan Tynan noticed in his book on deserts. It’s here, in this disenchanted spaciousness, that we can feel this essential gap - ‘the gap between Life and that which is conceived as before or without Life’*. This gap, - continues Tynan, is a ‘scarred region’ of the contemporary global imaginary that informs how we think and feel about fossil fuels, extraterrestrial exploration and apocalyptic futures.”
In this project, we try to avoid single-minded solutions and narrow depictions of what is happening or should be done. This work rather aims to pose questions through the image of the desert, treating it as both a warning and a potential exit, but situating these domains of meaning within different frameworks.
“To be in the world but not of it”, as it was suggested by Gilles Grelet in his “Theory of the solitary sailor,” is one of the main directives of this work.
The imagery of the desert is hauntological, it is a non-place that hides in its sands a cosmology of the psyche and that of the world.
It might appear as a dark night of the soul, but also as a zero point before a restart - a seed for revolt.
In spite of the dominating in our minds and society dogmas, the figure of the desert is egalitarian and cosmopolitical in essence. It is no-man’s land - a pure angelic realm that exists with another logic, which perhaps can be actualised solely by hermits or groups of nomads and anachorites.**
It is here, in exile and solitude, that we can find the connection with the spiritual, and, paradoxically, with the collective at a more profound level. On a large scale, desert can be seen as a subconscious domain, but also as a morphic field that collects and conveys our experience and a collective memory. ***
The desert, in a sense, is both a private space and a collective dream.
Within the interplay of these motifs, by sliding on the sand’s surfaces and diving in the abyss, by risking to be swallowed by the void, we seek to imagine another world, we move towards possible, though it might be a mirage, with an uneven gait, as fremens from “The Dune” taught us.
Sonically, the set is based on the media of the sea and tears, bereft of water, namely, sand and salt, and electricity discharges recorded with sensitive piezo sensors, microphones, and wires processed with Max/MSP and other software. Among procedural techniques are psychoacoustic ones, such as near-antiphase, where sound waves approach their opposites almost exactly, so that we hear the sound drowning in silence, as if submerged underwater, and then bursting forth… like a scream with a closed mouth.
The sound seems to be absent, but the tension is felt through occasional artifacts. These artifacts are being exemplified to the limits of their expenditure.
The resulting canvas of sonic movements is connected to visuals through synchronisation algorithms that are sensitive to the entire sonar spectrogram, creating a wide range of associations in the audience's perception and situating spectators in a non-place of high intensity.
The set was performed at Doc11, Berlin, in December 2024, and is now in preparation for realisation as an intermedia multichannel installation. (We are looking for funds!)
The installation invites the audience to witness sand dunes within a gallery space. The dunes are surrounded by marked boundaries on the floor. Over time, the sand seeps beyond these lines, propelled by a polyrhythmic beat from “Worm callers” positioned throughout the room and triggered at varying speeds via Max MSP—intertwining complex sonic processions with the sand's movement.
Besides other things, sonically, the work refers to Ligeti’s famous piece with metronomes but reinterprets it by layering a new mythology and complex issues of our time.
Video projections appear on two walls, employing particle simulation and the transformation of basic geometric shapes into complex forms, blended with an archive of old photographs subtly conjuring a sense of collective memory beyond time in an ambivalent way - hinting at retroactive causality and reflection through which we can perhaps influence the future and sense the interconnectedness of all things, but also as a sign of the possible transformation if not dissipation of human subjectivity as we know it.
“One can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea”
(MichelFoucault )
* “I was the object of a question outside my line of duty. It was there, but did not insist, called my name gently so as not to scare me. But I had no way of keeping track of the sound of its voice. So I called it absence. . .” (Edmond Jabes)
* Tynan quotes Elizabeth A. Povinelli
** angelism by Lardreau and Jambet, as well as Vladimir Shallar
*** a theory of morphogenetic fields by Rupert Sheldrake
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Snezhana Reizen - sound, composition, conceptual framework, text, imagery, visual art - particle simulation
Mike Iv - generative visual art - geometric transformations, visual projections, engineering, and technical production
For more context and content, please visit our “Zero Night” page.
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© 2025