Ben Jeans Houghton

By navigating a Gnostic astrology via the nuclear-messiahs, immortal-romantics, transhuman-deities and apocalyptic-guides of cinematic and animatic histories, we will speculate on the erotic embodiment and metamorphic dreaming of a living cosmos through the silver screen. By examining the seductive gravity of Eros as the physics of incarnation through which energy is enfleshed, we will consider solar systems as living beings that constellate consciousness, etching energy into organic embodiment to undergo a tutelary theatre of transformation; from both the pessimistic and optimistic perspectives of various Gnosticisms.

By illustrating a Möbius loop in space time, centred on the solar wound of atomic warfare, that echoes back into the historicism of Gnostic cosmogenesis – reconsidered as prophecy – and forward into the exponential threat of an AI singularity – considered as the black-mirror of mind-body dualism – we will establish a foundation from which to speculate on the macrocosmic and microcosmic function of ‘the wound’; as an evolutionary initiation within the architecture of an astrology. By speculating on the deeper functions of exoteric (obvious), esoteric (unobvious) and occult (hidden) ontologies, we will reveal opportunities to reconsider the tiered totality of what can often feel like a fractious reality, whilst illuminating magical opportunities towards radical acceptance and the agency it affords us in our embodiment of magic.

Whether asleep in the dream of life being danced by a cosmos, awakened to its implications and agencies, or lucid co-creators of a quantum becoming that populates a psychedelic terraforming of matter, desire ever siren-songs us into the nebulous eroticism of being.

Gnostic Animist, Artist and Astrologer Ben Jeans Houghton’s multidisciplinary practice spans votive-sculpture, architectural-installation, oneiric film-essay, liquid-crystal painting, self-reflexive writing, ritual costume, improvised performance, mantric-glossolalia and esoteric lectures. The work explores and expresses magic; the art of transformation and its methodologies, technologies, agencies, and implications, through art-praxis, as-gnosis, informed by astrological, philosophical, and metaphysical perspectives. Situating creativity as a generative site for a timely remembrance of occulted metaphysics and methodologies by challenging and dismantling the monopoly of the materialist paradigm, towards the reinvigoration of contemporary creative tools, for the forming of honest futures based on mutual flourishing in right-relation with a more-than-human cosmos.

Through his ritual performance practice Ben creates non-denominational haptic expressions of votive-worship, that evince the alchemical methodology of using art-praxis to both communicate and co-create self-reflexive, transformative opportunities, for author and audience. Through writing he engages with the poetic-economy of prose and the teleological structure of essay to intimate the historicism of foundational ideas and reanimate their essence with illuminating threads. Through experimental film and film-essay he creates oneiric time-based expressions that subsume the structures and languages of mythology, anthology, poetry and essay; to communicate a constellation of perspectives that embody existential questions, posited in novel ways, as the ambulation of a gnostic-psychogeography.

Ben has delivered exhibitions, screenings, presentations, performances and publications internationally in Germany, Greece, Africa, Japan, South Korea, and America and nationally across the UK with CCA, Gymnasium Gallery, Bloc Projects, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Generator Projects, Whitstable Biennale, BFI and Channel Four amongst others. Ben has also previously presented esoteric lectures for the Trans States; Esoteric Arts Conference and AstroMagia; Art of Astral Magic Conference and will be again this year, alongside another newly commissioned lecture for presentation to the IAAM; International Association of Astral Magicians.