Spooky Action at a Distance

29 October, 19:00, Mimosa House, 47 Theobalds Rd, London WC1X 8SP

£8.88 general / £4.44 for members with the code HONOUREDGUEST

Ignota is four years old! As the veil draws thin, join us to welcome the darker half of the year and to celebrate our birthday on 29 October at Mimosa House with an evening exploring quantum spookiness, haunted synchronicities, slimy entanglements and altered states of consciousness.  

In the so-called ‘normal’, observable world, everything might appear to be either a wave or a particle. But if we alter our means of perception, everything is always both. As the air age unfolds, Ignota draws inspiration from quantum theories about the inevitability of relation to look towards a more hopeful, more magical paradigm for collectivity, interrelationship and healing, even and especially in moments of complexity and chaos.  

Taking a journey through Hannah Catherine Jones' Owed to Chiron, this event interweaves readings, practices, dreams and questions, featuring: Dreaming with the Hag – a dream invocation and incubation with IONE; an Altered States mini-launch with poets So Mayer and James Goodwin and Ignota’s Sarah Shin; a yarn entanglement ritual with healer Leila Sadeghee; a hypnotic journey through illuminating visions led by the mind’s eye with Ignota’s Susanna Davies-Crook; and a slimy performance lecture by artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney: a slippery stream-of-consciousness travelling through quantum phenomena including sticky entanglements, many-sided superposition, slime and nature, set to a layered video montage edited with 'spooky action at a distance' data from IBMs quantum computers. 

Susanna Davies-Crook is Head of Growth at Ignota. She has worked professionally in the fields of art and media for fifteen years in which time her experience has spanned small and innovative artist-led work to large-scale brand partnerships and immersive high-budget exhibitions including Transformer: A Rebirth of Wonder at 180 Strand where she was Associate Curator. She is the recipient of an Arts Council DYCP 2021 grant to develop her creative and critical writing practice on Nervous Systems and complete her first novel. She is also a hypnotherapist and yoga teacher.

James Goodwin is a poet based in Wiltshire undertaking a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. His books are aspects caught in the headspace we're in: composition for friends (Face Press, 2020), Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip (the87press, 2021), and Faux Ice (Materials, 2022).

Libby Heaney is a British artist and lecturer who holds a PhD in Quantum Information Science from the University of Leeds and an MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins in London. She has exhibited widely in galleries and institutions in the UK and internationally. As well as quantum computing, Heaney’s practice also incorporates AI and VR technology, using each of these tools critically to investigate how and who they empower and disempower. Heaney’s work subverts the usual uses of these technologies, forcing them to work against themselves revealing hidden potentials and exposing their drawbacks and dangers. Often inspired by Surrealism and Dadaism, Heaney’s work looks at subjectivity, truth, desire and perceptions of reality.

IONE is an author, playwright, director, improvising text-sound artist, and performer in various modalities. IONE is Reverend Mother-Founder of The Ministry of Maåt, an international spiritual and educational organization whose goal is World Harmony and Balance. A journalist for many years, IONE was also the artistic director of Deep Listening Institute for fifteen years. The practice of deep listening goes back to the late Pauline Oliveros, a pioneer of experimental electronic music who died in 2016, with whom IONE created numerous operas and performances. Ionedreams.us  www.ministryofmaat.org

So Mayer is a writer, bookseller at Burley Fisher Books, and organiser. Their most recent books are the speculative essay A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing (Peninsula, 2020) and poetry chapbook jacked a kaddish (Litmus, 2018), and their hybrid writing appears in Ghost Calls (DCA, 2021), On Relationships (3ofCups, 2020), At the Pond (Daunt, 2019) and Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota, 2018), and is forthcoming in Fission, Extra Teeth 4 and LUMIN. They are currently co-editing an anthology of queer SFFH erotica with Adam Zmith for Cipher Press and Fringe! (Nov 2021).

Leila Sadeghee is a healer, ritualist, meditation teacher, and priestess. Skilled at creating powerful healing spaces wherever her voice is heard, Leila is known for her loving, supportive, and intelligent tone, and her talent in bringing the depth of esoteric spiritual teachings into immediately accessible and salient focus. Leila is dedicated to dismantling systemic oppression as a spiritual practice. She is a keeper of the Magdalene flame. She is a devotee of the divine mother in all Her forms, and she is a pilgrimage enthusiast for whom walking on sacred ground brings ecstatic satisfaction. She also is quite the instigator of community, is relentless in her service and studentship, has a freewheeling sense of fun.