REALITY AS PRACTICE
ARIA (ALGO-RHYTHMIC IDEATION ASSEMBLY)

Saturday 31st May, 2025

7pm presentation + discussion
by Brandon Rosenbluth

After 8pm please join us for dinner + drinks to celebrate new members and the continuation of au jus through collective struggle and support. In that spirit bring something liquid or sustaining for our shared meal.

In my research and practice I am developing tools, language, and forms of self and collectivity which I broadly label together as “reality as practice”. Primary among this project thus far has been ARIA, an arts educational Summer school and symposium which happens within a live action role-play experience, created and curated together with Tjaša Pogačar. The thematic focus tackled current ecological and political issues and imaginaries, featuring academics, artists, and curators engaged with art forms including role-play, interactive digital media, performance, opera, sound, and filmmaking. It is documented in two editions of ŠUM Journal including my essay, From The Ashes of ARIA. The Summer school was conceived to happen within a role-play format in order to break free from our entrenched ways of being and thinking, both individually and collectively, in order to prototype other possible selves, collectivities, and worlds; allowing for the new forms of subjectivity conjured to bleed into our experience of consensus reality. Practically, ARIA’s role-play experience took the form of highly structured days including guided somatic, psychic, and meditative exercises, the collective creation and use of talisman, workshops such as the devolution of language with the assistance of AI, encounters with the natural environment as unorthodox ethnographers, and group design of new rituals to be experienced by the other participants, amongst other transformative practices inspired by mystical techniques and contemporary cultural theory. ARIA constituted an askesis, putting into practice the theories we had been exploring intersubjectively, towards an understanding that was not only intellectual but bodily and environmental, often non-communicable outside of the group and its surroundings. It’s a format which fosters an extra-rational unknowing and transindividual modes of being, with outcomes that resist instrumentality; a formula for an apophatic self-with/as-other-empowered anti-pedagogy, embodying and animating its concepts.

Brandon Rosenbluth b. Los Angeles, graduated from Bard College, is an art and music curator and practitioner based in Ljubljana. He is the co-creator/curator of ARIA and curator for Indigo Festival. His texts have been published by OFLUXO, Kamizdat, Cukrarna, and ŠUM and he hosts ŠUM and Cartogenesis podcasts. linktr.ee/SkepticMystic