Thanks to all the participants – volunteers, speakers, performers, sponsors and attendees – who made EsoZone possible for its five year run. It was the trip of a lifetime.

If anyone’s interested in organizing a replacement event, you can let me know (me@klintfinley.com). I can offer advice and if I hear from more than one person I can connect all interested parties.

The most difficult and expensive part of EsoZone was always finding events space. The Slate now provides free event space for community events.

-Klint Finley. Portland, OR. 2012.

Friday at 10pm

The Duke of Uke

Followed by: DJ Princess Starbright Crystal Initiatrix

Saturday at 8pm

Soup Purse hosts the Surreal Industrial Showcase. Expect The Steven Lasombras, and some surprises!

Your donations keep EsoZone a free and open event.

Any amount helps and is much appreciated, but if you’re looking for a suggested amount I think $15 is fair.

Occupy the Astral Plane. And opening ritual lead by Danny Chaoflux at 1:15 PM on November 19.

Yoga for Slackers at 2:00 PM on November 19. Lead by Loren mccRory, who has been practicing yoga off and on for over 40 years. She’s taught yoga on Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania Poconos & Central Valley California. Bring comfortable clothes for this!

Grant Writing for Artists and Other Alien Beings with Amanda Sledz at 3:30 PM on November 19. Those inclined towards crafting projects, or cultivating careers conventionally described as “strange” might not consider grants when looking for some means to fund their creations. Why not? In this workshop, you’ll learn how to locate grant makers with an interest in the mind eruptions of the chronically odd, and the fundamentals of grant writing, including creation of competitive proposals and budgets. Though primarily directed at artists and writers, all are welcome, including those operating (or interested in operating) 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.

Anarcho-Sewing: Making Clothes Without a Sewing Machine with Jillian Ordes-Finley at 4:15 PM on November 19. In this workshop, you will learn basic techniques on how to fix, alter, and make simple clothing without a sewing machine. Don’t throw away that shirt with a missing button, those pants with a rip, or that jacket with an ugly stain- learn how to fix it, maybe make it even more awesome! People of all genders are encouraged to participate, and all materials will be provided.

You can expect even more workshops, discussions and activities to be planned the day of the event. Bring your own ideas to the event and reserve a time slot!

Expect a schedule to be posted soon.

Beyond Growth co-founder Eric Schiller will give a presentation titled “Digital Hipsterism: Anti-intellectual Movements in Social Media” at EsoZone Portland 2011 on November 18. Here’s Eric’s description of the talk:

In this talk I will explore how social media technology has facilitated the creation of loose ‘internet cults’, and how they are used to influence their followers. I will analyze elements of the lifestyle design movement, Hacker News, and Reddit to further the thesis that social media portrays itself as a transparent means of communication yet in reality is anything but. Using the notion of ‘Digital Hipsterism’ to unmask the authoritarian and anti-intellectual core of these movements, I will demonstrate how depth of research and well reasoned arguments are not valued, but merely the appearance of depth is regarded as the ideal truth.

Eric is a part-time social critic and philosopher. When not writing snarky essays, he works as a freelance web designer and developer in Seattle.

Eric’s essay on digital hipsterism can be found here. You can read the Technoccult interview with Eric and his collaborator Duff McDuffee here.

Tom Henderson, author of the forthcoming book Punk Mathematics, will keynote EsoZone Portland 2011 on November 18th at p:ear. Admission is free. Tom’s talk is tentatively titled “Time, Space, and the Self are Illusions – So Do ‘You’ Wanna Go ‘Out’ with ‘Me’ ‘Tonight’?” He’ll cover:

• Mining your history for strategy
• Virtual paranoia
• Your eigenself and “you”
• Using the howling void beyond your epsilon of consciousness for a good time

Tom has a masters in mathematics from Portland State University. According to the Kickstarter page for his book:

Punk Mathematics will be a series of mathematical stories. It is written for readers who are interested in having their minds expanded by the strange metaphors and implications of mathematics, even if they’re not always on friendly terms with equations. Better living through probability; the fractal dimension of cities and cancers; using orders of magnitude to detect bullshit; free will and quantum economics; and the mathematics of cooperation in a networked world on the brink of a No Future collapse.

For more on Tom, you can follow him on Twitter, read the Technoccult interview with him or listen to this interview on the Acme Science podcast Strongly Connected Components.

EsoZone Portland 2011 will take place over the course of November 18th and 19th. It will include a few pre-scheduled presentations, workshops and performances along with ample free space for ad-hoc “unconference” sessions in the style of BarCamp or Bird of a Feather.

Watch this space for more announcements.

This year’s EsoZone Portland will be on November 18th and 19th at p:ear. We’ll be accepting donations to cover venue rental costs soon.

We’ll be following the unconference format again this year, but stay tuned for announcements of a few pre-scheduled talks, workshops and performances.

What: EsoZone Portland 2011

When:
November 18 7pm – Midnight
November 19 1pm – Midnight

Where:
p:ear
338 NW 6th Ave
Portland, Oregon 97209

(Logo by Danny Chaoflux)

The plan is to have a hybrid conference/unconference, with free admission and, Bob willing, live music. We’re looking for a venue right now, so if you run a venue and want to host it or have any suggestions for a location please e-mail 2011@esozone.com. We have a few ideas already, but any help in that area would be appreciated.

Watch this space for further updates including exact dates, locations and schedule.

-Klint

The specific answer to this question lies somewhere along these lines : nobody, everybody, whatever, don’t look at me, leave me alone about it, fuck this I quit, etc… Seriously tho, we discovered last year that we prefer the way the event flows for all of us when we reject the idea that any of us are “The Boss.”

And since the daytime scheduling formula is designed to more or less run itself, it certainly relieves alot of folks of alot of unnecessary stress, and that’s part of the whole point. Still, SOMEONE has to take “responsibility” for getting the ball rolling on this far-out thing, and maintain the direction of the flow of events from a perspective of experience. And in the event something should catch on fire, a fight breaks out, a weird science project gets subjected to wiggling tentacle gang rape thanks to the ritual evocation of super-mutant comic book characters next door, someone loses their stash of this year’s designer hallucinogens, or whatever, we all need to know who to blame and/or complain to.

So, without further ado, let’s introduce this year’s resident slackers, in whatever particular order…

Klint Finley : Alumnus Emeritus Abstractus

Actually, Klint is off the hook this year. Leave him the hell out of your drama and expectations. Seriously, he earned it, being of the few founding members of the Esozone community who’s still around. Those who know Klint know the hard work he’s put into this thing since the event’s inception in 2007, and that he’s often been left holding the bag, or the bill, or the stack of nitpicky bitchy emails, etc. He kept the website running, wrote content for it, used his unparalleled webmaster powers to keep interest active over the past three years. He personally transported panelists and performers and presenters from out of town in his magic flying time-machine. He went thousands of dollars into the hole. His pet chinchilla exploded in a bizaare radionics accident. He’s lost countless limbs and had to replace them with cybernetic components at the last minute. He was impregnated with octopi and disemboweled for their harvesting at last year’s After-party/Subgenius Devival for fuck’s sake. That’s why we’re making damn skippy that he won’t be lifting a fucking finger this weekend, except to throw down his incredible soundscapes on Saturday evening with his recently revealed dark ambient project, Psychetect.

Ogo Eion: Jack of too many trades

Ogo is known around town for pulling remarkable events off at the last minute in chaotic environments, often under less-than-optimal conditions.  You may have attended one of his Cacophony events (a series of monthly noise and experimental music evenings that ran for two years straight back in the late ‘oughts) or one of the evenings in his more recent series of events, Psychopomp, where the lines between audience and performer are intentionally blurred.  You may be wearing a custom silk-screened patch or t-shirt or pair of socks from his Tesselate design line right this moment.  He may have designed your event’s promotional handbill, website, your buisiness card, god/dess knows what else. (See: iokaos.net) You may have seen him perform as An Exquisite Corpse, or in one of the many collaborative efforts he’s participated in.  At any rate, this modern renaissance mutant is hands down one of the more prolific and innovative forces in today’s Cascadian underground.  He’ll be co-hosting a daytime session which concerns the sorcerous implications of design and print, and will be performing in tandem with Cult of Zir as “Shortwave Theatre Noir Ministry” on Saturday evening.

Todd Dickerson : Sonic Sorcery and Guru Debunking

If you’ve witnessed any of Todd’s performances as Soup Purse, you know the psychological impact of the unseen forces which he intentionally unleashes into the room by way of his specially constructed sonic equipment.  Evocation and Divination thru the medium of abstract electronic music is one of the specialties Todd is known for.  In fact he hosted a workshop session devoted to exploring this approach at Esozone Portland 2009. (You can check it out here.) A specialty of his which you might not be aware of is the analysis of modern occult movements and the manipulative psychological strategies of their crackpot leaders.  If there’s an obscure bizaare UFO cult you’ve read a Wikipedia article about in passing, chances are that a large space on Todd’s bookshelf is devoted to them.

Nolon Ashley: Resident Fool, General Catalyst

Nolon performs under the name Cult of Zir, and has been performing, working, and making magickal mischief at Esozone events since the first year.  While he is a sincere practitioner of the craft thru his music, talismanic collage-work, and situational tomfoolery, he also throws much of his effort into demystifying the pomposity of occult hubris, and the taunting of stuffshirt occultist snobs. It has been alleged that he founded both the Stodgy Old Whitemen with Special Gestures and Costume Club (SOWMSGCC), and the Society for Trickster Comedian Ex-Magicians Flippant Toward Your Favorite Paradigm (TCEMFTYFP) (FACT: These allegations have no basis in fact, fiction, or otherwise.) Last year he hosted a group session involving the creation of Esozone’s temple on the astral plane (Check out this here blurb on it.) along with Klint Finley, who contributed binaural sonic landscaping to the experiment.  The Astral Esozone experiment (EZTRAL) will be repeated again this year, and Cult of Zir will be teaming up with Ogo Eion to perform Shortwave Theatre Noir Ministry on Saturday evening, as mentioned before.