some say the earth sings. there are mornings, like this, when the song is deafening. a song that hurts, and it is that pain that pushes you onto the path. let the voices of the elders guide your steps.
the cosmos of magic emanates recursive, infinitely mysterious fractals. in a state of magic, each living body envelopes a soul and, reciprocally, all bodies are embraced by an ambient soul. but when technic has murdered magic and digitized the ineffable, bodies wander soulless across desolate territories: they barely crawl, suffocated by a black sun. in their revolutionary demonology, gruppo di nun write that the “technical and scientific progress of a small part of humanity does not lead to truth, but to the dead end of extinction.”
when the technoscience of the privileged few subjugates magic, mystery hides in every dark corner of the earth, seeking refuge from the fangs of the single and multiple number that proliferates as a plague of locusts that devours everything that stands on its way. and thus every thing remains in a profound state of sleep, as if sinking into a pale dream of death.
lines of force is a game/essay that takes place in a post-technical world in which all living beings have become mere ghosts: nothing but shadows lengthening beneath the slow nightfall of annihilation. in such scenario, technic has already erased itself from the face of the earth, leaving behind nothing but a trail of destruction. lines of force happens on that hollow earth, where the mineral tentacles of matter reclaim their hegemony after the brief reign of the organic: a dying land inhabited by human and non-human persons that can hardly breath, speak or move. the player of lines of force is faced with the task of summoning life back through the reactivation of a forgotten sacred geometry. this vital mission and its details become gradually defined thanks to the words offered by the elders who, in ruined towns, resist the painful bite of extinction. to redraw the sacred geometry, to make visible the door to the invisible, the player must walk the land from end to end. she must learn from serpents, snails, plants, mushrooms and humans the alchemical arts that might make the black sun burn again, as well as the offering rituals that might awaken the lines of force that interconnect the sacred points that lie across the territory.
in november 2022 i had the opportunity of witnessing a ceremony where water was sowed in the outskirts of the city of bogotá, colombia. with songs, drums, gifts and a healing ritual, the wise old men and women buried a bowl with prayed water on a very precise spot near the confluence of two extremely polluted rivers, on grasslands that were still greening despite the looming threat of reckless urbanization. in that occasion i understood that the sacred points in a cosmic geometry are not only mystical places often aligned with astronomical phenomena. they are also sites of environmental restoration and management that need to be cared for, and therefore convey the sacred with a very specific and concrete role within the interdependent entanglement of the living. i realized that the form and vibration of the cosmic constitute the ambient soul that resists the technoscientific onslaught of order and domination. that the ambient soul and the health of all living bodies are one and the same thing. that the knowledge that traces and is traced by sacred geometries lives in every blade of grass that grows on a territory, in each lump of soil, within each being, and that it reverberates and takes the form of signs that take shape in the souls and bodies that are open, inside the souls and bodies that are still able to dance and sing to the rhythm and tone of the subtle.
i did not attempt to portray the knowledge of a specific culture or territory in lines of force, but rather tried to convey the experience of the throbbing of and with the points of a sacred geometry: an experience that may be lived as a transition towards the revitalization of both our digitized souls and our ravaged lands and bodies. lines of force is thus an essay that asks to be played: a text that is to be read by walking along many possible pathways, thereby resonating with the constant transit and transformation of the voices that speak and weave in the territories of knowledge.
