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SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS was a two day public event held during Margate Festival and hosted by current associates at Open School East. The event featured a programme of workshops, performances, live music and a reading group. Throughout these sessions the subterranean; that which exists, occurs or is concealed under the earth, was explored as a conceptual framework and physical space for retreat, resistance and learning.

This archive ~ or the SUB-LIBRARY ~ was constructed to document various forms and points of research that pointed toward SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS itself. To act as a network that linked individual excavations to chambers of collaborative action. Material found here was developed, collected and presented to provide an introductory and contextual platform for participants. The SUB-LIBRARY’S only intention is to highlight and disseminate this research... 

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01 CAVE MUSIC

02 CONCHYLOMANIA

03 VIRTUAL SPELEOLOGY 

04 SPELUNKING!

05 STALAGMITES/TITES

06 READING GROUP: DARK ECOLOGY

(’Jump to’ section coming soon once code is found)

“The place arrived through a screen. Coloured lights making images of a huge entrance on a flat liquid screen. Portals to places. Heavy, solid, ancient rock. Vast openings evolved from tiny cracks.

The heavy walls of the cave are a definite edge to a space. When the lights are turned out the darkness swallows everything. Deep darkness, like the pit of a stomach. The dark in the cave is a ‘stuff’, it seeps into every orifice until you are no longer sure of the edge of your own form. Everything merges”

Excerpt from Fixed Position by Flora Parrott.

> Flora kindly donated a selection of her writing and research to the SUB-LIBRARY during workshops for Open School East’s Public Programme. Fragments of Flora’s research feature recurrently throughout the library and are denoted by an X.

THE SUBTERRANEAN LIBRARY. assembled by George Harding

A singing boulder, muddy artefacts, donated reading material and an activity/sitting space.

‘I awakened in the cave holding the crystal in my hands / the pattern of the gate shimmering on the wall behind me’

CAVE MUSIC. curated by George Harding and Lou Lou Sainsbury

A skittish sound swirled in the cavities of SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS. Multiple tapes of DREAM MUSIC played in unison, filling and duetting with the space. Between clicks, whilst cassettes were turned, sounds of THE CAVE, a eclectic playlist of subterranean music, filled the space.

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Below are excerpts taken from ‘DREAM MUSIC’, a collection of mysterious and expansive outsider music produced by Sunpath.

Sounds of THE CAVE can be found HERE.

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Sunpath ~ Ga Te [Excerpt]

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Sunpath ~ Jasimin [Excerpt]

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Sunpath ~ Snowflake Dragon [Excerpt]

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Other Material:

☼ Chthonic Music (coming soon)

☼ Voodoo Science Park  ~ Victoria Halford & Steve Beard. 2011.

“The Tommyknockers were very rarely seen. Instead, they were most often heard. Underground messengers, they communicated through noise and vibration, the propagation of low frequency sound. The miners would tap out a call on the walls of the tunnels, their hammers drumming on the rock. The response would not be long in coming. It was a matter of locating echoes from distant passageways, catching a rhythm inventing a code.” pp.48

(watch the film HERE.)

A Singing Boulder

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“Inside the cave, sitting in a tiny pool are a group of white pebbles; cave pearls. Rolling stalagmites growing layer by layer. When cracked open, the inside reveals concentric circles of calcium, like tree rings

Rolling and growing, their bright, near transparent albino layers in the pitch black.” 

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CONCHYLOMANIA. led by Emma Gibson and Emily Whitebread 

During CONCHYLOMANIA, Emma and Emily introduced a brief history of shell collecting, followed by an expedition to the local shores of Margate to gather ‘undiscovered’ shells and guided participants through the alteration process typically used by shell collectors.

Every shell found and altered was then released back into the wild in a new, even more collectible form - awaiting for someone else to chance upon it...

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Other Material:

☼ Mad About Seashells ~ Richard Conniff (The Smithsonian Mag.) 2009.

>The Magnificent Shells of the Smithsonian ~ Smithsonian Video Archive. 2010.

☼ Kula Shells and Zombies: Notes on Value ~ Anonymous. 2009.

“Our own cultural limitations on capital are shrinking. Justice as an “eye for an eye” is a moral equation which preceded capitalism. Justice is a value system that has yet to be completely subsumed by capitalist logic, but it has become adapted to capital’s needs.“

☼ Van Nostrand's Standard Catalog of Shells ~ Wagner, Abbott. 1964.

( L->R ): A pot of cave offerings, white slime, a cave dwellers cup, petrified toad, alchemical pot, slit broach, candle.

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VIRTUAL SPELEOLOGY: Caving, Smuggling and the Deep Web. led by Jo Sweeney and Kris Lock

Through a live guided tour of the DEEP WEB and its most commonly used entry point, the Tor browser, Jo and Kris drew allegorical connections between the lore of cave systems and smugglers tunnels to the dark silos of the subterranean side of the web.

As they stepped further into the deep, a map of the sprawling cavernous space explored was formed, providing a more lateral way of understanding the DEEP WEB. 

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Other material:

☼ Graph Theoretic Properties of the Darkweb ~ Griffith, Xu and Ratti. 2017.

☼ British Caves & Speleology ~ E. A. Martel. 1897

> Smuggling at Margate ~ Anthony Lee. ????. 

☼ A CryptoParty History: Party Like It's 1984 ~ Anonymous. ????. 

“...What is CryptoParty?”

☼ The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin ~ Benjamin Wallace. 2011.

☼ The Ceremony ~ Molly webster (for Radiolab.) 2017.

“...a moment last fall when a group of wizards came together in an undisclosed location to launch a new currency. It's an undertaking that involves some of the most elaborate security and cryptography ever done. And math. Lots of math. It was all going great until, in the middle of it, something started to behave a little...strangely.”

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Petrified Cave Slime

“The long corridor doesn’t have the same dense blackness of the cave, shafts of light from above reflected in pools of watery mud underfoot. Sucking my feet right down into the ground.

Halfway down the corridor there is a dead, fleshy toad lying on it’s back. Spotlit by daylight streaming in from the shaft directly above. It cant have been there for long.

A 30m fall into nothing. The thought turns my stomach, a small measured jump in to solid ground that wasn’t there.”

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SPELUNKING!

After sundown and a brief moment for refreshments, SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS descended again for series of sub-terrestrial musical performances. 

Featuring: (mp3 files coming soon)

DREAMING IN THE DARK with Jacob Woods

A SEANCE with Jo Murray

CHTHONIC AMBIANCE guided meditations with Lou Lou Sainsbury & Emily Whitebread 

NOISE MUDDING live music with Benedict Drew, Kris Lock and others

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Other material:

☼ Rimbaud’s Derangement of All the Senses, Magic, and Archeology ~ Carolyn Nakamura. 2015.

☼ Lightning Bugs ~ B. Gajendra Babu. 2002.

☼ The Taste of Earth ~ Uzma Z. Rizvi. 2015.

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( L->R ): Shattered stalagmites (imitation), titty cup, ear pieces, stone knockers, candle holder.

“When a stalagmite is opened sometimes there are gill-like gaps interrupting the internal pattern. The gaps are formed when the cracks feeding the stalagmites become blocked. The path changes. New cracks open up.”

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STALAGMITES. led by Chloe Ashley and Sara Trillo

Exploring the formal qualities of the cave, Chloe and Sara led a workshop that aimed to speed up the glacial formation of stalagmites and stalactites.

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Other material:

☼ Cave Ecology and the Evolution of Troglobites ~Thomas C. BarrJr. 1968.

☼ Subterranean Ecosystems: A Truncated Functional Biodiversity ~ Gibert,  Deharveng. 2002.

☼ Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form ~ Esther Leslie. 2016.

☼ The Cave of Vortigern ~ Robert Vermaat. ????.

☼ The Writing of Stones ~ Roger Caillois. 1970.

“Life Appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future... A precarious kind of slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working... obscure distillations generate juices, salivas, yeasts. Like mists or dews, brief yet patient jellies come forth... It is the birth of all flesh irrigated by a liquid... like the semisolid in the chrysalis, half way between larva and insect...”

☼ Allegory of the Cave Painting ~ Mircan & Van Gerven Oei (eds). 2015.

> Lonely rocks ~ Adam Jasper (taken from ‘Allegory of the Cave Painting’)

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DARK ECOLOGY & BLACK METAL. a reading/listening group led by Lou Lou Sainsbury

Using Timothy Morton’s guiding, poetic voice willing spelunkers explored the link between Two Hunters, a seminal black metal album, and the ecological tensions of our age...

“Wolves in the Throne Room dwells upon the darkness of metal, that most chthonic of things, refusing to even try to attain escape velocity into the high orbit of affirmative culture that shuns the earth beneath.” 

Read Timothy Morton’s review in full HERE

Listen to Wolves in the Throne Room’s ‘Two Hunters’ HERE

( L->R ): Composite A (tunnel) , Composite B (fragment)

Visions (still) 2016. Lou Lou Sainsbury

‘SUBTERRANEAN WORLDS’ was hosted by Open School East in partnership with Margate Festival 2017

THE SUBTERRANEAN LIBRARY (SUB-LIBRARY) was curated by George Harding and features work and research gifted by all of the OSE associates.

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Open School East is: Chloe Ashley, Roxman Gatt, Emma Gibson, George Harding, Jessica Jordan-Wrench, Kris Lock, Jo Murray, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Jo Sweeney, Sara Trillo, Emily Whitebread and Jacob Woods