‘Subtitles’ often indicate that the identity of a work is fragmented and multi faceted. The programme of a work is then charged and has to be able to serve a diversity of demands. In the same way that in smaller tribal communities many public functions used to be performed by one and the same person, so the work provides input in various fields. You can look upon that packaging together of functions as a classical example of integration and the capacity for arbitration, but it can also be the more or less incidental result of the fact that no compelling hierarchy or plan can be demonstrated in the various methods of observation. In such a hyper cut-up of functions, everything runs through, into and alongside everything else and everything is equally important and every level of observation demands attention and recognition in a compulsory way. That is true here as well. To some extent, the subtitle provides the context of the references which have already been provided in the title: Factory Defaults Hyper - Testimony/The Anti - Cycles of Egophony Based on the cuneiform inscriptions of Enuma Elish (The Seven Tablets) & The Book of Neoism (Vol. 1-4). Nineveh was the lost capital city of Assyria on the banks of the Tigris. In the time that Ashurbanipal reigned there, a library of clay tablets with holy inscriptions (cuneiform tablets) was set up in his palace. These tablets were involved in the various rites and cult services. The seven Enuma Elish tablets, a high point in Semitic literature, also belonged to such a rite. These low-tech tablets served Kantor as the point of departure for the wild, hedonistic hyper-tech version of that cult. The protagonists in this flipped religious service are described somewhere as 'ego-maniac freaks' who desperately express “the multidimensional existence of individual organisms and their alternative life-style in the present trans-technological society” as the flyer puts it, not without bombast. In any case, it provides a variegated entanglement of shrilly singing drag queens (Mutant Diva), transsexuals muzzling each other and performance artists harassing each other with techno debris. Everybody in this cult improvisation does his or her own 'thing', but without any doubt with a feeling for theatrical madness. Roles, sexes, relationships change almost imperceptibly and ensure a flux of tumbling images, Sounds, animations, disturbances and contradictions floating on a rhythm of individual chaos. The question remains as to whether this sensory explosion of individual violence will lead us to the reverie that Kantor had in mind. His work attempts to be an exposition, With the conflict between the technological power and the subversive power arising from the creative individual, wrestling with that technological power. As far as the individual watching and wrestling with this techno-tape is concerned, perhaps there is nothing more than to swallow in greedy gulps, the consolation of the ultimate sub title, where Kantor, at the end of the tape says in his repeated telephone epilogue: "..."
– Willem van Weelden
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Camera, Light Kim Derko, Music Montsy Cantsin, Editing Michael Giroux, Istvan Kantor, With Angela Idealism, Monty Cantsin and others
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