The Otolith Group: Neophyte

Conceived as notes toward the making of a future film, a new project by London-based collective The Otolith Group treats the format of an exhibition as an exercise in writing, and attempts to give preparatory notes, archival materials and preliminary sketches shape as a form of speculative screenplay or notebook-film. For their first work produced within the U.S., Neophyte is an inquiry into the gradual spiritualization of Capitalism, and the state of California as a test-ground for both the importation of Hindu guru culture and the ideology of post-war production in the 1960s and ’70s. The Otolith Group’s investigation into the cybernetic subcultures, musical presences and sentient entities distributed throughout the spiritual landscapes and industrial parks of Los Angeles and San Francisco proposes a possible future, envisioned through an improbable present. Hypothetically titled Neophyte, the project is the materialization of a cinema that documents its own quest for places, spaces and subjectivities yet to be defined.