"Excavating the Templar Treasure: Re/Searching the Hieros Gamos in Artistic & Critical Practice" was presented at the Contemporary Arts Research Unit (CARU) 2016 conference "What does it mean to research art / to research through art?" at Oxford Brookes University on 2 December 2016 with a breakthrough keynote by Professor Kerstin Mey.
Tagging a sign under the London Bridge indicates that you too will return to the origin...
...signaling the Eternal Return of Zarathustra...
To get the deal, it was required to return to Oxford in order to revisit the Übermensch from your theory of the Third...
The Dreieinigkeit behind the pivotal conference CARU/Arts reSearch Conference 2016 with performance highlight...
..."It is really interesting but I don't understand it" summing up the state of the Art World from Peta Lloyd of Oxford Brookes University...
...the Eternal Return of 2016 by way of social media...
A new Facebook friend, Dr Hugo Drochon, a Cambridge University Fellow invited you to his talk with the provocative title, "A CRISIS THE EARTH HAS NEVER SEEN: NIETZSCHE, THE 'WAR OF SPIRITS' AND GREAT POLITICS'" at TORCH, a project of the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. The talk and discussion served to fertilize within the academy a 21st century dialectic of Nietzsche's Übermensch in view of the Trumping of America.
Drochon was emphatic that Trump is NOT the Ubermensch, as moderator Audrey Borowski and I played Devil's Advocate: 'How can we know this so soon in the game?"
Exiting the Radcliffe Humanities building you have the urge to tag...
Upon returning to London, you set off the next day to the City of London..
...ripe for tagging as clues for Excavating the Treasure.
Your guide, Joel Scott-Holkes, a rising film star who animated the tour with his acting, took you right up to the imposing doors of the Templar Temple.
In a rush before your flight to Athens...
And so, you made your mission of endurance into an erotic game of a treasure hunt of the THIRD. MISSING JAMES FRANCO is your honorary rhythmic gynnastics guide for holding the tension of the opposites in the most challenging environments...
...your unknown destination of the raw anarchist neighborhood of Xarchia.
The nearby Athens Archeological Museum beckoned with an "Odyssey" special exhibition in which your personal odyssey met the symbol of closure: the Antikythera Mechanism...
...opening your MIssing James Franco 3.0: Nine Days at the Berlinale text:
This text utilizes the oldest human science to explore the contemporary ontology of our archaic origins. The disclosure of planetary rotation as the imbedded source of the first analog computer was the surprise finding through decades of examining the Antikythera mechanism. The 1900 discovery that this archaic artifact actually was designed to predict astronomical positions and eclipses for the astrological calendar prepared the twentieth century, bit by bit, to the lights of the present. We might call this moment, "everyone is illuminated," for the occult science that was a privilege of the elite and the outcasts is now available to anyone with an Internet browser.
The next day, you performed a closing ritual by sending James Franco your Venus Return offering...
In the morning, a surprise message...
How to respond to that but by "IN TAG VERITAS"!!!
...culminating in a spontaneous SELFie...
...of the hieros gamos!
Your street performance had magical effect in delivering you to the New Man...
...born and raised at the site of the ancient oracle in Arta, discoursing over the hieros gamos on a trip to the Acropolis right under...
The problem is not to recover our "lost" identity, to free our imprisoned nature, our deepest truth; but instead, the problem is to move towards something radically Other. The center, then seems to still be found in Marx's phrase: man produces man...For me, what must be produced is not man identical to himself, exactly as nature would have designed him or according to his essence; on the contrary, we must produce something that doesn't yet exist and about which we cannot know how and what it will be.
--Michel Foucault, Remarks On Marx((New York: Semiotext(e), 1991)), 121.)
...the Evening Star tucked into the Crescent Moon Boat in the Übermensch sign of Aquarius!
Dr. Lisa Paul Streitfeld is a Kulturindustrie theorist and Web 3.0 philospher seeking hieros gamos iconography past and present throughout the world. "Missing James Franco 3.0" is Dr. Streitfeld's social media project putting into practice a theory of Uncertainty arising from collaborative practice.