“The Ritual“ has 3 components, which could be regarded as separate units, but are also interconnected: graphic (a painting - see above), video (see above) and sonic component (an audio track, which ended on Lingua Arcana - scroll up the page to listen, Track 7). These components are not meant to complement or translate to each other, but to be experienced separately, even though you can try that too, and see what you'll discover.
The painting depicts objects picked randomly from various aspects of everyday life (some well-known, some a bit enigmatic and/or not so well-known). These objects are depicted in a random order, without any context (apart from a barely visible grid and obfuscated numbers and symbols), apart from the title of the painting itself (“The Ritual“), which is to assign a new purpose to these objects and give them a new meaning - even though we don’t know what that purpose/meaning is. The point is not to look for one either, but to understand what it may be without intellectualizing, analyzing, (consciously) knowing or thinking about it. On the other hand, when we look at it like this, as a component of a mysterious ritual, every object, no matter how insignificant or banal it may seem, can attain a secret, sacred, deeper meaning - we just need to look at it differently.
The video depicts a ritual-like activity, deliberately shot in the dark, with minimal lighting, so that the objects used in the “ritual“ are as obscure as possible. The movements/physical activity in the “ritual“ lack any explanation/context as well, and the video contains no sound either, in order to obfuscate the whole “ritual“ even further. The purpose here, again, is to prevent the viewer from looking for any specific meaning consciously. We don’t need to see 100% clearly and know/grasp consciously exactly what’s happening in the video, nor do we need to fill in the gaps and construct a meaning ourselves when we’re offered none, but rather let go and soak it in by falling into a mental/spiritual state in which understanding precedes any conscious thinking and/or rationalizing.
The audio track contains everyday sounds one makes as they go about ordinary daily activities in their home, soaked in high amounts of reverb, so as to obfuscate what's really going on (and where), and give the sounds a different, ethereal, mysterious quality. Due to the lack of a visual component, the listener is left to their own devices and can only assume the nature of this enigmatic “ritual“ and its components, but that, of course, is not the point: the listener should give up any search for meaning of the sounds or the “ritual“ as a whole, but surrender and let the meaning come to themselves without trying to construct it by any means.
