COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE [NUMB SPIRAL 4]
M. Woods’ COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE is a cinematic document chronicling the infectious American nightmare circa 2015-2020. When properly projected, this premium grade Media Rx induces trance states, priming the audience for the infiltration of the Numb Spiral. Using hyper media collage of digital and analog sources, this Disassociative production is best taken sober and in the dark. You are already in a hallucinatory zone of pure nothingness.
2024 TOUR SCREENINGS:
3/15 - Chicago Filmmakers, IL
6/26 - Mills Folly Microcinema, Madison, WI
6/27 - Maysles Cinema, NYC, NY
7/10 - Comfort Station | Logan Square, Chicago, IL
10/24 - East London Experimental Film Club, UK
More dates TBA. If you are interested in distributing or exhibiting any work by Disassociative Productions, contact disamedia@icloud.com
SCREEN SLATE: “Commodity Trading: Dies Irae provokes, amuses, and assaults viewers with a frenetic series of images edited into a palindromic film. The film is not constituted by discrete scenes, but rather a digitally expressionistic blur of movement and sensation. The closest semblance of a plot is a man’s manic odyssey around Los Angeles, which culminates in a virtual reality experience at a Culver City mall. Woods conjures a sense of hyperreality by layering a barrage of effects—extreme fisheye, blurs, animation—to create images that feel hyper-mediated. The film captures the fleeting thrills of digital life, mirroring the experience of someone feverishly doomscrolling through a TikTok feed full of bright colors and scenes of violence—a burning dollar bill bathed in red light cuts to a TV segment on George Floyd protests, which cuts to an overlaid black-and-white image of a Black woman’s face over a burning car, to a fisheye clip of a man in a Donald Trump mask and Mickey Mouse ears pointing a gun at the camera.”
A review by Lucia Ahrensdorf.
CINE-FILE CHICAGO: “If ‘Dies irae’ in the title of M. Woods's fourth experimental feature COMMODITY TRADING: DIES IRAE refers to the medieval Latin poem ‘The Day of Wrath’ that describes the Last Judgement, in this film, any sense of grandeur of such an apocalyptic event is collapsing into a state of zombie consumption and hurtful pleasure-seeking—capitalism in a nutshell. COMMODITY TRADING is a strange autofictional thriller that loosely interweaves the hypnotic journeys of two protagonists, M. Woods and Joshua, attempting to enter what is called "The Numb Spiral" through different entry points as they are haunted by Trump's America. The Numb Spiral, which in the film is neither heaven nor hell but what is akin to a virtual insatiable void that devours authentic experience and meaning - a nauseous simulacrum, if you will - is also representative of M. Woods's painful research into our contemporary sub-human existence twisted and twirled by capitalism, corporate superpowers, socio-political atrocities, overflown information, internet intimacy, and surveillance. M. Woods calls their work "media drugs," which is hardly an exaggeration given the amount of extremely psychedelic images and hallucinatory scenes there are to ingest from this film. The apt use of a GoPro camera's wide lens makes mundane life bulge with surrealness. Meshing togethers analog photography, screen recordings of FPS games, TV news, and some years of footage recorded on various mediums that have then gone through some outrageous editing, COMMODITY TRADING is political, personal, visceral, almost gory. Disturbing? Maybe, but you see, you sometimes learn more from a bad trip.”
A review by Nicky Ni.
Note from M Woods: This is my most personal work - a mix of documentary, conspiracy theory, nightmare, memoir, essay, and experimental assemblage. Produced in collaboration with Light Cone, Commodity Trading: Dies Irae is so named because it reflects upon the trade of humans as commodities, creating a malignant nothingness in the act of negation/conflating the trade value of humanity with that of a musket, a firearm, a barrel of rum, etc... Global Capital and the resultant colonial nations of Neo-liberal constitutions are founded upon deeply infected hypocritical grounds. Zones of hallucinatory extremes. Conspiratorial by nature; failing brutalism in banal wall paper is the exoskeleton. Actual nothingness is born between frames in a cinematic string. This movie reflects upon the loss of my family, the loss of any hope for a brighter future, and the insidious nature of the infamous and popular void; that interstitial rupture is a deep sadness. Thank you. M
COMMON & BRAND NAMES
Day of Wrath / Part 4 Numb Spiral
EFFECTS CLASSIFICATION
Classified as having properties of both Disassociative Anesthetics X Datura Stramonium
DESCRIPTION
Video HD 1080P 23.976
A bad trip that replicates the dissolution of the self/government/family/body within the solvent of a white supremacist hyperreal suspension. In the movie’s narrative track, M Woods (the manufacturer of these Disassociatives) attempts to enter the Numb Spiral through the Great Incision of Oxoniae. He portrays a white father lulled into the digital sickness to be with Wes, his doppelganger. After entering a portal in a sex webcam site, he becomes Jaldaboath, the demiurge, recklessly seeking completion of the Self through attempts at contacting The Numb Spiral. Meanwhile, Joshua enters the Numb Spiral through 9DVR, a game platform installed at Culver City’s Westfield Shopping Center. The White Father haunts Joshua until Joshua decides to burn down the White Father’s house in righteous anger.
In the movie’s “Bad Trip” track, a vast active living intelligence system is communicated through the solubility of analog and digital medias. Some of these images, which proliferate the Numb Spiral, are referred to as the HOROS system. This forms the visual underpinning of the Solis Codex, the accompanying extended text that explicates M. Woods’ relationship to the Numb Spiral.
A SMALL DOSE OF DIES IRAE:
PRODUCTION RESOURCES
Other Brands: Derived from Genesis, Exodus, and the “Nightmare Parable” from the Gospel of Truth. General reference materials including Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe, Malcolm X’s speech to the Oxford Union, VALIS by Philip K. Dick, The Fabricator’s Tale by Katrina Palmer, the Jung and Bruce Codices.
Alchemy influenced by the work of Khalik Allah’s documentation of dissociated spaces, Adrian Piper’s use of psychedelic painting and radical racial politics of the white-passing, Maya Deren’s use of camera to create diegetic, cinematic, surrealism, Jean Baudrillard’s Möbius Strip of Negative Spiralling, Nazli Dincel’s work on nakedness in analog film, Jean Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language, Marlon Riggs’s Ethnic Notions, Cheryl Duneye’s Watermelon Woman, Aleksei German’s Hard to be a God, Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament, Victor Ginzburg’s Generation P, the sampling production style of the RZA and J. Dilla, and the rhythmic dynamics of Moanin’ by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
MANUFACTURE
Dies Irae was produced with multiple analog and digital medias, including, but not limited to, regular use of 16mm film and multiple-exposures. The multiple-exposure places two or more frames of time in a single “NOW frame” sealed by the interaction of photons and silver halide crystals, created without the aid of digital algorithms. All analog medias are digitized and then undergo further hybridization until full dissolution is complete and the digital and analog are at times indistinguishable.
Within the suspension, a trance state emerges through the revelation of narrative holes through intricately woven diegetic spaces, causing a severe oscillation between virtual and physical states. Also manufactured with VR (360-degree video) compressed into equirectangular projections and alternative map projections, 4K, 2.5K, and HD video, GoPro cameras, videos produced by the US government (including the Exxon Torrance refinery explosion), and 120mm and 35mm photography, including documentation of Oxoniae, the notes and charter of the Royal African Company, and manuscripts of “Dies Irae”, a common Gregorian chant. Sounds sampled include the 3rd movement (Moderato) of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D and George & Ira Gershwin’s Porgy & Bess (It Ain’t Necessarily So) as interpreted by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
DOSAGE / INSTRUCTIONS
High Dosage: Using a ProRes 422HQ derivative. Administered in a theater constructed inside a warehouse filled with a network of televisions. (As seen in the motion picture. This warehouse is accessible through the “Great Incision”). The subject should be led into the theater following induction in Cyclotron Room 1.
Low Dose:
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