Fotamecus: The Chaos Magick Film You May Never Get to See

In 2001, Matt Lee, director and epic beard-owner, announced the Fotamecus Film Majik Project, a plan to make a "film about time and modern magick, a story about shifting perceptions of time." The film would follow six chaos magicians as they cast a spell through the use of a sigil to "construct a tool with which our subjective perception of time can be altered."

Sigil of Fotamecus

The film's title, Fotamecus, comes from the name of a servitor created in 1996 by a magician calling himself Fenwick Rysen. In chaos magic, a servitor is an artificially created being with limited autonomy that executes a pre-programmed task. In the case of Fotamecus, the the task was to literally condense or expand time, dependent on the needs of the operator. Say, for instance, I was running late to an appointment. In theory, I could call upon the entity to contract the amount of time it would take to get there, and the trip would shorten. The problem, according to Fenwick, is that to contract time in one place meant that time had to be expanded in another. To this end, the servitor was then programmed to self-replicate clones of itself as needed, creating a matrix of servitor nodes. That way, if I needed to make my trip shorter, then a node would be created which another person could access if they wished to make another time period last longer (insert minute man joke here). This would keep me from having to "pay" for my time. With me so far?
Jump ahead five years to Matt Lee and friends, plotting out a film that would manifest the entity onto a projector screen, reaching a larger audience and teaching them how to contact it, effectively taking control of their own perception of time. Matt began soliciting crowd-sourced funding in return for what he called The God Maker Program, a CD/DVD/VHS package including background information on the film, images, audio files, and writings pertaining to DIY servitor creation.
Interest surged. Julian Vayne mentioned the film in his book, Now That's What I Call Chaos Magick. Discussions and comments popped up all over the internet expressing excitement for the project. Filming began. A release date was projected for 2003, but was pushed back later to 2006. Then, to the frowns of the internet occult community, it was canceled altogether.
Due to the economic downturn, the film's production company, Indifference Productions, had closed its doors, leaving Matt with hours of 16 mm film that would never be seen. The only publicly available footage resulting from from the work would be a trailer and a forty-one minute documentary entitled Chronomancy.
The first portion of Chronomancy features the magicians making a batch of cookies with the Fotamecus sigil imprinted on them while discussing their own experiences with the servitor as well as some explanations of the sigilization process. The second portion documents a ritual in the woods being performed to invoke Fotamecus into the film while a narrator explains what is happening. Throughout the footage, we hear the entity's name being repeated as a mantra. As we watch, we are forced into the role of participant, with the mantra being burned into our memory on a level matched only by "Call Me Maybe." By witnessing the ritual, we are perhaps invoking Fotamecus ourselves.
Although Matt Lee and numerous internet commentators seem a bit disappointed with the outcome of the Fotamecus Film Majik Project, I have to say that the original intent may have found fruition even without an actual release. This writer, at least, has now been exposed to the entity, and plans on future experimentation with his own subjective perception of time.
*sniff* Dammit. I think I left my sigilized cookies in the oven too long.

Frater Isla

Evernote helps you remember everything and get organized effortlessly. Download Evernote.