Billy Mullaney

About Billy Mullaney
(USA) is an Amsterdam-based artist working in theatre, choreography, and performance art. His research focuses on representational practices in and of various sites of performance, the modes of spectatorship they conventionally engender, and how interventions in the former affect the latter. By rigorously embodying such interventions, Billy's work often foregrounds the physiological impact of movement and thought on the body, indexing the stakes of adhering too closely (or too successfully) to logics such as the attention economy or post-fordist production. This research has led him to experiment with forms ranging from quantum physics lectures and children's television shows to promotional trailers and tarot readings.

About SIGIL
SIGIL is a sketch towards a live construction of John Dee's Sigillum Dei Aemeth, a complex occult pentacle described in his grimoire Quinti Libri Mysteriorum as allowing the magician the power to commune with angels and archangels. Billy is particularly interested in the extensive mathematical calculations required to construct this mystical object. While contemporary sensibilities may relegate math and magic to opposite ends of a spectrum of rationality, Dee lived in a time where there was little if any distinction between investigations of what we now call science, and the occult. “Natural philosophers" of the era blurred the line between the rational and irrational--or, rather, there was no line to begin with--and SIGIL juxtaposes these two modes of thought in a contemporary setting to indicate their co-constructive nature.