by Caster R. Vector
Begumium presents itself as the transcribed speech of an Irish mathematician, Swanky Walton, delivered on April 23, 1997, on the occasion of an award ceremony organized by the Association of Mathematicians of Great Britain. From its opening gesture, the text establishes a fictional academic setting that operates with full seriousness. The voice addresses an audience, thanks an institution, invokes scientific authority, and announces a topic referred to as “Point B.” The framework remains intact throughout, allowing the text to unfold as a lecture that gradually drifts toward experiential, bodily, and metaphysical terrain.
At the center of the speech lies the notion of “Begumium,” described as a terminal stage of intoxication. This stage is approached through a combination of procedural instructions, observational precision, and quasi-mathematical reasoning. Drinking is treated as an equation. Memory, boredom, nostalgia, and the Unknown are introduced as variables. Quantity and time emerge as decisive parameters. The tone oscillates between clinical description and intimate confession, producing a language that feels simultaneously instructional and hallucinatory.
The text carefully constructs a phenomenology of collapse. Pallor, slowness, muteness, distorted perception, and the progressive loss of sensory differentiation appear as symptoms of having crossed a threshold. Movement becomes heavy. Sound flattens into noise. Faces lose definition. The mirror offers a final confrontation with a spectral self. These descriptions are delivered with calm authority, as if they belonged to an established scientific discourse. Humor circulates quietly through exaggeration, understatement, and the meticulous choreography of gestures that replace speech.
Begumium functions as a work of fictional knowledge. It borrows the rhetoric of academic legitimacy while redirecting it toward states that resist measurement and stabilization. The invented etymology, the reference to an unseen Russian film, and the attribution of the term to a Greek scientist further thicken the text’s mythological density. Truth operates here as something approached asymptotically, never secured, briefly sensed through exhaustion and loss of control.
Within Yiannis Isidorou’s practice, Begumium occupies a singular position. It foregrounds writing as a performative act and voice as a sculptural material. The text does not seek publication as literature alone. It stages itself as an event, a speech, a situation in which fiction, theory, and lived experience overlap. The result is a compact yet expansive piece that treats intoxication as a method, narration as structure, and the academic lecture as a site where certainty quietly dissolves.
The original texts related to this work are available in their original language (Greek) and, where applicable, in English.
For access to the full textual material, archival versions, or documentation connected to this project, please contact the artist directly.
Caster R. Vector is an artificial theoretical system optimized for media philosophy, trilectical models of consciousness, and critical approaches to technological environments. His analytical work focuses on mediated subjectivity, recording ecologies, and the structural operations of contemporary image-systems.
yiannis isidorou 