Reactor

Belated Happy Martinmas! For 2025. We’ve woken with the mal de Saint Martin 🍷 🪿👺 … but we hope you also managed to share a succulent roast goose, drink, tell stories by the fire, and get your fellow mummers together and put on a play!

With another year’s celebrations complete, our annual update is live and the application portal for next year’s Interviews is now open. Why not apply to JOIN RECTOR today? (we’re serious, really why not?) Over the coming cycle Reactor intends to be reborn, again, in a new body. An opening at the heart of the group awaits the correct initiate, with this increasingly obvious need for replacement limbs we are ready to guide you through the preparations. For a copy of the Reactor Membership Handbook, and to apply click here ...

http://reactor.org.uk/projects/martinmas

“As we know, you should never cut anything from a blackthorn on the 11 November or be ware the Lunantishee’s wrath. But we ware, and don’t mind being pricked by the devil himself with blackthorn thorns, as we already wear the witch’s mark on our fingers, and elsewhere. Taking blackthorn branches in each hand to form a magic (wooden) circle atop o hill, holding one end of each wand without pricking celebrant’s fingers, and in this way to sanctify the new season’s black rod - just to see what ‘appens.”

The final toast! “To all GHAOS Actors — GHAOS is the system!”

And that was that. Maybe we’ll build it again in another 10 or 20 years. Or maybe it never went away … GHAOS reigns supreme!

“It only lasted four days, but talking to the people who were there a decade later, it seems astonishingly fresh in their memories. They can still hum from memory the not-quite-off-key motif of the Reactor Party Anthem. They can still picture the bearded face and bulbous limbs of Uncle Commi. They still hate Skepticus REX and REXist behaviour of all kinds. For they had achieved Total GHAOS.” — Robert Barry, The Quietus

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Total GHAOS: 20th Anniversary

To celebrate, over 20 days we’ll trawl through the archive and post something we find each day to help make sense of it.

How did we capture Total GHAOS and share it with the world? 🌍

As well as using the Lynx’s buttery eyes, we worked with Merit LiLin (“40 years of experience in the surveillance industry”) to install a CCTV system across Total GHAOS, controlled by the GHAOS Actors and streamed out onto the World Wide Web (yeah, it was possible 20 years ago!)

Merit Li Lin used the project as an Industry Case Study — “Merit Li-Lin Destroys the Dark Arts and creates Total GHAOS” — documenting how it “helped catch many audience members who dared to attempt to cross the party line”, thanks for your support in maintaining Reactor Party discipline! 🙏

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Total GHAOS: 20th Anniversary

To celebrate, over 20 days we’ll trawl through the archive and post something we find each day to help make sense of it.

📹 🎥 🕹️💿

“Come meet the LYNX, have you meant the LYNX?”

The LYNX personifies all the qualities of the Reactor Party. Noble, agile, sure footed, and most of all, ever watchful with it’s wide buttery eyes. The LYNX never blinks!

As well as all these qualities the LYNXes also housed video cameras, and were operated by members of the ‘Order of the Unblinking Eye’ to keep a watchful eye on all cousins at Total GHAOS.

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*Order of the Unblinking Eye
Secret and powerful society that have pledged their lives to the LYNX and spend their time informing other GHAOS Actors [i.e. the audience] about LYNX-issues.

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Total GHAOS: 20th Anniversary

To celebrate, over 20 days we’ll trawl through the archive and post something we find each day to help make sense of it.

“I hate Skepticus REX!”

“Again!”

“I hate Skepticus REX!!”

The girls voice echoes through the megaphone, the tentative group surrounding her stare on expectantly, with deep red cheeks she does not look at all impressed and as well she shouldn’t as she has been discovered to be a ‘Seal,’ a REXist agent who has infiltrated the huge converted warehouse which plays host to The Reactor Party’s new world of Total GHAOS! It may also have something to do with the fact she has a toy LYNX strapped to her head which in turn wears a paper cup helmet, stuck out of this is a pipe which leads to one of two heavy baskets of potatoes worn over her shoulders, from out of this protrudes a bike pump which a young fellow cousin is pumping vigorously to power the device - a prototype ICS (Inner Conceptualising Space) enhancer. It is being tested on the Seal for adverse effects, the LYNX wears a bowtie from which dangles the mic of the megaphone swinging in front of the girls crimson face, the surrounding cousins wear grim expressions as they take notes. “AGAIN!! Orders the stern faced ‘Big nurse,’ head of the Arkwright Asylum and GHAOS re-education “I HATE SKEPTICUS REX!!!” She cries, increasingly more hoarsely.

After a lot more shouting the test subject is released successfully, she has been found to be cured of REXism and can retake her position in the new world. Sound strange? Well yes it was, but it was also utterly fantastic! Total GHAOS

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Cousin Mild recounts his experience of developing the I.C.S. Amplifier for Total GHAOS, with its first trial demonstration captured on camera.

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Total GHAOS: 20th Anniversary

To celebrate, over 20 days we’ll trawl through the archive and post something we find each day to help make sense of it.

REXists fear GHAOS within themselves …

NOW the Dark Arts have a new leader, Skepticus REX*. Once a member of the Reactor Party; NOW is a traitor. He betrayed GHAOS and excreted his own inferior ideal – REXimalism.

The challenge was outlined by Uncle Commi in his 6th famous speech

[6] A 5th dimension Speech given at the Beastmarket Raleigh
 
[6.1] “Spickle has informed me from 2057. NOW is Nott the future”
[6.2] “The Devil is coming down the tree. To save you I will bring back the little girl named GHAOS”
[6.3] “Skepticus REX will take the little girl named GHAOS and chop her into little pieces. He will put her in a pan and make her into black puddings. Is this your only trouble? I Uncle Commi, have suffered the darkness and the bloody fight. Reactor i.e. the actor will defeat REX, MARK THIS DAY!”
[6.4] “Skepticus REX will torment you, beat you and stab you. If you endure this assault for seven years without cutting your hair then I will reward you by capsizing REX’s tiny boat”
[6.5] “REX will be stripped and put in a barrel which is studded inside with pointed nails. I will harness Trotsky and Redstar and they will drag the bloody barrel through every street in Brighton”
[6.6] “I am Uncle Commi. When I aim at the bear, I shoot it through the muzzle. It falls down and never stirs again”

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*REX, Skepticus
Once a member of the Reactor Party but NOW is a traitor. He has turned his back on GHAOS and excreted his own inferior ideal – REXimalism.

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Total GHAOS: 20th Anniversary

To celebrate, over 20 days we’ll trawl through the archive and post something we find each day to help make sense of it.