August 10 - 12 2007 , Portland Oregon

The second half of the twentieth century saw the proliferation of diverse cultural trends. Zine culture, underground comix and alternative media covered subcultures otherwise inaccessible in a stifling, corporatist consensus reality. This culminated in the Internet's promise of personally-created virtual realities. Now in the twenty-first century this promise has largely come to fruition with a corner of the Internet for every microculture imaginable. However, esoZone is conceived as an event decidedly oriented towards moving our specific meme culture (however one personally interprets that) out of impersonal communication (whether it be the Internet or mail art) into the Meatspace of Malkuth.
Human beings are deeply social animals, enriched by interpersonal communication in the flesh. Any (r)evolution which takes place only in cyberspace, the Interzone or the Akashic records is fundamentally flawed because culture is only a form of communication, it is not experience itself.
esoZone provides a map toward a new kind of culture that recognizes the truism of Stephen Dedalus' "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." Unlike the doom and gloom of the so-called "Apocolypse Culture", esoZone draws on the radical optimism of the recently departed Robert Anton Wilson. While we all admire the work of the counterculture, Chaos Magick, our comic books heroes and the Discordian pranksters of "the good old days" we do not seek to venerate or even necessarily to emulate them, but rather to provide a road map into the future where we can create reality in such a way that makes sense to us. esoZone is futurist, in as much as it is a future-present oriented event where we root ourselves in the present while never forgetting that we are creatures moving forward in space-time. Designer realities are the personal chariot of travel into future and esoZone represents a collective road map (not the territory!) through the process of mutual interaction.
Lest there be any kind of confusion, the "star" of esoZone is Time Magazine's person of the year- You. The event has been conceived as primarily user-driven and ceases to become the exclusive property of the planners the second that the doors open on August 10. esoZone's structure has been designed for maximum facilitation of communication between all participants be they event planners, guests, staff, performers, speakers or anyone else present in the physical area of esoZone.
Perhaps more interesting than our lofty intentions is the schedule. Everyone listed at the event will be available for your inspection- be it at audience-driven panels, performances that will permanently change your brain, open discussion groups, a for the 21st century mass, a live internet radio interview, workshops, gallery showings, dance parties, or just mingling around. esoZone is partly a reaction against quasi-celebrity driven esotericism. esoZone is not a collection of talking heads, but a menagerie of reality engineers just like You.