Ilium Express by AI RAZUTIS

This is continued in his experimental, dystopic pop-up novel/prose poem, I.E. or Ilium Express, which was written between 1970-78: “This sleep-walkers hallucinogenic dystopia of a place named ‘Ilium’ is based on my impressions and hallucinatory projections as an immigrant child walking down streets, playing in parks, observing humans turning into creatures and wildly imagining the rest in the Los Angeles of the 1950’s. While this is not a biography it contains the imprints of one.”

I.E. takes place in a single day in a town named “Ilium” where a bus, the Ilium Express has arrived just after mid-day, and Private Pagorsky exits to a scene of dystopic pandemonium where everything is in a state of dying or waiting to die and where proper grammar is in abandonment. Written in the language of Ilium, the L.A. of Al Razutis' childhood, made up from memory. English, as a second borrowed language, full of grunts and groans from drunks on the street, non-sequiturs and invented phrases, become atonal music playing from a boom box somewhere in this frightening noise-scape.

Al Razutis is an avant-garde filmmaker who has continued his work for fifty years; he is a pioneer in holographic arts and now a critic, archivist and historian for this medium; he is a video artist who took his interactive bio-feedback ‘video art’ devices on to the broadcast tv stage, and one of the early adopters of motion-picture art in web virtual reality.

published by death of workers whilst building skyscrapers
book design: Lucy Wilkinson
editor: Lucy Wilkinson
2025, 108 pages printed on recycled paper, 130 x 210 mm