From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ritual and ceremonial adaptations
See Participatory art and Beach Surgery for works emphasizing active audience involvement; South Korea and Iran for shamanic/mystical ritual traditions.
Ritual adaptations reconceive the novel as a ceremony of repetition—its cycle reframed not as narrative failure but as spiritual discipline. These works position eternal recurrence as sacred, the glitch as a perpetual threshold to be inhabited rather than resolved.
Cycle Protocol (Participatory LARP) (since 2012) runs 48-hour urban walks across multiple sites; each chapter receives a new interpretation; no two runs match, but all return to the beginning. The Healing Spiral (Participatory LARP) (2015, rural NSW) uses shamanic ritual: sensory deprivation in a spiral labyrinth, emergence into a "surgery" where participants articulate what they wish to break.
The Cycle Turns Inward (Immersive Installation + Performance, 2020) isolates visitors in an abandoned hospital; each room restages a different adaptation of a scene. Exiting into a central chamber, a figure asks: How many times have you been here?
South Korean and Iranian works draw explicitly on gut and Ta'zieh traditions, positioning Katita as a mudang or initiatory guide; Leif's three injuries become the three mystical "deaths." In this frame, the glitch is not a failure but an affirmation: the refusal of false closure; the discipline of acceptance.
Some practitioners argue that adaptations resolving the glitch betray the work's deepest commitment—renunciation of the illusion that stories can finish.