On may 26 2000 the ICA hosted 'The Promised Land', a sermon and miracle healing by the Rev Jim Jones of the Peoples' Temple. The night was the inaugural event of Rod Dickinson's current ongoing project, the Jonestown Re-enactment. The latter, a magnificently grandiose set of events which will culminate- funding and permissions permitting- in the public reenactment in Central London of the events of November 18 1978 when Jones, and the 914 men, women and children, inhabitants of Jonestown, their beleagured settlement deep in the Guyanese jungle, and the core members of his People's Temple, committed mass suicide. Or, to quote Jones himself: "We are not committing suicide; it's a revolutionary act".   Like many of Dickinson's projects, the Jonestown Re-enactment is conceived at the scale of the cosmos. Or as Jones would have it, at the scale of the "Vast universe...with a hundred billion planets in our milky way system, and then a hundred billion more Milky Way systems like ours"; that is to say, in the words chosen by Dickinson from the many hundred's of hours of recordings made from 1971-4 of Jones' speeches, sermons etc with which Graeme Edler, playing Jones, started his impeccably delivered, and microscopically accurate bricolaged sermon. And it is indeed a microscopically accurate, but perhaps not faithful, rendering of one of Jones' performances- and carefully managed performances is precisely what they were.   This insistence on writing 'words' is important: for what we hear is not a recitation of one speech delivered by Jones at a given date, place and time, but an impeccably cut and pasted selection of words uttered by Jones at a thousand times and places ('readily determined', if you have the inclination to sit and listen to Jones' oeuvre, noting where and when he said what)- this fact is only noteworthy when seen in the light of Dickinson's remark that in a bid for fidelity to Jones, every detail of Edler's performance, including the hesitations, fluffed lines, occasionally stuttered or mispronounced word appears on the tapes. This atomic, or perhaps nano, conception of language or parole and its reproduction leads us to recall one of William Burroughs' claims in his electronic revolution, his manifesto of the revolutionary use of sound recording. According to Burroughs "a virus is a very small unit of word and image", and as such it can be used to "discredit opponents. take a recorded Wallace speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs snarls dooling idiot noises and play it back in the streets subway stations parks political rallies. as a front line weapon to produce and escalate riots... Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. Recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots, and their guns are out". That Jones had mastered this technique is attested to in Deborah Layton's account of life in Jonestown; she "describes hearing gunshots from the jungle in April 1978. Later she assessed the situation: "Every White Night [the term used for the suicide rehearsals] Jim sent a different team into the rain forest to fire shots. Each boy was unaware that there had been others before him creating the same panic ... No one realised that all of the gunfire was from our guns." (Seductive Poison, P181,1999, quoted from Dickinson's website: www.jonestownreenactment.org).   Seeing Jones in relation to the set of ideas and movements represented by this aspect of Burroughs' work, brings us to the real challenge posed by Dickinson's project; for it presents the possibility of opening up an entirely new perspective, of forging a novel optic, through which to understand, not only Jones and his like, but Dickinson's work too. The strategy of the Jonestown Project evades the two main ways in which the Peoples' Temple has traditionally been understood: first, by its' committed detractors, most of whom seem to be either Christian inspired, professional anti-cultists, or else those former members of the Temple, who formed the 'Concerned Relatives', whose departure, represented for Jones, "the betrayal of the century", and who had, he insisted, hired mercenaries to attack Jonestown (it was they who were 'responsible' for the gunfire mentioned in Layton's already quoted account); second are those who see Jones in the tradition of revolutionary messianism, or apocalyptic and chiliastic socialism so eloquently mapped out by Norman Cohn in his The Pursuit of the Millenium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. That this latter view is firmly based in Peoples' Temple theology, is easily shown by continuing the already quoted reference to the scale of the cosmos. In common with other millenarians, Jones' cosmology is intended to show that: "We have done away with illusions of heavens that are for tomorrow, or gods that are out in space. We must work out the plan of salvation. You must fight to save this earth, and make the kingdom of this earth, the kingdom of hell, become the kingdom of God socialism", 'The Promised Land" of the event's title.   However, we can go further, for as with so many of the 'subjects' of Dickinson's other work. No, not 'subjects'. 'The objects' then? Still no. How about 'collaborators'? 'victims'? closer, 'unwilling collaborators', 'unknowing collaborators', 'unknowing' and of course 'unwilling victims'...all of these. All of these things, and doubtless many others, could be said with equal validity of the various groups with which Dickinson comes into contact; but what is important here is not the character of those groups, but the nature of the contact, of the productive articulation, or relation formed between them and Dickinson. It is only my maintaining a precisely defined relationship with these groups that Dickinson is able to produce his work, indeed, this maintenance, is the work.   For this relationship is one in which Dickinson quite literally, through his actions or productions becomes one with his subjects; whether that act of becoming is accomplished by producing the objects sacred to/studied by the given group; or by re-producing, re-enacting (in the current case) the actions or words of that group. The centerpiece of 'The Promised Land', the miracle healing or the production of a 'cancer' from a member of the congregation- was as much a sleight of hand, a piece of theatre, at the ICA as it was when performed by Jones. Each instance of the performance of this act was accompanied by an identical level of indeterminacy, of blurring between artifice and reality; between the description, and the making of history. Each of Dickinson's collaborations attempt, through the production of reality, to effect a change in that reality.   Like the other groups with whom Dickinson works, albeit with neither the knowledge nor consent of those groups, from alien abductees, crop circle enthusiasts and theorists (who dignify themselves with the title, 'cerealogists'), mystical or new age tourists brandishing photos of crop circles (produced by Dickinson)- Jones and the members of the People's Temple are all disparagingly dubbed by those who make, and claim for themselves the right to describe, reality, 'believers'. But, what is made transparently clear by Jones- Dickinson is that these people have all taken the decision- the political decision- to refuse to believe.   From this perspective, the overriding political import of Dickinson's work becomes manifest; for what unites these groups is that they have all taken the first and necessary step on the path to revolution, the revolution motivated by the will to be against (Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire p. 210); the great refusal, the refusal to believe that the world, that cosmic and lived, human reality is, as the authorities- church, state, official science- say it is. This refusal, made manifest by Dickinson through Jones and his other erstwhile collaborators, can quickly become the demand that the world be otherwise, and the first act in its remaking.