The following originally appeared on Seven Days to Live, a now-defunct promotional website for DreamWorks' The Ring. All text is © the original author(s).

7 DAYS: A NOTE ABOUT OUR NAME

Seven days is the life cycle of the television. Each new week brings a return to the beginning, the daily feed of static and movement, the blue-projection slow death. Like the electro-karmic souls which return to the world again and again after death, so do the new projections return mercilessly on each seven day advent to etch deeper into our collective souls their mysterious encoded messages and desires.

Seven days is also the life cycle of the Ring Virus, which we believe is perhaps the most dangerous threat to humanity in the new century. A lethal combination of genetic engineering, psychic violence, and curses from beyond the cathode-grave, the Ring Virus is our number one priority. We have taken on this name for our website to remind ourselves that we are caught in the cycle of life and death, and that to fail in our mission is to be reborn from scratch into a samsaric hell of our own creation.

RING VIRUS TRUTH

Japan has always sent us postcards from the future. William Gibson knew that to visit Tokyo was to take a prophetic trip into the land of what was to be. It is no surprise then that it is Japan that has given us a film exposing the truth behind every cathode ray tube - the memetic horror waiting just over the primetime threshold, waiting to infect us, destroy us, and swallow us whole.

The Japanese horror film RING is not a metaphor, nor an externalization of our media demons. It is a slice from the coming reality - the cathode apocalypse that looms on the business end of the remote control.

Ring tells the story of a videotape produced not by a camera but by the raging hatred of murderous spirit. The videotape combines curse and virus; whoever views the tape instantly receives a silent phone call and dies exactly seven days later.

This swirling combination of elements - mental creation of video, the viral / memetic, psycho-magical hostility of electronic media - suggests a paradoxical certainty about the unknown. There is something real in this fantasy.

Our research has shown there is a basis for believing the film is true. Certainly, it is a fictionalized account. But the world it depicts is not only possible, it is inevitable. What we once thought of as heaven or hell, the realm of the dead, or the "next world" is a place we see every day. It is the static blue pulsing just on the other side of the screen. A place of death and hate and disease, it is leaking out, carried on projections, and it is seeping into our flesh.

WHO WE ARE AND WHY WE ARE WATCHING

"7 Days to Live" is a two-man think tank providing the first - and last - line of defense against the increasing threat of viral electronic memetic violence (VEMV).

We are the CDC of the psycho-cathode landscape. We seek to inoculate against these technologies and detourn them for our own purpose. Check yourself as you read these pages, these electronic thoughts beamed from an origination that remains unknown: how do they make you feel?

Our approach is experimental, our methods psycho-magical, our tools the human mind and its will to know.

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