EXP

Plagiarist Assemblage Text

compiled 1999-2000 by the Events Vertical Apparat and host organism SCalvert...

Collage illustrations by SCalvert, from the album Colleges des Collages

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1.0
ENTELECHIES
LIBIDINOUS CONTINUUM
THE FOLD
ANTITHESIS - VIRULENT MEMES
SWOLLEN MEDIUM
NEW TECHNOLOGY
LINGUA COERCUS
CULTURE IS ALIVE
intraecology -
LEISURE NARCOSIS
IMPASSE - ESCAPE FROM HELL
LIVE HISTORY
CREATIVE GAMES
AXIOMATIC
STATIK AUTOMATA
Declaration of EXP

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I no longer think, I am being thought.  I predict only what has already happened…  with absolute attention, observe - from an interstitial site - perforated, elliptical, drifting, skidding - seek a new type of transmission - a mutation of consciousness, of structure, and of purpose…  standing on the brink of unnamed regions, where no victory is to be won - receiving subtle transmissions - the soul feels like a stranger on earth…  we no longer require sequenced fragments in order to feel we know what we are doing… one wonders finally if man is anything more than a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence… that the self advances and confirms the myriad things is called delusion.  that the myriad things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment… revolutionizing the internal workings of the human soul is the first step necessary for any true revolution - for the Ego to be reconciled, reunited with its Id - our Internal Other - for the world to undergo immediate transformation, and another, radically different, but entirely coherent, to be born…  following a non-linear logic which seeks to grasp the pattern in a series of events - processes are now seen as an aggregate of imperative combinations, links, collisions, repetitions, intersections and manifestations, serendipitious associations - trial and rejection and yet more experimenting - trying to get the audience involved in perceptions - nowadays one discovers methods, operating instructions, regulatory systems, softwares, protocols, by providence, pattern recognition, synchronicities, rapid lateral associations - aggregations and combinations, links, collisions, reflections, refractions, repetitions, intersections, manifestations – simultaneous contradictory, complimentarity - figure-ground flash - always paradoxical…  the invisible is inside the visible - folded inside physicality - always unstable, searching for order - in danger of dissipation, asserting and annulling ourselves - perishable, mutable, far from equilibrium - eluding classification, out of disordered structures, as though by accident, order grows…

minus an existential ground - a new aesthetics of the historical image expressing a range of experience at dangerous synaptic levels - well in excess of comfortable limits… not as mere vertices, but living vortices, generating power - patterns growing from patterns - creating secret environments – hidden, ghastly and glorious - the grammar of being, the rhythmic proportions of figures…  poetry needs to vibrate because it is life itself, itself alive, a great exercise in lucidity - writing can help free one from former ways of thinking - what interests is not writing or images, it is not about the book, not the work itself, but an energy, the performance of which is an unrepeatable act of creation - it is the only art of the living…  the philosopher 'knowingly' agrees to dream, forgets the lesson only so as to 'prove' that lesson again – an act of active forgetfulness, returning eternally - the activity of thinking is supplied from the sublimation of erotic motive forces - with ecstatic ebullience, a vertiginous movement - the continuous progress of the idea – it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible - it becomes a Woman - to think is to search for what is lacking, what makes life incomplete - seeking out what obstructs our abilities to create and to act…  at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled - this is the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down, inward to the unknown, along a silver thread - dream thoughts cannot have definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction, into the intricate network of our world's thinking…  understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible - the forms within forms - transubstantiated by tradition, education - linguistic awareness in the broadest sense - draw and vision distills itself - write and the voice is spoken - assemble collections, and this Garden grows - perhaps the experience of the oversoul is an apogee, a transitory peak in an orbit of growth, a momentarily receptive plateau of connectivity - a magnificent accident in the great exercise of lucidity…

so what is truth? a mobile army of metaphors - canals which go nowhere but back upon themselves - metonymns, projective anthropomorphisms - an aggregate of human relationships which, poetically and rhetorically heightened, become transposed and elaborated, which, after protracted popular usage, pose as fixed, canonical, obligatory…  truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked - what we think of as perception, is always already an inscription - a product whose function is only to sustain the image of coherence - masking the absence of a basic reality - sets of metaphors, allegories for itself, internally coherent explanatory systems constructing the artificial life of gods and ideas… to program the codes underlying life itself - transforming one another – to alter existing ratios among the senses and thus to alter sensibility until mental processes are the main preoccupations…  we care about your mind - the quality of your analysis - it's innumerable petty diseases - moral indignation endows the fool with dignity - you have alienated yourself from a society you've abandoned, you’ve succumbed to the indulgent delusions of a fantasy world of your own construction - scrubbing away the misery with endless page hours - denouncing the lies that create their own suffering - the suffering that restricts our ability to create and to act… consider this pre-cognitive complex – artful reflex reactions of agility, dexterity - speech, music, painterly gesture, dance - the body knows, behaves on its own – at their apex, creative actions fall well outside of the event horizon - things happen so much faster than ego or conscious intellect can think them through, it is as though another hand were speaking… finite representations of a process happening - building things without history, without present - no object to carry off - leaving behind no trace, eliminating waste, they function only for the future - their life with us is short, our control is minimal - we destroy the evidence - behaving only in relationship to a language we together have established…  a single secretion organelle in a complex of tissues - that's why you're here -  artists, writers, intellectuals - cells of glands in organs in bodies in environments - necessarily incomplete and interdependent - irreducibly complex enzymatic ecology - you shall now meditate while you work - encoded by a language, groupings of similarities - self-assembling molecular compounds lacking essential structure congregate in mutually attractive proteinous strings - continuously growing interconnective tissues, sustaining periods of supple vitality - we have the means - thrumming with vigor - between periodic oscillations of spontaneous disassembly and reassembly - its means the same as its goal – encrustations of habituation - long planes of consistency terminating in regenerative cell death - plateaus of dynamic stability - episodic lifetimes producing and consuming molecules of multiplicitious weights and densities – matrix of charges and configurations bathing endlessly in its own glory…

now that every individual is under surveillance - reveal your true masks - let us see you as you really are - what do you look like? are we unique? we are not - there are swarms - show us your many faces - we are legion…  staking claims in this undiscovered country - the darkness between the frames - do we make cents? - being nocturnal rekombinant anonymist is a survival strategy - thinking throught the forbidden zone - redistributing the wealth, re-e-valuating intellectual property - artists, scribes, musicians, thinkers, tinkerers, visionaries, healers, tacticians, technicians, psychics, psychotics and schizophrenes - into the night, the dark, the dream, the vision, the net…  searching for tracks and traces of entelechies - patterns of intelligible energy and change which are manifested in the artifacts and extensions of human facilities unto matter - quotation magnets, strange attractors, ideas which will cause the right sort of bifurcation for every occasion…  so worshipful of our archives, we refuse all containment and control - proliferate! copy! record and make multiple! Soon again, as ever and always, the empire will burn our libraries…  pirate broadcasters, set your vcrs for the democratization of total insight - anything and everything we've dreamed of, at once and always, will exist…  media work as immersive environments - in media ecologies, information is just noise - knowledge is a dream - truth springs from interpretation - malfunction becomes the only food for thought - contemporary survival adaptations wreak havoc with business-as-usual authoritarian power - there are no models for what we today experience for the real…  every new technology is a medium that topples man's former worldview, changed in relation to the central nervous system's newly augmented modes of perception - possibilities enabling radical reorganizations of our thinking lives - sensory life exploding - visual space no longer cut off from the kinetic, tactile, acoustic...  people are undergoing a kind of fission - in even with our astoundingly fertile epistemological ground, we revert to facile mythic modes of data classification - pattern recognition remains the way out of the maelstrom - the only way of dealing with instant and total information access/excess…

knowledge imposes its modes of division and classification, just as language, by its obligatory rubrics (and not just its exclusions), compels us to think in a certain way - writing has occasion to dispel the bad faith attached to every language unaware of its own existence - thinking consents to employ this image-repetoire with full knowledge of its risks - movements which favour speech as a raising of consciousness, as means to a libratory emancipation of a group, do not see that they are themselves acting in accordance with the very system whose imperative today is the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and speech…  philosophical problems are a symptom of conceptual entanglement in the web of language - as our language remains the same, it will continue to introduce the same questions - our grammar, syntax and lexicon, unsurveyable at a glance, entangles us in the rules of use for our expressions - understanding is recurrently mislead, by confusions resulting from the inadequate framing of our questions in traditional mediums - media which are not up to the task of finding adequate expression for the mutational experience of thought, life, passion, and vitality…  nomadic subjects - ecstasy of communication - capitalism and schizophrenia - madness and civilization –  the art of the motor…  a new subject is being constituted - one which begins its process of being through the act of viewership - in becoming a consumer, the subject overcomes a perceived lack - fixes appearances, becomes an image - a simulation of satisfaction - appearance is not negated as deception - but is posited as a necessary condition of existence…  the reification of the real is replaced by a recursive structure of infinite regression - an inward spiral of orbital circulation - circumambulations, ritual repetitions - in cybernetic terms, the feedback loop - the human subject has become a blip - ephemeral, electronically processed, unreal - below the event horizon lie only abstraction and hyphothesis: a nebulous hyperreality - direct experience is, by definition, impossible…  the constant flow of images, sounds and narratives , seemingly demonstrates a cultural abundance and promise - yet the choice is illusory; to view is to surrender - the hegemony of the subject is delusional, imagistic - a terminal of multiple networks - the subject is finished - the media is a virus which controls the mutation rate of the real into the hyperreal, virulently replicating itself - media precludes organized revolt - since the new technological environment absorbs and dilutes ideological principles and abstract value - addictive personality is cultivated by dominant culture, aims to make people identify satisfaction with survival…  a desire to consume is the one permissible participation in the social process - to increase social control and establish new means of dominance over populations - advanced leisure narcosis infects the collective and turns them into replicas - pseudo-satisfaction supplants genuine comprehension - complete surrender to paranoid implosion - alienation results from seeing through the system of spectacle…

chance and attractive gravity control our drift - flowing together toward unanticipated alien contexts - predicting and claiming no authority - no predetermined state of reception - no control over background noise – all our unknowably unruly destinations - readership is an indeterminate condition - we are ourselves loosely designed contagions - viruses reconfiguring environments for maximal proliferation – a pollution of the soul - miasma - bursting cell walls, we cross-pollinate with virulent memes, retroviruses - most ancient form of Artificial Life…  I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream -  the environment is not just a reservoir of information but also a field of forces -  I came not only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish, but also that I am myself being dreamed. Among all dreamers, I, too, who 'know', am dancing my dance. Nature is itself an Individual, in a human sense, it can be called the unconscious, or at least the ground on which the unconscious is constructed, composed of all modes of interaction - the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us…  one wonders then if man is anything more than a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence - the elements of the different individuals we compose may in fact be nonhuman within us - there's alot more social interaction between unicellular organisms than we now comprehend - they do anything animals can do – size may not be the greatest measure of importance…  culture is alive! behaviour is a social virus - it feeds and breeds in us - through a mimesis protocol - memes are mimicked, reproducing echoes - ideas are made contagious - transmitted through the machinations of shared discourse and public exchange - we are a swarm of cooperative entities - contingent on and embedded in the totality of our lived environment, swimming in collaborative noise - we are, like all else, active participants in the stream of experience…  the moment you are aware of this confusion ends the longest error – those who become elevated  will become beautiful and shudder with godlike desires - many beings in one being - his ego falls like a battered wall - he unites with God, alive but emptied of himself - He has so completely dissolved his ego - nothinged himself, that what he says is like God talking to God… terminal zenith of mankind - jest in earnest - believe only in a god who can dance -  if we can't dance, it's not our revolution… your impudence was better than any reverence - a broken stick breaks into bud - in the middle of the streets and gardens, i stand, and say and say again, and it's all i say "I wish everyone could know what I’ve known"…

the revolution is in the ditch until we get our chemistry together - it could be so much better, so much further out - a semiological, alien dimensional nanotechnology, whose circuits await mapping, whose actions await experiencing - every plant, bush, or fungus, which is capable, when ingested, of stupefying or exciting or evoking visions has been known and systematically employed by humans from time immemorial… always and everywhere, human beings have felt the radical inadequacy of their personal existence, the misery of being their insulated selves and not something else, something wider, something far more deeply interfused - the fact is strangely significant… meme trading lifeforms, makers of objects, transforming machines sung into being, collectors of divinatory manuscripts, asking 'have you got anything interesting to trade?' - head snapping reversals between negative and positive - this place you break into, weird as it is, is somebody's idea of a reassuring environment for humans… 

without direct contact with its origins, humanity loses its vital powers – the ritual ordeal is a medium, a synthetic channel which allows the living to die - in order to regain their lives from the dead - without such a connection, the dead take revenge by sending uncontrollable cacodemons who can no longer be ritually exorcised - without images of death, people forget that they are survivors - you are survivors - keep surviving - stay alive – survive,  survive…  when the dead and the living  used to treat each other on equal terms, every person was a medium and the media – constant contact with the ancestors and future generations was established collectively - the tribe was complete - there was no need for telecommunication…  ascending the splendorous realms of the ancestors in ritual dying - we remember, last lifers - dance the dreaming carnival of horrors - each war's traumatic memories lodged in every cell - recurring wounds of futures past – anamnesist incarnate avatars, wisened heroes of Valhalla, sacrificial Aztec champions, enough! abhor the war! so say we all…  time is no longer a hinderance but a means of making actual what is potential - the way to success lies in apprehending and giving actuality to the way of the living universe [tao] which brings about all phenomena in time - the beginning of all things lies still in the beyond, in the form of ideas that have yet to imagine themselves as real…  i am at the impasse - i no longer conceive of the present - there is only the interval - the pointless period between histories in becoming - a moment ago and a moment from here - memory and thought do not occur Now, its always already over - we grasp at lingering shadows, linguistic distortions, echo translations of an ancient residue - the Moment comes and goes in a flash of fluid exchange - observational gestures instantaneously incinerated -  unrecordable, ungraphable, unmaterialized, unmemorized - there is no active present, now is already tomorrow, yesterday again - and all we have are these accumulations, ink and paper traces – diffracting rays of light, lines of travel,  liminal memories of an iridescent theatre - tenuous tentative torpid tenacious - forward looking retrospect - insightful hindsight hesitating in it’s infinitely regressive experiment…  does nothing sustain itself but this flickering fiery heat death of hallucinatory events? the buddha's dreaming – in perpetual forgetfulness, anamnesis - endless stream of indiscernibly futile events, copulations and little deaths, epochal passing seconds - never and always, it is always already tomorrow again…    escaping from hell means not deceiving oneself - neutralize all fear, nullify all inward aggression - something makes boredom and hurt disappear - men do battle with their own shadows - horrified by the dark devouring within them - everything we do leads to this death…  merely private experience is the schoolmaster of fools - he not busy being born, he is busy dying… without the ego participating, do nothing that does not originate in your deep center - that the soul can begin to stir in you, like an embryo - inside the needle's eye, a turning night of stars - this love comes to rest in me…  maybe all men have one big soul that everyone's a part of - all faces of the same man, one big self, flowing together like water - til I can't tell you from me - witness the resurrection with your own eyes, stick your finger in the wound - look out through my eyes at the things you made in you I place my trust - wherever there is one life there is the world entire, mocking us with the sight of what we might have known - all things shining…  how else is the ego to be reunited with its Id - the eternal aspect, internal Other? Do It Instantly! Do Not Hesitate! - when things begin to happen they will happen quickly… 

the highest paradigm of negative reason is art, which speaks for the differential and non-identical - the inessential meaningfullessness of cognitive diversity - why should a picture be of something?  any more than music should make the sounds of cars and cows?  art provides a methodology for exploration and discovery - collaboratively elaborating transpersonal mythologies - cultivating lateral social thinking - reconciling the unconscious with it's vague condition - exploring behavioural adaptations to the shifting climates of culture…  a process of mutual exchange, challenge, processing and discovery - offering opportunities, roles for initiative - trying to get the audience involved in perceptions - artistic games are all-involving, spontaneous, participatory - saturating, all-consuming, inner trips – activated right-hemisphere invoking uncertainty, surprise, unexpectedness - involving participative concern with process, rather than point of view - generating special artifacts for enhancing human perception…  poetry serves the function of updating the awareness of the age - retrieving the past as present, liberating history from its copyrighters - the 'poetic' designates that type of message which takes for object its own form, and not its contents - a work of language homologous to itself can open research to the complete space of language – abscond with intellectual property – text is a social property, a cultural reservoir - information wants to be free - let literacy burst its bonds - education must be changed radically, and it must be free…  the literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda - unwilling to keep abreast of everyone else's latest worries, but sell him ideas, he will buy anything…  the audience now has now become actor - with an intense desire to achieve inner freedom - freedom from coercive conditioning - anonymity is our survival strategy - swollen with the potential of our reassembly… history is a complex and manifold extension of the present - alive, which can be awakened - it's all happening now - the future of the future is the present - open personal memory to the dimensions of the whole world - otherwise the mind is trapped in a huge stage of its own creation - doubt!  dubito ergo sum… dance! sing!  revolt against the scorn and contempt which constrains us! - make love your work, bring the pattern alive - evolution is a tinkering, a modifying of what came before - maybe it started as a dream, but so did everything - love does exactly what it wants to do - it's all there is - advance its illegal knowledge…

­­­writing can break the theological image imposed by science, can reject the paternal terror spread by the abuse of 'truth' - do we have to invent a whole new methodology of language?  today literacy is learning to type on a keyboard - the keypad's great liberatory achievement is the delete key, to say nothing of control ‘c’ and ‘v’ - word processing and text deconstruction launches vast stores of nonlinear digitized quotations into the public domain - open the process of sifting, reconfiguring limitless archives of compressed deep-structural psychographology…  coded devices replaying the dusty sounds of history - anticipating a marvelous efflorescence of fragmentation, hybridization, cross-pollination - loosely connected fibers of intensity and significance - data forming images only by accident - holographic illuminated manuscripts enveloping an integrated audience… it is human beings, not minds, which perceive and think - a psychophysical unity, the body is no simple vessel for a transcendent spirit bearing cognitive properties - it is the body which has ideas, desires, joys and sorrows, which perceives, thinks, feels and acts - human behaviour is suffused with meaning, thought, passion, and will - the language of gestures connects oneself and others, behaviour manifests in mutual exchange with the world - what is often considered 'private' experience - the introspective inner realm of the subject is experienced as it extends and intrudes upon the body in forms of language, gesture, image - a social activity which gives expressions to life- behavioural mutation is immanent - thought is made in the act - our reflex-response to culture will only result in the positive shift of paradigm when our own roles in reiterating social mores are perceived, considered, accepted, and comprehended - when we achieve consciousness, and our behaviours become self-aware and conscientious,  we will begin to tactically modify our modes of being sufficiently to effect our cascade of influence, and constructively anticipate our cultural leverage in terms of global social change…

its as if people think only with figures of speech - passively accepting all that is told to us - less is more, the bigger the better - the camera adds five pounds - you gotta believe in something - common senselessness, everyday inanity - less is still not enough - obligations which society imposes in order to exist - compelling us lie, gregariously, in a style binding for us all - according to unconscious habits of centuries standing - drawing a limited horizon around one's self - an art of forgetting…  attempt to see clearly how we are prevented from communicating freely, from producing more multiply open avenues of possibility for lived understanding - discern where these compulsory,  well patrolled routes are needlessly prescribing a narrowing of our lives…  threatening warnings against intellectual property expose hostility against basic human freedoms - supposed copyright infringement, plagiarism, theft in ideas, can only stimulate dialogue - at a time when the only available great culture, the only area of design innovation, the only option for a social great Leap Forward - the only foreseeable fulfillment of civilization's democratic promise, is the cheap proliferation and simplified accessibility of information reproduction technologies – a distributed system eliminating what coercive value remained in hegemonic market culture… 

inherent repetitions of the gesture - science and art, marvelous ordering structures that human beings have thrown out into the world - working to report our discoveries faithfully and with the best means available - artists, scientists, poets, healers - feeling the urgent need to encounter reality on its own terms, uncompromisingly…  the function of art is to make humanity realize the psychological and social consequences of technological advancement - the artist is human antennae, early warning system - allowing for and testing for technology's effects…  it gives people who come in contact with their work a subtler sense of what is, so that we might better understand for ourselves what good or bad there might be – conventional value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is an enlivening of curiosity and awareness - every value is the product of a punishment - extract moral judgment from insight and look again at what's left…  research and development toward an ever-widening range of interpretive possibilities - provide the viewer-reader with control over her own internal experience - redirect and enhance existing methodologies, revisions with which we may nourish and provoke the fields of awareness - augment the range of imaginative potential - facilitate and amplify fidelity to experience - stimulate and magnify local sensitivities – enculturate acceptance of the world as it is, so that the observer comes to hear ourselves watching, assimilating, evading, expelling, investing ourselves in the construction of our own interpretations… fish that live in trees…

if the world is to everyone what each one sees, then what is its definition? what is, evidently, is far more than is seen…  with astonishing regularity, an electro-sensory cybernetic system  [videoscopic, graphickenetic, neuroelectric, phototronic] arranged to generate [pseudo]random algorithmic noise – where carefully observed - will produce emergent wave complexes identifiable as pattern, legible as 'signal' - defining a set of strange attractors - a constellation of tendencies within fields of probability and basins of statistical noise - gravitating toward nodes of stability - potentially comprehensible as structure / pattern / meaning.  Self-ordering systems - like autonomous subjectivities – begin behaving self-reflexively - finding an internally coherent syntax - such that reflection in itself entrains, regenerates, resonates, builds up an accumulation of rules,  impacting with other processes, travelling and growing at radically differing speeds - unique complications resulting from tesselating feedback cycles and maintain the system’s variety far from equilibrium - scribbling itself into being, referring only to itself – a formalist-materialist’s mirror-phase, puncture of autonomous identity giving birth to an emergent intelligence, a living artifice – collapsing self-reflections of recognition, noisily feeding back…, a complex and robust symbolic order arises, harmonizes with itself - makes sense for itself…  

STATIK locates pattern assembly in the minds of the viewing subjects – the tense edges at which symmetry and asymmetry contend with each other - highly subjective mutually stimulating co-ordering affect – magically combining language with stroboscopic frame rates, scan lines and feedback loops - from an undifferentiated electro-static clouds emerge tessellating nets of virtual latent structure - a perpetually regenerative life-simulation – energetic cycles exhibiting minimal serial identity - spontaneous immeasurable gouts of mutually self-perpetuating novelty - emulating a biological morphology - minute asymmetries generating fractal branching helices or recursion - a set of tendencies without discernable source - a kind of self-ordering gravitation, strange attractive probability sinks, inducing spontaneous self-assembly - vortical spiralling autophagic torus, self-suctioning spirals of emergent self-replication - robust structural redundancies regenerating radical differentiations with a distinct horizon of self-similarity within language, wherein we, in our attempt to recognize one or the other, semblance and resemblance, form some organizing principle - a vitalist maelstrom of wishful thinking, projections bringing the pattern alive…

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Vancouver 2000 Steve Calvert

TEXT by S.Calvert

AUDIO by S.Calvert

ARTby Steve Calvert

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