Bachelor Machines - Steve Calvert

Bachelor Machines - Steve Calvert - texts


	STEVE CALVERT	COLLECTIONS
	MAINTAIN YOUR ENTHUSIASM Plagiarist assemblage text compiled in 2006 Illustrated by photos from the collection Palace of the Ice Queen. Identified, recorded, edited and reassembled by the Indefinite Articles Automata under the supervision of S.Calvert ..................................... 001 INDEPENDENT SCIENCE – TAO CHEMICAL 002 COGNITIVE LIBERTIES 003 AGGREGATION ANVIL 004 HOLARCHIC NEGENTROPY 005 ALEXANDER’S LIBRARY 006 FLOATING WORLD II 007 THE JANUS HOLON Todays artist again are like independent scientists. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, there’s no substitute for overkill. Only when the organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the processes of thought – the greater the failure, the more searching one becomes. I have a new fold in my brain thanks to hearing that idea from you. An idea arises when our capacity for being affected is exceeded, and we are content with imagining instead of comprehending. To think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. A radical enterprise of demystification: the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it. We all try to think through literary examples. A theory is fiction thought through. We establish continuities, substitute crude attributions of general similarities and differences, arbitrary analogies ascribed by legendary presumtions of Nature. Language is constantly and secretly slipping into our minds a whole universe of false assumptions that will never come to judgment. Notions of fault, merit or demerit, good and evil, are exclusively social, having to do with obedience and disobedience, and nothing else. Good and bad have a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial; a composition of power. Don’t apologize for your opinions. Ever. Compose yourself. Art is a lie we use to tell the truth. Realizing that you are the Tao, you automatically manifest its power - path of least resistance, that selects, outlines, organizes – divine oracle inscribing the perfect appearance of imperfection. Lucretiean swerve, uncertainty calculus of fast-wurms. Without conscious direction, unselfconscious and uncontrived skill. A certain capacity to be affected, relaxed and ready to move, corresponds to his degree of power. Superior virtue uses no force, but nothing is left undone. How does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions? Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation. I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind. Be formless so you can assume all forms. Tranquility within disturbance is perfection. Chaos trusted becomes a dancing star. The curves of quickest descent. When the Tao was lost there came ideas of humanity and justice. When knowledge and cleverness arrived, there came great deceptions. The greatest power is available to those who do not seek it, and who do not use force. It’s magic is something to which no one should lay claim, or name. A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. Not a philosophy of compelling oneself to be calm and dignified under all conditions, but rather to do whatever comes naturally in all circumstances, oblivious of any reward to be gained - works unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part… The unbelievable result is these are far more sociable and civilized than they who try to live rigorously by law and words. Entropy is creativity relaxed. Cosmic slack, implicate order by which rest is effortlessly achieved. Any profligate increase in disorder, wherein relations are decomposed and must yet yield to chance, instantaneously begins settling toward intricately interlaced pools of distributed energetic equlibrium. Attractor's condense a crystalline fractal incline, the suction of emptiness, bootstrapping events into the future, impelled by the passage of the Vaccuum in time, angeld falling backward through history, the Toroidal Vortex raises forth the manifold path. Despite the appearance of complexification, the Way is inherently inclined toward states of elegance, simplification, and relaxed energy. Chaos is pattern of a complexity which exceeds the observer's capacity to comprehend it's order. The limits of constitutive synthesis establish various forms of free association, cultural and political, generating novel structures, accreting ideational positions bold enough from which to speculate on partial knowledge. If during our existence we have been able to compose these intensities so as to increase our power of acting, we have at the same time experienced a proportionally greater number of affections that depend only on ourselves, that is, on the intense part of ourselves. If on the contrary we have always been engaged in destroying or decomposing our own parts and those of others, our intense or eternal part, our essential part, has and cannot help but have only a small number of affections that come from itself, and no happiness that depends on it. This is the ultimate difference, then, between a good man and a bad man: distinguishing one from another by the way in which they fulfill and satisfy their life. When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or another idea, these sets of living parts then enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws which infinitely affect all of nature - the body and mind alike. The good, where a body directly compounds its relations with ours and with all or parts of its power, increases ours. Sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. It happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, catalyzing modulation cycles on the plane of possibility. As conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these [de]compositions. Nimble embracists, moving with grace and ease. The self-realized goes through his life without any one preconceived course of action, or any taboo. He merely determines for the moment what is the right thing to do. Specializing in generalism, He only asks, demands, to be tolerated – himself and his uncommon aims: acts of understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible. Where action satisfies there is no residual to hold the attention. Cognitive liberties; Freedoms of conscience. Detailed observational analysis and extended explicatory grids are discarded in favor of instantaneous lightning flashes of paradoxical illumination. Human faculties were not designed for single vision alone, but to apprehend the widest array of subtle signals which nature provides and which no instrument but the human mind is fully capable of receiving. Is it so important that our eyes and minds are perpetually occupied and entranced by trivial things, such that our hands have no time nor will to strangle the men feeding us the lie? Remember when we took you to seaworld? The eye of innocence – unclouded by preconceptions… Significance, or lack of it, is for anyone to judge who cares to do so; this mystery remains a constant source of wonder, delight and speculation; endless fascination; the manifold vision that enriches and dignifies human life. The conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemns us to have only inadequate ideas. This is what is prodigious in the range of possible experience – we promote a reversal of consciousness that can dissolve the causality of our objective illusions, while remaining open to the overwhelming possibility that at least in some respects we’re very far off the mark. Unquenchable black flame. Time for some thrilling heroics. The state alchemists harness their thirst for mayhem; Ideological warfare: to create rationales, interests, collusions. One manifold truth, full spectrum black to blindingly white. For its viewers there is no sun. Avert your eyes please, Silence speaks. To know the masks of god is to know madness, to behold more than you could ever imagine. Now we see patterns, the foreshadowing that precedes every moment. We were human. To what gods do you pray? The rule of steel, stygian black lotus chewed slowly; the four winds, CROM! Hephastus, forge of heaven, smith of the indestructible glyphs. I appreciate your candor. You risk yourself to really listen. A civic courtesy to acculturate the stranger; a thousand schools of thought contend for attention. The state of pattern recognition, to see the truthiness; multilingual cultural rationales, curious, flexible knowledge claims: each thing we see hides something we want to see. Handshakes of invisible college - the grandmothers, grandfathers, the working representation of spirits striving to express themselves through the medium of their dwelling; a bedeviling, just below threshold. EMP Aum thrumming just outside the reception range of the common senses. Our hidden teachers, a Hermetic research trust, maintaining holographic records of the passage of energetic intensities. Early artists were said to be inspired to set free the figures they saw hidden or imprisoned in a block of marble or wood. Co-evolute crystallizations, fractal bifurcations, involved in-formation, inspired emergencies, the folding-twisting which [perpetually re-]defines the flesh; Semi-divine afflatus; hydrogen doodlings; stupor stupahs, cloud columns airbrushing the edges of earlier transcription-translations. The interiorization of the outside; continuous surface under perpetual repair. Nature deals not in smooth discrete objects, but in composite endoconsistency. Not a place, but an unfolding, ingestive process. He grew the way a city grew, with buildings and streets endlessly torn apart and reconstructed; a vast collection of templates used to assemble, from the smallest fragments of each digested meal, the molecules needed to repair and rebuild and extend every part of his body. Any living body produces itself; every cell needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Accepted on its own terms, you wouldn’t use the word ‘elegant’. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely, but it still fritters away half its energy just being alive. An organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success - that’s not the same as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. But still every convoluted regulatory pathway fits together seamlessly, and manages to work despite its incoherence. If the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them. Speculations on questions not answerable by instrumental observation or experiment: The only relevant forms of science are the ones with ‘pseudo’ in front of them. Absurdly, scientific knowledge becomes less valuable than literary political activity. Linguistically reinforced concepts guide our most seemingly original thoughts. Permission to be mystical: Imagination is more important than knowledge. Real or imagined, there’s no medium like no medium. The deepest essential that defines us as human beings. All theories lack consistency. The theory of signatures or protective mimicry hints on the influence of thought on the formation of image. Illustrates the tendency to invent anthropocentric explanations for [super]natural phenomena. Habit of the human eye to see its own face, and hence of weathered stones or flowers to manifest in chance its imaginary anthropomorphic image, Image-signs which every healthy dreamer perceives. So, nature is inclined to articulate the same images our eyes are inclined to recognize. The mind is always creating space. You dream in space. About and beyond - a microbiolite calculus. Living things frequently defy their physical explanation. Elementals, we calculate, we serve no gods. The dark ones, the guardians, will not rest. The deep waters are full of magic; a wall of psychic energy, protects the nexus of all realities. Reality may be an illusion, but the illusion itself is also real. A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event. Non-similar things in close contact with each other, sharing environment, tend to become similar; sympathetic resonance, rapport, emerges among actively Iterating systems – output feeds back into the input of the other’s next cycle. Details tessellate on all scales of magnification. Trees are not just triangles and circles, they’re something much more magnificent. All the instructions are there but not necessarily the outcome: a wandering extension of Euclidean geometry. Islands of order in a sea of chaos. Enabling simile ordeal. Holarchy: a nested fractal network of interdependent beings. Xenoliths, cystoliths, mineral concretions, unique towering forms of living crypto-bacterial fossil assemblies; undisturbed deep-water bioforms - millennia of metabolic events, ageless alien monoliths; an undying asexually-reproduced accumulative agglomeration. Microorganisms were once merely a curiosity, amusing little anomalies considered only to be agents of decay. Maybe he is in the swamp, maybe the swamp is in him. All hail plankton. It is chosen who will die – everyone. We’re meant to die. To live once and then give way to others who might do things better. To live only once, but with hope. Not of any great importance as individuals in relation to the great struggle to preserve our liberties. That’s what makes anything about us matter. Ollie ollie auxin free - all the vibrations, in’a midst of a heatwave, treadin’ on a road Desire. This plan z cannot fail. I need ya’ to school right here; Entropy as a measure of the probability of a molecular distribution - a disequilibrium structure - Life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems, able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of waste substances or free energy, taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form - Wherever we find a highly improbable molecular assembly, It is probably life or one of its products. Life is one of those processes found when there is an abundant flow of energy, characterized by a tendency to shape or form itself as it consumes. But to do so it must always excrete lower energy products to the surroundings. Plate tectonics and atmospheric phenomena might then be considered biochemically driven, a decentralized planetary metabolism. Consider life within a larger class of ‘dissipative structures’, including decidedly nonliving centers of activity like glaciers, tornadoes, flames, refrigerators: streams of order that maintain their forms by dissipating heat, noise, damage. Creation begins with an act of destruction. Autocatalytic maintenance and growth, coordinated entropic behaviors seeking basins of attraction… Recognition that even pieces of wood and metal, when specifically designed and assembled in a machine, may achieve a composite identity with its own characteristic signature, as distinct from being the sum of its parts. For millions of years life has been racing away from disorder. A harmonic imbalance seeking and finding a sympathetic resonance in one cubic centimeter of chance. Unmoving center, unobserved oscillations in stochastic syncopation - disunity batteries; negentropy in dynamic discord. Fundamental organizational property of emergence: dynamic equilibrium with robust resilience. It is through ordered dissipative systems that the rate of entropy production in the universe is maximized – the more life in the universe, the faster that various forms of energy are degraded into heat – energy expenditure and making of messes – nonstop chemical replacement. Acquired natural facility, Life demonstrates a significant decrease in entropy, or a persistent state of disequilibrium, resisting homeostasis. A system may reduce its entropy by transferring it to its environment. More than compensated for by increasing entropy of small molecules, especially water. Biological self-assemblies such as metabolism, protein folding, the increasing organization of larger molecules, the homeostasis of healing - each distribution is sufficiently different from the background state to be recognizable as an autonomous entity. Janus - god of portals - stereo inner eye, the vanishing point grid – Legba gatekeeper of the interstice – Hermes, of crossing boundaries and the travel between - Holons – wholes that also function as parts, like the centaur, man and horse. You become an inhuman cyborg of damage; Both-And. Step on a skateboard and it’s on. Transcendental experience of pushing your body to its limits. You break or bleed but don’t stop. Scar tissue is stronger than flesh. Bring flower like the genesis machine: the multiple as a large animal made up of smaller animals. Winged serpents, gods of wisdom; effigies of Moloch, the owl, burned. Do you like being food for the immortals? I search the universe for a celestial and this is what I find? The leaping gout, of blood and semen, symbols of the vast powers of thought. The incommensurability of the individual is rooted in the sexual experience: silver squirrels, white rabbits, running the labyrinth delivering messages; seraphically illuminated fraternity of elder immortals: serve the hole! The navel of universe, there’s a crack in everything, it’s where the light gets in..... Scholars lovingly attended by dragons with unlimited power in the underworld. Sex provides a ready means of attempting to bridge this difference. Ready and willing, good giving game, the rising of the sap; Let yo’ body talk - backally boogie and blues - a joke that one plays on oneself; formidable opponent. Judge its value - like an exquisite strip tease. Double fortune - cum together - watch yo’ step - powerful and vulnerable at once - achieve balance - fantasy will set you free - we are not alone - you tell me. Share the things you love with those numbers greater than each of you. To arrange a library is to practice, in a quiet and modest way, the art of criticism. A strength beyond one’s own. We must pursue knowledge without any interference. Freedom of thought is the rule. Who else sifts the noise? It must resist narrativising impulses; It does not lead or coerce a reader through a story to a moral conclusion, but instead expands the fields of possibilities, opening horizons of uncertainty. It must facilitate the recapitulation of its own procedure, exposing its inner workings, unconcealed – the operator is only nominally ‘in control’. It begins from a place of not-knowing; the artist selects from an assemblage of tools, applies the sequence, and sifts the results. The selective decompression of reading-projection-decryption-translation belongs and relies most heavily upon the investment of attention by the reader or researcher. Like it or not, you’re the only one with power to do anything. By transferring the debate directly to the audience, there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources. The fecund territory between art and commerce is mined in a novel manner. The intent of critical theory is to reconstruct the generation of historical forms of consciousness in order to demonstrate how they misrepresent actual social relations and thereby justify historical forms of domination – demonstrating a concern for the growth of false consciousness generated by the culture industry – seeking to reconcile men and women to the actuality of their historical possibilities. Muscular machine, getting ready to deploy: A terrible beauty is born. The experience in this world of something very otherworldly. Communities are spiritual extensions of ourselves. Cooperation casts embarrassments on heroism. We long for community while valuing our individual freedom. Cultures which limit the definition of self to the faculty of conscious attention attribute these workings to an external god or to unconscious mechanisms. Truth to experience stimulates its own demand. Sales velocity creates fancy needs. The separation of scholarship from self-interest facilitates exchange. As humanitarian enterprises, science and research are fundamental to consumer democracies. A single threat: it’s especially difficult to understand something when one’s salary depends on one not understanding it. Rise up out of your grave and feel alive! Open to more possibilities for change. Travel the world but all you ever see is a mirror. We think we have control - the truth is, we’ve become clones, reproducing, assimilating ourselves. Visualizing the whole organization of the brain, we should have no doubt at all that the irrational animals are automata. Nature, a vast lifeless mechanism, can be dismantled and manipulated, experimented upon with impunity. Man has been at war with Nature ever since time began 6000 years ago, attempting to infinitely forestall the inevitable moment of his thermodynamic equlibrium… The cleverest jackal of the pack is always found at the throat, culling the flock of its weak and young. Challenge your audience to reflect back on the world they live in now, it’s stark brutality. Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Thereby, my idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival. All the same, stay alive, breathe deeply. You are needed. When the appointed hour comes, talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. We no longer have eyes nor ears. Is not such fury necessary to free oneself from confinement? In repressive societies, freedom comes to the same thing as insolence. Withholding assent is considered reactionary. Creativity is born of such no-saying. Praise of folly is itself foolish. Disdain remains a primitive assembly-form. But in careful exaggeration, that’s where the magic happens. The impulse to hyperbolize, to go further, push limits... Lawful distortions in order to emphasize the unique proportions of the subject. Reality’s been exaggerated, that’s what’s so compelling. Blanket statements verging on nonsense open a room-like space; in which individual personalities are only masks, hyperbolic atavisms, illusion seen for what it is. A transpersonal z-axis, spectral depth-saturation. Informational mysticism. Our minds are unraveling. As language molds thought, writing accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. Who gets it and who doesn’t? Hypnoticus, we seek wisdom! His silence is his wisdom. It’s a lie, a crass double entendre. Medium for intangible understandings. Pictures of the floating world. Experiencing many emotions, we’re just ghosts - an army of secret cameramen, present company included. Amphibious recon; self-taught, obsessive, visionary creators. Polymath autodidacts; indigo children with bizarre natural talents. Thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience. Mutant revolt. Useless heat, noise, and uncertainty. a telepresent pulse inducing hypnogogic pandeciphering glossolalia; hyper-suggestive, trance-inducing. Opulent surplus, solar sacrifice of creative labour to obscene excess. You’re not considered an adult until you’re drowning in debt. For how long should an artist try? When does self-determination become self-destructive? Why do we do it? Keep going for years and even decades without reward? We will only fail when we stop trying. Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Artists are by definition asocial creatures whose innovatory powers spring from dissatisfaction. Here in its heart lie beauties concealed, unrevealed. Luck is the residue of design. Discernment which springs from real insight is constructive. Don’t worry, I’m sure its just your imagination. Do not site the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written. No man recognizes leadership without the challenge of combat. Crush your enemies, see them flee before you, hear the lamentation of their women. You need divine discontent in order to create – it’s how art made us human, and made the world, more human than human. Implausible! Free inquiry. Cognitive liberty. Comedy. To infuse space with ideas, without judgment, without avoidance. Conceive instead of an erotics of intellectual property, an animistic economy of curiosity and attention. Objects possess a life of their own, and are relational entities. Gifts make slaves. Possession hence is nine tenths of the law. Among the fundamental structures of state capitalism, most are unjustifiable. Inside that expanding circle we have banned money. Nothing left but information and experience. Receiving, we collect this data and redistribute, freely. To reach the levels of the avatars; the whole reason why we’re here. Test it out and see if it’s true. Depends on your perspective. There’s no fashion without sense of humour. We use what we can find. You can keep what you kill. At the bicameral fold, the water belongs to all of us. Once it enters my body its mine, my medicine to transform. This should hardly need saying: criticism should motivate and inspire, not condemn. Tools to divide space: judgments arise from personal experiences, and are limited by individual consciousness. That outsider status is vouchsafe for purity, because the detachment of the creator proves the absence of deviousness or cynical manipulation of fashionable taste. Harpies, calling the sailors towards the rocks. Tell my stylist I love him. What’s worst is people who can handle the truth but choose to ignore it anyway. Refusing to be what you are. The main issue is diversion, avoidance, aversion –- obsessive self-referentiality - is it necessary always to impose order? Ironic cultural relativism; divorce from the personal. Repetitive reproductions within narrow modulations, obsessive collecting beyond any rationale… To fall in love with life in spite of history, to be responsive to awe and wonder, and be occasionally inspired to throw gold at beauty. Bedeviled by whimsically sadistic leprechauns. Babies doing alchemy. Without the spice, the navigators are blind. Writing so difficult and even primitive as to constitute a form of exile. An audience should be able to forget. Quitters never lose. Striving for reality and only a short time later, abandoning it; the captive idea of beauty strives at once to reject happiness and to assert it; refusing and disputing culture, no need to get anywhere with it. All work worthy of the name has a great deal to do with delirium. To express more than realism ever could, knowledge and intelligence are puny flippers alongside clairvoyance. Tailwind of ecstatic mania – ominous dharma;; Enthusiasm propelling a buoyant spirit to port through blistering cross-currents of crushing malaise – zeal supplants reason. Motivating the engines to a prodigious surplus, refuse littering the wasteland… Revenging vanity with tears, we burn the fat off our souls. and share our water with the dead. Making known the unknown - effecting the quantum field. Art is a troubled process; penance for sins committed in previous lifetimes. Learning to achieve lucid self-creation, the protestant’s karma is sometimes rebalanced in this body, if he’s lucky. The work is a penance, a retrovirus, infectious correctional measure, recoding virtue. Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. We absolve our sins, weaving the fibre of our angelic garments on spinning wheels of karma. Scribes of experiential experimental phenomenology, thought-criminals, take haste. Make an improbable concentration of stuff, push it around in the light of attention, and it becomes more a little more probable. Art as perfect imitation for life. The reality is we humans don’t like reality. Cleverly undermines the whole myth of the artist as quasi-divine standard bearer for transcendent morality. When you hear just one drum in repetition, you can imagine every variation of the rhythm. Fractionally-indigenous ‘pataphysical shamans, aggressively decolonizing magic-realist scribes and minstrels of late-industrial folklore, dissident mental-health consumers, heretical poets, alchemical psychohistorians… My fellow travelers, mark this well, and when thou art home, do likewise. You have to change to stay the same; the essence of autopoesis. Those who fail to reproduce before dying are selected against. Mother nature is a furiously ruthless bitch sometimes. A compellingly gorgeous horror beheld. Negative enthusiasm beyond measure, neutralized by wisdom of years. Get far enough away from yourself, you can see the error of your ways and the brilliance of your future; an ecstatic sadness. Patient diligence, one quarter impulse power - the strain of aimless longing; tenacity, resilience free of doctrine, strength and flexibility, … Heroes! Giants! Titans! Swim! Best you live to exceed the expectations of the ancestors! …………. MAINTAIN YOUR ENTHUSIASM Vancouver 2006 - S.Calvert	TEXT by S.Calvert 1999 - EXP 2002 - Middle Worlds 2004 - ATCG 2005 - 'Pataphysics 2006 - Maintain Your Enthusiasm 2007 - Just Is 2008 - Theatre of Operations 2009 - Authentic Replica AUDIO by S.Calvert ARTby Steve Calvert MORE ARTISTS LINKS BLOG CONTACT
		CONTACT

STEVE CALVERT

COLLECTIONS

MAINTAIN YOUR ENTHUSIASM

Plagiarist assemblage text compiled in 2006

Illustrated by photos from the collection Palace of the Ice Queen.

Identified, recorded, edited and reassembled by the Indefinite Articles Automata under the supervision of S.Calvert

.....................................

001 INDEPENDENT SCIENCE – TAO CHEMICAL
002 COGNITIVE LIBERTIES
003 AGGREGATION ANVIL
004 HOLARCHIC NEGENTROPY
005 ALEXANDER’S LIBRARY
006 FLOATING WORLD II
007 THE JANUS HOLON

Todays artist again are like independent scientists. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, there’s no substitute for overkill. Only when the organism fails to achieve an adequate response to its situation is there material for the processes of thought – the greater the failure, the more searching one becomes. I have a new fold in my brain thanks to hearing that idea from you. An idea arises when our capacity for being affected is exceeded, and we are content with imagining instead of comprehending. To think is to confess a lack of adjustment which we must stop to consider. A radical enterprise of demystification: the peculiar character of philosophy which makes representation essential to it. We all try to think through literary examples. A theory is fiction thought through. We establish continuities, substitute crude attributions of general similarities and differences, arbitrary analogies ascribed by legendary presumtions of Nature. Language is constantly and secretly slipping into our minds a whole universe of false assumptions that will never come to judgment. Notions of fault, merit or demerit, good and evil, are exclusively social, having to do with obedience and disobedience, and nothing else. Good and bad have a primary, objective meaning, but one that is relative and partial; a composition of power. Don’t apologize for your opinions. Ever.

Compose yourself. Art is a lie we use to tell the truth. Realizing that you are the Tao, you automatically manifest its power - path of least resistance, that selects, outlines, organizes – divine oracle inscribing the perfect appearance of imperfection. Lucretiean swerve, uncertainty calculus of fast-wurms. Without conscious direction, unselfconscious and uncontrived skill. A certain capacity to be affected, relaxed and ready to move, corresponds to his degree of power. Superior virtue uses no force, but nothing is left undone. How does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions? Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation. I knew not whether the wind was riding on me or I on the wind. Be formless so you can assume all forms. Tranquility within disturbance is perfection. Chaos trusted becomes a dancing star. The curves of quickest descent. When the Tao was lost there came ideas of humanity and justice. When knowledge and cleverness arrived, there came great deceptions. The greatest power is available to those who do not seek it, and who do not use force. It’s magic is something to which no one should lay claim, or name. A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song. Not a philosophy of compelling oneself to be calm and dignified under all conditions, but rather to do whatever comes naturally in all circumstances, oblivious of any reward to be gained - works unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part… The unbelievable result is these are far more sociable and civilized than they who try to live rigorously by law and words.

Entropy is creativity relaxed. Cosmic slack, implicate order by which rest is effortlessly achieved. Any profligate increase in disorder, wherein relations are decomposed and must yet yield to chance, instantaneously begins settling toward intricately interlaced pools of distributed energetic equlibrium. Attractor's condense a crystalline fractal incline, the suction of emptiness, bootstrapping events into the future, impelled by the passage of the Vaccuum in time, angeld falling backward through history, the Toroidal Vortex raises forth the manifold path. Despite the appearance of complexification, the Way is inherently inclined toward states of elegance, simplification, and relaxed energy. Chaos is pattern of a complexity which exceeds the observer's capacity to comprehend it's order.

The limits of constitutive synthesis establish various forms of free association, cultural and political, generating novel structures, accreting ideational positions bold enough from which to speculate on partial knowledge. If during our existence we have been able to compose these intensities so as to increase our power of acting, we have at the same time experienced a proportionally greater number of affections that depend only on ourselves, that is, on the intense part of ourselves. If on the contrary we have always been engaged in destroying or decomposing our own parts and those of others, our intense or eternal part, our essential part, has and cannot help but have only a small number of affections that come from itself, and no happiness that depends on it. This is the ultimate difference, then, between a good man and a bad man: distinguishing one from another by the way in which they fulfill and satisfy their life. When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or another idea, these sets of living parts then enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws which infinitely affect all of nature - the body and mind alike. The good, where a body directly compounds its relations with ours and with all or parts of its power, increases ours. Sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. It happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, catalyzing modulation cycles on the plane of possibility. As conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these [de]compositions.

Nimble embracists, moving with grace and ease. The self-realized goes through his life without any one preconceived course of action, or any taboo. He merely determines for the moment what is the right thing to do. Specializing in generalism, He only asks, demands, to be tolerated – himself and his uncommon aims: acts of understanding performed with the maximum perspective possible. Where action satisfies there is no residual to hold the attention. Cognitive liberties; Freedoms of conscience. Detailed observational analysis and extended explicatory grids are discarded in favor of instantaneous lightning flashes of paradoxical illumination. Human faculties were not designed for single vision alone, but to apprehend the widest array of subtle signals which nature provides and which no instrument but the human mind is fully capable of receiving. Is it so important that our eyes and minds are perpetually occupied and entranced by trivial things, such that our hands have no time nor will to strangle the men feeding us the lie? Remember when we took you to seaworld? The eye of innocence – unclouded by preconceptions… Significance, or lack of it, is for anyone to judge who cares to do so; this mystery remains a constant source of wonder, delight and speculation; endless fascination; the manifold vision that enriches and dignifies human life. The conditions under which we know things and are conscious of ourselves condemns us to have only inadequate ideas. This is what is prodigious in the range of possible experience – we promote a reversal of consciousness that can dissolve the causality of our objective illusions, while remaining open to the overwhelming possibility that at least in some respects we’re very far off the mark.

Unquenchable black flame. Time for some thrilling heroics. The state alchemists harness their thirst for mayhem; Ideological warfare: to create rationales, interests, collusions. One manifold truth, full spectrum black to blindingly white. For its viewers there is no sun. Avert your eyes please, Silence speaks. To know the masks of god is to know madness, to behold more than you could ever imagine. Now we see patterns, the foreshadowing that precedes every moment. We were human. To what gods do you pray? The rule of steel, stygian black lotus chewed slowly; the four winds, CROM! Hephastus, forge of heaven, smith of the indestructible glyphs. I appreciate your candor. You risk yourself to really listen. A civic courtesy to acculturate the stranger; a thousand schools of thought contend for attention. The state of pattern recognition, to see the truthiness; multilingual cultural rationales, curious, flexible knowledge claims: each thing we see hides something we want to see. Handshakes of invisible college - the grandmothers, grandfathers, the working representation of spirits striving to express themselves through the medium of their dwelling; a bedeviling, just below threshold. EMP Aum thrumming just outside the reception range of the common senses. Our hidden teachers, a Hermetic research trust, maintaining holographic records of the passage of energetic intensities. Early artists were said to be inspired to set free the figures they saw hidden or imprisoned in a block of marble or wood. Co-evolute crystallizations, fractal bifurcations, involved in-formation, inspired emergencies, the folding-twisting which [perpetually re-]defines the flesh; Semi-divine afflatus; hydrogen doodlings; stupor stupahs, cloud columns airbrushing the edges of earlier transcription-translations. The interiorization of the outside; continuous surface under perpetual repair. Nature deals not in smooth discrete objects, but in composite endoconsistency. Not a place, but an unfolding, ingestive process.

He grew the way a city grew, with buildings and streets endlessly torn apart and reconstructed; a vast collection of templates used to assemble, from the smallest fragments of each digested meal, the molecules needed to repair and rebuild and extend every part of his body. Any living body produces itself; every cell needs to be fed, whether or not it’s working. Accepted on its own terms, you wouldn’t use the word ‘elegant’. Evolution does a lot of things very nicely, but it still fritters away half its energy just being alive. An organism has been fine-tuned to maximize its overall reproductive success - that’s not the same as embodying the ideal solution to every individual problem it faces. But still every convoluted regulatory pathway fits together seamlessly, and manages to work despite its incoherence. If the pathways didn’t fit together, they wouldn’t be there for you to study. We can celebrate our own beautiful mistakes. All evolution can do is murder them.

Speculations on questions not answerable by instrumental observation or experiment: The only relevant forms of science are the ones with ‘pseudo’ in front of them. Absurdly, scientific knowledge becomes less valuable than literary political activity. Linguistically reinforced concepts guide our most seemingly original thoughts. Permission to be mystical: Imagination is more important than knowledge. Real or imagined, there’s no medium like no medium. The deepest essential that defines us as human beings. All theories lack consistency. The theory of signatures or protective mimicry hints on the influence of thought on the formation of image. Illustrates the tendency to invent anthropocentric explanations for [super]natural phenomena. Habit of the human eye to see its own face, and hence of weathered stones or flowers to manifest in chance its imaginary anthropomorphic image, Image-signs which every healthy dreamer perceives. So, nature is inclined to articulate the same images our eyes are inclined to recognize. The mind is always creating space. You dream in space. About and beyond - a microbiolite calculus. Living things frequently defy their physical explanation. Elementals, we calculate, we serve no gods. The dark ones, the guardians, will not rest. The deep waters are full of magic; a wall of psychic energy, protects the nexus of all realities.

Reality may be an illusion, but the illusion itself is also real. A living body is not a fixed thing, but a flowing event. Non-similar things in close contact with each other, sharing environment, tend to become similar; sympathetic resonance, rapport, emerges among actively Iterating systems – output feeds back into the input of the other’s next cycle. Details tessellate on all scales of magnification. Trees are not just triangles and circles, they’re something much more magnificent. All the instructions are there but not necessarily the outcome: a wandering extension of Euclidean geometry. Islands of order in a sea of chaos. Enabling simile ordeal. Holarchy: a nested fractal network of interdependent beings. Xenoliths, cystoliths, mineral concretions, unique towering forms of living crypto-bacterial fossil assemblies; undisturbed deep-water bioforms - millennia of metabolic events, ageless alien monoliths; an undying asexually-reproduced accumulative agglomeration. Microorganisms were once merely a curiosity, amusing little anomalies considered only to be agents of decay. Maybe he is in the swamp, maybe the swamp is in him. All hail plankton. It is chosen who will die – everyone. We’re meant to die. To live once and then give way to others who might do things better. To live only once, but with hope. Not of any great importance as individuals in relation to the great struggle to preserve our liberties. That’s what makes anything about us matter. Ollie ollie auxin free - all the vibrations, in’a midst of a heatwave, treadin’ on a road Desire. This plan z cannot fail.

I need ya’ to school right here; Entropy as a measure of the probability of a molecular distribution - a disequilibrium structure - Life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems, able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of waste substances or free energy, taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form - Wherever we find a highly improbable molecular assembly, It is probably life or one of its products. Life is one of those processes found when there is an abundant flow of energy, characterized by a tendency to shape or form itself as it consumes. But to do so it must always excrete lower energy products to the surroundings. Plate tectonics and atmospheric phenomena might then be considered biochemically driven, a decentralized planetary metabolism. Consider life within a larger class of ‘dissipative structures’, including decidedly nonliving centers of activity like glaciers, tornadoes, flames, refrigerators: streams of order that maintain their forms by dissipating heat, noise, damage. Creation begins with an act of destruction. Autocatalytic maintenance and growth, coordinated entropic behaviors seeking basins of attraction… Recognition that even pieces of wood and metal, when specifically designed and assembled in a machine, may achieve a composite identity with its own characteristic signature, as distinct from being the sum of its parts. For millions of years life has been racing away from disorder. A harmonic imbalance seeking and finding a sympathetic resonance in one cubic centimeter of chance. Unmoving center, unobserved oscillations in stochastic syncopation - disunity batteries; negentropy in dynamic discord. Fundamental organizational property of emergence: dynamic equilibrium with robust resilience. It is through ordered dissipative systems that the rate of entropy production in the universe is maximized – the more life in the universe, the faster that various forms of energy are degraded into heat – energy expenditure and making of messes – nonstop chemical replacement. Acquired natural facility, Life demonstrates a significant decrease in entropy, or a persistent state of disequilibrium, resisting homeostasis.

A system may reduce its entropy by transferring it to its environment. More than compensated for by increasing entropy of small molecules, especially water. Biological self-assemblies such as metabolism, protein folding, the increasing organization of larger molecules, the homeostasis of healing - each distribution is sufficiently different from the background state to be recognizable as an autonomous entity. Janus - god of portals - stereo inner eye, the vanishing point grid – Legba gatekeeper of the interstice – Hermes, of crossing boundaries and the travel between - Holons – wholes that also function as parts, like the centaur, man and horse. You become an inhuman cyborg of damage; Both-And. Step on a skateboard and it’s on. Transcendental experience of pushing your body to its limits. You break or bleed but don’t stop. Scar tissue is stronger than flesh. Bring flower like the genesis machine: the multiple as a large animal made up of smaller animals. Winged serpents, gods of wisdom; effigies of Moloch, the owl, burned. Do you like being food for the immortals? I search the universe for a celestial and this is what I find? The leaping gout, of blood and semen, symbols of the vast powers of thought. The incommensurability of the individual is rooted in the sexual experience: silver squirrels, white rabbits, running the labyrinth delivering messages; seraphically illuminated fraternity of elder immortals: serve the hole! The navel of universe, there’s a crack in everything, it’s where the light gets in..... Scholars lovingly attended by dragons with unlimited power in the underworld. Sex provides a ready means of attempting to bridge this difference. Ready and willing, good giving game, the rising of the sap; Let yo’ body talk - backally boogie and blues - a joke that one plays on oneself; formidable opponent. Judge its value - like an exquisite strip tease. Double fortune - cum together - watch yo’ step - powerful and vulnerable at once - achieve balance - fantasy will set you free - we are not alone - you tell me. Share the things you love with those numbers greater than each of you.

To arrange a library is to practice, in a quiet and modest way, the art of criticism. A strength beyond one’s own. We must pursue knowledge without any interference. Freedom of thought is the rule. Who else sifts the noise? It must resist narrativising impulses; It does not lead or coerce a reader through a story to a moral conclusion, but instead expands the fields of possibilities, opening horizons of uncertainty. It must facilitate the recapitulation of its own procedure, exposing its inner workings, unconcealed – the operator is only nominally ‘in control’. It begins from a place of not-knowing; the artist selects from an assemblage of tools, applies the sequence, and sifts the results. The selective decompression of reading-projection-decryption-translation belongs and relies most heavily upon the investment of attention by the reader or researcher. Like it or not, you’re the only one with power to do anything. By transferring the debate directly to the audience, there are ways of compensating for the absence of resources. The fecund territory between art and commerce is mined in a novel manner. The intent of critical theory is to reconstruct the generation of historical forms of consciousness in order to demonstrate how they misrepresent actual social relations and thereby justify historical forms of domination – demonstrating a concern for the growth of false consciousness generated by the culture industry – seeking to reconcile men and women to the actuality of their historical possibilities.

Muscular machine, getting ready to deploy: A terrible beauty is born. The experience in this world of something very otherworldly. Communities are spiritual extensions of ourselves. Cooperation casts embarrassments on heroism. We long for community while valuing our individual freedom. Cultures which limit the definition of self to the faculty of conscious attention attribute these workings to an external god or to unconscious mechanisms. Truth to experience stimulates its own demand. Sales velocity creates fancy needs. The separation of scholarship from self-interest facilitates exchange. As humanitarian enterprises, science and research are fundamental to consumer democracies. A single threat: it’s especially difficult to understand something when one’s salary depends on one not understanding it. Rise up out of your grave and feel alive! Open to more possibilities for change. Travel the world but all you ever see is a mirror. We think we have control - the truth is, we’ve become clones, reproducing, assimilating ourselves. Visualizing the whole organization of the brain, we should have no doubt at all that the irrational animals are automata. Nature, a vast lifeless mechanism, can be dismantled and manipulated, experimented upon with impunity. Man has been at war with Nature ever since time began 6000 years ago, attempting to infinitely forestall the inevitable moment of his thermodynamic equlibrium… The cleverest jackal of the pack is always found at the throat, culling the flock of its weak and young. Challenge your audience to reflect back on the world they live in now, it’s stark brutality. Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Thereby, my idea of beauty has nothing to do with survival. All the same, stay alive, breathe deeply. You are needed.

When the appointed hour comes, talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage. We no longer have eyes nor ears. Is not such fury necessary to free oneself from confinement? In repressive societies, freedom comes to the same thing as insolence. Withholding assent is considered reactionary. Creativity is born of such no-saying. Praise of folly is itself foolish. Disdain remains a primitive assembly-form. But in careful exaggeration, that’s where the magic happens. The impulse to hyperbolize, to go further, push limits... Lawful distortions in order to emphasize the unique proportions of the subject. Reality’s been exaggerated, that’s what’s so compelling. Blanket statements verging on nonsense open a room-like space; in which individual personalities are only masks, hyperbolic atavisms, illusion seen for what it is. A transpersonal z-axis, spectral depth-saturation. Informational mysticism. Our minds are unraveling. As language molds thought, writing accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal. Who gets it and who doesn’t? Hypnoticus, we seek wisdom! His silence is his wisdom. It’s a lie, a crass double entendre.

Medium for intangible understandings. Pictures of the floating world. Experiencing many emotions, we’re just ghosts - an army of secret cameramen, present company included. Amphibious recon; self-taught, obsessive, visionary creators. Polymath autodidacts; indigo children with bizarre natural talents. Thousands of collective acts of rebellion and disobedience. Mutant revolt. Useless heat, noise, and uncertainty. a telepresent pulse inducing hypnogogic pandeciphering glossolalia; hyper-suggestive, trance-inducing. Opulent surplus, solar sacrifice of creative labour to obscene excess. You’re not considered an adult until you’re drowning in debt. For how long should an artist try? When does self-determination become self-destructive? Why do we do it? Keep going for years and even decades without reward? We will only fail when we stop trying. Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. Artists are by definition asocial creatures whose innovatory powers spring from dissatisfaction. Here in its heart lie beauties concealed, unrevealed. Luck is the residue of design. Discernment which springs from real insight is constructive. Don’t worry, I’m sure its just your imagination. Do not site the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written. No man recognizes leadership without the challenge of combat. Crush your enemies, see them flee before you, hear the lamentation of their women. You need divine discontent in order to create – it’s how art made us human, and made the world, more human than human. Implausible!

Free inquiry. Cognitive liberty. Comedy. To infuse space with ideas, without judgment, without avoidance. Conceive instead of an erotics of intellectual property, an animistic economy of curiosity and attention. Objects possess a life of their own, and are relational entities. Gifts make slaves. Possession hence is nine tenths of the law. Among the fundamental structures of state capitalism, most are unjustifiable. Inside that expanding circle we have banned money. Nothing left but information and experience. Receiving, we collect this data and redistribute, freely. To reach the levels of the avatars; the whole reason why we’re here. Test it out and see if it’s true. Depends on your perspective. There’s no fashion without sense of humour. We use what we can find. You can keep what you kill. At the bicameral fold, the water belongs to all of us. Once it enters my body its mine, my medicine to transform. This should hardly need saying: criticism should motivate and inspire, not condemn. Tools to divide space: judgments arise from personal experiences, and are limited by individual consciousness. That outsider status is vouchsafe for purity, because the detachment of the creator proves the absence of deviousness or cynical manipulation of fashionable taste. Harpies, calling the sailors towards the rocks. Tell my stylist I love him. What’s worst is people who can handle the truth but choose to ignore it anyway. Refusing to be what you are. The main issue is diversion, avoidance, aversion –- obsessive self-referentiality - is it necessary always to impose order? Ironic cultural relativism; divorce from the personal. Repetitive reproductions within narrow modulations, obsessive collecting beyond any rationale… To fall in love with life in spite of history, to be responsive to awe and wonder, and be occasionally inspired to throw gold at beauty. Bedeviled by whimsically sadistic leprechauns. Babies doing alchemy. Without the spice, the navigators are blind.

Writing so difficult and even primitive as to constitute a form of exile. An audience should be able to forget. Quitters never lose. Striving for reality and only a short time later, abandoning it; the captive idea of beauty strives at once to reject happiness and to assert it; refusing and disputing culture, no need to get anywhere with it. All work worthy of the name has a great deal to do with delirium. To express more than realism ever could, knowledge and intelligence are puny flippers alongside clairvoyance. Tailwind of ecstatic mania – ominous dharma;; Enthusiasm propelling a buoyant spirit to port through blistering cross-currents of crushing malaise – zeal supplants reason. Motivating the engines to a prodigious surplus, refuse littering the wasteland… Revenging vanity with tears, we burn the fat off our souls. and share our water with the dead. Making known the unknown - effecting the quantum field. Art is a troubled process; penance for sins committed in previous lifetimes. Learning to achieve lucid self-creation, the protestant’s karma is sometimes rebalanced in this body, if he’s lucky. The work is a penance, a retrovirus, infectious correctional measure, recoding virtue. Every work of art is an uncommitted crime. We absolve our sins, weaving the fibre of our angelic garments on spinning wheels of karma. Scribes of experiential experimental phenomenology, thought-criminals, take haste. Make an improbable concentration of stuff, push it around in the light of attention, and it becomes more a little more probable. Art as perfect imitation for life. The reality is we humans don’t like reality. Cleverly undermines the whole myth of the artist as quasi-divine standard bearer for transcendent morality. When you hear just one drum in repetition, you can imagine every variation of the rhythm. Fractionally-indigenous ‘pataphysical shamans, aggressively decolonizing magic-realist scribes and minstrels of late-industrial folklore, dissident mental-health consumers, heretical poets, alchemical psychohistorians… My fellow travelers, mark this well, and when thou art home, do likewise. You have to change to stay the same; the essence of autopoesis. Those who fail to reproduce before dying are selected against. Mother nature is a furiously ruthless bitch sometimes. A compellingly gorgeous horror beheld. Negative enthusiasm beyond measure, neutralized by wisdom of years. Get far enough away from yourself, you can see the error of your ways and the brilliance of your future; an ecstatic sadness. Patient diligence, one quarter impulse power - the strain of aimless longing; tenacity, resilience free of doctrine, strength and flexibility, … Heroes! Giants! Titans! Swim! Best you live to exceed the expectations of the ancestors!

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MAINTAIN YOUR ENTHUSIASM
Vancouver 2006 - S.Calvert

TEXT by S.Calvert

1999 - EXP
2002 - Middle Worlds
2004 - ATCG
2005 - 'Pataphysics
2006 - Maintain Your Enthusiasm
2007 - Just Is
2008 - Theatre of Operations
2009 - Authentic Replica

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ARTby Steve Calvert

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