MIDDLE WORLDS

Plagiarist Assemblage Text compiled 2002 by the Anonymous Autonomists Entelechy and S.Calvert

Illustrations By Steve Calvert from the collectionBetweeners : Middle Worlds

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Section 01.03 THE MANUAL - 2.02 AGAINST IRONY - 3.02 PALIMPSEST WABI SABI - 04.02 ETHICS  - 05.02 PHANTASY - 06.02 MODERN ART - 07.01 EXPERIMENT - 09.02 SIMULACRA - 10.02 THE WOMAN MARRIED TO TECHNOLOGY - 14.01 MACHINE EYES - 11.02 LOVE  - 12.02 SELF CONTROL - 13.02 LANGUAGE - 15.01 TACTICS of FREEDOM - 17.02 SUBJECT - 18.02 NEUROTIC SYMPTOM

Process and emergence in art production is intentionally and incidentally more interesting than the trace of the finished work. Shift from object to process, from representation to articulation. Everything weighs on the investment of the reader-viewer. A sympathetic, mimetic attentiveness, an attempt to extend the field of awareness to incorporate a superasensible realm, to translate appearances as both duped and willing player. A process orientation concerns itself with the reader's performative rearticulation of the text. Generative artists are eager to invite the audience to remix and mutate the work. It believes that collective minds are necessary in development of complex systems. The consciousness of the spectator no longer appears isolated, but rather as the collective subject of his or her own reaction, even as an objective force of nature itself. A moment of return, of restored presence, of renewed facility.

Instructional diagrams, sequences, procedural models for looking and knowing; determining values without diminishing their plurality. Life activates thought; thought in turn affirms life, recalling something essentially forgotten. Margins between higher intellectual order and the primitive are extremely volatile and mobile. Facts are flexible. What matters is a good story. We prefer to live with myths - it makes much better narrative. It's all about editing. Cutting and reframing.  To repair the dissociative, schizoid rift. That which we cannot yet recognize as subtle machinery, as sublime structure, as desire manifesting reality. The sufficiently advanced technology that appears as magic. Deep structures both sexual and mathematical, bubbling away in the blind spot. Anamnesis reconfiguring an always entirely new reality labyrinth, explicitly conscious and sensual, alien and integral to this life.   Repair the broken accord that appears as the cause of the subject's collective fragmentation, to unify the alienated agent by crossing in both directions at once. Intellectual complexity and compassionate sensibility, the gap between instinct and intelligence, sensory-somatic and perception-consciousness systems - across this we stretch new growths of neuronal fibres, like hands extended to each other. Spiritual amputees, we scratch at the phantom-limb of our shared dreaming.

Chaos has three daughters, depending on the plane that cuts through her - art, science, philosophy - as forms of thought or creation, the brain is the junction - not the unity - of the three planes. Against irony, the ancient dogmatic virtue, humour is the modern skeptical virtue. As philosophers we must invent devices to allow us to become the quasi-cause of what is produced within us. Art is that inquisitive machine. An old style of technique re-adopted, re-adapted; formally, style is content. A regrettable modernist idea insists that perpetual revolution is necessary to progress in the arts.   Nietzsche introduced aphorism and poetry to philosophy, and also replaced the ideal of knowledge - the discovery of truth - with interpretation and evaluation; always fragmentary and incomplete. Walter Benjamin and Hannah Hoch made the kitchen scissors the artist's buraq, the bricoleur’s flying machine, mediating everywoman's passage through underworld, her angel falling backwards in time.  The spritual automata - little organs of the reproductive imagination. Resisting the tendency toward low pressure - the system's downhill inclinations, negentropic contractions in anticipation of vacuum – strange gravities.  'Truth' re-creates itself everywhere, becomes all you can see. What you know obstructs further knowledge aquisition. Try to see what's behind this obstruction. Orthogonal perspectives, refractive bifurcating harmonics. Structures of perception are best discovered through variational methods. Real systems have no tops. History is the ultimate speculative narrative, the subject of ongoing and inevitable revision.

The image invokes magical thinking, where development does not proceed on a straight line. The total process achieves dialectical spiral – double helix - the highest forms of art have as their correlate the deepest form of subconscious. The polar separation of these two lines of flow creates a remarkable tension - a unity of form and content, characteristic of true artworks. Apart from these there are no true artworks.  How do you get people out of their own sorrow, their own hell? By teaching them to enjoy art? Determine what you believe to be true and good and do only that. Labour and life should also be integrated. Doors will open.

Ghosts in the machines, faith-based automations which constitute our inner worlds; ecologies of souls; psychic cliches by which we think and feel, are thought and felt. Being himself a cliche among others, exerting constant vigilance over stereotypes and readymade linkages, in service of those who live in ‘this’ world.  A renewed uncompromising adherence to the strict truth value of the imaginary. It would seem the true function of the imagination is to weave a garment for god. God relates to human beings in their cultural contexts:  to the android mind, all reality is virtual:  who can tell the difference? Just another simulation.  We’ve peaked, just our mind exists - what's real doesn't matter. These days you never know. What's important is how we live our lives. Hand over your flesh. A new world awaits. New flesh for old. You asked for it.

Outside describes that mute and formless region that appears as the center of the modern work of art, and becomes the principle cause of its deformation: its defect, its symptom and neurosis. A total physiological sensation that defines the experience of modern experimental art, caused by failure to attain the 'action-image', or to stir breath in the assembled life-form, which remains outside the powers of art to realize. A repeated failure whereby art comes to it's limits and recoils upon itself. The motive schism between artist and popular culture underlies this tendency to withdraw and enclose itself in aristocratic social forms. This is the source of social conflict between the 'spiritual automaton' and the major brain of the mass-subject. Phantasy insists that it must and can become real. That behind the illusion lies knowledge. It creates a universe of compensatory perception: the artist is oppressed by powerful intrinsic needs; not only from neurosis, he lacks the means for achieving his satisfactions, so like any other unsatisfied man he turns away from reality and transfers all his interest, his libido, to the wishful construction of his life of phantasy.

Photography and philosophy are about book publishing. No one realized that the book and the labyrinthe were one and the same. Suggesting an image bifurcating in time, a higher dimensional space, dizzily spreading networks of diverging and converging parallel lines, a web of time, the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, construct parsimonies, or ignore each other through the centuries, embracing every remaining possibility.  What is the minimum set of marks required to constitute an image? Art takes this bit of chaos in a frame in order to form a composed chaos, or 'chaosmos'. It extracts beauty from aleatory functions and chaoid variables, akin to Picabia's generative instruments: a sex machine operating at vertiginous speeds. Releasing the fixation on outcome, our concern is the process of making distinctions in areas of existence in which success is not achieved or is irrelevant. We begin to see a work as somehow complete at every point in its development. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment, given the proper circumstances and contextual point-of-view.  Art is a dynamic event that occurs between an observer and something else: an altered state of consciousness; a mythic optimism releasing extraordinarily graceful moments of erotism and poetry. In the reality-in-becoming of the aesthetic experience, that 'greater-than-thou' of poetic imagination, that presence of an unthinkable - of another thinker who shatters every monologue of the thinking self. Suddenly, it's not about authorship anymore. Once it's out there, or in here, words belong to all speaking voices who can hear.

What everyone else knows about you but you can't know about yourself. The play of mirrors - Tat Vam Sat - exploration of the blind spot, the shadow, lacunae in the reflection, the hidden Operator. To oppose and to reconcile the semblance of this real trauma. Deprived of its terror, she does this by means of a secret so perfect, so glorious, that she must keep it even from herself.  The mind, that ocean where each kind does straight its own relation find;  yet it creates, transcending these for other worlds and other seas. Command of languages; a practiced imperfection. Cryptic solutions which continue to distort perceptions by detour of their more-than double meanings. Levels hidden and encyphered, cascading thoughts triggered, released by the reader's activity, dormant viruses rehydrated by fresh attention. Trying to make things that will thrive in other people's minds even more vigorously than they were in your own. Tolerated for crossing those thresholds, artists have licence to dig underneath and look around, plant seeds.  A secular ethics of civility and dissent, self-governance, direct participatory democracy among exceptional individuals - omnivorous intellects labouring to comprehend reality more fully. Ride at your own risk.  Modules constitute different incitements.  Wearing a new shadow, you are who your friends have made you. The work is about the process of art, about making and giving, about anonymity, generosity, and obervance of the moment, something that appears to the soul and demands its creative power. We always get more out than we put in.

Misunderstandings have seemed to come from comparing Intermission with movements or groups whose individuals seem to have some principle in common, or an agreed upon program. There has never been any attempt to agree on aims or methods. Experiences generated in collaborative events are co-created by individuals with something unnamable in common who have simply naturally coalesced to pursue and perform their works. Perhaps by a feeling that the bounds of art are much wider than they have conventionally seemed, bounds established but no longer useful.  Art was the first thing we'd come up against that had no rules, and if there were, you made them up yourself. Nothing sacred, nothing forbidden, no hierarchies, free to declare your own truths, Things can just exist, co-exist.

What characterizes the modern work is not self-reference, but the attempt to introduce radical difference into the very idea of sensation. The work of art leaves the domain of representation to become 'experience', transcendental empiricism, or a science of the sensible - granted, as within a general literature of limited connoisseurship. Is it a picture or a painting? Sometimes paintings should be issued with annotated bibliographies. The work of art in the age of cultural overproduction - There are only two known kinds of artists: plagiarists and revolutionaries. inherited technologies making it easy to go on and not think. Obsessions whittle the world down to a manageable size, focusing on the few things you care about. Unembarassed passions, self-indulgent and narcissistic oroboros - creative artists have more to fear from insularity and obscurity than from piracy or plagiarism - here of course is the revolutionary moment.  Not only of the individual but also on the generic, historical, archetypal, and contextual levels, artistic imagination reshapes our unconscious memory of the liberations that fail, of the problem-promise that has been betrayed.  Art then survives only where it cancels itself, where it denies traditional form - thereby denying reconciliation.  In a state of unfreedom, art can sustain the image of freedom only in the negation of freedom. Surrealistic and atonal, the great refusal which is it's primary characteristic is a protest against unnecessary repressions.  The problem is a real one, not merely an intellectual game.  The struggle for ultimate freedom - to live without anxiety: the fact that the task is hard masks the fact that it is also taboo.

Seduction into imitation, compelling emulation and reproductive compliance. Introduce a dismantling metaphor, restructuring meme, a viral concept object, latency active in animate material, a code worm, novel theoretical prototype - a joke. These attention-viruses initiate thoughts 'outside the box'. Spurious laughter, seizure, rupture, confusing expectations with surprise lateral associations. The problem of vision is not that of representation, but of presentation. An object which resists subjectivation reveals the traumatic disavowal of a bond between subject and substance - and the subject is precisely the correlative to this object. Painters go through a catastrophe, or throuh a conflagration, and leave the trace of this passage on the canvas. They tear open the firmament itself. Other artists are always needed to carry out necessary and perhaps even greater destructions. Unfinished works: a body of organs in assemblage, art is never finished, only stopped. We're not interested in theory but the level of the universe it inscribes. Post-structuralist historical-libidinal materialism - the tsunami of cultural awareness looming over our shoulder. This is why librarians are sacred. The wonder twins, a boy and his log. We spend a lot of time building prototypes that don't work.  There’s a few kinds of 'first times': the first time something is ever done, and the first time that you do it. Experimental problems must first be embodied in an intensive assemblage to progressively give rise to ontological solutions. Casual modes are fine tuned to better adapt the results of the experiment. A new demonstration of thermodynamic tendencies appears in this feedback loop.

Who presumes that the new modes of seeing and representation pioneered through experimental art practice were necessary? Conventional links assert the legacy of conceptual abstractions, a progressive narrative of experimental formal breakthroughs - becoming themselves obstructions. These tendencies must be interrogated and then reinvented for different purposes. A mechanism constructed by putting together pieces from heterogeneous machines, displayed as though it functions perfectly. A complicated harmony that commands the inharmonious; an inner proportion that links the most glaring disproportion. Pragmatics is the call to intervene, and to experiment in all the material strata of the world; towards more integrated embodiments of the mind.   The object encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity, giving the impression that the information is somehow tracking us, looking back, hunting the hunter. As the difference between displaying a choice, and offering a tool, these motivations determine how we present ourselves differently. The work then is about the process of art, about making and giving; about anonymity, collectivity, generosity, and observance of the moment.

Any accident sounds musical when it happens twice. Pairity raises resemblances above other available background noise. An additive synthesis of modulated stochastic collisions; veins of continuity form along the attractor channels of symmetry and rhyme. Nodal flow lines generate rivulets of probability, subtractive grooves in attention engage in a processes of elimination, eroding novel images from the substrata of noise, so that the viewer must call upon his or her own resources of memory and imagination to complete a visual cliché - a face or animal form. The transparency of the mirror-technique tricks the viewer into reflecting back, into contemplating the magical structure of the image-system itself, triggering an impulse to resist being pulled into parlour-trickery and diversionary narrative illusions, by failing to provide any satisfying completeness.

Stereobifurcation and latency: the active step which moves between matter and pattern, demonstrating tendencies toward emergent organizational behaviours. A doubling of points permits a parallax distortion, a focus blur as we register 'identical' parallel positions. All you need to establish figurative simulacra is this stereo pair: the googley-eye motif. The reflective twin establishes a pattern of symmetrical recursion, simulating the sense of morphological cohesion and simultaneity. Proportions align themselves, establish new compositional balances, and initiate a narrative-symbolic cascade on differing perceptual registers. Natural refractions found outside ourselves disintegrate the gulf separating observer and object - a separation usually held in check by representation and the regime of signs. Things arrive, we assign archetypes; a system of digestive sifting accesses catalogues of historical marginalia, slicing the postmodern body into digestible slabs; cuts; spiritual amputations wrought by technologies' advance. Art finds this wreckage beautiful. The next step is to make it banal. On glass, or acetate, you're seeing the back of the paint - what is buried in a conventional painting. The first contact strokes, first traumas, wounds from whence erupt cascades of broken symmetries.  In redoubling the fold, the copy seethes, seeming always to differ slightly from the preceding. A probabilistic swerve asserts its destabilizing influence, and anomalies emerge. The tendency for failure is consistent and uncontrolled. Producing simulacra requires a gardening model, an artisanal wedding-with and coaxing-forth of material self-ordering processes; practice and patience produce an increased tendency towards uninterrupted flow, pushing mimetic impulses towards thresholds beyond which an emergent process of pseudo-mystical autopoiesis may occur. Luck is the residue of design.

In advance of the broken arm - a paranoid critical method. Practice sought to reproduce the delirium of interpretation. The philosopher presents a large pane of glass, broken, at last completed in a sudden accident. A random attack, or a surgical trauma, initiating tragic comic mystic paradox, attenuation to insoluble severance. A collapsing implosion to explode anomie - divine horror, annihilatory majesty. A blocked cataract, incapacity for contact, failure in perpetuity ; a machine that treads water. Stick that in your simulator and fly it.  Offering prostheses for the Nike of Samothrace. Curiosity's compulsive return, coiling regressions according to legend. Challenging the mimetic faculty, doctrines of the familiar, cascades of signifying chains, visual noises overlapping, waves of interference oscillating standing representations, non-sensuous similarities and correspondences helping us to read what was never written. Accidental confusionism; conceptual art gone feral. To renew and rejuvenate felt awareness; love - sustained attention and memory, rigor in kinship, truth associated not with a static fact, but with an ongoing quality of relationship.  We needed a lever, muscular and limber. An ontological apparatus untrue but insightful. Building excessive devices for unleashing thoughts. A spiritual aquaduct for your community, drawing water from larger pools.

Allowing each person to live her life as an exception, proving no law but her own. Materialize the chiasmus, germinating the open source. Exacerbate the crisis point, counter-revolt against the effacement of difference. The generality of such standards must always efface the specificity of any anomalies, if science must pretend that its measure is no caprice. To make this one case of exception the basis for all other conceptions. That a non-repressive reality principle could itself become a historical reality - a matter of developing consciousness, that the images of imagination could refer to the unconquered future, rather than to its crudely conquered past…Sexuality, eros, is the only function of a living organism which extends beyond the individual and secures its connection with its species. An open secret hidden in plain view.

Complex cascades of symmetry-breaking state transitions populating this manifold with phase-breaking portraits of invisible worlds transecting our own perceptual reality at many points across many scales and planes. Exceptional imperfections, each and every one a haven for its own idiocratic truth. Truth treats itself as both a law and an end. Who collect all cases of exception? Only eyes adapted a specific spectrum can detect a given signal.  Art has always been close to magic an intimate relationship with the material of the world. One need only establish the necessary conditions: gather the materials, give them a little push... submolecular agglomerations autocatalyze and the abstract machine, the spiritual automaton, the alphabetic protocloud, will pulse to life and create something of itself. Generating prodigious energies in all directions, liquefying the coherent organization of the body. Acting out a spectacle of hyperbolic exactitude, an alibi for a phantasmal solipsism which effaces its own will to error.

Documenting without exception all cases of exception, each event arises from its own set of exclusive accidents. Chaoid margins of error, control parameters set for alleatory ecstasy and libidinal rebellion. Orgiastic portraits of structural violence interjected by reason's glassy turbulence. Into the reprise of lawful cycles, no lawfulness can exist without such repetitions of compounds.  Whatever you want, you must want in such a way that you also want its eternal return. When thought becomes negative, life depreciates, ceases to be active, is reduced to its weakest forms. To create is to lighten, to unburden life to invent new possibilities. to listen to life becoming, unfurling in stumbling musicians, the creator's dances discovered by accidents, my accidents were as essential to the success of a causal chain of judgments as my accuracies. What we had disregarded as error was value in another guise. Dionysus had the sense that life is not to be judged, that it is enough, holy enough, in itself the real player affirms the necessity of chance to endlessly deflect. 

A hollow earth, the empty body, moths and fireflies inside a tissue-paper lantern. The mirror conspiracy. Encrypted mythemes compacted by a stochastic aesthetics. A media, art and science, of controlled accident. Particle accelerators massaging the interstice, building ladders from lattices in a fog of potentiating densities. Mobile seed crystals of fractalline concatenations, points of perspective wandering in basins of attraction. To begin to assemble from an initial conception, a problem: that of representational capability's agonizing insufficiency.   Fishing for kisses, kissing for fishes. Enjoy enjoy, much love and don't stop. What are we on earth for anyway but to make love and music, pass time and water, break bread and wind .  We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence. The only obstacles are the excuses in our heads. Impeded only by our lack of audacity in expressing our creative impulses. Grappling with inhibitory repressions, maladaptive readjustments to 'another' life. Selective elimination of linguistic obstacles; degrees of distortion, disparity, deception, misconception, dissatisfaction, delusion. Wrestling the perpetual brevity of time, testing the impossibliliity of capturing it's moment. Cloaked shackled concealed invisibled impossibled; made impermissible only by our own complicity, by submitting to belief in the verboten. Only your faith in what is prohibited stands in the way.  An accusation of pretension is a double articulated snobbery. It comes from the same position it criticizes; one of superiority, the arrogance of cultural supremacy. Falsely, history trains us to generalize about our class, race, cultural and economic interests. Must we presume ourselves as generalities in a primitive world of stereotypical desires and classist interests?  to speak on behalf of our category? Are we right to assume that pessimism will befall any project that does not appeal to the banal virtues of an imaginary moral majority?

We speak ourselves into being, present who we perceive ourselves to be. We learn to speak like we learn to move. Thinking, perception, and bodily-performance are considered to be the same process: a kinematic drawing out; carving significance. Writing-reading, then, is learned seated; heavy chains of monastic transcendentalism binding arms to tables; wax wings for eyes and heart.  This performance reproduces itself - the image repeats, reiterates, becomes an invisible estimation, a self-imposed misapprehension autonomously selecting values, aligning judgments, exerting assertions of preferential intensities. The excessive is the preferred value judgment; the kinds of extremes we find objectionable are the measure of our attitudes and values. Laughter is triggered in the surprise act of transgressing these sublimated ethical preferences. An unknowable behavioral limit; language taboos delineate the edge of the possible world, the blind spot. Why do we choose to speak a language that conveys as little information as possible? Opaque monosyllabic shibboleths of diffidence: huh, cool, fucked, weird; inert semantic glyphs to represent the inexpressible. We stammer, fall back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised - a coherent entity composed entirely of fragmented corporate logos: an automaton of mass civilization, set nomadically adrift, buoyant in the network of routing hubs.

To triumph over solitude and death; to be dissolute, multiple, coterminal with the world and one's companions; object-subject inside-out. Rapidly parsing threads of associations - an immersive infolding of subject and text, vertigo associated with reading speed. Cities built of syllables, an inexhaustible richness of synonyms, idiomatic connotations, nuances of usage, phonemic consonance, homonymic accents. Lexical kinaesthesia, cerebral proprioceptions, gradual accretions of encryptions, embodied comprehensions. This double articulation creates a bifurcation, tessellating iterations, provoking peregrinations of polysyllabic compound phrases; mixing metaphors, conjoining figurations, inducing kinesthetic affect, haptic multiphasia - buffeted inchoate with titillating jargon.

Surviving your own artmaking - the new register of artistic integrity becomes what you make and give away [and how funny it is]. Multiply-accented mumblings and mutterings - exercise caution scatterbrains. Achtung, stay wide awake, always pay close attention to what you are doing. Participate flat out, and respond to feedback. Remember, it's easy if you try. The difficulty comes from trying too hard…

Wrestling with concrete and wheeled momentum, challenging gravity's legalities in a violently acrobatic martial art involving ritual failures, perpetual wounds and painful periods of convalescence. A solitary fight club for adrenalized endorphin addicts, patiently quelling rebellions among  the young and restless prisoners of gravity. A continuation of the unrelenting adolescent project to smash the Self against the walls of the concrete; effecting an impossible collision between mercury and Pluto.  Self-immolating geniuses, tightly coiled weapons of self-destruction; single passenger recreational vehicles in deadlock traffic; self-propelled missiles of auto-annihilating love; ownership of their own movement, a line of flight to the outlands of the episteme. Perhaps also like art practice, my life, my creativity and sexuality, my skateboarding, are all simple redirections of libido as a neurotic-erotic sublimation; symptomology of a substitutive need for contact; for communication with a discernable other, surrogate for combat, adrenal endorphine.  Taking risks, falling down; developing tolerance, resilience. Articulating a violent impact with the world; the neurotic symptom imitates similarly a traumatic event, in an unsuccessful attempt at psychic defense. My abnormal hours, and the abberations of privilege they wrought, were what saved me. No one true clock; in all my years I've never had a job but I've always had my work.  Machinic quality of the abstract desiring machine; neurotic autopilot reflex scripts, freudian slipknots; viaducts of our minds; phrasic conversational conventions, homeostatic habits become laws regulated by repetition of the same.  Loquacious platitudes, a machine language, cut loose from referents, they assert another syntax, a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it, involving encounters which escape all recognition. We penetrate the mystery only to the extent that we recognize it in the everyday world…

Let us begin with a swerve. Let us digress. Technology-dependent media depend on and require intensive collaboration. Hybridity replaces cultural appropriation where collaborative and collective practice becomes life praxis. Suppositions begin working from allegories, exerting preferences for operative metaphors: conceptual contraception wearing the guise of liberation theory. Collaborative anaesthetic reinactions of the elan vital fill in the missing puzzlework. Images based on tactical uncertainties, unspeakables; conservative restraint exposes the selectivity of reality's exhibition, busy work crews maintaining the crumbling façades of empire. For postcolonial heroes, miscegenation and circulation is the first ethical act of a counterimperial ontology. Fraternity is currency in the cosmopolitic. Transforming oneselves, and actively modifying one another; presupposing the most impossible inclusions. But how?  The one who assembles, who offers arenas in which to gather, - the negative space manifold, next world undergrid - writing the unrightable wrongs such that participants themselves can see this absence and can actively begin to change their own minds.   Deploying tactics of estrangement; a series of mutations necessary and sufficient to circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity. Multiple economies enfold each other, convolving problems which collude and collide at asynchronous rates…

State of the art procedural apparat, mobile sovereign utopian construction zone; constitutive cipher, continua repetitio; robotic cartographers engaged in hyperbolic explorations; assembling deployable devices of autotelic surrationalism, we are after a kind of amazement. Kinetic momentum harnessed by muscular-machinic interface; a vector portal, compelling rapid directional movement, vortices which appear to puncture the interference.  Life has a way of letting you know there's no such thing as control. In its usual habitual functioning, allowing a part, function, or feature to spin off or mutate into a new organization or system is to reacquaint the witness with a mode of awareness that precedes and underlies the literate intellect - a way of thinking and speaking and looking that strives to be faithful not to law and record but to the sensuous world itself, to the other bodies and beings that surround us. Perception is always participatory…

Every theorist should know a poet who thinks a pen a scalpel.  The originary moment for the creation of a system comes when an observer makes a cut. Before this cut, only an undifferentiated complexity exists - impossible to comprehend in its noisy multifarousness. All observations are constituted atop a constitutive distinction that is paradoxical, and to which the observing system must remain 'blind' if it is to engage in that observation at all.  Subject as an absence - a vanishing point. Chance was showing me something valuable, something to be reckoned with. Thinking as perfect synonym for cosmos. Everyone binds themselves with self-interested pleasures. The fetters are ignorance, laziness, preoccupation with self, and fear.  We don't believe in genius, we believe in freedom. Self-substantiatiation. You save yourself. The questions asked at any given period do not necessarily reflect the interests, beliefs, prejudices, or needs of the ambient culture. Observing and rejecting paradigmatic establishments, we are all, in a commensural, consumerist way, cultural constructivists: in our views of politics, science, diet - the plane of delerium, chance, indifference out of which the habits of self are formed and from which the potentials of a life take off...

Abandoning what one has planned, what one understands, in exchange for uncertainty's dazzling agitations, its stirring sensations. The realization of resemblance is the fundamental function of thought. There is no intellectual or affective process which is not based on the phenomenon of resemblance. Our interpretations even more than our actions carry us along and determine our fate. Dissonance resolving into tone - autocatalytic overwhelm in the tightening of the feedback loop. You just start noticing the wind, and you put up your sail. Tow, tack; the work-around; the flow-through. A machine more efficient than language; art constitute an external critique of language itself - cinema, a consequent celestial mechanics of the intellect. It describes itself as a local configuration in an episteme, an experimental innovation unloosing systematicity, freeing elemental forces of organization itself…

Section 2
20.01 APOPHENIA 21.01 NEW MONSTERS - 22.02 WRITTEN SCHEMAS - 24.02 INDEXICAL MIMESIS - 25.01 SIGILS - 27.01 TESSELATIONS - 26.01 APORIA  - 28.02 HUNTING the WEGO - 30.01 STORY AND STRATEGY - 31.02 RULE OF THUMP - 32.02 REALISM

There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in; its real but it ain't exactly there. A mobile genius loci: it's as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Dreaming lets you know this mind exists. The mind fills in the gaps; fertile image-space in the black between the frames-per-second flicker. A hyperdetailed artificiality - apophenia suggests the almost theological implications of pattern recognition: there is no intellectual or affective process which is not based upon the phenomenon of resemblence. The fundamental processes of thought, assembling consciously or unconsciously - Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition - automatic, autonomic, crystallizations of representation. Le grand jeu - a metaphysical dadaism; magical ‘pataphysique of the living library - pleroma - wide ranging forms of alternative logic and poetic-scientific research. The hunt is the addiction, the compulsion, oh the time spent looking - the strange way reality seems to be tracking you, information is there looking back at us. Pattern recognition distinguishes everything human beings do: mimesis is a new name for a basic human faculty. Been around as long as we've had cities. A religious quest of data accretion. The author has no more privileged access to the text than any reader. Whats happening is much weirder, far stranger. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notions of interiority - an experience outside of culture. A biofeedback occurring within our own extended nervous system.

Unlike a universal, overdetermined network of ideograms, driven instead by the mechanisms of dreamwork and of obsessional psychaesthenic thought. In favour of primitive mentalities; breaking through personal experimental performative barriers with effervescent, collective participation, endeavoring to unify the waking and dreaming.worlds.  Designing seeds, verbs, concepts, and active others; challenging or dangerous autonomous objects. They will and do take route, root, suck seed, grow and change state, differentiate. Collaborative drawings can be postulated as an autonomous artificial lifeform because they reproduce, demonstrate mating behaviours, and induce further pseudo-symmetrical events. Drawring pairity. Personifications echo and repeat, reflections and refractions blow back, refrains are divided, punctutated by rhythmic gaps of silence.  If you can't recognize and rearrange these patterns, it’s merely accretion, merely pathology. There’s more than just having lots and lots of data.  Surproduction - detournement of the remainder – we can rebuild it - toward those random, purposeless activities which often lead to useful discoveries.  Always seeking out new monsters; an intellectual obsession for depersonalization, dissolution of self, discoveries of buried identities, the thronging ancestors.  Become and make creations that do not stifle the nonhuman element, but rather which allow what is other in the materials to continue to live and breathe... chills of recognition release the body from constraints and of outworn ways of speaking.  Merge with it deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us; transferring information with a certain lack of specificity.  They'll think they thought of it first; hacking the reality construct. Like watching her own dreams on television. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped up gland, piggybacking on the mammalian brain and the older reptilian brainstem. But our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath this awareness, mute and muscular, attending to its ancient agenda. Physics is a special case of biology – a shadow casting object before a radiant light source. Cutting the Gordian knot, automatic drawing naively encourages the banal pretention to devise a methodical way of 'forcing thought to speak' - as though thought were a machine; as if the interesting quality in drawing weren't always unpredictable. Art doesn't depend on the chance that always seems to come along when one believes in it.

Our translator is a much better writer than you are. An imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates. We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written, but images of word-sounds, repeated in the mind, assembling structures of pairity and association. What is distinctively human is not the capacity for language but the crystallization of language in writing. Power to preserve thought when no memory of it remains. Writing creates an artificial memory whereby humans can enlarge their experience beyond the limits of one generation or way of life. It has allowed them to invent a world of abstract entities and mistake them for reality.  A voice can articulate only what it comprehends. The inexpressible is therefore unknowable given the transformational possibilities of a language. Clothes make the man; the less there is of the man the more the need for the clothes. All technology is morally neutral until you do something with it. I don't think the media knows what it's doing, it's not autonomous in that way. The garbage of this great mercantile system building up in these Cornell boxes.  Social change is technology driven, not legislated. It's uncontrollable, wonderfully out of control.  We don't have a solid enough place to stand to luxuriously judge where we're going. Where accidents seem to have purpose. It could have gone nowhere else; the mind fills in the gaps. A fertile image-space opens in the interval between the pulses of light, a hyper-detailed artificiality - apophenia of almost theological implications.  Principles by which to work an image system; genres of mimesis needed to make sense of the words' confusions. One ventriloquises schemas, the names and songs we inhabit which facilitate yet inhibit our abilities to improvise. Can we can only reproduce the habituated discourses? We believe in improvisation even though we know it is impossible.  Out of touch with one's body and one's surroundings - simutechnosia - inability to perceive elements as components of a whole.  Double consciousness, duplicitousness, cognitive dissonance - the considerably and enjoyably convoluted amusement of yearning for something exceptional.  Mimesis calls upon an indexical, rather than iconic, relation of similarity - each time sensuously remade in the body of the listener. Mimesis presumes a continuation between the actuality of the world and the production of signs about that world. The senses are formed in a social context; mimesis is a form of yielding to ones' environment rather than dominating it. This offers a radical alternative to control-at-a-distance of visually-dominated senses, to vision honed to the character of a weapon.

The multi-sensuous gift of producing similarities is also the gift of recognizing them. Mimesis dissolves the dichotomy between subject and object - a forgotten relationship: intimate, immanent, compassionate involvement with the world. A yielding and mirroring of the knower in the unknown, of thought in its object - a willingness to merge back with a multiplied nature, to re-assimilate the death instinct.  An assiduously cultivated bodily epistemology, mimesis has become a way to shelter the individual from the shock of the world. Modern perception is shielded from experience, protecting the body rather than permitting sense to flow into the body. The eurocentric mistake of thinking that because the proximal senses are not accorded importance, that they are outside culture in general. Perception is a measure of potential action, sensation involves stimulus. The 'interestedness' of perception depends upon the memory of what counts as useful information. Perception takes place in the awareness of engagement between an individual's cultural history and her phenomenological memory - a multisensory complex not limited to the individual position.. Spectatorship involves a viewers attentive recognition and sympathetic identification with the images moving onscreen or in the text. In similar relation to the gleefully haptic proprioceptive trance bridging dancer and music, the observer's consciousness here ascertains that the theatre is dense with simultaneously self-authoring agencies. This dissolving realization reduces certain residual traumatic blocks still delimiting perception and inhibiting the fullest participatory engagement in the world.

The platonic psyche is none other than the literate intellect, born and strengthened in relation to written letters. Sigils, glyphs, scriptive portents. Misunderstood teachings bring only the conceit of wisdom, making men think they know much when in fact they know little. The process of learning to read and write with the phonetic alphabet engenders a specific, profoundly reflexive sense of self; a sense of the relative independence of one's verbal, speaking self from its breathing body. The literate self cannot help but feel something of its own transcendence relative to a fleeting corporeal existence. Alphabetic writing deflects our attention from its visible aspect, effectively vanishing behind the current of speech that it invokes.  Cultivate an art of this interstice, burrowing surface to previously unconnected surface, through the waiting wealth of weirdness sensed between those planes. An incredible, indelible deja vu - it's the process of recognizing this that makes us all as gods. Consider the human body and nervous system as unscrambling device. Imagine designs through which the subject integrates what is given to her in the universe of meaning, but this integration always ultimately fails to reach completion. The orbit is asymptotic. There is a certain unknowable left-over which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe, an anomalous remainder which appears and iteratively recurrs in time and in art.

If only words... advanced asynchronies, nested densities, tesselating chains of cross-referential signification. Exuding occluded esoteric subtextes, the poet's reading lenses are invisible in plain view. Interlacing contrapuntal interpolations, tweening transpositionings. It takes genius to recognize genius - jumping to conclusions.  To accomodate the murmuring in thinking. The wayward is the productive element, the source of the mind is delirium. An art of displacement a clarity not of ideas but of relations and operations. Forgetting the meaning to remember only the syntax. Phonemic diction's connotations evoke asymptotic lines following trajectories of causality belonging to entirely different orders of reality. Discontinuous chains of relation linking matter and ideality - the material of words and their referents which nevertheless meet at some point. Corresponding without resembling, the bifurcations of pseudoscientific modeling: approximations to pose as understandings, buttressing merely linguistic images of electricity, radiation, gravity, biochemistry - to nominal correlations. Bioscience is now a practical superstition, a voodoo, and its practices are outside measure as destructive machines. Can we still recuperate science's deconstructive and subversive weapons and beat them into ploughshares?  The fractal abyss marking the operation of an abstract machine. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere bundles of habits they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. All truly meaningful speech is inherently creative. Altering ever so slightly the whole webwork of the language - poetic productivity treats the preexisting structure as a coherent deformation. Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit; a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun.

Blind spot aporia; problems of description. Foldings inside and outside, collapsed into a dense new surface. Our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution. Our science leads us into an irreducible uncertainty. Language is an instrumental concept which incrementally guides us toward it's own investigation. Synchronicities, they are the expressions of our interests and they direct our interests. The forced-card trick of artifice is at the heart of reality. A politic of affect structures our interference and co-dependencies; all modular feedbacks, the noises of our collisions and collusions of ambition.  The combustive entanglements of musical organizations, their controlled panic and willingness to fly into ecstasy - art implicitly names force as the limit of thought, the point at which consciousness breaks down and points to its own inscriptions, toward a world of proscriptive forces, a 'general economy of truth'.   Self-ordering machinic assemblages above and below the level of the individual organizing material flows and ordering the social machines of democracy or totalitarianism. Everyone knows.

Pseudo-gravitational channels of intensity redirecting momentums. Echoes, resonances, magnetic envelopes. harmonic duadic dublicating chords. serendipity attractors synthesizing at-une-ment. Ideas with torque, where relations are external passages. An autonomous logic of fantasy forges its own fictive causal chains, using properties of language to illegitimate its own rules. A defensive simulacra of belief made by simple verbal repetitions that only simulate effect. A liar believes his own lies by repeating them. Education, superstition, law and literacy also work this way. A question of degree of belief, just as all vision has its blind spots - all images have a field of eclipse.  Rather than just making something we go looking for, actively hunting, initiating a process if autocatalytic ontogenesis. How can one expect to recognize a failure when one doesn't prescribe one's goals? Otherwise, where failure occurs there is a frontier, it marks the edge of the acceptable or possible; a boundary fraught with possibilities, faced with negative prejudice and suspended judgment. Mixing certainty and insecurity as threshold values, the wego supplants ego, a collective consciousness, of possibility, of merging the mynd with the thynd. Produced in response to a multiple dissociation, Spirit is adapted to endure a common alienation. A whole new world of social patterns opens up, a whole new modality for morality.

How to pay the rent in a delusional economy: design a machine that works perfectly coherently yet veers off from the very tradition that it initiates. 'Mattering' becomes more important than matter. Being important, having significant effect. What acts in me when I act? Directions without destination. Immanence, a virtualization, becoming - forgetting makes events new again. Rereadings, rethinkings, all active expenditures, palimpsest investments of memory and attention.  We’ll use futurological linguistics to create a new cosmogony, another theory for future generations to consider - they may not take it seriously, but the fact remains that it is possible to articulate such a hypothesis - free will, but... flow and resistance - forms of latency in autonomous becomings, fractal distribution patterns accumulating densities along organizational ridges bridging an astonishing depth of field.  Opening private plateaus of uncertainty such that the mimetic narrative unfolding relates entirely to you, the reader-viewer, which happens to be the only eye presently observing this system. 

Visual-temporal parallax, co-relative triangulation and recombinatory tweening of fragmentary inputs; edge detection, boundary reaffirmation. Surgical edits rapidly intercutting in places where coherence survives against stronger nonlinear potentialities.   Story and strategy; embodying concept spaces, intrepid adventure  maze puzzle worlds... heuristic recipes and creative cognition, cultural software, directive metaphors and sorting devices. Yum-yuck impulses making  jump cuts, as small as necessary. Arbitrary systems of limits, incising compositional preferences. Exactly the same procedures applied in different mediums; descriptive ceremony and demonstrative exercise. A craft of watching closely, selecting from millions of available inputs and outcomes. The unrepeating algorithm of indeterminacy strobes, nonlocal causalities crystallize, atemporal singularities tessellate in reverse across sprawling procedural maps - that these instructions for instantiating emergent flux go feral - a firehose cornucopia of plenty.

Confusion is a very important space to be in. It's completely necessary to get confused to have an idea about a solution. Until the hammer's not useful anymore all problems are nails. Moments of realization occur in extreme moments of distraction, instances that you're not conscious of yourself, you forget the point where you left off.  Singular virtualities hinge between possible and real.   Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.  A profound link exists between the mimetic faculty and nonmarket forms of exchange in that the absence of an intimate bond between the spirit of the gift and spirit of the mime, imitating and trading, as imitating and stealing, amount to the same system of gift exchange. The making of likenesses, of faithful reproductions, the making of semblances, versus the fantastic pretending to simulate faithfully and deceiving the eye with a simulacrum, a phantasm. The fertile surface is that aporia. Perception is an hallucination which is true. Thematic triangulations find always only what they're looking for. Creator and reader are partners in the invisible foundation of something out of nothing. The possible consequences of an impossible inconsequence, the delegation to access.   A belief in coincidence, that aesthetic faith is all I have left. That's all that's left of the real. A rule of thump. Murphy's laws, the general tendency toward accidents.  Silence where the beat falls. Selection tools in a cloud of feathers, divination through linguistic derivation, projective etymology. All materialization is provisional, ineradicable. As practitioners of superstitions, we shop for images, a crucial hinge in an infernal feedback loop. Hundreds of theoretical synonyms fuse in massive and terrible visions. No longer terrifying, these moments are by now rather exhilarating. The world beneath the eyelids that the eyes turned inward recognizes and obeys.  All remnants of science and religion are to be replaced by assemblage art and ‘pataphysical poetics.

Someone else's memory - a literalized experiment in collective consciousness; language has bisected time, crossed space, opened up a new tabula that allows thought to operate: to divide images into classes, to group similarities. Exercising patterning tendencies which will recurr elsewhere. Homogeneous and neutral spaces placed so as to display their continuous order; the semantic field of their denomination. Nameless resemblances agglutinate imaginary taxonomies rooted in ceremony overburdened with complex figures, tangled paths, strange places, secret passages, unexpected communications, hidden networks grids of identities, thresholds, analogies... The later aphasics, consistently unable to arrange any coherent pattern, as though the rectangle were unable to serve in their case.  Order is that which is given, that which has no existence except in the grid created by it's glance: an examination, a language. It is only in the blank spaces of this grid that order manifests itself as though already there. There are presupposed images which determine our goals. When we try to think, bundles of associative processes occur in parallel to guide our attentions toward and within certain proscriptive constraints. After a time, the long-term tendency of the system congeals our attentions into a steady, recurring state space.  Telling us equally what to avoid doing, attractors are approached orbitally, asymptotically, on basis of balancing gravities and repulsions,... approaching indefinitely close, but never quite touching. A roving point of view expressing a synaesthetic pataphysic of lurid imagery and abstracted visualizations. semiological irruptions of epi-intentional instability.

Reason is sustained only by a deeply animistic relationship with it's signs. Mimetic modes of experience still underlie literate technological modes of reflection. Bodily, participatory modes remain largely unacknowledged or unconscious. Realism in dealing with these matters of concern involves a reality which is not defined by matters of fact, which are only partial and very polemical, and very political renderings of matters of concern. Selection pressures.  We are not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing it.  You believe you are free, but in reality you are acted on by forces you are not conscious or aware of. Indisputable facts left unexamined. They too act; they do things; the make you do things. New critical tools could in no way be accounted for by fetishism or fact, nor by any combinations of these two absurd positions. Epithelial human is a torus, an Ariadne's thread of embryonic invaginations. Vector calculus attempts to maps these cooperative machinic hybridizations. In view of this body, every metaphysical system is completely worn out.  Now naught but rocks piled upon each other.

Type less, say more...

Section 5
95.01 ALEPH 69.01 LITERACY and THE FOLD - 70.01 FEEDING ICONS - 72.01 DRAWING - 73.01 WRITING GLYPHS

Every human language secretes a kind of perceptual boundary that hovers, like a translucent veil, between those who speak that language and the sensuous terrain they inhabit. Each monad contains a unique variable - a key or cipher - whereby the labyrinth can be ordered. From that single point of view, the role played by god is relegated to a pure function - a proclivity to fold and unfold. We read the world more than we see it. Belief and seeing are both often wrong. Desire obstructed is desperation. Be the change we wish to see in the world. An effort to exteriorize the soul and internalize the body, to wake, to attend one's own funeral - with grace, competence and confidence. An incommensurable point of non-symmetrical balance, or mobile node of equilibrium.

We read everyone who's reported this type of unusual experience. All our nervous systems seem to report slightly different parameters, manifesting events in our own technological-mythological-subcultural languages. To some they claim to be cross sections of five dimensional entities as expressed in nodal intersections of four dimensional space-time; possibly the gods and demons of history in refreshing cartoon avatars, or the archetectonic matrix of vegetal intelligence; maybe enslavingly parasitic insect machines from parallel universes - why is art history devoid of what our voyagers experience so totally? There is a raging universe of active intelligence that is transhuman, hyperdimensional, immanent and extremely alien. People have been talking with gods and monsters far longer than they have been silenced about it.  Icons demand our participation. We don't just observe, we become. Observing the parts while perceiving the whole is called 'closure'. This happens between frames, in gaps between panels. Asks the mind to work as a sort of animator, an in-betweener. Persistence of vision: there is no life here except what you bring to it.  The apprehensions of edges - an imagistic logic animates nonalphabetic writing systems, revealing other meanings to the same reader in different moods.  Filter feeding, picking up the pollen; ingestion, metabolism and regurgitation. Observe remember revise repeat. Language arose and evolved in a thoroughly animistic context - a world that is never exclusively human. Voice as a means of attunement and articulation, not only between people but between ourselves and the animate landscape. We stifle our direct experience, then wonder why we are unable to communicate - even amongst ourselves.

The book is a monosensory medium, yet between pauses, while turning pages, none of our senses is required - that is, momentarily, all of our senses are engaged. In relating juxtaposed images, connecting the dots, we experience our ability to extend our identities into inanimate objects. Our constant awareness of self flows outward to include the objects of our extended identity.  A little voice inside your head, a little piece of you chattering away. An impulse to make and interpret marks; sixty thousand year history of drawing.  Skin as an early material; seeking a living surface, tattoos like petroglyphs, cut on living rock. Tracking and mapping correspondences; sympathies, affinities, resonances, resemblances... Anonymous ventriloquism of authorial attention: if who I am matters less maybe what I say can matter more…  A literal and continuous maze; a single living structure which still grows; merge with it deep enough that it, not you, begins to speak with us. Participation mystique. Our machines have taken over; humans can not turn them off. These machines turn people on: provide a state-space offering more resources than language for individuating possibilities...

Pictorial writing initiates a direct contact with animate, more-than-human environments, that people who read it will be lead to situations where they might be changed; where potentials exist. All lines carry expressive potentials.  Drawing too is a subtractive act, as much as it is additive. With synaesthetic magnetism, appropriating each eventful process as a variation of its own unfolding, crucial to our understanding of literacy, a double retreat of written language clears the way for the notion of a pure and featureless space, no less than the emergence of abstract, linear time. Entangling coefficients of signal and noise, seeking tension between too much and too little. Maximalist mediums may be mastered within a minimalist ethos.  Ecrire et dessiner sont identiques en leur fond. It will not describe events - it will not describe at all; it will escribe...  The question of how blankness can yield image underlies the whole history of art.  A minimum syntax with maximal capacity for self-construction - an erotic, participatory world filling all possible spaces between objects. Conspicuously ostentatious constructions; deformation over typology; whole universes of blood and imagination built over lifetimes in rooms like these never to be seen - to die with their creators. Now they join the sea.

Our fondness for the immaterial and invisible, for the name of the thing instead of the thing itself, describes entire kingdoms of nonexistent thought. Spheres of radiant abstraction... Some people deal with their disillusionment by seeking out illusions of their own. An amplification through simplification; compression algorhythms; a way of seeing focussed on patterning. A mask for a vacuum; an empty shell that we inhabit, which enables us to travel. Mapping rivers only to indicate other rivers, we leave many tributaries unascended and can say nothing of them.  If the revolution could be spoken it would only be with a discourse that cannot assume a coherent position of truth; which does not constitute a point of view.  A series of contradictory voices that cannot know themselves, which variably repeat themselves and fall apart only in order to begin again. There is no orchestra, and yet there is music: the singer is decades dead but the song plays on.

The alphabetic universe acknowledges that the shape of our consciousness shifts in tandem with technologies that engage our senses. Faculties in conflict, failures of the imagination; slippery misalignments of conception and representation. Disparaging the merits of written discourse even while participating in it.  An entirely self-reflexive form of magic; for cultures without writing there is simply no separate vantage point from which to view and take notes. For literates, forever in the thrall of mimesis, there is always a layer of ‘pataphysics.  Among these pliable principles we base our convictions. Nothing is constant, nor should be. All human relations are and must be open to negotiation and change. Are we are so insufferably obliged to micromanage the conflicts engendered by our own self-identified distinctions? No one must be bound or measured by the majoritarian's rules of thumb. Our variations are legion; it becomes us. Making no concessions to blind convention, to rote recital or submissive obedience, take no prejudice, assumption, habit, inclination or tendency for truth. Think through the virtues you live by daily, constantly reassessing one's own doctrines. Take extended vacations from your own dogmas. Don't read everything you believe.

Slightly beyond comprehension: a salt language, the tongues of birds; an alien intersection brought on by asignifying transformations of voice. Stirrings of an ancestral aurality, oral memory unable to protect itself from the aggressions of a written science.   How different the world of peoples who take sound for the base material of reality, in place of light or mass. To listen intensely, is to attempt to sense differently. Tonal gestalts reveal textures newly available to the cognitive map.  How strong a song's mojo, swing, groove, hop, heat, charm... an actively crystallizing static form; temporal envelope of synaesthetic rapture.  Closer to the condition of music: spells and incantations, magic words, seed syllables beyond sense; arcane and improvised languages uniting the user with connections beyond herself.  Through a coefficient of weirdness, poetic language and reality co-direct each other. Both singing and dreaming participate and exert influence on this coming-to-presence of the real. The creative but unknowable realm from which conscious forms arise: the west's clinical unconscious, a contained theatrical scene; but for animists, dream-language is the medium of access to a spiritworld permeating the winds and waters.  

The triple coincidence of a histrionic search for lookout points that could excentrate the void or the thing being viewed. With rules we establish structure and with structure we build machines. Machines propel us forward, and by moving forward we reach into the future.  Manifesting visions, not as an awareness or power that resides within the head but rather as a quality that we ourselves are on the inside of. The future is indistinguishable from what we call the mental. Only the present can be spoken of - itself material, gathering toward manifestation - a collective desiring, preparing a stock of latencies, possibilities past and future.  Memory and imagination are only ever experienced in the current sense . The future is immanent, knowable only in thinking it now. The mind does not always know the difference between what it is experiencing and what it remembers, so enmeshed is it in its imagining.  Our reality is nothing but an obsession that takes hold over us: a loop of wonder that quenches our abilities to understand. Trying not to be so amazed, focus and look at what we're doing.  The word lives on in a matrix of its own making.  Wherein, the truth – lies.

Section Six - 74.01 BEARINGS  - 76.01 GAMES - 77.01 TECHNE - 78.01 REVOLVING DOORS - 79.01 SET - 80.01 CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION - 82.01 VENGENCE - 83.01 EXPERIENCE with PREDATORS - 86.01 DIDACTIC POETS - 89.01 VACUUM - FREE LOVE SLAM SECTION - 91.01 DELUSION - 93.01 SOUND - - 92.01 FLAYED MAN

The tragedy of our cultural situation is that we have no shamanic tradition. Shamanism is primarily technique, not ritual. The artist-shaman keeps the discourse from rigidifying, keeps the membrane fluid and porous, ensuring the greatest possible attunement between the human community and the animate earth. People of predilection are noticed and encouraged: A mindset that can lead to that chain reaction: the realization that we see what we want to believe. Consciousness is some kind of operating system that is hacked using words and sounds. Mind can be looked at as a space and that space may be inhabited. There might be entities indigenous to that space, complex self-referential idea forms, emergent awareness, compound conceptual entities - flora and fauna of the mental realms. Become yourself such a sangha, by and for all beings. A context of interrelationship motivated for the benefit of all living things. Not just to escape the self, but an altruistic will to cherish the well being of all sentient creatures. Where this is achieved, the intention to harm will not arise.

Dwellers in giant cities who have lost their bearings. Exquisitely capable people who feel they have a different purpose: to create a chaos that establishes the preconditions for a future sustainability. Unintentional communities, ecologies of souls fostering the interdependent co-arising of self and others. Peaks of enthusiasm without symbolic index. Meaning in our lives comes from our relationships with other human beings. We have only an idea of who we are as a social identity, largely developed in solitude. That tends to start coming apart when you don't have anybody to bounce off of. You can't be with other people unless you can be with yourself; what can you say to people who always want to be with people? After awhile, there's nobody home. Even completely alone, we are still social entities, still multiple. In travelling, we drop expectations and relax our filters. In meditation, we open up to that crumbling dissolution of structure.  Don't have to worry about being effective, but rather affective. Making art having never seen it's image elsewhere. Making it up as it makes me up. I still can't quite draw it yet, but it's getting much closer. Art's political act is the auto-transformation of the artist's own life. A sensory cultivation with disregard for popular constraints. Games without winning; deprogramming competitive combat tactics. Living the dreaming without reserve; jumping to conclusions. The world doesn't need you to deal with it. It takes a genius to recognize genius.

The self-healed madwomen, shamanic tantrics invoking cthonic magics; creativity magicians generating psyche-aesthetic epicycles, disturbances in the force. Exceedingly temporary despite our immortality. Prion chain liquid crystal bifurcation thresholds; enzyme golem agglomeration-hive. Strange heat generated by connotations, friction of diction.  No longer based on moral judgment, it's okay not to resolve. Conflating questions, lowering expectations, facilitating higher peaks of surprise. Madness or modus: a paratactical methodology recombining with advanced capability community data-sharing-networks. Maybe a technological survival adaptation to capital-induced obsessive compulsion and schizoid metanoia.  Volunteer, perceptual phenomenologists! Massively individuate the search for internal consistencies - rupturing extant hegemonies by profusion's overload. Appling experiments in manifest entheology; arboreal primates climbing the trees in their navels... Cultivate an ability to recognize the appropriate moment to intervene. The tongue and hands seek variation...

Themes of stochastic techne: coaxing material systems towards one or more of its thresholds of self-ordering, rather than imposing form onto chaotic matter. Crystals emerge in any system which approaches a bifurcation threshold for one of its basins of attraction. A state of order is induced, minimizing energy expenditure. Systems tend toward plateaus of formal stability due to laziness: inertia. Atomic lattice packing results from the tendency to minimize energy.   The highest level of play for techno-obsessives is always purely about information itself. Experts have constructed a system which in turn constructs them; forms of technopower which place everyone in relative positions of control and subservience.  Man vs technology vs himself. Buiding tools and instruments in place of artworks. Machines of loving grace offer power to the participants. Selection pressures and stochastic synchronicity displace the hylomorphic idea that you begin with order and persist by maintaining this control, fully presuming the pre-establishment of law. Emergence philosophy presumes no existing static order, but engages problems within the disorderly dynamics of systems without imposing control.  Instead, initiate attentive playful engagement; cultivating nodes of attraction and rapport from moment to moment; collaboratively improvising with provisional machines; grasping and rejecting, drifting into new alignments. A noble attraction: the gaze enters a collaborative phase.

Synchronicities produce a distressing apophenia: this must be some kind of joke. Simply by adding one's own turbulence to the mix in progress, teasing out the resultant response-affects emerging from the material relationship of one's own presence - in of those situtations in which the real becomes only another concept. Portals, doors, gates, thresholds, intersections. Otherwise unexplorable directionalities, plumbed in anticipation of vacuum; drawn in, by downhill momentum; a tendency toward low pressure.   I am honoured, go ahead, I understand, I know of no more extraordinary gesture. There is only the dance; these things we treasure are shells - scattered fragments of flawed mirrors - resorted to by poets, least of our broken selves. The process stirs them gently, slowly, perpetually.

Self-organizing autonomous agents: chemical soups, gene-expression regulators, super-organismic animal collectives; economic systems, networked hypercities... Self-replicating information systems that reflect the functions of DNA: learning, coding, templating, recording, testing, retesting, recoding...  You have forsaken the daylit world where everyone agrees on everything. Trusting only what it can count or eat. You have never given your belief over to anyone because you didn't believe the givenness of truth in your society. Because you refused this, your alienation caused you to extend your sense of self to encompass multitudes of strangers.  A brain state that allows expression of the assembly systems that lie behind conventional language. We are naive about the role of language in our lives. Whatever language is, it's still in us now. The brain is absolutely at home with these compounds.  God loves to talk to herself.  The most richly and densely organized material in the universe is the human cerebral cortex - the experience we're having right now. Everything constellates outward from the perceiving self. This is the primary datum.  A praxis of spiritual dissent from ideas you have not yourself experienced.  Allies defined by the energies of their intellect and the courage of their experiments. Dispense with ideas that are not your own and replace them with what you do know.  The only intellectual, noetic, or spiritual path worth following is one that builds on personal experience.  It does not come to you must go to it, and come to your own conclusions. Wisdom you can't get from a terminal: ability to analyze ambiguous data, a productive, adaptive craft. Working under guidance towards intensifications of being-becoming.  Directed thought provoking meaningful encounters - self-willed development increasing levels of power, knowledge, and pleasure.

Fragmented, weak, distracted, addicted to liminal states. Attention - remain alert. Know where you are. Know where you're going. Seek what you truly desire to become. Love as intelligence lights a black flame, which burns away the weak parts, tempers the good, and reintegrates the self with the world.  What radicals need to be doing right now is studying and thinking. What radicals need isn't action but theory. Anyone inclined to rethink politics in a serious way needs to put in their ten years at the library, figuring out what makes human beings tick, and what, if any, direction is to be found in history. Serious study is inextricable from working toward an alternative to a global bourgeois industrial democracy.   A futile resistance. There are many reasons why people obey the regime. The empirical, imperial mindset: a god's eye view of nature and humanity; a claim of presumed superiority carrying connotations of justice which actually serves to rationalize domination.  These principles are what orient our judgments before we make them. Destruction is the first step in the creative process. Freedom, love, self-knowledge: behold the genius of your creation; your sublime and terrible immensity.  The wisdom of selflessness is the antidote. Cessation of distorted understandings, attaining freedom from unenlightening systems.  Trust no one, especially not us.  When everyone starts feeling this we'll see our desire manifest on a gigantic scale.

Industrial culture asks us to distrust our immediate sensory experience and to orient ourselves instead on the basis of an abstract, 'objective' reality knowable only through quantitative measurements by technological instrumentation. The inheritors of this tradition built a triumph of mechanism which disguised what atrocities were going on behind the facade of modernization's progress. There is no dignity in the universe unless we meet these lies on our feet. How could we lead normal, well-adjusted lives among these slave-traders?  Consider what freedoms you want to maintain and work from there.  It is a wonderful thing to have definition brought to you.  What allows for maximal flexibility in all directions?  Enlightened beguilement; try and keep your karma and mood as high as possible, since they affect how many experience points you get for trying new thing - the tongue and hands seek variation…

The most powerful tool is withdrawal of consent, non-cooperation. The universal wrongness of inhumane coercion is our first principle. The selectivity of humanism's application has been a monstrous injustice. Isn't the betrayal of enlightenment principles what deepest bothers you? Can you align yourself with ideals of humanist modern progress without committing yourself to defending what modernity actually did?  Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses become mere adjuncts to an isolate and abstract mind, bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary, proceeding according to a calculative logic utterly oblivious to the delicate realities of the land.   We moderns are so grotesquely alienated that the self must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial in order not to alarm us with the truly bizarre dimensions it encompasses. Other intelligent mammals walk this planet and know of the in-between. Some have exceptional facility traversing this interstice. Moderns to the new world exterminated these peoples - there are few clues.

Industrial epistemes are compression algorithms, pattern-script super-simplifications. Schemas, tropes, paradigms, statements and beliefs that foster violence toward the land and its peoples; ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of being must be described as false, being of wrongful relation between these users and their world.  Indermination is reduced to a form of apriori nonsense. Any vagueness is prejudicially conceived as the absence of meaning. A tendency of extreme antagonism linked to a schema which persecutes all contradiction as nonsense. A system of extreme vengeance: the regime of representation is also the regime of judgment; characterized as the type of repetition in which two doubles enter into the destruction of each other by their very resemblance.  My experiences, like yours, have to be more or less a part of the human condition, a zone in the field of human phenomena. If we were each truly unique then none of our conclusions would have any meaning outside ourselves.

The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel. Only the lighthearted are advanced enough to merit immortality. Clown princes of saturnalia embroiled in a cosmic comedy.  Playfulness, daring, abandon, and serenity, are contagious. The transformer is herself transformed.  Gloriously inappropriate refusal to surrender to despair. Buoyancy and mirth liberated, the whole world opens up to life.  Make the short straw your own and ride the extra peril to transcendence.  An enigmatic invitation to rethink the meaning of existence. Uptightness replaced by a giddy rush, then by buddhistic calm.  ­In the east there's a rich tradition of cyclical and labyrinthine works of art: they emphasize being there over getting there; a wandering perspective. For those willing to reduce or permeate their ego, heaven on earth is a distinct psychological possibility. On the left-handed path, our maps are inaccurate and we have the wrong shoes. Playing easily in the deep end, alternatives are available.

Extra-dimensional latin magic, prankish asian wisdom, two-fisted american poetic irreverence, could be our best hope for clearing passage through the ice. Effective, potent, nimble, and refreshing; enjoying an enlightened exhilaration, exploring frontiers of psychic rebirth under the tyranny of the dulled mind. Trading in my rented bones for the return flight.  We have no natural predators, except mushrooms.  Catholics assume they have an absolute monopoly on theophagy, the eating of god. The mushroom states its own position clearly. It says: "I require the nervous system of a mammal; may I use yours?" There is some certainty that one is dealing with a creature of integrity. There are no decent words to name it but it is understood that all words name it or inevitably allude to it.

Amour fou, the opposite of conventional wisdom, deliberately swims against the current to avoid the numbing wake of bourgeois compromise; wisdom that flouts taboos in order to undermine their power; wisdom that insists on joy in spite of sorrows and injustice; wisdom that embraces risk and eschews security; wisdom that turns the tables on neurosis by lampooning it; the wisdom of those who neither seek authority nor willingly submit to it.  Veiled entreaties to resist coercive restraints of any neurotically internalized psychic regime, against compulsory regulation of the hylomorphic organism: anxious disciplines imposed, externalizing sources of order, again radically delimiting epiphenomenological experience. Endeavor to the recovery of our own unscripted creativity, agents of our own love-stories, walking dreams and working dramas. Abandoning layers of deception abstracting and obstructing justice in life and love.  imposing no supplementary didactic logos but experience. Plato equates the artisan's submission to the city with slavery to a guardian class; All plastic, all artifice.  You're watching a flat image, a projection - And yet, how just, how brilliant, with no special effects, a common literacy, of affects. This dream is never-ending.

Marooned in blind spots of the world we're creating, we blow the airlock and decompress. Is perception of reality just an act of faith constructed from fragmentary fictions and misrecognitions? Elements omitted are as significant as those included: example: the role of silence. Focus momentarily on the intervals; pop out the figure-ground, invert negative-space relationships, and perceive how attention to spacial distribution is selective.  Take your own consciousness as a witness, remembering: instruments used to analyze a system will predetermine values recovered by the study. Cultivate mindfulness day to day, playing by rules deduced in accord with one's own conscientious logic. Observe a selective elimination of linguistic obstacles: degrees of distortion, disparity, deceptions, misconceptions. Find out if the self is separable from pollutants, afflictions, negative emotions. This approach will lead to internal transformations. Turn the wheel of dharma, cultivate and nurture a good heart, but do not yet enter the final realm of nirvana. The other side, unseen, obstructed, between, and beyond... No-man's interzone, surrounding and within, literally uninhabitable to the unaugmented human body.  The manifold middle worlds are populous, animate, emergent, and in process, dynamic and continually unfolding.  An enveloping invisible between crystalizations, an instance of an incomprehensibly complex process, indicative in itself only as the inextricably vast schemata of this attentive moment. We cannot know that we know what we cannot know.

The flayed man, skinned, scalped, shattered. Our schizo-protagonist's anatomical meat mannequin; transforming-mask head enwrapped in shamanic process. The body is stripped and destroyed; trauma-shocked into a plane of hyper-consciousness; intersections of parallel worlds mediated within the parchment of his own skin. Images shadowed on the tissue walls of his dreaming organelles. Consulting the ancestors, a toast to buried poets.  Lifting spirited waters in memory, passing round again as they did through the old ones. Echoes of the deceased spoken again with surrogate's breath. For all poets and philosophers executed in revolutions; for houses of sociability bombed and bullet strafed - a drink before the wars, last dance in the twilight of serenity.  Soon again people like us will be rounded up for the gulags, our libraries burned. Together now we are still free. Tomorrow too, we'll rise and read books.

Participate in life more for fuck's sake, you are invited! Unfairly maligned, free love must be revisited, recognized as spiritual and political tradition. Free lovers must refuse to feel constrained or contained by the delusionary replications of roleplay. Contact-dance bodyworkers coaching phys-ed electives in high schools and colleges.  Open the shell and tinker with control parameters. We each build and lift our own levers for rupturing cognitive and behavioural proscription. In anticipation of massive structural phase shift, quietly, we articulate our passionate revolt.  To be present together and maintain the rapport. Don't be afraid to be a friend.  Provides free information towards cultural liberation.  Help change attitudes and influence behaviour.  Flexing empathic powers of communication, gently moderating the terms of engagement, heroic individualism gives way to the multiple character of redundant social nets. Have more commadres, compadres. Homosocial dehabituation exercises. Reasserting desire for sharing contact, exchanging stories and energetic caresses, touch reenters by gynopolitics. Build your own micropolitic: nested autarchist enclaves, symbiont syndicates. Speaking desire unlocks and reconfigures our limitless repressed social potentials.

Insight into the actual nature of reality is a source of tremendous advantage and benefit, ensuring success in this and all future lives. The heart of delusion is the sense of the permanent reality of the self. Believing the transient to be permanent, to perceive selfhood where there is none. His doom, condemnation for blasphemy, heresy, treason and ill-will against church and state, was to walk this world searching out the enigma, the pattern-key which enciphers a corrected image of the distorted phenomena around him – turning the corner of an anamorphic horizon,  destabilizing certainties, beneath any background-inside: shell-shocked by violent interpenetrations, collisions of new and contrasting truths, definitions stretch and warp in this new zone, as bodies and machines combine to become increasingly difficult to tell apart - illustrating the new landscape of industrial warfare and the radically new status of the humans that inhabit it.

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MIDDLE WORLDS – Steve Calvert - Vancouver 2002

TEXT by S.Calvert

AUDIO by S.Calvert

ARTby Steve Calvert

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