The Cybernetic Institute's Letter of Letters Manifesto
Video and Text
By Lila Moore
Background
The Cybernetic Institute's Letter of Letters Manifesto is the outcome of an auto-communication between the Cybernetic Institute and Seeker of True-files. The address-less communication commenced in the summer of 2014 and has solidified into a manifesto. Since it's inception, the manifesto has evolved into a series of manifesto-based artworks.
The Manifesto
It's time to pause, turn motionless in all directions, dive through introspection and contemplation's holes in the quantum ocean, and become much faster in warping space and time. It's time to reborn into other and see with eyes that can shine with many billion suns and moons the good and the beautiful. Time for shape-shifting Homo sapiens, no more commercial breaks but an extended odyssey, this time with Penelope leading the way, weaving the tapestry of the mind with her council of suitors.
There is no relief in a virtual home, there is only a growing displacement and the joy of wandering in an ever-growing matrix and Nature of space-time. The Cybernetic Institute is akin to a wandering space station, it functions as a bridge between the worlds, an elevated laboratory for the study of new horizons. It is a placeless habitation where interconnections can be made with and between worlds and monoliths of active knowledge. By being a threshold, the platform is a foundation for emergence and discovery, a portal for visionary flights in the fields of the mind.
Homelessness, which is propagated by a worldview of violence, is the dis-ease of contemporary humanity, hence, cynical thinking on these matters is futile. Replacing a virtual home with a physical home is pointless if the mental fabric from which it is constructed mirrors the previous dis-eased physical environment. Artists and designers of worlds, learners and teachers, shamans and healers, entities of all sorts, our home pages should begin to re-define our perspective on the place we call home. The institute does not offer the safety zone of limits typical of a traditional home, school or educational system. It re-thinks its own notion of home in the process of procreating neoteric and wandering learning habitats.
The technological capacities of the cyborg pose no threat to the spiritual aspect of the feminine, on the contrary, they enhance the feminine creatrix. The first female creative act that pertains to the cyborg took place in 1943 when Maya Deren, in her film Meshes of the Afternoon, equipped her eye with a camera lens, zooming inwards and outwards to explore the unchartered territory of the field of her mind. The female cyborg emerges in-charge of her cybernetic body, in tune with its cybernetic system holistically, and with amplified powers of introspection and intuition in the most profound sense.
Once upon a Time, whilst enjoying a cigarette, Luis Buñuel slashed the eye of a woman and the body of the full moon, all at once, with a sharp knife, and the rest is his-tory. All hell broke loose, when the fabric of Tiamat, the great python creatrix, was re-torn by the new god of film, Marduk. Fourteen years later, in a dark hour of poetic magic, Maya Deren invoked Erzulie, Goddess of love and beauty, making her a patron of women film-makers and the screen medium of modern technology and science. Erzulie cannot grant the people of the world what they need in order to survive, but which makes them uniquely human. In the second half of the 20th century, Roy Ascott's manifesto proclaimed a new cybernetic era for art and social change, and in 2009 Marinetti received a letter from Arahmaiani regarding his manifesto, notifying him of a change in speed and direction.
Violence is a key character of the civilization into which humans are being born today. It was hailed by the fathers of modern art, first the Futurists and then the Surrealists, who sought to assault the foundation of a world consciousness which seeded WW1 and WW2.
Valentine de Saint Point, you knew them well, their 'scorn for woman.' The odor of war still lingers around your manifestos now squeezed into pdf files. The futuristic woman's wisdom of violence is here invoked to guide culture beyond the demons that possess its matter. Mirror image of you at the start of a century sensing the thrill that comes with the swift charms of technology. Your sharp vision breaks the Maya of progress and casts off the narcissistic reflections of compliance and disability. Let's start the process of learning and creating with equality, your anger breathes flames of lust through the letters. Let us begin afresh on the premise of a mediocre humanity.
The futuristic woman's century-old insights on the culture of violence, rape, torture, killing, greed and war are revered signposts on the educational map of art and consciousness. The war is not over yet! Your wisdom is timely! The task which lies ahead is no longer to decipher our shared anguish but discover new codes, new software, with which to learn how to inhabit equalising and caring fields of consciousness. It involves being the conscious product and production of distributed consciousness, moving backwards and forwards in the trails of history and culture. It entails provoking a loud enough resonance in the fields.
Morphic Fields of Compassion are prototype electronic cyber fields embedded with compassionate intention through the activation of ritualistic art forms. Each field is the product of ritual and art performed by non-local entities and minds that together evolve an art and thought form. The field is generated by the five primary holons/channels of vision, sound, text, movement and intention.
The rites are not publicly performed. They are secret, undisclosed events involving participants only. The digital entity produced is embedded with group-mind DNA and field consciousness, which could be re-activated via repeated rituals. It is not an object but a thought form. The prototype morphic fields are designed to counteract the prevalent narrative of violence. They are driven by a quest for art that manifests as a mind field and technology that embodies active intelligence.
The institute distributes a compassionate field of influence for education and nourishment of the individual and collective. It breeds, seeks and supports technoetic thought forms, arts and designs which will transcend the global dominant culture of violence and give it new meanings and visions. It stimulates the practice of compassion through the process of learning and making compassionately thinking and feeling art forms. Make these forms into the new visions and archetypes of culture. Envision the newly born art forms as the off-springs of powerful ritual magic that leaves the old myths of violence spiritless.
The Fields of Learning provide learners a participatory environment with perpetual feedback. The learner may choose to learn with learners or/and focus on an introspective mode of self-study in the remote islands that are distributed throughout the fields. All members are equally empowered and empowering beings who participate in the odyssey of art and consciousness.
The cybernetic platform performs the dance of ideas where ideas are the soul of movement, and the structure or form is the organism. Ideas are the life and the spirit of the form. The futuristic woman emerges from the matrix void, the Zero Point Field, the cosmic dance of Lila, new forms of life and consciousness arise with her.
Seeker of True -files, to counteract the narrative of violence, art has to renew its contacts with the anarchic spirit of revelation that relies on communication with the realms of the other and the experience of wandering in the unregulated fields of consciousness. This cannot be found within the safe confines of cultural establishments that are based on the same materialistic constructs that breed violence through mind control.
Novel forms and ideas arise unexpectedly from unknown or previously unsuspected origin. Being new and full of mysterious possibilities, they could impact consciousness, nature and culture, similar to viral memes and bacteria. Their revolutionary traits may periodically pose a threat to the dominant order, hence, they get tracked down and uprooted to stop them from spreading. Yet, their point of origin, embedded in morphic fields, retains their memory and formula. Hidden within the recesses of space-time, they await for as long as it may take for a morphic resonance, a signal that will herald their next manifestation in Nature.
The wandering artist, free spirit and fool, has been reformed by the wandering quality of the Internet. Through virtual, vegetal and noetic technologies, wandering is spreading to the unregulated field of consciousness where the alien, mystic and visionary transmute with Nature.
The institute harnesses the cyber-spirit of communitas, the non- hierarchal liminal zone of a primeval experience of communion. The ritual cave systems are neurologically formed by the nomads of the mind-fields, drawing and curving on the walls of consciousness in the mysterious darkness of the Unknown. This is where the frontier of spiritual art manifests now.
The futuristic woman's selves offer the elixir of the soul in a ritual that activates odysseys in fields of photons, memory, and impulse. The jars are ancient but the liquid inside them evolves the structures of realities as the screens that bind them perpetually disintegrate. Free to flow everywhere, the cybernetic monoliths of evolution beckon in the field to the wanderers.