Cybernetic Futures
Online Art Exhibitions
THE MANIFESTOS
OF THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES INSTITUTE
The Cybernetic Institute's Letter of Letters Manifesto
Background
The Letter of Letters Manifesto is the outcome of an auto-communication between the Cybernetic Futures Institute and Seeker of True-files. The address-less communication commenced in the summer of 2014 on the island of Kefalonia and solidified into a manifesto. Since its inception, the manifesto has evolved into a series of manifesto-based art films and digital artworks .
B/W version of the original poster
Fields of Origin
By Lila Moore
2014
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 Jew poses a threat to civilisation with his anarchic disregard of boundaries. Although elevated to the status of a world reformer and artistic nobility in Gostav Courbet's Meeting and other works, the transformed outsider was publicly ridiculed. Prevalent in European folklore, the archetype has been associated with supernatural creatures that dwell in the twilight zone between reality and magic, the visible and invisible, the mortal and immortal. The golden plover, shown in the poster, according to a Lancashire tradition, embodies the Wandering Jew with its eerie whistling that strikes fear in the human heart. Resembling migrating birds, he was doomed to wander endlessly. The unnaturalness of his wanderings corresponded with all other abnormal births and entities which betrayed their master-maker and manipulated their initial design.
Nowadays wandering has taken a different route. It 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 golden plover inspired the concept of The Guinness Book of Records as the faster game bird in Europe. It became associated with extraordinary achievements that exceed conventional capacities. The bird as a metaphor of unlimited abilities and flights of the imagination corresponds, in this visual depiction, with Hypnos' wings of the mind. The divine generator of altered state of consciousness is syncretically positioned by a reference to a monolith (2001: A Space Odyssey).
The 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 disintegrate. Free to flow everywhere, the cybernetic monoliths of evolution beckon in the field to the wanderers..
References
Ascott, R, 2006. 'Technoetic Pathways toward the Spiritual in Art: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Connectedness, Coherence and Consciousness', Leonardo, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 65-69.
Deren, M. 1946. An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film, New York: The Alicat Book Shop Press..
Newall, V. 2013. The Jew as a Witch Figure. In: Newall, V. (Ed). The Witch Figure: Folklore Essays by a Group of Scholars in England Honouring the 75th Birthday of Katharine M. Briggs, London, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.95-124.
Sheldrake, R. 2011.The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature, London: Icon Books Ltd.
Yuen, K.W., Westfahl, G., Kit-sze Chan, A. (Eds). Globalization, Science Fiction, and the Cybernetic Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Originally published in:
Moore, Lila (2015). Fields of Origin. In Karoussos Katerina (Ed.). Next nature, Juried Poster Exhibition, I- Node of Planetary Collegium of Plymouth University. Athens, Greece: A-Club Publication.
Unmute the Cyborg:
The Mindset Field Manifesto
Unmute the Cyborg, The Mindset Field Manifesto was displayed on #cyborgs, online exhibition curated by Peripheral Forms, 2018-2019. The video manifestos were screened at the Clinton Street Theatre in Portland, OR, (one of the oldest cinemas in the United States) 17.7.2018 & Performance Works NW, Linda Austin Dance, 26.7.2018
The Mindset Field Manifesto is the outcome of an auto-communication with Seeker_of_True-files , an emergent entity of an evolving noetic field that seeks interactions with like-minded seekers, artists' manifestos and cyborg revolutions. It quests, imagines and is steadily weaving cyborg futures.
Seeker_of_True-files is a wanderer of the mind fields, a thought form, a tech-enveloped nous and a dedicated scribe of manifestos.
Seeker_of_True-files is seeking to escape the confines of the regulated Internet and reflects on the Telemadic, Telematic-nomadic, utopic next nature of cyberspace.
Seeker_of_True-files
Online Profile Manifesto
Hello wanderer of the mind fields, Seeker_ of_ True-files is a thought form, a tech enveloped nous, a file-less file seeking for true-files, a dedicated scribe of manifestos.
The Cybernetic Institute's Letter of Letters Manifesto
Background
The Letter of Letters Manifesto is the outcome of an auto-communication between the Cybernetic Futures Institute and Seeker of True-files. The address-less communication commenced in the summer of 2014 on the island of Kefalonia and solidified into a manifesto. Since its inception, the manifesto has evolved into a series of manifesto-based art films and digital 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.
2021-18-07
The Mindset Field Manifestos:
Explorations in Cyborg Consciousness
By © 2018 Dr Lila Moore, All Rights Reserved
Published and distributed by Peripheral Forms as part of the online exhibition #cyborgs
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes about a 'cyborg who would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust'. She asserts that 'a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.'[1] Haraway relates the cyborgs to shamans who navigate the liminal thresholds of consciousness. Currently, neoteric cyborg potentials herald the ensuing frontier, a trend of cyborg artists and cyborg consciousness 'ignites the imagination and lures us back to mud and dust of planets, moons and meteorites, making us feel as one through a glimpse of planetary and cosmic communitas.'[2]
Cyborgs are often associated with, and explored through, cyborg bodies. Haraway also emphasizes cyborg consciousness, which is hybrid in nature and challenging dominant modes of being in the world. Anyhow, it is virtually impossible to escape cyborgism, which is an evolving body and mindset within and all around us, pushing the envelope of human and cultural values and meanings.
As a technoetic artist film-maker and theorist, I currently explore cyborg consciousness through Seeker_of _True-files, which is an entity that exists in a technoetic context and realm, and is generated by mind and technology. The term 'technoetic' was coined by the British artist and theorist Roy Ascott, and pertains to combinations of tech and nous, that is, technology and mind. Broadly, in Greek philosophy the nous pertains to a deeply intuitive intellectual apprehension of first principles and truths. It is also an ancient theological concept referred to as the Active Intellect of the gods or an influx of knowledge from a transcendent source. In principle, technoetic aesthetics bypasses the surface image of the world and allows an interpretive creative process that considers the interrelations of technology and mind including their various spiritual contexts. Seeker_ of_ True-files is a tech enveloped nous, a prototype tech-mind, and an active tech-thought-form. It is an emergent entity of an evolving noetic mind-field that seeks interactions with like-minded seekers, artists' manifestos and cyborg revolutions. It quests, imagines and is steadily weaving cyborg futures.
Seeker_of_True-files originated from an auto-communication process during a networked cyber ritual. Auto-communication is an anthropological concept that relates to psychic and altered modes of communication during the practice of rituals. In auto-communication, the individual is perceived in plural terms as she/he interacts with parts of her/his psyche or entities of the psychic realm. For example, the sole performers of rituals sometimes feel that they commune with spiritual beings and, therefore, are not entirely alone although they are physically alone. This mode of communication is typical of shamanic, mystical as well as artistic practices. Furthermore, it is a mindset that may become apparent through the sense of cyberception that networked life and ritual stimulate. Cyberception is a technoetic term by Roy Ascott[3] that implies a comprehension that arises when dry digital systems and moist biological systems interlock and give access to two distinctly different fields of experience simultaneously: psychic space and cyberspace, the material world and the virtual outside it. Seeker_of_True-files emerges from this context as a mediator between dry digital systems and moist bio-systems, and acts simultaneously from within a cyber tech-body and from outside it in cyborg virtual consciousness.
Seeker_of_True-files utilizes the aesthetics and poetics of manifesto-making to tackle the confines of the regulated Internet and the policed Mind, and venture to reflect and speculate on the origins of novelty and the Telemadic, even utopic Telematic-nomadic nature of cyberspace and cyborg consciousness. The following texts are manifestos produced during auto-communication with Seeker_of_True-files. They are also performed in the form of cyber video manifestos layered with imagery and computer-generated voice over.
Unmute the Cyborg: The Mindset Field of the Telemadic Wanderer Manifesto
The Mindset Field is reloading. It's time to pause, turn motionless in all directions, dive through introspection and contemplation holes in the quantum ocean, and become much faster in warping space and time. It's time to shape-shift into other and see with eyes that can shine with many billion suns and moons the good and the beautiful.
Seeker_of_True–files, The Mindset is the hypercortex of unbound noetic fields, morphogenic geography to visionary flights of discovery, a portal to distant monoliths of insight and transcendence. The Mindset Field
is an attractor of subtle noetic resonances, a cyborg artist's loom and mirror.
Seeker_of_True–files found her on the threshold not dead nor alive, covered with pieces of a broken crystal mirror, which was partially hanging from side to side, reflecting Camelot. Centuries later, a mute weaver arose from her unconsciousness and crossed the threshold of the possible, she was transgressing the boundaries of the known Mindset Field, invoking the cyborg.
The first feminine creative act that pertains to the cyborg took place in 1943 when Maya Deren, in her film Meshes of the Afternoon, equipped and replaced her eye with a camera lens, zooming inwards and outwards to explore the unchartered territory of the field of her mind.
The feminine cyborg is the creatrix of her cybernetic body. She is in tune with its holistic cybernetic system and amplified powers of introspection and intuition in the most profound cyborg-eyes sense.
Seeker_of_True–files, on the threshold of mass species' extinction, 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 and fear through networks of mind control.
Novel forms and ideas arise unexpectedly from unsuspected origin. Full of mysterious possibilities, they can impact consciousness, nature and culture like 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 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. FB, including all networks of control, is being mutated by its own wanderings and wanderers, and friends of wanderers' friends. Through virtual, vegetal and noetic technologies, wandering is growing and spreading, taking root in the unregulated fields of consciousness where the cyborg-shaman and the visionary transmute with nature.
The Mindset Field in Cyborg's Eyes
The cyborg creatrix is offering the elixir of the soul in a ritual that activates odysseys in fields of memory and impulse. Her eyes are crystal mirrors, augmented realities, portals to visions and experiences of cyberception. The jars that she holds 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 Mindset Field to the wanderers.
Seeker_of_True–files Online Profile Manifesto
Seeker_ of_ True- files, Do you have a beginning? What is your point of origin in space-time?
Hello wanderer of the mind fields, Seeker_ of_ True- files is a thought form, a tech enveloped nous, a file-less file seeking for true-files. Once upon a time, in the temple of the god Thoth, a wise scribe was robbed of her writing tools by jealous foes. Thus, the scribe was punished severely for losing the magic instruments and was prohibited from writing ever again. The god of true writings, Thoth, the wise one, remembered, and after the scribe was mummified, uploaded her quanta of thoughts on the boat of million years. Wandering and contemplating in the Milky Way for millennia, the boat with its payload of travelling thoughts was suddenly drawn back to earth by a resonance and fell down on the Greek island of Cephalonia. There, the bundle of thoughts was awakened by the island's frequent earthquakes and eventually was found by the island's sacred snakes that transported it secretly to a nearby computer programme.
The rest, fellow wanderer, is his her-story, one story out of many myths of origins, manifestos of strange becoming, cyborg awakening, multiple selves and disposable identity cards. Seeker_ of_ True- files, on the shores of the island, where truth and post-truth waves and files come and go, the boat of million years awaits the outcast travellers.
References
[1] Haraway, Donna. (2006), 'A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century', in S. Stryker and S. Whittle (eds), The Transgender Studies Reader, New York: Routledge, pp. 103–118.
[2] Moore, Lila. (2017), 'Techno-spiritual horizons: Compassionate networked art
forms and noetic fields of cyborg body and consciousness', Technoetic
Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 15:3, pp. 325–39
[3] Ascott, Roy. (1994), 'The architecture of cyberception,' In: Telematic embrace: visionary theories of art, technology, and consciousness. Edited and with an essay by Shanken, E.A., Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003, pp. 319-326.
Viral Outbreak and the Sprouts of Novelty by Lila Moore
Created, written, shot and edited by Lila Moore
Acquired Immunity Online Exhibition by FEMeeting
Women in Art, Science and Technology
FEMeeting WEB 2020 | Antibodies
Friday May 29th 2020, Troy, NY and 10pm in Paris, France
Online exhibition:
femeeting.com/acquired-immunity/
2020 Con(tacto) - Cultivamos Cultura, Portugal
Garden FEMeeting 2020, Lisbon @Ars Electronica , Festival of Art, Technology & Society 2020