Theoria & Theory | Cybernetic Futures Dr Lila Moore

The Mindset Field Manifestos:

Explorations in Cyborg Consciousness

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.