ak47:
I looked out the window at the moody elegance of the Chrysler building and watched yellow and white lights blink all around like fireflies. I love this city because something’s always going on several levels deep. Beneath the surface level hustle and bustle is the constant slow churning of the old parts being made into new parts—bigger and stronger than before. Destroyed buildings come back taller—those from decimated families tumbled through and formed off-shoots. Friends that were families. The devotion I feel towards the city is far greater than any I could ever feel towards a single person. I wasn’t able to love the city as fully in my old life. Back then it was something I had to do battle with—it seemed to be grinding down on me and allowing only the tiny, fleeting victories. Now that I’ve changed everything is different than it was before—everything looks feels, sounds and tastes better. State of the Art. The further I drop out, the easier it gets. I’m no longer killing myself to live—just like in the Radiohead song. Next to the window is a large table made out of a piece of butcher block balanced upon four piles of cinderblock. This is where it happens—where I download the synchs into my brain. On one end is my desk with my laptop and my pens and magic markers and my stacks of black and white composition notebooks (labeled according to the subject matter they contained the notes of—“Psychological Weapons”, “The Matrix” and “Will Smith”) and at the other end sits a flat panel TV on a shiny plastic stand that is always on (although sometimes on mute). I sit off to the side of my laptop so that I have an unobstructed view of the TV screen. Sometimes, when the trail’s hot, I don’t go outside for days, living off of frozen bento boxes in my hermetically sealed bubble, 27 floors up.
One of the best ways to see universal feedback at work is through the activity of self-organizing groups. A self-organizing group is one that comes together without the hierarchy of a top-down command. Its members are motivated by their own desire to gather—not by paycheck, leader or religion. It’s non-corporate—grassroots in the truest, organic sense. The group exists because of deep, hidden connections that go beyond the everyday. The sheer number of self-organizing groups around today are only possible because of the flourishing of the social web. Applications such as Twitter and Facebook allow people to gather virtually—as one would at a gigantic cocktail party—complete with overheard conversations and the big names that are crowded by admirers and social climbers. The self-organized groups that have resulted are like groups of friends—the connections are fluid—at time tempestuous and at other times rigid and stuck in old models.
Unlike its social media cousin, Evolver.net, which was built with the intention of fostering not one but several self-organizing groups, the group on Reality Sandwich sprung up unplanned like a rhizome—a philosophical concept by Deleuze and Guattari which likens de-centralized, non-hierarchical systems to opportunistic plants such as ginger that use a horizontal stem in order to grow in-between trees. The trees were the old model—the top-down world in which authority came on high. The rhizomes weren’t bent on taking and replacing the trees as plant kings of the forest—they revealed a way of existing not as an either/or of systems but of an either and or. The botanical and conceptual rhizomes were about an expansion of possibilities—it wasn’t about doing away with the old—it was about coming up with that which was the least expected, like living life as a gathering of decentralized multiplicities in a world of towering, top/down metaphysical ideals.
The RS rhizome sprung up in damp shadows of the comment boxes. The posts themselves were submission only—their closed system based on approval factors formed the forest of trees while the comments became the twisting brambles and moss below where anyone who registered for the site could join in.
An old cohort from back in the blog 1.0 days used to say—sometimes comments are the best part. I don’t know if this was often the case given the generally high quality of the writing on RS, but what I did find to be the case was that the RS comment boxes were ripe for synchronicity—there were always connections being made through links or obscure references that would be mind-blowing with epic levels of uncanniness. I’d think—isn’t it crazy, I was just thinking the same exact thing!…or, wow, that’s the same book I was drawn to on my friend’s bookshelf yesterday—a friend who has the same initials as this commenter, making it not only about the connection of the book but about the friend, and the timing of having been over their place when I was, with the spine of the book sticking out from the shelf, just as the light in the room turned into long strands—the afternoon undoing its golden locks and letting them fall over us…
My research has shown that the grounds for telepathy increase in proportion to the amount of recognition that self-organized group members have of their status as members. It wasn’t enough to all happen to fall into a certain category in which they shared certain things in common—it was the group’s awareness of being a group that made the self-organized group truly dynamic. Not only were the commenters on RS technically members of a group by virtue of having a log-in and password, they were also members by virtue of an assumed curiosity towards RS’s subject matter. That said the group had no real rules—no membership dues or meetings to attend.
What was real was that you had the feeling you were in the middle of something. A way of thinking and being that was happening NOW.
Magical things happen in places where people feel compelled to gather without being coerced into doing so. Wanting to do something makes a huge difference in the experience of doing it—whatever it is. The feedback loops created in the comment boxes effects the entire site—from the writing to the graphics and layout—everything feels like it’s coming together according to remote control powers—there is the nagging sensation of a larger significance, the sensation of being one part of a bigger story.
[video]
(via peachme)
Since the summer I’ve been getting deep in the philosophical mud trying to sculpt a theory of Universal Feedback and Flow. A combination of things—including a Nassim Haramein lecture I attended at Collective Hardware, my experiences DJing vinyl records, and a mystical vision I had on a Florida beach coalesced into the insight that everything that exists is a feedback loop both created by and creating an exchange of energy. What’s more this exchange is constantly happening—on the level of atoms all the way to galaxies and black holes, the universe IS a fractal flux falling apart at the same time that it comes together. It’s a snake eating it’s own tail. I’m learning how to see through the veil of the everyday and experience the constant back and forth just behind it. This exchange can take many different forms (perhaps an infinite number of them) but it is always a give and take of energy. By focusing on that which appears solid and true it is revealed to be mostly empty space with flashes of static appearing and disappearing according to a web of criss-crossed signals. Like the inhale and exhale that form a breath—or the hyper-awareness of one hand touching the other—or the journey inwards that is embarked upon by focusing on the myriad detail radiating in the single NOW of the present. It’s not a matter of cause and effect—that’s the tricky part, getting past the long held belief that one thing causes another. Everything that appears is the result of it being simultaneously discovered and created by our perception. The exchange happens all at once—it’s not that one part comes first and allows for the other, but that one part doesn’t exist without the other—like how the ying and yang is only a ying and yang. Similarly, the insight of universal feedback teaches us that we only exist as individuals because we exist as networks. You can’t have one without the other.
The illusion that one thing causes another has morphed into an entire metaphysics, in which meaning stands outside of a thing as an ideal that infuses it with its essence. We believe that things happen because of other things—taking it to the extreme of interpreting that which happens as being what we deserve, based on whether we are “good” or “bad” people.
Nothing is inherent good or bad. There is only the perception and misperception of individual events—and only from the vantage point of an all-seeing God could anyone know which was which.
It may be too early to tell, but it seems that what I’m creating is a philosophy of collective relativism by which instead of qualities what exists is the infinite quantity of possibilities present in each and every instant. In addition to facts and figures and all that is true and definite the masses learn to focus their attention upon that which overlaps and gets fuzzy, vacancies, null sets and static. These in-between places are where new myths and legends are born. We look for openings in time—wrinkles by which to stretch out an ordinary collection of charmed moments into an infinity of infinities—an epic tale like a necklace with a never-ending string of jeweled stones that forever cast their light in the darkest places.
A few months ago I had the first in an ongoing series of synchs involving the Mona Lisa. It started when I was researching pix of stencil graffiti online. The objective was to find and save pix of anonymous hotness, blow them up and print them out so I could recreate the stencil with a piece of mylar and an exacto knife for my FTW T-Shirts project—thrift store t-shirts customized with graffiti style stencil sprays. FTW (Follow The World) T-shirts was an experiment with online telepathy—the goal was to “magically” select the perfect shirt from the ranks of second-hand goodness and to intuit the right stencil design to add to it. As I searched through various Euro picture galleries of stencil-based street art, I felt my mind drift with the beats emanating from my red Tivoli desktop speaker, dressed in the distinctive clitter clatter it gave them—like the hard wood Italian soles racing across cobblestones. I dreamily clicked on this and that before coming across a Romanian stencil spray of the Mona Lisa—complete with the perfect accident of a tear-drop shaped paint drip in the corner of her eye. This caught my interest—I sat up—ready and awake. When I hit the forward button at the bottom of the pic, the next stencil was the exact same image except that this Mona Lisa had its head half-transformed into Woody Woodpecker. Perfect, I thought to myself, as I right-clicked triumphantly. This must be the feeling a fisherman has when making a prize catch after hours of waiting knee deep in icy water. I started typing “Mona Woody” into the Save File box at the exact same moment Slick Rick’s “Mona Lisa” came on the magic shuffle—a song that I had thought, until that moment, had been accidentally purged from my iPod:
Well, it was one of those days — not much to do
I was chillin downtown, with my old school crew
I went into a store — to buy a slice of pizza
And bumped into a girl, her name was Mona — what?
Mona Lisa (what?) *singing* Mona Lisa, so men made you..
I felt the buzz of the synch course through me—mixing with my happiness at hearing the track again. I felt awake down deep, like I’d downed a cup of coffee for the spirit—setting me off to investigate further, casting the hungry hunting bird gaze of my third eye across the internets. The synch told me this image meant something—it let me know I was on the right path. My google research quickly revealed that Woody Woodpecker was one of the few American cartoons shown on Communist run Romanian TV—which meant that the stencil undoubtedly invoked childhood memories for many Romanians of a certain age. Pop culture meets the masterwork, revealing the nostalgia and trauma contained within both of them. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see the “real” Mona Lisa again—which is to say I wanted to see a picture file reproduction—the closest I’ve ever been to DaVinci’s work. As familiar as the image was, that post-synch google was the first time I could ever remember taking the time to really look at it. Other times I merely sucked in the familiar face vacuum cleaner style but this time I stopped and observed the sparkle in the eyes and the upward curl of the mouth—while all along I saw the reflection of my own face on the monitor screen, adding my own layer to the cultural assemblage that was the painting. I used what I had learned from my ongoing, virtual apprenticeship under Andy Warhol to recognize opportunities for art riffs in the exchange between the image and the culture within which it’s created. I’ve learned that the importance of a piece has to do with the expansiveness of its reach across the centuries. In the case of the Mona Lisa a core chunk of western culture’s expressive genius as well as its crippling repression is revealed in DaVinci’s masterpiece. He paints a deep humanity (light! Heat! Lust! Love!) glowing through a mask of culture and class.
I decided to make both stencils. They didn’t really fit with the ones I already had— the hip-hop head silhouettes and 60’s style psychedelic chicks with stenciled stars in their eyes, but the synch and the charge that being re-introduced to the painting had given me made it feel like a necessary part of my FTW line-up. The only way to really test the power of online telepathy was have lots of stencils to choose from so that I could intuitively choose one that was “right” for that particular shirt and person. I could put the two faces on the front and back of a single shirt—or just use one at a time or mix them up with other stencils. I chuckled as I imagined the possibilities of pairing ML with Eazy-E—or maybe Steven Colbert. I felt certain that no matter how I ended up using them it would be the right way— there was significance to them—something special, something with meaning.
As if in confirmation of this it seemed that as soon as I cut out the stencil I started seeing the Mona Lisa everywhere—on TV commercials and in print ads that appeared across the pages of magazines opened randomly. I saw her on display in the window of a poster store underneath the Port Authority. It seemed there was an especially large number of ML’s within a several block radius of Collective Hardware. A series of wheat pasted ML’s seemed an hommage to Andy on Elizabeth Street. It was a short stroll from the pizza slice bearing ML on the side of Lombardi’s Pizzeria to the Keith Haring mural of tripped-out orange and black faces on Bleeker and Houston—the eyes of which I’d considered making into a stencil for the purpose of giving the Twitter bird crazy staring eyes. I’d forgotten that this corner was it’s home. I wondered if seeing it again was a sign that I should cut out those crazy eye stencils—perhaps they were meant to go with the ML pix.
As I contemplated the green atomic symbol, dancing men and funhouse characters on the giant slab of concrete, a man stopped in front of me and took out his iPhone. I noticed that his screen background was a picture of the Mona Lisa.
[video]
blackholevacation: (via deversoir)
Evening came and I felt boxed-in. I watched TV all day and hadn’t caught a single synch—not a tremor or a gastronomical event or anything— just like the day before and the day before that. Usually a lull meant that an intense series of synchs were making their way towards me—even so, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it all over? Was the download finally finished? Did I have all the information I needed? After all that I’d seen, a part of me still believed it possible that I’d wake up one day and everything would be back to normal…
Who Needs Sleep?
I love his beautiful death eyes.
The idea of the glitch gets further turned inside out later on in the Matrix trilogy, when Neo meets The Architect who explains that although the prophecy is that The One will destroy the Matrix, what he or she will really do is reboot it—causing everything to be destroyed and then created anew in a slightly different variation. Among all the things accounted for in this new matrix will be a group of people destined to be the next rebel uprising. The truth is that there is no singular “truth”: all that exists outside the Matrix is another Matrix—similarly, there is no such thing as being outside of reality—our efforts to deconstruct it are what build it back again, efforts that begin with our awareness of the system as a system that can never be fully eradicated. Something always escapes—something unexpected—like an accident or another kind of surprise—a tiny bit of slippage that’s able to regenerate itself.
Is it possible that this understanding about the value of mistakes, glitches, accidents and our inability to make anything (or anyone) truly gone for good has effected our collective attitude to such a degree to have fundamentally changed the nature of that reality?
![(via voodoovoodoo)
Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality:
Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system.
My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers.
Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium:
[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]
Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/GJ2xH1hczqpx8btbavo6iWkJo1_500.jpg)
(via voodoovoodoo)
Is it possible that by becoming hyper aware of the way we experience reality we can change that reality? Perhaps a UFO sighting IS the experience of that change. The object in the sky is a blind spot in the context of our gaze—something that escapes our understanding and doesn’t make sense—a tear along the seams of reality that we immediately fill with unconscious fantasies. For the scientist Jacques Vallée, like Jung, the primary focus was not upon the “realness” of the craft but upon the psychological aspects to the event of seeing it. Vallée believed that, “…mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power….” He offers the following analogy by way of explaining what he called (back in 1978) the “open source” nature of reality:
Suppose you’re walking through the desert and you see a stone that looks as though it was painted white. A thousand yards later you see another stone of similar appearance. You stop and consider the matter. Either you can forget it or - if you’re like me - you can pick up the stone and move it a few feet. If suddenly a bearded character steps out from behind a rock and demands to know why you moved his marker, then you know you’ve found a control system.
My point is that you can’t be sure until you do something. Then you realize that what you were seeing, the thing that looked absurd and incongruous, was really a marker for a boundary that was invisible to everybody else until you discovered it because you looked for a pattern. I think that’s exactly what we have to do with UFOs. We have to do something that will cause them to react. And I don’t mean building landing strips in the desert and waiting out there to welcome the space brothers.
Vallée’s words bear an uncanny resemblance to the following scene from The Matrix—a movie that became a metaphor (myth) for the nature of reality at the turn of the millennium:
[Neo sees a black cat walk by them, and then a similar black cat walk by them just like the first one]
Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
[Everyone freezes right in their tracks]
Trinity: What did you just say?
Neo: Nothing. Just had a little déjà vu.
Trinity: What did you see?
Cypher: What happened?
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I’m not sure.
Morpheus: Switch! Apoc!
Neo: What is it?
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.
(via supersonicelectronic)
We tend to think of progress in terms of scientific inventions and improvements in medicine, travel and technology—but I believe that the advancement of the human spirit has more bearing on the quality of our lives. The peaks and valleys of the story of our self-awareness are often visible only to an eye trained to read in between the lines of the facts and figures of history. They outline the true measure of human evolution, which is in the amount of self-awareness attained by the general public. It might not be obvious but thanks to pop culture we recently advanced to a whole new level. American inspired TV has taken over the world—and the internet has risen up alongside it primarily to give us a means to talk about our favorite shows and movies and stars who star in them. As a result we’ve reached a saturation point in which post-modern marketing is mass produced and served up in microwave-safe, pop art inspired everyman containers and packaging. Everyone knows what it is, even if they don’t know what it’s called. It’s a language filled with cues that run like a laugh track beneath and between our multi-media streams. It’s a brand new t-shirt with a retro slogan design. It’s the sample of a TV show in the middle of a hip-hop song, or a commercial about the making of a commercial that never actually shows the product its advertising. Marketers no longer expect people to buy into a straightforward message—instead they build a pre-fab ironic critique into their campaigns.
I’m writing this in a way that makes it sound like a purely bad thing, but that’s not my intention: post-post modernism is neither good nor bad, just like post-modernism wasn’t either extreme, nor modernism before it…they are merely stages of understanding in the evolution of the human spirit. From the all-plastic center of post-modern meaningless gleams the 9/11 center—in which meaning was simultaneously destroyed and disseminated—the need to feel blew out across the country like the burning dust that blew across the city.
In fact, everyday post-9/11, post-post modernism has become self-aware to the point of paranoia— it is our own gaze looking back at us—our own psychic projections that we see in the sky as well as on the TV screen.
This is a moment of cultural confusion—of mashed-up disjointedness and TiVo’d happy moments. We’re at the moment in time when the DVD has ended and we can’t find the remote and we’re too lazy to get up…so the menu sequence plays over and over. There’s a handful of frames and a bit of a broken song followed by short pause before repeating—over and over, the way a CD used to skip. This is our reality—the next step is not to turn it off but to fall asleep with it on, and dream a new life based on it—a remix of a sequence from a TV season—a series of weekday evenings strung together in a beautiful silver disc—dangling like a large pendant from a necklace.
The dream becomes reality.
(no wonder we call the plastic boxes CDs and DVDs come in “jewel cases”)
Writing this reminds me that Jung had a dream that he recounted in his autobiography of “lens shaped” flying saucer in the shape of a telescope—which led Jung to wonder whether he was dreaming the UFO, or whether it was dreaming him…