Re: LIFESCIENCE: on the raft

[rdom <rdom@thing.net>]

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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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>
>     the question might be,,, who's still on the raft..
>
>     and who has slid off,, unwilling to take a stand??
>

Post Media Impossibilities (Part One)
Or
Mayan Technologies for the People


We must be ready for the unexpected. Not just about the
emergence of new technologies-but how people will use them.
 --(From Protocols of the MESH)

All post media direct action cells must pursue the instabilities in
technologies--even before they become metaphors. We must
move into areas that seem like the impossible--before they even
gain presence among the protocols of the MESH. It is within
these chaotic sectors that actors among civil societies in search
of leverage anchors will find opportunity for greater disturbances
and force multiplication for voices without power. Once minor
communities of autonomy have sensed these balance shifters
they must be harnessed. Those who wait for the decentralization
of these instabilities will lose the small windows available for the
development of micro-mass disturbance gestures. We must always
already be seeking out the flow of uncertainty beyond the
over used scientific discourse and technologies at hand: networks,
bio-technologies and nano-technologies. Let the MESH spend
its time tweaking these possibilities. Instead let us like the
Zapatistas continue to break the Mirrors of Power and
move into the elsewhere.

Post media cells should seek out unprocessed instabilities
even as the Army’s Force XXI and the Marine Corps’
Hunter Warriors attempt to retool the left over war engines
of the Cold War as interoperable  cyborg systems. Postmodern
war still remains bound by paradigms of military science
and spectacle (note that most recent actions from the
Gulf War, Part One, to the Kosovo Crisis were made for
TV and Internet presentation), the endless objective
theater of war discourse and the subjective NATO
disposition of one reality has been completely introjected
into the system (even in the case of Psy-0p actions) .
Their VR helmets can’t see the failure of Reality before
the new fundamentalism of the telematic-they continue to
believe that the lights they see from the midnight bombs
they drop are coming from something that still exists: nation,
justice, and democracy. These are now nothing more than
the last signs of dead cultural stars. The Military system,
like the peasants of the Middle Ages, still kneel before the
holy corpse of the MESH and pray for a true state of trajectivity.
Some even admit it among themselves:

….there is little apparent interest in the wider effects of
these developments and their implications for national
security. In fact, attempts to foresee even the near-term
future are remarkable for their conservative approach
and the general belief that the future will be very much
like today with a few advances in technology. Not
surprisingly, there  have been even fewer attempts to
anticipate basic change caused by technologies whose
 practical applications are only now being discussed
by specialists. We are already losing future wars now.

--(From the Army’s Book of the Dead, Book II )


The MESH is busy mapping the human genome to create
meme-gene weapons. Enabling the targeting of  specific
genotypes and building  self-replicating fleets of computer
controlled molecular weapons. Nano-technology first
emerged as a practice in 1990 when industry researchers
at IBM were able to arrange 35 individual xenon atoms to
spell out "IBM." In 1991, the Japanese government reportedly
began budgeting an annual $185 million for nano-tech research.
Since that time three-dimensional structures have been
experimentally produced from DNA. Researchers have
demonstrated the engineering of branched, non-biological
protein with enzymatic activity as a basic methodology for
nano devices. This nano_event will intermingle with other
MESHworks to produce the new aggregates for the
power zones of tomorrow. Post media cells must fight
the future with gestures that have no name in the present.


(Play Tape)

Mayan Technologies For the People (Rewind and Start Now)

Pedrito (tojolabal, two and a half years old, born during
the first Intergalactic) is playing with a little car with no
wheels or body.  In fact, it appears to me that what
Pedrito is playing with is a piece of that wood they call "cork",
but he has told me very decisively that it is a little car
and that it is going to Margaritas to pick up passengers.

It is a gray and cold January morning and we
are passing through this village which is today
electing the delegates (one man and one woman)
whom it will be sending to the March 21 consultation.

The village is in assembly when a Commander-type
plane, blue and yellow, from the Army Rainbow Task
Force and a pinto helicopter from the Mexican
Air Force, begin a series of low over flights above
the community.  The assembly is not interrupted,
those who are speaking merely raise their
voices.

Pedrito is fed up with having the artillery
aircraft above him, and he goes, fiercely,
in search of a stick inside his hut.  Pedrito
comes out of his house with a piece of
wood, and he angrily declares that "I'm going to
hit the airplane because it's bothering me a lot."
I smile to myself at the child's ingenuousness.

The plane makes a pass over Pedrito's hut,
and he raises the stick and waves it furiously
at the war plane.  The plane then changes its
course and leaves in the direction of its base.

Pedrito says "There now" and starts playing
once more with his piece of cork, pardon,
with his little car.

The Sea and I look at each other in silence.
We slowly move towards the stick which
Pedrito left behind, and we pick it up carefully.
We analyze it in great detail.

"It's a stick," I say.

"It is," the Sea says.

Without saying anything else, we  take
it with us.  We run into Tacho as we're leaving.
"And that?" he asks, pointing to Pedrito's
stick which we

had taken.  "Mayan technology," the Sea responds.

Above, a suddenly clear sky becomes golden
next to clouds like marzipan.

The Sup, trying to remember how
Pedrito did what he did.

(Above, the helicopter is a useless tin vulture).

Pause Tape.

For too long the specters of hyper-memetic cargo cults
have flowed between the bottom of the third world and
the top of the virtual class. A circuit that keeps the
impossibilities of the fifth world[s] behind the eschatology
of designer future/s/.  Post media cells must travel among
strings of inventions that fall outside of technological instabilities.
To seek gestures that leap over the lines of flight that our
current collective realities, or imaginary conditions, of speed
and interconnectivity. We must place the impossible and the
unexpected as our counter-gestures, as in the case of Hannibal
and his elephants against the Roman Empire.  Tensors that can
create unprecedented instabilities in the MESH beyond our
today[s] and tomorrow[s]. These tensors are already drifting
among the intergalactic children outside the limits of our
social condition. Post media cells must create situations
for mutation that can interrupt and reroute the protocols
of acceleration, improvement and obsolesce that clone
capital is bound by. So that rational history will be broken
and reshifted by the hands of the intergalactic ninos
of the fifth world.

Post media cells must side step the Universal State of the
Hybrid that clone economies of globalism. Our confrontations
should tactically release all the impossible singularities beyond
the homogenization of the New World Order’s Human Rights
agenda that has now been set as the foundational condition
of  hyper-violence and total social control. Here the son
(neo-liberalism) is devouring  the father (national capital) and,
in the process, is destroying the lies of late capitalist ideology:
in the new world disorder there is neither democracy nor freedom,
neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into
a phased battlefield, in which the chaotics of decayed neural nets
now reigns. Let us instead seek out those circuts of perversity
of the mother and child that reside outside of the luxury of
digital History.

Now is the time for the fifth world to move deep into the
virtual state of the Forth World War and bite its head off
with its own trajectories. Each post media pocket
should heed El Sup’s smoke signals:

The apparent infallibility of globalization comes up hard against the stubborn
disobedience of reality. While neo liberalism is pursuing its war, groups of
protesters, kernels of rebels, are forming throughout the planet. The empire
of financiers with full pockets confronts the rebellion of pockets of
resistance.
Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of different colors, of varying shapes. Their sole
common point is a desire to resist the "new world order" and the crime against
humanity that is represented by this fourth world war.

--(From the Book of Intergalactic Memories)

(Play Tape)

[A woman wearing a ski mask and holding a few seeds in her hand]

She Speaks:

We are networks without gravity, here the apple falls up.
-the zapatistas

Las Futuras

The zapatistas wrap the Mayan code of invention around the protocols
of the fourth world war. Each word retrofits the MESH of late capital,
each gesture displacing its dream of re-placing flesh with firmware,
and memory with a battlespace. Each note cuts into billions invested
in synthesizing hybrids of adaptable hierarchies and bound networks.
Instead the zapatistas ask us to build worlds outside of the disposable
history of speed—Las Futuras. Here the call of the dead are answered
by the living without wires, without ubiquitous  infrastructures,
without the need to re-dial future wars. Here Las Futuras flood
the present with the possibilities of a better yesterday[s].


P.S. Secret Bunkers vs. Open Theaters

*(The Electronic Disturbance Theater are)...anarchistic proponents who believe
that theatrical
technological strikes --"digital zapatismo"—should lie at the heart of doctrine
and strategy.*

--The Zapatistas "Social Netwar" in Mexico, Rand Corp. (1998)

*Why do you only remember us only after the floods?*

--The Zapatistas

Zapatismo is an event horizon, which frames and reroutes the generic
media event. A deviation of mass distraction towards a specific
point of the total market equation with a single question: what
is the position of the Mayan communities in Chiapas, Mexico?
This question is a concrete manifestation of an alien politics that
no longer resides within the society of secrecy—the perfect
dictatorship of knowledge. The time of the Guarded Society
is at hand, everyone must leave the last remains of public
space- now. Only those who can scan the waves of history
correctly, understanding the true nature of code  should define
what gestures can be made and when. Now the *Guarded
Society* recommends that we move behind our adaptable
firewalls, leave plenty of air, and make sure your bioagents
do not go astray. Only a society of secrecy will be able to
survive this stage of the electronic theater:

*CAE continues to believe that all useful models of ECD
(or for that matter, nearly all political as opposed to
consciousness raising and pedagogical actions***)
within the current political conditions have in common
covert action and an abhorrence of mass media as a theater of action.*

--Critical Art Ensemble

The *Guarded Society* maps the zapatistas floods from mega_networks
linking the West and East, where the south only functions at a
distance, where only the corpse[s] of technological instabilities
speak, where only a the few can govern the spaces of public
engagement. The advent of networks is now a struggle between
the open gestures of network_theaters and network_bunkers.
Network_bunkers only speak the code of soft conspiracies
and top_sight control. The zapatistas dream contests the agenda
of secrecy by speaking across whatever media spaces can be
rerouted into spaces of concern. Zapatismo is an untimely
gesture within the house the digitally correct. The zapatistas
network_theaters do not call for cyberwar, netwar, or infowar
but public acts of html activism. Digital zapatismo is
simulation_as_it_could_be not simulation_as_it_has_been.
A gesture that underlines the disparity of those who
seek interoperable top-sight networks and those
who link to forgotten phantoms, future forms of life,
and an impossible present.

*To arrive at the intercontinental R/reality, each one has
to make his own, her own path.*

--2nd Declaration of La Realidad (1996)

[Tape Ends]



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