Friday 02.20.09 -- Konrad Becker -- Cultural Peacekeeping in the Theaters of Possessions -- 02.20.09
Friday 02.20.09 -- Konrad Becker -- Cultural Peacekeeping in the Theaters of Possessions
Contents:
1. About this Friday and the performance 'Cultural Peacekeeping in the Theaters of Possessions'
2. About Konrad Becker
3. EXPANDED E~SCAPISM
4. SYNREAL SYSTEMS
5. Useful links
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1. About this Friday Night.
Who: Anyone interested is invited
When: 7.00 pm, Friday 02.20.09
Where: 16 Beaver Street 4th floor (direction below)
What: Performance / Presentation /Discussion
Konrad Becker would like to speak /perform on the topic "Theatres of Possession", which deals playfully with the more psychological
elements of security conflicts, (intellectual) property and identity:
"Cultural Peacekeeping in the Theaters of Possessions"
A presentation of some basic principles of the globally deployed creative technologies of cultural control, the pacification of the individual, the silencing of the living and the enigma of the undead. Surveillance is to secure property and investments. Today's priority is to protect Intellectual Property. But we have to ask what ownership is, what intangible assets are and how it is related to cultural peacekeeping?
Theaters of possession are the battleground for control of object and subject in information feudalism.
Security is not just technology but an internalized mindset where control is maintained by synthetic fear and the need to secure property against some other. CCTV cameras need not be connected; they do not even have to be "on" to work their magic in the rhizome of Evil Eyes and systems of symbolic domination. To maximize security means to minimize life. The chymical wedding of the technologies of control and the imagination, the Military Entertainment convergence of security and culture, brings on a new era of post-human conflict management.
The presentation involves music and projected images.
This event is organized in collaboration with Autonomedia.
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2. About Konrad Becker
Konrad Becker, is an interdisciplinary communication researcher and practitioner. He has been active in electronic media as an artist, writer, composer as well as curator, producer and organizer. Director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0, and of Public Netbase from 1994 to 2006, he started World-Information.Org and World-Information Institute, a cultural intelligence agency and runs "Global Security Alliance" a cultural peacekeeping agency.
Upcoming publication: "Strategic Reality Dictionary" (Autonomedia 2009)
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3. EXPANDED E~SCAPISM
spell checking
The iconography of the old media-underground has become mainstream, selling softdrinks and jeans, using artist as testpilots for the newer media and as suppliers of public relation and digital manipulation.
Subversive strategies dealing with this phenomenon of ever faster appropriation of artistic expression by corporate business choose tactical invisibility and immersion in the age of biocybernetic self-reproduction. The flooding of signals in cold channels of old media escapes the creative act of the artistic intervention through the recombination of signs out of the pink noise of the semiotic ghosts in search of a body. The nets used by cultural activists as meta-data tools according to a new artistic tradition of inspired interpretation of data within a panopticum of commodified worldviews. Guerrilla semiotics replacing pretentious artistic creation with recombinant cultural synthesis of the techno-voodoo memetic environment.
full e~facts
Political theories always relied on historic facts which can become dull and questionable with the advance of time and research. Hardly any facts can be truly verified anyway - so who cares. The only fairly secure facts: birth and death, (with "-" in between) produce a shift of interest from facts to effects.
Furthermore the assumption of solidarity of the working class seems a hilarious misconception. The association with a class of workers is the choice of loosers. Human pleasure seeking organisms, born to have fun, carry the risk of permanent brainstroke in an environment where "enjoying yourself" is a political risk.
The way out of materialism has to be looked for in hedonism. Anyone can easily agree on feeling well, a global language. Zero Work ethics in full e~fact towards the international united hedonistic diversification.
towards critical hedonism
The change towards an immaterialization of goods: electromagnetic pulses driving the global banking networks and media-satellites. A change from body-work to attention span management. Not the inclination for poetry but the compulsion for complexity reduction spiralizes the information management into the occult while the mesh of media creates black holes of attention and sells it off to the wormholes of the commodified supermarket. Transactions and exchange independently leading to the desubstantiation of the economic process through immanent conversion of values. The Economy of Attention: building attractors, dark stars as social sculptures, mindfocus in telematic flesh, with habits as expensive and sophisticated as tribal African village fetishes.
Is the transformation of the economic competition into a battle for attention a hidden blessing in the powerstructure of the social organism?
tactical synrealism
A constantly different picture, but allways the same. The choice of pain in the multiple choice emotional drama-trauma and an informational waste disposal problem. Phase-locked equilibrated paralyzed presence, strange medial washing detergents in the "immaculate conception": brainwash taboo.
Breaking control circuits of affirmation and diversion, the standard solutions selected by the symbol-committee. Storing and retrieving of complex cognitive material in a hierarchical structure in which the information embedded in higher stages remains available in less differentiated states, but not reverse. Artificial environments, menu-control symbolic orientation systems, watertight pasture for pattern-processing organisms, the menu-card beyond. Data cooked behind predefined windows, where interaction is easy.
who is who anonymous
Subjective science and meta-iconoclastic guerrilla in an alliance with intelligent machines projecting multidimensional transhuman reality. Feeling machines, to learn from their self-centered graceful existence - as the barbarians drew their powers from their totem animals. Virtuosity and distribution challenged by a diffusion of computer and expert systems. Urban ghostdance in the synagoga satanica of tarantismus technicus, mesmerizing the dataflux in immediatism.
Smarter then "artificial intelligence"- more than merely rational and faster than light, developing and enhancing the human side of intelligence as a weapon against information warfare machines.
e~scapism
Limited depth perception of relational proportions, perspective, allows for special effects illusions in the social group. Worldmaps, the tool of power politics and military intelligence, project proportional distortions of n-dimensional space onto the plane for propaganda purposes. The ways of life are marked by representational systems, highly effective inducers with enforced non-representation of profits. To know which way the wind is blowing, look at the "center-of-the world": Seamless parquetry and non-local tiling of the imaginary space as a telematic menetekel for scotomic visualization.
Escape artists and hedonic engineering for an anxiously bored society. An extended ladder being one technical execution of Jacob's Ladder, the functional principle visualized in the international symbol for emergency ladder. The space between this lattice fence becomes footsteps for escape, a projected vision. Not just up and down, left or right: ana or kata as proposed by the hyperspace pioneers.
In hyper-contextuality the stand point changes into a line, opinion into a question of style as everything is connected in the hyperspace-design of the biomass. Expanding the personal resonance with non-finite resources. Recombining the children of the synvolution, transcoding synlogistic permaflux to escape from the vicious circle of coded projections and perceptions towards a nondeterministic hyperspace.
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4. SYNREAL SYSTEMS
Konrad Becker on the politics of cybernetic synformation
http://www.t0.or.at/0ntext/synsysen.htm
Cybernetics blasts the conventional frame of science. Rules of control and communication-mechanism refer not only to inanimate but animate Nature, the connection between woMan and machine, biology and sociology, economy and politics. It appears as connectivity, as the upwelling of a universal science of the interrelatedness of symbols. A synthetic meta-system that questions:
"is God to Golem as man is to machine?"
(Norbert Wiener, God & Golem Inc., MIT Press 1962).
Syntheticus is, according to the legend, the God of the outcasts that hovers over stables, garbage dumps, and backyards. This is a time where the electronic revolution has to make way for biotechnological impulses. This quick succession of technological turnovers with its formative implications on culture and directed awareness is unique in his-story. But whose story is it anyway?! ("?!interrobang?!")
Already in the early days of Cybernetics there was speculation on advanced bio-machine interfaces and Wiener wrote,
"it is conceptually possible for a human being to be sent over a telegraph line,"
that is, straight into the electrocybernetic hybrid culture of mediafusion. He indicates that a better substantiation of data is prerequisite for application in social sciences and suggests further biological and physiological studies. But indeed this research has advanced drastically and through the networked data of commerce and society the requirements seem to have been met... More and more, computer-aided research on biological circuits and on systemcontrol provide data on the organization of mechanisms of society.
Everybody knows the impressive cybernetic prostheses of human limbs, yet to what extent do these insights refer to the realms of society, imag-I-nation and consciousness? Human beings are code-pendant codependents in this context, symbol-driven organisms. In order to establish an effective system of control of human groups it is necessary to manufacture consent and to form public opinion. Methods of creating consent are based on disinformation and extraintelligence. 100% pure industrial orange juice is really 101% juice -- the bonus lies in the juice of the squeezed insects. There are rules which define the acceptable level of bugs, mouse-droppings, and other contaminants, yet the added value is the worm...
The double meaning of the word invention as a pure lie is well known and rightly so; every form of creativity is seen as a rather dubious occupation. Scientific researchers of distinction have always seen themselves as discoverers. Not only crazed inventors had a bad reputation. Even the well-off "creative professionals" carry the stigma of decayed monks. Advertisement messages are good examples of enhanced information, the smart transformation of symbols is revealing the nervus rerum of recurrent currents of currency.
"Give me control over a nation's currency, and I care not who makes its laws" ,
a well known banker is said to have said and in economic theories the value of human life is rendered in pork-belly calculus.
Universal Product Code (bar-code), telebanking and telecommuting are steps toward the glass-fiber isochronous economy. Technological and cultural transformations always triggered the formation of new power elites and substantial economical shifts. Science is always a means to an end. Information and know-how is the means, control is the end. Who are the robber-barons and warlords of information society?
It seems like World War III, the info-war, is a covert undeclared war.
Media in the message-mess age.
Information can be manipulated or faked at many levels. It is not only the message itself that can be tampered with. Initially, the source for an information item may be masked or relabeled; than, the routing and the placing of channels and media can be subject to manipulation; and, finally, access of the receiver may be restricted. Data-processing is the silent weapon in an undeclared war. Social engineering, the analysis and automatization of society is derived from military operations research, the methodology of tactics and logistics. The automatization of society works the same way as the automatization of a meat-factory. The freedom of the individual disappears as unspectacularly as a popular illusionist spectacularly made the Statue Of Liberty disappear from the New York harbor: she is miraculously out of the frame of vision.
A folklorist example of traditional mindcontrol technology are the zombies of Afro-Caribbean Voodoo cults. Through a routine of shock, drugs, deprivation- training and nutrition, sociopaths (or those who were seen as such) were transformed to free-roaming workslaves, the so-called Living Dead. Unfortunately, these zombies are hardly useful for a modern household because the method implies serious damage to the higher functions of the brain. It is an effect that many conventional dictatorships had to learn. Models of mindcontrol in centralized linear systems have proven their instability to great length. The undervalued immaterial work in contrast to material turnovers can backfire on the system.
In this context, the so-called abolition of slavery is most probably the introduction of a subtle form of generalized unfreedom. Likewise, as in a pseudo-secularization, super-religious forms of person-related superstitions are formed. With the help of superior methods of control, the symbol-manipulative intelligence of the workforce may be increased to meet the requirements of high quality production lines...
The speeding-up of work processes through automatization demands a new speed in decision making on all levels. International business machines need people who can manipulate symbols on different levels of abstraction and hardly musclepower. (Just as the iron armor of the knights became temporarily a leisurewear after their military use was obsolete, so the posthumous culture of body-building overdeveloped.) Looking for a natural example for the mathematical form of a circle one immediately thinks of the wheel. The truth is that the wheel is a "discovery", a technological achievement. The technical instrumentarium of a civilization, by default, leads to a prosthetic symbiosis with the user. Abacus , knotted-string, eyeglasses, pocketwatch, musical instrument or microcomputer - an imprint on the deeper layers of the brainstem is produced, metaphors and semantics are influenced... people talk to their cars...
Technological tools like RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), Fuzzy Logic, Multitasking or Virtual Reality open up a reference-system that allows metaphorical-engineering beyond the immediate context. It is not without some irony that the subjuridical and unsovereign workmachines contribute to the emancipation of their alien colleagues.
It is a unique development of the postindustrial information-society that all this leads to a strange marriage between capital and intelligence. A certain amount of chaos and self-determination promises higher flexibility, shorter reaction-times and better adaptation for nonlinear systems. A targeted influence of the database itself allows for a subtle and far-reaching control over the individual. Style, tact, systems of measures, and other given rulers define the results by the measurement--the observer-defined Universe as "What You Measure Is What You Get " system.
An important aspect for understanding control mechanisms is the concept synchronized control and the theory of locked oscillators in phasespace, groups of oscillators (i.e. systems with periodic behavior) appearing in animate and inanimate nature. This principle is found with the pacemaker-cells of the heart, neural networks of the brain, the chirping of crickets and the phenomenon of the periodic luminance of groups of fireflies as well as in other frequent co-cycles. A breakthrough in the theory of locked resonance-systems has been brought about by computersimulation. The classical mathematical proof is more and more aided or replaced by graphical simulation.
Means of transport such as legs, man, animal, or robot may be perceived as oscillators. The human gait can be understood as two synchronous oscillators in bi-phase. System behavior is dependent on the bandwidth of frequency-distribution patterns, that is, if the bandwidth in relation to the phaselocking is large enough, the system falls into incoherence... variance below a critical level yields spontaneous synchronization. The synchronous phase allows for minimal mutual force. To attenuate disturbances, dissipative mechanisms and outer energy-sources are needed to keep the oscillator within the limit-cycle. The spreading of synchronization seeds and induction viruses is achieved by cooperation (or groupforce, mobbing). Many biological periodic systems are dependent on outside impulses as, for instance, the diurnal cycle. Although synchronous behavior spreads quickly through positive feedback, oscillators whose frequency is differing too highly will stay unsynchronized and may invite elimination.
The two circuits of elemental control-fields are the economies of affirmation and diversion. For example, to create problems or needs and to provide a selection of solutions standardized through a symbol-selection committee. Or to provide artificial environments by menu-control which , watertight 'til systemcrash, will be accepted by the pattern-processing organisms as pasture is by cattle. The successful principle of the menu, beyond the realms of gastronomy, is the easy interaction with which it opens a view through predefined windows. Is this where the expression cooked-data is coming from?
A menu-card is only a special form of a map, a symbolic orientation system, as it is traditional subject of military intelligence. Worldmaps have always been an instrument of political power. Proportional distortions that come through subjective projection of a 3-dimensional space onto the plane, have been attributed with the aura of objectivity and used for propagandistic purposes. The ways of life are getting flagged and marked, because who would want to sail to the end of the world and rise into the bottomless abyss... Maps offer an abstracted view of the world, and of the group that manufactures them. This is particularly obvious with very old maps. If you want to know which way the wind is blowing, you only have to look at the "center-of-the world" representation. Galileo's solar-system wars are propaganda wars. The file is still open. The sun has never set but the dawn of empires is routine...
Ambassadorial systems are highly effective inducers and the costs are accepted. Even today, topographic maps are processed and manipulated in details for strategic reasons. For the same reason, the access to high resolution satellite cameras is restricted. Seamless parquetry and non-local tiling of the imaginary space as a telematic flaming script menetekel.
The instrumentarium of a geography of power implies the effectiveness of separation and the drawing of borders. Divide et impera. Organized crime and covert operations just as designated activity potentials rely on split-brain education and lobotomized specialization. Naturally, similarly structured organizations like Mafia terrorist secret serviced high-financed illegal political groups and occult secret lodges repeatedly appear in the same field of reference. Even the most naive media consumer noticed this proximity... Saxa loquuntur... the stones are speaking... Every element need only know its immediate field of action to avoid control hierarchy strip-tease... the dance of the veils of the cui bono...
Ideally, as an ox, you know the way from pasture to stable, yet you circle... unwittingly, milling flour for your masters! Strategic control-mechanisms to dominate earth correspond to rules of biological warfare and to the old techniques of the hunters and herders. Secret collections of power-techniques, as in the collection of the "36 Stratagems", have a tradition in China dating thousands of years. The stratagems carry cute names like "To borrow a corpse for the return of the soul",
or number 20 "To mar the water to catch the fish". The stratagem NR. 6 "To make noise in the east to attack in the west" could explain quite a few events during the so- called cold war. The stratagem number 7 "To create something from nothing" refers to a line in the Tao Te Ching: " Things in this world originate from the being, the being originates from the non-being". These sources define the core of warfare as the art of deception. An indirect approach is seen as the more successful strategy and is preferred to direct confrontation. Categories of stratagems include veiling, pretending, enclosure, stick-and-carrot and forehand achievement. Schopenhauer's "Eristic Dialectics" lists 36 rhetoric stratagems. (6y=1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8) In the old testament there is the saying: "Through stratagems you should fight wars and victory comes through much planning". In the Geneva-added protocol to the Haager Landwar-regulations the accepted forms of stratagems like camouflage, decoy-operations, and delusive information (disinformation) are mentioned. The US Army-handbook "The Law of Land Warfare" names the deceiving by wrong orders, the use of enemy codes, slogans and signals as well as the targeted wrong instruction and propaganda. This means the attack is not pointed toward the enemy itself but to his ability to move, his possibilities of choice and his vitality. The operation is set at the sources of his natural and social energy-supply, therefore the expression to "Wasser abgraben" diverting of water supplies...
The modern trapper is a situationist. His weapons are symbol-manipulation and definition-transfer in situations in which the victim is on autopilot... mouse with cheese... The control of social groups is likewise achieved through the sabotage of education and mental mobility as well as the manipulation of emotions and self-definition through overdosed junk-information but also through the redefinition of the past (historical engineering) and jurisdiction. Overspecialization is not only the most favored path to extinction for biologists and anthropologists, but also the survival technique of a prosperous control-class that is systematically convinced that there is not enough for everyone. The control of data on data is the most subtle and at the same time most effective form of control. The art of omission is not only a virtue of engineering science but also a power-tool and mob-control GrisGris. The saying that the "pen is mightier than the sword" neglects the fact that the scissors of censorship are even more powerful. The cosmographer and data-dadaist Charles Fort writes in The Book of the Damned:
"science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts."
The damned are the left-out, suppressed and excluded data. Their graves lie at the crossroads of Trivia, but when hell is full the dead walk the earth. The procession of the unprocessed data is the wild ghost-army in the horror-cabinet of exclusionism.
Dies Irae! La vache qui rit!
A unified perspective does not allow for depth perception and the confirmation of relational proportions and this is why human beings have ideally at least two eyes and two ears. A limited and given perspective allows for a multitude of special effects illusions as they are applied in movies but also the creating of "necessary illusions" in the social group.
When you keep hearing the same, you start hearing something else. This is easily verified experimentally. But why is it always the same picture when you see constantly something else? A diabolical pain of choice in the multiple choice mindfuck-o-crazy. The information channels are glutted with sticky corporate entertainment and the emotional pest of the sociological drama-trauma in the magic circle of a hypnotic definition of the end of the world. The diversified amok-info-entertainment is a paradoxically phase-locking equilibrated paralysis in a multi-bind-deadlock coma...
But how do you get rid of the sticky stuff? In a strange contrast to the medial presence of washing-powder and household detergents (not merely clean but pure) and the concept of "immaculate conception" the subject of brainwash is very much taboo. How can permanent brainstroke be avoided in an environment where the simple "enjoy yourself" is a political provocation?
Is super-user online-help, the handbook of the human organism, classified? The competition to massproduction of impression and expression? Subjective science and meta-iconoclastic guerrilla can take advantage from an alliance with increasingly intelligent machines through the display of multidimensional interrelations of transhuman reality. Urban ghostdance crackdown, tarantismus technicus as synagoga satanica in communal banishing regulations?
Fight for your right to party!
The display of power is, on the long run, quasi-identical to the exercise of power. For the presentation of power, a B-movie actor is good enough, the altar boys of telepathos.
To veil the powerstructures, a factual or pretended self-implication is a well-tested tool. The transferance of culpability onto quasi-anonymous authorities is well documented and leads to bizarre crimes as experimental torture in laboratories has shown. Battlefields and slaughterhouses get their supply through this strategy of authority-transfer. The global think positive license to kill local.
Not just since the days the scapegoat of the demon Azazel was chased into the desert, the broken symmetry of good and bad has been used for the mobilizing of the masses. Symmetries have always been a starting point in the deduction of laws of nature and cosmogonies. The emerging of structure is equivalent to the breaking of symmetries. When snowflakes emerge from totally rotational symmetric steam, the rotational symmetry collapses. This is related to the phaselocking-phenomenon in groups of oscillators. A magnet too breaks the rotational symmetry of iron-atoms by providing direction. Magnetism means long-range order. Like ironfilings, social structures group in the fieldlines of cultural dominants that act like abstract ferromagnets on the social field of the restless many.
Fear and longing
have been analyzed as prime human motivations and have been used by the socio-techniques of the phantom-captains for thought-control in the new slaveships. Soldiers of fortune of abstract monopolies play the keyboard of fear and longing mostly on the black keys. The manipulation of supply in the infocalyptic age of technical reproduction, the excess of fear in the political womb of demons as a chronic mainspring restlessness of the qliphotic pseudomorph baby-substitution clinic. In the imagination lies the battlefield of social engineering over the psychocybernetic coordinates of the world models. A battle over the subliminal abrogation of power over the definition of enjoyment. Attraction and repulsion are forces that transcend the octaves of reality, from electronics to bio-survival reality, from social to galactic space. From the observation of galaxies and their inherent gravitational forces the conclusion has been drawn that the universe contains vast amounts of invisible, so-called dark matter. According to this theory, a minimum of 80 % of mass in universe is cold, dark and undetectable with optical- or radio telescopes. It is assumed that the invisible mass that is surrounding us consists of so-called Strange Matter.
Mass-society in the magnetic field as an induction-machine. Just as the dynamic of the social field is used for transactional profits. There are extensive theoretical calculations how through intergalactic mining-cars the gravitational energy of black holes could be exploited. But who is exploiting the attractors of complex biological resonance circuits?
The Moloch or Baal-Hammon have been supplied industrial style with blood sacrifices. To secure their "positive" influence on the fertility and luck in war, children and cattle and other humans have been thrown in the sacrificial pan. This obsessive and predictable behavior of some of those god-races reminds of the mechanics of Luna-park attractions. In many cultures the gods show the quality of machines or archetypically demented robots in the image of the human. The concepts on the effectiveness of evocations and prayer-wheels point toward a machine system as well. It is an open secret, that priesthood is gaining through the sacrifices to the gods. Votive offerings are collected after the show and that is how the temples became the first banks through the sheer amount of precious metals they had stocked. A symbiotic machinegod-mansystem of mutual dependency of victims and perpetrator. For one, the role of intermediation gives this group the power of interpretation. The interpreters of points of reference are the navigators and control-artists. The royal astrologers are at the steering-wheel and practice the telefacturing of conventionalized hallucinations. Techniques of experimentally induced obsessive bonding are traditionally an area of xenology. The objectivated interpretation of the oracle is the key to power that is defended against any competition. In nomina numina. (The ambiguity of the oracle is only made up with political declarations or modern law texts. Accordingly the need for interpretation is very high.) Non-authorized ecstasy-cults, that hold the heretical opinion that every man has at first the very same amount of access or non-access to other contents of consciousness, have been massively persecuted through all times.
But not only the question to what extent the gods are installed for interest groups arises, but much more, where the reference points of the underlying ideas and overlayered hierarchies are positioned in the synreal system of coordinates. The middle of the world of the dark subterranean gods of the plutocrats, whose systems of voodoo-economy have long transcended the mathematical foundations of their system of belief, the center of earth in Dante's Divina Commedia, the eternal ice of Lucifer's loins.
A handy argument against the effectiveness of social control-mechanisms is Murphy's law. But overstable and dynamic, highly complex cybernetic systems use multiple feedback loops. The efficiency of these filters may be compared with the control functions of a biological organism explicable in terms of relations of scale and dimension. A model in which the most diverse local conspiracies in the political-military-religious-academic realm weave together in an incomprehensible metaconspirative holistic system. Then the sublevel connections of the cults of the rational to the fantastic massacres of reason in the cults of the irrational seem only to be two sides of a coin. The extra-dimensional mesmerizing of the dataflux.
Very real, more real, less real? Synreal! The self-similar structure of the God & Golem Inc. scenario is growing in complexity the more levels are reached. But which secret golemgods rule the citadel of definition?
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5. Useful links
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Becker
http://www.t0.or.at/~konrad/
http://www.t0.or.at/0ntext/becker0n.htm
http://www.netbase.org/t0/intro/05
