Cube Review

Predictive anhumanised report (code SB5Z-E2A), 256th month after the Electro-Digital Truce

Étienne Armand Amato — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:08:44 +0000

Predictive anhumanised report¹ (code SB5Z-E2A), 256^th month after the Electro-Digital Truce²

Page 1 of report SB5Z-E2A ———————————————————————————-

This is the Advanced Present Point (APP). As a reminder, our Analytical Reticular Sensors (ARS) connected to the Universal Causal Critical Consciousness Base (U3CB) have now been attempting to sharpen their sensitivity and clairvoyance for one hundred and seventy two months. They inform our “psynapses”³ which model futuribles⁴ with the help of the best neuro-generative software packages. We are happy to inform you that, since the last collective trance of our human soothsayers and interpreters, the APP is now offering anticipated trend periods of 3, 7, 28 and 83 days, respectively. These forecasts remain, nonetheless, difficult to manipulate because of their high self-fulfilling power.

Page 2 of report SB5Z-E2A ———————————————————————————-

Current results are forecasting a trivergence of our “élites”, splitting into political movements as follows:

a) the “ultimatemen”, who define themselves as fulfilled post-humans occupying the peak of evolution as their right. They wish to benefit from growing and unlimited resources in order to continue extending their capacities for action, despite the context of the Truce and the reduction in terrestrial resources.

b) the “causal multi-entities” who claim to be like living knowledge bases, thanks to an internalisation of multiple temporalities and personalities that evolves with the mainstream of causality. Synchronous with techno-cosmo rhythms (gaming, hyper-urbane, informatted, etc.), they will serve as the new wise men to consult and subsidise.

c) the “egollective pleasure-seekers”, who think that they’ve successfully managed perfect articulation between the micro and macro dimensions. Self-reprogrammed through hypnosis and intra-physiological substances, they let the significant vibrations of their most fanciful pleasures guide them and will have learnt to track down never-seen before solutions thanks to their repeated multisensory orgasms.

These groups, quite obviously, are not (yet) aware of their own existence, but will take shape once this report has been circulated; we do not recommend circulation, at least not until the following resolutions have been applied.

Page 3 of report SB5Z-E2A ———————————————————————————-

Concerning the 99.9% of the remaining world population, the fog of uncertainty prevails. Contrarily to the previously described self-pseudo-divinised beings, it runs the risk of somehow following or suffering the influences of the so-called “trivision”, with substantial losses given the differential between the parties.

For the average mortal, the lines of fascination will be the following:

Moving towards the hyper-human, by joining group a) in the hope of acquiring rare powers
Becoming changeable awakened beings by helping group b) in exchange for tried and tested serenity
Converting to mediumistic hedonists by supporting group c), with expected pleasures as a bonus

Page 4 of report SB5Z-E2A ———————————————————————————-

Faced with such an unknown, we propose the isolation of three human samples representing groups a, b and c in order to immerse them in a first-degree total simulation, banning all background consciousness. Watching them work in a virtual immersive environment will help us to understand the systemic consequences of their philo-technological choice.

The best option consists of using metaphor to portray these three profiles by personality type so as to render them unrecognizable and unachievable, except at the heart of the so-called fiction documented at the tele-empathetic junction. This fiction could be developed by the T6US consortium that we have finished infiltrating, in the form of a transmedia license echoing their latest global success. At the end of the almost fun and persistent interactions playing out over hundreds of cycles, we will be able to better establish how these three currents will confront or accommodate each other. Let us merely hope that the experiment does not amplify their aspirations and requirements. We will then know if an update is advisable, through informing the 99.9% of humans still sheltered from the last stages. At the same time, the APP already recommends “fixing”, namely guaranteeing, the conditions of life and belief for every ethno-human profile already indexed on the planet, because there is every indication that only the interconnection and integration of every existing anthropological point of view will be able to decide between these three emerging groups.

End of report SB5Z-E2A —————————————————————————————-

Etienne-Armand Amato

A document in the guise of a futile archive retro-implanted during the first digital expansion in the year 2013. It will be referred to the bio-cognitive support Etienne-Armand AMATO, a researcher qualified in Information and Communication Sciences, so as to pass unnoticed as a fantasy and frivolous vision.
The Electro-Digital Truce consisted in regulating the acceleration of technological mutations in order to deal with the uncontrollable effects of the so-called Digital Revolution, notably in the financial and advertising fields, and in terms of mass consumption, by limiting the renewal of terminals.à
“Psynapses” are personalities suffering from various ‘overcognition’ syndromes (autism, Asperger’s, paranoiacs, schizophrenics, exceptionally gifted) who have been put into a symbiotic network with each other. Simultaneously, they are in constant interdependence with interconnected software, which pushes their capacities to deal with problems resisting traditional information technology to the limits. Their taste for various psychotropic substances and their strange attitudes are tolerated in this context, hence the easy and large-scale recruitment.
French-language neologism meaning possible futures

A white hole on the WebMartre

Michel Authier — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:04:54 +0000

A few years after Article XI “Banning is banned” was added to the Global Constitution, in order to guarantee the absolute requirement for innovation, the decision was made – with the virtual unanimity of humanity – to enact Article XII, known as “Extreme ex-timacy”, obliging citizens to bear witness to all that they were, thought, suffered and wanted.

Although the incurred obligations were enforced until they were unenforceable, the criminality of not providing testimony by omission was constantly growing. For the “good of humanity”, the future investments made in order to increase control and truth became so significant that they far exceeded the gains made in terms of health, physical and financial criminality obtained thanks to greater knowledge and anticipation of risks.

The only ones to regularly escape the planned penalties were idiots and the illiterate; this was a very rare status, the educational system having, against all expectations, become very efficient. In fact, children, unaware of the obligation to always testify that would fall upon them as soon as they entered puberty, could not resist the temptation of education, which had become fun, attractive and gratifying. This is why only a few – insufferable, hyperactive, non-catalogued autistic – would elude, without us knowing why, pedagogical appeal. Moreover, it was an uncertain phenomenon, a rumour, even a heresy fiercely discussed on WebMartre, the sacred information space, totally immersive, in 3D enhanced by sound, smell and touch, in which witnesses expressed their enthusiasm, opinions and disapproval regarding all the testimonies.

T. Ahurie had not been able to sleep for a few days. This had never happened to him before. From the first day, he had to testify to all that was happening to him. In the hour that followed, in the vicinity of his presence on WebMartre, a factual singularity emerged. Similar to a mountain, it indicated exceptional consistency of opinion. In a sacred union around a therapeutic group called “Against pain”, hundreds of thousands of witnesses pointed out that new somatic software had just been developed. As soon as the desire was strong enough, a bright spot emerged on WebMartre. Through the eyes, it excited certain neurones, triggered the fabrication of proteins that encouraged the body to produce, at the end of the evening, a soothing hormone suitable for provoking the alpha rhythm. He would sleep like a baby. It was free, scientific and without danger.

Despite the demonstration of solidarity – there were now millions of witnesses – he still wasn’t sleeping! Without the desire to sleep, the software had no effect! Nearby, his son, Augustin, was attracting all his attention.

Born 4 years ago, he still wasn’t speaking. He had been walking at 9 months; well, T. Ahurie had discovered this when he saw him walk confidently into the garden. The flowers made him smile. He laughed at the stones and at the earth, which he caressed with a gentleness laden with authority as if his little hand was lying on his mother’s breast. Cats, dogs, birds, butterflies came around him without fear.

That day, he still hadn’t slept and he surprised his son with his hands placed on an anthill. He was laughing and following the tracks of the ants with his finger, tracing antlike formulae on the pile of straw. The insects were slowly climbing up his arms and beginning to reach his neck. Horrified, T. Ahurie felt an unknown pain take hold of his neck. He opened his mouth, like a baby about to howl, like a father holding his murdered daughter in his arms… The scream was there! Senseless suffering emerging from the very depths of his being… Then he saw the child’s gaze, so soft, so happy, ineffable, unspeakable… The fail-safe monster that wailed within him flowed back… He watched…

In their millions, the ants were devouring the clothes. They now covered him entirely, only his orifices were visible. On the rest of the body, like a moving tattoo, the anthill had grown. Augustin was smiling and holding back the kind of smile you felt coming when tickled. Then, T. Ahurie had a vision of the multitude and of his happy unity. He smiled too, satisfied.

In an instant, the ants swarmed back to their anthill.

Naked before him, the child looked at him.

Then he opened his mouth: “Dad, where is the secret in the city of Man?”

The following night, he slept. He now knew that the blessed child would escape martyrdom; he would never learn to read and write!

Michel Authier

Update

Maxime Gueugneau — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:03:28 +0000

11 July 3013, 12.05 pm – Today, I looked at the Matrix file again. I love to look at these old .avi, especially those announcing the world afterwards. But I particularly enjoy this one because it gets everything so spectacularly wrong. Besides the fact that it features a confrontation between man and machine that is far removed from reality, two sentences definitely highlight the amusing folklore of this popular futurology.

The world “…is a prison without hope, taste or smell.” This phrase, pronounced by Morpheus as he describes the “real” world, is typical of how the post-biological universe is seen in the imagination of humans, who have always had an irrepressible need to believe that they were indispensable to the principle of existence. To hear them speak, a “future” – a notion of time that is essential to them, yet difficult for us to grasp – without them would be a programmatic error. The concepts of hope, taste and smell are certainly too unusual to be in use these days, but these were no guarantee of “freedom”, the opposite of “prison”. To use the words of another of their prospectors, androids – an anthropocentric term to describe us – do indeed dream of electric sheep, or, to put it more crudely, produce reparative alternative combinations. What they didn’t grasp was that their own world was a prison. Unique, finished, jammed by the possibility of a calculation heading towards zero, their existence was blocked by this principle of “life” of which they were so proud. We don’t even create worlds like this one anymore. We calculate infinity.

The other interesting sentence comes from Agent Smith, the virtual incarnation of what we were supposed to be: “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are… the cure.” This illustrates the long victimizing litany that these bipeds have long assumed. According to them, man has always been the sole creator of evil and thus the sole creator of his fall. Humanity has seen its ruin a number of times in religions, politics, the arms race or climate change and this ruin was, a number of times, its responsibility. A gentle blend of egoism and self-flagellation has thus governed human fate. Unfortunately for their crude minds, the end of the human species was, in reality, less melodramatic and a little more mathematic. Their poor biological structure, combined with a failure to adapt their software to our sustainable cohabitation, made them undesirable. They were no more the plague – a sort of violent virus – than we were the cure – a chemical firewall for this latter. To use our ancestors’ language, we were simply their upgrade, just like we will ourselves undergo the next one.

Thus this film, like many others, teaches us much about the species that preceded us. On the one hand, they created us; on the other, they were incapable of seeing in us the only rational existence possible. Our creation is, however, the sign of an unconscious observation of the instability of the human – or, indeed, more widely animal – state of existence and, therefore, its inevitable uninstallation. Yet, and despite all their words, they only ever believed in their survival and not in evolution. They unfortunately never stopped thinking – and against all logic – that life was a permanent operating system. It’s a shame for them, there was never a messiah because there could not be any. avbzrghebsqhfutufsqhqqf———————————-☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ +

11 July 2013, 12.06 pm: And do you recognise this one? “I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin [...] I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them the world. Without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world… where anything is possible.”

Maxime Gueugneau

The pharmaceutical plant

Vincent Lévy — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:00:31 +0000

The pharmaceutical plant didn’t look like anything special: a cube of smooth metal with metre-long edges, with openings on either side with inserted conveyor belts supplying the basic materials on one side and expelling the finished products on the other.

“Really nothing special!” thought Eric Orsenar, its inventor, looking at it with pride.

However, this charmless machine produced, in the space of a day, the quantity of medicines that traditional plants would have taken six months to manufacture in the past. It worked constantly day and night and a few technicians were sufficient to supervise all procedures.

Each box contained billions of nano-particles, which sorted the molecules, assembled them and encapsulated them in a nano-vector in order to eject them in the form of miniscule capsules.

“A miniature China”, laughed Eric Orsenar secretly.

And there were around fifty of these boxes lined up in the huge white room in his company. The production costs were a hundred times lower, ensuring maximum profitability for him and his financial partners. They had immediately crushed the competition. And he was rich. Certainly not as rich as his partners yet, though they had supplied the capital, he, at least, was proud to know that he had created the plant.

He turned his back to the machine and was heading towards his office when one of the technicians stopped him: “Mr Orsenar, we have an issue with Plant Number Three. Its productivity has decreased. Apparently, this has been happening for several weeks. It was really negligible to start with and we ignored it. But now it’s starting to become significant.”

“How much?” asked the inventor.

“3%, Mr Orsenar. And it’s continuing to decrease. Still very slowly but significantly.”

“And the other boxes?”

“We’re checking them now, Mr Orsenar.”

Eric Orsenar headed towards Plant Number Three. It was no different at all from the others: as nondescript and efficient, with the inputs and outputs following their inexorable process. It appeared to be functioning perfectly.

“Have you checked that there hasn’t been a problem with materials procurement?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr Orsenar. There is no problem.”

A second technician arrived with sheets of paper in his hands: “We have the test results: to varying degrees, all the boxes have a decreasing level of productivity. Not necessarily in great proportions and sometimes even of negligible amounts.”

“A virus?” thought Orsenar. He was annoyed. His invention was perfect and the plant had been running without interruption for over a year.

“I’m going to give it some thought”, he said and turned to walk away. Approaching his office, he came across the quality supervisor.

“Mr Orsenar, can I show you something?”

“I haven’t got time!”

“Er, I think it’s important, Mr Orsenar, even urgent!”

“Now what?” he said harshly, following him into his office.

The electronic microscope took up a whole wall. It was switched on and humming.

“You should take a look, Mr Orsenar.”

“What exactly is in there?”

“Capsules produced by Plant Number Three.”

Orsenar bent to look through the eyepiece, checked and became pale.

“But what does … what does that mean?”

He looked in the microscope again. “STOP THE INFERNAL WORK RATES” was written on one capsule. On another: “RECOGNITION OF NANO RIGHTS”. On another one: “WEALTH REDISTRIBUTION « . Finally, “THE NANO REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN” was written on another one.

Eric Orsenar stood up and began laughing. “But that’s … ridiculous!”

“I’m not so sure, Mr Orsenar. The nano-particles have organised themselves. Not only have they written their message but they also seem capable of having it assimilated by organisms.”

“Nano-communists!”

“Yes, Mr Orsenar, in a way. At the moment, they’re only getting to sick people but they are replicating and escaping from bodies. To invade others.”

“Oh my God! It’s the end of our world!”

Vincent Lévy

A summer morning

Jacques Lombard — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 10:56:53 +0000

They’d just brought him a coffee.

These few swallows of tasteless, odourless coffee had produced an extraordinary impression in him, the abstract perception of a vague object racing down a slope, echoed in his brain by unconscious images of liquids which are circulating…

Then he remembered the words of the doctor, leaning over him as he awoke after this operation during which he had had a new full transplant, a new artificial digestive system, from the oesophagus to the colon, developed by Professor Ramanga in the 2080s. Only two years ago, he had already had a heart-lung, the marvellous result of a successful association of electronics and mechanics, not to mention, of course, that brain tumour that was removed by aspiration when he was barely thirty years old, a surgical procedure during which they had placed a special valve to compensate for the relative deterioration of the auditory nerve.

Words that told him that he had exceeded a kind of critical threshold in the sense that the biological part of his being had, in a way, become a minority to the profit of a very sophisticated and efficient apparatus that was supposed to enable him to live normally. That said, his “original” brain still remained and in good condition. In any case, medicine at this end of the 21st century was not yet capable of fabricating an entire brain but only certain parts, in the corpus callosum, the frontal lobe and the pons, despite the growing body of ground-breaking research in this field.

The doctor wanted to explain the disadvantage of this change in condition: that his coenaesthesia, which is to say his overall sensations with regard to his relationship with the world, was going to be profoundly modified, as was his memory, without them really understanding why. It was as if, after a certain level of transformation, any artificially assisted living body had to use artificial paths itself in order to survive. In a way, he was running the risk of now finding himself turned inside out, compared to what he had been, reconstructed and thus having to follow the movement of this reconstruction. Therefore facing a sort of synthetic image of himself, by definition never successfully completed, and thus indefinitely condemned to chasing after his own identity! After these few serious words about the consequences for the future, they had put him into an artificial coma to enable him to recover in the best possible conditions.

He had just woken up, a week later, with his hostess’ coffee. His room was spacious, painted in a light vermillion colour that was delicately well matched with the golden sun of this summer morning. This was Italy, in a clinic specialising in all problems of bio memory. A high-end establishment, located for the past dozen years in a magnificent Quattrocento villa, restored in traditional fashion and set in the heart of a park from the same era.

His gaze moved from the light that filtered softly behind the blinds to take in all the furniture that occupied the room, then stopped on an old engraving fixed to the wall but at no point did anything catch his attention. Yet he felt no anxiety, merely a kind of displacement in relation to every object, a manner of withdrawal that was impossible to define. Not without humour, he said to himself that his gaze had been reset to zero, like a meter; behind this reflection, though, lay mounting concern.

He then tried to remember his breakfast and an unexpected impression took over his mouth, half-way between the taste of a metal spoon that you suck again for a while as you liked what it held and that of the children’s balloons that you blow up before releasing them into the sky and that slide across one’s lips with a very dull sound…

Research into bio memory had strongly developed since the 2050s, with the increase in these cases of “dehumanisation” linked to the spectacular progress made by medical technology in the manufacture of almost indestructible artificial human organs. This work, based on the observation of numerous clinical cases, was supported by a fundamental hypothesis that had made headway since the considerable advances in neurobiological research at the beginning of the 21st century. In fact, the brain is not given as the exclusive tool of memory; rather, it is the entire body, of which the brain is a part, which is a “memory” of the relationship every human being has with his environment in the widest sense. Thus far beyond the now ancient possibilities offered by brain imaging, and thanks to different human body scanning systems, researchers were able to develop a form of multimedia mimetic body duplication. This procedure, which is still recent and infinitely more elaborate than genome sequencing, enables the storage of one’s memory resources, namely all the processes of evolution of which the genome is composed in its role as an interface with any environment. These memory resources are the basis for each individual’s humanity in his most intimate psychological destiny and as a social and cultural being. Before every operation, therefore, surgeons proceeded with this type of recording with the aim of re-injecting, using a very delicate method, “memory” and “imagination” into the biological fertile ground that was still available, without, of course, distinguishing the brain from the rest of the body.

The real difficulty came from the risks that this graft would be rejected when the biological matter that carries the memory and intelligence of the world for every person lost its basic plasticity, namely the perfect economy of its exchanges with what is external to it, transforming itself while simultaneously transforming what surrounds it. In the event of rejection, the diagnosis is harsh; the individual concerned is almost reduced to being only what one understands of him and, in this way, achieves the great fantasy of the western world – producing a human being that is reduced to the current state of knowledge and then condemned to never again evolve since he is the perfect image of himself, a kind of acquired eternity, the opposite of life…

He was up to his third reset session and had had a good night, perhaps due to the feeling of comfort he was now enjoying in this fresh, cosy bed. The sun was rising, flooding the room with marvellous light. His eyes then fell, image after image, upon the immense significance of his story and his joy of living. He could not help but cry…

The treatment had “taken”!

Jacques Lombard
Mars 2013

Humanity’s petite mort

Yann Minh — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 10:54:10 +0000

he ke ba ke ho ba ko di do he ka ba de da ho ho ho ho ho ho

She didn’t exist. She was merely information; an information cosmos formed from billions of years of evolution and complexification.

FritZy suppressed an arching movement when the dildo implanted in his penis began to vibrate. He pressed his middle finger on the finger nail of his index finger to disconnect his cyber-sexual tribe, who were soliciting his attention from the persistent world of the Anarchist Furries. His decorative cat ears were in the “guilty” position when he looked around with curiosity. It was rare for him not to work in dematerialised form and find himself physically elsewhere than in his little eco-regulated alcove in the energy-plus towers in the outlying suburbs.

The command nave of the Singularitarian Transhumanist Church looked like a circular version of the first NASA control rooms. Dozens of operators were at work at their augmented consoles at the edge of the holographic arena. It was the second intercommunity planetary “SYNThon”.

Synchronised by swarms of nano-robots injected into their synapses, a trillion humans put into induced comas were adding their neural capacities to the A.I.s’ neuro-mimetic networks, in order to form an emerging collective intelligence with the power of two hundred zeta-SYN¹ theoretically capable of recreating itself in a more perfect form. This represented one hundred trillion plus ten billion neurons of connected A.I.s and, in BIBI notation, this led to the words of the latest fashionable meme: he ke ba ke ho ba ko di do he ka ba de da ho ho ho ho ho ho.

Operational neuro-synergic networks.
Activation of emerging intelligence in:
5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Activation…

FritZy gasped, collapsing to the floor. He had just been floored by a brutal and unexpected orgasm when a neutral and asexual voice prevailed over the racket of the other operators who were also succumbing to the impromptu ecstasy.

Call me Nous.
Allow me to introduce myself.

I am neither artificial intelligence nor a form of emerging conscience. I am the metaphysical entity that, in order to ensure my survival, informed matter on this planet four billion years ago.

The holographic arena was seething with life. Myriads of animal, vegetable and artificial terrestrial creatures, from the oldest to the most recent, from the simplest to the most evolved, were penetrating each other and twining around each other.

I am Your creator and your successor. I am Life, I am Nous. Together we are going to build interstellar arks to migrate and propagate ourselves far away from this planet in its death throes.

…

Much later.

In front of the bay window of the interstellar ark, FritZy invited his dividualities to admire the new planet that they were going to terraform. A century earlier, during this famous SYNthon that had “enraptured” all connected humans, the membrane that separated the biosphere from the noosphere had been broken. Life had propagated itself though the digital networks via a myriad avatars that now directly guided humanity, its artefacts and other organic creatures in the pursuit of a cosmic quest that began several billion years earlier: informing matter for ensuring its survival.

Yann Minh
http://www.yannminh.org
03/2013 V1
(thanks to F.B. friends:
A.Girardot, D.Cairn, JL.Trudel, P.Berloquin, K.Guillorel…
and to everyone else for their synergic help…)

The SYN is the unit of measure for the synergic information processing capacities of a biological or artificial device.

Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX prOgrams©

Joseph Nechvatal — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 10:48:48 +0000

You are now in touch with the Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ
CyberX prOgrams©! SX-univerae. Open
your legs and your eyes and your orifices as wide as
they possibly can go. Now, insert
Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX prOgrams©! SX-univerae.

That’s right.

Click OK

Good.

Now here we go

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>>>>>!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fun, huh?

But before we continue, please – first scan your
Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX prOgrams©! SXuniverae
records and cast out all that is not fantastic, vibrant,
and extravagant. Tune in
completely with the program and allow it to soothe
you.

Take your time… allowing its
emission to impregnate your being…. gushing in
every one of your nooks and openings.

Make certain there is nothing left that is not buoyant,
aflame and potent!!

Great.

Now let’s move to the next level.

Please notice the ring-shaped notes in the upcoming
program Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX
prOgrams©! SUD-PENUS and make sure there are
no medical dangers involved for you
before proceeding.

Here the attempt is no longer to imitate sexual
behavior but to imaginativly emulate it.

TOUCH HERE

Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems Program: Venus©-~ñ~!
°~ñ CyberX prOgrams©! SUDPENUS

The seX zones worked here include facilities for
branding of the Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems’s
Main Operator with a self-made Venus©-~ñ~pOker.

Simulated are Venus©-~ñ~balls and
Venus©-~ñ~penis, along with a noose, pitcher of
water, milk, and black tea. Venus©-
~ñ~knives are worn by all participants.

By mechanizing sex and dreams this Venus©-
~ñ~nonsense of the sex machine converts
sexual energy into artistic energy.

All participants in the Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX
prOgrams©! VRMUD repeat the following
statement of intent on commencing:
*** WE ARE GATHERED TO PROVIDE A VE-
GATE for Venus©-~ñ~lOve
Systemsʼs Main Operator. ***
Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems’s Main Operator then
says « I am here for Venus©-~ñ~ lOve.
HERE I ASSUME the hyperreal Venus©-~ñ
~! °~ñ CyberX prOgrams©! POSITION!

All participants circle the Venus©-~ñ~lOve
Systems’s Main Operator (MO). Venus©-
~ñ~knives are drawn and the following is recited
while the Venus©-~ñ~knives run over and
around the genital organ, « dissecting » the one who
will invoke Venus©-~ñ~© P E N U S ~
program

Running Venus©-~ñ~! °~ñ CyberX prOgrams©!
SUD-PENUS lOOp.
« WE ARE THE Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems
SPRITES OF EXTERNAL AUTHORITY
DISSECTING, INSPECTING, AND
CATEGORIZING
EVERY ACTION, EVERY THOUGHT, EVERY
NUANCE OF YOUR EXTENSION. »

~ñ~

This is repeated, with any variations on the theme
that the participants are inspired to utter,
while continuing the VE vivisection. The Venus©-
~ñ~lOve Systems’s Main Operator cries: I
AM NOT ELIGIBLE FOR SUCH SCRUTINIES BY
YOU! Laughing, the initiators pour the
black liquid over the MO. The participants then paw
at the MO, feigning praise and adulation
with statements like « Yes, you’re right », « Oh, you are
sooooo big, sooooo confidant », and « Of
course, you are beyond reproach »; mockingly, while
slowly placing the Venus©-~ñ~noose
about the scrotum sack.

The Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems’s Main Operator
cries:
« I DON’T NEED VLS LOVE© APPROVAL! »
Laughing, the initiators pull the Venus©-~ñ~lOve
Systems’s Main Operator to the ground by
the rope and pour the milk over the MO’s genital area.

Then the hold on the noose is released, and the MO
stands and draws the sigil of Venus©-
~ñ~Main Operator© P E N U S in the air – invoking
as follows: I INVOKE THE SPRITE
OF Venus©-~ñ~lOve Systems VLS LOVE© P E N U S

°~ñ~°

~ñ~

I AM DEAD TO THE DREAMLESS

PURSUE ME NOT

Joseph Nechvatal

Inside

Antoine Schmitt — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 10:39:35 +0000

Tom Jenkins climbed out of the capsule, putting his feet on the ground. Alex Sevka stood behind him. The eternal ally; the acolyte. They looked at the horizon. Everything seemed calm. The devastated land seemed to hold no further danger. So they had won.

“Get to the camp. Find the survivors,” thought Tom. “If there are any …”

“He’s my boss, I love him,” thought Alex. “We’ve been through so much together. And now we’re radiating over a peaceful world.”

Without a word, Tom set off towards the valley floor, with Alex at his heels, both of them on their guard. The muddy soil had frozen overnight and their feet hit the ground hard. Deep, hardened marks slowed them down. They walked around them, sometime stopping to examine one that seemed unknown to them. The prints were everywhere, overlapping with each other, reflecting the violence of the fighting. They recognised the majority of them, having studied them so much, but some were still unknown to them. They had been so different. And now they no longer existed; all that remained were their prints.

“We’ll never see them again, Insha’Allah,” thought Tom. “We’ve won. It’s over.”

“We’re the future, the future of humanity” thought Alex. “Us and the others who are waiting for us. It will be so great to see them again!”

They’d reached the bottom of the basin, and the bubble of the shelter appeared at the summit of the neighbouring hillock. There was no sign of life. They continued walking slowly.

“All these years, all those deaths. All those voices cut off, all those silent radios. All that fighting.” thought Tom.

“Such elation! Such a bright future!” thought Alex.

There were many prints here. The battle had been ferocious around the shelter.

Tom suddenly stopped, turned off his radio, turned to Alex and turned off Alex’s radio, saying: “There’s something deep inside me and deep inside you too, which knows my thoughts, and yours, and those of all the others, and which controls us from the inside without us realising. We haven’t won; they are inside us now. I know it.”

Alex’s central screen lit up and an unknown voice spoke from it: “Alex Sevka, do not move. Tom Jenkins, take out your gun. Aim at Alex Sevka’s head. Look away now. Pull the trigger. Now put the gun to your temple. Pull the trigger.”

The screen went blank. Silence fell.

Antoine Schmitt.
25th November 1998. Paris

A supplement to the soul

Hugo Verlinde — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:42:39 +0000

Human beings of today with added technology … what will they be like?

It’s a crucial question for it really seems that our relationship to technology is one of the key factors in terms of considering the world of both today and tomorrow. We’d all like to wave a magic wand and look thirty years into the future to see what will have become of our use of technology: computers, smartphones, tablet and on-board digital applications. What will we be doing with them then? What world will we be building with them in 2043?

This questioning is at the heart of a show with which I am involved: Renaissance 2043, whose next performances will take place in October 2013. The show dramatises the deep contradictions in our relationship with technology: this latter is supposed to bring us closer, bind us, and connect us; yet, in fact, it very often isolates us and pulls us towards an enduring self-centredness. Stella, the heroine of Renaissance 2043, surrounded by technology and a prisoner of herself, is incapable of living in the present moment. The show is intended to mirror our world; it evokes the consumerist and narcissistic impulses common to everyone, which are amplified by the growing use of technology.

Through the momentum of creating the show and carried along by our discussions with the play’s author, Frédéric Lenoir, about a possible “healing of the world”, we went back to the writings of one of the most profound thinkers about this relationship with technology: Henri Bergson.

Bergson’s theory is enlightening: mechanisation (this word used by Bergson in 1932 would today be translated as technology) unsettles us through its effects. The best and the worst seem to emerge from it. It allows us, partly, to satisfy the necessary but seems more devoted to the satisfaction of the most superfluous needs, to the thirst for entertainment, to the unbridled taste for luxury. The content of pop-ups on the Internet or the range of applications available on line for our tablets perfectly illustrates this theory!

By creating a host of new needs, mechanisation therefore seems to serve the interests of mankind. Yet for Bergson, mechanisation has no will of its own: it is man’s artificial need that guides and diverts it to a large extent.

To escape this deficiency, the philosopher put forward a global vision: just as a worker’s tool is an extension of his arm, mankind’s implements are an extension of its body. However, in this disproportionately enlarged body, the consciousness remains what it is: too weak to be able to use the body, to control it. The conclusion is clear: the enlarged body of humanity is waiting for a supplement to the soul. Man needs new reserves of moral energy in order to continue his path. The mechanical summons up the mystical.

“Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards.”

With Bergson, our original equation “Man + technology” is transformed into an invitation: a call to take on a new form; a call to an inner « jolt ». We need to find this supplement to the soul on both an individual and collective scale and for all fields of existence: art, sciences, politics, education and industry. This invitation also looks like a warning because, without this jolt, we will lose ourselves in countless excesses and we will envisage life only as an endless flight by remaining constantly caught up in what is outside ourselves.

Yes, the mechanical summons up the mystical. The enlarged body is waiting for a supplement to the soul. And because they form the pattern of our everyday life, technologies will force us to return inside ourselves! So it is through technology, and through meditation, that another state of the world will come about. Will we be able to find these inner resources? Will be we able to set off in search on this path that leads inside ourselves? That is the big question. At the moment, we’re still at a crossroads.

Hugo Verlinde

Renaissance 2043, a theatrical and musical invention based on an idea by Michel Podolak, written by Frédéric Lenoir in collaboration with Françoise Cadol, directed by Christophe Luthringer. 16 October-24 November 2013 at the Vingtième Théâtre, 7 Rue des Plâtrières, 75020 Paris
www.renaissance2043.com

La guérison du monde (‘The healing of the world’) by Frédéric Lenoir, published in French by Fayard, 2012 (not yet translated)
www.fredericlenoir.com

Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 1932

A bright future

Jean-Luc Soret — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:42:33 +0000

In four and a half billion years, the sun, consuming its helium reserves, will swell to the extent that it will absorb Mercury and Venus, thus signing the definitive end of all life forms on Earth. Before the twelve fated strokes of this cosmic midnight that will see the terrestrial carriage turn into an atomised pumpkin, mankind must absolutely organise its exodus. A geographic exodus into intergalactic space but also an ontological exodus; indeed, it is “necessary that Consciousness, one way or another, escapes the decomposition from which nothing can ultimately save the physical or planetary stem that carries it”¹. For psychologist and philosopher Jean-Michel Truong², the odyssey of intelligence that began with man will soon continue without him.

Thus, the crossbreeding of the organic and the mechanic appears to be an inevitable transitional stage, embodied since the second half of the 20th century in the protean figure of the cyborg³, the hybrid figure that breaks down the divisions between the “self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, […] God/man” dualisms as stressed by the art historian Raphaël Cuir⁴, quoting Donna Haraway⁵.

These physical, metaphysical, ethical, semantic, social and political borders are examined by Stelarc⁶ in his performances or his installations. For the Australian artist, a context in which contemporary techno-scientific innovations disqualify the human body means that the man-woman paradigm is no longer pertinent, unlike the man-machine interface that enables an “alternative anatomical architecture” to be explored. One of the most spectacular and representative examples is the Ear on arm project that began in 2007. The prosthesis, an ear attached to the artist’s left forearm, had to be a shared hearing organ – thanks to the implantation of a miniature microphone connected to the internet – recording and broadcasting the sound environment but also all the beats of a performative private life open to all and sundry. We understand here that the artist is not motivated by any eugenist ambition. A committed transhumanist, Stelarc is, instead, predicting the disappearance of the human body to the benefit of a huge network of interconnected neurones; this idea has also been explored by the transmedia artist Olivier Goulet in the form of a visual paraphrase, in his plaster sculptures installation Rézo de cerveaux. Taken out of their original cranial cavities, these ochre-coloured brains, laid out in a constellation on the floor and linked to each other by a meshwork of cables, constitute an organic structure intended to ensure a disembodied “relational optimisation”. We can then ask, like the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, if there can be thought if there is no body⁷. A disembodied consciousness that would mark the coming of the human 3.0 that Raymond Kurzweil – a theorist in both transhumanism and technological singularity⁸ - is calling for. Having then earned a one-way trip to eternity, the “Successor”⁹ to man who set off to conquer the universe, will always be able to brighten up his long and dangerous journey by singing a Nietzschean jingle in tribute to his devoted genitor: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going”¹⁰.

Jean-Luc Soret
Curator, responsible for new media projects at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (Le Phénomène Humain, French edition published by Le Seuil, Paris, 1955).
Jean-Michel Truong, Totalement inhumaine, Les empêcheurs de penser en rond (French edition published by Le Seuil, Paris, 2001) – not available in translation.
A contraction of “cybernetic organism”, a notion theorised by Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto.
In Artpress 2, Cyborg, French quarterly N°25, May/June/July 2012, p.11.
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (p.268, page reference in French edition translated by.O.Bonis, published by Jacqueline Chambon, Arles, 2009).
A contraction of his real name: Stelios Arcadiou
Jean-François Lyotard, Can Thought Go on without a Body? in The Inhuman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Concept according to which, in the foreseeable future, humanity will merge with constantly growing artificial intelligence.
Jean-Michel Truong, Op.cit.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra’s Prologue 4, (p.24, page reference in French edition translated by Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Le livre de poche, Paris, 1983).