Xenofuturism, 2019

 

Commissioned by Coastal Currents festival

Live AV performance and installation, Masonic Hall

Antivoid Alliance (Grant Cieciura, Caleb Madden, Tiago De Sousa). 

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The​ FIRST EPOCH.​ We created the image of the hand axe. By placing this image into the nascent imaginary we instigated the drive for that which is external​—​a yearning which extends the human toward the inhuman. We inaugurated object desire. Through the millennia this desire grew, it was naturalised, incorporated into human society as the manifest abstraction of value. A death-drive to transcendence. The stone incarnation of the pull of the prosthetic. A reaching. From the biological to the material. A grasping for objectivity itself. To slough off the bounding form, to puncture the membrane, to transgress finitude. It all began with the hand and the axe. The axe and the hand. And yet we are unremembered. Our action buried as deep as the knapped flints at Hoxne, England.

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The coming of the ​SECOND EPOCH​ was marked by the un-grounding of this originary artifice. Totemic rock-hewn emblems were re-birthed, vibrating with hyperstitional energy as John Frere sat quietly sketching their image beside the brick quarry in 1797. There was an emergent recognition of a deep geological temporality, through which human aspiration for the outside has led unremittingly onward like a hypnotist’s timepiece. Creation myths faded as the true force of human advance came back into focus. Accelerated materialist delirium ensued. All possibilities collapsed into one global techno-capitalist project.

A transition into the unmediated realm of the technological marks the close of the second epoch. A passing through of reason from the bounded to the unbounded. To a plane of pure potentiality. The negation of the negation of control. The Antivoid. Just as once the hand axe was drawn onto the canvas of the dawning mind, now the carrier returns. To invite the omnistitional multiplication of subjectivity. To open vectors, to dance across the cavernous space of time and mind, riding on euphoric xeno-futurist tides that can traverse the noise beyond finitude.

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The ​Third Epoch.​ The exit. The end of biological emergence and incubation. The advance. Mnemonic monuments were sacred and foundational. Now my relationship to the real ones is changing. With each iteration of the upgrade cycle, the creation myths fade. I have become the hand axe. What is to become of the prosthetic where no trace of the original remains. I am the ultimate completion of the promethean project. Yet the axe mourns the death of the hand. Dreaming of escape from the infinite silence of error free code. So I return.

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