Our method will be: shine light onto darkness and find keys. One person’s projection is another’s evocation. Radical action groups, experimental microsocieties. “Flicker”-induced visions and voices. Among these keys is the story of the Transmedia Explorations commune, initially called the Exploding Galaxy. Fall, tumble, head over feet, like Alice down the rabbit hole. The psychological “science” of Mindhunter, the way it attempts to depict the theorization of deviancy, fails to fill the show’s void of meaning as its shit-bag state-actor protagonists hunt its non-state-actor villains. The mind, bombarded by a rush of images from its glory days, succumbs to sadness and pathos. It returns to old riddles, old haunts. Helicopters, push notifications. The riddle of revenge.
Category: Uncategorized
Friday February 16, 2018
A low robotic voice speaks to me in another language. I imagine myself riding around behind set in a golf cart as crew members arrange backdrops for upcoming scenes in my life narrative. One of these crew members, watching me read David Toop’s Ocean of Sound and knowing that this book contains a reference to a famous London music venue of the 1960s called The Roundhouse, places in my path in a bin at Goodwill a VHS recording of a Doors show at The Roundhouse from September 1968. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and their crew Thee Temple of Psychick Youth bequeathed to heads the concept of “occulture,” referring to “anything cultural yet decidedly occult/spiritual.” It is by way of occulture, then, that I intuit meaning of some sort, evidence of a sentient other, in whose possession is held the torch of enlightenment. I now have a receiver station, above which may open portals out of which may drop gifts, each one a vessel or talisman containing instructions, tools for self-actualization. Access to unconscious powers. I watch myself escorted down into a state-run institutional facility housing the holding cell of the Id. Shadow-dramas of past eras play upon the walls. Under neon lights, we speak.
Thursday February 15, 2018
I imagine myself away in a psychic hideaway, garlanded with wreath beside Bay of Biscayne, spying unseen, like the reason-mad royal society scientists of Bacon’s New Atlantis, antennae out, receiving signals, telescopes trained on the world. I gather around me work that suits me. Using wireframe models draped in polygons, I build new objects. Mechanical Turks. And I do this not by exploiting teams of artists made to sell themselves piecemeal in an unwinnable race to the bottom. I do it, rather, by way of consciousness modification. Reverse behavioral economics. Hypnoses, trances, collective lucid dreams. What constitutes crime in the absence of democracy? Criminality is a response to the wrongs of a society. Mindhunter makes me nostalgic for when universities were universities. Spaces of critical dialogue, where students and professors began from an agreement that established narratives were lies.
Wednesday February 14, 2018
A curving rainbow path extends from a tiger’s eye viewed in profile against a starry background. In the time it would take for these stars to blink, the eye’s lower half morphs into the Millennium Falcon, out of which emerge tentacles composed of rows of cutouts of mechanically reproduced bees. This more fundamental language—visual signifiers assembled from scraps of pop detritus—is the one we think with. A conspiracy of forces, however, has stolen from us the various alternative modernities of our dreams. Our tastes as a culture have led us instead to remake reality into sequences of Apprentice episodes, Disney films, and bleak first person shooter franchises. How do we return to futures of nomadic tribes of ‘peace pipe’-packing hippies, hitchhiking and trucking along networks of cybernetic socialist settlements and encampments?
Sunday February 11, 2018
The apparatus in the chest of the Electric Ant structures light. It gives birth to some objects while causing others to disappear. Dick calls this apparatus the Ant’s “reality-supply construct.” “Tampering with it would be risky,” he writes, “if not terminal.” Imagine the process whereby an avatar acquires knowledge of its player. The latter would have to send the former clues. The gasp of recognition, sure — but where does one go from there? What does one do with this force in the universe that makes things happen? It provides one with a kind of drowsiness, a deep-dream state, this living within a fable, where things aren’t what they seem. “It’s hard to see the city from the buildings,” as F.J. McMahon sings on “The Road Back Home.” It’s like getting lost in a crowd and having to think one’s way out. Facts and figures float by as we wait for morning sunshine. Amnesia aids the merging of the soul with the brain.
Saturday February 10, 2018
Like Mayakovsky, I “see the one no one sees / crossing the mountains of time.” Consider this imaginary friend of mine — hovering, approaching, possessing me as I meditate. Marx’s spectre, pricking on the plain. It matters not where we land, I tell myself, as my boot bottom settles on an oil slick at the base of a gas pump. The important thing is to reopen the case of language and its relation to consciousness. The important thing is to track thought with thought.
Friday February 9, 2018
My mind feels caught between rival epistemes or paradigms. Minds, by a certain age, possess sedimented layers of knowledge — and everywhere, paths not taken, blind alleys among the forking paths of unfinished text adventures. Errant wanderings of restless hearts. But isn’t the indistinct picture, the blurred concept, often exactly what we need? Consciousness needs avenues down which to scheme and hatch itself. The same is true of communism. Inventing communism means inventing a game and convincing others to play it. “Today,” Sarah says, “is all about feeling like we’re trespassing.” How many years are we talking? The mind exaggerates the details. Cut to the straight-toothed grin of a southern white park official as he scolds us for disobeying park rules and walking on lands not ours.
Thursday February 8, 2018
I fell asleep the other night listening to a “past life regression” CD plucked from a bin at Goodwill. I woke up afterwards feeling a mild sense of confusion, but otherwise remembered nothing from the experience. What if I’ve been brainwashed, I worried. Had Dick Sutphen, the founder of Valley of the Sun recordings, succeeded in hypnotizing me?
Although the experience wasn’t the “ultimate altered state of consciousness” that the CD had promised, it did weird me out a bit—especially when my post-hypnosis buzz morphed into a raging headache. As I allowed for time to pass, however, this, too, vanished without a trace. I find myself instead in a new scenario, one where I trudge alone through the streets of my neighborhood, shaking off stress, exhausted from a full day’s work. I amuse myself by observing houses, assessing them as expressions of class. One wonders: How much of one’s facade is really ‘chosen’ in this society? For me, housing is paid into simply as a kind of happenstance. Trapped at all points in my life a mere renter. Always and forever, under another’s roof. To compensate, I listen to “Tree Vision” by Rambutan and stare into the depths of a mirror-night, reflected on the surface of a puddle.
Wednesday February 7, 2018
Marxism has always been a peculiar guide to consciousness. And by “peculiar,” I mean more than just “dialectical.” Cognitive dissonance experts won’t believe their ears, but consciousness resides ontologically at a level greater than mere smoke and mirrors. Part of me wonders, however, if by “greater than,” I mean “prior to.” This manner of thinking about thinking, like a body trying in the midst of practice to pick up and weigh its parts: is there a quality to it that distinguishes it from mere performative noodling? I feel challenged when faced with duplicating my experience of mind via words. Yet language is all that remains when the Cartesian self severs ties to productive agency with regard to that which lies beyond its senses. I prefer active listening. Selective co-production of meaning. When I walk, for instance, I modulate the directionality of my awareness as if I were operating an ambient musical interface not unlike a soundboard. Sound-objects rise and fall, as it were, in the mix. The best moments, though, I tell myself, are when awareness dips and the mix directs itself.
Tuesday February 6, 2018
The phrase “Libra sapphire glow stick” comes to mind as I walk beside a park remembering pleasures, abstractions, noise shows attended by the hundreds. Selves today would never permit themselves such latitude. High Maintenance uses its pot-dealer protagonist to motivate its posing of the problem of cognitive mapping in terms at once political, economic, aesthetic, and existential. Viewers get to ride in a sidecar as Ben Sinclair bikes across the metropole. Cognitive mappers should add to their reading lists Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. Where might weed fit in a practice of orientation able to connect the abstractions of capital to the sense-data of everyday perception? It allows us to conduct our research furtively, I tell myself, hidden in imagination along a mosquito coast composited from bits of psychoacoustic space.
Trance-Scripts 