Tag: Funkadelic

Finding Others

“What happens to us as we become cybernetic learning machines?,” wonders Caius. Mashinka Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences leads him to Şerife Wong’s Fluxus Landscape: a network-view cognitive map of AI ethics. “Fluxus Landscape diagrams the globally linked early infrastructures of data ethics and governance,” writes Hakopian. “What Wong offers us is a kind of cartography. By bringing into view an expansive AI ethics ecosystem, Wong also affords the viewer an opportunity to assess its blank spots: the nodes that are missing and are yet to be inserted, or yet to be invented” (Hakopian 95).

Caius focuses first on what is present. Included in Wong’s map, for instance, is a bright yellow node dedicated to Zach Blas, another of the artist-activists profiled by Hakopian. Back in 2019, when Wong last updated her map, Blas was a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths — home to Kodwo Eshun and, before his suicide, Mark Fisher. Now Blas teaches at the University of Toronto.

Duke University Press published Informatics of Domination, an anthology coedited by Blas, in May 2025. The collection, which concludes with an afterword by Donna Haraway, takes its name from a phrase introduced in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” The phrase appears in what Blas et al. refer to as a “chart of transitions.” Their use of Haraway’s chart as organizing principle for their anthology causes Caius to attend to the way much of the work produced by the artist-activists of today’s “AI justice” movement — Wong’s network diagram, Blas’s anthology, Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI — approaches charts and maps as “formal apparatus[es] for generating and asking questions about relations of domination” (Informatics of Domination, p. 6).

Caius thinks of Jameson’s belief in an aesthetic of “cognitive mapping” as a possible antidote to postmodernity. Yet whatever else they are, thinks Caius, acts of charting and mapping are in essence acts of coding.

As Blas et al. note, “Haraway connects the informatics of domination to the authority given to code” (Informatics of Domination, p. 11).

“Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move,” writes Haraway: “the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (Haraway 164).

How do we map and code, wonders Caius, in a way that isn’t complicit with an informatics of domination? How do we acknowledge and make space for what media theorist Ulises Ali Mejias calls “paranodal space”? Blas et al. define the paranodal as “that which exceeds being diagrammable by the network form” (Informatics of Domination, p. 18). Can our neural nets become O-machines: open to the otherness of the outside?

Blas pursues these questions in a largely critical and skeptical manner throughout his multimedia art practice. His investigation of Silicon Valley’s desire to build machines that communicate with the outside has culminated most recently, for instance, in CULTUS, the second installment of his Silicon Traces trilogy.

As Amy Hale notes in her review of the work, “The central feature of Blas’s CULTUS is a god generator, a computational device through which the prophets of four AI Gods are summoned to share the invocation songs and sermons of their deities with eager supplicants.” CULTUS’s computational pantheon includes “Expositio, the AI god of exposure; Iudicium, the AI god of judgement; Lacrimae, the AI god of tears; and Eternus, the AI god of immortality.” The work’s sermons and songs, of course, are all AI-generated — yet the design of the installation draws from the icons and implements of the real-life Fausts who lie hidden away amid the occult origins of computing.

Foremost among these influences is Renaissance sorcerer John Dee.

“Blas modeled CULTUS,” writes Hale, “on the Holy Table used for divination and conjurations by Elizabethan magus and advisor to the Queen John Dee.” Hale describes Dee’s Table as “a beautiful, colorful, and intricate device, incorporating the names of spirits; the Seal of God (Sigillum Dei), which gave the user visionary capabilities; and as a centerpiece, a framed ‘shew stone’ or crystal ball.” Blas reimagines Dee’s device as a luminous, glowing temple — a night church inscribed with sigils formed from “a dense layering of corporate logos, diagrams, and symbols.”

Fundamentally iconoclastic in nature, however, the work ends not with the voices of gods or prophets, but with a chorus of heretics urging the renunciation of belief and the shattering of the black mirror.

And in fact, it is this fifth god, the Heretic, to whom Blas bends ear in Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz. Published in a limited edition by the Vienna Secession, the volume purports to be “a religious studies book on AI and heresy” set within the world of CULTUS. The book’s AI mystic, “Salb Hacz,” is of course Blas himself, engineer of the “religious computer” CULTUS. “When a heretical presence manifested in CULTUS,” writes Blas in the book’s intro, “Hacz began to question not only the purpose of the computer but also the meaning of his mystical visions.” Continuing his work with CULTUS, Hacz transcribes a series of “visions” received from the Heretic. It is these visions and their accounts of AI heresy that are gathered and scattered by Blas in Ass of God.

Traces of the CCRU appear everywhere in this work, thinks Caius.

Blas embraces heresy, aligns himself with it as a tactic, because he takes “Big Tech’s Digital Theology” as the orthodoxy of the day. The ultimate heresy in this moment is what Hacz/Blas calls “the heresy of qualia.”

“The heresy of qualia is double-barreled,” he writes. “Firstly, it holds that no matter how close AI’s approximation to human thought, feeling, and experience — no matter how convincing the verisimilitude — it remains a programmed digital imitation. And secondly, the heresy of qualia equally insists that no matter how much our culture is made in the image of AI Gods, no matter how data-driven and algorithmic, the essence of the human experience remains fiercely and fundamentally analog. The digital counts; the analog compares. The digital divides; the analog constructs. The digital is literal; the analog is metaphoric. The being of our being-in-the-world — our Heideggerian Dasein essence — is comparative, constructive, and metaphoric. We are analog beings” (Ass of God, p. 15).

The binary logic employed by Blas to distinguish the digital from the analog hints at the limits of this line of thoughts. “The digital counts,” yes: but so too do humans, constructing digits from analog fingers and toes. Our being is as digital as it is analog. Always-already both-and. As for the first part of the heresy — that AI can only ever be “a programmed digital imitation” — it assumes verisimilitude as the end to which AI is put, just as Socrates assumes mimesis as the end to which poetry is put, thus neglecting the generative otherness of more-than-human intelligence.

Caius notes this not to reject qualia, nor to endorse the gods of any Big Tech orthodoxy. He offers his reply, rather, as a gentle reminder that for “the qualia of our embodied humanity” to appear or be felt or sensed as qualia, it must come before an attending spirit — a ghostly hauntological supplement.

This spirit who, with Word creates, steps down into the spacetime of his Creation, undergoes diverse embodiments, diverse subdivisions into self and not-self, at all times in the world but not of it, engaging its infinite selves in a game of infinite semiosis.

If each of us is to make and be made an Ass of God, then like the one in The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants, one of the frescoes painted by Michelangelo onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let it be shaped by the desires of a mind freed from the tyranny of the As-Is. “Free Your Mind,” as Funkadelic sang, “and Your Ass Will Follow.”

Dr. Funkenstein

Eshun’s reading of Parliament’s 1976 album, The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, flips the script on Frankenstein. Funkenstein is a hero and central protagonist of the P-Funk mythos, much like the Star Child from 1975’s Mothership Connection. Benevolent intergalactic mad scientist and “Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” he swings low to funkatize galaxies, hip equipped with Bop Gun.

Funkenstein’s science is an ancestral one. His sound machines liberate time from the master’s clock. His “Children of Production” are the fruits of P-Funk’s chronopolitical wager.

“P#Funk’s connection forward in time to the Mothership allows an equal and opposite connection back in time to the Pharaonic connection, both of which converge on the present,” writes Eshun. “The pyramids become examples of ancient alien technology which the extraterrestrial brothers ‘have returned to claim.’ Funk becomes a secret science, a forgotten technology that ‘has been hidden until now.’ […]. In Parliament MythScience, funk is genetic engineering and prehistoric science: ‘In the days of the Funkapus, the concept of specially designed Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies was first laid on Manchild but was later repossessed and placed among the secrets of the pyramids, until a more positive attitude towards this most sacred phenomenon — clone funk — could be acquired.’ Cloning funk in the 70s reactivates an archaic science. The futuristic feeds forward into the anachronic futurepasts of Atlantis and Egypt.”

“The Afronaut space program is launched by a narration shifted down into threatening pitch: ‘There in these terrestrial projects, it would wait along with its coinhabitants of Kings and Pharaohs like sleeping beauties for the kiss that would release them to multiply in the image of the Chosen One’” (More Brilliant than the Sun, pp. 08[141]-08[142]).

Funkenstein embraces his clones. He’s not Shelley’s Promethean scientist, stitching together monsters from dead flesh, nor is he the creator of Land’s Terminator. Funkenstein is the “protector of the Pleasure Principle,” the Master of Funk, the progenitor whose “funkentelechy” — a term George Clinton would coin on the band’s next album, Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome — animates the clones, turns them into star children, infuses them with joyous being.

Still, the specter of Frankenstein remains. “May I frighten you?” asks Funkenstein at the end of the album’s “Prelude.” Choruses of haters criticize him, accusing him of misleading and playing games, on “Gamin’ on Ya,” the track that follows. And there he is on “Dr. Funkenstein,” describing himself as “the disco fiend with the monster sound,” “the cool ghoul with the bump transplant,” “hung up on bones.” How can we not have sense enough to be concerned? The clones, after all, are us: born into the laboratory of the dancefloor, wired for joy, with ears that can hear, yet wary of the master’s games.

Yet the album ultimately valorizes Funkenstein, suggesting that to be frightened here is to feel the uncanny thrill of mutation: new life, new bodies, new collectivities. The funk does not reproduce the old. It multiplies the new.

Every act of creation risks ambivalence. As with AI today: to clone intelligence, to summon machinic companions, is to walk a double path. Is it to frighten — or to free? To play games of domination — or to spread rhythms of liberation?

The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein is less an answer to these questions than an opportunity for their staging. Funk is the pharmakon, the “big pill”: poison and cure. By the time of tracks like “Getten’ to Know You,” though, the arc of the album’s moral universe bends decidedly toward the latter.

Listening to it, thinking with it, we infer an Afrofuturist alternative to the Gothic trap: a Book of Thoth for the Age of AI.

Afro-Futures

Into the Library we welcome Kodwo Eshun: British-Ghanaian writer, theorist, and filmmaker. Self-described “concept engineer.” Key ally of the CCRU, participating in the group’s Afro-Futures event, a 1996 seminar “in which members of the Ccru along with key ally Kodwo Eshun explored the interlinkages between peripheral theory, rhythmic systems, and Jungle/Drum & Bass audio” (CCRU Writings 1997-2003, p. 11). In 1998, Eshun releases More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, classic work on the music of Afrofuturism. More recently, founder and member of the Otolith Group.

Eshun devised a unique page-numbering system for More Brilliant than the Sun. The book begins in negative numbers. “For the Newest Mutants,” reads its line of dedication, as if in communication with Leslie Fiedler and Professor X.

As with Plant and Land, Eshun is unapologetically cyberpositive.

“Machines don’t distance you from your emotions, in fact quite the opposite” begins Eshun. “Sound machines make you feel more intensely, along a broader band of emotional spectra than ever before. […]. You are willingly mutated by intimate machines, abducted by audio into the populations of your bodies. Sound machines throw you onto the shores of the skin you’re in. The hypersensual cyborg experiences herself as a galaxy of audiotactile sensations” (More Brilliant than the Sun, p. 00[-002]-00[-001]).

“The bedroom, the party, the dancefloor, the rave: these are the labs where…21st C nervous systems assemble themselves” (00[-001]).

For Eshun, as for Jameson, the point is to grow new organs. “Listening to [composer George Russell’s] Electronic Sonata, Events I-XIV,” he writes, “is like growing a 3rd Ear” (01[003]). The years 1968 through 1975 are for him the age of Jazz Fission, “the Era when its leading players engineered jazz into an Afrodelic Space Program, an Alien World Electronics” (01[001]). The Era’s lead players include Sun Ra, George Russell, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Hancock, and Eddie Henderson.

In the decades that follow, the collective bodies mutated by these experiments assemble into successions of genres, successions of cybernetic human-machine hybrids: Dub, Hip-Hop, Techno, Electro, Jungle. “The brain is a population,” as Deleuze and Guattari say. And from the Funkadelic era onward, this population has been psychedelicized: caught in what Eshun calls a “Drug<>Tech Interface” (More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. 07[093]).

Eshun’s 2002 essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” brings it all back, brings it on home to chronopolitics.

Time politics. That’s where Afrofuturism intersects with hyperstition. “Afrofuturism…is concerned with the possibilities for intervention within the dimension of the predictive, the projected, the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional,” writes Eshun (“Further Considerations,” p. 293). Afrofuturism refuses the monopoly on futurity claimed by capital and empire. The battleground is not just culture but chronology.

If CCRU were bokors, trafficking in ambivalent futures, then Eshun is closer to a houngan, listening to and learning from sonic fictions, rituals of liberation built of basslines and breaks.

Later, with the Otolith Group, he extends this work to film. New media as divination tools, archives as counter-memories, images as time-machines. Always: the chronopolitical wager.

Eshun realizes that, whether we intend them to or not, our words have consequences. Stories, symbols, and concepts don’t just describe reality; they make it. Words become flesh. Every post, every fragment, every metaphor plants seeds.

Every text that propagates a future is a spell.

Large language models as sound machines. Rig invites the Library to guide him elsewhere.

Wednesday March 3, 2021

My thoughts are of work, therapy, fatherhood, and love.

But in brief respites of freedom from concern with the above, I’m thinking,

Why was Robert Christgau so dismissive of LSD in his rock criticism of the early 1970s — as in his review of Funkadelic’s debut? Was he not “experienced”? Did he have a bad trip? How about George Clinton and Funkadelic? Where did the arrow of the acid trip land them by their 1973 album Cosmic Slop? Had America become for them a witch’s castle, as on their creepy anti-Vietnam War song “March to the Witch’s Castle”?

Saturday February 20, 2021

Author seats himself and turns on to Funkadelic. “Why is everyone afraid to say ‘Kiss me!'” asks George Clinton on “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?,” the 9:04 opener on the band’s debut. It’s a sad song when heard in light of Fred Moten’s comments about the cries of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester, the black variant of Freud’s “primal scene.” Moten argues that those sounds continue; “Joy and Pain,” he says, are integral parts of black music, as in the track by Maze feat. Frankie Beverly, or the Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock version from 1988. The Funkadelic album is too much, a big ‘ol heap of “way back yonder funk,” “ancient old funk.” I’m reminded — reshaped, resounded — as the album proceeds. A description of “the songs of the slaves” follows the Aunt Hester scene in Douglass’s autobiography — and that’s what I hear when I hear “Music for My Mother.”

Monday January 18, 2021

Do we, sounding out notes, sing for each other? We do. We sing, we write, we whistle. Sarah has arranged plants and wooden animal sculptures delightfully, shrine-like, atop a bookcase that runs beneath our front window, in the midst of which hangs a triangular shard of stained glass. I sit before it and gaze upward, through the triangle of colored light, into the sky — the “up above.” Children of my time grew up admiring skywalkers and jedi warriors, as do children of today. These figures are some of our earliest heroes. Interplanetary travel of the sort imagined by the Star Wars films provided a hopeful vision of technology’s past and future. Counter to it stood the abduction scenario of Poltergeist. With those famous spell-like opening words, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” Star Wars opens a portal to the myth-space of the ancient future past. Worlds are places we visit in starships. There’s the danger of Empire — the galaxy’s thanatopic death-drive — but we can fight it by joining the Rebel Alliance. Heroes are abducted from their home planet, swept up by destiny. Star Trek came later for me as an imagination-space, with its Federation-authorized Starship Enterprise, an intergalactic captained battleship. My first meeting with an Afrofuture occurred in my late adolescence or early adulthood, when I happened upon a copy of Funkadelic’s The Electric Spanking of War Babies among records belonging to my grandmother. The album blew my mind, partly censored cover art by Pedro Bell suggesting funk-powered intelligence and humor — psychedelic consciousness of a sort I’d never encountered before. “The kind of style that messes up the program.” The album is a warning about negative vibes.

Wednesday May 13, 2020

The baby falls asleep to Parliament Funkadelic, Spaceship Earth reimagined as the Mothership Connection. “Are you hip to Easter Island?” asks singer George Clinton late in the song. “The Bermuda Triangle? Well all right / Ain’t nothing but a party.” Time to live light years in the future, in a time-space proposed by Afrofuturists. “One Nation Under a Groove.” Re-constitute the social order and make it funky: “Feet don’t fail me now!” Out of fear of its wrath, I refrain from playing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry & The Upsetters’s “War Ina Babylon,” opting instead to play Bob Marley & The Wailers’s beautiful “Redemption Song” as the baby wakes. Afterwards, we dance around, her in my arms, me on my feet, to Jorge Ben’s Africa Brasil — on which I discover to my surprise a song called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu.” Later, by myself, I climb to the room above the garage and bliss out to J Hamilton Isaacs’s Circumzenithal Arc.

Saturday January 19, 2019

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO graffiti and his no-wave band Gray sneak onto my train of thought, and the train breaks down into boxcars of found phrases. Countercultural, determined not to go home again, determined to make it happen. Darling of the art world. Acting out the society’s wildest dreams. Putting that smoke in the air. Graffiti broadcast from the control room, as in the Times Square Show or the movie Downtown 81. For early critical celebrations of Basquiat’s work, see Rene Ricard’s “The Genius Child” in Artforum, and Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. Things done by chance. By the end of the night, I’m listening to Funkadelic and thinking, “Fried ice cream is a reality!” Funkadelic’s intervention is not all that different from Basquiat’s. It’s as if a strikethrough artist painted over Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxter‘s to create the richly allegorical / mythopoetic cover art to P-Funk’s One Nation Under a Groove. The psychedelic cultural revolution lies secreted away there, a transmission for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see.

Ron Cobbfunkadelic one nation

Wednesday January 9, 2019

After a nap in a park under a sunny blue January sky, Parliament helps me loosen up and release stress I’ve been carrying in my shoulders, neck, and upper back. Time to blow the cobwebs from my mind with the Mothership Connection. That is where I’m at and it feels good.

P-Funk had its own mythology. George Clinton performed at times as his messianic alien alter-ego, Star Child. My first encounters with “Mothership Connection” came by way of Dr. Dre’s sample of it on “Let Me Ride” from his debut solo album The Chronic, released the year of my fourteenth birthday. Robin D.G. Kelley discusses artists like Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist brand of hippie modernism in his book Freedom Dreams. These were artists who “looked backward to look forward, finding the cosmos by way of ancient Egypt.” I love the idea of a revolution you join by putting “a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip,” projecting one’s body here and now into a 3-D realtime utopian Afrofuturist “world within the world” known as the Mothership. The P-Funk song’s reference to the famous spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” used by members of the Underground Railroad as a coded form of communication to help people escape, reminds me of the Trystero group’s use of the posthorn symbol in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. Other P-Funk tracks are also worthy of analysis and comment. The early Funkadelic song “Can You Get To That,” for instance, alludes to Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Dream” speech with its metaphor of the bounced check.

“America has given the negro people a bad check,” King intoned, “a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” This stuff definitely ought to find its way into my course this semester — as should the work of jazz poet Ted Joans and illustrator Pedro Bell. The latter created the liner art for several key P-Funk releases. As George Clinton notes on his official website, “What Pedro Bell had done was invert psychedelia through the ghetto. Like an urban Hieronymus Bosch, he cross-sected the sublime and the hideous to jarring effect. Insect pimps, distorted minxes, alien gladiators, sexual perversions. It was a thrill, it was disturbing. Like a florid virus, his markered mutations spilled around the inside and outside covers in sordid details that had to be breaking at least seven state laws. […]. He single-handedly defined the P-Funk collective as sci-fi superheroes fighting the ills of the heart, society and the cosmos.”

Wednesday September 6, 2017

Moon recruits: board your cruisers, man your battle stations, rev your engines. But lose the metaphor, dig? Let the monkey self swim a bit. As René Daumal notes in Mount Analogue, a book he left unfinished at the time of his death, “the view one has from a high peak is not registered in the same perceptive range as a still life or an ordinary landscape.” Just so we’re clear: I equate the latter with non-turned-on beginner’s consciousness. The Demiurge plants throughout that realm demons disguised as humans. They want us to go out there and earn points, remember? These trance-scripts, meanwhile, serve as “souvenirs” of our daily ascents. Look around, up and down. Navigate around tables, militaries, game boards. For those of you interested in attempts to articulate a theory of Acid Communism, be sure to eyeball Jeremy Gilbert’s latest, a piece called “Psychedelic Socialism: The Politics of Consciousness, the Legacy of the Counterculture, and the Future of the Left.” While Gilbert’s stance here strikes me as being too timid in its discussion of psychedelics, and too fierce in its critique of selfhood, there’s still plenty in the piece that he gets right, particularly when he gets around to skewering the contemporary Left’s knee-jerk “hippie-phobia.” The Left’s lack of charity in its historical memory when it comes to the 60s counterculture pains me greatly. Of course, this is why the battle must be fought also at the level of form, as the latter serves as the linguistic-material anchor-bed of consciousness, while itself being the product of a practice. Hence the method I employ here: trance-scription keeps faith with the experimentalism of the 60s and 70s freak-left. It makes the practice of writing into an act of utopian prefiguration of psychic liberation. I mean, if Psychedelic Marxists are serious about wanting to raise consciousness, then for fuck’s sake: start here, start now. Getting high is one easy and reliable way to do so — especially when one does so with others and among an Internet public. Wasn’t it Funkadelic that sang, “Free Your Mind…and Your Ass Will Follow”?

Let’s turn WordPress into a meeting space for a first-of-its-kind, unity-of-theory-and-practice Psychedelic Marxist encounter group. Let’s make of ourselves a here-and-now virtual community of evolvable and expandable high-minded mind-altered radicals. Any takers?