WorkSpace Bruxelles

text of presentation for ExploreDance Festival 08.10.2010 National Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest

Humans as a construction of History, live now their agonizing apocalypse.

One year ago a group of scientists and activists started a project with the intention of exploring the possibility of a radical change at the core of human subjectivity. Now is time for some partial conclusions and some possible future scenarios.

Florin Flueras is interested in activism, cultural terrorism, institution hacking and perception management, a.o. he has a background in psychology, choreography and informatics, he’s candidate for the Presidency of Romania and a founder member of " The Romanian Dance History".

Valentina Desideri is interested in self-organization, change and creating her own conditions of work. She is head of human resources at PAF, founder member of ‘Sweet and Tender Collaborations’. She works for pleasure not for pain.

Iuliana Teodora Stoianescu. female. 26. performer. choreographer. visual art high school. candidate for the First Lady of Romania. love. future technologies. utopia.

The hero meditation

Ok, things are bad. The human species is fucked up.

Give up hope that things are going to change and you change. Change radically, change the understanding of what you are. You are a territory, not a subject. There’s no more I am, there are only I do, I say, I act…

Free yourself from the imperatives set by who you think you are, who people think you are, or should be. You don’t exist, only what you do (and don’t do) exists. This is a necessary understanding that allows all learnt parameters through which we understand reality to fall apart. When this happens, you don’t need to be courageous to speak up when something is not right or to question all authorities (including the internal ones). You just have to act in specific occasions and to know how to act you just need strategies. So you can go for devising strategies rather than self-improvement.

There’s really nothing to improve, we are already heroes. We have pretty amazing powers already, we have the power to think, compare, discuss and we have opposable thumbs that allow us to organize what’s around us. It seems to me all I need to make myself the world I want to live in.


Only it is very important to become aware of these powers first. It’s just basic logic. Clark Kent was aware that he could be Superman at any time. If he didn’t know he could kick asses, he would never intervene in a situation of danger. Same for us.

Now, a way in which I practice this recognition is through meditation and working while sleeping. It can be done alone or with others, even from a distance. In that case it’s important to get synchronized before going to sleep.

I go to bed with the clear intention to become aware of my powers, to become a hero. Of course I have no idea of how to do it and the experiences we had until now were very different. The basic practice is to focus on the breathing to enter a state in between asleep and awake. Then you don’t have to do or even want anything specific. All that you need to do is to keep clearly in mind the intention of discovering your powers. The meditation and the sleep are processes through which you become aware, so there’s no right or wrong, just see what happens.

apocalypse is ok

in general our ways of thinking and functioning are very much influenced by the culture, tradition, education and everything that comes from the past. the tendency is to let history answer the problems.. to search for models, values, norms and principles in history, all based on the past..

we cannot allow this anymore.. this model (pattern) works perfectly only in a stable, secured situation in which there are not so many fundamental changes. in a situation in which the grandparents and the nephews share the same world.. there the solutions from a generation can be applied easily to the next generation. in this kind of contexts it was the job of all the religions, cultural and artistic institutions to pass the values, beliefs - the cultural frame, the operating system from a generation to the next.

now we are living something completely different.. something fundamentally new happens, a fundamental transformation occurs.. even if you look at the statistics, almost all the parameters that shape our world are changing in an exponential pace. we are in an exponential accelerating transformation process. so in this case the old pattern of transfering knowledge, values, attitudes and behaviors can be actually the biggest problem, not the solution.. because it stops adaptation and evolution..

the problems that we are confronted with are radical, fundamental and the answers are weak, unaware or with bad intentions. how bifo said - only a mad doctor will propose the problem as treatment, but the mad doctor hapens to be at white house.. so the general frame about the crisis and solutions of crisis is set from the top of the hierarchy. the power try to save itself at the expenses of the periphery.. banks and corporations at expense of the ordinary slaves, the old empires or colonial forces at expense of second and third world.. the capital at the expense of precariat. externalisation or a better term gived by marina grizinic - necropolitics. but there is aso a good point in all this - at least the differentiation between the chosen ones and precariat will be more visible, the true intentions will be manifested..

our subjectivity is constructed and consolidated in the ideology, especially by a neoliberal frame of mind, how marina griznici put it, the reality and capitalism coincide.. the terms biopower, cognitive capitalism, discipline society, society of spectacle, society of control, arbitrary power or the concept of the Empire of Negri and Hardi are trying to catch this new manifestations of power that are so diffuse and are operating freely at the base of our individuality. the power becomes more perverse, more ubiquitous and probably impossible to stop. our core structures are corrupted and the instance of control becomes an interiorised authority.

the human as a construction of history, of the past, lives his agonizing apocalypse.. we are living an apocalypse because everything that we know in an increasing pace will not work anymore, the institutions, the ideologies, the policies are becoming obsolete.. how franco biffo put it - we just entered a catastrophic morphogenesiss.

it is crucial to have the force to see this as a positive fact. the "human" values, beliefs are the cause of the crises.. we have to go further, to surpass the human condition. a radical, basic reconfiguration is needed anyway.. how zizek put it - to accept the apocalypse first and after to see what can be done..

there is not a saving ideology, the problem is overwhelming, we don't know what to do but we know that we have to move on, to change radically. let's start by being aware without having a masterplan, avoiding the corrupted solutions from old ideologies that pop up everywhere. let's see where we arrive, to not be afraid of testing, of risking our obsolete human nature. if you manage to produce a mutation you create possibilities for others too.. there is nothing to hold on to.. we have to produce disidentification when it is still possible.. if it is still possible and we are not completely submitted already.. let's urgently start to create new subjectivities, to go posthuman.
so give up hope and enjoy the collapse!

Bilocation

Some of the physical symptoms of bilocation are:

A) Pausing as if in a daze
B) Forgetting what to do next
C) Waving the pen in the air
D)Misspelling words
E) A disregard for the surrounding activities
F) Rhythmic rocking or tapping
G) Decreased eye movement and blinking
H) Forgetting common words and names
I) A Dazed look in the eyes
J) Decreased body movement.
K) A wavering walk

posthuman empathy @wuk viena squat

project & project
posthuman project & empathy project (magdalena chowaniec)

Work meditation protocol (or how to avoid productivity stress)

Set a time-frame to work.

Name the work. Know what is the work/project/product you dedicate to.

From the moment you start working (according to the time frame you previously set), you stay either by yourself or with the people you're collaborating. It's not a time for socializing, it's a time for meditating, alone or collectively.

All you do during this time IS work. No matter if you're looking out of the window with an empty head or if you're wandering off the internet about related or unrelated subjects: it's work, and it's GOOD work.

You just stay open, observing the work as it happens. At times waves of initiative might appear, ride them. Follow through ideas, attemtps, try outs. If they go nowhere, don't get upset, don't try to force nor trash them. Let them go, keep them there somewhere hanging, wait for the next wave.

When time is over, stop working.

#2 transhumanism  poem

#1 transhumanism  poem

 

improve my spirit. improve my brain.
improve my body and why should i do that?
Humanists believe that humans matter, that individuals matter. We might not be perfect, but we can make things better by promoting rational thinking, freedom, tolerance, and concern for our fellow human beings. Transhumanists agree with this but also emphasize what we have the potential to become. Just as we use rational means to improve the human condition and the external world, we can also use such means to improve ourselves, as human beings. In doing so, we are not limited to traditional humanistic methods, such as education and cultural development. We can use personal different methods to improve ourselves that will eventually enable us to move beyond what some would think of as “human”.

 become a humanity+ activist

Extract from: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century – Review

by Stephan Scheel

The authors quote different examples of strategies of dis-identification. Here I will mention only two: Some migrants assume several identities over time and thereby enter into a permanent process of indefinite change by continuously reinventing their existences. This strategy challenges the prevailing understanding of migration as a unidirectional and intentional process: ‘Even if migration starts as a form of dislocation [...] it is not relocation but the active transformation of social space’ (p. 211). Another example of dis-identification is resembled by the ‘brûleurs’ who burn their documents before reaching European soil in order to avoid deportation. By refusing to be identifiable the migrants voluntarily abandon the regime of human rights: Instead of claiming asylum they enter a life outside of visibility in the informal networks of clandestine labour in the European metropolises. These two examples of dis-identification together with several others discussed in the book subvert the very basis on which control operates: the logic of representation that renders individuals governable by making their bodies identifiable. Imperceptible politics rely on the political practice of becoming ‘through which social actors escape normalising representations and reconstitute themselves in the course of participating and changing the conditions of their material corporeal existence’ (p. 81).

Entire article at:
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/04/21/escape-routes-control-and-subversion-in-the-21st-century/

- About the idea of 'imperceptible politics' they propose:
It is in the everyday practices and imperceptible moments which make up people’s ‘escape’ from a given social order that we can find the beginnings of social transformation.
...
’Sovereignty manifests in response to escape…Control is a cultural-political device which comes afterwards to tame and eventually to appropriate people’s escape. Social struggle comes first’(p. 43).

The term 'singularity' applied to intelligent machines refers to the idea that when intelligent machines can design intelligent machines smarter than themselves, it will cause an exponential growth in machine intelligence leading to a singularity of infinite (or at least extremely large) intelligence. Belief in this idea is based on a naive understanding of what intelligence is. As an analogy, imagine we had a computer that could design new computers (chips, systems, and software) faster than itself. Would such a computer lead to infinitely fast computers or even computers that were faster than anything humans could ever build? No. It might accelerate the rate of improvements for a while, but in the end there are limits to how big and fast computers can run. We would end up in the same place; we'd just get there a bit faster. There would be no singularity.
http://www.singularity.com/

humanityplus.org

how we become post humans

project & project

maybe in a process the most important thing is how to work, to find a concept for working, in order to do something interesting, "new", you have to challenge the means of production..

project&project.. is an open working protocol based on connection between two projects. the intention is to use the unpredictable interaction between the processes that are meeting in the same space and time, in order to create new dynamics - a synergic system (a system in which the processes are amplify by the interactions, evolving together and the result mysteriously is bigger than the sum of the components).

can be an alternative to the old models who encourage that products and information should be guarded, kept secret, and used as a means to separate for competitive advantage.. is based on openness - the possibility to transfer materials, knowledge, strategies, methods between processes and to start from not knowing place - to allow that this complex situation of connecting processes to find a way to work..

seems to be in the air now this shift of focus from unit, product, towards connection, link, relation. in a relation the other is not so predictable like yourself and this force you to go out from your territory .. project & project wants to provide the frame for the situation of being lost in the process to appear, to deliberately lose the control of the process in order to can go in unknown. to work indirectly towards the product, to go sometimes out from your knowledge and practise.

1th EVENT

terrorist meditation: 

allah allah allah allah allah allah allah allah allah

now we will try with these ones. a posthuman should believe in All

event protocol

a place
a time
an intention/proposal

+ announce it on email, facebook, twitter or how you want... don't keep it for yourself if you work on something, share...

everything is an event, a facebook event - a party, a performance or a university course, but also in the corporate world.. event protocol is a revinescence of the events from the fluxus. an event can be a mixture between workshop, performance, research, open rehearsals - anyway the distinction between them is often blurry, is a wider term that can cover everything. can be use as an education tool an open school protocol that follows flash-mobs model - accelerating edu, open, no long term program, instant, decentralized, sharing. the social media allows allot of spontaneity, flexibility, is possible to avoid the heaviness of artistic and educational institutions planning, there is not need anymore for hierarchical organization. people select the program for their education by choosing what events to follow, is not a pre-impose program on them by an institution. you will know better what you nee for your education/research than what a school is planning for you... your education/research than what a school is planning for you..

a coevolution dynamic will emerge - on the way, organically we will propose what is needed or, what will propose will be what we need..

strategy for "post" : continuous improvement. 5 corporate performance diagrams

inhumans

via valentina desideri

when do post-humans Show Up?

"Will the Singularity arrive within a few decades? Unlikely, according to most of experts writing in a fascinating issue of IEEE Spectrum examining the idea that we’re approaching a revolutionary transition when humans and/or machines start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software. The skeptics take issue with Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, described in myFindings column, that computers will be powerful enough before the middle of the century to reverse-engineer the human brain.

The neuroscientists Christof Koch and Giuliono Tononi write in Spectrum that their long study of consciousness has convinced them that it will eventually be created artificially, but not necessarily by reverse-engineering the human brain. They say it’s more likely to be done by starting with a fairly simple mental architecture and allowing it to evolve into a conscious entity.

Others quoted in Spectrum say we’ll be lucky to figure out the fruit fly’s brain in 20 years, and then it will take another 80 to understand our own, if it’s even possible. They argue that Mr. Kurzweil’s graphs — showing computing power exceeding the power of the human brain in the 2020s — are wrong because he has underestimated the brain’s complexity. The science writerJohn Horgan totes up the uncertainties and obstacles cited by neuroscientists and concludes that the old joke may be right: “If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand it.”

I asked Mr. Kurzweil for his reaction to the criticism. Here’s his response:

In general the Spectrum criticisms were de novo criticisms of these ideas as if I had never written about them. I have an extensive chapter dealing with all of these criticisms in‘The Singularity Is Near.’ These critics obviously have not read my book and have not read this chapter because they do not respond to anything I’ve written. It is as if they’ve just heard a superficial presentation of these ideas and respond without any engagement of the extensive discussion that has already taken place about these issues.

For example, I point out that the complexity of the design of the brain is at least 100 million times simpler than it appears because the design is in the genome. Even including the genetic machinery that implements the genome, the compressed genome is only about 50 million bytes (which I analyze in the book), and that is a level of complexity we can handle. We are already showing that we can develop realistic models and simulations of brain regions like the cerebellum and others. The cerebellum, for example, repeats a basic pattern a few billion times with some random variation within certain prescribed constraints. There is a lot of apparent complexity in the cerebellum but not very much unique design information, and we’re showing we can reverse-engineer it.

I asked Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist who appeared with Mr. Kurzweil at the World Science Festival, what he thought about the predictions for recreating the human brain. Dr. Ramachandran, who has identified circuitry in the brains responsible for subtle abilities like understand metaphors, said he couldn’t guess when or how an artificial brain would be created, but he certainly didn’t rule it out:
Obviously the brain is already a machine. It’s bits of jelly and you put them together in certain ways you get a brain. Maybe you need to actually get the squishy stuff to get the functions of the brain — you need messy biological stuff. Maybe all that matters is the software and you can construct it out of cans or whatever — we don’t know that. I’m agnostic. But it’s not anything mystical.

I’m similarly agnostic when it comes to a date for creating a conscious artificial intelligence as powerful as the human brain. Maybe it will take longer than Mr. Kurzweil expects. But I’d bet it’s going to happen, and so do even some of the skeptics writing in Spectrum. In his opening essay lambasting the unrealistic optimism of singularitarians, Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette writes:

The brain is nothing more, and nothing less, than a very powerful and very odd computer. Evolution has honed it over millions of years to do a fantastic job at certain things, such as pattern recognition and fine control of muscles. The brain is deterministic, meaning that its reactions and responses, including the sensations and behavior of its “owner,” are determined completely by how it is stimulated and by its own internal biophysics and biochemistry. Given those facts, most mathematical philosophers conclude that all the brain’s functions, including consciousness, can be re- created in a machine. It’s a matter of time.

Whenever that happens, things will get very strange. I’ll give the last word in this post to Vernor Vinge, the computer scientist and science-fiction writer who introduced the concept of the Singularity in a 1993 essay and still predicts that it will occur by 2030. In a rebuttal to the skeptics published in Spectrum’s special issue, he observes:

The consequences of creating human-level artificial intelligence would be profound, but it would still be explainable to present-day humans like you and me.

But what happens a year or two after that? The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly.”

And then what happens? I welcome your thoughts on what comes next, or when this will happen, or why you don’t think it ever will come to pass."

text by John Tierney

preparing humans for postspectacle times

the ideology of change is very present nowadays from the Obama campaign to the scientists, ecologists and contemporary theoreticians. seems that we are in a middle of an acceleration change period. the exponential growth is the law for almost all the parameters (climate changes, population growth, debt, species extinctions, energy costs, etc). the system is close to a limit and the models of behaviours, values and beliefs of actual human being are pointed to be the basis of a very complex crisis. and the "solution" that appear more and more often is a human transformation, a radical change in the behaviors, values and attitudes. upgrading, transcending, evolution, transhumanisation - this seems to be the collective dream of this years, reflected also in the recent SF movies like Avatar, a need for a new kind of human being, a post-human being for a post-apocalyptic world.

manufacturing alive artistic products:
the process will be focused on developing "florin flueras" and "iuliana stoianescu" as humans/transhumans/posthumans artistic projects.. we are curios to see what will produce a shift of focus from an artistic object - the performance - towards human beings. we are inspired by reality shows, documentaries, and hiperreality aesthetics. we are interested to question the life-art separation and maybe to go "back" to a more human approach - to research maybe in the opposite direction than the proposals from recent SF movies..
and the approach is not selfish - recently in science (morphic field theory) is demonstrated that if you change/discover/understand something for your self, automatically, in a mysterious way the rest of humanity is affected.. Our ambitions are very big, we want to change the world..

one practice would be to perform all the time (for some periods) - anyway we perform our constructed image of the self, why to be so restrictive.. usually the real life feed the work, the tendency is to transfer/express/investigate issues from real life into the work. we want to reverse this - to bring the performativity into life, the performativity to invade the normal life situation. we are curios to explore the limits - continuously working, continuously rehearsing this situation probably will affect equally our lives, our working process and our performance..

2 ways of working:
positive work:
to go ultrapersonal - psychotherapy aesthetic;
expand our real identity - to integrate in our identity foreign behaviors, attitudes and values;
using empathy as a way of embody different identities;
improvement practices from different cultures (like different strange shamanic practises);
affectivity investigation;
blurring the life-work relation till extreme;
love in life-work environments;
reality - mediate reality - fiction relation
twitter accounts, facebook and blogs to play also with our extended, online identities (avatars)

negative work:
we are mainly cultural constructed identities so we will try to deconstruct and create awareness about the cultural, social, national, familial, sexual, racial, artistic identities;
our self-schema becomes self-perpetuating - investigate and maybe affect this;
questioning the cultural provided relationship image;
diminishing the ego practises;

about performance:
we are curios to find a different ideology about performer - audience relation. all the intermediate steps between performer and audience are questionable (convention, representation, artistic languages, aesthetics). im interested in stage, not as a place for fantasy, creativity, imagination and representation but as a place for hyper-reality, not an escaping place but a confronting place. we will play also with the performance frame, trying to "escape" the artistic/dance frame - what is nowadays the difference between an artistic process, a philosophical, a scientific, neoshamanic-spiritual one?