Speculative Machines: Recent Episodes
Speculative Machines
Electronic soundscapes transmitting from a speculative posthuman microcosm.
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"Since each body will carry a different set of tendencies and capacities, there is no guarantee that they will act in unison even if they are cued in concert. " - Brian Massumi Keywords for Affect
A sudden stroke of night, another item for the catalog of objects we filter through the onslaught of our senses.
Pan to the left, pan to right or spin in surround sound, but the panning is the primary creature.
Our protein base is not the weakness. Digital dissection, breakdown and compression taint the stench of the knowledge economy, surveillance technologies, and privileged access. The time to mammalize is now.
In the victories of artificial intelligence, the win is forever artificial. One player built through decades of research, millions of investment dollars, and teams of engineers and programmers. The fleshy other made with one night of too much wine and not enough birth control. The optical-steroid dice are loaded in these staged competitions, the games fixed down to binary level. Is it really a win in games like Jeopardy or Chess on behalf of the industrial business machine?
Typically, we refer to them as server farms, but the ritual is the same. Like the Golem, we harvest the earthen material, then shape it as needed. Words are then written into the material body. Once written, they mindlessly execute the intention of their creators. The Golems are born, but we call them server farms now.
The citizen goes extinct. We are all consumers now. Consumer micro droplets, lubricant for a global economic autonomous machine. It grinds away indifferent to our wants, desires and needs. Every drop plants the seed of NO! its own particular way. The tweet, the repost, the photo, the sign, the march, the punch. The NOs grow, multiply, swell and swarm into the massive horde. A swarming horde echoing infinite variations of #resist
Step outside to see any random cess pool. Stir it with a stick and stare into the swirls. This green swampy parliament of things is the oldest history. Look at this primordial soup to see our oldest home, our oldest womb.
Our biochemical instructions are there for the taking. Like a choice James Brown sample, our DNA will be re-sampled, recycled, glitched, chopped and screwed.
How does the vowel or consonant work when it never passes from the human voice? Imagine the sounds for the languages to help the aardvark, the radioisotope, the faux sentient program or the piano key connecting to the mesh of their places. The pulses, clicks and pops to speak experiences we can never hear.
To hear, to see, to touch and then to know. We do it in the habit of humans. Don’t think different. Think Alien!
The mammalian knob turns down the anthropo-affected habit of the campy, the kitschy, linguistic beer goggles and the ironic wink. The hymns rotted away so we sing the carbon date. The hominids were not invited, so the jelly fish click ‘interested’. The Singularity knob turns up while humming to the tasks of its house cleaning. Peep through the key hole to see the silicon solipsystem at work. That gloryhole is a USB port, your meatware is obsolete. How does 4-on-the-floor work in 4 dimensional space time? Most planets make instrumental music. Listen to anthems for the unoccupied universe, the other 99.99999999999999 percent. Can slime-molds carry their own tune? Make Alternative Music with pheromones. Hear lonely mating calls of the first tardigrade walking the surface of Mars. Yodels echo across a canny valley, from cheap android knock-offs awkwardly mimicking the wet bios of analog song birds. The Plastiscene era begins spinning in the center of the Pacific. Try the Cambrian Explosion as a tape loop. We thought, therefore we were. Our time is up. Mark the period in the last chapter as a pale blue dot. The roaches get the VIP room at midnight. Last call for you, monkey-boy.
We were never alone. Before the first telescope, before the first written word, before the opposable thumb, the invasion happened. The viruses clicked into position to hitch rides in our DNA. The microbes possessed our insides to ferment food and instinct. Our fantasy of the self is a realism of micro and macro cosmoses. Our free wills are the by products of massive and systemic symbiosis. Let the tentacles unwind, the work is incomplete.