https://spikeartmagazine.com/?q=articles/downward-spiral-rehearsal
Category Archives: theory
Jenna Sutela Stuff
We are basically a collection of bacteria, acting as carriers of bacteria and systems that allow communication between bacteria. The language that we speak is probably not the most efficient way of communicating among bacteria — it’s about being aware of “noise” in a system — whether that’s Martians, or whatever other lifeforms we encounter in space, or other DNA-filled systems. There’s this “noise” that exists, there’s a form of communication that’s happening there, a collective intelligence that exists in the body without language. An individual has this capacity for this living and growing intelligence: this ‘bacterial’ or ‘prokaryotic’ consciousness.
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I’m interested in what the machine can do with nonhuman data: languages that we don’t understand like those of bacteria or Martians. The origins of deep learning and machine learning, for example, are not necessarily from a human perspective. So I wonder if there are other ways of approaching AI — perhaps not as a replacement for things that we do or are trying to recreate ourselves, but to open up new sets of problems that we haven’t seen before.
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“I’m interested in the idea of the gut-brain connection and the fact that we consist of more bacteria than so-called human cells,” shares Sutela. “This sort of multiplicity or idea that we’ve never been fully human to begin with was really interesting to me, but also this widening or opening aspect to that.” With Bacillus subtilis — which is believed to survive life on Mars as happily as it hangs out in our gastrointestinal tract, and could well originate from other planets
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Human genomes are only found in around ten percent of all cells in the human body; the rest comprises of bacteria, fungi, and other protozoists. Bacteria were the first to breathe air and to swim; through fermentation and other macroscopic processes, they perform the backstage metabolic acts that sustain all forms of life; they carry with them traces of material histories of the Earth and quite possibly other planets.
This time I almost wanted to believe you
when you said it would be alright
you wanted to end the suffering;
And the deliberateness of the wrongs
were only in my imagination
This time I almost wanted
to believe you
when you implied
the times of sorrow
were buried in the past
never would we
have to worry
about shadows and
memories clinging
and draining
the strength
from our souls
This time I almost wanted
to believe you
when you spoke
of peace and love
and caring and duty
and God and destiny
But somehow the
death in your eyes
and your bombs
and your taxes
and your greed
told me
this time
I cannot afford
to believe you.
-John Trudell from Living in Reality
Industrial Slave
capitalist and communist
imperialists
smiling with false faces
beckoning us
with their lies about progress
wanting us to enjoy
the rape of the Earth
and our minds
Industrial Slave
forked tongue legalistic contract
chains
turning our visions into tech no logical
dreams
national security war makers
desecrating the natural world
and god still trying to get over
what you done to his boy
Industrial Slave
material bound
law and ORDER
religious salvation
individually alone
Industrial Slave.
-John Trudell from Living in Reality
“To be forced into thought is to begin to formulate the event of feeling historical in the present”
-Lauren Berlant
‘Paradoxical’ trait combinations yield particularly low payoffs: individuals with low choosiness but high effort tend to get exploited by their co-players; individuals with high choosiness but low effort waste their time searching for better co-players, which are, however, unlikely to accept them. The positive correlation between choosiness and cooperativeness leads to a positive assortment between cooperative types – an essential feature of all mechanisms that promote cooperation.
Gift
Daniel Everett, a linguist who studied the small Pirahã tribe of hunter-gatherers in Brazil, reported that, while they are aware of food preservation using drying, salting, and so forth, they reserve their use for items bartered outside the tribe. Within the group, when someone has a successful hunt they immediately share the abundance by inviting others to enjoy a feast. Asked about this practice, one hunter laughed and replied, “I store meat in the belly of my brother.”
…
Anthropologist David Graeber argued that the great world religious traditions of charity and gift giving emerged almost simultaneously during the “Axial age” (800 to 200 BCE), when coinage was invented and market economies were established on a continental basis. Graeber argues that these charity traditions emerged as a reaction against the nexus formed by coinage, slavery, military violence and the market (a “military-coinage” complex). The new world religions, including Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, and Islam all sought to preserve “human economies” where money served to cement social relationships rather than purchase things (including people).
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In North America, it is illegal to sell organs, and citizens are enjoined to give the “gift of life” and donate their organs in an organ gift economy. However, this gift economy is a “medical realm rife with potent forms of mystified commodification”.
Joelle McSweeney stuff on the Necropastoral (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/04/what-is-the-necropastoral)
“The pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism.
…
With my snout up against the fact of the Anthropocene, with my bill snared in fishing line and the blood pooling in my industrially overdeveloped chest and my meager thighs locked and a bolt in my bovine brain, I find myself reeling through an Anthropocenic zone I call the Necropastoral.
…The Necropastoral is a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of “nature” which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect. It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mold.”