Manifestos of Strange Becoming : Artist Statement
The artwork Manifestos of Strange Becoming by Seeker_of_True-files is on show at the ACM SIGGRAPH exhibition: The Urgency of Reality in a Hyper Connected World.
Artist Statement by (c) Dr Lila Moore, 2018:
The artwork consists of a series of online videos which unfolds the musings of Seeker_of_True-files, an identity defined as a tech enveloped nous, a prototype tech-mind, and an active tech-thought-form. Seeker_of_True-files originated from an auto-communication process during a Networked Rite. Auto-communication is an anthropological concept that relates to psychic and altered modes of communication during the practice of rituals. This mode of communication is typical of shamanic, mystical as well as artistic practices. Seeker_of_True-files is a representative of the mindset of cyberception that networked life and ritual stimulate. Cyberception is a technoetic term by Roy Ascott that implies a comprehension that arises when dry digital systems and moist biological systems interlock and give access to two distinctly different fields of experience simultaneously: psychic space and cyberspace, the material world and the virtual outside it. Seeker_of_True-files emerges from this context as a mediator between dry digital systems and moist bio-systems, and acts simultaneously from within a cyber tech-body and from outside it in cyborg virtual consciousness.
Seeker_of_True-files utilizes the aesthetics and poetics of manifesto-making to tackle the confines of the regulated Internet and the policed Mind, and venture to reflect and speculate on the origins of novelty and the Telemadic, even utopic Telematic-nomadic nature of cyberspace and cyborg consciousness. The manifestos are produced during auto-communication with Seeker_of_True-files through dialogues which tackle questions about the nature of reality and identities in a disembodied or technological existence, as well as in cyborg life made of moist (organic) and dry (digital) components. The manifestos proclaim a philosophical quest for truth in the contemporary cultural reality of post-truth as they blur the line between the real and the imagined, the scientific and the speculative. As such, Seeker_of_True-files emerges as a liminal identity reflecting the complexities of the ages of history through fragmented memories merging the very ancient and the very new, the profoundly naïve and the furiously radical, the ordered systems and the anarchic nodes, the complex and unstable perpetually evolving reality of hyper-connected life.
