<documenta X><blast> Casa das Rosas Manifesto (fwd) <English>

• Messages sorted by: [ date ][ thread ][ subject ][ author ]
• Next message: Greg Ulmer: "Re: <documenta X><blast> home.Morse quote"
• Previous message: Eve Andree Laramee: "Re: <documenta X><blast> home.Morse quote"

Casa das Rosas faces the challenge and challenges all: to translate and to
codify a language that will pervade the leap to a new civilization. No
more and no less. It is not a metalanguage. It is a new language, with no
commitments or ties with the past. It is a quantum leap, a rupture that
leaves no bridges. It is a very uncomfortable although very fascinating
moment to participate and to be present. In this last millenium, we have
witnessed 3 crucial changes in civilization: from verbalization or from
circumscripted memory to the writing civilization or extended memory, and
finally to the electronic civilization or incommensurable memory. All
these cultural changes were provided by the technological quocient of
these momentums. The change is drastic and if there is not a translation,
there will be an existential blockage leading to serious sequels. The
Sphinx turns up, materializes itself at metamorphorsis times, and there is
no mistake in its appeal: DECIPHER ME OR I WILL DEVOUR YOU. Now there are
no plain truths but instead, parallelisms or insighs that navigate and
meet over this translation. We, from Casa das Rosas, have thrown ourselves
in this insight navigation on our pirate ship (the new is always piracy
compared to the old) and we forward a manifest-invitation as our rose and
skull flag to join strength with other insights and to create an access
road into the eye of the cyclone of this new civilization. The 19th
century finishes at the end of the 20th century. As we said above, the
technological quocient determines the culture of the moment. One of the
biggest changes in History occurred when the press was invented.
Guttenberg turns the world upside down. Now, you were able to carry the
library from Alexandria under you arm without fearing that any Barbarian
would burn down the knowledge of Humanity. Memory is extended to wherever
there are eyes for translation, that is, for reading. The same book you
have in your hands is also found at the Public Library of Piraporinha do
Sul. You do not have to memorize as the book-men from Fahrenheit-455 by
Truffaut did nor copy them at a monastery by using a feather-pen
throughout years to make each volume. And if the monastery should catch
fire, as in THE NAME OF ROSE by Ecco, everything will be lost. More
important is the establishment of a new concept: you are the center of
knowledge. For the first time in History, there is a democratic concept.
It was a new breath for a new cultural and philosophical ideology.
Monsieur Descartes gives the starting kick to the new era. COGITO, ERGO
SUM. I think, thus I exist. The other levels are questionable, but the
thought is irreductible, the pit of the peach. The greatest innovation,
less perceptible, was the construction of the first person singular. I
think, I feel, I eat, in short, ME. Well, if I can take my book (the
laptop of the 16th century) under my arm, I can everything. Have you ever
pictured the ectasy of this person for being able to express himself
freely? Not as a report from the past, not as an exercise from memory of
others, but HIS OWN opinion? He could WRITE, and even to print HIS
insights. He could have his book, even if he was not Aristotle. And his
peers could write their opinions about his book. Reader communities were
being formed all the time. Knowledge was democratic. Literacy became as
popular as our current computer schools. The glitter of having lived at
that time can only be compared to the reality of living the present. The
glimpse of discovering the body and the ME in renascence fullblasts in the
16th century. The world wonders in astonishment at the discoveries, the
new flora and fauna, the new nations, having everything registered in the
Internet of that time: the books. The kings were no longer heroes, but the
adventurers are, Columbus, Vespucci, etc. The Church, representative of
verbalization, attacks outrageously, for fearing its power threatened.
They were right. Inquisitions, tortures, genocides. Now, man Is the center
of the Universe. He possesses his own library. And then there is this
other titan from modernity: Newton. For him, man is not only the center of
the universe, but he also has a golden throne in the role of a total
observer. He can help God in translating His creation; giving dimensions
to the natural fenomena, the mass, forces, speed, inertias and discovering
the ways of celestial bodies, the nature of light. Man can translate
universe through his individuality. Science frees itself from the dogma
and through Newton and Descartes the modern times begins. The memory is
extended to everyone, open to all and free of Church control. Science
became a password, a parallel power. Knowledge overflowed in the following
centuries. Thousands of books were published. A lot of memory. It became
a need to classify the memory. To create a browse which would decodify
fast. Then, Ted Nelson's bunch and its Xanadu project of the 18th century
turned up. The French encyclopaedia makers, D'Alembert, Diderot and even
Voltaire and Rousseau came along as consequence. After having knowledge
classified, on surface, it was clear that the king was an anacronism. It
is incredible how a revolution movement always follows a moment of
ideological awareness. Fifty years later, the French king, who was a
synonym of the power of God and of verbalization, lost his head. Then the
gates were wide open. God was replaced by the Cult to Plain Reasoning.
Translate it for Science. A short Corsican was made the herald of the
modern world. The 19th century begins with the power of extended memory at
full blast. Literally. Railroads, ships, the industrial revolution and
Mister Darwin giving the Church its last blow. Faith becomes an
existential choice, what characterizes the moment is reasoning. The symbol
that best represents this century is the clock, after a minute comes
another, the beginning, the middle and the end. The mechanism of reasoning
regulates, explains and reveals all the phenomenons of Nature. At the
beginning of the 20th Century, the Royal Academy of Sciences stated that
almost everything had been invented and explained, except for some
details. Precisely in 1905, a few years later, a true bomb blasted such
certainty. Einstein published the Theory of Restrict Relativity in 1905.
The throne of absolute observer no longer exists. In fact, observed and
observer interact. Actually everything interacts. Matter is energy. There
is no outer reality. You create it at every moment. A huge turning point
of humanity. It is no longer Me, but it is US. WE, the universe. WE EXIST,
SO WE THINK. And we act. Everything is a whole and not a part. A part is a
whole. The world is made of an intercommunicating nervous tissue. THE
WORLD IS A NET. This concept subverted reasoning. Quantum physics turned
the planet upside down for good. Schrorindinger's cat is dead and alive at
the same time. This is too much even for Sherlock Holmes, the epithet of
Victorian rationality. In the thinking field, only Arts and Physics joined
hands. For intelligence, the 20th century began in 1905. FOR THE REST, THE
19TH CENTURY ENDS NOW IN THE END OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Could there be
dadaism, the Russian constructivism, Bauhaus, Demoseilles D'Avignon by
Master Picasso, Nijinski and the Nude Coming Down the Stairs by Duchamp
without the discovery of Einstein's Theory of Restrited Relativity? A
sound NO. Even not consciously knowing the green light to a new
decodification of the universe through relativist and quantum physics, the
artists received this information through uncounsciousness. The world is a
net and the information navigates like waves in a planetary nervous
system. The cultural knowledge becomes holististic. As the Church, synonym
of verbalization and of circumscribed memory, that became aggressive at
the approaching dawn of the ME civilization for it faced its impending
replacement, also the me civilization, once liberating and now retrograde,
also becomes offensive before its replacement by the US civilization,
eletronic characteristics or of incommensurable memory. The Me culture
identifies itself with its peers. Nationalisms. Whatever is different is
a foe. Genocides of the different. The peak of nationalisms. The nations
who better identify with the US civilization beat the nations who better
identify themselves with the ME civilization. Conquered and with the ME
civilization hegemony broken by its fuehrers and condottieres, the
democratic US civilization becomes the only one. It is when its most
significant cultural shedding overflows. There is a kind of a law or
contigency which says that the conqueror is conquered by the culture of
the defeated. Rome was conquested by the Greek culture. The United States
won the war against Japan. The Japanese culture subtly reached the United
States via West Coast. Sushis, hai-kais, floral arrangements and mainly
zen-buddhism. Although not favoring dualisms, zen introduced the concept
of sacred and profane and also the concept of religiosity as opposed to
the concept of religion. This influenced a generation that would be the
seed for a new era, the BEATNIKS. The personal computer is a book you
carry under your arm. A little more than a book, though. A universal
library. A line of communication with the entire world. Graphic Arts. A
television and movie studio. According to Mr. Negroponte, in a few years,
through nanotechnology, you will have computer-glasses, computer-shirt,
shoes, computers navigating in your blood stream, everything with an
intelligent, friendly and allied interface, taking shape in your psychic.
The first PC appeared in 1974 or 75 with the name of Altair in New Mexico,
USA.

Who invented the PC?

First it was the beatniks when they subverted the attitude, the behavior,
the cultural reading. The bravado Hemingway was a hero-adventurer like
Columbus. Fitzgerald was a representative of the crazy years, the
creative anarchism of the 20's. Pound, James Joyce, Picasso, Duchamp, Man
Ray were revolutionaries who turned the culture inside out by using the
Cartesian view, but using its contrary, its antithesis. The zen
religiosity (do not confuse with religion) swept through the USA (always
imperceptibly and subtly) until it reached the East Coast. When the
cablecar of insight passes by, only the most alert people board on it. It
happens at the unconscious level, but conscious at sensitivity level. A
rather crazy painter started throwing paint on canvases in New York. But
the moment to throw paints was singular and precise, sacred as the blow of
a samurai's sword. Syncronicities. The American painting started with
Jacson Pollock. The beatnik generation was the rupture, through the use of
an operational system of a different culture. The pulsation was no longer
on ethics, bandit or not, but it was on the flowing. The prior pulsation
was on the person, now it is on the syncronicity between the person, the
action, the places, and especially on the insight. Adventure + insight +
syncronicity + flowing + where energy throbbed + speed + Beebop +
repetition leading to poetic mantras + zen + hit the road + wisdom of
shamans + peyote + ON THE ROAD MAN, plus everything you can think of, your
Dharma vagabond angels, everything you can imagine, action is poetry,
everywhere you find energy, Baudelaire chewing peyote with Burroughs, Walt
Whitman babbling mantras with Ginsberg, Kerouac blustering the night roads
with Neal Cassady on the wheel. ALL THIS IS TOTAL PERMISSION as long as
you know the difference between the sacred and the profane beyond this
duality and know how to smell syncronicity. The most important thing is
not individuality, the most important thing is to be and to vibrate at the
right time and place. The beatnik movement eliminated the borderlines that
separated different languages: music, poetry, action, non-action,
meditation, everything was a single whole. Undoubtfully, the seed for
pop-art is found in the beatnik movement. This being one in a thousand
seeds that bloomed to a new form of culture. Without Kerouac, Bill Gates
would hardly exist, even though he does not know it. More questions:
Would there be James Dean, Marlon Brando, Actor's Studio, Pollock without
the existence of Neal Cassady? NEIN, NYET and NO. The 60's were probably
the golden decade of the History of Humanity. It is comparable to the
centuries of Pericles in Athens or to the 15th middle century in Florence.
It was the time when History left the archetypes aside and started to
broadcast in net. An intercommunicating nervous system in the planet. It
was when there was the need for consciousness expansion to beyond the body
limits. Aldous Huxley opened the gates to consciousness and Jim Morrison,
Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, the Grateful Deads, helped to fling the gates
open to their max. It would not have been possible without Burroughs and
Ginsberg's help and their Peruvian experimentations. At that moment, a
civilization was founded in another. From beatnik island to a hippie
continent. The moment of one of the greatest artists in this century, Andy
Warhol. It was totally possible to live out of the system, there was even
an encyclopaedia of this parallel living, the Whole Earth Catalog,
compiled by Steward Brang and his gang. Beatles, Rolling Stones, Living
Theater. High Renaissance. But energy was too much. A short-circuit could
occur. The 70's cooled down the enthusiasm of the 60's, but it was for its
own future survival. The 60's melted away like the Beatles, but it did not
disappear. It took refuge in the furtiveness, or better, it went into the
garage. The Drop-Outs had burned the bridges down. No return. A great
number of people deepened themselses into alternative knowledge,
chemistry, physics, biology, electronics, etc. And Buckminster Fuller said
that the utopia was at everyone's reach, maybe only a few steps away,
maybe in the garage. They went into the garage. And it was from the garage
that came out Steve Jobs's Apple and Bill Gates heavy ammunition. Brazil
is a privileged country because it bore one of the greatest cultural
decodifiers: Oswald de Andrade. The manifest Antropgreatest cultural
strategy in the country. It is about the deglutition of Bishop Sardinha by
the Tamoio indians. The transformation of a taboo into a totem. You
swallow the external influences and you eat them in your stomach. The
result is art. A lazy and aimless art. Like the character Macunalazyness
and aimlessness totally alienated to homo-faber protestant constructor of
factories and chimneys whose team is money at every second. There is no
business according to Oswald. Business is the negation of idleness.
Clairvoyant. Oswald and Macunathe second wave to reach the third wave.
Productivity generates imbecility or the least, a very narrow sight. They
navigated through insight. And to have insights, you have to have a lot of
pleasant idleness. We were already in Internet in 1928. The 80's lived the
fragmentation of the concept of nation through the collapse of the soviet
empire. The concept of nation, of nationalism started to be reviewed. Is
there the United States of America? Is there China? Is there Brazil? The
burden required to maintain the administrative machine of a nation running
is absurd. Not mentioning the war industry. A country cannot work carrying
this burden. This concept of non-functional nation is crawling in silently
and being replaced by a curious invertion. Mini instead of maxi. A local
economy works better than a global economy. Your neighbor is a better
friend than an ally some hundred miles away. Communication is not made
through the self-importance of power of the strongest, but through quality
meritocracy from the communicator. It is, then, established a new
communication approach based on democracy. In the NET, everyone is equal.
General Electrics and me. So far. According to Buck Fuller, the earth is a
uterus and the vector is the decentralization. If I have an insight,
taking the shape of ideas or images, I do not necessarily have to o Paulo
or in New York. It will be navigating through the nervous system of the
planet via internet, that is, to everywhere there is an electrical
connection and a phone. Survival conditions as vital as a kidney or a
lung. Still in this decade, the encyclopaedia makers from Whole Earth
Catalog become the most holistic site of the net, THE WELL. From the well,
leaps out Mondo 2000 magazine, the most plugged and wired magazine in the
planet. 1996. 3 more years and so for the third millenium. Basic ideas
changed radically and so did the concept of individualism. Richard
Dawkins, in his book THE SELFISH GENE, states that the egg characterizes
the nest and the chicken, that is, its individuality is a projection of
the winning gene. It is a zen concept of enlightment. You are a screen
where it is possible to create any level of fantasy, but it is the genes
who shoot out the movie. This offers a huge amount of freedom. It is not
necessary to invest much on personality but on the fantasy level. An
enourmous amount of freedom to navigate through insighs. But be careful:
the gene needs food. And its food is INFORMATION. At this moment
TRANSLATION. At least it needs a such absurd translation as does this
civilization trying to create a bridge to reach another civilization. The
world is not like science-fiction. The world is sci-fi, a kind of
Kafka-Burroughs-Gibson, a replicant-neoromancer. Nanotechnology,
bio-engeneering, criogenesis, science of frontiers, perception beyond body
limits are a rather bizarre scenery for the humanist from the past century
we still are. So there is the need to create new concepts for ethics,
behavior, grouping, communication, arts. Without a bridge, a big surf.
With a bridge, just goof off. nio e npouco foi feito. Um ano em 1950
equivale a uma semana agora. Mesmo assim esta um saco o pescar nada. Em
rela o a arte -- uma experimenta o muito pobre. o vai ser um
nanocomputador na sua corrente sanguinea que vai te transformar num
Leonardo da Vinci. A rede te torna passivo, uma vaca ruminando no monitor
colorido. o tem o mto de se tornar criativo ou a rede se transforma num
parque de o idiota ou numa terapia de grupo mediocre. ecessm deste
momento. Precisamos de Hipertextos GENIAIS. Grandes VoOS. Cultural
decodification or transcodification means to make events and people
timeless, to take them out of a single, temporary, circumscribed context
and to make them universal inside a universal, pluralistic, alive and
throbbing context. Let us take Goethe as an example. The symbol of German
culture. Das Kultur. What a pain! The guy is a monument, and he was
dissecated, made a saint and depicted in statues to serve as propaganda to
a mediocre and xenophobic nationalism. Every nationalism is mediocre. This
is also valid for Moliere, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Cervante, Cams, Dante
Alighieri, the list is long. These genii were castrated, made mediocre,
all for the sake of propaganda. Let us revitalize Goethe through a
timeless approach. He lived during a period of fervent cultural
flourishing with intense information exchange. Goethe not only was a
writer, for this concept of specialization did not exist in classicism,
but he was also an expert in botanics, geology, archeology, physics,
music, etc. His knowledge and information made up a whole, it was much
more vivid than the myopia of specialization originated from the
industrial revolution of the century after his. He spoke of colors,
insects, geological eras with the same passion he spoke of Werther and
Fausto. He played the cello. Just think of a duet having Goethe playing
the cello and Jimi Hendrix the guitar. This impossible feat is totally
possible if we escape from the strait-jacket of a backward cultural
concept based on time, nationalism and specialization. Another example of
cultural decodification was the discovery of Arthur Bispo do Rosario, a
poor, black and schizophrenic painter, at a sanatory where he accomplished
one of the most contemporaneous artworks in Brazil, by embroidering
bedsheets or through his collections of sandals or plastic bottles, vivid
symbols of his codification or translation of the history of humanity
originated from himself. Together with H lio Oiticica, these are
universalizations of art. Or the CD Roots of the band Sepultura, playing
heavy metal with the indians from Xingu. Our roots are rammed in the
nervous tissues of the planet, our roots are our insights. Our job is
simple. Just throw away past concepts that are no longer good. Throw away
the garbbage and bring back pearls from the past to the present. An 11th
century poet could not be more alive and updated than Quentin Tarantino.
And navigating even further, there is no past nor present. There is only
the insight.

Jose Roberto Aguilar, May 19, 1996.