Est. 2012 · Specimen No. 2.2

The Museum of Vestigial Desire

GalleryEvolve

We are ahead of ourselves. Whereas common concern requires us to focus and deliver on promises, there is a neurotic urge to escape. Of course we never want to be who we are, where we are. 'The grass is greener on the other side,' doesn't capture the anxiety of the moment, the emotion of the moment, it just speaks of aspiration. It is a question of recursive multiplication, a virus, steam. Here the we is not the same as earlier (not just me in multiple projections), here the_we_ is the idea of the human. The idea of the human was a prescription, social and cultural that at best we have been able to rise up to occasionally over the years. It is not a description. We are not human by default. Or all the time either.

The tangential momentum of humanity's common motivation is to get organised and efficient to conserve effort and resources. And to be more elegant. The clean lines of the design I see in magazines tell me that that soon we are not going to be happy with out bodies. Bodies that sweat, need to shit and take a piss, bodies that complain though pain. We will need ones that behave like good computers, don't get heated on overuse, have no disease, are upgradable, don't smell, have accessories and are a mix of born in a cradle and bought from a shop. I am personally attached to the illusion of personality and personal identification. What will I do about it? When it is time to accept the evolution underway, resign to it, surrender, agree. I will think of the person as an instinct, as electricity, the systemic stimulus that lets gadgets breathe.

Into the fluctuation of the voltage of this electricity, I will see gradations and pencil in a full person. Do a naming ceremony afresh, call different ranges of fluctuations by different names of organs and erstwhile-body parts.

Our impatience with evolution to catch up with aspiration is a clash of two scales of time. One is granular, instinctive, throbbing, residing in the pulsating rhythms of our organic body. And the other is an urge to chase tangents.

Passion tags: Trigger-mechanisms

Passion, following it and hiding from it are the processes that describe the equations of all the stories in the world. Passion and the desire to deal with it has nothing to do with sincerity. Passions can be flirted with utmost corruption. The corruption of perusal is in season. It competes with distraction, disinterest and distortion to encourage inaction. This corruption is sometimes perversity, sometimes tortuous, sometimes basically sporting conflicts of interest. Holding something in your...

Individuality tags: psyche compulsions

We don't believe in you as a singular creature, born in time, living in sync with the meta. At an understated level every voice is a bunch of voices, of course. But we don't see the understatements, we ignore them. We ignore the subtleties of expression that individuals can muster. Characters do not have depth. All personalities are paper-cut dolls. We believe in multiplicity. Each voice in the bunch of voices I hear from your mouth is a different person. A different individual. Some with a bod...

The waiting room tags: architecture

The waiting room is where the slack catches up with us. Waiting is a good excuse to start breathing. Once you are breathing besides the flow of oxygen through your windpipes some other things also happen. For instance when you breathe, and you are in the midst of people, the stardust of broken and crushed stories flows into your lungs too. The perverted stories of the waiting room are not like the stories of the crematorium or the cemetery. They are not paused stories composed after a whole life...

Alternatives don't exist tags: re-configuration

There is only one system. Alternatives are not possible. When we survey the landscape of choices that exist for you, when we see how confused you are, we understand that you have been misled. You have been told that this and this is the central system and it survives in such and such ways, either directly based on the market or some secondary or tertiary layer above it, depending on what we are talking about. Then you are told that this central system leaves lots of spaces open and these spaces ...