synthetic_zero

Any change in determining conditions is never a complete re-coordination of components, but rather a complex adjusting of variable elements according to intrinsic properties and extrinsic force. So it is with base materiality and so it is with any of our scaffolded sapient worldviews.

This blog has been a lot of things for me: an extension of my personality, a platform for sorting of interests, but more concretely it has always been a tool for inquiry and expression. Since 2009 i have explored a variety of obsessions: from speculative theory, fringe politics, evolutionary science and ecology to architecture, art, depth psychology and popular culture – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and human encounters in between. However situations change. I have changed.

These past few months have been tumultuous with regard to my conceptual grasping of the world and its entities. Step backs and switch-backs and revisitations have led to intensive thetic mutations and shifting political sentiments. Living and ‘managing’ routines, needs and psyches in the context of rapid dissolution and continuing reorganization of the world-flesh by anarchic forces of production (hyper-abstraction) and pseudo and mega wish-fulfillment(as a multitude of egos amplified exponentially) has brought me to the brink. Nothing I think I know makes sense in light of what I am experiencing. Its time to cross the threshold.

I am no longer driven to pursue individualized intellectual processing. On my own I am a mere glitch. Nothing but a momentary capture of language and associations. But with others I become more: we become. As an assemblage our powers are increased and new capacities emerge. And it is only in the ‘we’ that the Eaarth and its woven sublime can be adequately disclosed. Knowledge tokens and bio-understandings are always (co)enacted and disclosed socially, as intact ecosystems. Only thru collaboration between elements and materials do new configurations occur. The Madness of one becomes tempered by the madness of the more-than-one so that whole worlds (as multiplicities and spaces with differential dimensions) can be devoured, transformed and rebirthed. 

So moving forward (and backward and sideways perhaps) I will be focusing most of my energies on a new joint project - involving Arran (from Attempts At Living) and lurking-linker extraordinaire Dirk (dmf) and guided by a shared concern with evolving more sophisticated speculative and praxis-oriented responses to the continued collapse of contemporary ecological, socioeconomic and ideological realities. Below is a basic outline:

synthetic_zero

about: Synthetic_Zero is a project designed to explore the challenges and opportunities of being & becoming human after nihilism. The collaborative approach pursued here is intended as an experimental response to the various crises, disjunctions and unequally distributed realities of contemporary life. At different moments this website will act as research tool, culture hacking platform, and crucible for critical discussion – with all sorts of confessions, carnival events and mutant encounters in-between. We seek to salvage and explore the various speculative and pragmatic opportunities afforded by established disciplines and traditions of inquiry (from philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, psychiatry, social work, and ecology) while simultaneously assembling insights and sensibilities from across the spectrum of human expression and engagement (from art, literature, architecture, urban design, indigenous politics, and various social movements). Our intention is to cultivate more flexible and adaptive modes of relating and existing. There are many ways to live among ruins and here we will explore most of them.

Archive Fire will continue to function as a space for personal reflection and individual explorations in rhetoric, style and self-expression - while all new formal and para-academic content will be shared at synthetic zero and will command most of my attention.

Thank you to all the readers, participants and the many supporters of this blog over the last 4 years. I hope you enjoy the new direction/focus here and please check out what Arran, Dirk and I are up to over at syntheticzero.net. Until then…