I organised group listening workshops before a performance evening in Spanners, Brixton from my collective Roca. We thought by meeting outside in a park and then walking to the club together it would increase the intimacy potential of our event. This footage is from our 3D immersive surround sound system!
Last Summer we organised multiple outdoor events with a radio system to transmit and amplify live performances without needing a lot of equipment. For this event it was not possible to set up the radio system so I thought we could do some shared activities together. For this activity, one or more people are instructed to stand with their eyes closed. The rest of the group circle around them and make sounds.
At the beginning of the activity we were quite playful and wanted to surprise eachother. It was clear that the soundmaking position was as stimulating for the participants as the listener postion. I felt it was so are that I improvise with my voice, that I didn’t know what to expect when my body tried to make a new sound. People enjoyed playing together and making eachother laugh.
The participants had different reactions in the listener position. People quickly became overwhelmed when there were lots of soundmakers moving quickly around the space. It became clear that the soundmakers should intend a calm experience for the listener. When they slowed down and made quieter sounds, the listeners were able to focus more on the subtleties and the wider soundscape beyond, bringing a calm sensuality of space and motion. Most people enjoyed the quieter sounds more. If I organise this activity again I would like to add an instruction for quietness or subtley, perhaps as a place to arrive at or throughout the activity.
I noticed people would be curious to ask how it went for the listener and discuss the process together. When I was the listener, I felt a playful connection and warmth from the soundmakers. With the right intentions I imagine this practice to build intimacy between people, their environment and their own bodies. I am very interested to pursue research into group soundmaking and listening practices in my final year!
While I am engaged in terrible research about the end of humanity, doing activities like this make me feel hopeful about what simple practices can do for our sense of togetherness and environment. I am interested in how elaborate and abstract theory (end of the world) can inform simple accessible practices for constructive purposes (new worlds :D). The end of the world as we know it means we have an opportunity to imagine and connect in new ways.
This is my passionate belief in what immersivity can mean and a critique of the term’s usage in virtual reality development.
In this chapter Bifo forms a great analysis of the affects of cognitive labour on our bodies, psyches and social relationships. Bifo loosely determines cognitive labour as paid employment and freelancing “creative” work that involves the processing and communicating of information. It seems that our general behaviours on digital media for communication and entertainment cause similar affects. The distinction between “pleasure” activities and “labour” activities is put into question.
Bifo describes how the competitive nature of cognitive labour isolates us from each other. We see other workers as competition and therefore we lose solidarity. Bifo claimes that due to automation of manual labour, it has become possible to reduce the entire production process to exchange of information. Virtual information is expanded towards infinity driven by the profit motives of the economic machine. Survival and competition becomes a semiotic production of symbols no longer based on sufficiency but infinitely expanding due to the infinite capacity of virtual information and the profit incentives of this production.
Bifo descibes the destructive nature of cognitive labour: “An infinite velocity of exposure to signs percieved as vital to the survival of the organism produces a perceptive, cognitive and psychic stress culminating in dangerous acceleration of all vital functions, such as breathing and heart beat, leading to collapse.”
Since cognitive workers are dependent on this labour for their own survival (duh :P) (or hm?), the signs they are exposed to are deemed crucial to this survival. What happens when the signs are changing too quickly to be able to comprehend their meaning, while chasing after them in belief of our dependence on them?
(What is our emotional dependence on social mass media?)
Bifo points out this is not an isolated individual experience. It is the formation of a collective panic, but it seems to create a feedback loop of self isolation. As we collectively panic our ability to care and support each other is weaker than the tendency to isolate and reach for the semi present connection we can recieve online.
Collective panic can lead to aggression and hate in small local bursts or in large, even national or international formations such as border policies, financial crashes and geopolitical conflicts. Bifo imagines this is not a problem that can be dealt with political persuasion or punishment by law, since it is not a political problem but cognitive stress based on the “infosphere’s excess.”
A question emerges: How can we manage and heal cognitive stress in an ever changing environment, when our own survival seems to depend on engaging with the “infosphere’s excess” to find work and make sense of what is going on?
Bifo proposes that a priviledged “virtual class” can isolate themselves from the physical destruction through virtual spaces. “The removal of corporeality is a guarantee of endless happiness, but naturally a frigid and false one, because it ignores, or rather removes, corporeality: not only that of others, but even one’s own, negating mental labour, sexuality and mental mortality.” By spending time in virtual spaces such as social media we can remove ourselves from the physicality of the pain of other bodies and also our own. Bifo proposes we need to analyse the virtual class in corporeal, historical and social terms to rematerialise virtual lifestyles.
I would like to hypothesize a manifesto of action to be derived from Bifo’s critique. We can aim to reduce our time in digital space, which has the capacity to produce an excess of information towards infinity and therefore leads to cognitive stress. We can aim to reduce our time in specific online platforms that use manipulative algorithms to entangle our attention and emotions into more cognitive labour. While the medium of a virtual space is problematic, certain platforms can be more stressful than others in the way our survival and social ranking is semiotized through likes, followers and instant messaging. These platforms encourage a competitive nature and lead to as much isolation as their proposed connective capactities. We can integrate embodiement practices into our lifestyles to reduce cognitive stress. If a person does not feel safe to engage with their body there are forms of therapy available to help heal towards embodiment. Of course humans have been practicing “embodiment” in different ways since recorded histories and the term is overly simplified. If we look within but particularly beyond western medical sciences we can find incredible resources for healing cognitive stress.
Another way we could collectively deal with cognitive stress could be to increase our disembodiement. Imagine transhumanist biotechnologies that reduce the tension between the human and the machine, junk media that destimulates our imagination and desire, and hyperstimulating experiences that work as a vaccine for cognitive overload. I imagine these already exist in many forms, whether it is hardcore club experiences as vaccination, netflix as sedation or developments in immersive reality technologies that reduce our sensorial seperation between the real and the virtual. I think that these behaviours can be seen coping mechanisms for our current worlds. They can help each of us in different ways, but we may have confused these states of “frigid happiness” as something to strive for rather than a temporary release from suffering.
Not everyone has access to frigid happiness. Neither has all manual labour been automated. Bifo has made a sturdy critique by fixating on a certain part of the labour force, but what does it mean about other humans who are outside of the “virtual class”? I am confused by his projections of a collective psychosocial collapse from cognitive labour when many human bodies are still carrying out manual labour all around the world, without which the virtual class could not survive. Why is Bifo fixating on this class of humans when they represent a small minority? He writes “I’ll focus on the most innovative and specific forms (of labour), since they represent the trend that is transforming the whole of production.” I guess Bifo discusses what he can relate to, which reveals the limitations of his point of view and future predictions.
I am also carrying out my research on cognitive labour as a form of cognitive labour, disembodied from the mass of infastructure and other bodies that makes it possible for me to type, read, compose on my DAW, eat food and generally survive day to day.
An exploration on forming a definition for the heart/humanity, and notes on “The Soul At Work” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.
If the heart is impure, contaminated by otherness, then what could it possibly signify? What means a story of connectedness when alienation is constant? It seems the story of the heart is ripe with problems, bordering religious. It needs to be made flexible!
But is some idea of essence, of humanity, necessary in order to prove the wrongness of exploitation? Humanity is in evolution and therefore remains undefined in it’s present moment. The recent steps we make are unsettled and barely noticeable while our technological development makes it seem our evolution is accelerating. When “humanity” is totally subjective, then a total submission to machine intelligence becomes possible. Is this evolution of humanity or something else?
Herbert Marcuse, a radical philosopher from Berlin wrote this in 1964: “The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of (hu)man.” I am fascinated by the idea of a fetter of liberation: I feel this is an essential point we need to make towards our techno-optimistic cultures. To fetter, to chain, to restrain…
Bifo connects this to our economic model: “The economy, like a general semiotic cage, forbids the development of the potential still existing in the material and intellectual structure of technology.” The incredible infastructrucal development of our technologies loses any potential of radical social liberation due to the economic model they depend on. While capital “diminishes labour time in the necessary form” it tends “to increase it in the superflous form.” Only through superflous labour activity can we value an excess of production.
So through semiotization, a capitalist realism perhaps, our technological development can only function under a specific system of value making, where it loses possibility of total social liberation. Partial social liberation is essential to foster an emotional dependence with new technology. This emotional dependence will supply the new value making system with endless energy (superflous activity). The heart is entangled with the machine. I don’t believe we will be satiated through further development, but it seems like an inevitable cycle of longing and curiousity. Perhaps the only hope is restriction of possibility due to the collapse of material infastructures and semiotic production that leaves a gap for new thinking and new constructions. I imagine this collapse is already occuring so we don’t need to accelerate destruction but start imagining and building our healthier societies together.
To make the heart spectral… if the heart is an active position towards our encounters, then it does not represent a lost human essence but rather an idea of our potential. An active position depends on what is around us, a way of being that evolves with the surroundings, not lost but unwritten, capable of being wrote collectively, and wrote again.
Knowledge production: Human knowledge is not revealing/excavating truth, it is instead a feedback between our active comprehension that reacts and acts into our encounters, being formed by and forming with our environment. “TRUTH” is transformed as it is discovered, meaning that knowledge is produced. Let’s imagine a vulnerable encounter, a proclomation to love! Imagining might transform what becomes possible.
Different holy states remain undiscovered in your now world. Hunt it with open wings and pores, shifting your position so the light tastes different. The end of the world is not enough to put your heart out… if your body can survive then let “the world” get out of the way to reveal the jittery bouncing of world-making things that tickle within and around your wingspan. Flying; you are flying but you are not. Go fly!
Listening with machine. Holding the walls open. Arms strong. Listening through capital for the persistence of soul. Lucky to have arms, ears, a question.
Is the soul underneath, or is it throughout? Neither arms or ears are the essence, nor universal.
How does a soul speak out against exploitation? In a spectrum of voice: roars of passion, whispers of pain and love sing the machines, the people and the materials.
How to open the question itself: tear it apart, into parts, to see the assembly of forces that make up your question. See the longing and the joy that hold them together like sticky glue, to make your question possible. A narrative. Vertical tension.
The sad anti-capitalists have narratives fueled by longing and joy!
The self is now deemed free of external limitations. The self now subjugates itself with internal limitations, those determined by the new technologies of power.
Han’s dark critique starts to crack open near the end of the book, with sillyness, stillness and idiotism.
So it’s not a fine answer to find <3. Narrative making, story making, he describes as a vertical tension. Holding the character in place. What is our own language that exists only to itself? Not always must we see the patterns and relate our experience to a specific knowledge system of reason
