Segments from Unruly City
HD Video
running time: 10:00 loop
2016

49
inkjet print on Crepe de Chine
381x 218 cm. (150×86 inches)
2016

Works on paper:

DogOwl1
Ranu Mukherjee
ink and pigment on paper
101x 71 cm (40×28 inches)
2016

DogOwl2
Ranu Mukherjee
ink and pigment on paper
101x 71 cm (40×28 inches)
2016

Masked Bear
Ranu Mukherjee
ink, pigment and inkjet print on paper
42x 29cm. (16.5 x11.5 inches)
2016

Running Bear
Ranu Mukherjee
ink and pigment on paper
42 x 56 cm ( 16.5×22 inches)
2016

Pixel Fire
Ranu Mukherjee
ink, pigment and inkjet print on paper
70x70cm (27.5×27.5 inches)
2016
Melting Sky
Mer Maggie Roberts
ink, watercolour and gold pigment on paper
50x73cm
2016

Portent 1.0
Mer Maggie Roberts
collage on Venetian marbled paper
2016

Synthetic Experiment
Mer Maggie Roberts
collage on paper
41x63cm.
2016

Flying Bears and Portal
Mer Maggie Roberts
collage, laser cut vellum, glitter and fabric on Venetian marbled paper
50×70.5cm
2016

Exorcists and Cross Dressers
Mer Maggie Roberts
collage on paper
50x73cm
2016

The Time Of Skinning
Mer Maggie Roberts
Collage, ink, pigment, handmade paper on shiny metallic blue paper
51x65cm
2016

Moonlit Tourists and Fur Jacket Projection
Mer Maggie Roberts
Monotype. oil paint and silver pigment on paper
45x65cm
2016

Time Travelling Bears
Mer Maggie Roberts
Monotype. oil paint, irridescent and flourescent pigments on paper
45x65cm
2016

Camo Bodies, Leopard and Hoodies
Mer Maggie Roberts
Monotype. oil paint, irridescent and flourescent pigments on paper
45x65cm
2016

Holes and Portals
Mer Maggie Roberts
Monotype. oil paint, irridescent and flourescent pigments on paper
45x65cm
2016

Travellers (Fire Dancers)
Mer Maggie Roberts
Monotype. oil paint, irridescent and flourescent pigments on paper
45x65cm
2016

Video Works in back space:

Chimeric (dogowl living on the edge of free trade zone)
Ranu Mukherjee
Hybrid film (dogowl, early morning sun, haze, empty billboard stand, noise, tiara, Bombay/Mumbai, Singapore, San Francisco, London, earrings, hairclips, silk fragments, cell phone towers, magazine clippings, sparkle swatches, rainbow, Lonavala, monkeys, Bandshell, dusk)
4:54:08 loop
HD animation
2015

Jan 30th 2015
Atlantic House
1 Perth road, 7405 Maitland, Western Cape, South Africa

Cello and saxophone improvising with traffic noises under a highway bridge. A performance of Terry Riley’s in C for two laptops. Avant noise electronics. Analogue synthesizers. A postrock ambient drone ensemble with experimental cinematography. Performance art. People playing on obscure instruments, like the blik ‘n snaar.

The ethos of Edge of Wrong is what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the logic of the AND. Instead of relying on an either/or approach to artistic expression, we choose instead to explore the creative becomings that emerge from unusual, even impossible combinations (or folds, as we’re calling them for EOWct9.2) of sound, visuals and performance. As Deleuze says, “it’s always in-between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow, only we don’t see it, because it’s the least perceptible of things. And yet it’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape.”

Please join us on Friday, 30 January for our next foray into the pleats, folds and unexpected segues of contemporary music, visual art and performance.

NB: We ask that all guests arrive at 7pm latest as we will be taking a short group walk to a nearby highway bridge for our first performance, returning to the venue at 7:30 for the rest of the evening.

A BIT MORE ABOUT EOW:

HUNTER THOMPSON ONCE SAID that there is no honest way to explain the edge, “because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

It is a kind of hidden place that is revered and feared by some – the hellish underbelly of the world. Yet it is also a place searched for, written about, and found in the music of the strange. And it is this edge we want to bring to you by creating a space which allows musicians to etch out the edge of wrong, pushing the boundaries so that new sounds might be found.

The EDGE OF WRONG festival is currently in its ninth year and serves mainly to facilitate cultural exchange. Though it has become an established production network it is forever evolving, intent on creating a sustainable environment for quality art of an exploratory nature.

SITE: www.edgeofwrong.com/sa
FACEBOOK PAGE: www.facebook.com/edgeofwrong

AAF is LIVE. Sydney 5th and 6th February 2015

aestheticsafterfinitude.blogspot.com.au

‘Shadow Operators’ is a sensory cross-talk (textual and spoken) of signals from realms beyond the physical, a succession of becomings mimetic, contagious and machinic. These intensities carry the sorcerous forces that technology and science unleash as they delve further into the quantum, the chaotic and the abstract. It is a synaesthetic, chromophonic work where trembling textures respond to the immersive soundscape. (Sub bass may not be audible, depending on your speakers). Collage imagery is embedded in the flow, reflections on 21st century hyperstitions. Suspension, overproximity, over exposure are tactics with which to dismantle the focused gaze. The liquid canvas conveys a space of infinite possibility and intensity, both a turbulent ocean and virtual entity. The work maps devices that operate between the finite and the infinite, the complex and the linear. Hyperstition is driven by speculation, trends and hype cycles that are culturally producing apocalypse. The Mechanosphere, the Anthropocene – the pace of technological and socio-economic change has amplified speculation as to where history is taking us. Accelerated superstitions have very real consequences. Technology has revealed the immense and un-human time scales of cosmic, geological and biological evolution, the existence of dark materials and energies, existence of further dimensions, the very mechanisms of matter and life. The ocean, filmed in myriad states of turbulence, then heavily and cumulatively effected, forms an abstract medium in which to embed these influences. The overall intention with this piece is to conjure an intense beauty with toxic reverberations that produces future shock and yearning for immersion in the viewer.

Shadow Operators explores the feeling of Hyperstition as an affective frequency. The current version is an audio and text driven work. Text is both embedded in the visual field and a spoken presence in audio.

Like A Wilderness Of Elsewheres, Shadow Operators consists of five sections, each with a distinctive frequency, audio and image content, here based on the elements of contemporary Hyperstition science fiction. Catastrophe, transformation, forge. Sound as a way to travel.

Perhaps we imagined the earth’s processes were linear… Habitat destruction, over population, over harvesting, pollution, ozone destruction, all are non linear. And work on each other in non linear ways.

The visual canvas is an intensely effected series of complex and increasingly turbulent fluid states which originate in close up footage of ocean movement, its rhythms and textures abstracted from their source and rendered virtual in substance, tactile, viscous. The sensation is of being overwhelmed by and dissolved in quantum currents, chaotic fields of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The text is generated from 0rphan drift performance and publications, my notebooks and Delphi Carstens Hyperstition phd. It becomes a shimmering embedded layer by being refilmed off a screen. Sampled documentary and scifi clips are similarly treated so that these elements merge with the fluid canvas. Allocated video filters applied to each section create a distinct artificial frequency. Content reappears mutated, transformed in temporality, direction, scale, opacity by the effecting presence. Hyperstition is a dimension of flux, a manifestation of the invisible and collapsed temporalities. It highlights uncanny, unpredictable patterns and attractors:
proliferations and die backs; storms, heatwaves, tsunamis, dust and wind, weather as monster; super bugs; excessive capitalism, radiation clouds from Fukushima, mercury levels in fish. This uncanny is also temporal – time oozes and undulates, concertinas and spreads. Events are always already happening. They are demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity. Such vivid intimacy and a concomitant unreality. The intensity of their traces are unreal in their very luminosity. This searing clarity presents as clear unaffected photographs and collages that float on, rupture the dense textural ocean.

Stream organizers: David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, Eldritch Priest

London Conference in Critical Thought, June 27-8, Goldsmiths, University of London.

That sound and affect are fatally entangled should be obvious, for they share a primordial relation to a zone of indetermination between unconscious bodily impingements and their selective, conscious actualization. This is further suggested by the way sound’s im-mediacy and hearing’s continuous intake figure audition as a amenability to influenza of various forms that nudge virtual potentials towards predetermined outcomes. For contemporary cybercapitalist power, sound’s affective/infective nature plays a key role in ratifying its need to preserve homeostasis through a negative feedback that holds matter and information as equal realities. According to Anahid Kassabian, in a world of ubiquitous, networked technologies, music and sound are crucial vectors across which distributed-informatic subjectivities are constituted, a position advanced by the third wave of cybernetics wherein machinic, mediatic, and prosthetic ecologies have become indissociable from biological processes. Indeed, within this human/non-human commingling control operates virtually, nested within affective states that “unfold the past into the present” and inflect “the way the present acts on the past to unravel a new future.”

Hyperstition, a term coined by the Ccru (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and most often attributed to its chief ideologue Nick Land, is a useful point of intervention within a system that suppresses contingency, futurity. According to Land, “hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality…transmuting fictions into truths.” Such a formulation is exemplified by finance capitalism’s investment in fictional entities such as futures and derivatives to compose an abstract but no less real dimension of profit. However, the manner in which the power of the virtual has been exploited by inhumanist capital to bring about the reality of a speculative profit—as in branding’s sorcerous implantation of false memories and future desires, which rewire the very notion of lived experience—points to the promise of hyperstition as producing counterfactual lines of actualization that compel the world to unaffordable futures.

How might sound (noise = rumore (It.) = rumor), the virological, immanent medium par excellence—acoustic space as networked space—be productively leveraged for its capacities to induce, bend, and channel affective potential? How might the effective powers of fiction be sonically enacted? How might spatial redistributions of mobile electronic sound galvanize emergent social and political structures?

Papers that grapple with these questions are welcomed, especially (but not exclusively) pertaining to the following areas of investigation:

– Sonic, technological, vibrational intervention: tactics / strategies.

– Science-fiction scenarios productively intermingling sound and futurity.

– The relation of sound to virality and emergence: how the molar might be engendered by the molecular.

– Technological prosthetics: how an alien phenomenology might be sonically leveraged.

– Sound and neurological processes: psychoacoustic neuromarketing (audio branding), priming, etc.

– New forms of listening (distracted, marginal, algorithmic, molecular, paradromic, pareidolic, machinic, infrasonic, telepresent) fostered by distributed, networked technologies.

– Techno-magical operations: confluences between occult procedures and bleeding-edge technologies.

– Rhythmanalytical modalities in algorithmic, computational cultures.

– Sonic accelerationism: auditory catalysts to induce alternative modernities and new socio-political formations (swarming, crowdsourcing, local-global transversals, viral processes).

Music’s amenability to cybernetics is underlined by Claude Shannon, who defined a “singing condition” as the inability of an automata to recognize its loopy entrapment. Music’s particular affordances, vitalities, and teleological necessities could serve as a model to help ensure a preordained future through the transformation and regulation of extra-musical sound, channelling the impersonal, inhuman death drive (positive feedback) into homeostatic equilibrium (negative feedback). Noise, far from being a nuisance to such cybernetic systems, is in fact essential to periodically restart them. How might an effectively transgressive practice operate given the alien, invasive neuro-military-entertainment avant-garde; what hyperstitional, paradromic methods might hijack and mutate uncommitted affective excess, escaping the reach of capitalist territorialization? This event is intended as a conversation probing the multifarious linkages between music, affective modulation and chronoportation.

Further details are available here:
http://www.thelondongraduateschool.co.uk/blog/marc-couroux-sabotage-the-audiostat-hyperstitional-paracoustics-chronoportational-pragmetics

SCHIZO-CULTURE – CRACKS IN THE STREET
03/10/14 > 07/12/14

SPACE is proud to present an exhibition and event series taking the seminal 1975 event: Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Madness as its point of departure.

Organised by the early Semiotext(e) group – then comprising Sylvere Lotringer and John Rajchman – whose mission statement was to ‘bring together two continents of thought through a revolution of desire,’ the 1975 Schizo Culture conference saw counter-cultural icons such as John Cage, William S. Burroughs, R.D. Laing and Ti-Grace Atkinson come head to head with figures now regarded as some of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century: Michel Foucault, Jean Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari.

Cracks in the Street will feature new exhibition and performance commissions by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thompson (Terminal Beach), Sidsel Meineche Hansen, and Susan Stenger, alongside recordings and ephemera from the original 1975 event and the Semiotext(e) archive (courtesy of Fales Library and Special Collections, New York). Also featuring contributions by 0rphan Drift and Plastique Fantastique.

Curated by David Morris and Katherine Waugh in collaboration with Paul Pieroni/SPACE. Supported by Arts Council England.

More here: http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/schizo-culture-cracks-in-the-street

The Occulture (David Cecchetto, Marc Couroux, and Eldritch Priest) presents:

Tuning Speculation II: Auralneirics and imaginary networked futures

7-9 November, Toronto (Canada)
ARRAY space, 155 Walnut Avenue

Plenary Speakers: Frances Dyson, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy and Dan Mellamphy

In the context of ubiquitous media not only is the sheer volume of data notable, but so too are the ways in which we encounter, interact with and articulate its abstract mass. This is particularly significant where contemporary social experiences are increasingly interpellated by a technical apparatus in a way that makes the former available only through the invention and deployment of extra-sensory algorithms. The implication of technology in human activity (while always present) in this instance raises new challenges, for the algorithmically negotiated data-bloom of digital networks intensifies the problem of agency by distributing its expression across material and virtual domains that belong to both organic and inorganic systems, as well as actual and fictional entities.

Building on last year’s meeting, this three-day workshop seeks to examine how aurally inflected mediations might address the complexities of agency and its relation to the counterfactual when one’s actions, feelings, thoughts, competences, desires, failures, and daydreams are implicated in the self-adjusting operation of nonlinear networks. For instance, we are interested in the ways that aurality conjures alternative sensitivities to data flows and rhythms of change that allow for both increased agency in existing networked settings but also for the envisaging and summoning of new vectors of agency itself. While several approaches can catalyze such speculations, we propose to concentrate on sounding art—broadly understood—in order to leverage the fated semiotic parasitism, differential production, relational expression, and perceived multiplicity that informs such practices. However, alongside such concentrating we also welcome various reflections on sono-distractions, phonochaosmosis, rhythmanalysis, harmelodic-prescience, audio pragmètics, chronoportation, h/Hypermusic and other invocations of impossible and/or imaginary networked aural futures.

Participants: Mitch Akiyama (Can), Lendl Barcelos (UK), G. Douglas Barrett (USA), Marcus Boon (Can), Geraldine Finn (Can), Paul Hegarty (Ireland), Ted Hiebert (USA), Eleni Ikoniadou (UK), Jonathan Scott Lee (USA), Nicola Masciandaro (USA), Svitlana Matviyenko (Can), Magdalena Olszanowski (Can), Ashley Scarlett (Can), Nikki Cesare Schotzko (Can), Marcel Swiboda (UK), Doug Van Nort (Can), Michael Vertolli (Can), Alexander Wilson (Can), Scott Wilson (UK), Martin Zeilinger (Can).

Special performance Saturday night, 9 PM : Paul Hegarty and Guests!!!

The schedule is online.

The entire three days will be streamed online. Live tweets will appear throughout the workshop under @xenopraxis. Stay tuned to The Occulture for details.

All welcome!

Marc (for the Occulture)

A videoscape by Margarida Mendes with works by 0rphan Drift, Jol Thomson, Nate Boyce, Diogo Evangelista, André Sousa, Serafin Álvarez, Laleh Khorramian, Trygve Luktvasslimo+Fredrik Strid.

December 2014 at CAC Cinema

As the winter darkness peaks, visions of possible futures announce themselves: deteriorating cyber-landscapes collapsing into erupting lava, occult planetary formations merge into new data-matter systems, encrypted scenarios emerge as coral-like structures; sulphur and sweaty hardware.

This event takes the format of an ambivalent wonder.

While drifting through immersive world views and celestial formations, a polyphony of voices disclose epidermal plateaus and disassembled neuronal systems. Cells mutate and transform into new entities, infinitely consumed by their own metabolisms. Decomposed minerals are rewired into new interchangeable units. The nerval subtraction of the skin deteriorates into drinkable liquid. Cosmology reiterates itself and existentialism is molecularly navigated.

Grotto-Heavens is the first act of a series of events included in Catastrophe Cabaret, a programme speculating about possible futures in an era of predicted extinctionism. Contesting the general pessimistic view that dominates the topic, this project takes the overlap of absurdism and science fiction as an essential catalyst working towards self-representation, leaving us with the following qualms:

How do we envision our bodies in the unforeseeable post-catastrophic material world?

How will we choreograph the cognitive sensoriality of the future?

Margarida Mendes has directed The Barber Shop project space in Lisbon since 2009. She has a Masters in Aural and Visual Culture from Goldsmiths College of Arts in London. Specific research interests include materialist philosophy, cybernetics and experimental film.

“Grotto Heavens” is a contribution to the programe of events of the pilot project of the XII Baltic Triennial, “Prototypes”.

Hyperstition: An Introduction

In the following interview Nick Land responds to some questions about the mechanisms of Hyperstition in the context of apocalypse.

Q1. I wonder if you could elaborate on what exactly is concealed … what will be revealed by apocalypse?

R1. What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.

 Q2. Does writing about the apocalypse chase it back into the shadows/encode it more heavily … or does the act of investigating the apocalypse help to decode and actualise it?

R2. For theists, the former. For transcendental naturalists (such as hyperstitional cyberneticists), the latter.

 Q3. Could you elaborate on the ‘hyperstitional endeavour’? Hyperstition is a key word in the lexicon of my thesis … I was wondering if you could break the term down into language that normal academics (such as my supervisor!) can understand. Hyperstition is the backbone or channel into which everything apocalyptic flows, but what exactly is it?

Could you define it? The way I understand it from the Catacomic is that it’s a meme or idea around which ideas/trajectories crystalise).

R3. Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality. Capitalist economics is extremely sensitive to hyperstition, where confidence acts as an effective tonic, and inversely. The (fictional) idea of Cyberspace contributed to the influx of investment that rapidly converted it into a technosocial reality.

Abrahamic Monotheism is also highly potent as a hyperstitional engine. By treating Jerusalem as a holy city with a special world-historic destiny, for example, it has ensured the cultural and political investment that makes this assertion into a truth. Hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths.

Hyperstition can thus be understood, on the side of the subject, as a nonlinear complication of epistemology, based upon the sensitivity of the object to its postulation (although this is quite distinct from the subjectivistic or postmodern stance that dissolves the independent reality of the object into cognitive or semiotic structures). The hyperstitional object is no mere figment of ‘social constuction’, but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it.

Q4+5. In the Catacomic you also relate hyperstition to the ‘Old Ones’ – the Nommos … are these water spirits the avatars of communication technologies? I’m fascinated by your reference to Dogon/Voodoo/Shamanism/Magick … how do these archaic occult systems, which are so heavily coded and hidden, relate to the immense speeds and ultra-modernity implied by the term hyperstition? I’ve always been fascinated by archaic systems myself … they are the dark roots of modern technologies.

R4+5. John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

 Q6. Does hyperstition exist outside of time and how is it hidden? This is fascinating, particularly in relation to the apocalypse meme, which is not at all. How do the two terms relate?

R6. Time is the working in historical time of that which lies outside (but constructs itself through) historical time. Apocalypse closes the circuit.

 Q7. How does hyperstition relate to capitalism as a force-field?

R7. Capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force.

 Q8. Can you say anything on the subject of fictionality – i.e. history and philosophy as fiction, and fiction as a more intensive actualisation of historical / scientific / technological / sociological potential?

R8.  Hyperstition is equipoised between fiction and technology, and it is this tension that puts the intensity into both, although the intensity of fiction owes everything to its potential (to catalyse hyperstitional ‘becomings’) rather than its actuality (which can be mere human expressivity).

Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organisation in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture.

Functioning as magical sigils or engineering diagrams hyperstitions are ideas that, once ‘downloaded’ into the cultural mainframe, engender apocalyptic positive feedback cycles. Whether couched as religious mystery teaching, or as secular credo, hyperstitions act as catalysts, engendering further (and faster) change and subversion. Describing the effect of very real cultural anxieties about the future, hyperstitions refer to exponentially accelerating social transformations. The very real socio-economic makeover of western (and increasingly global) society by the hyperstitions of Judeo-Christianity and free-market capitalism are good examples of hyperstitional feedback cycles. As Nick Land explains: “capitalism incarnates hyperstitional dynamics at an unprecedented and unsurpassable level of intensity, turning mundane economic ‘speculation’ into an effective world-historical force”(email interview).

Not only do the ideas themselves function as hyperstitions, but the trauma and fear engendered by their cultural ‘makeovers’ (whether in the form of crusade, jihad, secular war, industrial revolution or economic reform) merely serve to further empower the basic premise and fan the flames.

“Popular anxieties about the uncertainties of the future procured by rapid change are not merely the issue of ignorance,” explains historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto. “Rather they are symptoms of a world in the grip of ‘future shock'” (2001:556). Those who find change unbearable not only expect it to become uncontainable but work to make it so by fanning the flames of paranoia. ‘Future shock’ is one mechanism whereby hyperstition works to bring about the causal conditions for apocalypse. Once started, a hyperstition spreads like a virus and with unpredicatable effects. They are “chinese puzzle boxes, opening to unfold to reveal numerous ‘sorcerous’ interventions in the world of history,” explains Land (CCRU.net).

It’s not a simple question of true or false with hyperstitions, explains Land. Rather, its a question of “transmuting fictions into truths”. Belief in this context isn’t passive. As the CCRU website explains, the situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than religious or rational ‘belief’ as we’d ordinarily think about them. “Hype actually makes things happen and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it’s not ‘real’ now, doesn’t mean it won’t be real at some point in the future. And once it’s real, in a sense, it’s always been” (CCRU.net).

“Hyperstitions by their very existence as ideas function causally to bring about their own reality,” explains the CCRUs Nick Land. “The hyperstitional object is no mere figment or ‘social construction’ but it is in a very real way ‘conjured’ into being by the approach taken to it” (ibid). Even conventional historians allude to this process. As Fernández-Armesto cautions in Civilizations (2001: 544), “illusions – if people believe in them -change the course of history.”

Falling outside the parameters of conventional philosophy, the concept of hyperstition subscribes to what French post-structuralists Deleuze and Guattari have broadly termed schizoanalysis. Unlike conventional philosophy, with “its predeliction for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions,” explains Nick Land in Meltdown, schizoanalysis avoids seeing ideas as static (1995:2). Rather, it favours an approach that sees ideas as diagrams that are “additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches and loops, caught in scaling reverberations” (1995:2). Primed to create what Deleuze and Guattari have termed Bodies without Organs (BWOs) – namely metaphorical exploration devices of the kind crafted by engineers, artists and even junkies to ‘map’ new cognitive territories – schizoanalysis denotes a technique that can be utilised for analysing hyperstitions. The BWO, like a hyperstition, indicates an inchoate flux of deterritorialised energy; a speeding up. After all, the investigation and crafting of novel directions for culture, implied by BWOs and other types of schizoanalysis, necessitates an investigation of the very mechanisms of cultural overdrive or meltdown. Fictions that explore these areas are in themselves hyperstitional, functioning to speed things up and bring about the very condition of apocalypse.

The CCRU has coined the term ‘K- tactics’ to describe the action of hyperstition, using the mode of schizoanalysis, in contemporary information culture. “K-tactics,” explains Land, “is not a matter of building the future, but dismanteling the past … and escaping the technical neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive [narratives]” (1995:13). Symptomatic of a type of cultural illness induced by future shock, the hyperstitional ‘infection’ brings about that which is most feared; a world spiraling out of control. This, manifestly, is the task of the’hyperstional cyberneticist,’ according to Land – namely, to “close the circuit” of history by detecting the “convergent waves [that] register the influence of the future on its past”.

As Nick Land explains in the Catacomic (1995:1), a hyperstition has four characteristics: They function as (1) an “element of effective culture that makes itself real,” (2) as a “fictional quality functional as a time-travelling device,” (3) as “coincidence intensifiers,” and (4) as a “call to the Old Ones”. The first three characteristics describe how hyperstions like the ‘ideology of progress’ or the religious conception of apocalypse enact their subversive influences in the cultural arena, becoming transmuted into perceived ‘truths,’ that influence the outcome of history. Finally, as Land indicates, a hyperstition signals the return of the irrational or the monstrous ‘other’ into the cultural arena. From the perspective of hyperstition, history is presided over by Cthonic ‘polytendriled abominations’ – the “Unuttera” that await us at history’s closure (in Reynolds 2000:1). The tendrils of these hyperstitional abominations reach back through time into the present, manifesting as the ‘dark will’ of progress that rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities. “The [hu]man,” from the perspective of the Unuttera “is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag,” writes Land in Meltdown (1995:14).

Exulting in capitalism’s permanent ‘crisis mode,’ hyperstition accelerates the tendencies towards chaos and dissolution by invoking irrational and monstrous forces – the Cthonic Old Ones. As Land explains, these forces move through history, planting the seeds of hyperstition:

John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness includes the (approximate) line: “I thought I was making it up, but all the time they were telling me what to write.” ‘They’ are the Old Ones (explicitly), and this line operates at an extraordinary pitch of hyperstitional intensity. From the side of the human subject, ‘beliefs’ hyperstitionally condense into realities, but from the side of the hyperstitional object (the Old Ones), human intelligences are mere incubators through which intrusions are directed against the order of historical time. The archaic hint or suggestion is a germ or catalyst, retro-deposited out of the future along a path that historical consciousness perceives as technological progress.

The ‘Old Ones’ can either be read as (hyper)real Lovecraftian entities – as myth made flesh – or as monstrous avatars representing that which is most uncontainable and unfathomable; the inevitable annihilation that awaits all things when (their) historical time runs out. “Just as particular species or ecosystems flourish and die, so do human cultures,” explains Simon Reynolds (2000:1). “What feels from any everyday human perspective like catastrophic change is really anastrophe: not the past coming apart, but the future coming together” (ibid).