Recipes for Breaking Free from The Matrix: Language, Deception, Manipulation
Artmaking experiments to transform ghosts & demons - artmaking2024 part 1
Tablet of Context
Links & ephemera
preface to artmaking2024 series
Main Article begins: Recipes, or “I need to tell you about how recipes work so that you can make your own recipes”
exercise one
housekeeping
1. Links & Ephemera
Pluralistic: Against Lore (27 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty | WIRED
The Lifecession, or Why People Think This is the Worst Economy Ever (theissue.io)
A Third of My Online College Students are AI-Powered Spambots. Now what? | by Mary Rose | Jun, 2024 | Medium u can get around the paywall using this link
The Stranger Edition - On the power of (very) short-term intimacy.
The Tech World’s Greatest Living Novelist, Robin Sloan, Goes Meta | WIRED
people i read semi-religiously
Umair Haque | The Issue
Cory Doctorow | Pluralistic
Douglas Rushkoff | Team Human
Alex Carberry | Dystopia Unmasked
2. Preface to the artmaking series
concurrently with the series of articles on deathpractice (Nourishing the Spirit during Times of Demonic Infestation - currently unpublished), i will be attempting to cut to the root about the basic steps to use artmaking experiments to heal the brain/mind/perception from its indoctrinated patterns.
the two series are like looking at the same thing via different positions. the other series is tagged #deathpractice2024 and this series is tagged #artmaking2024. they are parts of a whole.
you can think of this artmaking series as a kind of pre-intro to deathclown, or as series of modules that look at my approach to interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary artmaking, which includes but is not limited to writing, collage, poetry, critical reflection processes, devised theater making, acting, movement/embodiment/somatics, clown, bouffon, satire, puppetry, storytelling, design thinking, collective mythology, folk art, public speaking, etc.
in the future i may take these articles and turn them into ebooks or zines. if i live long enough and/or am assisted enough by others, that is. everything in my life is very uneven, very uncertain. i would love to be able to be a real/paid teacher-mentor. i would have a made a great experimental art teacher at some liberal arts college in some other life. but this requires connections, luck, proper placement and time. people need exposure in duration and frequency, something that capitalism doesn’t seem to allow for. ah, that’s karmic momentum and it is a very difficult road.
3. Recipes, or “I need to tell you about how recipes work so that you can make your own recipes”
learning to not be manipulated as easily requires spending energy (time, attention, calories).
it also requires a process (generating/reflecting/refining).
this is the same for learning anything, or for practicing anything.
learning something new is harder (consumes more energy) than refining something you already know a bit about.
changing or replacing a habit is also costly because you have to examine the benefits of the old habit, decide what you need and what you don’t, and wean off the addictive parts of the old habit while replacing what you do need with altered habits.
learning generally follows a format of desire: what you want and what you don’t want are BOTH desire.
the body system craves stability and familiarity, which are anathema to learning, which is both disruptive to stability and familiarity.
however, you can learn to enjoy disruption and novelty and oscillate between the familiar and the unfamiliar.
this is partly what i tried to do with deathclown online but people have too many barriers to entry into this kind of work/play.
let’s talk about barriers. they can be anything. usually, i can sum them up as a lack of exposure, a lack of determination and lack of a comprehensive system or process.
too tired, too hungry, too excited, too bored, too thirsty, too oversexed, too undersexed, too sick, too happy, too depressed, too confused, too scared… all of these are just automated signals with automated reactions. a signal occurs and sets off a series of associated signals which result in a few automated replies, all based on a streamlined and unfortunately efficient flattening of data and meaning. I feel X and that means Y. no questions, i just “feel bad” and bad is bad and that is that.
the human body is quite easily possessed by entropic forces and is wired for narcissistic addiction (narc = numb) which will justify and satisfy itself with any plausible denials. your “mind” will default to the familiar even if it’s bad for you, because making decisions (especially when you perceive threat or danger) is more painful and costly than almost anything else, until you learn how to learn in a “cleaner” way.
this would require revealing where your energy is “trapped” via double-bind thought loops and narrative trickery. trapped because you only learned how to operate the vehicle of your bodymind in a few ways and now that’s the automatic.
essentially, something inside you, or “you”, is always conning you, always manipulating you, and creates negative reinforcements (punishment symptoms) to stop you from asking too many questions, rocking the boat or otherwise changing the appearance of stable, familiar control you think you have.
language is built on deception. you can use deception for good or ill. language can be used for good or ill. but to discern which from what you’ll have to spend energy to look under the hood and discover how you already have been wired to be manipulated by language, you will have to learn how you’ve already learned-to-learn and then unlearn, relearn the process by which you integrate information and perceive reality.
a writing practice is immensely useful for this process, as you can experiment with language infinitely on the page (or screen) and feel feeling, sense sensation, and perceive perception in a relatively safe container.
combining writing with theatrical arts such as movement, dance, orating, singing, mimicry, melodrama and clowning can supercharge this process because after all, the first language is body language.
this means you can essentially re-invent your language comprehension via your own agency, not anyone else’s. you can use any text or material to do this because you switch gears from trying to understand what is being communicated to trying to understand communication. you focus on process more than product; you focus on context more than content.
this unravelling must become:
FUN (novel, low risk relative to your current state, interesting or curious to you in the moment)
have low barriers to entry (minimal tools & setup required, fastest paths from impulse to expression)
a process, procedure, system or map that you can fall back on and that produces some non-random effects (generation/reflection/refinement, game procedures, rules or constraints, ways to focus attention, etc.)
a quick feedback loop (you do a thing and then you feel the effects of that thing in the fastest way possible through the least number of “middlemen”, such as what happens when typing, drawing, drumming, wrestling, singing, dancing, etc.)
part of why language is so compelling, addictive, perplexing is because everything about it is relative, not absolute. meaning is derived from hundreds of contextual clues, associations and wisps, fragments of symbolism. definitions are not definite, not singular, not fixed. this creates paradox and the mind loves paradox, even loves to hate it. it’s a puzzle and we love trying to solve it. we love games. and games, like stories, contain unpredictable events within semi-predictable patterns.
to the person who cannot enjoy the process, the confusion, the game of language, all communication is an existential threat, and constantly threatened people are easy to manipulate.
rage-baiting, lust-baiting, wealth-baiting… all of it is rampant in the algorithmic dissonance of the modern internet age. short form content is crafted to hijack your naivety, your ignorance, your greed, your trauma, your grief. your consent is engineered, your attention is captured, and your agency is co-opted.
4. Exercise one
to get you in the mood:
freewrite for 7 minutes (use a timer) everything you believe. you can start sentences with “i believe…”
don’t stop writing, just keep going even if you have to repeat the last thing you wrote. many people find handwriting this better, but you can also type in a blank document.
after the timer goes off, open a voice message app and record yourself reading it out loud as if in an auditorium. authoritatively, declaratively.
now, write for another 7 minutes but this time, write from the point of view of someone who believes “the opposite” of everything that was in the first freewrite. “the opposite” can be interpreted in various ways. keep writing until the timer goes off. if you have to start over again, do so.
after the timer goes off, record yourself reading this second writing out loud again, but this time, as if in a seedy bar late at night after all the losers have gone to sleep.
now, take all the writings and omit any repeat phrases such as “i believe”, etc, so that what you are left with is just a bunch of declarative sentences without subject, such as for example “i believe that all dogs go to heaven” becomes “all dogs go to heaven.” you should now have a list of declarative statements from two points of view.
type up these words and put them into this machine: The Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk - a Cut-up Generator
you can play with the settings if you want, but now you should have a very strange mash up of your writings from a kind of “third” perspective, someone who is neither you nor your opposite, a voice far stranger and mysterious yet familiar. record yourself reading this out loud now, but slowly, pausing and moving around as much as you like, emphasizing, diminishing, repeating, inflecting, hinting, riffing, improvising, singing… based off of this third text.
5. Housekeeping
Donating is Liberating & Sharing is Caring
venmo @dare-sohei or paypal.me/daresohei
ok that’s part one of artmaking2024. please reach out if you’d like sessions listed in the sessions tab. i feel like a real community member when i can sit in wisdom-play with others and give what i wish was given to me when i was younger. may this way of relating and knowing be re-distributed to all beings everywhere.
see you next week. until then, i write little things in the notes tab.