Funny philosophy is a partly serious partly lighthearted video series I have started on YouTube exploring a variety of philosophical ideas from a personal and fact based perspective. I cover everything from the pessimism of Nihilism in 20th century though and the history of Modern art, and all in 20 minutes! It’s basically a quick romp though various ideas which I try to inject with a bit of sardonic humour. Enjoy.
What is it to know? What is to to feel? To feel the gnaw of mortality instinctively in the gut, from the pineal gland gliding all the waydown. The struggle for meaning in it all, a finality, some meaning to burden with truth, and some truth to burden with meaning.
Truth. Lie. Duality. Contradictions. The mind as experienced by the soul must live by its excess, and by its very nature struggle, the storm creates the perception of sea, the lonely wanderer in an ocean of chaos, is bound to it’s treacherous rages, it’s moody melodramatic odyssey. Metaphor for mood. Alone. Aspiring to being an ‘Organic thinker’ as Cioran puts it. This short document shall try to uncover in such a state what possible meaning can be found, and what escape hatch we may yet escape down, to hold at bay the drop into despair the very real sense that purpose, is but a long lost pipedream. Reclaiming. We begin by exploring the question of meaning, and then proceed to a multi-angled exploration of the downfalls and triumphs of Nietzsche’s Overman Ideal in history, and in the arena of ideas.
The scope of the Burdens in a field of confusions – The Questions:
Must everything contain meaning? It is the question that drives me insane on late nights, has me thrashing in consciousness again an imagined brick wall, banging head again again against a blunted and stubborn question. What is this burden of meaning? What gives it such a feeling of density? Must we as poets and philosophers lie to tell the truth, is truth that most exquisite device from which many lies are generated in some excruciating circular fashion? To sail alone with such questions is to be half mad, adrift in the ocean of disconnected relations to a world that escapes meaning. But is this a reason to despair or to hope? Does not a void of absolute imply an infinite potential? Acceptance is the burden perhaps. The burden of uncertain meaning. Love, hate, data, fact, the whole boatload of associations and relations, abstract language.
And what of language itself, the obscene syntax generator of multi-dimensional potential. Meaningless garbage, syntax – Is this then a problem for linguistics to argue over? Or a mathematical equation that can be found? some underlying universal standard;
Of course not. How then can meaning be philosophical? Analysing Intention is the realm of linguistics, syntax maths, what place then does philosophy have in the world of meaning?
A brief analysis on philosophical precedence through the Bestial forces of Nature:
A subset of meaning and associations follows forth from each object the human mind forges – the abstract result of the slow heat death of the universe, and being as entropy is certain and set as a law of nature as far as our observations can tell, but with inclination to chaos there comes the subjective forms that we as the conscious and unconscious co-creators and interpreters of Nature imprint onto our ‘objects’, our ’emotional states’, our distractions from animistic impulse, our escape into that most forgotten, deep and feckoned of realms – the imagination, residing deep in the collective unconscious from which springs forth all the visionary arts, the arcane poets, the self imposed wanderers in the dark, the beauty, the despair, the multiple spinning distractions of the ‘music of the spheres’ Platonic ideals? A mere humanistic imprint.
Conceptually sound, but chaos begat chaos begat chaos, divulge meaning and the universe will play ten more tricks on you. My intuition is that if consciousness could be said to represent anything akin to a mathematical form, it would be that of the fractal, a self generative feedback loop of information, constructed ‘reality tunnels’, imprinted meanings. Associations. The whole garbage pile of psychobabble can’t really describe it, and written language is as an inefficient beast. Art can visualise the meaning of specific moments in space and time, but always as a frozen infinity, not as all moments, all meanings. To know such a thing is to touch the membrane of the mind of God. And what is God you ask? The burden of meaning. Our desire to impose order, morale (man made) and structure.
Negation of God as ‘Absolute Meaning’
The real question then, if we can negate God, in the abstract sense of all meaning, which are after all unknowable by virtue of being the ‘top of the chain’ of associations, and that objectivity in everything is an impossible quest, what must we replace this void with, as spoken of in hushed tones in the halls of Atheistic thinkers and philosophers.
What void replaces the void of the all knowing God, some obscene Man Puppet? Some Man God, wannabe Superman? Some rent a day Zarathustra? Some man as God Idol, New Hitler, and Dictators? The 20th century was an exercise in such folly, millions burned for it.
let us not forget our responsibility to each other, to the very base of compassion, an attempt at least at suppressing the dormant Beast (you’ll all know its face all too well).
This crisis is real and reaches into every spheres of man’s contemporary existence. A natural question, and one that requires if not a complete answer, at least some attempt at such. I will return shortly to this truly horrendous and difficult question, like some mountainous question mark in the distance, but for now, I must visit some ghosts.
Conversing with Ghosts On the limits of the overman
The answer Nietzsche provided was that post-human Ubermensch, some being who transcended the limitations of the dulling culture of complacency of ‘The Last Man’, accepted their suffering and transformed them into strengths, denied the cult of the ‘Christian Slave Morality’, and laughed in the face of death, instead creating art in its place.
This seems to me at least to be a rough description of the Zarathustra ideal as described in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Few men and Women can work at such a level, by it’s nature the Overman is above man, and Nietzsche was a certain kind of ‘Cultural elitist, rallying as he did against ‘last man socialism and the weaknesses inherent in the Marxist interpretation of history, of which I would agree there are many.. But still the question remains, the will to power being the creative will, is a driving force, but the cult of the individual has driven us also into a willful despair. Unconscious but howling everywhere, from every street corner.
The children of Ayn Rand (herself unquestionably influenced by Nietzsche) have a powerful place and influence in the world, and if Nietzsche’s idea have rooted and changed the world, beyond amongst the artists and the poets it is in her philosophy of Objectivism. But this is not about her, and her cult of followers. This is about the Overman.
What is clear to me is that Nietzsche was one of the most painstakingly accurate philosophers of the 20th century, adequately smashing and reconstructing in the Ubermensch the ‘Ideal’ of the self created being, tragic but totemic. But if I were to say there were a flaw in this totemic statue of something new, a figure emerging from the shallow weeping of a dying God, which is not known and evades easy detection, I would say it is the very mercurial description of what this Ubermensch would entail practically in man, for which one forgive Nietzsche. What other philosopher has set himself such a task!
Most certainly an impossible task, but a task for which yet more must pick up the baton, in this the – certainly the most complex, multi-layered and confusing of eras to live. How much of this is mere projection I leave to you. But the failure of the Ubermensch ideal is reflected in it’s inherent belief in the subjection of all societal moral values into a self created morality – no morals exist in isolation from the cultures that create them, and no man is without Morales, even in a universe as certainly burdened with meaning as ours, this much I can attest to. By which I mean of course that morals are abstract value systems, but this does not mean they are without ‘Meaning’ as understood via the prism of society, the suppression of the unchained Beast in man is never without purpose entirely.
The flaw of the Ubermensch in my humble eyes is Zarathustra’s tendency to blast the world open, it’s bombast and stern arrogance, whilst stemming from the most sublime arena of the human imagination, also has a tendency to veer into fanaticism when applied to society, and even worse when interpreted by the moronic, as in the 20th century when the ideas of the Superman was co-opted, leading to a mass misinterpretation to a fatalistic Fascism and self destructive will to power.
Perversely instead of cultivating and refining the individual above the values of the herd, inversely during the disasters of the 20th Century the herd became the powerful possessor of a weakened will via the false idol of the Man God / dictator. It is the opposite of the ‘truth’ of the ideal, a negation of the superman. He will not come from outside. Such failure, it is a good thing that Nietzsche got to see his ideals co-opted and distorted, mutated in such an ugly fashion.
The Overman will certainly never emerge in any way we can imagine, it must remain by its nature enigmatic, this is the greatest strength of Nietzsche and also his greatest weakness. He created an ideal so perfect in its philosophical elegance that it is the most clarifying of ideals. That is, it must always remain so. A vessel trapped in a metaphysical chamber, separate and winking at the sufferings of men, forever, but pointing us occasionally to sweet moments of transitory bliss.
For the love of all do what the fuck you want [Transgressive / philosophical prose]
This is a piece of writing I did earlier this year when I was a much more angry man, and it shows. Posting up for posterity and as an archive but I have modified many of my positions since writing this, still some interesting ideas and concepts explored, though it is loaded with a jet black nihilism throughout and a great deal of sexisim, which I now reject as a thinking individual. It was always meant to be partly satirical, and it should be read with that in mind.
Don’t take it too seriously, it’s mostly a send up of Crowley’s philosophies of hedonism and selfishness, which I draw from in some ways, but also reject in others, and like I said I was a much more angry person when I wrote it.
Ok that’s probably enough of covering my arse, just read it – Chris G
For the love of all do what the fuck you want
On the weakness of gender biased philosophies, paradigms of separation and why we are all weird monofuckers floating in an abstract space which we’ll never truly understand and should not wish to (fully)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law – Aleister Crowley
Welcome to the Chaos-sphere (*)
Feminism, hmm anything that starts with an ‘ism’ in language I already have an inane distaste for, as soon as you sell your living soul to to any reality tunnel you become a living embodiment of that thing or thought pattern, so few human beings realise that all is chaos and that chaos is sublime in it’s own internal insanity and that it is the true and eternal nature of all things. You can change any second, any minute, each NOW can turn WOW in the blink of an eye, that should be beautiful, instead it is considered ‘hedonistic’ and self obsessed in the dull, languid quarters of the unenlightened (religious or orthodox ‘philosophy’ systems on the whole) to wish to follow you own desires and impulses, and to also understand them at the deepest levels, to dig that deep, to plow those fields of the self, to cut under the skin of your spiritual being, your actual living flesh – to arrive at truth.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted – old chaos magick saying
The idea of a world formed of male or female values dominating as guiding principles is obscene and ridiculous , not just obscene but counterpoint to nature, nature does not discriminate and these opposing principles male and female , black and white, all dualities are constantly in opposition, what so few of the dimmer humanoid creatures of the world today realise is that violence and revolutions and cycles are the nature of all things in the universe and nature, and that it is difference and tension between opposing opposites that creates dynamism, change and progress. Marx called this idea of newness emerging from discord, thesis and antithesis, and it is one of few ideas that I think that old red bearded German got right, one of the few concepts he pretty much nailed full whack on the smacker with a good Left (wing?) hook.
Now onto more personal matters, I should at some of this from a first person perspective after all – I am talking fundamentally about questions of human nature, and I am a human (though sometimes I wish it was not so, looking at some of the lesser excuses for human beings, or mere often in the contemporary world clones of a short ADD popular culture who dilly dally about everywhere thinking they are free, dutifully as ghosts or cogs in an enormous cold, unfeeling machine).
I know within the deepest stirrings in my being that I have enormous wells of compassion inside me, but I also on the flipside I cannot not deny the truly horrendous things I and every human being is capable of if I when pushed to extremes. I am a potential murderer as much as a saint, a potential rapist as much as a protector or guardian. I say ‘I am’ in the abstract, since I have never murdered, never raped, never done so much that would be considered truly debased or evil , but I am aware that those desires exist in me, even if in barely quantifiable doses and as such are forces that could be exploded into the world where mere circumstances arranged in the right chaotic manner, on a bad day, possibilities that could emerge were stars to align wrongly on one cursed night.
Awareness of your inner bastard, means you can tell him to fuck off!
Being aware of your own evil, and your own demonic side is the only way beyond it, and to also transcend your own dark side. The more you repress a thing, the more power it holds, as any pathetic boy fiddling Catholic Priest can attest.
Now onto some cheerful analysis of Feminist claptrap, nonsense and Bullshit (and then Men’s claptrap, nonsense and Bullshit afterwards)
Im the year 2055, 2055…
It’s about to be another glorious new year in our faultless Female First Republic
Long live the Mother, the Sister, the Daughter
Long live the Sisterhood
– Radio Announcement 2089 AD
2090 AD: Females have finally smashed Patriarchy, but nothing really changes – we are now just ruled over by Cunts instead of Dicks…
Which brings me to feminism, feminism first because it is the most alien to me in both the abstract and the concrete, the most primed for destruction as a framework due to it’s increasing popularity, and also one of the easiest contemporary paradigms to destroy by virtue of it’s own degrading relevance to anything resembling reality.
But before I destroy an idea, I should explain why it must be destroyed, give my justifications and the give a no-nonsense, no bullshit answer for I think what could replace it.
Feminism comes in many forms, the most popular of which, at least on the Internet is that which focuses on the patriarchy as a symbolic symbol of oppression.
It is a popular feminist notion that centers around the concept that women are oppressed from achieving their full potential because men acting as agents of ‘The Patriarchy’ are keeping their full potential suppressed through media, through institutions, power structures, basically through all of the dominant power structures of our society at present, and in fact since time immemorial. All men have been oppressing women, and by not directly, implicitly rejecting their vision of what Patriarchy is, Men are supporting it’s continued existence.
I said symbolic symbol of oppression a few paragraphs back because that is what it is, it’s an easy get out clause of a philosophical framework that has been dreamed up by desperate females and sociology majors looking for a pillar to which to project all their own failures onto the external image of the male,
You just cannot argue with one of these women (or men) about the existence of their framework, you cannot questions their basic assumptions, and just just like any good communist,fascist, pro-market capitalist, Thatcherite or otherwise brainwashed Ideologue, because they have a pre-programmed answer for everything – as all brainwashed beings do. That is the nature of programmed realities and ideology in general. All is in flux constantly, energy, thought. Matter. Desire etc
Genuine Good points and “Ok let you off then” bits of Feminism
Sex impulse from the personal point of view
The problem with all these gender based philosophies is that they forget that human sexuality and nature itself is more complex than they can account for. I like to envisage reality as a fractal – as soon as you understand one part of it , it will confuse and confound you with some other contradictory information. Indeed I believe as I have already stated that all nature is mysterious and chaotic, and we will probably never get it all or understand it all. It is noble to aspire to more, but really who wants to be God?? Far too much responsibility for a concious being to take.
But I digress – onto the sex impulse (from a personal point of view)
I can only understand desire and sexual desire personally through my personal sexual preferences and desires, which in most ways mirror that of nature in that they are chaotic, free, complex, fractal like, diverse and sometimes contradictory. I believe this is so for most people on Earth, but often people just don’t articulate it.
All my sexual fantasies revolve around hierarchies of control – dominance , submission etc. It is my belief that all sex can be deduced down to these factors – the sensual and tactile, the transgressive and the factors of control and submission, or hierarchies of control and bartering. This is just speaking plainly to be honest, and if you hide or deny that, well done you’re basically just a 21st century version of a sexless, repressed Nun or Priest and likewise you will live a sad cloistered existence, denying yourself the desires which are your birthright, by virtue of your genitals and body and your flesh.
Ask yourself this, if God meant you not to use your prick or your cunt, why did he design you one?
(Not that he/she/it exists , but for the sake of argument and for my own personal joy of causing offence there you go…)
The God Emperor – Art from Warhammer 40k Manual
Monofuckers
AKA The many and varied ways the human race may fuck up the Future
Extreme Female Based Society visions and why they are wrong:
Extreme Feminist society
The Male creature and sex instinct has been wiped from the face of the planet and all females procreate via a historic genetic sperm database of notable figures in history hooked into the planet itself, female genetic engineers manipulating the genes to force the sex to be female – this works for a few hundred years, until inbreeding inherent in using the same genes again and again creates weakness in the genetic chain, and the world becomes a genetic wasteland and literal wasteland, then the sun dies, and anyone that remains is burnt in the flames. Sounds great… Go the Sisterhood!
Posthuman Female Society
A Transhumanist female borg society where reproductions occurs via cloning so you end up fucking your sister without even realising it. Urgggh, am I right?
Also as the society is over reliant on technology to achieve reproduction it runs the risk of invariably dying out within a short amount of time when a natural disaster occurs that breaks the overeliance on said technology. Could be successful if they can adapt their bodies to deal with extreme environments like space and extreme weather systems however, so there might be some faint hope that they can escape the sun death. Which would be a start.
Extreme Male Based Society Visions and why they are wrong
Extreme Male only societies
A very bad man
Man’s worst instincts kick in after some war started by some guy, and we decide to wipe out woman as they are considered weaker and more inefficient at that killing each other bit which we are so fond of. Men then reproduce though the system of tribal competitions broadcast in ‘The Arena’ a VR fighting game. Weak specimens are disposed of naturally in the Arena though the acts of competitive violent behaviour, while the strongest get to mix their genes in the lab with ‘The King’. This again leads to breeding in weakness, as the intellectual elite who created the gene systems are all killed in the Arena, so again you have a self defeating extremist paradigm. Oh and we die when the sun dies, cos the males are too busy honing their muscles to think of anything constructive vis a ve escaping the Sun Death and the aforementioned killing of the intellectuals which has left all men as preening, body obsessed metrosexuals.
Sounds fun doesn’t it?
New Dark Ages
Inquisitions / Denial of sex instinct cult spreads
The sex instinct is denied by the male ruling class and any variance from the prevailing class is met with the inquisition – the priesthoods of various religious creeds. Christ, Mohammed etc become the only male figures that the priesthood or nunnery can aspire to – a non-physical relationship, we devolve into mindless, sexless beings, complete devoid of independent thought until the sun dies and we all burn screaming in it’s flames. Not the best one eh? But at least we’ll all be in Heaven™
Banner art from Ex Machina
Outside the Box visions and why they are probably wrong but could work, a bit
Free-market Pervert Capitalism Sex Societies
Sex and porn are used instead of monetary systems as exchange currency. Wall Street is renamed ‘Fucking against the Wall Street’ and they only deal with the orgy’s at the top elite of society, and complicated Gang Bangs.
Goods are only created and exchanged to increase sensory pleasure, and everyone lives in communal sex hives.
Sex is exchanged via the internet to pay for everything, so if you walk in the newsagents and you want those eggs, you have drop your trousers or skirt and have a webcam wank!
We don’t escape the death of the sun, because we are too busy wanking off and having sex to notice or care, until we die screaming of course in burning heat.
On the plus side we will of got a lot of pussy, penis , arse or whatever orifice is your orifice of choice though, but we’ll also all be dead. Swings and roundabouts right? Or is that Swingers and roundabouts? Am I right? Why aren’t you laughing?
Androgynous mainframe
We crack that whole mind / body interfacing with machines problem and upload ourselves into a a hyper-dimensional machine mainframe as androgynous beings of pure information. We then proceed to possess people and influence others worlds in the multiverse, a bit like the Timelords in Doctor Who. We can shift bodies and forms through technology, gender is irrelevant – as we are all are hedonistic Borgs of the post-millennial. Again this one is probably over reliant on technology as a basis but at least we might escape the flames of the sun, possibly…
Genetically engineered Seahorse / Post-Human society
We become hermaphrodites through genetic engineering and reproduce asexually. This would work I guess for a while and does get rid of the need for binary genders, which would settle that whole men are from Mars women are from Venus thing that people always bang on about. This version would probably evolve / devolve down any of the aforementioned routes eventually, but it’s good to have open options at the least.
We might even make it so we can swim in space maybe as we will be strange genetically engineered tranny beings so might just escape the flames of a dying sun. Then we’ll go to another planet or something and repeat cycle ad infinitum until the Big Bang™ 2.0, so yeah could work, maybe…
Religion
Spirituality as a concept is one that has existed since the dawn of time and as such it does have some relevance to the human experience. We have always gathered round flaming fires, found solace in songs and painted our innermost desires on cave walls.
Spirit and Spirituality however are quite a world apart from most religions in my view, please let me explain;
Spirit is an abstract, a feeling that grabs you suddenly, a jolt – what the ancients would call God, but we should be more accurate in calling experience of divine selfhood (I.e totality of your human journey). Ego death in some ways – an experience of unity, but also a death, a veil lifting into something more than just ‘yourself’.
Terrence McKenna
Religion warps this essential part of human nature, it says obey our laws, abide our doctrine and you will acquire the divine, sets up a barrier between ourselves and that sublime divinity within – and it is within, not beyond as so many Priests, Ayatollahs and Rabbi’s might have us believe.
The anthropologist and Psychedelic Journeyman Terrence Mckenna spoke of a return to an archaic revelry and revival of the sense / spirit experience of the ancient shamanistic cultures, a return to the authentic experience of the body and the mind. I too believe this is what is required, experiment, find your limits, explore your desires, take drugs, have weird sexual experiences, dance wildly around a fire telling stories so bizarre they make your friends doubt your sanity.
That’s the only way we can move forward culturally, to embrace the positive aspects of a sublime madness, and synthesise them into sanity, to make the insane and transgressive as ordinary as taking the dog for a walk on a Sunday morning.
Returning back to gender based paradigms, all these philosophies are I feel just increasing ways to divide ourselves mentally into smaller and smaller boxes, we must become the fucking ‘I AM’ on a constant basis, make our very living act a constant orgasm aimed at achieving oneness with the Godhead – to become the eternal orgasm is the only thing worth aspiring to now, I say Hedonism = good, asceticism= bad. We are all only granted limited time, a mere tiny snapshot of existence on this planet before we spiral of off the giant atom and dissolve back into the universe from whence we came.
So ignore all those who seek to limit your pleasure, limit your experimentations, limit your infinite will and desires and place terrible shackles round your soul.
Answers for the separated;
Say to the King – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
Say to the Queen – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
Say to the Priest – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
The Male – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
The Female – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
The Dick-tator – Your experience is limited, and for that you are not whole
The Fool – Your experience is fuller, And you are closer to wholeness, if not there already
The Trickster – You’re there bud (We think)
Become a bit of everything, take a bit all the information about everything in and ride with your minds most fevered dreams, you might just end up in Paradise… But can you take that much freedom?
For the 2nd episode of this thought and comedy podcast series , Chris and Jez discuss what makes someone evil , and about famous villains from film and real world history. We also touch on morality, and philosophical approaches to evil, as well what creates evil in terms of psychology.
For the first episode of this podcast series exploring questions of ethics, science and philosophy / freethinking, Chris and Jez discuss the ethics of cloning and related technology for 50 minutes
The artist engineer is the paradigm of the artistic archetype for a new century that demands a change in methods of reflecting on ourselves, and the productive processes and meaning of the art we produce. The artist engineer reforms and re-arranges the world according to their desire, generated through the prism of all networks and energy flows. The artist engineer takes the tools of the present to make a better world for all, to reform and restructure the elements of the universe in a manner not unlike the alchemists of old.
The true artist-engineer is a free agent of creativity utilising and developing new technologies to expand the human potential for possibility and imagination, mining the corridors of the possible, intellectually, spiritually and technologically to create a world of symbiosis between pure art, design and technology.
Theory – Not Slaves to reason alone
reason arose out necessary phase in the history of intellectual inquiry into nature, and as a reaction to the repressive and controlling hand of ancient religion. Reason helped forge a new world in the wake of the renaissance that led to the scientific cultural evolution of man beyond the dark ages and into a world of light and knowledge. But reason alone breeds monsters, to twist the well known ‘the sleep of reason breeds monsters’. That is an overemphasis in logic and reason to the detriment of a creative and meaningful chaos represses and makes silent an essential element of our souls and nature, namely the creative and fiery spirit of innovation, that Promethean will to power that marks all great men and women from the herd of the moral masses. We propose that reason alone cannot breed the new art, and that indeed art requires imagination and vision to progress into new and novel fields.
The artist engineers must first delve into themselves, before they can output their visions into the mould of the Earth
The importance of the visionary experience to digital art
An inner vision has been the driving force with all breakthrough in art , from El Greco through to Van Gogh and Bacon, all greats artist use the raw material of reality to reform and restructure the possible into the impossible and visionary, breaking through to a world previously unimagined, the metaphysics of depths and the flesh of things unsaid, and unseen. At our current juncture we have access to unprecedented tools and materials as artists, paint, metal, computer systems , technology, paper. Increasingly these mediums should intermingle into the newer conception of art – the unified art of chaotic unreason, the visionary and interconnected world of meaningful relations, a new unveiling of the word made art. The Artist engineer must plunge deep into their self in order to wrest out their nervous system, plug into their own nexus of nerves and wrest out the meaning of our confusing and constantly shifting post-modern world of wires, sex and the it’s opposite , the controlling industrial violence of the military – corporate complex and corpo-sigilism (The creation of symbols in the service of extreme forms of consumption and capitalist monopolies and their continuing influence on the biosphere).
Any artist worth his or her salt will confront these issue, any less is to be a servant of the corporate interest artists in their ideal should be seeking to dismantle and rebuild, and in my view forms the antithesis of the artist engineer – the artist producer (I.e an artist who produces purely for commercial aims)
Creating a new language of forms based in catholic symbolism. To take religious imagery in its literal form and reinvent it in human terms.In an attempt to establish the human as the centre of society rather than anything divine. A symbolism and structure that reshapes the realm of god as the new non representational art that is the new spirituality of the body via a re-imagining or reinvention of the spirit.
The Artist as Cybernetic Feedback Loop
Definition of Cybernetics:
The science of communication and control theory that is concerned especially with the comparative study of automatic control systems (as the nervous system and brain and mechanical-electrical communication systems)
The Artist in the 21st century exists in a world of information overload and the emerging information society, the question should be then; how then can artists make sure that they steer their desires and will in a direction that guides whatever will emerge from the ruins of our post economic crash / post 911 world in a positive direction?
We propose that we can start by embracing a constructive chaos, and by becoming the cybernetic feedback loop in the flows of information that now largely dictate and guide our destinies. This means a constant reinvention, a perpetual reorganising of the collective unconscious, how does this relate to art? We must seek to create an art that reflects this informational chaos and seeks to reorganise it into a form that re-crafts our current story into an order that makes sense and both reflects and directs the energetic flows of the coming information society into systematic feedback loop of imaginative energy and information.
The Artist must become the loop, so that he may reassemble and create new loops in the system of reality
Practical Theory – The Tools of the artist engineer
What fields then should the artist engineer seek to probe in search of novelty and creative / technological symbiosis? To my mind there are many, both familiar and emerging that the artist engineer could turn their attention to, to create and form new ideas, idea and methods of visual communications, beyond that which has previously existed.
These include but are not limited to the pulse of the electronic machine that underpins our networks and communication tools which increasingly dominate and dictate our time and lives, to use these tools for purely creative means. Emerging virtual reality tools which can be used to create new landscapes and stories that inform our current narrative, and help esteem a sense of wonder at unknown territories. Computer software that is meant to educate, entertain in equal measure. We speak of a digital method that incorporates all of these technologies and more, including of course the most ancient and arguably effective of visual communication tools – painting.
I also made a PDF version of this with some variation which can be downloaded here (this is the original text which this final text is an evolution of)
Book Analysis: Thoughts on Noumenautics by Peter Sjostedt – H
This is a piece of writing I did earlier this year when I was a much more angry man, and it shows. Posting up for posterity and as an archive but I have modified many of my positions since writing this, still some interesting ideas and concepts explored, though it is loaded with a jet black nihilism throughout and a great deal of sexisim, which I now reject as a thinking individual. It was always meant to be partly satirical, and it should be read with that in mind. 
