Featuring the Mycological Twist, MBJ and Hector Patch reading excerpts from Octavia E. Butler’s “Bloodchild and Other Stories” and “Lilith’s Brood”.
Sound design by Tom Richards.

—————— Description
A psilocybin tea reading invites embodied knowledge of mycelial infrastructures. The “Wood Wide Web” networks plants, fungi and other species for mutual benefit of the interconnected; thinking through it offers potential for psychic connections during social or ideological distancing. Observing how mycorrhizal webbings form networks to collectively thrive and survive, queers hierarchical worldmaking to manifest what Denise Ferreira da Silva words as “differences without separability”.
To decolonize reality as a given construct, the tea reading adopts the mind-altering paradigm of psilocybin - in physical and in transcendental sense. The psychoactive compound known as "magic mushrooms” has been used as medicine since pre-recorded history. Indigenous populations believe in its mystical properties as a psycho-spiritual conduit with an ability to manifest the human mind and induce connection with the cosmic. Clinical studies confirm psilocybin’s ability to aid mental health treatments through synaptic recalibration which dissolves a separate sense of self. Recent trends indicate microdosing psychedelics as a widely spread movement, especially popular with the tech start-up industry.
Using psychoactive rootscapes as metaphors, fantasies and hallucinations, the act of lucid dreaming involves science fiction by Octavia E. Butler. Opening portals of awareness to release the rational, we are rewiring the collective unconscious to reimagine a new kind of normal.

The ‘Self Optimization’ series considers biopolitical underpinnings of productivity strive. Previous iterations have engaged contributors from the fields of behavioural economics, AI/ neuroscience and devotional practices, where the participatory formats introduced concept metaphors through raindrop cake and yin practice among others.

Marija Bozinovska Jones, Self Optimization through embodied psilocybin reading, 2021 / Part: Three

Marija Bozinovska Jones, Self Optimization through embodied psilocybin reading, 2021 / Part: Two

Marija Bozinovska Jones, Self Optimization through embodied psilocybin reading, 2021 / Part: One

New Feathers
Text arranged by Lou Drago (@lou_drago)
Music and sound design by Valentino Mora (@valentinomora)
In conversation with Wanda Gaimes, ZD Harris, Mmakgosi Kgabi, 
Pedro Marum, Paul Mernagh, heather purcell and Camilla V. Barratt-Due

The intimacy of friendship, Derrida writes, lies in the sensation of recognising oneself in the eyes of another. But what chance do we have of truly seeing another in a world increasingly reduced to pixels, (binarised) swiping, and blocking? 
In a moment where societies are supremely polarised and fake-news permeates oft undetectable, it begs to question what has precipitated this shift. One speculation could begin with the way society is atomised into distinct family units and how increasingly, connecting is considered something done via social media. Hyper-connectivity and infinite information access give the impression of being able to know anything and anyone at once, and caught-up in the fast-pace of neoliberalism (the brainwashing endures the pandemic) we can suffer from the pressure to know more than is humanly possible as we skim-read headings in the same breath as friends’ posts.  

Capitalism both assumes intimacy to occur primarily between romantic partnerships and promotes the idea of success being attributed to a lone individual. Isolated and in competition with one another, capitalism thrives on the myth of the individual, attempting to negate that we are all entangled with the ideas and affects of others. In a society where friendship (like everything else) is co-opted by capitalism to be transactional, shallow, and disposable, subverting these conventions to create intimacy as well as acknowledging ones interconnectedness can be pivotal. “If capitalism works by dismembering transformative relationships” carla bergman and Nick Montgomery ask in Joyful Militancy, “can friendship be revalued as a radical, transformative form of kinship?” 

In the work for Spaces of Faux Intimacies, Drago troubles these capitalist assumptions by diving into intimate conversations with several of their close friends and comrades, exploring intimacy not only as the subject, but as a process by inviting discomfort, challenging social anxiety, and through broaching difficult topics to explore vulnerability. These conversations are later transcribed carefully keeping the voice of each speaker in tact, and fragments are woven together to create a dialogue.  Through the anonymity of the format and the intimacy provoked by the process, Drago’s confidants share their impressions of what it means to exist under digital-capitalism.

Lou Drago - New Feathers

“leaning (on) parenthesis” is an audio work with a circular character, a cat following its tail, built on fictionalized self-identified self-disclosure tactics. Self-disclosure appears as a character who self-discloses, analyzes and advises herself. In an episodic form, a multi-monologue fashion and in the absence of a pre-existent relationship with a potential interlocutor, “leaning (on) parenthesis” stands for a wide range of affects we have mirroring ourselves with avatars in search of affection or guilt-relief. The parenthesis stand for what we normally don’t say, the confession, a common praxis for long-distance lovers and other technologically mediated interlocutors over dating apps. This audio works follows connections between the indubitably sensitizing nature of self-disclosure, her correspondent punctuation marks, downsides, oddities, poiesis and ephemeral character.
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Jasmina (Alexandra) Al-Qaisi is a writer for voice and paper. She often makes waves on free, independent, temporary or mobile radios and is a member of the sound interested artist group Research and Waves. She co-authors diverse audio actions with the artist Ralf Wendt.

leaning (on) paranthesis 09 Half - Hug

leaning (on) paranthesis 08 Desire

leaning (on) paranthesis 07 Help

leaning (on) paranthesis 06 Listen

leaning (on) paranthesis 05 Wound

leaning (on) paranthesis 04 Hobby

To feel oneself, to feel the otherness;
Partly in, Partly out.
A garden in constant metastasis allowing evanescent openings to be felt and be experienced
as flowers bloom yet also fade away.

Gardens have always been regarded as ideal places that remind us of the balanced relationship between humans and nature. The classical interpretation of the garden has been that of a lush and abundant place where passion, desire, pleasure and a manifold of other sensations harmoniously coexist. Apart from its glorified and romanticized connotations, gardens have simultaneously been materializations of purely anthropocentric actions, unveiling a reality of greediness, emotional impoverishment, and ecological injustice towards the Earth, the humans and non-human others. What was before regarded as a utopian ecosystem has now been turned into a terrain of bodies in pain and souls in grief, where even some elements of welfare here and there fail to disguise the strong presence of contemporary micro-dystopias.

Chaos and order, fantasy and reality, utopia and dystopia, gratification and pain, lust and aversion glide from one to the other in an endless interplay of manifestations, inclusions and exclusions. The Garden depicts a primal sonic universe in which the desires of being, the tensions in the becoming and serenity take turns in no chronological order and in which each sound allegorically originates from a library of voiced sounds, such as audible breathing and other nonlinguistic utterances connected to intimate communication.
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Farah Hazim is a french-lebanese intermedia artist and composer; she investigates experimental and improvised forms of sound art, and explores alternative inquiries into hearing, listening and experiencing with a particular interest in multi-channel environments. Her compositions and performances proceed with a certain slowness and a semblance of repetition in the exploration of intermediate states, allowing states’ deployment in order to let the listener inhabit an atmospheric and textured soundscape in which sound-collage hunts tunes, and sometimes protocols lead the way.
In installations, her work has been turning towards plural narratives and time-based collaborative projects, creating a platform that tackles the way we understand reality of media and interconnectivity. Superposing and extracting different live streamed events or pre-recorded sound capsules, and concentrating them in a temporary media space, in which things accumulate and dissipate. Desireful of building temporary links and opening spaces for aesthetic interaction between different territories, geographical regions and temporalities in a complexity of “superimposed territories and intertwined histories”. (E. Saïd, 1977)

Farah Hazim - The garden

Is language a false witness? Is promise information? Exploring the techno-politics of the voice, friendship, counter-information and war, Jessika Khazrik’s composition ‘Only Distance Has a Name .x. Artificial Intelligence Is Work’ attempts to ceremonially subvert the premise of AI as labor that extimately auto-denies itself in alchemical rationalizations. This composition was premiered live in 9-channels at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2018 as part of ‘The Exhaustion Project’ curated by Abhijan Toto.  

Recently, the voice has been presented as an agnotologically ubiquitous yet impossible biometric, that could exponentially be replicated through resources as easily accessible as seconds of recorded speech. If singularity is denied to the voice as matter, then what is the promised multiplicity abundant under artificial intelligence as a recognitive accumulation that feigns what is being said yet learns and teaches, most often us secretly? This AI-aided performative composition is conceived, laboured up and trained out of these questions.

Through the statement “Artificial Intelligence Is Work”, the second act grapples with AI as a division, distribution and re-arrangement of labor with a cryptographic and alchemical core. Rather than abolishing work as advanced in the endless dream of automation, the increasing spread of AI creates new forms of work and learning i.e., a re-distribution of labor, alienations and a re-organization of knowledge.

If we look at the ethics purported by some strands of machine learning that build its datasets from data shared by users online, collated and re-used in hidden network architectures and inferences without their explicit knowledge or from images collated by surveillance cameras of pedestrians and passers by that happen to be crossing a monitored environment, we see that so far with Artificial Intelligence – and specifically within machine learning, the tautological statement that ‘everything computable becomes work (whether you know it or not)’ holds a greater truth value than ‘work will become obsolescent’. Can an incomputable cryptography exist?
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Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991 Beirut, based between Beirut and Berlin) is an artist, technologist, electronic music producer and writer whose indisciplinary practice ranges from composition to ecotoxicology, machine learning, cryptography, performance, visual art and history of science and music. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize. In 2012-13, she was a fellow at Home Workspace Program in Ashkal Alwan, in 2018-19, a fellow at the Digital Earth and in 2020, guest faculty at HfK Bremen. While concurrently working as technologist and researcher in different collective and institutional settings, her work has been presented at The Normandy Landfill, the Stanford Research Institute, CTM Festival, the Arab Image Foundation, Kunsthalle Wien, Les Urbaines, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Times Museum Guangzhou, LUMA Foundation, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Amnesty International, Center of Documentary Arts and Research at UC Santa Cruz, her house, the internet, secrets and Theater der Welt, among others.

Jessika Khazrik - Only Distance Has a Name .x. Artificial Intelligence Is Work

Spaces of Faux Intimacies is the first part of a series of interventions unfolding over a year, exploring intimacy in the wake of socially distanced capitalism, digital technologies and the pandemic. 

Today’s neoliberal, hyper-connected society, has capitalised the very notion of intimacy. Screened semblances of emotional abundance are promised to us within only a few swipes away while corporate conglomerates are profiting from our desire for physical and emotional connections. As the pandemic and the accompanying social distancing measures are driving us even further apart, and amid the already existing turbulence around the world, how can we work together to produce new channels of care, social resilience, and affective solidarity? 

"Spaces of faux intimacies" brings together artists of various disciplines to contribute to the discussion with individually commissioned auditory works.

Curated by Katerina Gnafaki for Centrum

The exhibition is part of the Vorspiel program of the CTM and transmediale festival 2021 and made possible with the generous support of Musikfonds, by means of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Spaces of Faux Intimacies

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