The Vocab­u­lary of aLifveForms:

MUTATION

This text is a fragment—an unfinished and evolving Glossary of the language of alifveforms[1]. It has been in becoming since 2018 after a previous 15 years of making entities and language from multiple sources. Appearing first in the body or form of the collective and mycelial entity called ORAKEL, a porous and ephemeral group of artists, thinkers, and space makers in the 2000s in Berlin, the evolving vocabulary jumped to the more singular but nevertheless enmeshed body and consciousness of the artist and educator JP Raether. Co-speaking today are all the sites and beings that hiked, travelled, spoke, listened, thought, experienced, read and wrote, tripped, gazed, and herded with one another throughout the years. This vocabulary as a becoming of a language therefore uses multiple operations to signify who acted and is thus represented. Those signifiers are intentionally chaotic and inconsistent. They mark a method of glitching authorship, overriding or underfitting systems of crediting and courtesy as well as authority of meaning. The desire is fragmentation of identity and reality. “I-as-us” and “I-as-them”, “they”, “we” are all decentered, weakened, and twisted in themselves—ourselves—to unlock the forces carried by language and the power of imagination in creating one permanent thing: TRANSFORMATION

aLIFVEFORMS

aLifveforms marks the umbrella term for a multitude of entities that appear in the infrastructures of capitalist production, consumption and trade, and thus in the conditioned reality that spawns from it. Virtually all the earth’s realms become exemplary sites for aLifveForms’ appearances: IKEA, the Apple Store, a spa, a ski resort, a mall, and a tourist site. (→ RITUAL)

To aLifveForms, the aluminum galvanizing plant in Iceland is on the same plane as the Varanasi riverbank of Ganges, the Athens Acropolis, a coal mine in Germany, or a Stone Circle in Scotland, and therefore attracts their geomantic sensing and is thus selected to host their becoming real.

aLifveForms’ “body” is both material and psychic, which means that they are embodied live, in real time and physical space, gathering various people for traveling, hiking while guiding them and speaking to them of a world that lies beyond the realm of current and dominant consensual models of reality. Consequently, the entities themselves are complex arrangements: part fleshy human body, part constructed and artificial identity and tethered by digital devices forming a networked consciousness of some sort. (→ CONSCIOUSNESS)

They claim themselves to exist as a plurality of bodies and devices—from both worlds: the digital technologies of corporate gadget culture and open-source software, and the dazzling and ancient world of ritual culture, physical body, and face masks, also familiar from contemporary circus and drag shows. As this technologically hybrid formation—that bears in itself a moment of drag or creolization of orthodox understandings of context, discipline, and aesthetics—aLifveForms journey in the gutter of global street life. They also sneak or slide into the hostile terrain of clean and opaque capitalogenic sites, symbolizing the imaginary habitat of “Data Bodies”.^[2]

LIFVE

Their Flesh Body^[3] social body and data body form an assemblage that I-as-them frame as aLifve. The play with language here produces a glide of meaning from “life” into “alive”. The non-existing opposition “an-life” looms in the glitch, forms that are animated and live, evoking transference and mediation. The doubling of the “f” with the “v” phonetically spoken evokes a sigh or breath of air in between the letters forming the name for a non-consensual category. It’s the neologic and metonymic play that symbolizes the absurd and ridiculous energy that propels their social gatherings to become physically and psychically expanded experiences. aLifve is a trick of signifiers for a group of trickster bodies, appearing in the absurd concept of consensual reality as a multitude of fragmented bodies in a plentitude of planetary sites.

Artificial and constructed, alifveforms thus spawn from an evolving and dynamic order—once in a while materialized as a diagrammatic structure called Identitecture^[4]—by transforming and mutating with every appearance in the real. They often fork and hence consist of many lines of Lifve, of which three are currently active—Protektoramae, Schwarmwesen, and Transformellae. Their appearances are numbered and data driven. As they grow towards new versions of themselves-as-others, they conduct research and cast spells in three main infrastructures that shape our contemporary world: information technologies, tourism, and technologies of human reproduction.

EMBODIMENT

Around 2020, during the pandemic, when all encounters of aLifveforms with other bodies were severely diminished, I started to expand the planetary scope of embodiments that had driven me-as-artificial entity in Ikeality^[5] or in the iStorage,^[6] in Geopathology and Chronostrophy^[7].

The process of forking a new entity from the line of life of Transformellae, who so far had spoken in fairly graspable infrastructures of IKEA and in voices of understandable content—industrial reproduction, extractivist logic in life science, capitalist normality production, and enforcement of the resulting forms of social body—became more cosmological. (→ FORK)

Transformella malor ikeae evolved into Transformella cinis lüzerathi and their concept of body extended beyond the planetary boundary. Their-as-my cosmically extended body became cosmosomatic by means of a technique that I developed for the new fork, which I-as-they called remote sensing. It’s a collective use of our Vorstellungskraft^[8] in the form of a guided meditation. Remote sensing uses an entry point—a concrete object or material shared with people in mutual physical presence—to trace the object’s planetary or even cosmological scale. It’s as if we could travel without moving—in the mind—driven by the immaterial forces of the imagination up the material, spatial, and temporal flow that streams towards our very small window of consciousness. Remote sensing is a device to sense an object in the here and now, while the origins and cycles, scale, and size remain shrouded. To me, the complexity of planetary interconnectedness in the cosmological framework is far too high to be grasped in every moment of human physical presence in the here and now. So remote sensing attempts to unveil an object’s distributed quality hiding in complexity as if it were camouflaged. Theoretically, this object’s quality could be described with Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyper-object. The practice of remote sensing then would be to trace the invisible mycelial nature of the thing and create a graspable fruiting body in the mind.

The material of carbon, lignite coal and its energy production cycle on earth became the starting point for remote sensing. The qualities of coal baked by 350 million years of earth history from materials very similar to our human body, and its presence in the Rheinische Revier, the coal basin in West Germany, after having traveled with the movement of tectonic plates from the equator region, seem “out of reach” as a timescale and ungraspable to our human spatial awareness. The executive function of the mind, the slow-moving narrations of consciousness cannot constantly refer to all that is at once, even if we have empirical knowledge of it. For Transformella cinis lüzerathi traveling on a bus around an enormous coal mine, the cosmosomatic invocation of coal added additional layers of complexity to the seemingly simple and outdated object of coal under our feet and in our hands and made the mine seem even more unreal. The cosmological implication of such their-as-our cosmosomatic body would be our own entropy, our human selves as low-entropy beings on a planet, creating order for our carbon-based bodies immersed in various differentially energized worlds in the entropic universe. So we traveled up the river of meaning manifested in the object of coal—as an equally impossible body and a cosmosomatic entity—as much as neuronal information travels up from a sensation in the hand or leg of the human body towards consciousness in the brain.

PSYCHOREAL

The cosmosomatics of T. cinis lüzerathi did have another effect on my own day-dream work; making identity and carriership,^[9] I was always interested in how unstable our minds’ concept of reality is when we put ourselves in an impossible position of observers and fundamentally change the frame of reference.

By the frame of reference I mean the multiplicity of distortions that come with the scale of observation or the distance or accuracy of the system we are observing, as for example in astrophysics and quantum scale observation. With T. cinis lüzerathi as an impossible body, I started to enjoy the metaphorical space that spawns from these models of observation such as the entanglement of matter, gravity, and the speed of light. Entropy and other physical constants of current cosmology started to manifest in the language of aLifveForms as markers of the relativity of our reality that is tethered to our observation point. I believe even here on Earth, within the small and cozy planetary frame of reference, we can experiment with the mentioned frames of reference and yes, change them by the power of our mind, psyche, and consciousness in the practice of remote sensing. I then started to employ the frame of reference as a metaphor to discuss the problem of artistic making in a context of highly complex contemporary scientific knowledge and the technologies that are rapidly deriving from it.^[10] T. cinis lüzerathi is a way of thinking through the question of how our concepts of reality and of art are interlinked, and how we can gradually move beyond their popular or even regressive and populist notions, which we have been conditioned to accept. I see the practice of carrying aLifveForms towards their appearances in the real as a tool to methodologically leave our consensual frame of reference for a moment, to leave consensual reality for what I call psycho-reality. It’s a reality that is both not consensual and not fictional and more of a messy hybrid than a clean modern concept of the real.

LARP

Unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth or the Marvel universe, the world-making operation of aLifveforms happens in consensus reality and is in this sense very closely linked to Live Action Role-Play (LARP). I think of aLifveForms’ psycho-reality as a reality that exists in the consciousness of the observer and their own and unmediated frame of reference. In this frame of reference, time can be perceived accelerated or slowed down, gravity is felt in numerous ways, and emotions and psyche drive the experience. However, I like to manipulate these individual experiences live and in real time by synchronizing and meshing them to one another in a more excessive form as is usually the case in LARP. Masks and digital devices, and language as a technology are tools to spawn this fragile and temporal psycho-reality inside people’s minds. In LARP, the initiation and preparation, the character building, and finally immersion are created to avoid bleed, to create and sustain a coherent reality which is narratively enhanced and dominant over the consensual real. The LARPers become their own inward looking group trying to hold the immersion and in cases even defend it against the outside, the reality they are immersed-out-of. aLifveforms, however, welcome the moment when the conditions on the outside—the frame of reference that was consensual reality—intervene and disrupt our “immersion” in psycho-reality. aLifveforms invite the notion of an incomplete or disrupted immersion.^[11] Psycho reality, by never attaining to full immersion, does not aim to dominate the living and sensing consciousness of the travelers, but invites to sense a third reality, a liminal space in between what is real in consensus and what is shared with the smaller group of people (fiction, immersion, worlded real). In the event of alifveforms, this then leads to a particularly complex constellation of consciousnesses in a space: the mass of people, existing and present in consensual reality, who are oriented towards their aim of shopping, selling, guarding, or servicing, is without knowledge of the existence of the psycho-real and in this way unable to immerse in it. The fragile and psychically enhanced reality spawned by the alifveForm is thus constantly attacked, subdued, or ridiculed by the dominance of the norm of consensual reality. I would frame the power dynamic between these two forms of reality with terms from BDSM and thus instate a play between a dominating reality and submissive reality, of which the play space in negotiation is people’s minds. To me, this is closer to psychedelic space than to fiction or the space of LARP.

FORK

The making of psycho-reality has a strong intersection with contemporary art and, for the time being, spawns itself from art’s material base, economy, and symbolic order. Nevertheless, after ten years appearing in and collapsing out of the psycho-real, the recursive process is taking on its own materiality and methodology beyond Art. All the entities in their lines of life have developed a tendency of their own that I see as independent from my own will. The more plasticity they seem to attain, the more they separate from myself. In other words: rather than remaining in my ever more effective function as their rational author and actor, I am giving my flesh body and consciousness to carry their own irrational tendency to the real.

To me, this is not only an effective way to avoid the available growth model of the art industry to become a more prolific and visible author of a thing (artefacts and services as a performer do not differ much in their respective growth models) but also to question the ideal of creation resting in an individual body, rather than in a complex ecology of things and beings in even such disenchanted space as Western Art.

Transformella malor ikeae, for example, developed the tendency to almost eternally, for 468 times, float through every IKEA that exists in the world. I as an author did not devise this structure that reaches most probably beyond my own lifespan and might as well fail as a “project”. But as their tendency and as a manifestation of this tendency, the entity evolved itself into existing as a recursive function, as an algorithmical being, haunting IKEA in everysite. This tendency is very real, very practical and very material, and therefore the source of the entity’s autonomy towards me. Since spawning T. cinis lüzerathi and as an effect of the pandemic and the ensuing wars in Europe, a tendency in the line of life of Transformellae seems to manifest, in which this latest fork longs for or aims at an arguably mythical space beyond art. Since the space of art seems to collapse itself, at least in its modern and liberal foundations that we are used to, I-as-carrier of identities ingest the multiplicity of crises and from it form a tendency. The tendency is actually and materially aimed at leaving contemporary art as it is and venturing somewhere else. Since this process is neither rational nor strategic and certainly amounts to a similarly ridiculous trick as visiting every Ikeality on the planet, my conscious and consensual reality self, even as a carrier of artificial entities, can only let it happen to myself-as-other.

So it seems a fork in the lines of life is occurring again, but now there is not a fork between two different identities, but a hard fork, a more ontological forking from the reference frame of contemporary art itself. To me, T. cinis lüzerathi seems to be an entity that is not just the last of a set of entities that have continuously left the space of art in order to lead people on a trip into the “outside” of some sorts and then deliver them back to it. T. cinis lüzerathi seems to open a path that leads us out of contemporary art entirely.

APPEARANCE

Until now, after the exit of any of the aLifveForms into the unstable outside of psycho-reality, the re-entry into the real was inevitable. In fact, I have described our-as-their practice as appearing and disappearing and substituted the term Performance with the term Appearance. Performance Art as genre and performing as a form of labor within contemporary art started to have an enclosed, claustrophobic notion attached to it. Yet, for years, I-as-entity have thought of our appearance in IKEA or the Apple Store as coming from the inside of contemporary art into the outside of consensual reality. For many years and still residual in my thinking today is the notion that I was actually an observer inside of art, making and carrying an entity to appear outside in reality, as if art itself wasn’t part of that reality. If we now would invert our frame of reference and channel the observer from the outside of art, we would also have the entities appear and disappear, but differently. Without the reference frame of art, they would certainly come from nowhere. Bystanders, immersed in consensual reality, often speculate about the context of the entities and usually some instance of the creative industries comes to their mind, like film or advertising, marketing and less often contemporary art. With few exceptions, the appearances are unannounced and not previously negotiated with the space in the consensual reality in which they happen. Customers, shoppers, and workers are following their everyday tasks and—literally out of nowhere—a stranger appears. As the entities’ masks feature contradictory contextual information from sports, sex clubs, drag, and gadget culture, they often cannot be placed or situated.

EVENT

aLifveforms form non-annunciation in the consensual real, and its capitalist infrastructure that spawns from it creates a sudden temporal impact of complexity—an overload of otherness in it. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze associates events with the process of becoming—transformations that go beyond stable identities. The potential and truth of the event that ruptures normality manifests in aLifveForms as the overload of information for the senses of the uninitiated bystander. In parallel, the moment becomes an intensification of the spectator’s perception of time, as events and coincidences tend to do. There is simply too much information around and attached to aLifveForms body to decode at once and too short of a time to process for a bystander’s consciousness to form a coherent narrative as the entity floats by in their own time. The event of appearance makes aLifveforms seem out of time entirely. Consequently they are often registered as devoid of time as if they don’t come from any past or cannot be in the present, and if anything, they are often assumed to be from the future. It adds to the mysterious nature of the appearance that they speak and act normal, or at least in line with a normative concept of behavior, and an even more fundamental spatial and temporal sensorial distortion of expectations occurs.

alifveForms’ appearance as an event of rupture is both projected inwards towards the audience of contemporary art that finds itself outside the normal space of art, and projected outwards towards coincidental encounters who sense the internality and therefore alterity of the “audience” circle that radiates its own state of immersion even if distributed across the many bodies. There is a particular surplus of sensation in tethering these two social groups to the aLifveform as an artificial entity and so rendering the whole operation as a formation—a constellation of sensual experience brought as close to a complex networked consciousness as I believe possible with no technological means.

ART

The model of appearing and disappearing is not limited to the observer outside of the reference frame of contemporary art in the encounters of an uninitiated public with an unknowable creature.

Appearing with an audience in the real world instead of performing for an audience on a stage complicates the practice for an observer inside contemporary art as well. Inverted and seen from the other side, from inside of art, those who just moments ago were an audience within the four walls of the theater now depart from the space of contemporary art and leave it quite literally by foot, heading out into the outside of the theater. Harun Farocki’s image of workers leaving the factory comes to mind, only in that case the labor of spectating, the labor of becoming a bourgeois citizen with polite taste and refined judgment hasn’t even started. The infrastructure of contemporary art as a space—in this image the factory of politeness—mundane aspects of providing the frame for art, such as ticketing and registering, informing, priming with information on the author’s authorship, nationality, age, and summary of what is to be expected, might be still present. Yet in the moment the audience gathers in their role of audience by physically coming together, they immediately exit—guided by the aLifveForm—the walls of the theater or the gallery. Countless times, I-as-entity have left the space of contemporary art and then later that day delivered myself and the people travelling with me back to it.

I’m working on leaving behind the identities that carry Art as an enclosure of general human creation. In leaving behind, I mean to gradually and publicly shed the artist identity, authorships, artistic labor, assistants and their product—the art work. This is not a singular event, a sudden rupture, or another hero story. On the contrary, it is a tendency to nurture within the thickness of a practice embedded in the cultural totality of the West. A tendency that meshes and weaves with others in their respective tendencies and creates an ever stronger counter current of collective refusal.

The concrete manifestation of such tendency in aLifeForms is to venture from more historically acknowledged art identity into the second nature that is our infrastructures outside of art, re-apply what we in the West once had and have since lost to capitalism and Enlightenment art: the mystic asceticism of creating. The enchantment of the constructed self in play. The overwhelming power within our consciousness to create in the presence of an extractivist profession of any creative industry—or not. The drive to combine and unify material objects into a symbolic order beyond the function of leadership and trade. aLifveForms within this current then form one of a billion models that are re-enchanting the ruins of our own non-art sites, non-art acts and events. They are to me a force field of mysterious nature and unknown origin in not resisting the negative—the injustice and violence of the society we are embedded in, but to become non-compliant in continuously reproducing the gravitational force of this society’s positive idea of itself—of what is beautiful, moral, ethical, polite, and true. Re-enchanting IKEA with our presence, practicing iPhone witchcraft—the strange animism of a souvenir stall on the Acropolis: I’d like to offer journeys out of the reality of Art into the psycho-reality in which everything is animate, aLifve and speaks to your conscious and constructed identity derived from an open frame of reference beyond capitalogenic reality. In the afterglow, afterimage, and the reverberation of art, there is plenty to do. (→ RITUAL)

IDENTITY

To understand identity from the perspective of aLifveforms is to engage with an expanded notion or a contestation of what consensual reality affords our minds to identify with. Carrying alifveforms as artificial and constructed identities, and recursively manifesting them in consensus reality and thereby testing and exposing their effects, affects, and efficiency, renders them a tool of expressing my-as-our desire to expand the frame of reference within which contemporary notions of identity are nested.

But rendering visible the frame of references of who we are, who we identify as and most importantly expanding the concept of who we can become on the scale of a singular constructed life form and its unwieldy process of making and unmaking of identity, doesn’t necessarily change the frame in and of itself. Nevertheless, I think it’s productive and important to work through identity making and unmaking as an artistic method on a microscopic and experimental scale to propose models and experiences that in turn cannot be made under the normative gaze of popular identity politics driven by other political conflicts that have attached to the term.

Despite the difficult territory in which this artistic research is situated, and the conditioned projected identifications and self-images that come with it, I’m interested in the potential of ruptures in social and political space occurring around the making and unmaking of identity. I’m interested in tracing the material and concrete experience of becoming other in the event of alifveforms, becoming unreadable in their bloom and non-identifiable in their other-than-human acts, aims, sites of their rituals and then falling apart as an entity, falling back into normality of what we think of as human.

I’m trying to quite literally trace modes of identification in appearing and disappearing on the fringe of art, treating this territory as a scene of humanity, a metaphor for the instability of culture and the awesome queerness of evolution. The most powerful tool for this research, I think, is my own artist identity as opposed to my political or social or natural identity.

I believe that within our very small frame of reference—which I constantly remind myself is the planetary network of sites of culture and the contemporary notion of time as history—we already have powerful psychic forces at our hands for temporarily exiting the one frame of reference that our identities are derived from. We, and here the “we” needs to be specified towards humanity and not just the Western world, have the tools to dive into other frames of reference, beyond the barrier of what is currently empirically knowable, measurable, and most importantly marketable and therefore subject to accumulation.

Guardians and carriers of these processes of psychic expansion are projected to remain or reside in premodern human societies and indigenous practices. Psychedelic and entheogenic substances from various species of mushrooms and vines come to mind, but also narration and mythopoesis, masks, song, and play. With aLifveforms, I hope to contribute to a growing group of thinkers and makers who propose to reinstate these practices—as belonging to fundamental human cosmological understanding of our Earth and its many worlds—that reach beyond the ontology of capital and the identities that spawn from it.

CONSCIOUSNESS

I explore the hormonal nexus of me-as-carrier with the “networked consciousness” that is tethered to us-as-alifveform as a landscape of emotions and cognition in the real. Since in Western art and culture, gallery and museums, and most prominently in Performance Art, figures of transgression immediately appear, when alienation and confusion, disorientation and discomfort are in the space, I’m trying to decenter the deliberate production of anxiety and shame in what I see as a collective traveling through the landscape of emotions and the cogniscape. (→ COMMUNEERING) To me, it is an important practice to spawn, maybe excavate, all the emotions in sites of trade and commerce, tourism and wellness, even when there is a risk of negative emotions coming up in peers and followers. All emotions are situated with the site, embodied in the unlikely social formation and always tethered to the masked entity—a stranger. A threatening anthropomorphic figure that is simultaneously adorned with items that are signs of vulnerability. A trickster human—a non-identified being, non-readable—dazzling but evasive. The status of being in an artificial skin, a technological and identitarian masking makes them what I call alifve. A form. An entity to evoke emotions of various psychic qualities at once and all together in a moment. Those emotions could be anxiety—coming up in the openness and therefore assumed illegality of the journey, alienation—when in psycho-reality everything speaks of the violent and absurd state of our world, or shame might occur in being with such a ridiculous trickster entity.

A rather confusing emotional landscape arises for all the people that are present: art audience, workers, shoppers, security forces. My-as-our proposal is that if “that thing” speaks, the formation of “networked consciousness” speaks and even the site itself speaks, then “everything speaks”. This quality, I hope, resembles the sensation, if not emotion of a deep and fundamental connectedness to things, objects, beings, and worlds. Nested within our conditioned worldview is a space excavated for these states of consciousness as separate from normality: with the ingestion of a mushroom, lysergic acid diethylamide, or a vine containing DMT, this space is accessible. Within it, all of us find the presence of “others” that speak to you and in reverse, entities that you can talk to, and then quite literally talk to everything. As those who have overcome the brutal taboo in the form of a propaganda of anxiety and paranoia that is barring this internal outside of our human consciousness might know, things and beings do not always speak in positive and supportive tongues. In speaking to and within our human consciousness, entities of all sorts stride through the full realm of the human emotional landscape, including dark and sad and absurd and violent patches in our shared world. Those substances—in the conditioned world view—trick the rational self that I believe never existed in the first place and is nothing but a powerful narrative in itself presenting as normal. (→ OTHER THAN HUMAN) If we could, with the journey of aLifveForms and in other ritual practices, reinstate the full psycho-reality of human consciousness immediately and would not have to deal with the overrepresentation of the parts that are narrating a so-called rational, executive, competitive, violent, and hierarchical normality as the only one that is present, the transcendental and divine, the animalistic and ecological, the enmeshed and hybrid would not remain marginal but reign supreme in our narratives of ourselves.

IMMERSEGAINST

I’m interested to learn and understand the algorithmical reality as it is proposed by social media platforms. My practice of spawning artificial identities as a substitution to late liberalism’s models of subjectivity, and carrying them to capitalist infrastructures, gives me yet a faint sense of how powerfully the interconnected machine—surfacing as “the feed” on your smartphone screen—is manipulating our bodies faster and more profoundly than I can fully comprehend.

Fragmenting my artist identity, my social media identity, and my identity as an author has taught me valuable lessons how wired my sense of corporeality is to the algorithmically controlled infrastructure that I have tried to grasp by critique, a mode of outsider observation. Yet, I realize, I am far too deeply immersed in the algorithmic reality of art and culture, human corporeality, hormonal and psychic conditioning to ever attain the standpoint of an observer. For me, the obvious algorithmically controlled reality is nothing but a symbol for the pervasiveness of social automation that I experience in art and culture, in IKEA or the Apple Stores. This positionality of an impossible objective observation, while immersed in the thickness of consensus reality, doesn’t vanish with obsessively pointing towards the contradictory nature of social justice and its theories. My work points towards the notion that it needs another embodied subjectivity to experience these contradictions. I try to develop a subject for myself and others and as-other, which I immerse—against myself—in the real. I have played with the idea of calling such subjects Immersegainst, which is phonetically very close to the German Gespenst—ghost.

ALGORITHM

Throughout last year, I experimented with untethering my own sensual apparatus and the resulting hormonal production in my body—my serotonin and dopamine systems—from the Meta algorithm. I had already fragmented my social media identity into the three lines of life (→ LIFVE) and created a multiple identity perspective for the algorithm with three distinct profiles that represented three artificial digital identities. This “three-feeded” reality in itself has created multiple confusions, missing or corrupt information and a slight multipolar emotional tether to the social media real, when feeds of a German institutional virtual subject and the other artificial subject of Transformella—whose interest would be interpreted by the algorithm as an internationalist polyamourist—collide in one app. In an enjoyment of escalation, I left these accounts on a phone in a corner in my work space running, receiving likes, interactions, and comments, but I did not engage with them at all on the level of sensing, reacting, or deciding upon what the multipolar feeds were giving me in terms of signals, images, and texts. They became a ghostly presence of three identities lurking in the corner of the selfsistership^[12] connected to an invisible feed of other’s stream of markers of achievements and failures, pleasure and pain. In the Einsamkeit^[13] or Loneliness from the memory of a seemingly interconnected and collective neurotransmitted presence, the manifestation of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage from Mille Plateaux appeared and showed its power, without even being immersed in it.

In parallel, I witnessed the unveiling of yet another layer of algorithmical sensing: as an educator at a small art institution, I witnessed the use of the backend of the Meta algorithm, a professional tool called “business suite” to control the visibility and reach of any publishing. We used fiat currency, as opposed to the “natural” currency of attention that created visibility for the education program’s posts before. We worked together with the pulleys and levers of the Meta platform to train the algorithm, which suggested showing our posts to a very well-defined group—let’s say 1000 people, interested in Performance Art education, in New York City for 4 days, and we consented to this proposal for visibility by booking and paying. This way of planning, selecting, and controlling language and images together by co-forming “our” audience and “our” visibility felt like a very different relation to the algorithm as I had experienced before in my fragmented torrent of feeds and increasingly also to what I was saying and publishing as a person with three virtual spirits feeding from the web of life outside. The Meta algorithm for the institution seemed like a very well-meaning coworker, instead of the machinic other imbued with their own agency. We were bureaucrats of visibility, all dressed in a Microsoft-Excel way, sporting very mundane numbers and percentage points when speaking together to the feed of precisely targeted audiences over the ocean.

OUTSIDE

Lately, I have been engaged with the figure of the internal outsider, a powerful yet often sequestered caste of ritual experts who carry magic and spells, ritual and song. David Graeber, in his anthropological writing on egalitarian societies, and also Silvia Federici, in her feminist rewriting of European history of witchcraft, have both tried to write the importance of these figures back into the histories of the West. Especially in the case of sites and moments of experimentation with the commons, the non-violent and non-hierarchical collaborative spirit in humanity—so often under siege by warrior cultures—has been carried perhaps by mentioned ritual experts that are inside on the outside.

I like how Graeber, throughout his writing, is repeatedly shocked and almost surprised by how the imaginary of peoples from various cultures throughout history is constantly devalued and substituted by a simple, stupid, unimaginatively boring, yet spectacular hero story. This story is manifested as shiny self-aggrandizing, in the folly of feudal European subjectivity, and the fancy war machines that foolish men operate across the globe. In the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin compares the impact of a story of a hunter to the calm and repetitive act of collecting oats in the field. What is preserved as a narrative over the course of centuries and how? Does the excitement and spectacle of a narrative influence how we identify ourselves as human? As a hunter or as a gatherer? This question resonates with me when I make identities as an assemblage of narrations and as an assembly of humans and machines. Those assemblages are frail, they are not autonomously robotic, highly technological, commercially digital, or neurally networked on a mountain of stolen data. They are not in any popular way spectacular as they insist on the intimacy of physical presence in their travels. Their masks make them unreadable and their complicated language speaks to people in mysterious tongues in a complicated and absurd reality. To me, this is aligned to the queered spectacle of drag, not as a queen in a marginalized and more or less sequestered community, but as a worker drone camouflaging outside on the inside of the society of the spectacle.

OTHER THAN HUMAN

Humanity as a concept, as Silvia Wynter proposes, consists actually of a multiplicity of narratives. She uses the concept of homo narrans (introduced by thinkers like Walter Fisher and others) to describe humans as storytelling beings. As homo narrans, humans create themselves and sustain their realities through stories, myths, and shared imaginaries. These narratives define what societies value, how they organize themselves, and who is included or excluded. Concepts of mankind then fork along narratives that constitute different timescales. Man1 for Renaissance and Man2 for Enlightenment narratives of rationality, progress, and biological determination are two of many possible “mankinds” in their narrativization. By challenging the dominant narrative of Man2, Wynter seeks to liberate the human from narrow, exclusionary definitions and open up space for a multiplicity of narratives. The foundational moment of storytelling in understanding the Earth beyond an anthropocentric perspective resonates with me. Through Wynter’s concepts I started to connect the fundamental alifveness of the planet in the agency, value, and interconnectedness of non-human entities with my entheogenic experience of sudden ruptures of consensual reality. The mysterious veil that shrouded the meaning of the event in psychedelic space, when everything started to speak, was lifted for a moment.

LANGUAGE

Bees pollinating crops, forests regulating climate, wetlands filtering water, AI and robots influencing human decisions and behaviors, and ancestral spirits or deities in Indigenous belief systems all populate the planet with other-than-human activity and language. aLifveforms each develop and speak their own language which is enmeshed with the site and the temporal sequence of their appearance. For their journeys, they create a vocabulary by displacing and mutating current terms and categories. This is an essential part of their process of orienting language towards sites—manifesting it as bound to the specific site—much like a geomantic or sacred site spell, which is anchored to the site for its power.

In the line of life of Transformella malor ikeae, over many recursions, it has become important for the entity to utter a specific fragment of language in each IKEA section that displays a different type of furniture for a different simulation of life as a diorama. It is of course important what T. malor ikeae says at this site, but it is equally important that she has already said it ten times at this very site in IKEA in other cities. And she will say it, again and again, at every IKEA in every city where IKEA exists, until the end of her or the end of IKEA. I-as-us have tried to circle in on such use of language and called it language-as-device or language devices treating language as an object and its psycho-real ontology as site-specific and at the same time algorithmic aesthetic production. This is where the automation of the social body and the ritual intersect. (→ RITUAL)

RITUAL

aLifveForms’ journeys are closer to a ritual practice than to a performance. The language operation of a ritual is the recursiveness of an event—the imagination that it has happened before and will happen again. In this form of speaking, the content is of equal importance as the structure of what is said. The performativity of the act of speech is part of its content. This performativity is repetition. It is embodied, for me-as-entity, in the recursive appearance in the real. A repetition of the same language in a structurally similar site.

Transformella malor ikeae, for example, is an entity that evolved to visit every IKEA store on the planet. (→ FORK) Though IKEA, as a global corporation, grows and shrinks and opens its characteristically absurd lifestyle diorama displays in multiple locations in various cultures, which all have their potentials and limitations, it is never the same. But the vector, the aim, the direction and intention are clearly to apply sameness as an ideal to every one of the so far 468 IKEA. This is why I-as-entity call this network of stores a stack—IKEAE instead of IKEA. Therefore, the ritual and the algorithmical, the analog and material as well as the digital moments of repetition and recursion within the stack of IKEAE is structured as a full reality. A corporate reality of such weight that I gave it its own ritual and algorithmical frame of reference that I-as-Transformella malor ikeae call Ikeality. Ikeality is the IKEA-specific real, in which the spells and incantations of the entity have the power to make everything speak for fellow travelers. Here, a ritual is thus removed from the arrogant devaluation that can be sensed in the claim of an incomprehensible divine invocation of some strange god entity so prevalent in popular Western projections. It is also removed from its relegation to a totally mundane, New Age-inspired question of how exactly to prepare your chamomile tea in the morning.

Instead, creating, sustaining, and devoting ourselves to a ritual requires many maneuvers and material strategies, so that the entities involved, artefacts both human and other-than-human, can realize themselves in their plurality and paradoxicality of being in this complicated world. Ritual then, as an effect, is not confined to the concept of an individual body and linear time but a recursive and ritual sequence across sites and time scales, made from language for an entity that is the embodiment of this very constellation. The aim of the ritual, as I see it, is to journey into a realm in which “everything speaks” to you and in you, to journey in a narratively augmented and materially distorted real.

The center of a ritual is then paradoxically clear and at the same time empty: it is a form of more-than-human communication—and happens in the presence of the here and now, but will simultaneously continue to spawn, beyond my carriership, beyond my lifetime, and beyond any other archiving in the museums or other storages of culture. (→ LANGUAGE) To I-as-aLifveForm, this is the central difference to performance art within the frame of reference of liberal art making: the artefact, even if it is as ephemeral as a singular act of service in public space, needs, wants, desires to be archived. Performance, for all it’s often counter-documentary rhetoric and oppositional pride tethered to art history and its storages. A ritual, however, stores not in any archive but stores itself in itself, recursively embodied and re-embodied by the multitude of people that enact it.

COMMUNEERING

As a performer, I insist on something visceral and material: the live moment as an important instance of collective sensing. As a performance artist, I work with detailed sensual and neuronal information of the people who I’m speaking to—by the very basic means of production in the practice of performing myself. I am present. I compare the state that I transport myself into when I perform to that of possession. Traditionally, possession is often understood as control of the physical body by a metaphysical, transcendent, or divine entity. I’m interested in how far I can be possessed by an entity that I co-create, such as aLifveforms, and that is largely an identity assembled from language—years and years of making words in acts of speech. (→ LANGUAGE) I’m trying to invoke language as an object and agent that can seemingly attain a life of its own or at least rendered a cognizer. Even before chat GPT, neuroscience was proposing that thinking is not necessarily bound to a human being and that human consciousness is a slow and unreliable narrator. In her fascinating writing, for example in the book Unthought, Kathrine N. Hayles describes human and other-than-human agents as cognizers—meshed, linked, tethered to one another in something that she calls “cogniscape”. She also offers a striking image of human consciousness being a cogniscape itself, stratified and hierarchized by different forms of sensing, deciding, and narrativizing.

People who I-as-aLifveForm speak to are also rendered present—I bring them in proximity to one another, seeing and hearing one another when we travel through masses of other people. The aLifveForm tethers them to one another by radio transmitters, so they hear a voice as the language of the social formation. I have called this constellation communeering.

Everyone is present in the space on a horizontal plane: I-as-alifveform are not only a performer, and the audience is not just a passive group, but an actor and agent in the reality of the formation. We are not sequestered from the world in a white cube or a dark box—other bodies are also present by coincidence and think, decide, and narrate with us and for us. Communeering as a model is consciously built as an alternative, if not an opposition, to the model of contemplative viewership in the art gallery or the individual emotional immersion in the darkness of the theater. I-as-entity look into people’s eyes, they smell me, I sense their body’s heat, and their reaction to what I speak is a feedback loop that we all know very well from situations other than contemporary art. In communeering, we are modeling a non-existing social formation, expanding from our human lives in community but simultaneously rooted in the reality of social life.