Anthropol: Origin

"homework" for New Centre Anthropol seminar series Week 1

The slight man stepped into my office looking skittish. Eyes bounced around the room at anything but my face, pushed up his glasses, then began speaking in a surprisingly forceful voice. “I don’t care what kind of connections get you this entire floor for your...whatever is going on up here. But we can not tolerate the use of the lab for drug synthesis. Do you have any fucking idea how much trouble that will get us?? Do you know how many laws you’ve broken? I represent the heads of the other departments, and I’ve been sent up here to demand an explanation for this and the state of your….staff.” He slammed a container of liquid on my desk, scoffed, turned to glare at the hooded woman that stepped into the room behind him. “We are running through the new sequence in 5.” she says, handing across a folder crammed thick with notes.

“Perfect. Our new friend is coming along. Management wants to know what we are about. No sense in hiding it from them any longer. Perhaps they can….help.” She eyed him with obvious concern before turning away and disappearing down the hall. “Listen carefully.” I rounded the desk and came face to face. “The work in the chem lab is sanctioned, and will continue. The state of my colleagues is of no concern to you. This work is tiring and requires comfort. The immediacy of this project is, as you will see, defined by the fact that its original designers are utterly unaware of what they have created. This is also why I am choosing to break the secrecy that has been employed thus far. Now if you will follow me.” I stepped out into the hall and followed the robed woman toward heavy, mechanically-locking doors but we could already hear the hum growing from halfway down the hall. “No electronic signal passes in or out of this section.” I say, while pulling a heavy black pKey on a chain from under my shirt. We passed through a kind of “airlock” and as the second door opened the humming became suddenly, exponentially, louder. From a distance it sounded like amplified chanting. As we grew closer, the digital undertones became clearer. We passed a large modular baffling wall and the sound became louder still, coalescing into a droning, whirring, oscillation warbling up and down in microtonal increments. The sound seemed to be emanating from nine robed figures sitting in a circle on the floor.

“They achieve interlock by matching the tone and frequency of their humming to IT. We spent 14 months in this room trying to figure out the source of the effects. Small points and shards of light, at seemingly random points throughout the room, solid and cool to the touch. Fragments of solid light that can reliably be described by terms like ‘force field.’ It was like being in a slow-motion snowglobe. One night a technician snuck her girlfriend in after hours to watch it and smoke DMT together. Set off several alarms trying to scramble to her office while extremely high to type one of the strangest formulas I could imagine. If the math had not achieved so much precision, not to mention immediate results, we would have surely written her off.”

The humming shifted. One radian of the circle lowered their volume as the opposing segment raised, there was a physical lurching as a point of light appeared above the center of the circle. The point extended into a line, a point at the center of the line pulled away into a triangle. A louder exclamation moved around the circle, one voice raised, then its neighbour raised, then its neighbour, causing a circular movement of sound. The triangle mirrored along an edge, doubled. Doubled again, grew monotonically into tetrahedron. Octohedron. Icosahedron. It seemed to settle here. This platonic solid floating above their heads. Circular chanting continued.

“Am I supposed to be impressed? Our VR hardware does this in full 3D with affective response modulation. Your people are what, dropping acid and chanting around a holographic projector?” The chanting began a new pattern, waves of sound coursed through viscera, and the icosahedron imploded and left a visible warping that pushed the gaze away from it. “Does a hologram prevent you from looking at it?”

“We are ready, sir.”

“Go ahead.” The chanting suddenly halted, spacious silence dominated. The warping knot remained motionless. Then appeared inches from the slight man’s face, instantaneously, causing him to nearly jump out of his shoes. It was suddenly human-shaped, the warping effect seeming to dissipate until it was a squirming silhouette of identical size and shape as our interlocutor. It reached a hand up to the man’s face that dissipated as it came close, never quite making contact, like an ice cube pushed close to a radiator and vaporizing. Its “skin” came into focus, and almost like a human-shaped digital screen, began projecting fast-moving, complex swirls of mathematical data and geometric imagery. IT held up the stump of “arm” that remained, waved it around a bit as if contemplating it, then leapt bodily at the man, exploding against him in a ghostly whirl. At this point, apparently the man had had enough, as he raced to the door, shrieking.

The chanting began again, and I followed. I managed to calm him down and we found ourselves back in my office. After sitting in silence for 20 minutes or so, he spoke. “Explain it. Now.”

“It seems to be unable to interact with matter in a normal physical sense, and it does not understand any language any of us speak-”

“Wait, you talk like it’s…”

“Conscious, absolutely. The densest representation of information I’ve ever studied, definitely. Systematically testing every conceptual and physical object it can get at for interaction. Made oddly placid by being given a puzzle, which is how we coaxed it into the box in the first place. Reacts in fascinating manner to sonic mimicry. It seems to draw power from its own activity, which makes no sense to us at all, and it was discovered by antivirus software when it began to grow out of your “affective response modulation” data. You will be pleasantly surprised to know that it did several years worth of corrections to work that was essentially rotting in a garbage file before we pulled it out of the system, though we are sure a doppelganger was only narrowly avoided in that, so we will be keeping said work. As for the drugs, my people are utilising heavy doses of LSD25 and prana meditation to effectively “neuropuzzle” it into cooperation. You could say they are presenting it with hyperplastic encryption combined with tranquilizers. Our problem is, that its behaviour has led us to the inescapable *heh* conclusion that the only reason that it has not been treating the box itself as a puzzle is because it is...having too much fun "solving" us to care. This has caused some of us to worry about how long we can entertain it.”  

jazzorcise me : wearing thin

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I'm nothing if not....whatever the opposite of prolific is....

Somewhat recently, late spring....
Struggling with some topos theory concepts while simultaneously wondering why jazz/improvisation seems to be the common thread linking most of those I see talking about these concepts, I decide to take an afternoon experimental. At this stage I'm criminally underinformed and uneducated about nearly everything jazz is could be was or will be...a complete novice. After scrambling around youtube listening to scraps and seconds and scrapings from several records by names I knew as an outsider, Coltrane Davis Monk, but an album title caught my eye. I plug in Mingus' appropriately black metal-sounding "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" and plug myself into roughly 200 µg of LSD.

[[the initial wash, the peak, was detailed in the mother/mary bit a few posts back. an ego-dissolution that coincided *perfectly* with a thunderclap and a downpour. when the peak collapsed into the decay stage, i pressed play and lied back down, my problems with this strange musical math in a sober state very much on my mind.]]

Upon the first notes, my arm hair stood on end and I could feel the shape of every instrument individually squirrelling and rumbling around various points of my body. I've felt structure in music, plenty of times, I've even written about drugs and the shape of music, but always in a wondering, speculative fashion. Wondering how much was just in the head, always subjective etc. I've watched music happen visually on many drugs, but this was razor sharp definition compared to large blobs of sound coming out of other bands and musicians. This had definition in a such a way that it was difficult not to think it as a technical upgrade to the technology of music, definition in such a way that I could recognize the math involved, could recognize the accuracy of my perception. It became no struggle at all to understand why it is a challenging genre to try and take hold of out beyond the muzaks and the kenny g's...I could feel the waveform of every musical structure and flow as separate strands and strings and curves, and I could feel the movement between perception and recognition, the gaps as strongly as the sounds. I could see how multiple instruments interlocked and constructed scaffolding for other instruments; how the group swelled and breathed as a unit, a complex system of individual complex systems working toward a unified projection. I felt a hundred spidery fingers, one for every frequency, cascade and crawl around on my cortex. By focusing on a single instrument I could mute the feeling of every other sound, singling out each strand individually from the rest, singling out the pathways that particular strand of energy took through my brain. After playing in this feeling for a little while, I mentally backed off from this awed analysing, relaxed my thinking and simply listened to the morphing musicality as a whole.

I could feel it bending my thoughtwave toward it. The spidery fingers were massaging my mind, attempting to build speed toward nonlinearity, toward a concrescence that crescendos into an awareness that this band is operating seamlessly as a single brain focused on a thing. Or on nothing? That the topology of this album seemed structurally identical to the topology of a single brain pacing around a structure that it is trying to understand. A brain praying to a structure it is trying to understand? A brain preying on a structure it is trying to understand?

I'm hearing myself in this album.
I'm hearing my brain work upon this album.
My perception split perfectly in two.
I have a sort of default, standard hexagonal latticing framework(?) for multi-perception, I've noticed, that occurs when my perception is split into multiples during psych trials and spellcastings, but this was the first time I'd ever witnessed it simply doubling. Perfectly doubling. A single hexagonal cell of unified perception mirrored itself dimensionally, somehow from the inside out, involuting toroidally and I saw myself across the room pacing around the stereo, lost in thought. Pacing around the structure it is trying to understand. I saw myself, and somehow instinctively knew it was a faded copy of myself from slightly earlier in time, and my brain raced past my rational mechanism into the conclusion that I was watching my ghost, and that I had died.

As this emotion overwhelmed rationality with an elegant precision, I started crying. The crying came out like a bolt with a decidedly un-sorrowful feeling, however - the feeling of extraordinary comfort, followed by a surge of flaming bliss. The thought that held my mind in its jaws before had resembled "if only I had myself to talk to, I wouldn't be lonely" was scorched away by the flash and heat of "I ALWAYS have myself to talk to, how could I ever be lonely?" and a warm blanket closed over me as I watched my spectre dance around the room to this beautiful record.

I accepted being dead forever, and suddenly knew the truth, that the structure around which I pray/pace is a mirror image of my own Death.


"A psilocybin mushroom experience in which I had perceived memories laid out before me contained in a seemingly infinite array of mirrors, mirrors that also contained the seeds of future choices, suddenly made sense. A labyrinthine reflexivity, an asynchronous reflection of every possible self. Sitting alone in the middle of the night watching an old man drown in a mirror of his regrets, my vision went geomorphic and I began to weep. Self-reflection was enveloped by void-thoughts and shattered across a broken-mirrored wall. I saw my Death pirouetting in the reflective surface before I reflexively shook my head and snapped out of it in time for the credits to roll."  
Reflections on a Hyperprophet - J. Hypheresis

something slightly less plausible

Yesterday
my witchcraft worked
Today
i sharpen my bones
Tomorrow
we pierce the roof of yama's mouth

I have been thinking on my last post, and I keep coming back to this image…I wish I could art better, I think I could draw this better than write it…I'm working on my calculus anyway heh…ok so, if, in the tryptamine state, at a certain level of synesthesia we get the filtration through the visual cortex of each step through the components, i.e. a visual point being reproduced in a tactile sensation, an audible sound, a taste, and a smell simultaneously etc etc if each component registers the sense and runs it through memory and the spatial mapping region individually with the visualization of those processes being collated and THAT being ran through the same system….we would get extraordinarily complicated patterns and movement pretty much at any level of simplicity above absolute primitivism yea? Suddenly Terence McKenna's 'dark room, no lights' idea begins to take a better shape….instead of what was often propounded, that it was to give one a free space to project into, thereby intensifying the trip….i think the idea could be better served as rather a method to test what kind of visualizations and imaginations are caused or triggered by what sensations. If they are singularly presented, in an otherwise stimulus-null environment like an isolation tank(which I experienced for the first time a few days ago, at the excellent FLOAT STL), they would be visualized singularly….practice with singular repeated sensations in this fashion over time would develop skill in drawing out individual threads of the sense-tapestry for examination during standard meatspace hallucination? Ultra-fine playback and tracking develops with intuitive analogous geometric responsiveness; or, how fast can you calculate the distance(and can heightened mathematical ability give one an ability to calculate "shortcuts", more directly perceive the motion of any moving parts, or in effect "simplify the equation"?) between the beginning of direct physical sensing and where it hits the active reflection of the perception in order to short-circuit subjectivity? I think we could train ourselves to interpret the signal earlier in the chain if we knew what it was, sooner, which would just be a matter of knowledge, practice, and genuinely paying close attention. Sounds create different visual formations when repeated over time but they don't seem to change(for me, anyway) enough for you to not recognize them once you have seen them a couple times unless you undergo a significant change*….my theory that -a more scientifically accurate internal model of whatever processes are being observed would render them in the visual cortex in greater and more accurate detail faster and with less metabolic cost- should be put to the test one day.
Maybe. Somehow.
Maybe I just haven't read enough to know if this is already old hat for everyone?

*repeated listenings to a pair of albums(Wreck and Reference No Content and CVLT Nation's Joy Division Sessions) while under the influence of LSD showed a structure that was constant across multiple listenings, and the structure visualized wavered only where I was "involved." From where the sound emanated, to where it hit my ears(and the same pattern again post-visually) remained constant through each listen. This constant structure was overlaid onto my vision for their duration unless I shifted my perception away voluntarily, and oddly (or not so…) resembled the "psychohedron" form my emotional machinery generally appears as when visualized.