NEW MEDIA SPACES, DREAMSCAPES AND MAGICK
Who hasn’t fallen in love with an idea? Better yet, who hasn’t fallen in love with a fictitious scenario, whose dynamics and interactions happened nowhere except in our (body)minds? Have you ever found yourself daydreaming while listening to music, drifting off to an ethereal location known only to you and to your heart? Places, sounds and experiences belonging to the noosphere frequently haunt our waking lives, let alone our dreams. And I don’t know about you, but I long to inhabit those fleeting landscapes of inspiration, which always leave a bit too soon.
Well, what if you could manipulate vision, smell, taste, touch, hearing, psyche and beyond — by any and every means possible and desirable — and align them with an artistic vision, a sort of script for the “poetic experience of yourself”?
One of the most interesting possibilities of Post-Architecture is the creation of platforms where it is possible to curate the individual’s sensory input. Let’s call this composite media-technology a NEW MEDIA SPACE; a communications technology of which space is but one component out of many. Suffice it to say for now that all these components add up to the production of a total eclipsing of our sensory inputs — in contrast with, for example, the partial eclipsing of our auditory perception caused by headphones, or of our visual perception by means of screens. These technologies of illusion would allow us to become immersed in dreamscapes whose power is, by several orders of magnitude, larger than those conjured by movies or music. But the implications of what I’m trying to communicate are much, much greater than simply inventing cooler ways to use VR and adjustable acoustics to watch cool movies.
HACK YOURSELF
ALL spaces are media spaces — from Vegas to my grandmother’s village. They are inextricably linked to our sense of reality, or to what Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson called “Reality Tunnels”. They are the setting — the “stage” — for the performance of ourselves. And this happens naturally, all over the place. Because New Media Spaces are so immersive and have control over the totality of your sensory input, this means that our personal realities could be curated.
We shape our tools/ they shape us — we shape our spaces/ they shape us.
The kick is that New Media Spaces are such an improvement in the communicative ability of a space, that it’s power to shape us increases manyfold. Our individual sense of reality could be hacked, even consciously and carefully curated. In other words, what New Media Spaces make possible is the practice of conjuring and manipulating meanings and subjectivities.
If we equate information with energy, we can say that the amount of sensory data input that we are dealing with here is so great that it has it’s own type of gravitational pull. All surrounding bodies of meaning are swallowed by this black hole of information. Reality is subverted and replaced with a sophisticatedly designed substitute.
This leads the argument to the following topic: Magick.
“Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.”
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
In “Magick in Theory and Practice”, the famous occultist Aleister Crowley proposes this definition for Magick. This occult art/science has much to do with Post-Architecture — both seek to grasp a workable understanding of oneself and one’s conditions, and both seek to put that into practice in accordance with one’s will.
ANY required change may be effected by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner, through the proper medium to the proper object.
Aleister Crowley, Magic in Theory and Practice
The theoretical body of Post-Architecture is a growing body of knowledge that allow us to understand the conditions that determine ourselves and our realities. And its executive arm is what puts that understanding into practice. So in a way, Post-Architecture is magick applied to creative ontological design.
Now, our sense of “self” and “reality” are perceptional ideas; they are volatile and subject to fluctuation. From social discourses and relations of power, to our perceived roles in our personal and collective narratives, to the devices that shape our interaction with everyday life and so on and so forth — reality is shaped by myriad elements that are, in themselves, useful for the Post-Architectural endeavour.
What this amounts to is the slow and steady composition of an operative blueprint for “reality tunnels”. To know how these reality tunnels are defined, their structures and compositions — both in everyday life as well as in the exceptional moments of imprinting — eventually means that we can interfere with them effectively and precisely. Timothy Leary conducted research in this sense, using LSD to rehabilitate irremediable criminals, by programming their experience while on the drug. He succeeded many times, before his research was shut down. What is important to point out here is that he effectively designed the processes which would imprint and alter people’s reality tunnels.
In the same way, Post-Architecture is an exoteric method for Hacking the Noosphere, the personal and collective Psychospheres. The goal is not to create space, but to create humans through space, space-related technologies and through whatever means one deems useful and desirable.
This is the power of Post-Architecture. It’s easy to become megalomaniac while considering the possibilities and the consequences of this idea. But at the same time, the megalomania of the experiences that these New Media provide is unlike anything we have fathomed yet, as a species. It’s scale is unfathomable. l refuse to believe that we, as humans, are just specks of dust on a little blue pale dot, somewhere in the unfathomable void of the cosmos. We are not the size of our physical materiality. It is our birthright, as sentient, signifying beings, to finally reach the point in evolution where our “existence” is weaved into a masterpiece — whose magnitude, power and gargantuan brilliance only pays tribute to what it means to be alive, conscious, sentient and here.
Post-Architecture opens up the most exciting design possibilities that have been available to us since immemorial times, if ever. Only at this historical point, given the unprecedented accumulation and acceleration of knowledge and informational energy, are we able to stitch together all these separate longings that have plagued man for so long, and weave them into our own spells of reality.
POST-ARCHITECTURE OPENS WORMHOLES IN THE NOOSPHERE. IT WEAVES EFFECTIVE AND POWERFUL MAGICK SPELLS ON OUR SO-CALLED REALITY AND ON OUR SO-CALLED SELVES.
This wizardry is to dreamweaving what musical notation is to music; a way to harness, in a system of thought and of practice, disjointed ideas, notes and melodies — it can produce both utter shit as well as timeless masterpieces.
Ladies and Gentleman, let us learn how to read “experience notation”, and how to create it. Let us write symphonies and odes in worship to existence; let us harness emotions and power that will render us literal Gods for moments. And let us do this WILLINGLY, with PRECISION and ABILITY. Let us tear down the gates of our realities and step in the shoes of the Creator — creating ourselves. Let us live the love stories like no other humans have lived before — sharing the most beautiful dreamscapes with our lovers. Let us produce art the likes of which the world has never seen — composite content of audio, sound, smell, video and narrative, designed to flirt with the human spirit in bizarre and astonishingly new ways. Let us become Magicians, and take a quantum leap in our understanding of the concept of “Human” — now, it is US who decide what this means.
Can you imagine?
Let us accelerate even further, fearlessly, onto a future where it is we who own the control over ourselves. Let us accelerate the feedback loop between perception, reality and creation to near infinite speeds — and see where that leads us. Is technological singularity near? Sure. But from this point of view, it also entails a creative and ontological exponentiation of the Human entity as well — at least within the context of the Post-Architectural method. Architecture is no longer petrified music; it’s an unstoppable hurricane of poetry, energy and being. Let’s become more human, beyond human, the next humans — the Ubermensch.
Or we can just watch cool movies on VR sometimes, whatever you want. My name is Daniel Fraga and it was a pleasure writing for you. Hope you enjoyed it. Share your opinion on the comment section or through Facebook or Twitter. Keep an eye out for new articles — there is some cool stuff coming.
