ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XXVI. THE NEW EPIC - LIBERATION CATHEDRAL
Today there is the beginning of a world fusion theater, dance and music, the culmination of which is an epic, reality-based, robotically synthesized musical drama, a Theatre Concrete. The working classes are solving the paralytic knot of muteness, the TOWER of BABEL slave-knot, by merging all of our planet's constituent cultures into a truly international artistic language. It is a political and social necessity for the world's peoples to learn to speak to each other. Because of our common economic and social interests, the working class is the only truly internationalistic class in the cultural sphere, and also the only class capable of full mastery of technology. Unhampered by the blinders of privilege, those who built the machines are also the ones with the motive to implement them fully and humanistically. The gray-skinned, corpse-faced, mind-blanked, soul-dead bourgeoisie have created a fully realized technology of death. We must create a language of life, and not fear the profound art of suffering and eroticism that accompanies that process.
Slaveocracies have always made multimedia installations for the transfer of social and political power from the slave to the owner - they're called churches. The rulers became very skilled at assigning responsibility for human creations to God, which then iconically transfers back to the earthly stand-in, the God-chosen: the king, priest, and ruling class, who created the gods in their own image. Art plays a key role in this power transfer. When feudal stonemasons walked into a Gothic cathedral, in full blush of chorus and rituals, they were transported to a transcendent reality by the incredible power of the aesthetic experience. And if, during the rites, a spectacularly robed figure repeatedly tells them that God is responsible for this wondrous experience, the masons soon forget that they built the cathedral themselves.
I think true spirituality is based on courageously facing one's mortality, and making the absolute most of your limited life on this earth. Cult leaders lead by flattery, and the greatest and most brutal form of flattery is to tell someone they are like a God, immortal in soul, thus stealing from them the opportunity to fully realize the short but incredibly beautiful journey of this life. Why pour a true measure of your mojo into this brief span of three-score and ten if your life essence is immortal? Why not just tolerate the suffering of your current incarnation, if it shall be relieved after you pass under the mental influence of the anti-materialistic blather-radar of whatever tinsel-heaven your latest stealth-guru hacks together for you? True leaders say what needs to be said, regardless of whether their message will be popular. Today we have unprecedented tools for artistic creation and communication: computers, the internet, robotics, synthesizers, digital video. What we need is a new language, which will be forged in the primal laboratory of art. We need a visionary ritual that implements our technology in the creation of Liberation Cathedrals; musical-dramatic environments within which we take the power back to the source of the true mystery - our own human creativity.
In our cities, they still test a pre-apocalyptic air-raid siren, like the voice of the serpent from Eden, reminding us of our potential for self-extinction. We have a choice between the siren and the drum - a song of collective fear and paralysis, or the rhythm of people rising, reaching out to each other, making the world in our image, then re-making ourselves as truly human beings.
