Hello you!
Or maybe, “I”? Or maybe every single entity we define to understand things – a person, a word – is already a totality of ALL other “imaginable” expressions?
Well, it is a dystopian truth in our so-called “post-modern” world almost completely mediated by mediums – from language to VR – constructed out of reproduced symbols, images, and the “meanings” they create to attract “people”'s desire, therefore justify the existence of something in a humanistic world. They predetermine our experience before we experience it. They construct the “reality” that we think they represent. They rape our imagination into whatever forms of “retro.”
Still, it is also a road toward transcendence—something we have secretly and seriously desired since the Enlightenment.
This experimental project speculates a radical (yet gentle) post-human ontological practice beyond the paradoxical humanist ideals of “subjectivity” featuring LLM-inspired “containers of existence” and NFTs with fluid (alterable) metadata as “existences.” Primary textual references to this work can be Deleuze & Guattari’s works, as well as (not as conflicting as it might seem) Lacan’s.
The final production form can be a design fiction with a conceptual map and a possible prototype (at least for visualization purposes).
Brief texts cannot justify and even nearly explain this. If you are interested in this, I wrote something a bit longer to help explain it below. You can also go to the images at the bottom of the post to see more details—especially for the “What is it” part—but that one probably seems to contain more “post-structuralist gibberish” and is unfriendly for some of our friends while helpful and possibly intriguing for others.
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Why is it?
History repeats itself, with revolutionary movements failing to break free from the oppressive structures they seek to overcome.
After the Enlightenment, From Bauhaus to Fluxus, from Futurism to Personal Computing, to whatever post-prefixed, decentralizing ideals there are today, they seemed just the dust of the Enlightenment, revisiting its ideals, never fulfilling it. They took away hope and redirected us into “retro-styled” dreams. They haunted us with an unresolved past. They lead us to the well-criticized neoliberal orders where “it is easier to imagine the end of humans than imagining a (true) alternative of capitalism.”
To “oppose” something, we need to mention that thing in a way that we know what that thing is and isn’t. To say something is to affirm its existence in our web of meaning. “Innovations” are based or to be based on existing ideals and desires, doing what’s mostly like explaining a new word with old words in a dictionary.
Our existence and our justification of the existence of something are deeply entangled in a web of signs and symbols. They are not “tags”; we use them when we criticize “tags” and these concepts themselves. They reproduce themselves by reproducing our desire to sustain ourselves from melancholy.
Under humanistic ontology, “individuality” justifies existence, and subjects are societally validated and empowered. To be socially validated, an entity (human/non-human, tangible/non-tangible) must be registered on consensus-creating symbolic networks as placeholders (like a word in a sentence or a dictionary) to ensure the order of symbolic operation. The dichotomous logic of being/non-being specific symbolic presences (semantic, statistic, etc.) categorizes entities into signs - individual pairs of corresponding signified and signifier - on corresponding places on the symbolic networks.
Subjectivity is a construct that registers us on these symbolic networks and renders us accountable to their binary logic. Whether as humans, commodities, or any other “subject” caught in the gaze of attention, we are reduced to signs in a system that constrains our fluidity.
But what if we could transcend these symbolic constraints? Inspired by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this experimental system design project aims to move beyond the limitations of subjectivity by creating a new universal form of existence: Singularity-Multiplicity.
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What is it?
By leveraging the power of digital mediums, especially LLM-inspired models (new containers for existence) and an NFT system with fluid metadata (the inter-forming entities of existence, including the whole LLM-inspired “semantic” database), we will establish a collective, constantly evolving existence that sidesteps the Symbolic Order.
In this world, events and entities are not justified by their crystalized symbolic registration in our cognitions but minted as NFTs based on their intrinsic, ever-shifting, digitalized, and mathematically justified DYNAMICS (not coined recordings) of relationships that free humans from needing to participate in this finite game “subjectively,” enabling a pure flow of liberating energy.
Imagine a reality where existence is not defined by signs but by the dynamic interplay of countless potentials on both its most micro and macro levels. Where the boundaries between physical and digital, self and other, dissolve. This is the world of Singularity-Multiplicity, where existence becomes a dance of endless becoming, unbound by the stifling psychological paradoxes that have long divided us.
Through an eight-step process involving data deconstruction and synthesis, NFT minting, and the creation of a resonant, interconnected database, this project will forge a path beyond the Symbolic Order and into a new, post-human reality. In this reality, we can still engage in all the activities that bring meaning to our lives without being confined by the oppressive logic of symbolic justification.
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