Phonic In and Off the World

Becoming Terrestrial

The Pale Blue Dot ¹

Participatory Thought ²

The first organ spirals out from a pile of cells, the first beat creates the legs, the arms, and the spine. Together they spiral out. All components ready to survive, they compose and decompose to the rhythm of environmental change. Piles of cells pulsating with others, each one creating an entire ecosystem. ³

A spicy soup is tentacularly spiraling through it, touching base with its parts, pushing the beat to go on. Any affect connects the gut brain with this pile. Intruders, charming microbes stay, the nasty ones leave. They remember, they listen, they communicate, they wait, and they vanish when we need more brainspace to focus. And yet, they are beaten up by language and systemic division constantly.

Lost in the terrestrial courtroom

A line divided between holy and earthly

Worlding happens constantly

We are flying over damaged lands full of creatures curious to cross paths carrying complex stories with them. Microbes are Yourcrobes. In the biological court they judge on their own behalf by exchanging unearthly stories about the junk they got last night. A pig has eaten a holy oplate and was publicly hanged. Animals were in court until 1991. In the constitution of time a strong glossary has been made. Rotating actions create lines between living and dead material. Simplification is the end of symbiotic affairs.

As if we had no other ways to reworld

Zooming out of the comfort zone

A watch smashed into random pieces is different from the parts that have gone into the making of it. The parts are one. They function together. The fragments are not, but they are still on their own. We break things up which are not separate. The parts are fundamentally at odds with all other parts. They participate. Spotlights on the activity of fragmentation, an experiential process.

Being within the Terrestrial

Becoming Illegible ⁴

Primordial Soup

When you get out of prison you don’t have an ID. You have not existed and yet you have. The machines didn’t learn from you, the criminal. An ID is never for free. Filter bubbles and biases are fed into machine learning behavior. There is no free speech, but learning. Worlding happens constantly.

Intentional Mutations ⁵

Quaking on top of tectonic plates

There is no accident. A computer never does something that was not trained before. The moment a computer understands that a person is a person, an iceberg is an iceberg, can be marked with the line. Contact Zones separated. This line is dangerous. ⁶ We are complicit with these structures. We build them by using them. Humans are like machine learning algorithms, learning constantly and not necessarily consciously.

Crystalize the Glossaries!

Nobody is about to exit the Contact Zone! ⁷

Mathematically we are Kin

Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of Recurse Centre, and an organizer of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web.

Carola Uehlken is a curator and writer based in Berlin. Currently she is interested in the stigma of the criminal; microbiotic systems and the way they inform human behaviour and well-being; biomimetic architecture as well as manta rays.