Metabody – Journal of Metacultural Critique – 1

IMF – International Metabody Forum

Metaformance Studies 2013-14

Multiplicities in Motion – Open source Bodies-Spaces.

Preface.

We start herewith the first of a series of publications of the Metabody Project and its International Forum. It’s a first mosaic of introductions, kaleidoscope of incipiencies, declarations of unintentions and dispositionings, since this project is above all a displacement form disciplinary grids, a movement across known territories.

With this first series of microtextual improvisations and multiples manifestos or manifestations, we share an incomplete mosaic for a potential horizon of thought, yet without aiming to foreclose it. How to mobilise thinking always towards new and irreducible domains?

The images accompanying the text are from the Metabody Forums 2013 and 2014, images that don’t aim to represent but rather displace the text towards a corporeal practice from which it emerges and is inseparable, a practice of which the images say little to who hasn’t participated in it.

The reflections contained in the text expose a first period of immersion, from July 2013 to January 2015. A difficult period of continuous crisis, of bureaucracy, difficulties, lack of prefinancing and precariousness. A project in permanent crisis for times of permanent crisis. A creative crisis in which however the greatest challenge, even above economic survival and technical challenges, is transdisciplinary dialogue between the partners.

Where politics has transposed to the secret laboratories of corporations that design perception at planetary scale, we mobilise a counter-laboratory of perceptions, bodies, affects and movements. Mutant Bitches 2.0 as secret agents for a new politics of plurality and resistance.

Antidata as antidotes.
The context of the Project is an unprecedented control society, with the onset of Big Data as new economy that aims to reduce all reality to traceable data. The history of cybernetics could be written in terms of the persistent attempt to erase the body, reducing movement and complexity to forms subject to control. Therefore the horizon of the project can only be excessively broad, since it proposes a many sided approach to a millenary formalizing tradition, both in terms of creating and of reinventing ourselves beyond it, reclaiming a body in all the complexity of its multiple and open becomings.

Metabodies as antiobjects.
Metabodies are antiobjects, they invite us to perceive ourselves as part of relational fluxes that never become fully fixed in a form, proposing a relational ontology in which everything is body, but the body is not an object with defined limits, but an infinite field of forces, fluxes and movements. Metabody thus questions the ecology of objects as discreet measurable, traceable, entities, and the economy of objects in the internet of things.

Metaffordances.
Diffuminating the object, undoing its limits, is perceiving in another way, taking perception outside of a millenary fixation, so that instead of objects we may perceive open potentials of interaction. Instead of neatly defined affordances, that invite to just a predefined repertoire of interactions, to open up perception to diffuse affordances, indeterminate potentials.

Illegible affects.
In the emoticon era, where our behaviours are traced and reduced increasingly reduced to six universal emotions patterns, to recover the complexity of expressions in all its embodied ambiguity, where each gesture disseminates in infinite potentials, irreducible affects, infinite invention of illegible affects that escape the emoticon capture as invisible mode of soft control.

Disalignments.
To disalign from Renaissance perspective that still governs our digital interfaces of rationalized vision and manual control.

Microsexes .
To undo the anatomical, functional, biological reductionism of the body to a form-function, and disseminate sex-desire in irreducible movements, constant microdeviations of the atractors of desire in Affective Capitalism.

Amorphogenesis.
To mobilise amorphous bodies and movements as antidote to the empire of formalisation in the information era, opening up language and discourse to its tenuous and mobile frontiers.

Intra-action.
Where interaction is of things already defined, intra-action is of emergent processes that co-constitute one another. Radical ecology of bodies, affects and perceptions.

Metaformance.
Where performance operates in the limits of discourse and representation, metaformance operates dismantling the very perceptual frameworks that sustain representation and discourse: not towards a new sensory hierarchy, but towards and ongoing non-hierarchical reinvention of the senses, perceptions and relations.

Open source bodies-spaces – Affects hackers and perception hackers.
Where the question is above all to open up perception, as ontological substrate of politics in affective capitalism.

Metapolitics and Metacultural Critique.
Where politics has transposed to the laboratories of corporations: a counter-laboratory of affects and perceptions.

Performing contradictions – Don Quixote Crucified.
Where an ecology of transdisciplinary ecologies of collaborations and the questioning of dominant homogenizing alignments and expressions is proposed, the very structure of the project, its legal, bureaucratic and financial structure operates as hard limit reifying a radicalized embodiment of that which it seeks to questions. A Project that started being quixotesque, of fight against the windmills of neoliberal domination, transforms along the way…. ¿Is this performance sustainable?

By Jaime del Val