frenz r gud

God mode, a general purpose term for a cheat code in video games that makes a player invincible,
Windows Master Control Panel shortcut, sometimes referred to as Windows God Mode
— Wikipedia

In this hybrid talk/tech demo, we at the Eyemole art collective reflect on our interventions into late capitalism’s “God mode”: specifically, the future of futurities that Achille Mbembe describes as the “negative messianism” of “apocalyptic libertarianism.” We argue that a key articulation of Silicon Valley theology operates via intellectual property–specifically the patent–that lays the conceptual groundwork for monopoly capitalism’s vision of the end time.

Behind its urgent walling off of the intellectual commons lies the fields of Virtual Reality and Neurotechnology. These two technologies promise, alongside techno-utopian dreams of ultimate liberal humanist empathy, ever new heights of panoptic control over every aspect of everyday life via sensation (VR) and volition (Neurotechnology), abetting all the while the complicit handover of data to the state or simply opening such data to hacker attack, state-sponsored and otherwise.

Via guerrilla hacks and golem-like creations, we aim to seize control of a fiery spark from the heights of contemporary techno-capitalism and formulate a new critical dystopian praxis offering redemption beyond the apocalypse.

Spring 2018 Semester: The Body, Movement, Technology, Apparatus

Movement, gesture, protocol, and choreography of specific bodies are continuous in language, politics, technology and other structures that signify and organize material. This semester of the Vancouver Institute of Social Research seeks to discuss ways in which the body and systems co-articulate each other and the inertias of power that attempt to frame them and the disruptions to various sovereignties that emerge. These discussions will take place also as a way to gesture towards the morphing forms of capture that are developing within the everyday hand-to-hand combat with apparatuses.