Indigenous vs. Anthropocene v.1: XLterrestrial Tales from Homeland Insecurity
March 12th, 2013
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< 13.03 > XLterrestrials will take part in an an evening of Open Presentations at Supermarkt, Wedding – Berlin
We’ll discuss our work on PSYCHO-MEDIA ANALYSIS, CiTiZEN KiNO, and why we think that maybe technological ‘progress’ in a society with a dismal operating system might just be like poking yourself in the eye with a smart and sharpened i-stick. And ideas for how one might properly assess the current situations via community interventions.
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An excerpt:
Hello, our names are Dr. Podinski…
When we landed here as children, we landed on a tropical island… And the sea was just across the street. But because the waterfront belonged to the Benedetto family, the Cohens and Harold B. Floyd, the shimmering and/or inky blue-green neighbor was not our playground. The sea lay behind walls and fences, and a colonial history. The direction to the water was a dead end street. But worse than that was if you were to climb over the fence, the water was a No Go Zone, b/c the shipping lanes were not so far off, and parents would tell their kids, “Don’t go in there, the ships, they spill things, and besides there’s sharks, jagged rocks, and jellyfish that sting, horseshoe crabs and stingrays with sharp tails. DON’T GO IN THERE ! “
To go to a public beach was an hour drive. There were no buses and trains, at least not for children… they don’t just wonder out alone into these areas w/ the suburban + corporate brain feeds, projected fears and barbarian realities. Years later we learned a bit more about the chemicals, the waste, and the oil that gets both spilled and dumped into the city port, and about property, and about downloaded agendas.
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And still many more years later, we landed in San Francisco as artists, sound and theater technicians, pirate radio djs, and an indy- fire in our pants…
And while the city held all sorts of treasures, the doctom, start-ups, and silicon vulture waves were on the rise. And life in the inner city felt a little like those days of our shipwrecked childhood.
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The beautiful and magical California coast was not inaccessible, but it was a remote and hardly common experience, not just for the low-income, the oppressed minorities working multiple jobs, the families stacked on top of each other in the dense, precarious and sometimes violent hoods – the Tenderloin, Hunter’s Point, Western Addition, Excelsior, but even at 16th and Mission, where hearing gunfire and watching junkies shoot up in the alleys and people sleeping on doorsteps, on the concrete, in the crevices… was a common occurrence. Not just for them was nature remote, but also the new digital class, who more resembled creatures running nowhere fast on hamster wheels and ever-higher rents and amidst ever-longer landlord tentacles. To catch a piece of the gold rush, or just to stay above… that was our modus operandi….
The bayside of San Francisco near us was a pretty toxic soup, a former marshland teaming w/ marine life, migratory birds and all sorts of living things moving and feeding about, had all been turned to a 1st-world dumping grounds… an area known as China Basin and The Shipyard were known to have been contaminated with dozens of chemicals, lead and even levels of radioactivity , mostly by the military in the 40s… and ongoing, by a cast of crony characters.
So if ya wanted a dose of the real forest and the pristine beaches you have to take a bit of a journey, which could cost you up to 10-20 bucks. And you weren’t likely to find any clues for harvesting your rent out there, so trips were few and far between, if at all.
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Yep, we lived in the hamster cages, most of us, while a few scored big in the feeding-frenzied new tech market. Some artists rode the waves, other played for peanuts, others just said, “fuck it” and produced little vignettes of fury and heartbreak, at a loss. And either and anyway, you could get the carpet pulled out from under you on any day of the week, whether it was getting fired from a job or suddenly eating the odd but devastating healthcare bill.
It was in these little microcosms of the grand anti-social phantasmagoria, that The XLterrestrials was founded, in order to examine what exactly had led people into thinking this is how life should be, accepting this as is… We began to analyze the codes, the scripts, the desires which played their part in a hamster’s arrested development … the furry civilized rodent-folk scurrying to the next station, the next check, the next crash. And why would they willingly play the extras in this b-movie virtual trash-heap reality designed by the 1% lottery dreamers ??
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… So we began to analyze, and then we began to Hack !… We began to re-dream and then we began to Act !
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to be cont…
