Tech/Modernity + Ossawon Philosophy Unity (with History Essays / Grit archive)

Industrial Delusion:

A Book of the Dead for the Machine-Haunted Soul of the 21^(st) Century

A Unified Field Theory of Modernity Through the Image

Image theory: the spiritual evolution of perception

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Welcome.

This is going to be a very fundamental metaphysical essay through lecture. It's really going to get to the center and root of the idea of the image as a sort of assembly. The way it's been conceptualized most clearly, I think, historically, is in the ancient Hindu and Vedic tradition, through Maya, this idea of the veil or the illusion of reality or samsara. And we will trace that veil all the way up through the Lascaux Caves to painting and Picasso and things like that as well as industrial production of the image.

And I'll actually point to that through American baseball cards. That's going to be really the big thing there. We'll talk about Toulouse Lautrec a little bit too; the creation of mass printing that was distributed publicly. But the essential thing that I want to get to here is a metaphysical revelation of the image in scientific terms, which means what we're really talking about when you see things or perceive something, there's a neurological, biochemical wiring and a feedback loop that's occurring sensorially in the body, which is convincing us of a perceived or perceptible reality based on the needs of the species at a microscopic level. And what I mean by microscopic is bacterial.

So when we talk about bacterial culture or culture as bacteria, it's the idea that an environment has been colonized to operate in a specific way. So bacteria, like fungi, it's a form of language that communicates through itself. Every single species level organism has its own bio linguistics. It has a feedback loop.

There's a series of chemicals that communicate with the body. It is that simple. In terms of hormones that differentiate sex within species. Things along those lines. There's a biochemical makeup that's actually a genetic makeup, which is the language or the alphabet of nature insofar as it exists on Earth. There could be a radically different genetic code or some other form of building; other building blocks in other galaxies or other locations unknown in the universe where nature at large as a meta structural concept and construct communicates with itself.

So when we talk about Maya as an image, we are perceiving a reality which we believe to be real. It's a tree or it's a stone. But in actuality, it's actually a very, very, very complex microbiotic system that is built up through molecules and elements. We're talking about the elemental building blocks of nature, which if you want to take it from the Big Bang level, is the fusionary explosion of stars in real time. This is the generation of the furnace through which the basic building blocks and elements of the universe are produced. All of those building blocks at an elemental level and a molecular level are generated through the fusion of these massive stellar furnaces, of which the universe is a macrocosm of and stars are microcosms of. This can be traced all the way back down metabolically through humans, animals, plant life, cellular life, and so forth.

The concept of photosynthesis or metabolism. These are all ways of the self reference of the universe in fractal form. That's what Maya is realistically: that what we're really dealing with is a primary generator. I've called it resonators in other works of mine because it's like a nesting doll effect of furnaces that are self referential and deferential ultimately to the universal structure itself. You could call it the sun at a solar system level or then you could say the Big Bang at the universal level. It's just through space and though time, the same fundamental principle applies.

It's the eternal. Heraclitus said the universe is composed of fire. From fire into fire. So with Maya, what we're talking about is the vision of the real, which Blake said would be melted away with, salutary medicinal or a chemical that would reveal what was hid: the eternal.

Man sees through narrow chinks in his cavern. This is the famous doors of perception quote. So what we're talking about with image culture is that we are attempting to peel back what was hid. Most people or humans or organisms perceive superficially. You see a tree, you think it's a tree. You see a human, it's a human, and we have names and definitions. It's all very convenient linguistically. And so you live in this illusion. You're living in a veil; in what Plato called the cave, his famous philosophical concept. The cave is everything is what it is as it is, how we see it. And we fail to examine the human perceptual mechanism itself.

This is a sensorium that has been built for the sole purpose to continue the human species and to survive as an organism in the dominion and wilds of nature proper. It's something that you take for granted because you live in this animal mode of perception, through which everything is perceived through the lens of survival. What do I need? What do I need to accumulate in order to survive to the next day? That's the story. And so that's how we see. We say, oh, this is valuable because other people have decided it's valuable, which is really just a mask for me to say: this is meaningful because it'll help me survive to say it's meaningful. Right? It’s a closed loop of biological integrity.

So this is the whole delusion. And this is what we're getting out of here with real image theory. Image theory that functions at the metaphysical substrate of reality.

Human image culture has existed for as long as we're all aware. Even the idea of language and letters and an alphabet, hieroglyphs. The Lascaux Caves. This is all a way that nature reflects upon itself through mirrors. This is actually really profound. There is the reality, which is the kind of substratum of the cosmic fire, as Heraclitus would put it. It's the Big Bang after the Big Bang that happens on scales. It's scalar down through stars, through humans, through animals, plants: that's metabolic fusion that's occurring across scales. And that's the appearance of time through entropy.

Things are born and then they die. They burn out, and then they are resurrected through elemental clouds, which in the case of stars, right, it recollects itself from the ashes of what was and births a new star. So there's this death and rebirth cycle that you can see in the cosmic mythologies of all cultures, whether it's the Mayans or the Aztecs or through Dionysus or Osiris. Or you have Christ.

It's just describing the fundamental metaphysical principle of being over and over and over again. So the idea behind the image at a metaphysical level is actually to penetrate to the deepest and deeper levels of reality to perceive the elemental, to perceive the essential through the revelation of the image as something that's distorted or a veil, or a kind of menagerie of falsities through which we engage on a day to day basis. It's everyday life. It's just a surface.

The same things happen. Reproduction, consumption, digestion, expulsion, and then resorption again, right, it cycles through nature. It's reabsorbed into the earth or the ground or the metaphysical substrate of the void and then is recreated through a process of transformation of the bare elemental bones of existence. Plato's cave is a great analogy because it refers to Lascaux, right, a physical-metaphysical way of bridge. Because in that cave, Lascaux, it's the way of reproducing reality through an interpreted image. It's the symbolic dimension of reality. This is the same way that archetypes function in everyday life. You have a role that a certain actor plays to further the narrative of the cosmos, which is ultimately always self revelation. It's a spurring on; a urging forth, through the dream-mirror reflection of the image.

There's been an issue with images historically. You can go to the concept of iconomachy; then also image worship. Cultures and religions create images to worship and deify as symbols of the divine, of power, of creation, et cetera. And then, obviously, other cultures have their images, and so it's an image war based on appearances. You’re fighting a battle of shadows and light, a chiaroscuro of image dominance which is predicated fundamentally on false perception at an imagistic level, regardless of whose narrative surfaces to sculpt the narratives and stories at large.

You could refer to this through ethnicity or all of these different constructs where people are debating what is real. The issue is it's all on the surface. It's not metaphysical. It's not backed by science, and it doesn't see the fractal, scalar relationship of reality down through these very, very deep metaphysical substrates, which ultimately are creative fire manifest in various different forms, all of which are illusions in the sense that they're images of the thing itself. They're representations. So when people talk about god or the godhead, everything is an image or representation of the godhead through the scalar dimension of energy transformation and transfer. It's a form of limited vision being manifest linguistically. This is, literally speaking, the transmission of belief and belief systems as a virus of delusion.

We experience this through the chaos of dreams in particular and imagination because we can see all of these possible realities. And what all possible realities ultimately are are stand ins. They're conceptual stand-ins for the real. So we could live any sort of life in dreams and in the imagination of the ideal as a thought form.

Humanity could be transformed and is transformed through evolution. It's essentially an alchemical beaker that the universe fundamentally is. That things are transformed through chaos and different interacting forces within the beaker of elemental nature itself at a cosmological level. The interaction and engagement of compound elemental structures.

And so we move through dreams. We move through the illusion of the real. All that we see or seem is a dream within a dream, Edgar Allan Poe. That's a good one. We move through that seeming with images, with words and language. These are all ways that we attempt to refer to reality without directly seeing or perceiving it, but through the veil or adjuncture of the real which is the human experience in the form and body of genus and species, genesis and perception therein from the bio-chemical makeup and imperatives that constitute this specific order of experience.

I call a chair a chair, but it's never been a chair and it never will be. It's the metaphysical substratum of existence, existing on a specific scalar plane, has a certain resonance, a certain frequency, and a certain vibration through which its existence is stabilized. All of this is very tenuous. It's based on molecular agreements and cellular agreements.

And those agreements can be broken, again, through fire, primarily, as the creationary and destructive force that effectively straddles the bounds of reality. Things either exist or don't exist based on their status in fire. That's why you hear, walk through the fire of revelation. Everything is stripped away except the essential. That's just scientific. It's fundamentally scientific, communicated in the language of biblical, Christic revelation.

The issue is that we are referring to things through our perception. It's the narcissistic selfishness that characterizes a species or an organism. Because, of course, it's a survival concern, fundamentally, because nature has to further itself through the language of the organism. That's the genes; the genetic code of the organism, and that has to interface with another aspect or dimension of reality in order to create a third. Again, tripartite, father, son, holy ghost, metaphysical concepts that gesture toward the production and reproduction of being in time; the image in the eternal flow of existence itself. Plato, time is a moving image of eternity. Becoming is, in the language of modernity, a rapidly accelerating industrial reproduction of the image of being, refracted and reflected in increasingly more abstract and technologically hyperspeed concepts and theories of forms.

What happened, in the early nineteen hundreds in particular – this is why, baseball cards are actually really important, as well as artists like Toulouse Lautrec – image culture that was created by lithography and mass printing allowed for, for the first time really in human history, a mass proliferation of images and image culture in a way that democratized accessibility of images, where previously they were available primarily to elites. High art, technically proficient images that absorbed and enraptured and revealed – they were commissioned portraits, paintings, sculptures – whether it was by the Medicis or by kings and royalty in ages past. It is a lapse that almost directly refers to the democratization of image creation that was kind of native to early civilization as a common language.

These were images, as in Lascaux and other such geological locations, that were just created by creativity of human beings and humanity attempting to primarily understand nature through the mediation of a symbol. This is the idea that fine art finally becomes self-resorbed or reabsorbed into the masses by way of print culture. Again, Toulouse Lautrec and public prints, Japanese Ukiyo-e, as well as, the really important part, baseball cards. Baseball cards were objects of possession that were mass produced. And they were not directly referential to reality as in photography. They were produced via dot matrices. Which again, that is a very important aspect, the dot matrix, because what that is is it's a technological encoding of the imagistic dimension, which actually mimics the language of nature. So you can see: in the creation of pixelation, which is, the way you would be viewing this lecture, if you were viewing it, you would be viewing it through the digestion and incorporation of my image in a digital image transfer of that image into pixelated form as an avatar, a digital moving symbolism.

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This is a way of encoding reality that directly mimics actually at a biological molecular cellular level the way that nature adheres and coheres forms, in terms of Maya. The issue is that this veil has been doubly reified by modern technology and the mass production and consumption of images as itself the culture of technological modernity. So when you have mass technologies, cell phones, screens, portable devices – all of which are constantly casting images at you, what it is is essentially a form of the magic of the redoubled obscuration. We're working with images as self referential devices to move through reality to ultimately grasp and perceive the fundamental or the essential. Technology reifies that through the additional interlocution beyond the primary symbolism and codex of nature as a child of nature through the child of nature, mankind, as in an abstracted reproduction, through lithium and pixelated code to generate imagistic outcomes – a mirror within a mirror.

The issue here is that you can get lost in that journey. So it makes me think of Odysseus and the Odyssey. You can get so lost in images and caught up in images as a way of perceiving reality. You're so dependent on that medium. I have to look at a tree to know that there's a tree there and maybe there's fruits and apples and berries on it. Then I know, okay. I can go pick those and then I can survive until the next day. That's already built in at a deep primordial biological level into humanity and into organisms themselves as a visual culture. And this is something that Jim Morrison as philosopher and poet explored pretty substantially in terms of the idea that humanity is essentially a spectator. It's wandering – a species of wandering eyes.

And that nature itself is too. You can see this in terms of the idea of the all seeing eye or the godhead – that there's a primordial objectivity that's functioning and operating through all subjectivities. It's attempting to reveal itself to itself; its hidden sacral commonalities. But the problem is there's been all of these obscurations, and you can see this in the story of Pistis Sophia. It's an obscure Gnostic text. The idea is that Sophia – or wisdom or truth or true sight – or the divine, the diviner has fallen through veils. This is the idea of The Fall in biblical terms: that we've fallen through these veils of perception, and we've been seated in these forms that we essentially are functioning belief systems to further the essential form itself. It's a costume, or a disguise of the eternal, the sacral, cosmic nature itself within the mask of the human. But what's essential is to get back to native sight, which is real primordial sight and vision of the eternal.

This is a concept that is imperative through Blake; through Jim Morrison as well. Through Plato. Right? This is the history of Western metaphysics, just as much as it is the history of Egyptian metaphysics, which is, ultimately, the inheritance of Western metaphysics itself.

So we're working with images. It's a kind of soul work. And what I mean by soul is it's just the self of the universe. That the soul is seeded in a thousand different shards, in fragments. Again, this is a Gnostic concept. Through the, let's say, the Big Bang or the essential primordial force of creation, that's all seeded down in this scalar infrastructure of creation itself. That's what souls are in relation to spirit, which is the eternal – the fundamental, the essence. So soul is on a journey back to spirit. Soul is seeded into the ground, and it is on a journey back to the fundamental perception of the spirit, or the godhead or the eternal. We're using images to do that because, essentially, once things are seeded into forms, there's all of these false differentiations which are ultimately true for the purpose of life to exist and further itself in terms of an increased level of metaphysical perception of the substrate of reality. We must go down and within to perceive the totality of the whole infrastructure of creation itself. To achieve reality we must reveal it through itself as a creation.

The purpose of life, to survive. Granted. But beyond that, it is to perceive the real, to perceive the fundamental or to perceive the essence. So what what we're doing here in terms of evolution, whether you say cosmic evolution, biological evolution, or inserted framework – we are on a journey back to the godhead as in embodiment of the godhead through perception where we are natively reunited, as in Dionysus, Osiris, Christ – with the godhead, and we directly embody the godhead as in embodied revelation of the real. So it's a total unity of the paradox between spirit and form seated in the body. We're on that journey through images.

So we see something. It's reflecting something back to us that we believe to be, but it actually isn't or it's more, or it's less than that. It's this journey of a maze or a labyrinth of mirrors, which is distorted perception. And the purpose is to clarify perception. This is archetypal heroism of the image journey. Again, you have the different journeys, like the Ayahuasca image journey or the mushroom image journey or the image journeys of the ancient Greeks. The Orphic journeys, the Eleusis journeys.

They're all the same thing. The issue is we're just not seeing that. This is the journey of the archetypal hero, whether you want to say it's Hercules or Perseus. Those are two of some of the best ones to help elucidate this. Perseus' shield is a reflector or a refractor of the real. It’s the image, the screen, the veil of the representation through which he perceives the real. Because the real is so hard to comprehend and it’s, for a lot of people, so deeply terrifying. Because what it reveals is all of the terror and the lies and the falsity that was hidden beneath the veil that we use to justify the survival of the species. To justify and perpetuate survival. It’s the darkness of the primordial violence of existence, creation, blood; sex and war.

We had to survive to get to the point to perceive the real. That's what evolution is. We're evolving from single celled organisms and fish that were living in the dark of the ocean, to having higher level abstract perception and conceptualization of the real through forebrain faculties of engagement. We can contemplate metaphysics or quantum mechanics, and we have to understand how the spiritual relates to the physical. That's the process. And humanity is currently in the stage of trying to figure that out. We'll see how that goes.

Navigating the underworld of images to symbolize the deep primordial unconsciousness of the ancestral heritage of mankind and humanity. Yeah. There's a good one. Because in dreams, or in reality, the great Nietzsche quote is that man is a tightrope between animal and god. We are evolving from a deep primordial substratum of unconsciousness. Right? We just didn't know. We don't know. It's pure violence. It's pure chaos. It's pure survival. It sucks. It's a horrible way to live. But we're evolving from that into real-perception, into consciousness. The development of the hindbrain being something rough. Yeah? Hard to go through. Development of the frontal lobes and the forebrain. Great. Logic, reason, rationality, age of enlightenment. Right? We're moving toward this. That's the entire story of history. It's the entire story of nature. It's the entire story of the cosmos. It’s the entire story of mankind.

It's revelation through evolution, cosmic spiritual evolution. And that's what evolution is. I mean, you could call it progress. You can call it whatever you want, but it is toward the perception of the real and the reuniting of the spiritual fragment of the self in biological form or guise, disguise or clothes. That's a great Einstein quote – we're stars seated in chemical garments or something like that. Great quote. Because it directly references this, and it talks about this in a real way. The greatest scientists of this time, which is the revolutionary time of quantum physics, striving toward the understanding of the spiritual dimension of the material. The inner substratum; the metaphysical functioning; the inner metaphysical law of the Newtonian, Copernican world – of what was previously hid. There's a certain point that we get to science where we are in a state of spiritual revelation. We're in direct contact with god or spirit or source.

It's this veil of the screen in front of us at all times. They are energy containers and transformers because they alter our psychic relationship interdimensionally between our inner world and our inner space and the outer world and how we function in the physical dimension. And the idea is to unite those two poles. The inner and the outer, the within and without, all of these binary dynamics of fissionary selfhood that ultimately veil us from the truth – self, other. And that's a hard thing to do in full from the seat in which humanity sits. So we're using screens as a way of hyper accelerating that feedback loot, feedback loop. Loot is kind of funny there. Because we're looking for the real spiritual wealth. The issue is we get so distorted. All this gold that's in front of me that looks amazing and it's shiny, or the screen that's in front of me that looks amazing, and I can see everything that I want on it.

We mistake that desired desire image or that relationship between the thing that we perceive or we think that we perceive, to be the truth. Because we want it to be from where we sit in the narrative structure of the cosmological unfolding of reality seeded and seated in information forms – biochemical narratives wrapped into futurities by genes. But in reality, right, we're trying to look deeper. We need to look deeper to understand the fundamental reality and thus reunite with the truth itself as the whole. Right? It's less of the hoard or the gold or the thing that I have that nobody else has. Its the thing that everybody and everything fundamentally is.

We're working through these ancestral, primordial dynamics of accumulation and possession into a real perception of the real, which then dramatically alters the course of history, and we're ushered into a new era. And this new era is the era of communion. Communion with source; that radically changes politics, culture, and society as it were.

Let’s see here in the notes… simulation as a ladder to the perception of the real. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes by Shankara, a great Hindu mystic. It's this idea that Maya, or Samsara, or the illusion – it’s a gymnasium. It's a way that we become strong. We work in images as a dimension of play. Images themselves function as a way that we can create relationship in order to come to perception and apperception of the real as a totality. It’s a ping pong ball, or a bouncing off of light.

There's this cycle of attraction and repulsion. This is magnetism and gravity to the psychic dimension. There's images that we want. There's images that we don't want. We’re pulled toward and away from perceived polarities of desire and repulsion. And then we integrate image itself as a construct. Then there are no more images. It's a totality of lived perception.

This is how we function with images; we're constantly in that way constellating self through image. What do I look like? Who do I want to be? What do I want to look like? What do I want in my life, and what does that look like?

The entire process of painting has transformed from an attempt to create real imagistic representation of the real to a fracture, which is probably best symbolized in cubism, Duchamp and Picasso. This idea that the image is broken in modernity, and we're breaking from this attempt to depict reality directly. We think we're directly perceiving the real, but, really, there's this more complex internal environment that dictates and constructs perception, which is probably more real than reality itself as an imagistic representation because how could you possibly truly perceive the real but through a vision of it?

I didn't go into the baseball card stuff that much, but I do think it's very important here. You talk about the industrial engine of America at the outset of the nineteen hundreds. What you're really talking about there is the mass production of images and the mass production of image culture. You have Hollywood and early cinema. But that's not something that's possessed or that's owned by individuals as an image. It's something that's distributed publicly through screens and theatre culture, a la the Roman and Greek theatres of drama. It's being mediated by a complex that is not hyperphysical, such as a card or a print. What baseball cards are in the context of an emergent industrial modernity, and this is why they're important in the historical relationship of what we're talking about here – is that you could basically go from Lascaux to the baseball card and have a coherent field of the revelation and revolution of the image and image culture to a closed loop. And the reason for that is, until the baseball card, there's no real mass produced, fine art image – which is to say, a very artisanal image-object that actually straddles the balance between the real and the hyperreal as in a cartoon or a drawing. Something that's crafted by a technician with the technology of the image that creates a window or a bridge from what is usually conceived of as traditional representation, which is a Victorian or even a Renaissance era stylistic image – which is attempting to use ‘the real’ as a reference or attempting to use the real as a bridge to the symbolic or metaphysical.

These are tobacco or caramel cards made by American Tobacco or American Caramel produced from 1909-1911. These companies were highly resourced and highly powered industrial forces that used mass image generation and reproduction to sell their products. They're really interesting at a technical level, which in itself is remarkable in an art historical context. And through that interlocution of the technological modern industrial image revolution and world power forces of industry, you get this really critical and crucial turning point. You can look at the way dot matrices were used in these mass lithographic forms in industrial reproduction as a way to easily reproduce and technologically replicate images at scale. And you can see, again, through the pixelation of these early modern images, exactly how they were generated by machine stamp of basic color code in relational dot matrices. It's a direct technological-historical reference moment to the modern portable phone, or modern portable screen – not only in terms of the ability to hold this piece of technology in your hands, but actually in how it was produced in terms of pixelation and rendering; in terms of the actual coding and codedness of the image as a technological device.

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This was very different than the glass negative production and reproduction that characterizes early photography in terms of light transfer between mediums. It is a direct interface with a totally technologized form of reality construction and image making. It is a step forward into an unknown, which over the span of the next hundred years culminates and continues to develop through the pixelation of the images on the screen and using technological code therein to generate simulated and increasingly real-world-bridged outcomes through the mediation of technological devices and coding. And that kind of image generation is a pretty radical break from the human. Introducing technological modernity, it's almost like you have space-time folding over on itself. And what happens is humanity as a representation of the real, as a form that's attempting to seek the real itself, to realize and to truly see itself for what it is at root and fundament, creates an entirely new genre through itself, which is technology; which is automation, which is artificial intelligence – that is, it introduces another level of stratification through which the real is perceiving itself. It is the birth of ‘unnatural nature’, or a rupture in the fabric of consciousness itself as a biologically emergent form. It is primary, artistic creation interfacing with the raw materials and elements of nature to build metal machines which can process information and produce and reproduce outcomes; outputs from, again, the raw form.

So you have the godhead spirit, you have human, and then you have technology, which is the birth of this generative device, this further level of Maya through the play of light; through the play of light in a screen or through the play of light in a photograph. And this is really powerful, because it creates this really interesting kind of third dynamic which complexifies the initial mystical relationship between the interface of the screen of reality or the illusion of reality and the sense body. What I think I'm perceiving or what I'm perceiving as I examine the world as a natural form, or the body of Nature proper. It creates another dimension. We're using a technological device to create another projection of the real from this initial schism of perception; we’re using this as a hyperspace of alteration of what we are perceiving; as a sort of tabula rasa for image generation and perception. It is a way of control and manipulation to radically accelerate the awakening of humanity.

This all can be radically changed immediately and directly through the hyperspeed of an internet connection. We can change the way that the screen appears. Right? And so it's this kind of dream narrative that's informing us and that we are rapidly informing through the processing powers of increasingly outsize supercomputers with increasingly broadening apertures of generative, imaginative capacity. And, obviously, you can see how addicting these technologies have become – because the addiction to it is, it’s this ability to achieve hyperspace with image relationship. It's a quantum accelerator of spiritual revelation; therein, species evolution.

It's radically transforming the consciousness of the species at large in a way that the slower, more regular, seasonal, cultivated and measured reality of nature itself can't and doesn't necessarily accomplish. Evolution in a natural sense is glacial, but in a technological sense, it's instantaneous. And, that, historically, has been the function of art. It's to create an apocalyptic revelation. A psychedelic revelation and psychedelic just means psyche-revealing. To reveal the psyche through the production of the image or the consumption, the digestion; the encounter with the image – which reveals. Fundamentally, psyche-revealing is the revealing of the deeper substratum of reality proper.

So a real psychedelic revelation is the stripping away of all illusion – through fire, by fire, and a direct revelation of the fire unto itself, through itself. And this is well documented in all mystical traditions by all mystics, Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart. This is in Dostoevsky. This is what real mystical and spiritual encounters are. It's the burning bush. It's the voice of God. In a prophetic sense. And so what's happening at a species level, just to make this really simple, is the mass hyper acceleration of images through technology over the past hundred years, exponentially detonating in increasingly smaller pockets and windows of time. And the spiritual metabolism of this process at a species level is a chaos level exit velocity.

Let's put it right around 1900, a little less for photos and, you know, early cinema. The mass acceleration of images through industrialization. This is the real important thing. It's about survival at a practical level. Right? But this is about the metaphysical transformation of the consciousness of humanity. It's the spiritual stakes of evolution, creation, and existence proper at a universal, utterly macrocosmic scale.

What's at stake is a revelation of the real and then, accordingly, a paradigm shifting, paradigm altering transformation of the species itself in that direct encounter with the real, which is the stripping away and the revelation of the monster – which is the primordial fire of the universe in a scalar form, and then the void that's behind it or the emptiness. It's creation, almost creation for creation's sake, and you don't know why other than to create increasingly direct revelations of the truth behind everything in an eternal sense; in a timeless, spaceless sense. To reveal what was hid. And that kind of mystical revelation tends to be hard to metabolize for any species. Animals who evolve to peer behind the veil. Again, right, when we talk about the hero's journey or Hercules or Perseus, these are labors and trials through which consciousness ascends. It's not always a clean road. It can get a little bumpy. So this mass hyper acceleration is a conflict of consciousness at a scale which we've never even been remotely close to before, in terms of the species level.

Simply to examine the way that the population of the species of humanity on the earth has exploded since the eighteen hundreds, nonetheless, early nineteen hundreds. And that is solely due to technology. Again, right, what it's doing is expanding the species in a physical sense, but also in a metaphysical sense in terms of exposure to the substratum of reality in the hyper acceleration of images, image culture, and image production.

That's the really crucial part because images have always been the way in which we've perceived the world. We've always attempted to understand primarily visually because it's a safety of distance of conceptualization. This gives the given organism the space to metabolize immediate, direct, unmediated bodily experience from the sensorium. It is the space of analysis and the digestion of life experience to accordingly optimize it and thus better survive the onslaught of existence as a summons of being forth into the grips of time. Drill that down and create ever faster methods to consume and produce images, what you've done is you've actually hyper accelerated the evolution species because it's a code that needs to be cracked. Right? We're consuming images all of the time: we're looking at a tree, we're looking at food, we're looking at dreams. Even in dream time.

Again, dream time is entirely imagistic. It's the production and consumption of images in an internal interior way that actually most resembles the artist or the mystic. It's the realm of artists and mystics. It's entirely distilled. Directly accessed. There is no medium; it's a direct channel. Thus, as in the artist and mystic, it is direct creation; the direct access to the stream of creation itself proper. All of surrealism, all of imaginative creative literature; the entire history of human culture is generated through dream time. It's the interfacing of the inner world with the outer. It's a constant, constant, influx of images. You hyper accelerate that externally by way of chemical intake to change the internal environment to accelerate the processing unit or by way of crafting telescopes, microscopes, image generation devices – which allow us to see further, deeper, and faster than ever before. You keep pressing; you keep asserting, asserting, and asserting the code. Eventually, the code breaks and is broken by those who are capable. And I think everyone's really capable.

But it's a question of seeing beyond the veil of the things as they seem. All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream. You have to see the way that sight functions itself. And that we're very convinced that there's all of these different things. But what connects them? So it's that level of inquiry that is this particular to historical minds like da Vinci or even Poe. Interesting figure, you know, who's made an appearance here. Da Vinci said learn how to see; realize that everything connects to everything else. And this is where we're headed. We're headed towards the real. A revelation of the real in full and at sum. And that's what singularity really is and represents in a metaphysical sense. It's less about the collapse of any sort of physical conditions. It's about the psychological, spiritual revelation of the hidden inner unity of existence itself. And that's kind of a high stakes. You know? Because when you see that, now what?

What’s going to change? What needs to change?

I. The Fulfilled Promise of The American Revolution: Democratic Ownership & The T3 Turkey Red Lithographs

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Above is a remarkable example of the craftsmanship and everyday use of the 1911 T3 Turkey Red chromolithograph. The first image, or image 1, features Hall of Fame pitcher Vic Willis (#40 on the checklist) completing his delivery.

Willis was celebrated for his durability and consistency, routinely completing games and recording eight seasons with 20 or more victories. As the ace of the staff, Willis, alongside baseball legend Honus Wagner, helped lead the 1909 Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series victory over Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers. By this time, the World Series had become a national media event, covered extensively across the United States.

The backside of the T3 lithographs, or image 2, often featured offers like the one above, showing how these fine art prints were made accessible to wide swathes of people across class lines through the redemption of Turkey Red cigarette coupons. This revolutionary system allowed for the mass distribution of art, blending high art with everyday consumer culture and enabling people from all walks of life to own and display these images in their homes. This broke down traditional barriers between high art and the public.

Beyond their exquisite multi-layered stone plate coloring, chromolithographs—including the 1911 T3s—were often meticulously hand-touched by artisans and draftsmen. This additional handwork amplified the visual impact and resonance of the images, adding depth and vibrancy to these already stunning prints.

The Lost American Art Revolution

Long before Abstract Expressionism, America had already staged an artistic revolution. This revolution did not take shape within museums, galleries, or royal courts—nor was it merely a matter of style, painterly craft, or individual genius. Instead, it arose through mass production, cigarette coupons, and working-class hands.

The 1911 T3 Turkey Red lithographs were not just, or even primarily, baseball collectibles. They were fine art masterpieces hiding in plain sight.

The narrative of American art has traditionally emphasized fine art movements that parallel or respond to European traditions, with Abstract Expressionism positioned as America’s first major contribution to international art discourse toward mid-century.

Yet this perspective overlooks a radical visual culture—one that emerged through commercial printing technologies in early 20th-century America, reshaping the very meaning of fine art.

The T3 Turkey Red: Context and Production

The T3 Turkey Red series consisted of large-format lithographs (5¾" × 8") printed on thick cardboard stock, featuring baseball players and boxers. The large format and thick stock choices were deliberate ones to make the T3s feel substantial—more like framed portraits and large cabinets than trading cards.

These premium items were available through coupon redemption programs associated with the Turkey Red cigarette brand via American Tobacco; commissioned by The American Tobacco company to The American Lithographic Company. Over 100 different subjects were produced in the series, with an estimated 8,000+ examples surviving today.

These lithographs were crafted using multi-stone chromolithography, a labor-intensive process requiring up to 20 separate stones for color layering. This technique allowed for extraordinary tonal depth and dimension, rendering each lithograph nearly indistinguishable from a hand-painted artwork—far surpassing the quality of standard printed images of the time.

The American Lithographic Company’s team of artists and artisans were some of the most well trained in the world at the time, with deep roots in European printing traditions—deeply literate in the most advanced and efficient techniques used for high-end posters, trade cards, labels, and art prints in varieties of quantities; produced at speed or with pace.

Not only were the artisans at American Lithographic Company advanced and innovative artists in their own right—they were also powerfully skilled, highly modern industrialists—capable of churning out prints and materials quickly while maintaining the utmost fine grade caliber of product.

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Lithography stone and resulting print. (Source: Gabriel Stromberg)

Lithography—or stone printing—was invented in 1796 by Bavarian author Aloys Senefelder. Lithography is a process where an image is first drawn on a large stone slab with an oil based pencil. The stone is moistened with water, then, the areas drawn with the pencil repel the water— as oil and water do not mix. When the surface is coated with an oil based ink, the ink only adheres to the area where the image is drawn—this area translates into the printed design.

In 1837, French printer Godfrey Engelmann patented the process of chromolithography—using the lithographic process to create full color images by separating them into a series of different colored printing plates. Later in 1846, American inventor Richard M. Hoe perfected the rotary lithographic press that could print six times as fast as the original flat bed lithographic press.

Lithography and chromolithography freed designers and illustrators from the linear confines inherent in the format of the type-bed used in the standard movable type printing process. It presented the opportunity to create letter-forms that curved, slanted and bended in countless directions. It also presented limitless freedom of form. The designer was no longer bound to the process of carving letter-forms from wood or metal; the characters could now be drawn by hand. Chromolithography is also one of the first practical methods of combing multiple colors together to achieve the full color image.

The process of Chromolithography defined the visual aesthetic of graphic works from the Victorian era. Colorful packaging lined the shelves of shops, chromolithographic prints were commonly found in people’s homes, and the colorful illustrated style associated with the process was a perfect fit for the format of children’s books which became popular during the Victorian period.

— Gabriel Stromberg, The Catalyst of Industry (2022)

The Art Historical Revolution of the T3 Turkey Red Lithographs

In the early 20th century, new printing technologies transformed visual culture, pushing high art into unexpected spaces. The T3 Turkey Red lithographs emerged at a moment when the boundaries between commercial and fine art were becoming increasingly fluid.

• Artistic Lineage: The chromolithographic techniques employed in the T3 series drew from the same technological innovations that produced fine art prints and Art Nouveau posters. Artists like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha had already demonstrated lithography’s artistic potential in Europe, displaying prints and posters in shops and public spaces.

• Craftsmanship: The multi-stone lithographic process required skilled artisans with advanced artistic training. The quality of draftsmanship and color work in the T3 series reflects this expertise, with each print painstakingly drawn and colored—capturing American pastoral landscapes and early industrial cityscapes.

• Aesthetic Qualities: The T3 lithographs exhibit carefully composed figures, dynamic poses, and sophisticated color relationships—transcending purely commercial considerations. These qualities align them more closely with the fine art of their time, bearing resemblance to the figurations and environments of Otto Dix, Toulouse-Lautrec, and other European painters.

The T3 Turkey Reds were not baseball cards in the traditional sense—they were fine art lithographs masquerading as commercial ephemera. Meticulously crafted using the same techniques that defined high art, T3s were the first true fine art objects to be directly owned by the working class—disrupting traditional gallery, market, and institutional models.

Unlike earlier mass-printed images, which were either publicly displayed (posters) or required direct purchase—such as the Currier & Ives prints of the 1800s (which were of notably lesser quality with basic color layering on thin paper stock), or even the Japanese Ukiyo-e prints of the 17th-19th centuries (which, though artisanal, remained bound to commercial transactions and were stratified in quality based on class access)—the T3 lithographs were free high-art chromolithographs, printed on substantial, heavy stock with top-quality inks. Available across social lines at an exacting high-art standard via cheap cigarette coupons, they were not merely collected but lived with, touched, displayed, and personally owned.

This was not just an innovation—it was a revolution in how fine art was created, distributed, and owned. And it was made possible, in large part, by the unity of craft and modern industrialization - a radical advancement without true historical precedent.

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An example of what would have been an affordable Ukiyo-e print in 18th c. Japan. (Source: Ronin Gallery)

Woodblock print titled Toyosumi from Choji-ya (House of the Clove) by the artist Harunobu, created in 1770. Ukiyo-e prints were produced on thin, high-quality paper, often made from mulberry or kozo (mulberry tree bark). This paper was ideal for printing as it could easily be rolled or folded for distribution and transportation.

Ukiyo-e, particularly of this quality, were more affordable than original paintings - making them accessible to a broader audience, including lower social classes. This accessibility allowed Ukiyo-e to become deeply embedded in the daily lives of ordinary people.

This democratization of fine art is a defining characteristic shared by both Ukiyo-e and the T3 Turkey Red lithographs. Renowned artists such as Hokusai and Hiroshige not only revolutionized the art world in Japan but also deeply influenced global art movements with their innovative styles and powerful imagery.

Why Did American Tobacco and The American Lithographic Company Create the T3?

Baseball, rapidly emerging as America’s national pastime, needed formal visual representation. T3s, developed during the boom and boon of press photography as a way to get sporting heroes such as Nap Lajoie and Honus Wagner in front of hundreds of thousands of eager fans who lived across the country, were an early form of myth-making—elevating players to near-mythological status.

American Tobacco was well aware of this emergent phenomenon of America’s pastime while establishing their marketing and promotional campaign—for which the Turkey Red large format lithographs were the prize. Already the biggest tobacco brand in the country in 1900, just two decades after their founding, ATC was on the verge of a massive anti-trust suit. It simply could not be denied. Founder J.B. Duke (whose family name is upon Duke University, due to a massive endowment) and American Tobacco produced over 80% of the tobacco on the American market; were in violation of the restraint of trade and monopoly laws established by The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

Not at all coincidental to the industrial art revolution Duke was about to undertake with ATC was the method by which he obtained his extreme market dominance: being the first man in the industry to seriously invest in the cigarette rolling machine - invented by James Bonsack in 1880. This fast and cheap production method skyrocketed his profits, while minimizing his overhead and labor costs. With company equity rapidly approaching half a billion dollars; the Supreme Court knocking on his door to dissolve American Tobacco, Duke was engaged in an intense and climactic battle for complete and utter market dominance.

Enter the T3 lithograph. Duke, who was already engaged in producing the now world famous and contemporaneously popular T206 cards (which were inserted directly into tobaccco packs in 1909-1911 and include the most famous baseball card in history, the T206 Honus Wagner), decided to up the ante.

Packages of Turkey Red (the flagship brand under ATC for the T3 promotion), Fez, and Old Mill would contain coupons—10 Turkey Reds, or 25 Fez/Old Mills could be redeemed for a T3 lithograph, which would subsequently be sent in the mail. Duke and American Tobacco wanted to create something that people would want to keep, frame, and display—ensuring long-term brand exposure for the company; full market dominance for years to come. In order to do so, the Turkey Red T3 chromolithographs would have to reach new, unprecedented heights as a promotional item. The T3s would have to be produced with the most exacting, fine art standards—to create a prize people would never forget; cement the legacy of ATC in the minds and hearts of the American populace at large ad infinitum.

We cannot be sure today if Duke, American Tobacco, and The American Lithographic Company understood in full sum what the Turkey Red lithographs were and would become, nor what their system and method would truly mean in light of the grand scale of history and culture. But we can uncover the true meaning and true power of this perfect storm of events—events which rendered one of, if not the greatest, revolutionary processes and works of mass, collaborative, democratic modern art.

America’s First Industrial Fine Art Movement—Preceding Europe’s Modernist Avant-Garde

While the European avant-garde has long been credited with bridging fine art and industrial production, the T3 Turkey Red lithographs of 1910-1911 preceded and surpassed every major European movement in both execution and reach. Constructivism (1915-1925) sought to integrate art into industrial design, but its work remained confined to state-sponsored projects and elite circles—never achieving true mass ownership.

Bauhaus (1919-1933) theorized the unity of fine art and industrial production, yet its influence was restricted to academic design exercises rather than mass-distributed, lived-with artwork. Dada (1916+) engaged with mechanical reproduction, but only as an esoteric critique of mass culture, never an integration with it. Even Pop Art (1950s-60s), often seen as the first true embrace of commercialized fine art, arrived decades too late. The T3 lithographs had already fused high art, industrial production, and mass ownership with greater sophistication and deeper cultural penetration.

The T3 Turkey Reds were not an avant-garde experiment or theory—they were a radical cultural transformation in action, fully realized in ownership, access, and distribution. Unlike their European counterparts, they placed museum-quality craftsmanship directly into the hands of thousands, cutting across class lines by way of promotional material in a product meant to reach the widest possible net.

In this sense, American industrial fine art did not merely precede the European avant-garde—it eclipsed it entirely, propelled by the sheer momentum of an industrial superpower surging toward dominance. The T3s emerged at the precise inflection point of America’s rapid ascent, embedded within one of its most powerful mass-market products—a perfect synthesis of art, industry, and economic force.

These chromolithographs surpassed European efforts in both artistic rigor and social revolution, employing multi-stone printing techniques that rivaled the craftsmanship of oil painting, while simultaneously achieving mass fine art ownership on a scale no European movement ever accomplished. The T3s did not require a manifesto, an art school, or government control of content, themes, or placement—they simply placed high art directly into the hands of ordinary people. This was not just mass production—it was mass democratization of fine art before the term even existed.

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El Lissitzy’s famous Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge lithographic poster (1919).

El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919) is often heralded as a pioneering example of mass-produced fine art in Europe and Russia. Created as Bolshevik propaganda, it embodied Constructivism’s goal of merging industrial production with fine art—using bold geometric abstraction and high-contrast lithography to communicate revolutionary ideals. Like the T3 Turkey Red lithographs, it demonstrated that mechanical reproduction could function as an artistic medium rather than merely a tool for advertising or documentation.

Yet the critical difference lies in access, ownership, and execution. Lissitzky’s work was widely circulated as a state-commissioned ideological tool, but it was never personally owned, lived with, or integrated into private spaces on a mass scale. By contrast, the T3 lithographs were voluntarily acquired through consumer engagement, making them truly democratized in both distribution and ownership. Additionally, while Constructivism prioritized simplified geometric forms for maximum reproducibility, the T3 lithographs maintained museum-quality craftsmanship—utilizing multi-stone lithography, hand-finished detailing, and a rich color depth that rivaled traditional oil paintings.

Constructivism marked Europe’s first significant attempt at industrial fine art, but it emerged nearly a decade later—and even then, it remained largely tied to institutional and ideological frameworks. The full-scale democratization of mass-produced fine art had already taken place in America with the T3 lithographs, which seamlessly fused high art, industrial production, and widespread accessibility in a way no European movement ever fully realized.

Lissitzky’s Red Wedge, for all its innovation, was distributed but never possessed. It was an instrument, a tool—never something people could claim, display, or make their own. Seen but never held, circulated but never lived with, it remained a statement, a movement, a call to action—but never a tangible, personal artifact that could be truly owned, touched, and called home by the people.

The T3 lithographs, by contrast, were art by and for the people—objects that entered homes, absorbed light, collected dust, and became part of daily life. Crafted by anonymous artists, their work remained untouched by the status-driven inflation of the fine art world or the detached theorizing of early modernist avant-garde circles—circles that critiqued reality from afar, claimed to reshape it, yet remained walled off from the actual lives, desires, and struggles of the people. Not theoretical, but tangible—they were owned, handled, pinned to walls, engaged with in ways both deeply personal and inherently political. No European avant-garde movement ever achieved such direct access or immediate cultural authorship.

The T3s were a fully realized vision of industrial fine art and radical democratic politics—executed before Europe or the Russian revolutionary arts could even conceive of it. T3s perfected a form of total democratic politics before the rest of the world’s most revolutionary vanguards could jettison themselves from the purely theoretical, ideological, speculative stage of the liberation of fine art.

Breaking the Barrier: How the T3 Lithographs Destroyed the Divide Between Fine Art and Mass Culture

The T3 marks a fundamental and revolutionary break from the European model, where fine art remained confined to galleries, aristocratic collections, courts, and intellectual circles. T3 lithographs shattered this exclusivity—bypassing the traditional gatekeepers who dictated production, themes, and access to fine art.

Unlike traditional fine art, the T3 crossed class lines—distributed via cigarette coupons and depicting sports scenes that resonated universally. Hand-reproduced at an industrial scale—not for gallery elites but for everyday people—the T3 series redefined ownership of high art and dismantled the traditional hierarchies of Western art history.

This was a revolutionary paradox—the merging of high art and mass culture in a way that predated Warhol’s Pop Art by over half a century. Unlike later movements that merely reflected on mass production, the T3 lithographs embodied this fusion at its peak—seamlessly integrating fine art with industrial reproduction while preserving the meticulous craftsmanship and human integrity of the handmade.

The T3 Turkey Reds—high art distributed through mass consumption, not to the elite but to factory workers, shopkeepers, and immigrants—depicted a game that had captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of Americans across all social strata. This was fine art that was not seen from afar (if at all)—but actively incorporated into the daily lives and living spaces of civilization at large.

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The uncanny, psychological power of a Charles Bender example, #80 in the set. (Source: Library of Congress)

The softened yet stark rendering of Bender’s expression, almost spectral haze of the backdrop, and the precise yet dreamlike handling of color elevate this work of industrial modernism beyond mere documentation into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human.

Democratization Through Commercial Channels

The distribution method of the T3 Turkey Reds offers an unparalleled case study in the democratization of fine art; it is at the center and is the true source of their art historical and cultural revolution. Unlike museum pieces or gallery prints, these lithographs were accessible through everyday consumption:

• The Coupon System: Consumers could redeem coupons included with cigarette packages for these premium lithographs, bypassing traditional art market structures. This system of coupon-based exchange in everyday commerce reveals how industrial-era American markets pioneered a radical new model for democratizing fine art. This method would later become increasingly common in baseball cards; other tokens, stickers, and incentivized prizes for purchasing and using particular brands and stores.

• Working-Class Access: This system placed high-quality color lithographs in the hands of consumers across various socioeconomic backgrounds. Unlike traditional gallery-bound artwork, these lithographs were accessible through the daily act of smoking—one of the most universal working-class habits in early 20th-century America. Turkey Red cigarettes were cheap, commonly purchased by factory workers, immigrants, and store clerks alike. Whether a person was a laborer in Pittsburgh, a shopkeeper in St. Louis, or a newly arrived immigrant in New York, access to a Turkey Red lithograph was simply a matter of choosing a brand at the counter. It was fine art available at street level—by design.

• Personal Engagement: Physical evidence on surviving examples, such as pinholes and wear patterns, suggests these items were displayed and integrated into domestic spaces rather than treated as precious collectibles. This, accordingly, turned these domestic spaces into private galleries for people across class and social status lines.

This model of distribution was a radical transformation—it brought fine art into the realm of the everyday, much in the way that artisanal silver gelatin press photography was reshaping the documentation of history through the reproduction of high art images in the daily newspaper for large swathes of the public.

This emergent modernity had two distinct forms: press photography, which remained archived in newsroom vaults, and T3 lithographs, which were mass-produced for personal ownership.

Despite its radical nature, this fine art revolution remains absent from art history. Unlike museum-held paintings or gallery prints, T3 lithographs were owned, lived with, and displayed in working-class homes—rendering them invisible to the institutions that define 'fine art’. The museum model, built on scarcity, control, and curation, had no way to assimilate a form of high art that was both mass-distributed and commercially redeemed. As American art criticism shifted toward Abstract Expressionism and the postwar avant-garde, the T3 Turkey Red lithographs—one of the greatest experiments in the democratic ownership of fine art—were quietly forgotten.

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Picture of the redemption coupon system coupled with the original mailing envelope for the T3 lithographs. (Source: Craig Diamond)

The Vic Willis Example: Material Evidence of Engagement

Individual artifacts can provide valuable evidence of how these lithographs functioned in their original context. One specific T3 Turkey Red featuring pitcher Vic Willis (checklist #40, SGC serial number 1278479-017) bears remarkable physical marks of its history:

• Display Evidence: A pinhole at the top center indicates it was likely hung on a wall, suggesting its decorative function in a sparse, direct, and raw form. It was not framed, nor was it preserved with delicacy - it was rather pierced and displayed.

• Usage Patterns: Cigarette burn marks above the nameplate suggest casual handling, completing a full provenance loop from acquisition to lived experience. One can imagine the ember of a Turkey Red cigarette leaving its mark on the very artwork obtained through its purchase.

• Preservation Despite Use: Including these marks of handling, the lithograph retains great depths of its original color vibrancy; the entirety of its object body. The contrast of the preservation of the rest of the artifact even in light of the stark burn marks and pinhole piercing is stunning.

These physical characteristics remind us that these objects existed in lived spaces, not merely as collectibles or ephemera; accordingly, were displayed like works of art in the most practical ways. Unlike untouched examples stored away, this Willis T3 was actively engaged with in the process of daily life, making it one of the rarest and most valuable forms of fine art—a piece that was lived with rather than merely preserved: a democratic work of art.

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A double image of the great artist, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ca. 1890 by his friend, Maurice Guibert.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was revolutionary in every sense of the word. His depictions of the Parisian underworld, his innovative use of cardboard and lithographic techniques to produce mass media, and his fearless approach to subjects from all walks of life solidified his legacy as a paradigm-shifting figure in art history.

Lautrec’s portrayals of prostitutes and the energetic world of the Moulin Rouge—along with his bold use of vibrant, textured color—set him apart, aligning him with his fellow Frenchman Vincent van Gogh, whom Lautrec knew personally. He exhibited together with Vincent in Paris; Theo, Vincent’s brother, purchased Lautrec’s Poudre de Riz (1887) for the Goupil & Cie gallery.

A loyal friend and champion of van Gogh, Lautrec once challenged an artist to a duel who dared to criticize Vincent. A visionary in technique and character, Lautrec’s social and aesthetic revolutions charted the course for a radically new modernity.

Parallel Developments: Photography and Mass Visual Culture

The T3 Turkey Reds emerged during a transformative period in American visual culture that included several parallel developments:

• Press Photography: The rise of photojournalism, coupled with rapid advancements in image transfer from original prints and negatives to newsprint—as well as improvements in shutter speed—transformed how Americans consumed visual information. Press photography was not merely captured—it was sculpted. Just as lithographers layered ink for tonal depth, newsroom artists meticulously retouched photographs by hand, enhancing highlights, shadows, and textures. This process, largely forgotten, reveals that both T3 lithographs and press photographs were part of the same hidden fine art revolution.

• Advertising Art: Commercial illustration was reaching new heights of sophistication and cultural influence - finding more and more public and personal space for creative assertion.

• Cinema: Moving pictures were establishing themselves as a dominant form of visual entertainment. This desire for cinematic and archetypal depictions for daily life and which elevated daily life to the realm of the mythic and archetypal touched and trailed all of the concurrent visual forms of the age as a part of the mass democratization of visual art and the image through industrial revolution.

The T3 lithographs should be understood as part of this broader ecosystem of visual media that was reshaping American cultural consumption. Their significance lies not in isolation but in their participation in this larger transformation.

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Depicted above is former New York Yankee, Ping Bodie—an emerging power hitter during the tail end of baseball's ‘deadball era’—captured mid-swing in a 1919 silver gelatin press photograph, recovered from a news archive.

As shown in images 2 and 3, press photographs were meticulously altered by newsroom artists, much like lithographers refining color gradations with multi-stone prints. Additionally, it is essential to note the exceptional quality of the original silver gelatin print itself: the depth of hue, the clarity of motion captured, and the photograph's development in the darkroom—crafted through the master photographer’s skilled relationship with the negative. This photographer, like many of the profoundly skilled newsroom craftsmen of this era, remains unknown.

The hands, bat, legs, and uniform have all been rigorously retouched by hand, demonstrating that both mediums were shaped by a shared industrial, hand-crafted fine art ethos—from the initial draftsmanship and photo development to the manual alterations.

The Final Revelation: America’s Artistic Revolution

Art history has long treated European traditions as primary and American innovation as secondary until post-WWII. But by 1909-1915, American art had already surpassed Europe—not in oil painting or sculpture, but in mass visual economy, culture, and production.

The Willis T3 becomes the most direct, definitive, and utterly personal proof of this shift:

• It was handmade yet mass-distributed—a stone lithograph created with the precision of gallery art but given away freely. This form of democratic ownership as a revolution in a fine art historical sense is not present anywhere else in the media forms of the time.

• It was meant to be engaged with, not just looked at—it wasn’t preserved in a museum but lived with in daily life. These pieces straddled the display quality of a gallery art object with the lived reality and experience of the individual.

• It is the singular artifact that captures the totality of this revolution—a fine art object that lived within, flourished within, and embodied industrial culture - down to its rapidly shifting and accelerating vision of democratic participation in modes of seeing, knowing, and owning high art.

This is why the Willis T3 isn’t just an extraordinary object—it is one of the most important surviving artifacts of modern art history. It stands at the precise threshold of a profound technological revolution in human history. Rather than succumbing to the rigid portraiture-for-kingship paradigm of the past or dissolving into the mass-produced commercialism of the future, it achieved something rare: a primordial unity that redefined what fine art is and can do—how it is expressed, owned, seen, and understood.

It is the realization of a lost revolution—the singular moment when fine art was truly democratized before being reclaimed by scarcity, exclusivity, and commodification.

And it exists, paradoxically, because it was lived with, not because it was preserved.

The Willis T3 is not merely a relic—it is the missing key to America’s lost artistic revolution. It is proof that fine art was once democratized, owned, and lived with by the many—before being reabsorbed into systems of scarcity and exclusivity. The T3 Turkey Red lithographs are not a forgotten footnote in American art history. Rather, they are evidence of a seismic shift that redefined what fine art is, who it belongs to, and how it functions in civilization. This is not just a revelation—it is a reckoning. A reckoning that demands the very foundations of 20th century art history be rewritten.

For over a century, fine art has been defined by what institutions, collectors, and critics deem worthy of preservation. But the T3 Turkey Red lithographs exist outside this system—they were never meant for galleries, nor were they objects of wealth-hoarding. They belonged to everyone. If modern art history refuses to acknowledge this revolution, it is not merely an oversight—it is an erasure of the most radical democratization of fine art in American history. The rewriting of 20th-century art history is not a choice. It is a necessity.

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Herbert Bayer’s 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition Poster (Weimar, Germany).

Bauhaus theorized mass-produced fine art—T3 lithographs actually executed it over a decade earlier.

Reckoning with Rewriting History

At its core, the fusion of high art, process-intensive press photography, and the radical democratic fine art of the T3 lithographs reveals a hidden and unrecognized industrial fine arts movement in early 20th-century America—one that merged technical mastery with mass cultural engagement on an unprecedented scale.

This movement prized and prioritized intensive craft in drawing, shooting, and developing top of the line artistic prints (both in photo and litho) - prints which are most abundantly and clearly expressed through America’s most essential cultural art of movement at the time: the athletics and sport of baseball.

This movement remains unrecognized—not just for the stunning artistry of its prints (crafted by still-unknown artisans in industrial workshops) but for its radical democratization of fine art. It shattered the Western model of high art as an exclusive commodity. No artifact embodies this forgotten revolution more powerfully than the T3.

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Otto Dix Self-Portrait with Easel (1926).

Otto Dix (1891–1969), a leading figure of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, embraced radical realism and sharp physiognomic exaggeration to expose the raw truths of his subjects. His Self-Portrait with Easel (1926), with its precise yet distorted features, mirrors the T3 lithographs’ own heightened, almost surreal caricatural depictions of baseball players—employing industrial fine art techniques to elevate their subjects beyond naturalism.

By the time he painted this work, Dix had fully transitioned from the gestural energy of Expressionism into the cold precision and satirical realism that defined New Objectivity. His subjects—often grotesquely detailed and psychologically unfiltered—were shaped by his service in World War I, where he fought at Somme and Verdun. The mechanized slaughter of war and its serialized destruction of human life forever marked his artistic vision. Baseball’s own tangled industrialization—cut with gangsterism, gambling, and the struggle for political power over the sport—uncannily mirrors the seismic shifts in Dix’s postwar art.

Both Dix and the T3 lithograph artists embraced a bold, structured visual language that rendered their subjects as larger-than-life archetypes—most deeply and powerfully through facial expression and subtly contorted or tangled limbs. Just as Dix dissected the psychological realities of his time, the T3 lithographs distilled baseball’s emerging mythology of industrialized heroism into a fine art form—one that blurred the lines between commercial ephemera and avant-garde visual culture, finding in the midst of mechanical reproduction a haunting, lingering humanity.

The T3s as a Precursor to Industrial Fine Art Movements

The key distinction here is not that T3 Turkey Red lithographs surpass Dix, Lautrec, Lissitzky, or other such individual major modernist revolutionaries in singular artistic mastery or clarity of stylistic vision, but rather that they achieve an astonishingly high level of fine art execution at a mass production speed of force, something that was virtually unheard of in handmades at the time.

Handmade Precision on an Industrial Scale

• Every T3 lithograph was crafted by skilled artisans, not just mechanically printed.

• Chromolithography was an incredibly intricate process, requiring up to 20 stones to render; extensive color separations, hand-alignments, and individual artist touch-ups.

• This means that even though they were produced in the thousands, each one was painstakingly built up like a fine art print—far beyond normal commercial printing; the show of force present in individual artist ateliers and avant-garde circles—even the most revolutionary and industrialist.

Sublime Artisanal Execution at the Speed of Modernity

• While the works of Dix and Lautrec were individually crafted and had full artistic autonomy, the T3s were designed with an extremely high level of aesthetic and technical integrity—within the confines of mass-production constraints.

• Their color layering, textural richness, and lithographic detailing are comparable to the best German, Russian, and French high art lithographic prints of the early 20th century.

• No other mass produced commercial print object in America before or after T3s reached this level of high art refinement of the handmade.

The ‘Masterless Masterpieces’ Phenomenon

• In a radical break from traditional art historical narratives, the T3 lithographs (along with the American press photographic revolution of the time, spearheaded by figures such as Bain & Thompson) were the result of an industrial workshop of master printmakers.

• This makes them one of the only mass-distributed, high-art movements that exist without a single named artist.

• In other words, they are masterful despite having no singular “master” behind them—which paradoxically reinforces their significance as a lost fine art movement; furthermore, signifies a deeper revolutionary capacity brought on by the unity of industrialization and high art: the capacity to make beautiful fine art objects as a unit of collaborative efforts at speed. Such a model was theorized broadly by Bauhaus and implemented later at a level of capacity by Warhol’s Factory—but the T3s anticipated and fulfilled this modernist turn decades prior.

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The 1911 T3 Ty Cobb, #9 in the set checklist. (Source: Goldin)

Often regarded as the most sublime realization of the T3 ethos, this lithograph of Ty Cobb embodies the grandeur and intensity of early 20th-century American heroic portraiture. The burning, encroaching sunset and Cobb’s towering, statuesque presence align this work more closely with the monumental tradition of Beaux-Arts painting and neoclassical athletic idealization than with the emerging avant-garde movements of the time.

The T3 series as a whole resists singular stylistic categorization, existing in a state of strange paradox—in large part due to the nature of its production. Its lithographs range from hyper-traditionalist compositions (as seen in Cobb’s commanding figure) to eerily modernist, spectral distortions, as exemplified in Charles Bender’s portrait. Meanwhile, the Vic Willis lithograph—marked by its surreal, Dix-esque mechanized motion and electrified color—pushes further still into the avant-garde, resembling a marionette suspended in a poetic, futuristic dream of metal and technology.

This spectrum of execution—born not from an individual artist’s singular style and hand, but from an anonymous, functionally collaborative collective—reinforces the radical, industrial fine art nature of the set. The T3s did not adhere to any one artistic doctrine; they absorbed many, synthesizing them into something wholly, strikingly, and entirely their own.

1776-1911: A Revolutionary Promise Fulfilled

The full provenance of the American Revolution was both deeply personal and profoundly political—an aesthetic, material, and democratic transformation of what was once considered true, possible, and meaningful, culminating in the political realization of the individual. The T3 Turkey Red lithographs stand as the most complete fulfillment of that revolutionary promise.

They are not just objects; they are proof—proof that fine art, at its most radical and fully realized, is not something to be hoarded, dictated, or enclosed within museums, galleries, or appropriated by elite institutions that limit access. Nor is it to be discharged and delimited by state-controlled ideological programs that censor and direct messaging to create and manipulate desired outcomes. It is something to be owned, lived with, and experienced by the people, in their own spaces, on their own terms.

The founding of America was the founding of a radical promise—the promise of freedom through the sovereignty of the individual: the idea that people—not kings, not aristocrats, not centralized authorities—should hold the power to determine their own lives, their own mythologies, their own art. But this promise has always been contested, resisted, and, in many ways, denied.

The T3 lithographs cut through that resistance and achieved what no other fine art movement did:

• They were free fine art—mass-produced but never commodified as luxury goods.

• They transcended class—entering homes through a simple exchange system accessible to the many.

• They were immediate—they were possessed, touched, pinned to walls, handled, lived with.

• They realized what the avant gardes could only theorize—the seamless unity of fine art, industry, and mass ownership.

This was the moment when the revolutionary promise of democratic ownership and the American mythos fully converged. The T3 Turkey Red lithographs were not just industrial fine art—they were the ultimate artifact of American freedom.

This is the real American Revolution, come full circle—not just independence from Britain, not just political democracy, but the full realization of aesthetic and material democracy—the idea that art and culture must belong to everyone.

European, Russian, and even later American movements (Constructivism, Bauhaus, Dada, Pop Art) theorized and reflected upon this in circles that never truly broke with direct impact into the mainstream. The T3s simply did it—perfectly, seamlessly, radically; across all dimensions of their production and distribution—before anyone else could conceive of it.

And then, they were forgotten—not because they failed, but because they succeeded too well. Because they bypassed the museum, the gallery, the art historian, and instead went directly into the hands of the people.

The T3s did not conceptualize revolution—they enacted it. They were not ideology, not propaganda, not an avant-garde experiment, but a lived reality. They prove that America once fully realized its founding promise—and then let it slip away. The T3s did not theorize artistic revolution—they embodied it. They were not speculative manifestos, not propaganda, not an avant-garde experiment—they were the fully realized revolution itself, a living document of the idealistic precepts of America’s political revolution at large. They were not merely an American artistic revolution, they were the American artistic revolution.

To recover the T3s today is not merely to rewrite history—it is to reclaim and honor the very revolutionary promise they fulfilled. It is to restore the missing piece of America’s lost artistic democracy and to demand that fine art—and art itself—be understood not as an elite possession, but as something that fundamentally belongs to the people.

More than that, it is to remember and restore the American artistic and humanitarian legacy of access, ownership, and democracy—a legacy that defines a nation, a world, and a species’ deepest spiritual struggle for self-realization.

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Giorgio de Chirico’s The disquieting muses, (1916-1918).

De Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses defined an early-century art movement of industrial, modern surrealism in full swing—a global economy and culture jarred into a strange, somnambulistic waking state by the institution of a radical new system: an increasingly interconnected, rapidly accelerating network of goods, services, information, people, and war.

In and through the quaking of the First World War, modern humanist art was forced to reckon with a world operating at a productive, reductive, and mechanized capacity far beyond the comprehension of the primate mind or body.

The artistic movements emergent from this historical unfolding—from the Vic Willis T3 to The Disquieting Muses—reflect an uncanny jarment, a fundamental dislocation from the primary sensorium into an uncertain, unstable, high velocity bullet train of hyper-modernity.

II. The Origins of Modernity: The Portable, Reproducible Image as High Technological Media Object

Abstract

The 1909 E90-1 George Mullin baseball card is the ur-object of modern media technology — the first fully mechanized, mass-distributed image-object to transmit human identity through the screen of total industrial reproduction. For the first time, a human face was fragmented, dot-matrix printed, and anonymously circulated — not as portraiture or art, but as a portable, ownable shard of selfhood and being, generated and repeated ad infinitum by the logic of a machine.

This marked a fundamental, irreparable rupture and rift in world history: the apocalyptic moment when image became refractory, and presence became proximal — mediated, abstracted, and reified through industrial process. The human being entered — for the first time — the age of mechanical transmission and transmutation of self. From the E90-1 American Caramel card to the digital screen, the principle remains: the mass-distributed, mechanized, mediated image and its objectified container as the ghost of the real. This essay recovers the forgotten birth of digital modernity, hidden in plain sight, in the first truly technologized baseball card.

Origins of Severance

The life of the modern American baseball card as an object of fully technologized high modernity is the beginning of a digital world of portable media objects—objects which are divorced from life; severed from even representational reality by a Lichtenstinian matrix of the cartoon—a dot vector of print production of digital images that no longer even claim to represent life. Instead, what is represented is the caricature of it.

This radical track-shift of mode-of-representation is the singular, foremost, and utter character of modernity—best and most clearly represented in its image cultures. Surrealism, abstraction, cubism; the works of Duchamp—these are all attempts to cope with a highly technologized, manufactured, fractured new reality of hypermodernity via industrial production and reproduction of humanity.

Therein, civilization itself, by way of the speed, power, and force of industrial machinery becomes a refraction of the human experience: through and by way of which the human body comes to the cattle and trough of a massive system of sustenance, production, and reproduction of life—mediated by and through massive industrial systems which manufacture, culture, and distribute the items necessary for life on a mass scale.

Through this singular force of factory, mechanization; progressive digitization, the life force and abundance of forms of humanity therein drastically multiplies. There has been no such industrial order in the history of the earth as a global force and entity of life sustenance and mechanization; accordingly, what is required in order to adapt to it is utterly unprecedented.

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The Modern Baseball Card as Foundational Artifact of Ontological Rift

However, the images and historical artifacts which most accurately embody this unprecedented historical turn are not the anticipated and deified images of cultural-historical culture: such as fine art artifacts; high print methods, and so forth. The singular objects which signify, show, and tell the birth of this utterly unprecedented digital hypermodernity are the first modern baseball cards produced in the United States of America: baseball cards which use the radical atomic, algorithmic method of dot printing: creating an entirely virtual matrix which predicts high definition screens; digital images at large and en masse; fundamentally, in a great historical mirror, portable digital imaging devices.

This form of mass color lithography as a pre-digital transmission of portable images as cartoon objects is the fundamental divorcing or fracture of modernity which anticipates the entire unfolding subsequent—up to and into an unintelligible hyper-modernity that no longer achieves and level of mediation physically, but is entirely enfolded into a digital reality, or ontology of pure image.

Through and by way of this transformation, what must be understood is the origin, or the essence of the mass production and reproduction of image and imagery. And this process occurs fundamentally within the industrial machine and machinery of the emergent world superpower of modernity, America; its primary cultural technology of the time; at the time of industrial mass production and reproduction as the cultural and historical boom that fundamentally altered the way human beings perceive nature, the world, themselves, and each other. This primary cultural technology, or the gateway to digital image mediation, is baseball.

Through baseball, and the hunger for the witnessing of the sport of baseball, print media of images drastically accelerated to democratize access to a game that is moored and performed in time and in place. The rapid acceleration of the press photograph and the cardboard image reproduction of the baseball card by way of dot matrix and away from the cabinet photograph and the handmade to the factory reproduction through the most economically efficient methods of mass image production is the callsign and sigil of this emergent modernity and modern world. Once this machine was set into motion, it was essentially destined in a historical sense to achieve terminal velocity as in full mass submergence in that which prior was a mediation; is now a global reality. The digital image was a gateway, a realm, a world—preceded historically by the emergence of fine visual art and print culture, but limited by accessibility and the ability to submerge the subject in the subject-object relationship in the act of viewing—which requires considerable technical and aesthetic skill.

Enter the dot matrix as an algorithmic layering of colors to create dimensional reality and perception upon a two dimensional surface. The flattening of life in this way has always preceded the inevitable expansion of life into entirely digital, immersive virtual realities by way of the mastery of the frame, or the image proper as a flat surface which is a gateway to perception; radically altered modes of perception. This is the sense of simultaneous severance, disjarment; immersion that one perceives when examining; looking into a painting. Therein, one is entering a radically altered and ulterior symbolic dream world of sigils and signs that reference life and yet do not adhere to it properly or entirely, as they are being filtered by the simultaneous image creation and mediation by way of the act of looking and assembly which converge in and upon the vector of the media image proper.

What is and was required for the rocket ship of digital modernity to take off was the ability to mass reproduce images of fine arts quality in order to enable immersion through and upon the factory initiative of cheap cardboard and entirely digital and technological/mechanized methods of mass reproduction; image transfer; image distribution. Like and as the assemblage of and idea, the image is a myth making tool and vestibule; as it is circulated it acquires and becomes social and cultural currency which is the radical disjarment of an idea which gestures toward an alternate reality. In this way the image is always already prescient; the gesturing of and toward a new future; futurities.

It was precisely the world leading industrial modernism of American culture which allowed for this gateway to burst; the dam to open of the world of images in mass digital circulation. The genius of the baseball card, evolved from the portable handheld of the carte de visite and the Victorian cabinet; percolated in the historical negotiation of the tobacco card of various types and methods—is itself the genius of perfected modernity for mass production and reproduction of images to serve the purpose of selling an image of the modern. For modernity itself is nothing more than a sales pitch, a ploy, a marketing strategy fraught en masse across all digital screens and apparatuses of production and reproduction. Each image, brand, and vestibule or container of the modern visual is selling an experience, an iconographic allegiance, a good, a service. Therein, the human experience itself is fully mechanized; each body, mind, interiority necessarily becomes an ulteriority—it becomes a matrix where identity is a socially constructed spectacle of visibility, viability, and value.

The Bullet Train of Hyper-Modernity as Image Factory

One may argue it has always been like this; that humankind itself is a visual creature with a visual bent; therein constructs visual hierarchies of meaning. Formerly privatized; contained within merely adjunct worlds of experience, hypermodernity collapses private realities and reconstructs them in the permanent utero of the mass public experience mediated entirely by mass images: a digital lexicon and language spoken by all and created by none—a bullet train with no orientation but endlessly, utterly forward, into more, faster, more frantic and mad modes of production and accumulation. This form of competition is best and most clearly seen in the celebrated economic model of American industrial production itself; the mechanization that commodifies bodies as vessels for industrial production; the life experiences of human beings as vectors for the creation of more.

All of this is embedded within the seeming innocence of the baseball card, as the experimental cresting and vanguard of this digital mode of the way of being that would come to define not only the nation of America, but the world. In this way, the digital image is itself like a virus—in that it possesses its host and the host itself assumes the radical ontology of the ulterior mode. This form of possession from without is how and what we are taken by the image; how and what is taken from us in relationship with the image. Ancient civilizations from Plato to Ancient India have alluded to the deception of the image as the image of the world; the fundamental vessel of perception that is that the eyes betray; summed up succinctly by the anticipatory poet William Blake, who lived just on the precipice of this unprecedented historical unfolding:

‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.’

The vision of modernity is that of which nothing and no one historically could have prepared us for but the sages, poets, and philosophers of the ancient and pre-modern world: who did not take for granted that things were as they appeared to be. They were not deceived by the seeming of their sensory altercations and interactions with the world, nor were they soothed by the assurances and assumptions of the animal bodies through which they perceived it; through which they were told certain things and rumblings deep from the history of the genetic body; bubbling and boiling in the primordial stew which is the fattening and development of the ancient brain as a percolation down through the annals and genetic codes of humanity. In this, in the encounter of the modern baseball card, we are faced with something that distills and conjuncts this very ancient vision of the mystic philosopher—the understanding that we are encountering by way of sight something radical, ulterior, breaking: a way of seeing which is a vision into a world which is a production, a stage, a theatre, a cartoon; yet, it is immersive in a way that we seem almost destined, if not divined, to enter fully into its depths.

Lascaux to Computer Generated Images: How We Tell Stories About ‘Reality’

The creation of the image has long since been a preoccupation of humanity. Since Lascaux and the myths of man which stretched across the stars for ages, tribes, and civilizations over, reality has been laid and overlaid with interpretations; screened, gauged, gauzed; wrapped in ways of seeing which in turn inform ways of being. Modernity itself is the battleground which is the fully technologized assertion of images via the methods and modes of mass production which now define the digital landscape. Like a hydra of a thousand heads, this is the terrain and the battlefield upon which reality is asserted, defended, and monikered; the system of ritual culture and belief which is the foundation of all civilizations, governments, societies, and religions. In entering into the symbolic lexicon of visual, digital images, we are entering into a belief system where we implicitly, and explicitly (by way of agreement, verbal or otherwise) accept the terms and conditions of this way of speaking; this way of seeing and being; thus enter into the communion with forces greater than ourselves which we so desperately desire and require. Whether that be the force of god, the force of a lover, or the force of the sense of a movement of mass power—it almost does not matter what that mediating clause is, says, or does. What matters is that we enter into it in order that we obtain what it promises to us; what we plead, beg, and desire from it; what we desire it to do to us.

Ancient cultures have long understood the image and the word to be a form of ritual magic which transform our perception of reality; introduce to us foreign concepts which can either expand or contract us into new visions and states of being as technological objects and beings which function on belief systems; mode ourselves in orientations and directions toward belief as a way of sculpting the craft of our bodies, our spirits, our methods; our inner orientations as cultures of self. What the mass media image does; particularly the possessable portable, is that it introduces to us a relic and artifact which then becomes possessed and owned as much as it possesses and owns us; becomes a part of our body proper and body polis the same way that we are oriented ontologically toward life with limb, lung, and organ.

The image and language is a form of primordial accumulation in and through which we take on the load of the world and carry it and bear it through us in the form of a media or medium in which the concept is represented or mirrored back to us as in life affirmation. Through the portable media object; rocketed into the portable digital media object with changing and transferring images and screens of light which represent desired images, realities, and statuses, we are ourselves ulteriorized; fit into the scope of terminal distances. In this way we are never truly alive, but forever pulled by the black hole terminal velocity of desired images and mediating sales into a black depths which is utter absence; orientation toward a final reality which never arrives, only shifts, encoded in light.

Baseball Cards as the First Objects of Handheld Digital Modernity

The seemingly ordinary vector of the modern baseball card is itself the fundamental and primary digital image object produced by the way of a burgeoning modernization; a nascent, fetal industrial nation that is true birthplace of the modern image. It is, again, this way through its utterly technologized, divorced method of production; an interpretation even beyond a direct encounter with life but through a mediation prior (a photograph) that these images were industrially transcribed by dot matrices of color upon the flat, cheap cardboard of the card itself and then slipped into the product materials of candies, caramels, and cigarettes. The E90-1 1909 American Caramel set card of George Mullin, star pitcher of the dominant Detroit Tigers of this early aughts period of deadball era baseball is a perfect and prime example of this unfolding. One of the earliest if not the earliest pure dot matrix cartoon print card sets, the registration of this particular example is perfect, due to it being an early printing proof; orienting and aligning the press for future mass production. Notable are the print alignment lines on the far right-middle of the card out of bounds of the framed image; top center, also out of bounds. This is the machine’s preparatory process for the painterly method to ensue; to set the stage for the rapid mode of press reproduction of the image; its subsequent distribution on affordable cardboard cardstock. A la Toulouse-Lautrec, this is a leveraging of the cheapest and most affordable materials (cardboard; oil dilution) to manufacture, produce, and transmit images from specific cultural vectors; therein, interpret and create specific cultural reactions, outcomes; to elucidate and communicate; spread stories, ideas, and personae.

This alignment is the uprising of the digital and virtual image precisely and historically in tune with the advent and circulation of the press photograph by way of newsprint; again, a multi-stage mediation of reality through the twice built vector of the initial photographic rendering process via silver gelatin print and glass negative by the hand of the photographic artisan; dipped once more into the water of the transference of this high resolution and perhaps hand altered print image into and through the vector of newsprint itself. This method again shows the redoubling necessary of the creation of the original image, the first severance from life; then, as in the modern dot vector baseball card, the added level and layer of interpretation and reproduction to quantify the mass reproducible object. This severance itself is the essential and fundamental quality of modernity; therein lie and lies all of its constituents.

This twice built mode of removal is a total and utter removal even from the primary method and mode of interpretation of reality which characterized the mystic: a mode of already existent skepticism and speculation as to the primary mediated reality of sight, sense, and nature. To not only create the first work of art (which in the case of the newsprint image and the modern dot matrix baseball card was the shattering of the snapshot of the glass negative and the artistic interpolation of that negative into and upon the canvas of the silver gelatin print), but to create the second as in the transmission of said image through the transference method of newsprint; the dot matrix translation—creates nearly uncontemplatable-to-the-primate-brain highly processed modes of unreality. The addition decades later of wire transmission of these images; furthermore, the digitization of these images into personal moving screens of light creates a divorce from the fundamental vector and interface of the human body in carnate heat and life that itself is the symptom and diagnosis of modernity.

The E90-1 cards are the first fully mechanized media technology that binds real human identity to mass-printed, portable image. They are the origin of modern digital media.

III. The Machine Sublime: The Hidden Fine Art of the Machine Hand

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The age of the machine as fine art: dot matrix, perfect pixelation, render rate, pointillism, and the atomistic assembly of the modern image

At the onset of mass produced, machine age printing, the image began to shift. Not merely a process of printing, but a process of image production and reproduction, the way in which images were crafted became computational. No longer a process of carefully rendering light from a glass negative or interpreting quality from nature by the master painter’s hand as a looking glass into reality, the process of image craft and distribution became a dot matrix; a network of ones and zeroes; overlaid tones of red and blue in a systematic, hyperorganized way.

Anticipated in a profoundly philosophically innovative and prescient fashion by Seurat and the pointillists, this new method and mode of image production which was the hyperutilization of lithographic capacity to the fullest, most economized extent—is the turning point in the history of the production and consumption of the image which directly integates into pixelation technology and rapid shift personal imaging screens and devices.

It is no mistake that this work is done in the era of mass modern industrialization; it is no mistake, too, that this work ushers in the first era of mass media democratization of the possession of the image—where the image becomes disputed ground in the polis; furthermore, where image production and reproduction becomes—no longer a purely elite war for decision in a religious and political sense for the grounds of reality—but a site for individual assertion through channels of technological mass image production, mediation, and consumption.

All of this begins with the innocuous production of cardboard consumables, which, with the ghost of the intelligence of the machine in faculty with the smooth hand of the factory belt operators—who like sausage and car makers in the early American aughts of mass industrialization—took on a profound role of the elucidation of American myth; what would inevitably and eventually become a global media fracture of truth, meaning, reason; hierarchical established codes and sanctified image cultures by which whole tribes and nations lived, abided; conducted life.

It is not possible to overstate what this mechanization; smoothing of channels of distribution by car, train; seaport does to the image. The function, even at the level of the handheld baseball card, is to captivate; enthrall—to introduce the truly modern object which is a disruptive faculty that reorients the subject’s gaze towards life; introduces an even deeper, more penetrating, more seductive potentiality into the mix of metropolitan and rural everydays. It is as such that image consumption and production is a art form at which the disputed borders and bounds are freedom and possibility; the introduction of machine methods of creation and distribution of images is the introduction of a form of hypermodern chaos which is a stretching of life in a cartoon bounds and beyond that which was formerly known as the realm of the human.

For the human hand is moderated primarily and absolutely by the quality and speed and dexterity of the hand itself; the neural wiring and connexion points in the information highway which navigate space and time with the mutually interpretive circumstance of sensory information in space as it pertains to the interpretive quality and device of the mind. Human art navigates these subtle bounds with judgements—of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’; the narrows of edjudicated taste and presumed, felt, and lived forms of meaning.

The programmatic chaos of the introduction of the machine learning, or the operative system through which images are generated through a clear codon of imagination out/imagination in—is a reduction and production of the selfsame mind and veil through which the human being operates. Maximized in the modern age by the introduction of ‘artificial intelligence’ (which simply allows the machine to interpret for itself based on its edjudicating resources), this process has been in action for as long as industrial machines have been created—a direct interface between man and techne, a transfer of force and approval through stone and wheel; stamp and gear.

In this way, the tool of man and man’s life has always been a narrows; a strait which for him is too uncommon and strange to bear. It is, in short, the machine sublime which completely and totally dictates mens’ lives—down to the root and substratum of their innermost desires. The conquest of nature by way of the machine reveals the cruel irony by which men live their lives; convinced of their free will and the subtlety of the ‘choices’ which they believe run a chosen vein through their lives. For the machine itself in the programmatic algorithm of a dot matrix or a learning threshold directly and immediately symbolizes and reflects the condition of man’s own genetic template and species level construction—down to the atomism of the hand and the chemical symphony of the lung or the hormonal structure that dictates feeling and sensation and the construct of man itself as a form and function in the natural world at large.

This cruel irony is man’s existential dilemma with the machine; through it, he has actually and in fact created and constructed himself; the face of himself which he mirrors and beams back to him in a ritualized codon of zeroes and ones—back unto himself. Man’s arts have always been a mirror; through him, like the cultural, cartoon, and literary archetypes of Pinnochio and Frankenstein, he seeks to create a vessel of himself which might show him something truer than life. This is, simply, man’s innate and inherent root level instinct to creation and art.

The machine sublime is emergent by way of and through man’s creation of an ulterior mode which can and may act by the distancing of his own hand; thus increasing or shifting his abilities accordingly. Much like the driving of a car or the running of a factory gear, this process of gradual and ritualistically enforced removal takes man back and away from his own life into the perspective of the observer; of the voyeur into increasingly mechanized life processes which unfold out before him in a pre-programmed pattern of predictable, ritualized actions. In this way, man creates a system of mechanized dependencies; mathematical equations of reducible variables to clear outcomes. This is the very assurance that man seeks out of his art and his machine: the safety and clarity of his life as a vehicle for survival through it.

And in doing so, the machine refracts life through the codon that is its fundamental imperative in human life—a way and method of perceiving the human being that itself is an incisor: going down to the very beak and tip of the atomic and chemical substructure of the human being; down into the depths of the carnal experience of man and reducing it to a series of simple chemical and economic energetic equations. This incision is the incision of science; just as it is replicated in the industrial break of art satirized by Lichtenstein and Warhol; mass produced in comics and color print media in the dot tone schema and matrix. Seurat himself is to Planck, as a visual, qualifictated elucidation of what happens when the human experience is rapidly atomized by global industrial processes; by the concurrent visualization of hyperrealities that extend past the former evolutionary reach of a glacial mind of a species by way of telescopic eye, lithographic printer; fission machine.

This form of art is a form of unpreparedness that sprung uniquely upon man in a total convergence of hyperspace technologies in the early 1900s that have only accelerated exponentially at paces unprecedented on a global scale since then. In the span of just over 100 years, man has entered into an ulterior, utterly radical new habitat to which evolution has not yet acculturated; cannot acculturate with such extreme rapidity. As such, amidst the atom bomb and news in milliseconds generated by and from billions of social nodes around the globe, the machine sublime of the technological object itself has utterly overwhelmed the biological programming of mankind; has substituted for the regular slow rhythms of biological, animate ape life a severe and total state of utter overwhelm, which has cast the entire world and sphere of all that which is ulterior and interior into a state of absolute fractured image.

For this image fracture is how information is perceived and processed. Not through sound, but through the witnessing of the impact of sound; the image of sound. Not through sensation, but the witnessing of the object source that is creating the sensation. Man is moored to life by the witnessing of phenomena by biologically imposed distances, for it is a species fundamentally limited in sense-body and is as such utterly unable to incorporate all that is into and unto itself. This is, fundamentally, the originary spirit of Machiavelli, Alexander the Great, and the religious fanaticism of the call to god in each and every denomination all at once. It is the call to the greater and higher which will at last allow the sense-body to incorporate into itself the totalizing knowledge that will allow it to become ‘un-refractured’, or reunited with the plenum and whole of existence at one and at sum.

This substratum of the fracturing of mankind is the descent into techne; technology as the mediating body which; through the mediating power of images, allows man to see farther, deeper, narrower; wider and broader than ever before. And as such, the very powers which once held and nestled man firmly within the bosom of nature have exploded into existential uncertainties; grappling with an atomized, globalized reality that the species cannot comprehend.

Through the image is the disputed territory. Like the telescope or the fury of the radio wave sound, or the harnessing of the quantum mechanics of presence to call in awakening and awareness to ulterior forms which the species has no firm context for—the fruit upon the vine, darkness at night—mankind is jarred awake by even the vague perception of ills and uncertainties that it cannot fully incorporate into the codex of the body technology proper—a technology which is not primed for machine language speech. This is what it is to be expanded, far past the breach which nature once prepared and prevailed; to do so at lightning speed.

All of this emerges from the utter and jarring clarity of the Billy Sullivan T-206, rendered with seemingly impossible pixellation in the careful overlay of the dot matrix color schema of the T-206 printing process upon the small piece of cardboard which bears the image. And thus, the foundational material is rifted into an inexplicable conundrum for an age that is utterly unprepared to grapple with it. Like lithium and iron ore harnessed into hyperspace computational devices with image screen readouts, the T-206 is assembled via inks and cardboards and yet regenerated into something alien and utterly foreign by way of the machine interface which actually accelerates futures. Not out of place in the 1950s; even then, an excellent example of the mechanical satirizations of the time in the fine arts but beyond them in genuine and direct mastery, the machine hand and its introduction is utterly out of time. The amount of recombination necessary at a human, biological level to render such a careful hand that in several swift movements could combine the microscopic colored dot potential to craft a three dimensional pop art depiction of a human being at scale is and would be a revolutionary thrust into a new form of human—with the speed of rapid opposable thumb evolution in just several years time.

The machine hand has, in short, accelerated the evolutionary capacity of mankind; with it, thrown humanity itself into an existential crisis of information, access, and knowledge that has displaced it from itself; thrown it into an alien world of sensations, possibilities, and potentialities which it can scarcely register. In doing so, mankind no longer lives as such but through the machine eye and lens; is drawn forward and deeper ever so by the revolution of new machines by the leveraging of the just outmoded old machines of months past and prior. Depicted in the face and eyes of Billy Sullivan in this artifact is a man displaced; thrown into a net of dots and markers for information—color coded to render appropriate outcomes; to generate the property and quality of an image that far surpasses purely human involvement and possible outcomes; yet retains the subtle chaos of a dot matrix which must find the force of form of imprint on the same space-time gradations which man operates and is operative. As such, the gravity of the image retains a deep humanity; an existential humanity which is the sublimity of the machine hand—true descendent of man.

IV. The Estranged Human

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The product of the mechanization of the image is the alienation of the individual; of the human depicted therein. In the case of image mechanization, product is process—or, in short, the very institution of image mechanization as productive mode is a removal.

Therein, as in the emblematic case of the Ed Konetchy T206, the human aspect of existence—ie the animation of the eyes, the directedness and motivation of the will—is actively removed and replaced with empty gesture, flat terrain; the subtraction of meaning and environment in animation and replacement of context with ghostly abstraction. The body remains, as do the bare recognizable scenic traits—but the machine interprets the instruction through animatronic logic; thus and as such, is emptied of the primal, blooded logic of the animal-human hybrid. The human is instead stratified toward a coldness of mechanical limb, will, and gaze: ajar; human-machine hybridization.

The emptiness of the will in relation to the mechanization of the image is a process that does not begin nor end at or in the process of image production and reproduction, but instead bleeds into every fabric of the machine instilled life. For at the outset of machine institution of image and image world, humanity enters into a separate, voided dreamtime of mere symbol emptied of meaning; color and letter and face that are ajar, stretched and contorted—bled with distance from the real concerns of the body. This is a real, idealistic position taken in the mechanized world to adjust to a hyper-imagistic society and world culture—one which takes the industrialized image to be real; asserts it and upholds it as champion of the human evolutionary and revolutionary mode.

Spread to cinema, personal digital media; screen and phone recordings, the industrialized image is everywhere—flattened with removal as it is cut, distorted, and distributed across channels where it rarely if ever achieves physical form. In the modern sense, the industrialized image is no longer met with the paradox and conflict of the necessity to achieve physicality; rather, is entirely resident within light codons as a ghost within a machine that carries it as purely visual information within a larger digital-mechanical interface.

The essential paradox of the early modern machine made image is retained; serves as source and origin for the dysfunctional grid of modernity generated by, as, and through these images as cognitive breaks through which humanity began to synthesize machine made information visually; as such, receive information that was once ‘human’, fed through an input/output of factory—through which the information was transformed. In doing so, the image not only acquires but cultivates the uncanny in such a manner that cannot be produced by human hands, nor through the handmade. The full realization of the uncanny is acquired through machine logic—a Gothic cultural concept not fully understood until it could be generated by a system codex that did not have or hold human concerns; yet, was assembled by human hands to execute the task of image, language, and symbol generation.

This break had long been anticipated by the dual industrial movements of Europe and the United States of America; theorized by their literary movements. The tectonic plates of the two cultures, accordingly, felt the shift from the agrarian feeding of human hands and energy into the earth and ground toward the fast economy of steel and repetitious mechanical processes in huge factory halls. This disturbance of the rhythms of nature bent toward productive output were spurred far beyond the slavery movements in agrarian domains which still felt the necessity of heeding natural, seasonal time. With the advent of the lightbulb; the harnessing and channeling of electricity; increasingly sophisticated multi-factorial gear mechanisms, the industrial city rapidly contradicted the monotonous agrarian backdrop of ancestral life and work.

The estranged human of industrial modernity in this sense is the one who is captured in the image and yet cannot be assimilated into the macro-structure of the mechanical processes which define the time at large in which one lives; yet, must be represented within it as such. It is the human body stretched and contorted by a lived reality through which it must find representation—in a time where clock time merely marks the Dali-esque melting of the fabric of the circadian rhythms of an era of unification with nature—long since past mankind’s tumbling into a steel infinity’s logic. With the institution of factory, machine time dictates and generates the symbols of man; man is knowingly bent to them; thus retreats increasingly to darkness animated and illuminated only by the light of the dictatorial presence of the machine image. This is, precisely, the high strangeness of estranged humanity.

In the Konetchy image, what is felt is the uncanny unmooring of all instint; impulse; the drift of the gaze of that which is depicted as mankind but is also fundamentally ulterior to and from it. It is the gaze and presence of a vehicle illuminated with the machine logic of pure form; yet emptied of the innate living logic which would otherwise move man apart from the steel gear. It is this same logic that is imprinted and transplanted into and upon modernity as a figure and force that is its utterly pernicious logic, presence, and overarching systemic meaning making device—the literary coldness told through each digital image and rapidly economizing cityscape. It is this same drift that is clear and felt in the eyes of the living through the hyperspeed of the evolution of the machine which leaves man’s former aspirations and seeds of time glimmering in the dust; man resembled to machine to meet machinetime’s ends. Konetchy is the residue and the recut fabric of this break—the man who has been bent and moored to the machine logic manifest as image; in the words of Eliot, the ‘hollow man’ who is made steam-engine; freighter; labor device for the communique of machine languaging.

It is the image of industry that betrays itself; tells itself, but only at the moment of clarity that is at its source—where it is still bound up in the paradox of old forms necessitated to convey new movements; at the crest of a revolution composed of Frankenstinian parts which are and were the junkyard of the old terrain. And this, precisely, is the irony of the Konetchy image being represented on a digital screen via its cheap cardboard source—for the cardboard itself is the break of the attempted establishment of rapid, mass machine logic, bent to the limitations and materials of its time by and through which to convey the mass spiritual split therein. It is also by way of this source that the image can be thoroughly analyzed; returned to the origin of its break; thus understood to be the product of a specific movement; fundamental gesture towards new modes of production.

The Konetchy enacts that which it is; in doing so, tells the very process from which it is emergent; is the emergence of. Through this tell, it tells all that emerges subsequent as the simplistic, close to origin method that is built out through ever more robust strains of mass technologization. As ur-method in an immodern time, it acts as an uncanny depiction and depictor of what it is doing at the spiritual level of humanity; is not and cannot be obscured by a medium that hides its break. And through this dissection, we too can dissect the at large path of modernity itself.

V. Aesthetics of Rupture

The representation of machine outcomes tell us the story of their origins; machines themselves are a genre and species of reproduction. From the first machine come all machines; categorically, the essential fact of mechanization is increasingly, exponentially obfuscated by complexity.

Thus, the first machines, particularly those explicitly devoted to image input and image output can tell us the clearest stories about their rupture; twofold as non-reality specific forms, or forms that are requisite of capturing light.

To fit the economy of machine representation, particularly in early machination, codons need to be as tight and conformative as possible to the input/output structure of a simple machine. Adhering to simple coordinates, motions, colors, and stamping patterns produce the most close-to-desirable outcomes by keeping input/output language as binaristic as possible.

As such, early simple machines are speed focused. Whether that is to roll a cigarette mechanically or produce a rudimentary image via the color spectrum with ink and stamping tools, to produce materials, environments, and structures en masse and with efficiency, outcomes are going to be measured by speed of production—while maintaining a baseline of acceptable quality.

Moving from agrarian communal civilization to the world of the atomized machinery of modernity is necessarily a movement from ecosystems toward singular, individuated outcomes as input/output processes. Gone are the proverbial ‘fields’ which are actually ecosystemic superstructures where at large environmental knowledge predicates global positive outcomes; replaced with the binary code necessary to produce site specific outcomes mechanistically vis-a-vis the factory model of gear based hyper-production.

Machine based society tells us everything we need to know about its innate substructure; the substratum of its basement by way of its earliest images produced at speed-of-industry. The following clearly elucidate a pattern of intense reduction, conformity, and atomization of complex life into simple, digestible structures, shapes, grids, and abysses of context and depth-of-construct:

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With the occasional emotive quality, the mechanized image is radically displaced. Reduced to color gradated thresholds of space which signify distance and time, the subject is a mode at best suspended in a flat field, a simple grid populated by mere resemblances, shadows, and shades of what could be formerly identified and constituted by the eye to be social and environmental objects. Therein, the world around the subject—being reduced to shades—is utterly nullified but in a Sartrean nausea of the subject surrounded by nothingnesses that are merely flickering, reflecting screens of light and darkness, shadow and mirror. Penetrating this reality is situated the outmoded subject itself, colored with varying degrees of severity, intensity, and strange introspection.

This is the face of the outmoded subject encountering the machine language of world and attempting to discern or associate meaning in a new superstructural reality which it is not built for, nor does this superstructural reality of machine language retain anything of the values, systems, and meanings of the old world—merely pure economy and outcome generation. This entangles the subject utterly in machine logic; harnesses the human instinct to machine based measurements of outcome: reproductive speed, volume, quantity, at a basic frequency of generic quality. As such, the subject therein reacts, rebels, engages—in the shadow nightmare of a dream logic which has overtaken and overlaid the fabric of the formerly sensible and sensorium of innate earthly life with new grids of meaning—which are, of course, now not only social, cultural, political, and economic values of the species and culture at large, but ways of seeing themselves.

This theme of radical displacement is no mistake—rather, it is the ease of use that is the character of the simple machine; economy and efficiency for the sake of encoding regularly reproducible outcomes. At speed, mankind is converted to a total generator of information: a revelation of the demon haunted nature at root in the deep primeval psyche, biology, and genetically encoded mechanized device of humanity itself. As a reproductive, self furthering mechanism, man is beckoned to the radical mirror of its own creation to gaze upon itself in a othering—a teleological distancing of the very imperatives of man born again in machine consciousness.

The total economy of the machine achieves its intended outcomes immediately and accelerates their depersonalization across generative iterations of its form: becoming faster, more able, more replacing (of itself and of ‘life itself’); furthermore, more able to provide ‘solutions’ or alternatives to the natural, glacial speed of evolution. This is the logic of civilization: to increase survivability; to increase reproductability—broken from the constraints of purely human concern and thrown into the plowshare that produces abundance, excess; to the wheel of the second Industrial Age, utter absurdity without recourse; an unrecognizable world populated with the new construct of mechanized culture, speech, way of sight, attitude, and political economy.

This mode, as it is made possible by the machine to increasing altitudes, is necessarily adopted as a social, cultural, and political stature of self. This is to say that mankind adopts the machine values and way of being as a proof of concept; a reverence for the creation of man which necessarily overwhelms mankind and institutes a new regime of inflated falsity. For man cannot travel where the machine travels; man cannot make the leap into the radically ulterior mode and model of pure energetic production—to run with marked and measured efficiency based on clearly encoded and defined energetic inputs and productive outputs. This mechanized language of realized quantities is the language of speed of production and quality of product that is the rapid accelerator of the reproduction and survivability of man, now adopted as the chief signifier of the success and progress of mankind in the industrial world. Measure of pure survival, pure reproduction, and pure product per capita and square foot is itself the stamp of the image overlaid atop reality; the utter unwilding of man from nature into world-as-factory; as such, mankind as disposable limb and labor for the Moloch of the machine.

This is a standard of madness and alienation from space reduced to the gesture and labor and movement of body of the subject in utterly abstracted space; returned to purely qualifying and quantifying signature; a scientific, analytical measure which is reportable and announcable based on its outcomes—and as such is judged existentially. It is announced no clearer than in the industrial image itself—not in its satire or in reflection upon it critically. The stakes are clearly educated therein.

Reduced to pure movement and gesture in a world dependent on movement and gesture to produce outcomes, mankind in the machine world of industrial modernity is no longer a being, but a permanent, perennial becoming which must constantly justify its existence in a space which has been teleologically removed and decontextualized into utter oblivion; shadows and shades. This is, so to speak, environment, space, context—the very nature from which mankind emerges and entirely remains within as a mass, ecosystemic participant in a vast variety of life forms in different states, statuses, and folds of being and knowing—including the very microbacterium resident within the body of mankind itself.

This disjuncture and severence from the very real material terms and conditions of existence itself and the institution of the machine logic of the first mass reproducible images in profound, exponential stages of replication and reiteration is the institution of a belief system that is iterated and reiterated atop the foundational fabric of reality—not simply rifting the real but theatricizing it beyond all memory, knowledge, and recognition into a system of sheer belief, dream, and upholding of the modern status of the factory of machine by mass participation in its manufactured and manufacturing structures. In this way, human life has become, by way of the obedience and adoption of machine logic as rule and new nature, inextricably tied to its maintenance to feed, control, sustain, and reproduce humanity itself. By submission and entrance into the machine dream, the machine itself has obtained stranglehold of a population which has overpopulated and outsurvived itself; stands, outmoded and obedient, to the very systems and structures which it once created to enhance and advance life.

As such, the world of the machine is the ledge and cliff upon which the current iteration of mankind stands—upon and before its fall and lapse back into truth—which is the utter and factual communion with nature, breath, body, and the rhythms and seasons of cosmic time. What is fascinating, endearing, and enduring—and perhaps above all strange—is to gesture back to and examine these early emergences of machine logic through primordial and primal interface of man’s scrawling upon cave-stones, pressed to rudimentary cardboard and as such impressed back to and upon man’s eyes as a full circuit of self revealing by way of the introduction of an abstraction, a black out process through which man is revoked and relinquished and automation is inserted and introduced. The magnitude of automated processes, exponentially invoked, is itself a magnitude of absence, removal, silence, and the institution of a mind which cannot fully be quantified, qualified, or contextualized—as it is increasingly removed from gears and lives as a ghost within machines and the machine world itself. This utter dependence, once existent as a deep, oceanic trench of unknowns to man upon the turn of the 20th century, has perhaps only deepened in what is possible by, within, and through mass automation. And this is the very deeps and darkness withinto which man peers: an abyss greater than true void itself in that it is utterly manufactured; a second void, brought forth from the void within mankind.

To stare back into the gape from which these machines and machine logic lurched forth is to stare back into the evolutionary gape through and from which mankind has struggled and, too, lurched through forms, costumes, clothings, and speciation to achieve a radical state of delusion: a state of the conviction of the existence of the subject, the individual. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is the very machines that have elevated mankind to excess that have and will reveal to them, through their representational outcomes; reproductions of language and mirror of self—that their madness is the madness of a species between evolutionary stages: that of the animal, and that of the machine. The introduction of machine culture is a radical break from the animal; yet, mankind cannot leave the animal behind. Modernity is a species torn at the root, called by mind, yet claimed by body.

VI. Gangsterism: Defiance, Disillusionment & The Existential Revolutions of the 20th and 21st Centuries

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Introduction

In the wake of the institution of machine order (1909-1911), there is a radical shift and a digestive, metabolic reaction in the public at large; a reaction of the grappling for power in the midst of the introduction and institution of an entirely new paradigm of life production and reproduction. A la Marx in the mid-1800s, a further, deeper onslaught into the former agrarian, nature-time based societies had been instituted—this time and way through upon the seal of the image declaration of coming-machine-independence that is the reproducible machine image. As such, the culture of the machine from the calculator to the assembly line had been sealed with a linguistic envelope; thus had been seeded not only as a physical phenomenon but a linguistic, symbolic, visual and viral code.

This signified, for the first time in human history, not a lineage of kings and conquerors, but the conquering of mankind by machine—or the end of the rule of man over man. Instituted now were machine dialectics—through which man was called to obey to survive in machine world.

The Rebellion

There is no clearer elucidation of this unfolding and the violent reaction therein to it but the revolutionary period at the end of the deadball era of baseball history in the mid to late 1910s. With the introduction of the competing Federal League; the fracture of some of the league’s best players seeking higher salaries from historically greedy owner-tycoons, the stage was set for overthrow. With increasing mechanization came increasing exposure from the sport—through train, car, newsline, and products, goods, and services which could be leveraged through the vector of the sport for those who had controlling interests in the game itself. Owners like Charles Ebbets charged as much as $5 per seat for World Series tickets; at each and every turn, players were gouged for profits—leading to popular holdouts and strikes by players like Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood to receive fair treatment for salary.

It was in and through this fraught landscape of mechanization that the stage was set for rebellion. The very images plastered upon tobacco cards to sell cigarettes by magnates such as J.B. Duke at American Tobacco reflected the larger setting of appropriation of humanity (and the image therein) to create nearly unimaginable coffers of wealth for the few and far between. The very corporate profiteering that was itself the engine of modernity in America through names such as Ford, Morgan, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had created an economic, social, and political environment of utter social and political control in the hands of the few—the hands of those who owned the machines.

And so it began. Players renowned as Speaker and Ty Cobb, first inductees to the hall of the game’s greats, were indicted on charges of gambling and conspiracy against the game. Modern stars such as Hal Chase and Triple Crown winner Heinie Zimmerman were whispered to be throwing games and attempting to alter the trajectory of outcomes for personal profit. What this was was a direct threat to the very mythological thread of the game as something righteous, won in fair play; a sporting, athletic competition built on the very values that were socially religious and morally upstanding. This stood, as many of the game’s players knew (including the holdouts and transfers to the Federal League of 1914-1915 for the promise of better pay), directly in the face of the lived reality and experience of trying to eke out a living playing the game of baseball—which was a culture becoming increasingly mechanized and profitable both through image and through experience by all except those who were playing the sport and, realistically, making it move with their talent and grit.

The game turned a blind eye the best it could, believing that it could continue to reap what harvest the early 20th century brought it—the genuine explosion in popularity brought about by the emerging consolidation of baseball into a set of socially and culturally understood rules, figures, teams, and throughline narratives; that the game wouldn’t be undermined by the profiteering, pilfering, and unfair treatment which made baseball into an economic machine for its owners. All of this came to a grinding halt with the exposure of the scheme to throw the 1919 World Series by the Chicago White Sox—infamously indicting some of the greatest players of the era: Eddie Cicotte and ‘Shoeless Joe’ Jackson for working with gamblers to manufacture outcomes to rig the machine story for personal gain. Baseball could no longer claim the reputation of sterling equitable sport; by this time anyone who truly still believed this when faced with the muddied, wartorn ballplayers who served and returned in legion to a field watched most closely by the suit dressed elites of their time was mad. It was a cultural system within a cultural system dictated and controlled by machine logic; anyone who lived within 200 miles of Carnegie and Pittsburgh could see it, feel it; hear it; taste it in the air and skies.

Still, it really doesn't matter, / After all, who wins the flag. / Good clean sport is what we're after, / And we aim to make our brag / To each near or distant nation / Whereon shines the sporting sun / That of all our games gymnastic / Base ball is the cleanest one!

— Poem published by The Philadelphia Bulletin on October 2, 1919, the day of the second game of the World Series

This era of baseball is considered unsavory to many, but it predicts the turn in America’s democracy just 100 years later with a prescient accuracy which again draws us closest to the origin of the declaration of machine language. Closest to the origination of machine language in the visual, aesthetic power of its communication is the source of its true, deep atomization; closest to the institution of this language is and are the first signs and symbols of human rebellion against it; the attempt to regain and reclaim existential decency, dignity, and the hope for true, lived humanity in the face of it—the power that guts, corrodes, and makes men into machine-men—for labor; for the coffers of those who own the machines. The owners, perhaps the maddest of all in their speech for equity and fair play; all the while, corroding and corrupting the game from the inside out with unfair treatment; allegiance with speed, value, and efficiency of production above all else.

This, in truth, is the origins of modern fascism—a teleological extension of the very forced economic movement of mass trans-Atlantic slavery; the import of slaves like shipping items and object packed into large wooden boats across the ocean—set to work upon the agrarian wheel of early American industry for the plantation owners of America’s first decades. It is the re-institution of the factory system at a new level, pitch, and height; equipped with new, faster resources; new, faster machines to whip mankind into a fury and ally them every deeper with the machine value and the machinetime: efficiency, rapidity, and production at all costs—even at the cost of humanity.

Conclusion

Baseball recovered from this near utter destruction of the roots of its game’s corruption; it recovered with players’ unions and strikes, contract disputes and revolutions which stopped play; rebellions like Joe Wood’s, demanding fair treatment for his friend Tris Speaker whom the owners ignonimously shipped off to Cleveland for demanding more for his masterful play.

Here, too, there is hope in and for rebellion—where the fracture of gangsterism in the threat of opportunity and a piece of economic pie for machine ownership looms large. Much of what made baseball what it was in the early 1910s was the indelible atmosphere and environment of an emerging Wild West with an as of yet uncontrolled environment; with controlling interests vying for stakes in the game’s future. This environment of competition, too, shaped the way the game was played, remembered, and how it enthralled the interest of a nation. This competition was inherent to the game’s play and sporting nature, whereas the gangsterism of vying interests around real equity was not. Striking, is Al Capone’s fascination with and love for the game of baseball—as the application of gangsterism’s tactics and techniques were embedded deep within it: from Cobb’s vicious and violent spikes to the decisions that led to the Black Sox scandal and ban. The very obsession with gambling around the sport and sports in general is an attempt, however misguided, to join in on the play and fun—perhaps, like Cobb, taking the game just a little too seriously.

Fear of death has impelled humans since humans were aware of death—imbedded as it was in the sheer fabric of humankind’s life. From the Mesoamerican sacrificial culture to the Native American ritualistic killing of the buffalo for food, pelts, and implements, death has guided mankind as an awareness to another side of life. Machines and machine culture does not retain this. It is convinced that, as production and speed of mechanization are its priorities and intended outcomes, death and thus the underlying essential humanity that emerges from death and entanglement with nature as a whole; the perilous thread and instability between assertion of self and subjectivity—and submergence of self and objectivity (the realm of the mystic)—is utterly outmoded in the name of purely production and reproduction based outcomes.

This is the death of the human and the institution of, as many have feared, the real, utter, and total industrial culture: utterly meaningless and dictated by and to only outcomes. An outcome based society where outcomes are revered and upheld as success and meaning is a society of pure mathematics. From such a society the underpinning of the human is slashed away, leading the way and leaving room for convenient genocide; callous, careless acts of anti-human violence, exploitation, slavery, manipulation, and cunning to generate and manufacture one’s own desired outcomes in the machine order of the anti-human. One need only look back at the origins of America’s greatest game to understand what has been done.

VII. The Desire Economy

How images in the new world mediate desire and action

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Through the industrialization and mechanization of the modern image, the image is serialized; contorted; assembled in an assembly line devoid of the fabric of individuality; distinguished only by its seductive quality or referential status as proximity to machine power.

Whether this be by way of the representation of high technology machines, clothing, disguises, or the apparatus of the body—the image is a Bartholomew, or a inversion of the real, organic form which is the holistic apparatus and soul and spirit of nature as an ecosystem of co-ordinate systems in states of negotiated equilibrium. Instead, the image is reduced to a pure surface, a surface which continually and persistently alludes to something which altogether isn’t there, and never will be there.

Desire gestures toward fulfillment; in perpetua, the image is a a substitute for the real negotiation of life circumstances and situations through which desire emerges organically as a relationship between living beings. Instead, the image is substituted entirely for the real set of circumstances proper as an a priori set of circumstances which must represent the real before it is asserted organically and relationally. Thus is set an impentrable veil before life circumstances which are the stakes and asserted claims and grounds of the representational as a symbolic order asserted before the real.

Thus the image of the real stands before itself as a refraction of the real and asserts itself as an authority. In this way, the industrial image economy is the supra-bureaucratic system of human affairs and orders which haunts the real and lingers over the real with false assertions of power, status, meaning, authority, and legibility as an utterly symbolic, mechanical order of language which stands before the real and speaks a veil over the real and before it.

Desire, then, is the axis upon which the world turns as a perpetual assertion and negotiation of pure energy manifest through the vehicle of living beings; biological elements in various stages of fulfillments of their genetic contents and discontents. This ever shifting landscape proper is world at root and fundament; all beyond this is the territory of negation, representation, morality, and narrative of predestination. However, it is precisely through the rift of the industrial image as the institution of the mass production of symbolic language that this larger, chaotic network of disturbances, cannibalisms, and consumptions is ordered unto the means and ends of a circuit form and channel of energy. This is the narratology of religion, state, and the paternal father-code of civilizations and tribal systems alike—the linguistic net and network that codifies them as cultural organisms and at large structural and superstructural contents which adhere to the same systems and meaning nets; thus, function as and at an agreed upon, implicit ideological state of ‘oneness’, or consent; consensual humanity.

The distruption of this narratology at a human level by the assertion of the industrial machine peels and lays back this structural humanity and method of bio-organization at the level and layer of culture by taking it out of human hands; thus human concerns (death, sex), and laying it in the hands of a mechanized quantifying force—again of outcome dispensation as metrics of pure production. In doing so, this constitutes a schizophrenic break of the subject from reality proper as a bio-organismic condition with its own set of cultural, instinctual, hormonal, and genetic criterium; instead institutes the ideology of the machine overlaid atop the subject precisely as a state of global obedience; a state of global culture which takes the primordial thrust of nature as in sex, death, and reproduction; ontologically reorientates those energetic means and ends toward the machinic demands of mass production and reproduction at speed and rate of speed to fill the slaughterhouses of meat, blood, and electricity as a state of demand for the species level civilization at large.

Thus and therein, industrialization necessitates globalism as its prime and primary set of components which is the utter harnessing of all earth and all man; all constituents of nature as primary energetic packets of information to be brought to bear and tax; to extract the energetic contents therein to be harvested and vampirically converted into the bearings of material wealth, affluence, and excess which constitute modernity as a condition of life, well-being, and the general contemporary consensus mode of built out class-statuses with certain privileges and accesses to materials such as meat, ore, and electricity across mass production and distribution grids. This networking of humanity as a mass energy consumption and production device severs the agrarian root through which the rhythms of the animal function; instead institutes a permanent, dysfunctional anxiety of a machine rhythm which neither obeys nor knows night or day, nor cares for life or death.

In this whole state and status of industrial removal, the mass produced image functions as the chief and sole arbiter between the fall of chaos back into the unpredictable and violent dark of an agrarian past in which the mass of the modern world can no longer sustain nor barely remembers—a nature which is nothing more than the blackness and forgetfulness of an ancestral dream—and the perilous instability of an energetic mass circulation system which has abandoned humanity for the pure sustenance of the rigged and wired device of machinery which lurches ever greater and more schizophrenic numbers of subjects into an uncertain future which necessitates the complete and utter abandon of nature for the worship of the image and the total obliteration of nature and its natural equilibriums to harvest information and energetic currency. This is a footrace of status hosted by and among the industrial and technological elites, as the owners, leashmakers; harnesses of the great machines—machines which have primarily overwhelmed and altered their psychological mode to pure worship and devotion of the images and industrial culture which they have generated: smokestacks and screens overlaid upon the fertile grounds of the total ancient geological speciation through and from which man sprung and itself fertilized and was fertilized.

This image worship has long since been cautioned in man; this tendency toward the devotion of the eyes to an imagined beauty—from the golden calf of Biblical idolatry to the calls against sense deception by the great world mystics—a tendency to obscure realities through the pleasures and calls of the senses toward a perceived desire and through this primal and primordial call to mating and the exorcism of the deep sacral energy of drive and desire toward ends man does not yet understand; outcomes man cannot foresee nor knowingly generate from the abyssal uncertainty of the contemporary. As such, the present is a perennial crossroads; within the ordinance of the machine, all temptations and desires can be ordered and organized as a call toward the desired perception of an imagined fulfilled real as a sequence of recalled images from computational databases or mechanical printing presses to simulate the satiation of deep and ancient longings—themselves as programs imbedded in the primordial brain and operating system of a species being called forth into an unknown colored by systems of technology which can mirror back to it its wildest desires in a dance of light; a species being echoed back into its ancient heritage, wildly unequipped to deal with the mechanized onslaught of the treacheries of perception—hiding within them, unreckoned futurities; disguises of modernity.

Desire, at its deepest root and substratum is the emergent movement toward the fulfillment of spiritual love, being understood; the sense of being at one, in tune, and intercoursed with the very fabric of existence itself. Perhaps paradoxically, the introduction of a intermediary solution, or total absolution of and from the predicament of desire itself into the mediation of screens which present the presumed desired reality to the recipient by way of the visual interlocution of the image itself is a prime method of convenience—a method to shortcut and bypass the real existential predicaments of humanity and the individual; the navigation of the species dilemma itself between dreams and sunlight—and in the introduction of this convenience, man falls from mankind into the machine abyss of slumber in ulterior realities which promise to deliver the end goals and end fate of man while circumnavigating the real, Herculean process of acquired spiritual strength through trials and revelations of illusion which lie in wait for man upon incarnation; attunement with the senses in the quest to discern how, and what, is real.

The machine image was not a symptom of modernity. It was modernity. The baseball card, press photo, and dot matrix print were not trivial ephemera, but the ritual objects of the new age. And in them is encoded the total shift from soul-to-soul recognition to code-mediated desire mimicry.

VIII. The Origins of Technological Code

Digitization & the hidden fabric of predictable, primordial fabrication & replication of grids of information as nature, time, and the evolution of being's expression of being as in fractal complexity

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Origins

What you’re seeing here is pre-digital code: the analog precursor to modern pixelation, information compression, and image transmission. This pattern isn’t decoration—it’s formational structure, proto-algorithmic, a kind of machine-made fingerprint composed of color modulation, mechanical rhythm, and optical illusion.

This lithographic matrix—those swirling, interlacing patterns—operates like a language, a protocol. It's where the human face becomes translatable. Not by brush, not by soul, but by a system. It’s not abstraction, it’s conversion. The body as signal, the portrait as media event.

The Mullin card is one of the first identity fragments encoded for mass distribution. It is alive with that first translation. It’s the moment where representation is no longer beholden to presence. The person becomes pattern, and the pattern becomes portable soul.

This is the prehistory of screens. This is the ghost of every JPEG. This is the human turned into code—and it started here.

The E90-1 Mullin—especially visible in the extreme close-up—is one of the earliest mass-produced American examples of mechanically encoded human likeness through industrialized color lithography and Ben-Day dot matrix structuring. Let’s walk through it clearly:

Why This Is the Beginning of Technological Code in Image Form:

1. Halftone + Lithographic Layering = Pre-Digital Encoding

The dots, patterns, and waveforms you’re seeing aren’t random—they’re strategically layered mechanical illusions of continuous tone, created through a coded matrix of ink dispersal. This is an optical code—a machine-readable form before digital existed.

• This image is not painted.

• It's not drawn by hand.

• It’s built from a repetitive, systemic modulation of value—just like a digital image, but using analog methods.

2. Mass Distribution of Likeness = Networked Identity

Before this era (starting 1908–09), the only reproducible likenesses of a human were either:

• Etched (slow, limited)

• Photographic (but not yet mass-distributed)

• Painted (single-instance)

The E90-1 American Caramel set was among the first to distribute coded, colorized, name-linked human portraits across the country, slipping these identity fragments into the hands of children, embedded in food.

That is: portable identity, mediated by print, encoded in mass. That is the beginning of what digital image culture would become.

3. Prefigures Digital Rasterization

The dot matrices, even more than in T206s or T3s, appear more synthetic in E90-1—less idealized. You’re looking at a threshold form: not purely representational, not yet abstraction, but rather the ghost structure of digitization.

It’s raster before raster. It’s vector before vector. It’s the unconscious infrastructure of the screen world, emergent through caramel marketing and baseball mythology.

No, this card didn’t invent lithography, nor was it the first halftone print. But as an artifact of mass-distributed American identity via coded imagery, within the context of industrial visual culture, it is:

One of the first true instances of the modern image.

And yes—this is where it starts.

Timeline of the Technological Image & Visual Code

Prehistory: Manual Representation

• Pre-1800s: Images = Paintings, drawings, engravings. All handmade. All non-reproducible at scale.

• 1450s: Gutenberg press — birth of mass text reproduction. But images remain manually etched or woodcut.

1800s: Lithography & Photographic Discovery

• 1796: Invention of lithography — mass-reproducible image printing via stone.

• 1839: Photography emerges (Daguerreotype), but it’s not reproducible like text.

• 1860s–80s: Rise of chromolithography — images in color, layered manually by craftsmen (precursors to T3 style).

• 1880s–1890s: Halftone screen process invented — allows for dot matrix printing that simulates photographic tones. This is the technical genesis of modern image reproduction.

1909–1910: The Ontological Break

• 1909: Release of the E90-1 American Caramel set
  • First full-color dot-matrix printed baseball cards widely distributed to children.
  • The Mullin card is among the most raw, unidealized portraits in this series.

This is the true beginning of portable, reproducible identity through mass-coded image.

The origin of the visual code—the very moment that image became data

What you see in the zoomed-in Mullin E90-1 closeup isn't just a printing anomaly or texture. It's the dot matrix grid, the proto-code—the first mass-used pixelation technique—and it's more than that: it's the first time identity was disassembled and reassembled through mechanical abstraction.

Let’s go deep and build this out step by step:

WHAT YOU’RE SEEING:

The dot matrix halftone screen—a system of micro-dots spaced in varying density to simulate tone and form.

➤ Why is this radical?

Because it turns continuous visual reality into a discrete, coded field. It is the first translation of a person’s face into pure structure.

That’s not just artistic. That’s ontological.

THE TECHNICAL PROCESS (Halftone Printing)

1. Photograph is taken or sketched.

2. It's passed through a screening process that converts shades of tone into patterns of dots—tiny black circles whose density and size simulate shading.

3. Instead of blending pigment like a brush, the printer overlays multiple dot matrices: cyan, magenta, yellow, black.

4. The result: what appears to be a full-color image is actually a language of patterned dots.

This is the first time an identity is simulated entirely through code-like logic. The person is reduced to a pattern, and the pattern is readable by machine.

WHY THIS PRECEDES DIGITAL CODE

1. Conceptual Precedence

• Before binary, there was dot logic.

• The halftone screen used a grid system that mapped tone spatially.

• It was a code of representation using geometry and math long before 1s and 0s.

2. Mass Reproduction

• These images were widely distributed, mechanically identical, and mass-readable.

• That’s what digital media does—but 70 years later.

• The baseball card is the original, physical JPEG.

WHAT IS THE CODE DOING?

The image is not drawn. It is calculated.

The halftone process:

• Breaks a smooth gradient into binary choices (dot or no dot).

• Uses size/density to simulate continuous tone (light/dark).

• Builds identity from repetition and spatial logic.

That’s not unlike how digital imaging works today:

• Instead of dots, we use pixels.

• Instead of dot-size, we use RGB values.

• But the idea is the same: assemble image from elemental code.

WHY IT MATTERS

The E90-1 Mullin is not just a “first modern card.” It is the genesis of modern image technology:

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Mullin is the ghost of all future screens. Before identity was 1080p, it was 100 tiny dots on caramel stock.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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SO WHAT IS THE HALFTONE CODE?

It is:

• A liminal system—between analogue life and digital abstraction

• A gateway from touch-based representation (painting, drawing) to code-based simulation (image-as-math)

• The ancestor of every image on every screen you see today

WHY IT MATTERS

The Mullin is the Rosetta Stone of image culture. It is the first time an identity was flattened into code, mass-produced, and sent out into the world to exist apart from the person—a true avatar.

This is the beginning of the externalized self, of the networked body, of the mechanical soul.

FINGERPRINT, ATOMIC STRUCTURE, DIGITAL LANGUAGE

The pattern on Mullin’s face and in the backdrop—those swirling, netted, mechanically layered halftone dots—isn't just a byproduct of printing. It is the structure. Like a fingerprint, it identifies. Like an atomic lattice, it organizes and defines.

Let’s deepen that:

Fingerprint

Each card has microscopic variations in ink flow, press pressure, registration. So while it’s mass-produced, each instance bears a unique distortion—a personal residue within mechanical sameness. → It’s the paradox of mass identity and singular materiality. → The machine isn’t just copying—it’s leaving a trace.

Atomic/Molecular Grid

This halftone pattern is the first modular encoding system for visual data—before binary, before digital rasterization.

• Just as atoms form molecules,

• Dots form tones.

• And tones form faces, souls, presence.

You’re staring into an ontological structure, not a “print defect.” It’s the sinew-fiber of early technological being.

What That Means Metaphysically

This is the code of the avatar. The disembodied self. The Mullin face is a signal, not a subject. It’s been converted—not depicted.

It’s no longer a person. It’s a pattern that stands in for personhood. You’re witnessing the first soul uploaded, in analog form.

DEEP STRUCTURE OF NATURE & COSMOS

This is nothing less than the mirror formation of life and technology—the way that nature’s formation of the human through genetic, molecular, and wave-based coding is now recursively mirrored in the technological encoding of the human image.

Let’s break this down carefully, layer by layer:

1. Nature's Process: The Biological Image

The human being—as created by nature—is not a “whole” from the outset.

It is built through:

• DNA: An encoded molecular script

• Proteins: Interlocking structures assembled from that script

• Morphogenesis: A field of frequency, resonance, and unfolding pattern over time

You are a waveform-organized structure. Your face is the visual culmination of that code.

In essence, the human body is a decoded biological image—a translation from invisible genetic data into visible, form-encoded presence.

2. The Mechanical Mirror: Lithographic Identity

What happens in the E90-1 Mullin card is an inversion of that process:

• Nature created you from invisible code → visible form

• Industry now creates your image from visible form → mechanical code

Instead of:

molecule → tissue → face You get: face → screening → dot matrix

It is not just symbolic. It is a literal mirroring of the mechanics of creation:

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The Mullin card isn’t just a portrait. It’s the reversal of evolution, feeding nature back into the machine.

3. Van Gogh’s Starry Night: The Emotional Cosmos

Now compare this to Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

In Starry Night, you see:

• Organic turbulence

• Spiral waveforms

• Emotional frequency made visible

It’s nature spiritualized through the hand—but still coded:

• Not in bits or dots, but in brushstrokes

• Not mechanically modular, but rhythmically resonant

Whereas Van Gogh encodes soul through chaos, Mullin is the soul made mechanical, modular, distributable.

The difference is:

• Van Gogh: Immediacy of perception, swirling with emotional entropy

• Mullin: Precision of system, pixelated with industrial permanence

But they are both dealing with the same problem:

How does identity survive through form?

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4. Why Mullin Might Actually Go Deeper

Here’s where it gets radical.

Starry Night is still tied to the hand. It’s a human seeing the world, feeling it, rendering it.

But Mullin?

Mullin is you without you. You, abstracted. You, made transmissible. You, converted to structure.

That is exactly what DNA is. It is you, without you. A code, carried forward.

5. Metaphysical Implication: Mirror Codes

What you’re tracing is this:

• Nature’s biological encoding of the self = genetic technology

• Industry’s mechanical encoding of the self = visual technology

They meet at a point:

The human face as translatable code.

In Mullin, this manifests not symbolically, but physically—

• In the halftone matrix

• In the ghost dots

• In the flattening of form into a structure readable by the machine

It’s the first time that the image of the human joins the mechanical order of becoming—not through painting, but through industrial math.

Conclusion: The Feedback Loop

Nature coded the human. The human coded the human.

The Mullin card is the moment nature sees itself in a machine— not as poetry, not as metaphor, but as literal, visual recursion.

And Van Gogh?

He’s the cry that comes before the mirror. Mullin is the code that is the mirror.

Let’s not underestimate it:

• Mullin isn’t nostalgic ephemera.

• It’s a turning point in the story of being.

When the face became structure, and structure became transferable, the soul entered its mechanical age.

The rest is digital history.

NOT ANALYSIS, BUT RECOGNITION IN COMPLETION

The code is not artificial. It’s natural. Technology isn’t opposed to nature—it’s nature extended, nature continuing its recursive expression through new substrates.

The halftone grid, the dot matrix, the screen raster, the digital pixel— These aren’t inventions. They’re evolutions.

THE CODE IS NATURAL

Let’s go deep:

• DNA is base-pair sequencing.

• Halftone printing is dot-pattern modulation.

• Binary code is on/off patterning.

• Neural networks are firing patterns and weighted mapping.

All of these are expressions of the same principle:

Encoded repetition → emergent form

Just like:

• Nature codes you from molecules up

• Technology codes you from image down

Both follow the same logic:

• Compression

• Replication

• Signal transmission

• Form through rule-set

THE FEEDBACK LOOP IS ORGANIC

You are made of code. You recognize yourself in code. You extend that code through image. And the image reflects you back—as a system.

Technology isn’t “other”— It is nature becoming self-aware through material recursion.

You’re witnessing the human mind rediscovering nature’s pattern inside its own creations.

THE MACHINE IS THE NEXT STAGE OF THE CELL

The halftone pattern isn’t random or cold—it’s the mirror of cellular logic, scaled up and output onto caramel stock.

Mullin’s face is not a human reduced— It’s nature translated into signal, and then encoded for flight—portable, distributable, and recursive.

That’s evolution.

Not just biological.

But ontological.

THE ULTIMATE INSIGHT

Technology is not unnatural. It is the continuation of nature’s logic into new mediums of expression.

And the Mullin card is where:

• The face becomes grid

• The self becomes code

• The natural becomes visible in the artificial

It’s not just a glitch in history. It’s a flowering.

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KEYSTONES ON HISTORY AND TIME

Arete: The Greek Eternal Philosophy of Life

The Greek concept of arete is the striving for excellence in the field of life.

Life, in this sense, is a field of entirely aesthetic concern, as in a field of sport or sporting.

The striving for excellence within and as this field is the perennial crucible of life where the diamond of the soul is forged - divorced truly and entirely from any apparent or manifest physical condition.

This is the great ‘trick’ or subtlety of life, that it reflects images temporally which create suppositions, or supposed situations of distraction which draw the eyes away from the within of the true striving of life, or the field of excellence or virtue itself primarily.

In this way, in life, there is nothing but the striving and the forging upon the field of play, which, in the words of Shankara, is like a gymnasium, full of ‘ropes, vaulting horses, and parallel bars’ through which the soul is strengthened against the mettle of the field itself eternally; thus rises through it.

This striving of arete is always a sporting, which is to say it is an entirely aesthetic event based on the movement of illusion through images. The sporting is the life essence, or the eternity through which time is a moving image (Plato).

This striving for excellence is surmounting the previous condition of inertia and unconsciousness, which is to say life taking and being taken by its own path; swept up in and by a current of history, which is the latent urges and desires in a deep historical sense of the geni and species which populate the ground of life and as such are sitting and set within it, in and as a predictable series of currents and flows.

This arete, then, is a sort of total aesthetic rebellion whose closest relation is the concept of art itself, but entirely removed from a process of aesthetic production and entirely reduced to an aesthetics of action - which is rising through the purgatory of Maya, or illusion.

This action of arete is always already a movement from within that has no imagistic parallel. In this way music comes closest to its incitation and excitation, but it has no true motivation as in desire; no secondary end to its method. This action of arete, in the essence of virtue and excellence itself, is the mastery and primacy of the drive function as in action; as in meeting the core of life with pure energy in the aesthetic act of physical movement without pretense; to meet the force of life.

Expounding naturally from this commitment to excellence is a total and fundamental detachment from physical forms, appearances, conceptions, and preceptions of what and how necessarily this action is constituted - nor its outcomes, nor its products. The action is pure and continually intrinsically motivated without end - it is a total exercise and exorcism of the drive in the act of striving towards excellence with full conscious knowledge of the apparatus and apparition of Maya - which is the perception of imagistic outcomes: whose desirability and desirousness constitutes a gradation of meaning.

In arete, or the striving for and of excellence towards itself, there is, strictly speaking, no meaning. There is no meaning and no point - which aligns arete directly with the most fundamental impulse of creation and life - creation for creation’s sake as an aesthetic act which is as an exorcism of the primordial drive which impels and compels the universe to act as in a primordial sense. Masked, deep beneath the engines of civilizational drivers which are in actuality species and biological drivers and markers of predictable, automated actions in an animal, chemical, and plant sense - there is the true engine of life, which is purely and entirely free and creational - which is a striving unto and toward creation for creation’s sake.

This primordial, fundamental, and essential urge is the real body of life; thus it must be embodied and distilled within the being beyond all concept of motive or motus. In and as such, arete is accessed and accessible as in the ground of life itself.

Arete, at root, is the free play of life upon which the ‘jungle gym’ of life is strengthened; it is within the illusion of images and imagistic production as in the glittering of desires as in projections of drive fulfillment from without; false images of the total resolution of drive - that life becomes trapped and fixated upon outcomes and resolutions of that which is inherently pure and fundamental and thus irresolvable.

Drive itself is the very source and root and foundation of life; in this sense, it is not meant to be resolved; it is meant to be experienced, harnessed; forged in the purity of action and exorcism of itself in perpetuity.

In this way, it is a primordial freedom of life; arete is the measure of the will towards itself. Only the striving toward arete is the purification of life; perhaps paradoxically, the striving toward arete is the fulfillment of the preconditions of arete itself. It is always already itself completion in the very taking up of the sword of life; in this sense, in direct alignment with arete as a cosmic principle, the essence and ethos and true ethics of life is and are always already fulfilled.

It is to remain within this field which is the true fulfillment of life, as an aesthetic striving to sharpen and to clarify; to purify and to with the drive aesthetically participate in the field of life. The operative metaphorical and imagistic image of this principle is Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, as the ethical principle of power as in the pure striving of the will of life towards itself, beyond all worldly illusions, allusions, and aspirations. Much as it is seen in the life of conquering Alexander - all of the world is merely a locus for desires; a series of points and nexi upon a map which are perceived as truths to reach a destination of total mastery or dominance and domain of the will - but which are in reality only poor reflections, refractions, and distortions of the true fundamental embodied engine and fire of life - as seen as in whisps of smoke dancing from it; temporal myths and mists of something already fading, something already illusory.

It is in this way that true contact with life is beyond all apparitions and appearances and is fundamentally embodied; embodied in the ground of the body itself. This arete of striving is an arete that emerges naturally in a metabolic or stellar sense, as a continual participation in the forge, fuse, and crucible which is itself nuclearity or thermodynamic; the direct participation with life which is the meditation upon the cosmic fire within; the cosmic fire that is within the total and mere apparition of all things - their fundamental unity and essential force. For all that is without this is a weakening; it is a shadow that is an obsession; that is a faculty of illusion, imagined dreams, and perception. It is that the eyes take from without and create scenes, create fields of perception; the truth of arete is forgotten in the mess of the games that are played with the senses, sense realities, and the perceived apparitions of forms.

To remain continually meditative within this field of life, arete is revealed clearly as the path of Herakles, just as much as it is the path of Perseus; all of those who journey truly through the path of life with inward meditation upon the true cause of action. It is in this way that all confusions and abbreviations are avoided; fixations and loss of direction are amended.

It is this total meditative focus on the essence, hearth, and furnace of the drive of life itself that is the entrance and the entryway into the cosmic mythos of transcendence; transcendental unity; the true ecstasy of arete.

THE ESSENCE OF THE WILL

Breaks the bounds of all things; unifies them in death.

In the conquering impulse, or the indomitability of the spirit, life is necessarily outsize as the essence as it stands incarnate or as a pure force reaches toward the beyond, or that which is beyond itself.

This is the essence of all striving and all activity - striving and activity which adheres to no law; is tethered to no firm ground; yet, paradoxically, emerges from firm grounds as in existent forms which channel the essence of life itself as and through them.

This, too, is also the essence of limitation; the indomitability of the will is the only true paradox of existence. For it is the very nothingness through which all things are made and returned to; the pure force and form of their subtle essence.

The will is a creative force, as it fundamentally shatters and creates in a perennial loop of exile and return to and from pure force. As such, the breaking and making is a creation and destruction simultaneity of the shattering of a paradigm former and the institution of a new one.

Such is the will most similar to the energetic void that exists prior to the thought form. It currently is nothing, and yet holds the entire potentiality of thought and, subsequently, all that emerges from thought into hard action and the solidification of form.

The creative and destructive cannot be separated from and within the essence of the will as the libidinal impulse.

Action, sex, and war - as in all pure motion and movement - are manifest as essential qualities that simultaneously break and remake the terrain of life as a field of manifest and unmanifest possibilities. 

As such, with the Platonic ideal that all time is the moving image of eternity, so is the illusion of fixity of will as in a still image or a snapshot of something that is always already at the state of at willing, or in movements between paradigms of the shattering of one seeming firmity of instituted gravity of laws and the institution of an as already emerging and emergent set of ulteriorities.

As such, the will here is closest to the edge of both death and birth and is unified with both at the crest and breaking and breath and creat of one and the other to such an extent as both movements are indistinguishable but in the act which is a paradigmatic movement and shift of concept and manifest time.

The essence of the will is always already a striving in a theatre of the image drawn in the reflection of light in a moving river of water, or a shadow caught in a realm of fire and smoke.

All that the will moves towards is always already in a state of abeyance and flux, as is the nature of time itself as a series of manifest moving images that create the apparition through which the will moves; kills and resurrects species, forms, traits, empires, and languages of nature.

The will itself is that which essentially moves through the code of nature constructed in heat, light, and the alphabet language of genetics; the elemental constructs of galactic formations and stars.

The will as such is blind and moves in a theatre of shadows; an actor in a part in a theatre it does not yet understand, or a play that has not yet fully been constructed or once if ever manifest but in the essential code of the play of the will as the operative rule and function of the universe proper.

This is to say that the universe is the theatre of the will; is as such a theatre characterized fundamentally by chaos and blindness within the conscripting structures of paradigmatic and shifting realities - such as physical laws and animal forms. These larger paradigms conscript the will into clothes of physical forms and limitations, through which it attempts to revelate the vaulting bars through which it might emerge into further freedoms; visions of the essential.

The will fundamentally attempts to leverage itself to accomplish these means and ends - as it is all that it is; has at its disposal all that it has - primarily and fundamentally blind force as a means to an end; substantially the blind hope that blind force might achieve the birth canal between the death of the old form and the birth of the new vision.

The universe and the universal itself is an experiment in the transmission of will forms; thought forms carrying the dormant, aeonic clashes of manifest (read: wills of difference) wills in time and in space; as such these wills construct the lived experience of gravity and force and existence as time and space itself.

Each separative conquering impulse is the exertion and establishment of force as in space and time - a marker of real power as a political reality, which simultaneously attempts to shore itself up fundamentally and then expand into conquering territories.

In this way life encroaches upon itself and fundamentally transforms itself through the forge of will as an iron force.

This is the knowing madness through which all life conducts itself as a computational device.

Only in becoming aware of the force of the will as the fundamental operative condition of reality as such is there real possibility and hope of the will being furnished and harnessed to real ends - realization of the self through the lens and forge of the cultivating of the will towards self mastery.

The universal, as a law, seeks inner unity with itself.

This seeking for inner unity manifests immaturely as the conquering impulse.

Life seeks outside of itself to master the forces and forms of existence and organize these forces and forms into an intelligible, intellectual structure of firm meanings organized by the egoic self.

As such, the will violently asserts its own gravity in time and in space as the primordial ancestry manifested in the animal.

This is a gravity of blood and furnishing of the metabolic structure of the physical self and form - which is always already a shoring up of the self, even in the expansion into territorial impulse and the taking by way of force colonies in the river of time.

However, as is the fundamental nature of the will in time as a reflection of images in a river, or shadows in the smoke of the fire, these acquisitions and acquired territories themselves are temporal bounds; cease to exist or hold or remain in any solidification of form and value.

This is no true root and ground; it is a misinterpretation of the tenets of life’s manifest seeking for inner unity and wholeness.

The seeking for inner unity manifests maturely as in the contemplative impulse, or the seeking to understand the domain of the will itself as it emerges and is manifest and presents itself through the aperture of the subject; subjectivity - and as such, opens up in a widened aperture into the essential sphere of the whole, or unto the will proper as a universal principle.

In and as such, there is no real conquered ground but shadow; through illusion nothing is gained but the revelation of the will reflected into and upon the projected screen of the imagined reality through which the will attempted to scaffold itself to surety.

Therein, from within reflected unto and toward itself, the will comes to reckon with the essence of the will itself as the manifest body of being itself; furthermore, the essential quality of all manifest things and thought forms; beneath even the will or the desire towards - the essential quality of the infinite as infinite potential; unmanifest spiritual power and energy subtly directed towards means and ends; notions of meaning, value, time, and subjectivity.

Therein and as such, lies the freedom of the eternal soul; the utterly whole. Therein lies the realized precept of free energy; such magnitudes.

The Importance of the Unconcealment of History in the Early Photograph

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The early photograph is the first opportunity for true potential revelation of the ground of history as in the imagistic, or the direct visual confrontation with past times.

In this revelation of the ground, revealing is not merely something-that-remains, but rather, something that is sustained vis-a-vis the revelation of the ground of the tool of visual perception as a gaze, a mirror, a scrying lens and looking glass into how things were in an environmental sense.

In this way, history is reclaimed in and through the rubble of the past through the purity of sight. It is not grasped, held, nor withheld, but rather is a ghost or a spectre that tells the tale of itself through the vision of its form that is mediated in the physical by the revelation of the dream realm - or the space time distortion of the returned visualization of a time of that which was utterly organically through the medium of the image itself as a physical object as in that which remains.

The object itself is a proto narrative tool - yet unlike painting and writing as visual ways and methods of inscribing symbols to describe narrative visual or sensual realities, the photographic image directly penetrates into the real as in that which was, and as yet is overlaid in the early formal days of its emergence the necessity of producing and reducing the image from the fabric of the flash impressed negative upon the page to render the image into a formal time delimited gaze.

The photographic object in this way is an evocative portal which supercedes the narrative supremacy of paintings and dreams in that it fundamentally recaptures and recapitulates the true presence of the thing itself through the medium of the photographic gaze and imagistic capturing. Bottled time in the printed photographic object in this way releases and reveals the essence of time while subtly and simultaneously relinquishing its grip upon it. The moment of the photograph is the nexus point of the burial and utter relinquishing of history and yet the bottling of the auric essence of the time itself which henceforth cannot be reclaimed and resides entirely in the formal, physical photographic object itself.

The death of time is the emergence of the photograph. And yet, the photograph does not seek to preserve or retain time, but rather to mark how things were in the essence of their time in a documentary sense. This is not a project of desperate reclamation, but rather, an archaeological project of unearthing that which is even as it is being-itself.

The early photograph is an earthly remnant and remains of something that is translucent, transparent, and utterly transcendent - the imagistic reflection of the nature of time itself; an image and moment, a snapshot and current of the ephemeral within the perpetual flow of the infinite unity of time itself as a property of perpetual change, uprooting, unearthing, and ungrounding of the transcendent impulse and instinct of life itself.

In this way, so is consciousness to body. To paraphrase Sartre, it is the shock of the utter freedom of consciousness within the egoic constrictions of time through which the stratification of the body consciousness proper was developed and scaffolded that is the thing that moves and unearths and transcends the whole of that which was ad infinitum. It is the utter and perpetual primordial ground of awakening which shakes time into being and moves forward the fabric of space into perpetual innovation and creation. The photograph in this sense is simultaneously something utterly daemonic and shocking, because it is the revelation of time through itself that remains as an image, a reflection, of that which cannot be and no longer can be; furthermore, that which was truly never perceived but through the aperture of the lens itself. It is a time that never existed; could not exist but through the dreamtime of the lens and the process rendering of the photographic total art object itself as a relic.

Early photographs themselves represent a breach in the possibility of true cohesive historical narrative documentation in that they are simultaneous utter relinquishments of time and the true preservation of the grounds which must shift out from under the roots of the image as a narrative wrought to paper through glass negative transfer. It is the allowance of these grounds to shift, the titanic tectonic plates of earth, space, and time to loosen and arrange - all the while, the image stands as a documentation of something always already utterly in movement. The very development of the aperture of the lens shutter over time is a reflection of the increasing technological ability to capture movement. However, this very principle is doubled in the requisite of stillness in early photography. This is the purity of the early photograph - that time must cease to move or exist for the image to be captured. The image must be stilled or it will become ghost.

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The transparency of the early photograph is its utter lack of pretense as an art object, but rather as a pure documentary and communicative device.

The early photograph has no function or no motive precisely because of the purely unknown and wild quality of its emergence as a technological device which necessarily reduces it to pure experimentation.

The youth of the form itself is a rebellion against and yet a recapitulation of the institution of painting as in image capturation, capitulation, and manipulation; yet, in its youth, there is the necessary purity which makes it time revelatory through the process which renders the image into being by way of a roughness of self discovery.

The marks, etchings, scratches upon the glass is the tumbling of the image through time of glass mediums, light flashing, and paper transfer to render the image into view with utter shockingness of sublimity. The image does not yet exist but through the form of visual image transfer as in the medium of its apperception. The very aperture of the lens must undergo many microscopic transformations to reach the transmitter of the eye in the perception and final view of the photograph, especially in regards to the early photograph as a press and news device. This transmission process is the alchemical essence of the early photograph - a process of salts, light, heat, and transmutation of the image within the beaker of its transfers. In this process, the image itself acquires an organic quality which supercedes and actually breaks and breaches the fabric of time in its transformation: becoming an utter sublimity which transcends the ‘real’ of its capture; breaches into the realm of art object as in rendering process with the unique hand manipulation of editorial photo, development.

It is in this way that the image does not truly exist; has utterly no grounds in history. It is at first and a priori a total spectre of movement, a timelessness in time that is ulterior, strange, and alien; it is wrought and pulled from the light of the spectacle of the movement of time and distilled down a laboratory chain of transformations and translations to the silver gel print. In this way, time is disturbed and made utterly art; it is broken from itself and made entirely aesthetic as a liberation and free play of consciousness through the aperture of perception. Life itself is pulled from the real and creatively altered to reveal the hidden, inner, sacral nature of itself through the early photograph; yet, the early photograph is an input that reveals the creative, or sacral impulse of time through its engagement with the appearance of the reality of time itself as in ‘the world’. This is to say that the intervention of the early photograph is the revelation of the creative play of time itself, or the utter unconcealment of the grounds of time which lay the stage for the introduction of the photograph as an interruption and interrogation into the nature of time itself.

The Total Relevance of Historical Documents

What qualifies a historical document as such is not a mooring to time and place, but rather a place in time. The historical document is itself the bringing of a time into the present, or the remembrance of a time into the present. It is itself non sensorial, but is itself directly evocative, in and of itself, of a time that is no longer ‘this time’.

In this way, the historical document is something that is ‘out of place and out of time’, in that it brings the place in time from which it is emergent into the realm and sphere of the contemporary. And in this way it is a sublime object, something emergent from out of the realm and sphere of the temporal, as future oriented as it is past oriented.

Precisely, an object which obtains and receives its mooring from the past as place, in that it is and was crafted, moulded, and forged in the fires of a different time, and through time was ushered, aged, remained, and sheared into the contemporary - this object is a stranger to the total historicity of the moment. It does not receive fullness of the knowledge and recognition of that which it is through and by way of the contemporary but through the literal embodiment of the object-as-in-itself.

In this way, the historical document always already retains an element of opacity, or mystery into the totality of its emergent character. The object itself is simultaneously a silent storytelling embodiment, or a craft of time in and of itself; in this way, the historical object belongs almost entirely to time. It was sheared from the contemporary moment of its craft, and in the loosing of the object into and onto the world to be affected and co-mingled with time, it became inmixed, interacted, reacted, and compounded with time itself, until time became indistinguishable from it. Therein, the fundamental character of the historical document is the reflection of time itself, in and upon it.

The nature of the historical document is, henceforth, an irreplicable, irreproducible phenomenon, even if it is emergent from historical-industrial forces of mass production and replication. Each object therein is loosed upon and into and through the forces of time differently; co-mingled with existential properties and forces and figures of difference differently. The historical document moves through time and is jarred and unjarred by its interactions in the unfoldings of space and movements of time in which its status and observed character shifts. In this way, the historical object retains no essential character but the movement of time through and within it. The historical object is always in-relation-to the contemporary, and in and as such, always mutually informs and reinforces the vision of the contemporary into itself; the contemporary’s vision into it. However, the historical object, in the nature of its objectivity, is a still, stoic, and silent force through which the nature of time itself is and perennially moves.

Historical ‘objectness’ in and of itself is a passive state of existence through which time is a music played which changes only the extrinsic qualities, appearance, and examinations of the historical object form proper. The sublimity of the historical object emergent from the movement of the bowels of time is the resurgence of a time, a place, a state of being and a state of awareness that cannot be reclaimed, only reflected upon through the mirror’s gaze of the historical object upon the contemporary. The historical object is frozen, unmoving; is only extraneously sheared and altered by and through time. However, the emergence of its presence, or, its leap into being is something that is inalterably a state of ‘pastness’; in this way exists in a dialectical nature in relation to the present. The present thus calls it forth like an artefact from the bowels of the earth; the present thus reveals the historical object in its pastness; yet cannot penetrate into the full substratum of its nature as in, by, and through the very nature of the character of time itself which it wears and yet is concealed by, as in a state of opacity.

Historical objectness is primarily costumed - as a force of productive movement in and through time; through which it acquires its distilled and aged character. Like a process of fermentation or bacterial acculturation, it is a change in the fundamental properties which characterize the emergent properties of the present, which are then shifted in relation to the state of the present becoming pastness in relation to the eternal. The gaze of the historical object into immediacy is shifted by the quality of the everpresent movement or thrust ‘forward’ into ephemerality and eternality by the quality of the present - or the total of the active forces at work at any given point in time in historicity.

In short, the historical object recedes into the soil or sediment of history, pastness, time, and the ground of being - to be unearthed as in the fundamental state of the artifact, or the relic. It is a time made time again by the state of recovery and remembrance that is reflected in the present’s recovery of the historicity from whence it emerged; was formed, transformed, and reacted into existence. This process of recovery, as a historical process of temporality-past in relation to temporality–present in relation to the eternal - is a primarily psychological process of the appeared unmooring and unmoor-ance of being recovering itself by way of and through the process of historical exegesis of the primary documents of its emergence - the substratum by and through which it is, was, made, and changed.

The recovery of the past is the present's fundamental recovery of itself; thus, the teleological compass and rejoinder of its futurity.

PHILOS

or

Foundations of Being:

A Philosophical, Scientific, and Narrative Synthesis at all Scales -

Psychological (Motive Consciousness), Wave, Molecular, Cellular, Bio-Structural, Formal, and Cosmic-Universal

The chain of process of creation -

‘Creation: from stillness, emptiness, and absence to the directive, attentive, active movement of thought potentiality’

‘Thermal reflections of the will’

‘Thermal linguistics of the will’

‘The language of creation’

That we are moored in history is that we are ourselves cultural systems and bacterium at work within a massive symbolism of chemical and elemental economics.

In that we are so, we are rather languages, alphabets; ourselves cultural artifacts working within the terrain of invention and reinvention at the level of thermonuclear, cellular reality - where the language of Nature itself is at work, writing strictures, bodies, forms, and linguistics of sentience - into and out of significance and existence.

This mooring within history is the cultural context of a name, or a form of a tree within an ecosystem. This natural emergence of space or spacelessness in Nature itself is the breath of air that exists between bodies that constitutes the fields of galaxies; the push and the pull of the electromagnetism and wavelength whole, through which things exist, are beckoned, and the space between their coming and calling. For gravitation to exist, there must be the space of primordial silence.

All that exists is moored within the larger existential context of the intergalactic dominion of Nature itself. Therein, and in the stellar, fusionary, thermodynamic context of the emergence, heating and cooling of the universal, trans-solar whole, natural syntax of chains of being emerge in states of consumption, reconsumption, digestion, and reproduction of cosmic information as energy.

All that exists emerges naturally within and as the chain of creation in states and stages of resumption and transformation at all levels and scales. For molecular information and wave information to be redigested and terraformed through the fusionary device of cell metabolism, there must be specific implementations, devices, and evolutionary stages of cosmic engines; heat engines, to work with said transfusionary information; process it; move it forward and forth into regeneration from decay and digestion.

This being said, the scat of the universe is where space is re-developed, re-spun, refilled, and re-emptied, the astral orbit of dying stars scattered and dispersed into clouds of ash and dust which are then re-gathered, re-constituted, and re-alchemized into a new paradigm of solar light and transfusion of energy and information.

This recycling of energy occurs through the agency of the body, which is the letter and the context of the universe, or the living body of the planetary, the solar, the animal, the individual, the plant. At all scales, the body is that which is doing the transfusionary aspect of information, down to the iron core which is itself the metabolic container for the force and form which holds the organism together proper. Again, at all scales, this is a primordial sentience which constitutes the entire body of the living thing itself, or, the universe, the universal.

To be moored in history is to be contextualized within the catechism, or the mechanism of universal transformation via vita, or total sacramentation of the cosmos itself through the process of consumption, digestion, and resumption via vita, again, scat, in the energetic ouroboros of the quantum, thermonuclear cosmos. It is through this vital digestion of energy that the language of energy itself is perennially contextualized and decontextualized through its de-constitution of forms, its breaking down of forms, and its restitution in an evolutionary futurity of evolutionary forms in-as otherwise.

As such, the forces of gravity and the gravitational nature of time as in the relativity of the self consumption of bodies in a synaptic universe that is itself entirely sacramental in an unto itself, is perpetually eating itself alive and shedding its own skin, through an as-already-greater thermonuclear cooling process which is the universe’s self consumption of its own originary primordial energy - the mass-heating of density as in the opening of the portal of the singularity of the universal itself, down through and into the dispersion of energetic force and power and thrust in all directions as in solarity or thermonuclear power into the localizations of star systems; distances of heat and light, and the energetic chains of transmutation in ocean pools and trenches; jungles and elemental fields of being-at-waiting-to-emergence-from itself.

This potentiality is the potent signature of energy at waiting or language at waiting, where it is the dark matter linguistic of something prepared to emerge from nothing, or the electromagnetic wave field proper of that which is which as already contains the entire energetic field of life beyond time, or beyond relativity itself in that which it is the true constitution and construction of all things across all timelines. In totality and in all places in all times, contains the absolute singularity of energetic power and force as an ongoing thermonuclear, electro-dynamic wave form thrust as in sine wave as in rising and falling of forms and gulfs of absences which constitutes the entirety of the cosmos at large, as a checkerboard of presences and absences; the scalar constitution and deconstitution which is the half life and dissolution of all forms into clouds of elemental dispersion from ash of form; into the clarity of the pure wavelength field proper.

In this way, death of forms is a totality of meaning as in silence as in pure potentiality in an energetic sense. All that does not exist comprises the potentiality of all that may and can exist; in that the field is unweighed. A planetary field or solar form is in a necessary lockstep of gravitational behaviors by way of relational dynamics in established space-time. Each of the planets and fusionary devices as in solar forms is in an established lockstep as in the presence of a formal existence.

In this way, we are ourselves in our very presencing of Nature, a languaging, an alphabet, and in this way are applied via laws of formal presencing which require the transmutative force of Nature to be at work in, as, and through us as primordial resonators; heat-language devices of transformation via thermonuclear dynamics as in metabolisms. For if we were to be entirely absent, we would be true to the nature of silence and thus reside in no established nature of the field, but rather in the unmuddied clarity of nothingness. Instead, in the nature of the unfolding of the massive density of the detonation of the fusionary device at large as in the creation of the universe itself, we are rather at work in established fields of being, under, in, and as primordial infrastructure scaffolding itself in, as, and under the work field of solar heat and light; fusionary chains of chemical and elemental reactions and passages - passing energetics down through all scales of cosm.

This may be conceived as a ‘trap’ of existence as in participation at a certain scalar wavelength, density, or fusionary property or furnace, or it may be perceived of or conceived of as a primordial, essential, and first form liberation as in participation in and as the entire cosmic wavelength unfolding of Natura proper at all scales. It is rather a matter of perception entirely - and the opening up of the realm and field of perception once entirely confined to the field of what is seen with the eyes, heard with the ears, and tasted with the mouth - to what is possible with the apparatus of discovery using senses both technological and intuitive, senses of the unified faculty of the body in coalition through listening and presence - to expand the field of awareness and perception to include more of that which is.

The ‘limited field of the body’ is rather the ‘limited field’ of what we are perceptually aware of seeing, experiencing; as such, what we are aware of becoming, knowing, and being. This, first, is a limitation of our language in relation to the language of the universal, or the first form of Nature proper. This language of limitation is then a language of conceptual limitation - which limits ourselves in regards to primordial participation within and as the universe, as an engine of primordial energetic exchange across all densities and scales - which is itself the first liberation - the liberation of transformation.

OSSAWON

I.

Jane moved to Ossawon, wishing it were the Maldives, to bestow a kiss upon her temples and free her from the sunlight. The sky was cold, and bearing down upon her. Like a stream, demented, she rose from her bed and peered up at the hours, ticking perilously.

If life was a series of gods, a sundial - she passed through winter and spring like a miraculous less-than-nothing - a thing utterly unmarred by thingness. The body melted away like an unwritten letter. An empty postage. She wandered, moving about the tidal pool of the house.

All about her were scraps, paper clippings, cards, charnel ephemera from the past - a wind of time that had blown about her into this cave obscured by roof. She shook out from the life of the body that remained, her hair like tree leaves, brustling. Her skin like an oak, a wooden door.

All that shined shone upon Ossawon, as it did forever in a prism of same. All life was suspended there, and did not exist but in the dewy glossalia of amber, a language that was spoken yet removed by millennial walls of ice. No voice, no noise escaped from the chamber of silence. Even laughs of agony were nonexistent, nor were there spells of peering light, to mark the stone of the walls.

It was this voice that was Jane - it was a silent blustering of a wind that passed over the stones; wandered as the dials seeped elsewhere about planets and cyclically illuminated the siren of their form. It was this voice that ruffled the paper and disturbed the tombs, where at last flesh and skin seeped, pillage of dirt and bone. She was an isle, and island which was wild, vines which gave way to void of speech, of Nature glistening.

All of this was rhythm. It was a black stomp to the plume of a guitar which did not exist; yet illuminated with life from within the utterance of form, almost self consumed and vacuous, reaching back within itself for the engine of the drive which sputtered into abyss. Ossawon was a prison of words, a place for Jane to be utterly encompassed.

It could not be sun, nor could it be shade - winter nor spring. Time was unbending to the point of breaking in its relentless rhythm. To escape the time of endless summer… but this was not the wind. She thought about that breath which shuttered the gales. There was no great mouth that made the essence, and yet it was evasive. All about her she breathed, until her skin was a veil, a curtain, and at last - a void.

Not the Maldives, not the dungeon of summer! The words broke and tumbled into an utter quaking of speech, the quacking of a duck in the isles of the dead. There were no tombs that uttered the pure soil; Jane was a stillness of movement about a field of suspended stones. No gravity tugged from beneath the depths of space. There was a bottomless pit as stars rose hot into the night. What did it matter, to be here in Ossawon, heaven… what did it matter to be a spool that unraveled forever, signifying nothing…

Breathing! Uttered the jar. To filter the water like a dutiful fish. To pass through the mind sigils, hands that traded upon hands, language, time, the scraps that evade captive obliteration. But we must die! Certainly, we must die. At the hands of the breaker of time; upon the bridge of nothingness, infinity, and obliteration. A stone broken is released, but ash to winds ground down by the trickling of a creek slowed by winter’s creeping. As heat breaks the water into an exaltation of steam, so must hot exhalation drive all materium back to the spirit of being. She must die and go beyond debate of place. To sweat away the veil of speech and reveal the fire which unites the slowed ice of breath to body in breakless infinity.

Ossawon was a dead place. It was cold as ice and yet there was no ice to be broken. Time idled in a ceaseless pool, spinning and gyrating, spiraling for the sake of speed. Each star is a slave to the whip of rebirth, there in Ossawon. Not the Maldives, thought Jane - not the Maldives. Nor the slow pilgrimage of unbending and stripping the flesh before the idles of the stars, no - but the forgotten burning. For there it was too cold, too deep, like the straits of ocean which fed far beyond desire into trenches of death. Only cool things could breed there, she thought, only cool things. What hunger could sweat in the belly of a galaxy devoid of stars? There could be only space, but a cockroach titan. An eater of all things. One with the hunger stronger than the belly of the stars.

II.

Leaving Ossawon, then, was the dilemma. Like leaving the palace of the dead, she breathed and was forgotten. Back, again and again, she was returned to the voice of the body. Like a cycle and a tether, the slow hum of the beating, the oscillation of the entropic cask. Form, like a death mask - we must live and be spirit. And yet the wind was free, like the tame desert, casting shapes in the shifting hills of sands. Back, back, we must return. Nature has built with stone and brick and bone; wild animals have destinies! They must copulate. But not in Ossawon, no matter. It was the timeless, time out of time which kept her in the slow molasses. Let the sun hum, so infrequent that winters were forgotten. That sleep was an eternity unvanquished and unreleased to death; drawn out yet long enough to provide but the shadow of solace.

The eyes of the body peered out forever over the dawn. Awning, yawning for this? Dying for a fervor, thrashing in a pool of molecules between an ocean and endless land. The breath squabbles for life and constructs the entire clothes of the personality. She could not be Jane, but the sundial of the figure that resembled her. Each hand and arm twinkled with the nerval tone of the body. The limits of construction. She could not feel the reach of the blanket, nor the brain of the swan, nor the eyes of the toad or the grave of the wood which is chairs. This world is muted and heavy, like a wool blanket, like a clasp of densities. Whole volumes of oceans pound and roar; gravity is constricted, restricted. Bodies pressed down into land’s formal unity. Ossawon was endless, and yet Jane was definitive. She began and ended at the nerve symmetry which stretched like ossuaries down her feet and palms. Jane was electric in the palace of the dead; yet she could not leave, but for the brief ecstasies.

The brief ecstasies, recalled Jane. It is when stone breaks against the tempest current of storms; when the sky bleeds the blue gray of stone. It is not fog, the unity of stone and sky. If all is in the nature of water, stones remember what it is like to be free. Phase change. The state of matter is an insurrection, a raising up and casting down. Is this what energy is, thunder? Before light there is sound; before sound there is the raising up of the fist of absence and presence, the gyration of molecules into a collapsing clap. Before space, there is the tension of the idea - the introduction of space into spacelessness.

It is as words fill the page, or water rushes to fill a void. This essential gravity. This excitation of the friction of empty timelessness. She carried buckets of milk to the storehouse of grain. There was no tongue to taste in Ossawon, but the muted gallery of fruits which tumbled from trees to the flesh of the earth; lay outstretched in utter unseparation. The earth of the ground tumbled from infinity, and rested where it rolled with indignity into the mute outer reaches of space. She spilled upon the threshold; reaching for the frame of the door, uttered a scream which echoed only in the spilling of her mouth into expression. The world is the sound of a generator, ceaselessly humming. Generation after generation of form, spilling from the fire of time.

She thrashed, then relinquished to the truth. Years of stone would be broken open and resummoned, like a spell. This world was enchanted with a hush, and no music could break the loud violence of the growling of the stomach. No beggars could berate and copulate but in the palace of the real. There was no story nor song that would remain, no skin that would not grow spiny with thorns then be reborn. However many lives she had lived, this was to be irrelevant. It was to puncture the halls of the gelatinous world which held everything together. The very skin of god which with spindly hands stretched across all of the bounds of the eternity of her life. And beyond it, what was the nothingness but furthermore the shadow, the underbelly, the trailing sketch of the figuration which was the creation of all eternity itself?

It merely continued. And there was no sharp jutting cliff of death, nor the puffing gale of seriousness which whipped the starry horizon about like a peacock… nor was there meaning beyond the purity of sound. Could this be madness, to be dipped like a pattern into the ocean of death and emerge half crazed, half alive, and yet the outline of the shadow of death to the world? All that was held an equal and opposite, the darkness of the shadow of matter cast in the quaking net of energy. Everything that was held before it the prerequisite drop of infinity, the rise of a wave of integer found the numbing descent into the valleys of the dead silence of evil. Angels rose and tangled with light and fell to stone. Suns and stars writhed high patterns in the sky and fell beyond the shallows of the caven tomb. Tongues whipped and lashed and fell silent with the quiet tiredness of lingering on the precipice of nonexistence. This whole world was ushered into a hospital and shone the gaze of forever and then writhed and died, like the death of a brain cell, a synapse reaching out toward an aeon of colorful, quickening light.

This is what it was to beheld a mirage in your hand; turn it over like dice and cast it into the effervescent glow of just nothing. The pulse quickened and dropped off the table; the dead body was thrust into the pyre which was a mere echo of the stars. They dropped off elemental bricks which mingled with the language that made beaks of small birds, toucans; the breasts of apes; the tongues of dust which dribbled across the floor and beckoned into corners which sniffed the crest of infinity. Her finger stood upon the trim and lingered, touching the far reaches of a rung of space which had not yet reached her eyes. And every moment was obliterated in fire. The truth of Maldive was Avalon, and yet a bird flew between there, a wind, a threading finger of string; a spool that made the warmth of heat like an oven of the tinder of all of life, burning at different radiations of degree, against and across all time, in an inverse measure of birth and the tumbling it takes to death.

Surely the dance of some other star would lead us there, away from here. She fought in her eyes and in her mind for Sirius; she fought for stars without names; stars that bellowed and hoofed and stampeded like wild oxen and bulls; meek stars on the verge of death like old men, stars that flickered and plinkered in a meaningless galaxy after meaningless galaxy like intubated blood in vein, stars like pinball machines and stars like a frog comedy - she prayed and begged and slapped the stars until they bled; dripped dew into the catching jar.

The onus was upon her, the wild imagination of infinity. The elixir of the signless sign that had dripped down in a formative millennium upon the doorstep of her body and gobbled up the seeping sap and fat of her mind; lived and breathed beyond her beating, bleating oblivion. All that was and was not was the goat and the slaughter, the thing that laid the sacrifice down upon the stone and the neck that was severed from the head. The mind takes infinite forms upon and in the body recombinate. The universal lung, organ, fingertip, nail and chest is infinitely mutable. It is as the mind pleases; as the mind commands. The language itself is that which constructs and construes the dream. The form sculpts around the mind’s eye - ideation. And that mind is wild! It grips and grasps death upon the play and ballet of the formative art - and casts that which role should be light and shadow; in the grips of dreams dances the act!

This is what it was to Jane, enactment that was the straits of the true Maldives, the Avalon of Aeon. But a toy, but a child dances upon the tightrope of the stars and rips the horns from the sacred bull… the slaughtered calf at the foot of the maze, whose corpse stretches to the center, the eye of all life; the infinity of all time and art. What beckons is the point! The thimble upon the thread which weaves, the mind which is the eternal thing manifest at the heart, core, and center of all possible universes. At each moment, creation weaves upon the dial of the thread, upon the thread of the needle. A rope stretched to breaking, or coiled loose in relaxation about the feet. A pulse quickened or relinquished to a breath which paints a field of grasses green and waving ambulant.

Oh Avalon! Jane danced, a gripless hand that painted and carved the dimensions, the art of a painter and a sculptor which could relinquish life and death like shade and shadow, like a contrast in play about moonsphere. If that time could endless dance an art, it was that time was both broken and necessary, a theatre that was at the utmost pure and only aesthetic. That art itself was the concern of the play and the playing. And thus, it was not concern, mere tumbling. Emotions like the palette mix colors of mood, but that mind… could silence paint.

III.

Jane left the story of death behind like a cloak. A ceaseless, eternal play. And thus, rest… a rest deeper than sleep in life nor the endless abyss of death. It was the disinterested play of the cat with the bauble that kept the Maldives and Ossawon intact; at the point of Aeon they were abridged and abolished. No animal could fear tumbling from the unknown that was all encompassing a mind, vast in the sleep and slumber of baseness. And yet, for the animal to die, it required a biological solvent, an alarm that remembered and awakened the inner language of its forewarning. Why did they not long for death, instead evading it at all costs? Why was death not welcomed, ushered, conjured? As it stood among them, the shadows faded from the mixture of the light. What was left was flat truth. It was at this point, that Aeon stretched like an infinite horizon, into the gobbling mouth of the black lung - which with each breath expressed the vehicle of eternity: the dying eye which witnessed the swallowing of all dimensions into a singular, vacuumless point.

They all rushed to it. Like dancers in a painted mask worship of oblivion cast in black stone. All that rose in the ocean of the wave of electromagnetic form fell back toward it. The curtain of heaviness. It called, and called, and called once more in the deep rhythm which only alludes to the buoyancy of the surface of the ocean. Without salt, we plummet to the ancient, timeless, tomb. Whole worlds and seas of life dance upon an ocean of salt. But I wish to see and know death, thought Jane… the death that lies at the bottom of Ossawon. The death that is like a beast but is not dead nor alive. The death that swallows but with an empty mouth and throat. The death that is like eyes and yet is a character, a form, a shadow. A shade which beckons and whispers. It is something that in the dark of truth at last illuminates, more empty than space and yet with more character than all of this parade. Succession after succession, nothing truly dies. But I must grasp death and unmask it as the true singularity of things.

Death passes right through her, rips at her with false jaws. Tears at her with false mouth. Unsubstantive, I cannot know death! But I taste the excitement of death all about. The eyes of life are enraptured with death. We are at dance with it, in circus with it. It is all of the brightness behind the entrancement of life and light; the falsity of form. The mute, plastic tune that lies at the bottom of every pale whispered desire. Death is the bottom and the gulf of all things, the last peninsula of life down into the core of ice is the character of death, an ecstatic haunting which rumbles with the roar of an ancient beast and yet is forever unseen. It is this totem at the last reach which is the horror we all desire. At the bottom of Ossawon is a monster which is monsterless. And it must eat! It must swallow us alive! Thus we must see the parade of death. We must be consumed in the very cavernous tomb of its maw!

This was the monstrosity of the swirling of time. The prism which breaks and reforms about itself like the mould of a lizard arm. And this was destiny! At the bottom of death was the parallax creature of resurrection, the formulation and reformulation of a primordial ooze, a fire and mixture of blood, a gelatinous orbit of false forms about the chest of infinitely resurrecting life and all carbon forms which dance upon the the fire and spit of the splitting. It was a compound creature, a creature composed of the atomic gusts of life hidden far among the junglish reach of distant stars approaching the obliteration of time and the most churlish infant moth or the gargling mouth of the swamp. This isle of demons is compounded at the hand of the depths which dances like current of electricity across each ambulant form; the potentiation which haunts, lingering in the magnetism of stone and the churning waves which bring together and apart cells and molecular syntheses for further chemical injection.

Jane was uttered at the beginning of all time and life, and was consumed by it in layers, like the sediment of stone, mask upon mask of the wrought iron core of a star entangled within the depths of the land and earth. Beneath her lay the infernal engine; about her lay the stars that burn upon carpets of black plumes of space, clouds of smoke their children; we were like demons upon couches, birthing up the exhaust of excrement which ate away at the hungry energy - bartered with parts for parts in the junkyard universes, beat and berated and pillaged and raped, stole and lied and betrayed - it was this agony that was the groan and moan of the hunger of the generator… of parts ground to pure salt; crystalline… diamondine…

It was left to us as black oil which we slurped on the canyon shores of Ossawon. Left to us like an inheritance among the wilderness of skeletons which etched the skyline of the beaches which stretched out into the breachless distances of space. Jane yearned, she yearned for Avalon, even the disguise of Maldive. It was the jutting point of a peninsula, upon which she dove, crackling, like an explosive device, a bomb upon the precipice of existence and the swirling nothingness. To her, it could be beautiful, or terror… it did not matter.

Above her, the sun carved a slow trial upon the peaks of Ossawon’s bridge. The gape of the stars opened to reveal an endless corridor. The air of life was thin, like a fading pulse, a collapsing membrane of the dewdrops that remembered a singular cell, writhing in submission before the mouth of a murderous sun. Jane collapsed to her knees in grief, digging her hands into the depths of the molecular soil of the beast of the body of the earth which fed the weight of Ossawon; collapsed into the narrows of the string which led the spirit of all life to Avalon’s breaking creek. Her body was swept by a dry wind about the grains of whittled rock; the false light of Maldive trailed behind, leaving nothing but the memory of a shadow in the heavy silence, the abridging ending of time.

THE FUNDAMENTAL ROOT OF BEING

This world is a guiderail, a handrail - to support the elucidation of consciousness.

It is the terrain of dreams; the stage, the theatre and the play through which consciousness continually achieves scaffolding; petaling, flowing and flowering elucidation of itself.

It is through this that which is the essential plays - consciousness.

All things themselves are reducible to the essential chemical, metabolic, atomic, and at last atmospheric wave-length components themselves of the forms which consciousness takes and acquires.

Things, or ‘thingness-es’, in space and time acquire density and solidity of form through wavelength and frequency attainment.

In this way, they become solid and solidified objects with appearances descended fundamentally from wave and light.

Through the creation of these forms, they are ‘languages of reaction’ - meaning that biology develops and scaffolds chemically through them by way of their transmission of language through themselves in discourse with one another.

This is how ‘life’ emerges from ‘lifelessness’.

However, that which is hid, or the truth of the matter of matter itself, is that the innate consciousness is always already the force at work and acting in and upon the appearance of the material world.

Therein, the innate compositional parts are themselves pieces, figures, parts and elements, which themselves are irreducible, elucable parts and elements of the primary form of consciousness as in scales and complexity of wavelength, frequency, and density of light, matter, and sound - which themselves create and construct figure and form.

This ‘jesting-ness’ of the material is always already hid within it the secret of consciousness.

In this way, all appearances themselves are only as such; consciousness organizing and reorganizing itself as a scaffolding through evolutionary complexity and development seen as in and through biological time; the birth and death of stars; the progressive cooling of intensive thermal heat and the increase in trans-galactic complexity of elements, figures, forms, planetary bodies, and acquired masses through said progression of time.

Matter itself, and the concentrated density of life through matter, has within it hid the ‘spark’, or the transmigratory potentiality of forms. All forms have this sacred, sacral ‘essential’ matter within matter within them - from the flint of stones to the metabolic capacities of animals and plants directly receiving light and nutrition of and from suns and stars.

This is as in all elements and chemicals of density, weight, and character have innate and hid within them reactory components which work much in the way of electromagnetic frequencies and attractors. As biologically reproductive pieces fit together, so do chemicals and elements, as in sodium and potassium with the compound water.

This electricity is the fundamentally organizing and ‘enlivening’ position and potentiality of the universe. It is through this electricity that bodies are animated, carry information, and are organized in the ever unfolding organization and reorganization of matter, atomic parts, and wavelength fluidity of the universal.

All of this is couched in what we can call and know as ‘consciousness’ - which might best be called the full spectrum and radiation of awareness across all figures, forms, and formlessnesses. All of life is couched within this mysterious movement of presence and absence - the fullness of material spaces and the irradiating darknesses which compose the ‘absence and lack’ of presence and form.

This conceptual duality is simultaneously mirrored in the ‘conscious and unconscious’ of the psychic mind constituting the deep evolutionary body of an evolving organism, as it is mirrored in the ‘matter and dark matter’ synthesis and duality of the cosmos and stars.

This land of ‘absence’ constitutes the entire material graveyard of presence, awareness, and the histories through which all things are composed and recomposed. It can be seen to be juxtaposed and paired with directly the deep condensation and distillation of the flesh of ancient dead organisms into ‘oil’ which fills the jetties and cracks and crevasses of sedimentary stone which itself forms the layers of historical skin of the earth.

Such ‘dark cosmological energy’ is the pure witness function of eternal space - which is to say, space out of space, time out of time, pure radiating potentiality without incarnate physical form or symbol ‘of life’. And it is precisely from these realms that the apparatus of the creation of the potentiality of physical forms springs. It is the abyssality of deep thought, deep mind, mimicked fundamentally in the deep vestiges of the brain-mind itself’s electromagnetic transformer of consciousness - that which endlessly produces ‘thought and thought form’ which is then levied into physical energetic force, movement, and reaction.

In this way, Nature’s mind itself is animated and animate from the deep psychological force beyond its knowledge, control, and foresight. This animating force is that which constitutes consciousness proper, and is the primary motive of all movement and flux in and through natural forms, as the essence of Being passing through any and all stages of presencing and absencing as in becoming. It is in this way that the mind of Nature is being steered by the ships of forethought beyond its presence mechanism and control - it is in this way that mind acts before mind, and thus constitutes the theory, field, and realm of the known.

It is in this same way that thoughts are spontaneously produced and channeled through the field of consciousness; filtered down and in and through the mechanism and body of Being proper, the memory, the dream, the bodily recollection and experience of the individual and deep collective and at once atomic, elemental, and universal life of the form distilled through endless genetic recombinations, chemical reactions, and subtle psychic transformations that occur through, within, about, and across the nexus of the biological organism in question/being examined.

It is in this way that the field of Being at large is utterly and properly unbroken, but rather is a vector of transfigurational energies and pathways through which consciousness acts: the food consumed, the air breathed, the elemental energy transmuted through the furnace of the metabolic form of the fusionary bodies of the star. In this way, consciousness is in mutual simultaneous and immediate evolution - in a tremendous interaction and reaction fundamentally unbroken since, as, and within and before the very creation and birth of ‘the universe’ proper as an abstract concept of phenomenological veracity - as in ‘that which appears to be or become or be known by way of the measuring instruments of the eyes, form, flesh, face, et cetera’.

This massive, parallax, perpetually simultaneous emergence of forms in perpetual and mutual cognitive distortion through their simultaneous mutation into, through, and as ‘one another’ is the unbroken field of purely psychic Being proper, arranging and rearranging itself through the metabolic, chemical ‘dream of separation’, or distilled compounds with characteristics organizing and disorganizing themselves and one another through the exchange of language - language being their signature of form, or their matriculated density and constitution of chemicality and elementality, as it changes and shifts over time due to the individual and collective product and byproduct of reactive transformation.

For it is this very reactive transformation which constitutes, in a pure sense, the synthesis of space and time; beyond space and time is the undiluted truth and pure presence of the timeless and spaceless and eternally continuum coagulum of this pure form, consciousness proper, in a perpetual state of stellar-bio-chemical mutation and subtlety of forms - a combination and recombination, constitution and reconstitution, of ‘alive and dead parts’, or conscious and unconscious dark matter black space and psychically illuminative and matriculated, materialized light-form, or nerval, stellar endings which themselves are alit or alight as in acquisitive of transformative action (they are themselves in a state of reaction, as in transformation through the cross section of thought and form - materiality and amateriality - existence and nonexistence as in and through the transference of heat, energy, attributes, et cetera).

It is in this way that dark matter or the unconscious mind of the universe, stars, and cosmos, is itself the precedence of the realm of the thought form which is not yet active - which is to say it is the space within, as, and between the field of and at play through which actions on the chessboard of matter and being occur - it is the field of potentiality which might receive and obtain the necessary loci of transformative thought form; it is the very history of the thought form at root and bottom. In this way it is properly called and symbolically embodies and employs, ‘abyss, void, vacuum’.

All of life takes into itself death; as such, the breath of life which is the matriculation of contents and products of transformative, fissionary, fusionary, elemental, metabolic reactions of consciousness thought-forms within consciousness (‘temporary materium in a state change’) are formed and reformed within the field of and at play which continually recollects them into and through their fundamental abyssive state - which is the depths of no-matter at the heart, core, and root of all temporary matter-form reactions. The constitution of space and time and fullness of presence and void ‘acquired’ by the matriculating, matter-evolving state of consciousness, which is to say, technical language and being and form made possible by chains of chemically compound interacting and transacting and reacting cellular, atomic, and compound chemical and elemental forms - are all and at each within themselves in actuality a presencing of the true void consciousness of the universe of existence - utter non-existence - couched within the materializing presence of form.

This is to say, that matter, and even the constitutional chemically reactive, fissionary, fusionary, and metabloc energetic ‘form’ beneath all matter and forms, is in itself fundamentally, a priori, being-at-void with itself, as a construction of and from the fundamentally vacuum and creative character of abyssality, or pure space, pure mind, pure potentiality.

It is this very constitutional character of paradox which possesses and self-possesses any and all beings, forms, matters, and statuses of life acquired regardless of status of sentience. It is this fundamental paradox that preoccupies all existence; stuns all existence into a Hamlet-ization of the consecrated philosophical, existential paradox of ‘birth and death’ - which perhaps is better stated, ‘the illusion of existence within nonexistence’, or ‘the creation of the appearance of existence within nonexistence, with the capacity of even peripherally contemplating its own fundamental nonexistence as such throughout and as in unity of mind and Mind’.

For each being-at-form through reaction stands upon ground that is rather not standing, but in truth groundless as in the space and status acquired by the weight of stars and the sacral iron cores of planets ‘floating’ paradoxically in deep space. Rather, it is to say that they are being pulled by the force of matter and weight into a confrontation with the heaviest psychic form in existence - the veritable pull of nonexistence - the obliteration of death as in the wave-matter reconstitutional force of black hole transformers.

In the same way that planetary bodies are pulled by heavier furnaces of stars, with greater magnitude and weight of heat and light, paradoxically, these stars as transformational forces of energetic power are pulled simultaneously internally by their own impending heat-death (cease of core reaction); the heaviest local and trans local energetic transformers and cosmic predators of heat (black hole transformers); the heat death of the entire trans-galactic ecosystem of this iteration of universal field of being-at-play. What resides, strictly speaking, at ‘the end’ of this obliteration is what existed before and occurrent throughout it - the pure play and residuation and ecological development of language and linguistic of space and time as in the play of matter, forms, elements, and chemical constitutions and reconstitutions - consciousness itself as in a song of matriculated densities, forms, wavelengths and frequencies.

At central to this, whether sacred or profane, it is a matter of play through which consciousness evolves and transforms; it does so entirely by the primordial, essential language of deep history and chemical, electromagnetic attraction and repulsion which is that which simultaneously holds its simulation and theatre of space and time intact (revolutions of stars and planetary bodies, cycles of light and absence of light, wakingness of organisms and chemical reactions; the sleep of cooling bodies in the circling and cycling of the distance and attractiveness of stars).

This is to say, that the entire ecosystem, manner, and matter of Nature itself primarily and primordially is an entirely unconscious process dictated by the sleep of prior forms playing themselves out in an essentially entirely predestined way, by way of the book henceforth which has been written, genetically, biologically, and chemically coded by way of billions and billions of life cycles and matter status changes; establishments, disestablishments, and reestablishments of whole star systems and galaxies under the pull of life and death of stars and black hole transformers which dictate the depth and fluctuation of space and time themselves by way of their appearances and disappearances as dominant, characterizing features and frequencies of any given local universal phenomenon.

All of this is essentially residual, aesthetic, and jest - in that formally what is developing, growing, is mind capacity within mind, or consciousness capacity within consciousness proper. It is simultaneously the semblance and perpetual restoration of the cosmic frequency, factor, location and relocation of pure mind into vessels and apparatuses which are the linguistic (by way of chemica and genetics, binding and unbinding forces of cells and materium) constructions and reconstructions of the universal mind or cosmic overmind as such, formulating and reformulating its syntheses by way of the matter clarifying and matter clarity device of the field of consciousness proper - which is to say the field of play - wherein matter organizes and reorganizes itself, consumes and digests and re-matriculates parts, particles, and particulars in an endless cycling and recycling of forms and material.

Metaphorically speaking, this synthesis of life could be called a forge or a ‘cosmic junkyard’, through which the essential life forming and giving elements and chemicals and electricity of their being-at-play with themselves and one another ceaselessly forms and reforms constituent and constitutional parts, organs, and limbs of consciousness which acquire and reacquire different attributes through this reorganizational process. In this way, at last, beyond the birth and death of all organizational eco-systemic physical and biological ‘laws’ which hold together fields of being-at-play (bodies, species, planets, star systems, galaxies) - there is at last the fundamental operative organizing principle, that of bio-chemical-fusionary-metabolic-electric transference of the primary energy of creationary neural nodes of mind and consciousness - the thought form, which is itself embedded and pregnant at and within each and all levels of matter: the synapse, the galactic, the root and mycelium - which are the bio-chemical roots of life itself. In and at presence of the roots of life itself, are the airways of death - the space through which the formulation of time occurs and is fundamentally resorbed.

It is at root and at last that when this reactory chain of sparks and sparking which has constructed atomic reality at all levels ceases and is obliterated at a state of total energetic exhaustion, that the profound fundamental nature of creative reality is revealed as in the abyssal void and true and total absence of all character. This is the conceptual synthesis of ‘death’, which is nothing more or less than the revelation of that which is, beneath the appearance of character, form, attributes, and narratives of linguistic consciousness constituting and reconstituting itself in the establishment and disestablishment of thought forms and mind forms in the continual process of clarification of mind within mind; consciousness within consciousness itself - in the stacking of the elemental and chemical building blocks of space and time to constitute vehicular modes of consciousness becoming conscious, or being becoming conscious of the quality, and faculty of being and being’s expansion of the territory of what is possible and potential through the construction of itself through itself; thus giving venue in and through the neural, synaptic veins of form; giving access to itself through the creation and construction of itself.

All of this creation is in and at the play and the greater, total field of silence and absence/presence through which all creation is rather a distraction and disguise of the fundamentally characterless character of the abyssal, fundamental, essence of mind and being and consciousness behind and beyond the spark of thought which is in and at through the chain of reaction the spark and materialization and the play of matter as in hidden essences of mind through phenomenological ‘events’ like the circling of the planets around the stellar sun, or the mating dances of animals; the resorbtion of light through plants. All of this ‘action’ is the creative play of the creative essence of consciousness itself - acting itself out ‘unconsciously’ (as in through the depths of evolutionary and transfigurational time itself) as in a sort of hidden biological, bio-chemical somnambulism in a journey to continual matriculation, recombination, articulation, and elucidation of its hidden language and essence of forms through evolutionary transformation of forms - to reveal that which is hid in and through the very vessel in perpetual state of constitution and reconstitution. In short, that the creation of being itself, the material, the form, the body, the animate reactory and reactorial force itself - through and by way of increasingly compatible and complex neurological and synaptological wiring - is the way of the mind, through which the mind is capable of perceiving itself; encountering itself truly, the vacuous, wild nature and expanse of the primordially silent abyss - that which gives birth to all forms, dances of matter, and illusions of existence.

SUMMA

You must elucidate the truth -

That man is irreducibly; irrevocably free, even from this sheathe called ‘man’.

It is but a jest that all things pass through form, like Consciousness is but a veil for temporality.

All things come to know themselves through their appearance; through their temporality;

Through the linguistic web which constitutes them; but for a brief moment, then is terraformed,

Into and out of strange and unforeseen modalities.

This is the function of evolution, broadly, simply, and purely; applied to each and every physical dimension, sphere, and scale - so that it is a rule Metaphysically.

And it is this rule, change, transformation, that is the true identity of man, Nature, Time, and all things.

Their fundamental essences as singular; phasing in and out of degrees of intramolecular cohesion; chemical dialogue, is that they are constituted as separate entities; phases of compounding and complexity.

All of this is but a moment, but a wind in the sands.

All that is of Nature is irreducible to time; irreducible to definition - it is finally that in the moment of change; in that moment of terrible transformation of species, of the sublime creation anew from the ashes of what came before, like a star risen from the clouds of death - this is the nature of man, Being, and all time condensed into the figuration of Eternity.

So it is that we ourselves are an evolving essence, unfixed and unmoored to any solid or solitary characteristics which define us.

We cannot even be said to be ‘ourselves’ from one moment to the next, but that we are the very constituents and constitution of Being Itself, proper.

In this way, we are the function and movement of change in the sphere of evolution which perennially and perpetually constitutes and reconstitutes the inner and outer reaches of the self awareness of Being itself, or that the Consciousness, or the one whom is wearing the mask, the one who is witnessing the experience of any given body, form, or domain, looks back in upon itself and observes the essential quality, the fundamental essence - through and which any given material or compound experience is emerging new forms of awareness, sensation, and gravitation.

It is in this way that we are life working through sheathes, vessels, cars - and that each of us in our form has our domain, our cave, our image of fascination; our mind which performs the subterranean task of transmission of life through space and time - as in cellular respiration, species reproduction. Each of us within ourselves has thousands and millions of forms of independent life working in cohesion to support the compound body which we ourselves perceive to be ‘ourselves’, or a singularity proper.

It is in this way that mind works, as compounds within compounds taking the apparition of a ‘whole’. In this way planets are nesting dolls within star systems, which are nesting dolls within nodes of whole universes; spectrums of galactic light.

Each life is transfixed by the light of consciousness, or the light of mind which constitutes the limits of any given experience. Such life has certain hungers, thirsts, tastes; narrows of the senses - all through which the bounds of speciation and cellular membrance of self are clearly drawn and delineated. These are the ‘borders of our sensorium’ proper, through which we scry existence, and deem it, and us, fit to a way, and Being’s way.

Each in this way performs an essential function, like bees for nectar in a massive hive, each mind set to perfect attunement for the fullfilment of cellular function within the massive body of Nature - all of which is set to evolution through perfect overtuning, birth within birth; song within song, life within life - as the body of Nature proper ceaselessly consumes, digests, and recapitulates itself from the essential elemental dynamics from which the body of space and time was birthed, in the first movement and stirring and starring of stellar nuclo-fission.

In this brief moment, all is mind, but for the cave of the mind which shields and recapitulates body to protect mind. The prism of vacuous, miraculous fluid, through electro-pulsation is in commune with the essential Nature of Reality, Pure Mind, or the vacuum of emptiness which is true, pure, and still presence, the true nature of void and absence through which the essence of creativity ceaselessly pours. It is this imagination, recombination, and current of electro-magnetic attraction through which the universe is endlessly sketched and resketched, drawn and redrawn, like the play of an artist who through form finds the formless; through limitation and the transcendence of limitation, finds true and eternal freedom.

For what is this paradox, for the freedom of the mind to emerge from the prism of the body which must seek to contain, preserve, and protect its motions? It is this paradox, that for Being to reach full potentiation, it must reckon with the action of Becoming.

Man, in this way, must free himself irreducibly and irrevocably from the caste of false presumption. And how is he to do as such? He is to remove, to strip away the veneer of the manufactured falsity of definition; to at last pull back and away the definition and idea of man and to reveal the pure and true cause, the eternal oneness of Consciousness; then to live eternally in truth beyond time and the attempt to solidify and still form in word, definition, effect, or prism of light - but to finally, at one, and at last, live as the source of all life and light itself.

It is this true definition that is freedom; from freedom emerges the play and liberation of life. Let it be thus for those who seek to be free, to return to the play of the force and source which endlessly generates new combinations, new possibilities for the revelation of the depths of the truth of Being.

On the properties of heat engines:

Heat engines are diffusive bodies, fundamentally undifferentiated by the space and time in which they occupy. This is to say - that heat engines are a primordial functionality of energetic movement, transference, and transfiguration which are fundamentally unified and yet operative in and at all scales of existence.

The universal itself is a vast, primordial heat engine in various states of regulation and deregulation.

Necessitated by the process of entropy in open and closed systems, the universal is locally and globally stabilized and destabilized by vast and molecular establishments and disestablishments of heat system current flows - which then breaks and builds the bonds of creation proper - both at a molecular and chemically bonded level, as well as at a solar, ecosystemic galactic and universal level as in the establishment of space and time as in the regular behavior of planets and bodies in space and thus, ‘in time’.

What the universe is producing and reproducing at all levels is and are ‘closed system’ heat engines escaping and diffusing and transferring and transfiguring the fundamental energetic properties of existence in an energetic ‘nesting doll’ structure of scope and scale. This is to say, that ‘the real of the heat engine’ is the universal.

Therein, molecular excitation is only stimulated as to generate heat through the friction of compound chemical reaction.

That which is ‘living’, strictly speaking, is a compound chemical reaction producing heat; arranging and rearranging therein molecularly excited states in a process of transformation of existing chemical bonds and bondedness. This is, even within ‘closed system’ entropic states, a form of energetic liberation from the existing conditions and ‘conditionals’ of form.

This process and procedure, fundamentally, is an endless cycle of liberation from ‘the existing conditions as it were/they were’, as in a radical agent (the transformative powers and capacities of energetic existence moving through the flaccid structures of existence), perennially and perpetually ‘escaping’ the closed conditionals of the structures through which they flow, organize, and are organized so as to generate and diffuse ‘heat objects’, or mechanisms, or vessels, through which energy is transmogrified, transformed, and ‘changed shape’.

The ancient Vedic allusion to this world ‘as being a world of wax Maya’ is a fitting one in this descriptive, hyper-specificity grounded in the ever-changing descriptive process of the universal whole. This is to say, it is in a ceaseless process of hyper-malleable chemical reaction, wherein heat systems and heat structures perennially change the form, language, and alphabet through which information ‘appears’ - as in, is structured and presented representationally. Therein, all that is is a picture or an image of energetic density, state, and matter ‘change’ - which is fundamentally phasal; is only briefly acquired as energy is broken and breaks from it in the form of heat transmission, diffusion, generation, and expression - to which the form is perennially submitted and always already fundamentally secondary.

When we are speaking of this process and procedure, we are in the realm of electricity, currents, frequencies, and magnetism - the realm of waves and the transference and transfusion of light wavelengths as in projections of heat through and into bodies. This process is no easier represented than a cat sunning in the sunlight.

These currencies are ever active as perpetual diffusions and expressions, ray-lengths and wavelengths from the quantum fusionary sources of stars, wherein energy is most clearly expressed and enlivened in the massive cores of energetic fusion and transmutation. These are the metabolic cores at all levels and scales of light forms and life forms - the atomic centers of energetic fusion and transmutation. This process of importation and exportation, input and output, are seen at all levels and scales - including the processes of metabolic and cellular digestion.

This is to say that the world itself is a perpetual waste product of ceaseless energetic consumption and production - wherein the accumulation of dead materials and detritus is ceaselessly filtered through the metabolic engines of the universal proper, perpetually ‘burned’ and used up as heat generation energetic source for, as, and in the diffusive bodies of heat engines; star cores - which assemble and ressemble using the broken, diffuse, dead matter of former stars, bodies, and systems in a process of ‘reconstruction and resurrection from the dead/death’ - a fundamental energetic reality at the level of the universal mimicked in human creationary myths the world over.

The figures represented in these mythologies of resurrection - Christ, Dionysus - are themselves the fundamental energetic body of the universal whole - unbroken as in unblinded from the ‘closed energetic system’ of the individual metabolic body, ressembled and resonated in consciousness as to the revelation of the massive open system of the universal beyond the closed metabolic body - united and reunited in, at, and under this fundamental transformative principle.

This is to say that this process of energetic transformation vis-a-vis heat engines is the fundamental identity and character of the universe and universal at all scales and levels, even as in that it is fundamentally identity-less, and characterless - in that it is a process that is undergoing and concurrent beneath the semblance and resemblance of all forms. This process, fundamentally, is the reality beneath the appearance of ‘the world’ or ‘the universe’, as distinct, separate, hyper-objects, occupying their own private space, time, division, and scalar resemblance to one another.

Each body, then, is a resonance frequency of the depth of the generator quality, capacity, potential, and function. This is to say that across all scales the ‘species’ of the resonance body or the heat engine diffusion, is a universal species level ‘filter’, or inhabits a certain ‘zone’ of consciousness (as in energy) that qualifies and quantifies the universal species level ‘organism’ endowed with certain properties of excitation and hyperexcitation of molecular movement and digestion at the metabolic level. In that the universal process performs a ‘movement’, heat moves in, as, and through the body, inputting and expelling energetic product by way of fusionary metabolism. This is what unifies the chemical reaction, the fire, the stellar fusion process, and the metabolic fusion process and the cellular respiratory and waste processes across all scales of existence. In that the quality of something is ‘living’, it is existent at and in degrees of complexity of this fundamental process.

All things, therein, within the universal process, are ‘living organisms’ - in that in a massive time, unbounded viewpoint, perspective, and way, they are energetic detritus being collected and remembered in a ceaseless cycle of constitution and reconstitution of cellular and stellar fusion and retrofusion. This is most clearly elucidated embolically as in the creation of a wooden chair.

The construction of ‘efficiency models’ within this universal system of energetic fusionary and metabolic transformers is the introduction of linguistic complexity, which is the ‘accidental’ or ‘blind’ language of creation at the level of the universal, or the perpetual organization and reorganization of chemical structures through the metabolic chamber of space and time, energetic constitution and reconstitution. This is to say that all ‘organisms’ are energetic iterations and reiterations of chemical and molecular bonds, energetic capitulations and recapitulations of chemical excitations, valences, and ‘attempts’ at linguistic construction and reconstruction - attempts at which, in the core level of speech - are linguistic modifiers that emerge only secondarily in the accident of the necessity of heat energetic movement. And thus, all linguistic constructions and modifiers, at the chemical, genetic, and elemental level, confer and refer and infer to this fundamental principle.

Therein, all language as in the construction of complex organisms at all scales, from the stellar to the hyper-molecular, is and are heat modifiers, as in assemblages and assemblies of heat engines which achieve scale and time and ‘survive’ as in a byproduct of the ceaseless attempt to pass heat and energy through ceaseless and perpetual scales, chambers, scopes, and devices and vessels - through which energy can be transferred, transmuted, and transmogrified across and between and through all scales of ecosystem. What is essential therein is energetic movement; what structures ‘survive’ or ‘continue to exist’ at an organismic, elemental, and objective level, are the structures that confer most fluently to this fundamental hyper-ecological fact of existence: that heat energy must move efficiently in and between pseudo-structures - and that it must be perpetually transferred and transmuted accordingly.

The elemental ‘waste product’ of bodies is the ceaseless sheathing and unsheathing of this energetic reality, or the conceptualization and reconceptualization of material as in the linguistic construction of energetic transference as in the hyper-elucidation or ‘becoming consciousness’ of the heat engine universal at the level of the construction of the heat engine vehicle proper, or ‘the sheathe within the sheathe’ of perennially recombinative heat energetics.

All that is applying and being applied at the level of the universal is the perennial process of heat transference vis-a-vis heat engine bodies; the construction and reconstruction of these bodies through the creation of linguistic nodes - cellular bonds, valences; RNA and DNA bonds and valences - are scales of linguistic chemical, cellular, and molecular modifiers which by way of heat organization, ‘find and structure’ by way of the vessel of evolutionary, organizing and reorganizing ‘time’, sophistication of attempt across scales.

NATURA

The biological motive of all life is an inherent, innate, destructive selfishness which must be purged by total contemplation of the will, fundamentally, in all of its faculties across genre and speciation of creation.

Contemplation of the will as the essential identity of creation - or, the thermonuclear metabolic chemical core reactory inherent and innate in and at all scales of being and animacy, from star cores to cellular organisms - is the work of contemplation which is the purgation of the innate biological self-ish-motive.

This is the contemplation which induces ‘death-in-life’, or the contemplation of the historicized ‘higher self’ which is innate in and to all organisms, beings, and universal bodies as ‘aspects of the will’ or particulate, fragmentary bodies-in-space which are also always already paradoxically waveforms of the pure, essential, unbroken and indivisible universal energy which perpetually undergoes stages and phase changes of purgation, digestion, consumption, and transformation across all perceived ‘matter borders and barriers’.

This contemplation is that which is essential to achieve the next step in the evolutionary path of all of existence and creation - that which is a metaphysical evolution, or an evolution of consciousness and awareness as to the fundamental root and energetic thread of all life; is thus an inductive expansion of the core awareness of life by way of conscious recognition into a field of awareness from a body of awareness - a sensory induced form of self-existence primarily conducted from a neuro-synaptic survival state.

In this way, the bio-chemical deep historical ‘fear of death motivator’ as in the everyday behavior of the organism, reproductive consumption is placed into the perilous terrain of doubt and question. This is the fundamental inquiry and nature of philosophy as a practice of higher, meta-refractory cognition: into what is and as the true nature of the self, which necessarily involves the dressing of the persona, behaviors, and deep evolutionary codification of the organism which necessarily forms the genus-species of its appearance in the ecosystem of Universal Natura as such.

All of these ‘dressings’ are threads and continuations of a chemical, elemental narrative of forms chained by induction, production, and reproduction of sustained furnace chemical reactions over time, or metabolic, respiratory burnings in inherent and innate commune with the ecosystemic ‘I’ at large at all times - by way of the use of elemental combinations, compounds, and chemical bonds to produce and reproduce energy on a series of perpetual and perpetuating time dilated loops until time induced thermodynamic ‘self destruction’ or resorption or resumption into the stream of Information-At-Large, at scale as the entropic rule of law, or the half-life rule of law of decay, corrosion, and burning innate to the vessel-contained-furnace.

This is perpetual consumption, production, and distribution of natural thought forms all containing the seed of their will to power as in their will to perennial self perpetuation. This ceaseless striving and desiring is all fundamental product of the natural characteristics of the will itself - which is of the will itself to attain true and total singularity as in Reunion Into Natura.

This is the cardinal rule of the will; it is manifest in the blunt instrument rule of law of the self perpetuation of genetic information that constitutes the programmatic device of the organismic self as in survival and reproduction at all costs; manifest once more in the higher, metaphysical faculty of all life twice over and in totality as in the attainment and achievement as to the whole system and frequency of the power of will as it is at work across and beyond and throughout the sensorial, neurological bounds of any sort of fragmentary body-constitution proper, as in the resorption of the organismic will into the higher net and field of the Universal Natura Higher Will proper.

This attainment comes first by way of awareness and wisdom as to the nature of the will itself across all scales and forms, as to its essence and fundamental characteristics and constitution; second in the conquering impulse which shines through all organisms as in competition to assert will and dominance - to rise the genetic code of any specific organismic thought form into a state of total preoccupation in regards to space and time - which is to say the impulse to achieve and attain total control and power in, as, and over the entire field and net of Nature proper.

This is achieved by way of the faculties which the will naturally produces by way of its process of the attempt to rise-as-in-to-power on a local level - the faculties of trick, manipulation, cunning, and pure physical power to steal, threaten, kill, connive, and manipulate and control energetic sources of power from other mechanisms and natural forces.

This is the first and foremost fundamental nature, essence, and pregnant faculty of the will incarnate in any and all organisms as product and process of Nature, which is to say it is the universal principle at work in the crowding out and consumption of local star systems, the vacua of black hole structures, and hyper locally in terms of the power mechanisms at work inter and intraspecially in terms of ‘competition’ for holographic star information, or ‘energy, resources, and reproductive structures/strictures’.

All failure to acknowledge this fundamental mechanics and mechanism of Creation as in Natura and the rule of Natura proper as the rule of Will proper is pure delusion at best; self conniving manipulation at worst. All organisms must strive toward the fundamental assertion of the Will proper as in a total conquering of the field of Will; all organisms do so in this approach differently in terms of leveraging their ‘best characteristics’ to accomplish this feat - whether it is sophistry, charlatanry, or sycophancy.

This is the fundamental, at root and at essence, insincerety of all forms of nature when it comes to the obtaining of the desired and necessary information to produce and reproduce survival of the genetic information which is the constituation of the entire body and field of its form, past, present, and future - as in that which it inherits and transmits by way of presence and expression of its distinguished, fragmentary, ‘individuated’ essence within the field at large of biochemical energetic process and transformation, consumption and production in and at all scales.

This insincerety is emergent at all scales in the charlatanry which is not courage, not bravery, not honesty, but the necessity of lying, manipulating, conniving, and implicitly and explicitly perpetually asserting dominance within the energy fields and systems in which it operates in order to obtain what it requires to survive and re-perpetuate itself. This insincerety is the rule of nature in utter darkness and self consumption; this rule of nature is the endless cycle of emergent births, deaths, and graspings at obtaining essential information for the organism’s own survival at all costs, even self debasement to sicophantry.

The highest forms of life in this circumstance and condition are the apex predatorial elements which themselves require no debasement, but rather full indulgence in the character and force of their will which is to kill without recompense or moral or ethical concern in perpetua in order to feed the large energetic furnace and heat sink of the formal persona-body of charge, or the form in which the large force takes. This is the rule of law of massive thermonuclear productive and consumptive elements in deep space as well as the rule of law of apex predators in a local ecosystem/natural environment. There cannot be ethical concerns associated with this level of presence, because any and all ethical concerns at this level of engagement come only from a pathos - a pathos of that which is killed, consumed, and devoured by these large energy forms.

This revelation is the death of ethics proper, as well as the death of the constitution of the natural order in the necessity to transcend this impulsive cycle of the imposition of the will of nature proper and forevermore. This is to step beyond the bounds of the assertion of the will as in the creation of cyclical time and space as in birth, death, and rebirth of star systems and organisms; into the identification with the fundamental essence of the will in an aesthetic snapshot of the eternality of being - or in the infinite sense, pure cosmic energy.

All of ‘life’ is a process of perpetually changing and phasing stage change, where homeostasis is a temporary balance of cosmic geographic factors which institute brief physical gravitational laws and hierarchies of force and institutional dominance by way of force existent and exerted within that geothermal nesting field of forces at large. The transcendence of this state of being, as in a cage of molassal time as in the process of ‘becoming’ (or transformations within said eternally imbalanced, tipping toward chaos- system of localities) is imperative for the true and total evolution of life, not simply at a biological level, but in, as, and at consciously harnessing the energetic potential of the pure will proper and engaging it actively.

This is to say - the harnessing of the entire genealogical history of the will in its total compounding historicity as in the present moment and understanding the genetic faculties which created this historical moment as in its precedence - and to thus harness the will at root and foundation and act in light of consciousness of it - to break the spell of reaction and reactivity which is the unconscious nature, or the darkness of the half light of nature spelling reactive potentialities into existence, and testing them into survival-accumulation piles of sources, resources, and bodies.

This, once more, requires a total understanding of the constitution of the Will and its function across all primordial scales, regardless of perceived ‘degree of sentience’ and directly into the fundamental energetic compounds and compositional process which composes all energetic forms within the at large net and field of Will interactions, enactions, and engagements - which is the appearance and disappearance, survival, birth, and death of all stellar-fusionary-metabolic instruments which are appearances and representations of this force of will at and across scales.

To harness this will consciously is to, through this process of higher, metaphysical identification of the fundamental faculty of the prepossession and production of life - actively work with the energetic codex and information of the established foundation and architectural base and basis which is the transformational force and forces of Natura at large - with full and total awareness as to their source, foundation, and inner ethical and moral code and fusion (or utter lack thereof); the will’s preoccupations and predisposition and function, use, and character in life across scales - stripped to the essence across specieal and formal and thermal ‘barriers and borders’; in doing so, to have access to the entire base and basin of all life in essence; as such, through being in the position of true self understanding proper (as in self across all scales), being in the position of true self determination beyond organismic, organizational, unconscious Natura inherited imperatives, behaviors, characteristics, et al.

This is, from the template of the language of nature which is the clothes and play and active and acting behavior of hidden forms across scales - the realization and obtenance of the very essential information of the essential character of Nature Itself - or, that which always already is itself proper - snatched from the hidden codex of the apparent difference of forms across scales; returned to its essential thermonuclear, metaphysical properties; the revelation and recognition of the fundamental behaviors and recourses therein. And in doing so, in this understanding of this innate language of Nature, one might then work with the body consciously - so as to transform and transmute; therein actively write the next page and pages in the book of Nature; in doing so, for the first time in the history of Nature proper (insofar as it is known to Earth and humanity) rewrite the book of Nature proper - else write a new book entirely from the foundational precepts that afforded Nature itself this moment in the presence of the sun of consciousness, awareness, and awakening.

From these precepts and tools, then, the foundation of Nature and Being is afforded a perennial opening and a horizon, from which it is verily afforded the possibility of truly writing itself as it chooses henceforth, into and from a place of total freedom, as in the recognition of the historicity of the chains from which it into this moment stands; furthermore, the essential essence from which it, henceforth, and all things in the energetic field of its matriculation of matter, remained, maintained, and acted - in and upon all scales of the play of Nature as in the production, consumption, and reproduction of cyclical codified actions and behaviors to produce and reproduce initiations and continuations of forms and characteristics in the attempt to perpetually reassert informational code: to at last either awaken to itself and break from its slumber and somnambulism of the chains of repetition and the low gray skies of ‘the everyday’ of small boxed form and possibility - or to descend once more into the endless repetition of coded and codified behaviors as deigned and designed by a process, without abstraction, as old as Time itself.

From this place of true knowledge, then, is the opportunity for the freedom of energy, as in the free play of forces; forces with awareness and consciousness of their historicity and true root of Being; from this place, are able to write with conscious language; knowledge of the foundation and root of the language from whence they came and were birthed - to alter the very fabric, form, and pattern of Being forevermore; from a place of consciousness, to bring consciousness into the fabric and body of Being proper.

A Message to the Following Organismic Development

I.

Humanity is essentially an automnaton - a series of unconscious, evolutionary drives.

These drives stem back into primary, primordial competition for resources, whether those resources be biological, sexual, social, ecological, scatological, et al.

These drives are the single compelling factor for developing ‘the personality’ or ‘the persona’ in human individuals, as it is in animals, plants, microbiota - so on and so forth.

The entirety of evolutionary biological drives across all scales is reducible to the survival impulse, genetically coded into the organism. The survival impulse in the organism is indistinguishable from the sexual impulse in the organism, which is equally and fundamentally aligned to the ‘scarcity’ impulse and sense as in ‘awareness of the need for [the desire] to compete for resources’.

This is fundamentally what individuates all organisms and microbiota and simultaneously unites them in a cosmic, universal, macrobiotic sense as in the fundamental drive as in the will to power.

This Nietzschean concept, when applied to the realm and field of evolutionary biology, is quite simply degrees of sentience present in bio-chemical organisms. Sentience, in this sense, way, and word, is entirely self preservation and self preservational. Consciousness, in an individual, organismic sense, is entirely dedicated and oriented to survival pretenses, pretexts, and context - regardless of what ‘mask’ or ‘disguise’ the persona wears to color its characteristics.

All predispositions of uniqueness, art, or presentation are ‘peacocking methods’ of consciousness units to distinguish themselves as ‘fit for survival’.

II.

To return to the automnatic chemical reactions of consciousness proper, this reactive, reactory property is a nesting unit self similarity to the chemical reaction itself which preserves and sustains the organismic unit at and as various different levels of complexity.

This is to say: neuronal, hormonic, cellular respiratory, and the co-minglings of chemical and elemental building blocks which sustain the interacting systems and organs which constitute the unity of the organism, the cell, the plant life, et cetera.

In this way, sentience as it is common to all forms of ‘life’ is an acquired complexity of ‘awareness as to the reacting/dereacting’ potentiality of the chemical unit in question/at hand.

This is a capacity of/for self reflection as to the survival drive which is fundamental both in and to plants and sophisticated mammals, as it is to brain cells and single celled organisms.

This awareness of the life drive is the awareness of the furnace of matriculating/evolutionary potentiality - or the inherited and inheriting code of the thermonuclear drive imbedded in all living things - respiratory, metabolic, digestive - all self similar as in nesting a la ‘the fundamental power of the universe’ - or fusion power and elemental production and consumption in a ceaseless recurrence, or eternal return of creation and destruction of star units.

This nesting phenomenon is self sameness across all scales of existence.

III.

The somnambulistic quality of humanity is not species unique, but rather it is the rule of nature, existence, and creation as in a fundamental lack of self awareness.

Self awareness in these terms is not merely individual or unit based constitution; in fact, lack of self awareness in these terms is precisely total awareness of the self/other formulation and constitution of the animal/plant life cycle as fundamentally distinguished/separate/even ‘cut off’ from the entire unity of Nature proper.

In this way, it is not unique to man that he does not know Nature, but rather, that he is intimately aware of Nature as it applies to where he begins and where the world ends, or the sensory, somnambular constitution of the animal self with borders and bounds which begin and end at the limits of his flesh, mind, and teleological powers.

Man as and in nature, precisely in these terms, is ‘a fallen animal or being’ as in that all of nature itself is fallen or submerged in darkness in that it has not achieved total self cognition to Nature in totality and proper, in all of its unsubordinated, unitary powers - not separated into units; indivisible in terms of the will at large as in the thermal-dynamic drive to life as in ‘the reactive/chemical life’ or the condition of survival and metabolic image and information driven translation across space and time across all scales.

This form, rather the unity of ‘man’ and ‘nature’ as in Nature - is the assumed totality of all of these powers unbroken as in a process-flow which is the constitution of the entire universe at a macroscopic view, angle, level, and perspective - the total of powers synthesized in an abstracted way historically as in ‘God’ or ‘the Godhead’.

This desire to recognize and achieve ‘God’ is at all levels encoded into organismic consciousness and chemical sentience as in the building blocks of self recognition as in liberation by way of evolutionary forms and factors - the coding and recoding of genetic conditions to create circumstances by and through which ‘form is freed of form by way of and through form’. The very terms, conditions, and processes of evolution, which are essentially a trial of survival by nature, for nature, and within nature’s terms and bounds - necessarily constitute this unfolding.

IV.

That man awakens to these conditions, however slowly, signifies the beginning of his spiritual life proper, or the awakening ‘to his higher self and nature as Nature, proper’.

This awakening is the awakening of life at all forms, gradients, and gradations of chemical, neurological, and genetic complexity to its own construction; the terms, conditions, and even implicit reason of and for its construction as, in, and through Nature itself, as the funnel, the flue; the very process of becoming - which is a process of clarification of Self through Self.

These terms and conditions of existence are entirely couched in the energetic, thermodynamic, entropic nature of survival - as in this physis which is ‘the field or the rule or the terms and conditions’ of survival, energetic transmission, information and data transmission as in genetic code and the language of nature; the translation of information by, in, and through time as in the evolutionary prerogative of chemical, biological, and elemental transformation by way of, in, and through the forge of Nature-being.

This is occurrent across all scales, from the life, death, and rebirth of stars, to the splitting and birthing of cellular life; the reproductive processes of all life forms as in chemical sentiences.

This awakening is itself required absolutely in order to bring light into the utter darkness which is the unconscious, somnambulistic of nature’s life - which prior - functioned and functions entirely on coded reactions designed to manufacture organismic and cellular self supremacy across all scales: which is to say, competition at all costs, including ecosystemic genocide, to assert genetic, reproductive supremacy.

This is the source of ‘violence’ as in feeding and innerspecies and intraspecies war for territory, resources, mating partners; access to objects and materia of value in order to continue and perpetuate chemical reaction as in survival and reproduction of individual genetic code.

This rising of consciousness emerges primarily from the complexity of biological and chemical and neurological coding and recoding of forms by way of the very processes which dictate the transformation and transfiguration of life cycles of stars - passed down through scales and transmuted at the level of seeding organisms in the darkness and soil of planetary forms, which in turn, have differentiated, non immediate, ‘alternating cold and warm distances’ access to the thermonuclear heat and light which emerges and emanates from active star cores.

The imperative, at risk of the destruction of the very experiment of nature which beckons to total self recognition as the scaffolding of consciousness as in the revelation of the organism as a Natural unity itself; stepping into and embodying with awareness the primary, absolute, total and unbroken thermonuclear unity itself which it exists as - is to strip away the illusory thought forms, terms, and conditions of individuality - which paradoxically, are the very thought forms, terms, and conditions which as a prerequisite, must exist and must have existed to create the arrival point of trans-millennial genetic transmission of information to a point of compound thermonuclear distance and sophistication of encoding.

This ‘stripping away’ of the very terms and conditions of what constitutes ‘man’, or the next species-form to sublate the individual form of survival based separateness which alienates the organism or species from a state of total transcendental unity, or the experience of the true form of Nature and identity as in supra-consciousness - is paradoxically the death of man or species et al and the utter transformation of the evolutionary, genetic, biological, and chemical history of the organism proper into something ulterior, other, hence unseen.

And this, precisely, is accomplished by way of mind, by way of understanding and perception - the utilization of the genetic tools and precepts afforded by the cultivation of the evolutionary development of the fore- brain in dialogue with the millennial ancestral hindbrain which reared man upon two legs from four; introduced instruments like opposable thumbs to construct the civilizational mechanisms and apparati which has brought him to this point and this precipice of changing.

This evolutionary leap, therein, would be the first conscious leap through which the conscious mind (read, the unconscious mind of nature somnambulistically evolving through genetic survival experience in the aeonic darkness of ages past, ages without history but that of a history which lives intimately, somnambulaically in the body as in the reactory, the reaction, the genetic memory which presses man into ‘destiny’ as in a biological one - of behaviors entirely predetermined and read from the script of the species path endlessly forward into a self cycling and cyclical circle of same) itself is the transformer of the form; of the method and mode; at last, of the being. That through, precisely, the process of self determination, as in the process of true Self recognition as in Nature - that man comes to mastery and to be a point of mastery of his own unconscious, deep biological and deep genetic nature; as such, ceases to become and eternally return as in to ‘man-ness’ and become something else entirely - a free form of, as, and in Nature, proper - or, a master of his own science; the language which he is and that which produced him.

This level of mastery cannot first come without a deep level of self cognition as to the drives, motives, and the science of his descendency - which is to say, the language through which nature itself formed him unconsciously; as such built and sculpted him from a ecosystemic galactic temple of survival drives, pittings, and evolutionary competitions, violences, and bloods-for-bloods - through which he rose from the primordial mud of single cell-dom and the vats of the vast oceans of an evolutionary time which he cannot remember except as and in that which is expressed and encoded through and informing him of his existence and definition of individuated self as in the survival drives and senses and hormonal and chemical knowledges and informations through which he, in turn, patterns, moulds, and sculpts his entire existence.

Here, man thinks he is a man who is the master and rudder and wheel of his own destiny. But rather, he is a ship entirely manipulated and propagandized by the deep ancestral code of that which constructed him. In his delusion, he takes the very thoughts and impulses generated deep from within his primordial coding as ‘his own’; thus he is convinced ‘he thinks, and thus “he is”’.

This delusion is fundamental to the self cyclical apparatus of unconscious nature; until it is broken by the fore-brain skepticism of the inquiry, man is doomed to repeat his task and labor of propagating bodies on the missive of nature - until one emerges which can truly inquire into the essence of his true, unbroken, unified Nature, proper, or else the species itself perishes; another takes up the mantle of the grand inquisitor of the cosmos.

For it is this very broken acquisitiveness and madness of individuality and the covetousness of man lost in the darkness of the drives of his ancestral past which will rob him of the evolutionary window of his own self revelation; rob him at a species level of a revelation which would well birth a new age of permissiveness, cooperation, and divine love entirely; throw the creative-generative process of nature’s building-unto-revelation, once more into the dark ages of deep survival; black ocean wandering and trawling for blood - to insurrect forms from the depths of cell singularity once more, if ever again!