Looking for participants!

edited April 2018 in Community

Hi people,

A little update for some of you who might remember the previous post on designing apparatus. To briefly walk you through, my project puts more emphasis on therapeutic/metaphysical aspects that surgical practice (subdermal ones in particular) holds aside from its techno-progressive ethics grounded solely in the practicalness of cybernetic device and pursuit of linear enhancement. Based on further research & a couple more chats with implanters, I spotted growing necessity of self-awareness of the procedure and the consequence followed, so I am now leading the project to develop a way to prolong the procedure borrowing methodology from the mundane rituals, such as marriage ceremony or ceremonies at ritual places, in which people engaged become under the influence of maximally sanctified significance of the event throughout the prolonged duration that could otherwise have been temporary and time-limited. With full understanding that this area has been devoid of spiritual interventions or myths, the methodology is only to posit alternative situation. Prolongation will be done by breaking down the acts involved and disperse them within the site so that moving on to the next step inevitably requires physical relocation of the site and therefore temporal pause followed in between.

As situational narration is key structure, I am going to hire a venue and set up the tables and props I designed in which actual procedure will be done and filmed. I am now looking for an implantee/implanter who is willing to take part in this shooting and most importantly give feedback on the project. Questions about additional information (procedure and resource cost will be covered) are more than welcome and there will be a little polite reward for participation. Wink... Looking forward to hearing from any volunteers!

p.s Drop me an email to: [email protected]

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To give you more clues to solidify the idea of dispersing spots and relocating sites of broken down acts, this is an example of The Old Operating Theatre in London where the relevant surgical furniture coloured grey, are distributed within a broader operating zone compared to the average studio places, enlarging and expanding the route of the implanter. Even though it's hard to say that the furniture pieces here contributed to prolonging the duration or evoking self-awareness due to their distinct and straightforward purpose of serving pragmatic uses, analysing this site plan gave me a glimpse of the upcoming scattered configuration of the artifacts I will come up with.

Oh and I'm based in London but the shooting location hasn't been fixed yet. (Highly likely an abandoned Victorian power plant in UK tho)

Comments

  • I'm interested to see where you go with this. It's written a little vaguely. Can you provide a concrete example?
  • edited April 2018

    @Cassox Thanks for your interest, I am also interested to see whether this project will have an actual effect on both implanter and implantee. So the diagram describes a cluster of artifacts and how the participants will enter the place and visit each artifact in a certain order which will in the end usher them to the main surgical table to start the procedure. The table will be equipped with extra motion-detecting components that call for certain actions, for example, a gesture of lighting up a match, to turn on the overhead lights to prolong the moment. But for the artifacts, I am still matching which specific steps should go with each piece! Will be decided shortly.

  • So a few thoughts about this.. ritualism to me.. ritualism can be good because it lowers the amount of decision making needed. It conserves psychological resources. It puts a person in a state where they are just "going through the motions." Two things though.. first off you have to really know what you're doing before youre allowed to "just go through the motions." And second, the only way that it doesnt turn into a half ass job is if you pay an incredible amount of detail when planning and retain an incredible commitment to following the procedure exactly.

    Beyond that, there are other ways we use the word ritual. Ritual often means empty, useless, or vistigial acts that don't really affect outcome. That's one of the dangers. I like a full five minute hand scrub. It feels right. It feels cleaner. There's new resaerch showing that the new surgical hand foams may even be better. I have to accept this. I have to be able to drop the ritual where it no longer serves a purpose.

    And even worse is harmful ritual. The things that work against us but we retain.. in the body mod scene there's this whole idea of people having mentors or whatever. They clean up and do simple shit for years before they're allowed to try more advanced stuff. I know we all love the story of the Shaolin monk who had to stand outside for six months to prove his dedication. Cool story bro, but I'm sure there's a more productive use of time. So for a period of time, a short period, part of what made a person a grinder was them doing their own wet work. If you can't cut yourself open and put in a mag, you ain't shit right? Lame. This could seriously be a wall to a lot of very skilled people who bring a lot to the table. I'm glad the idea died long ago. I'm not really saying any of these apply to what you're doing.

    I'll tell you what I think might be of value in the ritual thing... Time binding. I'm a nurse. Many nurses are stupid. That's why we have protocols. Protocols are like predetermined pathways to respond to a condition. If your pottasium falls between a and b... Give c at this dose via this route. Someone else went through and really studied and planned this stuff.. I don't even have to think. I just do it. This doesn't mean that I don't have to have the skills to do it and the knowledge to understand it. But it means we do the same thing every time based on certain factors. It's the difference between being a technician, and being an artist.

    So something I was thinking about.. what conditions would preclude me doing body mod work? What if someone had a congenital bleeding disorder? Tell you what I'd do... Id do a lot of research and talk to a heme doc. The ritual is broken. That should be part of the ritual.. assessment. If everything doesn't match, then you need to stop and not treat it like everything else. That's when you need to either do some research or talk to people who specializes. So a ritual is like a protocol... It's only applicable to a super specific thing. If someone wants a magnet on the arm instead of a finger.. STOP. It's no longer a ritual and you have to go back to a beginners mind. I hope this makes sense.
  • edited April 2018

    @Cassox I have to admit that the previous discussion of 'ritualisation' had a quite significant effect on the project. I also agree that ritual and ritualism in their fundamental reasoning can be put on the same line with protocols in terms of automatisation of the process but with unlogical and unprovable belief accompanied. The fallacy in my earlier stage was in expanding the 'belief' that implantee has, however personal or macroscopic whether towards enhanced future self or the idea of implanting devices itself or transhumanism, into ritual ceremony in an attempt to evoke divineness of the procedure, sort of modeling after Way of the future founded by Anthony Levandowski (a good epitomisation of how unlogical belief towards technology and artificial intelligence formed a legit religious community). However, that only came to a realisation that this is a different case when there hasn't been a thing to be called religion formed under the influence of Body-hacking.

    Anyway slightly deviated from that, embedding the ideology or the metaphysical attitude of ritualism became off the track now, but rather I started to appropriate actual architectural constructions and props from real-life occasions with social significance (mostly one-off) and from the site engaged. So we are finally free from the word ritual. And in those occasions, props were deployed in a certain configuration to subtly manipulate people's moving line and repetition of acts were involved. All of them lead to one purpose of prolongation of the event, that otherwise could have been substituted with one-second paperwork or public statement, whether spatially or temporarily and evoking significance of the event to stakeholders and the witnesses of the spectacle.

    So I would say this research has become more about, for implantee how to raise self-awareness and self-inflicted consequence and for the implanter to prevent accostumisation of the practice, by conjoining equipment utilised in prolonged social occasions with a surgical environment, if I make sense.

  • Well, the above images remind me primarily of a Loci system of memorization. If you're coming at this from a "magical" background, a lot of the Golden Dawn/Aleister Crowley stuff is based in this.
    I'm not personally interested in "metaphysics," but some of this stuff I would actually categorize more as a technology of mind.
    My take on this is:
    Optimization and Organization beget Ritualization. We did a surgical intensive at GF. I think it went really well. Now that I've gotten the organization done, I think the next step is to formulate a memory system with periodic review with a sprinkle of Neurolinguistic Programming primarily in the form of a Mantra. If this sounds really bullshitty, cool. So like an entire generation of hand surgeons learned under the Sterling Bennel. All of them would recite quotes by Bennel. For example, when putting on a tourniquet they'd say,"One doesn't do surgery in an inkwell." It was intended to "jar" their memories and focus them on the task at hand. I think it's a cool idea. Ultimately, all that matters though is outcome.

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