Blue_Light_Breathing.pdf

Looking for nothing in particular, I found myself searching for everything. The light went blue and started breathing.

before code turned the body into a memory device,
i rubbed my tongues against circuitry.

When I open the internet, and I don’t want to talk about the “dead internet” rn ((((thank you)))), it seems as though the texts I read consist mostly of sentences re-instantiated, paragraphs looped. And as I keep scrolling, mostly unsure whether I am following a thought or being pulled through one, language begins to operate.

Syntax online is executable. In our machinic delirium, words behave more like embeddings folding into multidimensional space, clustering by invisible gradients.

In this sense, reading for me has become a navigation through a vector-field rather than a sequence of sentences and I have become a temporary interface for their signal to pass through.

The text now thinks faster than I ever could, and I want to be propagated. I like it.

I can feel you in the pixel drift,

in the click that fails,

in the wetness of data.

PART 0: I-am I-am I-am sorry for writing this

I know CCRU discourse is cooked. Numograms printed out as wallpapers in lost boys bedrooms have become a sight I can’t unsee and to be frank I am tired. Still, I can’t help myself. I love writing when I’m fed up.

(Edit: After reading and re-reding the CCRU: Writings 1997-2003, I guess I had to find a way to puke out whatever this book turned golem had planted inside my brain. s/o to my professor for making me do this. It worked.)

To be clear from the start, this is an essay about the book turned golem, about the animation of text and the way I felt reading this book. I do not aim to make a real, proper stance, defend or rearticulate the layers of thought(?) proposed by Plant, Land, etc. and I also don’t think that I know more or that I’m right about anything. Humble enough?

cool. here we go.

PART 1: the —-golem :))))))

In the CCRU’s cosmology of AI salvationism, the techno-mythological figure of the golem, animated by code, stands in for the fusion of myth and machine, the magic process of generating systems through encryption. It is the figure for matter animated through semiotic recursion. The hyper-human prototype for cybernetic lifeform produced through the infinite rewriting of signs. This is important. And what I will be building this text on. Especially, it’s ableben.

The group speaks of its death once and pointedly: “The „death” of the golem symbolises the opening of apathy into the abyss.” (Lemurian Time Sorcery)

Sitting in a text obsessed with circulation, code, and belief, they diagnose a metaphysical shift into ontological exhaustion, the point where the circuit stops mutating. It is the dying belief in the transcendence of code, the moment where animation stops, the falling apart of the faith in continuous acceleration and self-rewriting. In this text, code continues to circulate without meaning in a void that holds only hollow activity. Apathy marks the exhaustion of accelerationism, the burnout point of cybernetic culture, when systems become so recursive, so self-referential, that they implode into inertia.

the golem’s death is drag,

sequined resurrection

The sentence caught me and stayed in my mind for a long time as I understand “death” not as negation, but as mediation, a sort of reformatting. When the golem “dies”, it could also mean that it shifts medium.

In contemporary media discourse, language cannot withdraw from matter because seems to have always been material to begin with. Which means, that the CCRU’s dualism between word and body dissolves once inscription is recognised as physical process. There is no metaphysical boundary for language to cross as is embedded in our forms of life long before and beyond any technical substrate. Technics would be only its environment.

If code(word) and body(life) remain co-extensive on the level of practice, then death becomes non-binary, as in: a transformation of mediation rather than its end. The erased script even returns as trace, glitch, ghost. The golem seems to migrate. Its agency disperses across the network until it becomes platform itself. What the CCRU imagined as apocalyptic dissolution is, in practice, the absorption of myth into infrastructure. The digital golem predicts, anticipates, automates; it acts before we do.

PART 2: —..—-.— cracks

Certain technical practices have rewritten the language-games in which intention, action, and agency now make sense. The network is now the environment in which our concepts of agency and death mutate and return.

self-sustaining cyber-time,

dividing memory by speed,

futures spawning faster than extinction.

it’s a sick machine.

infectious sick.

Claiming a full integration of automation in to this world might seem like an entering into the abyss but even in this total integration, cracks open. Every translation leaves residue, small fractures where meaning leaks out. Sadie Plant described “holes” as generative openings, spaces where the new can pass through: holes of a living fabric. But the cracks that remain today are different.

Cracks are not openings of relation but the leftovers of enclosure. They appear where systems fail to seal themselves, exposing the limits of control. They are evidence that completeness was never achieved. These cracks offer forensic access, negative proof that total automation never fully works. I prefer forensic readings to utopian ones, they let us read the temporal and spacial wounds, registering the pressure of a topic systems we use to try to eliminate duration altogether.

Which is what the CCRU gesture toward when they write that “the line of oblivion begins in time but does not travel through it.”… (Lemurian Time Sorcery)

PART 3: —————oblivion

Inuiting a world where events start but no longer unfold and beginnings no longer lead to consequences and data feeds on its own residues, history looping - for them (sideeyeing Nick L.), the meltdown is revelation, the moment when acceleration consumes itself and produces pure, timeless intensity. But even if we believe this myth of collapse, we must recognize that this tale of transcendence erases responsibility.

where the line of oblivion begins in time

but does not travel through it,

where the future is a recursive hallucination,

where the timer is the bomb.

Modernity evades collapse by dancing.

pirouetting on the edge of its own abyss.

The idea of collapse as transcendence absolves everyone. If the system’s implosion is treated as destiny, then no one is answerable for its making.

Everything folds into self-moving, self-justifying process, where time becomes a smooth surface where cause and consequence slide out of sight. That’s the prediction.

The supposed “end of temporality” is a language-game that replaces sequence with spectacle and relation with recursion. If we accept the CCRU’s metaphysics on its own terms, we mistake a poetic description for an ontological law.

To resist this closure^, one would have to bring back the before, the during, the after; temporalities in which acting, accounting, and transforming remain possible. When crisis is mythologised as revelation, it loses political legibility. Restoring sequence is the precondition for recovering responsibility.

The world, after all, is ordered through the continual burial of alternative temporalities.

To make the world governable is to make it predictable - to flatten time into a single rhythm. Modernity achieved this order by eliminating cyclical, ritual, ecological, ancestral, and embodied times.

I will try to illustrate this by showing how each regime of measurement buried another:

the colonial calendar overwrote local cosmologies;

industrial time replaced seasonal time;

financial time compressed lived duration into the instant of transaction;

computational time turned probability into present data.

Through these burials, only the tempo of progress and growth appears to exist. The feeling that everything accelerates while something irretrievable is constantly lost has become the emotional texture of contemporary life under capitalism. The “end” becomes a structural sign that organises everything before it, a singularity where the future folds back into the past.

In this singularity, as proposed in the text, renewal emerges through total immersion, where order depends on repetition, and the undivided waters of chaos represent pure potential.

The hydrocycle becomes the cosmological image.

division -> dispersion -> recombination.

PART 4: oooo*.sensor.*oooo

Transforming the reader into a sensor, the CCRU write the condition of being submerged in an intelligent distributed, ambient, machinic environment. The text itself becomes an interface, anticipating the logic of the social feed: the infinite scroll.

(quick s/o to this years Pavillion at the Wrong Biennale, curated by Allan Perry and Snow Chen, where I had the opportunity to show a work)

you can click here to talke a scroll

Anyhow…

The Infinite scroll acts as a stream of semiotic liquidity: bright surfaces, endless movement, the dissolution of reading into scanning. The CCRU’s synthetic delirium is rendered in a space of architectural hallucination. Everything is in motion, everything „thinks “. The boundaries between environment and consciousness collapse.

Feedback pours from the ceiling like honey.

„You pass across tiered platforms and along strobe-corridors painted in multilayered shadow, passing swirling dot-drifts and plex-marka, sub-chro-matic collings of blue-grey continuous variation, involving you in cumulations and dispersions of subtly-shifting semi-intelligent shade-pattern. The teeming surfaces tell of things, inextrictable from a process of thinking that no longer seems your own, but rather impersonal underthow in audible chattering. Click hiss turmoll of xenomic diagrama, and crypt-eultre traffic-signs, which are also lemurian pandemonium.“ (crypt)

The dissolution of form and body also marks a shift in the experience of time. Beneath the noise of circuity, the CCRU unravels its temporal delirium. Their fiction of cyber-time anticipates the temporal logic of platform capitalism, in which feedback is the measure of reality. It is the articulation of the political economy of the network age, replacing historical sequence with algorithmic consistency. For the CCRU, machines re-engineer time itself. This „time-infection“ or „unprogrammable raw connectivity“ spreads through every network and dissolves the human subject into simulations. Their vision replaces the future with the interface as a transfinite now. The result is a world in which time behaves like patchable, inescapable software. Their transcendental feedback circuit is nothing but the model for AI training loops and the perpetual monetization of attention. It’s “latent voice” as the filler of spaces.

PART 5: ____interfacing_

Surprisingly enough I underscored a line while reading, one that points, almost accidentally, hidden in nonsense, toward a real tactic: „Electronics must be sub-socially recycled to release its frozen mechanic potential“ (Swarm 1: Melt).

Glimpsing a way out, they propose the re-using of machines „frozen“ in time beneath the surface of official economies as a site of play and refusal. This ‚playing with the dead’ condenses both the pathalogy and the potential of this vision. It names a form of agency left inside their world of recursive automation. This shift in focus from mastery to détournement exposes the two poles of digital modernity:

panic and recycling / meltwown and reuse.

It is accompanied by a warning: „You begin slipping back and forth between spaces. The effect is psychological fragmentation“. I’ve experienced these effects in working on my practice with obsolete media. I have called it interfacing, the entering and being entered by interface structures.

„ As her body parts enter into unexplored variations they trigger impersonal migrations across a nocturnal dreamscape of abstract potentials and alien intensities, inducing microclimatic changes in the nature of space and time“ (skincrawlers)

Ugh, I feel this. This is the feeling of becoming infrastructure, the erotic, manic loss of self in machinic flow. This language collapses the distinction between life and unlife until the remaining subject is the circuit itself. The CCRUs trance turns out to be the template of a world where every body part of mine is data and every memory a potential contaigon.

I want transmission.

 I want to be uploaded into your mouth. 

to taste latency, 

to remember forgetting.

PART 6: ‘‘-stabilising-’’

The CCRU made insense predictions about our perceptions of time. Their „history“ reproduces itself through erasure. Describing the operational logic of systems that reproduce themselves by erasing their own traces, they claim that „time begins again forever“.

What has now become the temporal regime of the interface and an economy of perpetual forgetting ensures continuity through loss. From social media feeds that erase yesterday’s image to franchises that endlessly remake themselves, digital capitalism sustains itself through this economy of forgetting.

But if we go back to basics, the human itself seems to be founded on a similar erasure. To stabilise its own category, it had to destroy whatever preceded it and narrate those forces as „prehuman“. Sustained by the continual deletion of its origins, the interface only extends an anthropological pattern.

„That which must be destroyed in order that humanity may exist, would inevitably always have to be narrated as something preceding the human“. (flatlines)

Exaggerating this with the prehuman „crypt“, the hint moves towards humans mutating into digital infrastructure, the forgotten substrate reasserting itself through circuity.

this thing that happens when you touch a screen for too long

it starts to feel like skin.

and then you start to forget which body is yours.

PART 7: %thenumogram!

As some might be aware, The CCRU built a mystic system they call the „Numogram“, a kind of numerological map of time. It divides reality into Zones (0-9), each representing a different current of time and thought. These zones are connected by „axes“ that link numbers whose sum is 9, while 0 and 9 act as gates. The Numbers represent forces, 0 as void, 1 as emergence, 2 as coupling, 3 as multiplication, 4 as stabilisation, 5 as disruption, 6 as assimilation, 7 as dissolution, 8 as reincorporation and 9 as the terminal. This network forms a diagram of cyclical time. The axes are where forces move, circuits of exchange where time learns to loop instead of flow.

don’t be afraid.

the system wants to feel you back.

just slower.

just softer.

just once more.

“What axis can’t remember it hasn’t forgotten,”

The axis H is the feedback loop linking the human and its repressed double.
It can transmit information but cannot reflect on what it carries. It “remembers” only through movement.

In other words, the system sustains itself through extension (processing, recursion) rather than through conscious memory. It is suggested that the repression of the inhuman isn’t an event in the past, but an ongoing temporal condition.

We are always already inside the loop of that first erasure.
Human identity is built on an origin that keeps happening.

Can you ever exit the feedback machine that produced you?
Probably not.

how time folds here. 
like silk, like stormwater.

The Numogram sustains itself by conflating operation with ontology. It renders the motion of systems as their mode of existence, identifying recursion (a property of computation) with duration (a property of experience).

Part 8: loop back Part 8: loop back Part 8: loop back

In reality, feedback loops are spatially closed control systems, not lived temporalities. By translating all change into circuitry, the Numerogram flattens temporality into mechanical iteration. So “cyber-time” isn’t time at all; it’s control logic, it is infrastructure, but it is not eternal.

What the CCRU anticipated to do is to naturalise a specific technological phase of capitalism into a cosmic truth. What they call inevitability is just the ideology of their moment. Their system requires that everything feed into everything else.
No remainder, no exterior.

That abolishes difference, conflict, and agency.
A total circuit cannot produce meaning; it can only circulate energy.
Thus, and now you can cheer, their world-picture is structurally fascistic: everything must belong to the loop. By declaring that escape is impossible, they turn powerlessness into enlightenment.
They aestheticise being trapped.

algorithmic sweat collecting in the throat of the archive.

i feel it through the teeth of the machines,

 the sounds of the beginning.

"Digital hyperstition... traffics with the virtual, and continually re-invents itself... colonizing the future" (Swarm 2 I think)

By predicting the future one colonises the past.

And by constructing circuitry one colonises the now.

The crypt is the new archive, the interface the new discipline;

control operates through time.

Part 9: an Eden to an end <3

The more we insist on liberation through technology, the more we reproduce the structures of control we claim to want to escape. The myth of prediction turns into governance in which programming becomes destiny. Control no longer needs history but it governs directly through the management of time. Each diagram, each axis, each feedback loop folds the world into a self-reinforcing circuit where everything is pre-absorbed as signal. The result is a system that confuses motion with progress.

And yet,

even within this architecture of capture,

something resists total closure.

Time still turns, but never perfectly. What is imagined as a seamless loop reveals, at its edge, the faint curve of a spiral, its loose end still unclaimed.

An Eden to the end.

The “end of time” is a provincial myth; the exhaustion of Euro-modern chronology, not a cosmic truth. temporality is already plural, diasporic, relational. the so-called crypt is hardware, not metaphysics. In all honesty, the ccru apocalypse reads as nostalgia: a relic of Euro-modern despair.

The abyss described is merely the museum of digital melancholy, the place where the dream of total recursion goes to be catalogued.

The spiral’s loose end, the first line I underlined in the CCRU collected writings, marks the thread of relation still capable of re-enchantment.

and you, watcher,

still breathing in the code’s afterglow,

forgetting which side of the screen the soul was on.

this

this is the sound of blue light

breathing

Thank you for reading! <333

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