[spectre] Mindthestorm - a New Way of Jamming in the Third Millennium

[Heike Borowski]

Mindthestorm - Like random steps of sunlight, Random steps of  
consciousness.

Themes on and about the complex mesh of relations between biospheres,  
climatic science, environmental politics, globalization, culture and  
art form the point of departure for mindthestorm.org’s continuously  
accumulating archive of image and textual documentation.

Processuality constitutes the focal point of mindthestorm.org. The  
archive is neither hierarchically structured, nor does it follow a  
defined order. The structure emerges through the quality of the  
contributions, their continuity, their quantity and tagging; the  
information structure which undergoes permanent renewal is represented  
by swarms.

Users of mindthestorm.org
store the images and textual documents relating to their research or  
their actions in a common databank. The data are tagged when entered  
and subsequently set in relation to one another editorially and by the  
participants themselves. A tool is thus produced, which automatically  
and by way of the text proposes relations to other, already existing  
documents. These proposals can then either be confirmed or rejected.  
Swarms are visualized by this mesh of relations, which persistently  
form themselves anew with each subsequent entry. At this level,  
participants may interactively position the documents within the  
swarms, whereby the representation signifies a communication of all  
entries. Ultimately, what emerges from this is the possibility to  
record and represent both the subjective explanatory space of each  
respective participant as well as to assess the latter’s entry in its  
connection to other such entries, such that multiple swarm images may  
then be generated. Each of these representations stands in a relation  
of reciprocal influence, and leads to an unguided, dynamic revaluation  
of the swarms. This revaluation, though editorially accompanied by  
selected partners, is not directly influenced. The descriptions  
accompanying these are located on a separate level as a complement to  
the above-described representation of the swarm intelligence.

In this sense, mindthestorm.org is a collaborative, multi-user social  
network – as far as possible, an open platform. The immanent obstacles  
of Internet as a medium such as spam inhibit the possibility of the  
real-time visualization of the processes in the archive and hence make  
an editorial intermediate step necessary. The use of the platform  
however is designed as a simply as possible so as to guarantee the  
continual expansion of the content by third parties.

The objective of Mindthestorm
would be to generate by means of audio-visual media that which  
apparently cannot be mediated – the shift from nature to climate –  
into a kind of web-archipelago, populated by swarms that converge in a  
biosphere. This would run counter to the way the current planetary  
crisis of global warming elicits a variety of responses ranging from  
the exercise of societal self-delusion, declarations of the commitment  
to sustainability, to total indifference – to a playing field for  
curators as a fashionable arena for topical shows, to denial,  
disconnection, precipitation of the sense of the present and to a dis- 
envisaging of the future. We cannot but function within complex  
systems such as nature, within whose limits and laws we interact and  
in whose nomos we immanently and manifestly move: together with its  
perceived 'recorded' transformations, mindthestorm interdigitates  
itself by means of swarms with that other, elementary natural science  
poised as it is in a 'Copernican leap' through experimental physics  
and mathematical universal formulas, anomy of predictions and controls  
out of non-manifest structures that characterize the climatic turn.

Our experience shows that these systems are intrinsically irregular,  
are exposed to the unforeseen and that which cannot be assessed. Not  
only are they subject to irregularity, but they actively create it in  
their search for certainty and in their need to control. Uncertainty  
is the constituent data of living systems.

Mindthestorm, a new creative reflexity
(meta-observation) aims to integrate the arts, sciences, politics, and  
feelings and to reach a higher level of evolution. This leads to an  
augmented reality, a new world appearance delivered over / under -  
determined masses of membrane worlds, in copies of a divided cosmos or  
stray quests for meaning in a world of enhanced attentiveness, but  
also to an acknowledgement of the recognizable and the unrecognizable.  
Jumping out of the climate boomerang trespassing biological borders /  
frames, as also referred to by Peter Weibel in the postscript to Boris  
Groys' book, Die Kunst des Denkens [The Art of Thought], we read:  
'Society suppresses not only unacceptable desires, but also  
unacceptable information. There is knowledge in our society that  
suppresses itself. Appearing in the guise of art, this socially  
unconscious, this suppressed knowledge can again return to  
consciousness and to reality.' – In particular, this socially  
unconscious, this suppressed knowledge can return to consciousness and  
reality in a web-archipelago.

Mindthestorm opens up
what has until now remained concealed from view, the significance of  
which is not occupation, but an enhanced perception of significant  
phenomena in an entangled biosphere. It does this by way of the  
formation of swarms composed of a vast and, we hope, soon unlimited  
and self-organized collection of pictures, data, sound, etc., whereby  
each squib gushes over in a relation of reciprocity: a collection of  
nested shells of biosphere matter. Perhaps, it was this that impressed  
itself on Jeremy Rifkin, and that presented him with the idea of  
mindthestorm when dancing on the floor of a Roman Hotel located close  
to Via Veneto: the sense of freedom, of swarming. When mindthestorm  
jumps out of the World Wide Web it would seem as if this collective  
intelligence could be more empathic than he ever imagined in his book  
'Empathy': he wrote "a new way of jamming in the Third Millennium".

Perhaps, we could re-enact in our minds the experience of the past,  
able we are as "weumans" to experience ourselves as a species. Yet  
climate turn poses for us a question of a human collectivity pointing  
to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience  
the world.

Mindthestorm removes the separation
posed by those rights that have been in existence since the  
Enlightenment to celebrate our freedom without any awareness of the  
geological agency human beings were gaining, and ushered in this new  
geological time-interval called the anthropocene. The frame of  
reference is the discussion in the context of public conferences about  
the meaning of the swarms between natural scientists, environmental  
activists, peace movements, as well as 'observers' in the broadest  
sense of the term, and territorial entities such as the Council of  
Europe, the European Parliament, the ZKM, the PIK, Universitá la  
Sapienza, AVAAZ, 350. org, AdK Berlin. We would like to invite all of  
these organizations to interact with us in a call for  
interdisciplinary discussions: deep records and deep histories of  
human beings open to new experiences - to fight back for the future.

Much like the swarm itself, the user of the platform can himself  
become an actor by indexing the 'squibs' with the alternating  
'keywords' as derived from the discussions, creating and generating  
swarms in ascending complexity and, we hope, enhanced consciousness.

http://www.mindthestorm.org

Mindthestorm is on facebook:
http://facebook.mindthestorm.org

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