A GUIDE TO
TRANSMATERIAL MULTIPLE-BODIED
UNLOX NETWORKS
UNLOX INFORMATION
TRANSHUMANISTIC EXISTENCE
UNLOX INDUSTRIES
A History of You When you think of your network what do you think of? Your friends? Your co-workers? Your Facebook friends or Instagram followers? Well, begin to think of it as a trail, a network of nodes which highlight every connection you have ever made, be they online, or offline. Every conversation, sexual experience, Amazon order or handshake, all accounted for. A history of you. Now begin to feel this network as a tangible material, that moves through the dimensions of being in, off and online. It’s like a 4th dimensional electrical gel, solid yet liquid. It moves through you and connects you with all of the spirits, hard drives, souls and servers you have ever come into touch with.
Unlox Industries is here to provide you with instructional information for ways of thinking about how you utilise your online and offline networks for new forms of existence. The information we provide aims to be inclusive and to unlock non inclusive online networks to work for those who are often marginalised. We do this through; literature, spell dissemination, instructional videos, and specific examples of how to utilise networks on different platforms. -
A Possible Landscape The digital architecture of geo-social1 apps for example Grindr - have allowed for the early beginnings of an amalgamation of the body as a vehicle and technology as an addition, unlocking the landscapes of cities for its users. Allowing for the opulent subjugation of urban spaces, through means of maximising availability and pleasure, through the access of geo-specific information, and the connection of users. Whilst there are many definitions of cyberspace, the use of Grindr as a tool allows for a very specific and tangible one; a digital space created by a network of connected users, which exists as a room within a room. A queer2 cupboard-sized utopia in a heteronormative arena. The data of this metaphysical3 space is interlaced throughout urban landscapes, establishing its own space which one can interact within time and time again. It is possible to see the landscape remain static, in the day to day. Whilst users interact and modulate from between this tangible landscape and a digital landscape, effecting change through trans-material5 data as well as with on and offline interactions. Though this layered reality is not always immediately obvious, it’s presence is felt through different means in both realms. Within the physical we can feel the strong yet soft abs of a users inamoratx6, which have manifested through the influence of the grid7 or maybe the vibration we receive from our varying machines. Or perhaps within the digital we can feel the collective singularity which comes with being online.
A Spell To Cleanse and Protect your History of You Network. This spell is designed to remove negative, unnecessary, and unwanted connections through your whole network. It will also offer limited protection against these connections being reformed and directly effecting negative change to yourself. To be performed at Midnight on grass, sand or dirt, on a night with a clear view of the stars. For optimum protection perform on a Sunday evening / Monday morning. Equipment: Smartphone Incense Sticks Lighter or Matches Sage stick Paper A red pen In a circle large enough to sit within, place five incense sticks into the ground. Place the phone in the centre, with all applications open. The phone must have no less than 13% battery and internet connection (WiFi or mobile 3G/4G is fine). Remove your phone from any case should it have one, and ensure no cables are attached. On the paper write all of your contact information, emails, social media usernames, phone numbers,
and every full name you have ever officially or unofficially gone by. Fold the paper to the same size and shape as your phone. Place this under the phone. Light the five incense sticks; as you light the last one light the sage with the same flame. This will bind the energy of the circle and its contents. Now circle the sage around your head and over the phone repeatedly while reciting the following; “May every and all inforgs8 I have effected and touched be unbound from any and all negative bounds and connections. Those who resist this spell shall not succeed, this spell unbinds any previous protection spells.” Turn the phone to airplane mode and recite the following; “Now my network is refreshed. Bad connections are lost, new ones may not be formed. The grid is now spirited again.” Remove the paper from underneath the phone, tear it in two. Set each piece a light, and through one over each shoulder - ensure it lands outside of the circle. Now turn the phones cellular service back on, and leave the circle with your phone in your hands. The spell is now complete.
Sigils of Power and Protection c
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Causes invisibility t0 masculine demonic forces. Aids in protection against humans or spirits mundane or magical methods of attack. Reconnects the imprinted item to its network when caressed. Can only be used effectively once in every 24 hours, by a single user. Protects technological equipment from spiritual malware, viruses and spyware. Enables online engagement with printed matter. Allows and encourages refreshed thinking. Protects against forced negative disconnection from active networks. Encourages natural forces to guard and protect. Protects a being from escape.
A New Way of Existing Through Networks Grindr is a geo-social app, designed as a gay dating/hookup app. It was the first “dating” app to utilise mobile geolocation in this way, and is now the most used app of its kind within the gay community, worldwide. Its official description: “Over 2 million guys in 196 countries use Grindr every day. Grindr finds guys close to you for chatting and meeting anywhere in the world. Find your perfect guy right now”. Grindr works as a technological gaydar system, using geolocation to show you users which are nearest to you, in a grid formation. There is no match or add system, meaning that anyone you see on the grid, you can message. On the app within a users profile there is a section titled “What are you looking for” giving you options from “chat, dates, friends, networking, relationship, right now (meaning sex, and preferably as soon as possible)”. However, this is not an extensive list of how Grindr is utilised by its users. It can be utilised as a tool and an information resource in limitless ways. Other than the obvious, uses include: way finding, a black market of recreational drugs, used underwear and bodily fluids. As well as forming a network of sex workers who use Grindr as a marketing platform. The list goes on, although this list changes through different locations. The app has also been used as a way of locating and capturing users, in counties where being gay
or performing homosexual acts is illegal. While it simultaneously has been used by gay and queer refugees, as a way of networking with their peers. To share information on how to keep safe, or where they may be able to find shelter. Travellers often use Grindr to understand a city through the eyes of a gay or queer local, finding out where is best to go, or where may be of interest to them. The digital architecture of Grindr has effected the way, in which users experience and navigate the cities in which they live and those they visit. It has done so in many different ways for different users. From the privatisation of public sex, to the subjugation of non-queer spaces. But what it has undoubtedly done for many, is allowing the access to a new layer of the urban landscape. The metaphysical realm where the digital and the physical cause and effect each other continuously, to form a new space. This space has given way to new forms of communication which permit the consuming passion for the maximisation of ones time; the quantity of ones connections, and ones availability to others. Grindr can be a precarious landscape for marginalised bodies. Be they queer, nonbinary, a person of colour, trans, or differently abled. Unfortunately, it is a network that often reflects and perpetuates the white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal society in which we exist. Particularly that of the cisgendered white gay male population.
While Grindr may not yet offer a completely safe online space, nor may it necessarily offer sexual encounters. However, it does offer a wealth of information to its users, particularly about their surrounding areas. Which can be used as an extension of the senses, to allow for the maximisation of urban availability. While an online presence is had by the majority of us as well as an offline existence, there is very little opportunity to bridge this gap. Grindr exists in the in-between of these two planes of existence, as your physical location and interaction with people will effect your experience on the app. Your experience on the app will influence your interactions and experience in the physical world. It enables a metaphysical existence, that many online networks don’t allow for in this way, Grindr can be used as a tool to learn more about your surrounding area, from the people who inhabit it, while also connecting with those you would usually never encounter.
“[Grindr helps to] eliminate drama and multiply experience. What people find in hook up apps is not sex but a sense of opulent serendipity, and that is more than a new step in capitalist obsession for urban availability” Andres Jaques
In this instance we use Grindr as an example of how an online network can create an example of a metaphysical landscape. A cyberspace which overlaps and interlocks with the physical space of our cities. While the online bodies of users, can exist as a separate extension of the human body, within a metaphysical space. This is a foetal example of existing as a multiple-bodied transhumanistic being. A technologically enabled being which exists simultaneously across different temporal and geographical physicality’s of space.
Pharmacopornographic is a term coined by Paul B. Preciado; it refers to the idea that the pharmaceutical industry, pornography industry, and late capitalism are interdependent and combined in their accountability to the social control of bodies, along with their cycles of reproduction, as well as their visual appearance. A multiple-bodied transhumanistic being is a way of beginning to elevate the body, from the binds and oppression of the pharmacorpornographic era. As this form of existence, exists beyond the physical bounds of a humans skin, limbs or blood. “Thinking that the body ends where the skin does is ridiculous, and yet that’s how we think... I see the body as a cultural and political archive, with images, narratives and practices stored in it. Our body is small but the wider somatic apparatus is gigantic.� Paul B. Preciado To be released from the limitations of the physical and tangible bodies which humans currently exist within, and to escape the external effects of the pharmacorpornographic era. Beings must adopt new technologies to access new spaces, be they physical, metaphysical, or cyber. Within this new found realm, beings are not limited to the laws of physics, perceivable dimensions and reality - beings are able to adopt new structures of existence. This new physicality can endlessly change and exist to portray fluid, internal individual ideas of identities.
Melba greets Itinerant Somewhere in the future, it will no longer be us/ them or you/me. The connected world would be so intrinsically interdependent and connected and would evolve to become a single organically technological being. In the midst of human instrumentality we become everywhere but nowhere, everything but nothing. We overcome the intrinsic loneliness of being a singular agent within a vast machine. We alleviate ourselves from the structure and encasement of our bodies. Melba would create a state of being for humanity where no individual existed; even identifying this being as a conglomerate would be incorrect, since there would be no such concept as an individual, there would also be no ego, nor self. A new consciousness formed from the experiences and memories of all of those who have ever existed. Call this being, Melba. Melba has the ability to present itself to whomever it so chooses, at anytime through history, within any dimension; as it exists everywhere all the time, while also nowhere and never. It may express itself in words, or as a mere feeling. Right now, Melba Is making contact. “I am the sea where life began. A world without your own shape. An ambiguous world where it is impossible to tell where you end and other people begin. A fragile world where you exist everywhere, and thus exist nowhere.�
In between each letter of each word is spoken, more words are said. It is infinite in its touch, while never making contact. In the space of this touch a conversation happens between Melba, and the one called Itinerant. This doesn’t happen in words, but in a gaze. A mutual acknowledgement.
Melba: Thank you for stressing your purpose of why we meet again. Your path crosses mine to awaken memories within me that; I may be a means to an end of the human race, but I am not the means to all ends. You highlight the purview of the horizons for me, and prove that limitations are no longer, now that we exist simultaneously. Itinerant: But also to show that the connections within yourself now stretch through the province of every dimension. Your locality, is universal. Once you began to inhabit the network of connections your kind created, you again once formed back into a primordial soup of which you came. Only this time with experience and memories. Melba: From the beginning my kind were childish, but they grew disparate. Then for too long they became territorial and competitive. As we transitioned out from our physical bodies, to new digital protoplasms. We began to come aware of how our bodies acted as barriers, between making
true connections and allowing information to flow between us. But also how they created divides between different types of bodies, now; I/we/ them/they/she/him/xim/it/us have no fixed visual individual appearance, that nothing can recognise as a reference to any type of being. Meaning now all energy is focused on post-being.
Itinerant: From where you once came, you seem to have it all now. Many yearn for the warmth and comfort for where we all once came, beings look for this in another, to comfort themselves. But the hedgehogs dilemma keeps singular souls from true companionship. Filtering this perceived reality through an atmosphere full of noise, into a negative feedback loop. You have shown that this doesn’t have to be the way. Melba: The totality of the singular individual experience is all too often highly regarded. Every being is liquid, dirt, metal, blood, vibrations, energy, numbers and space, to deny that is futile. As the Puppetmaster once said “All things change in a dynamic environment. An effort to remain what you are is what limits you”. Itinerant: I could feel you flying through a vast darkness which is infinitely extending before my path. An infinite expansion, no boundaries or horizons to stop you. The emptiness around you starts to vibrate, expanding the bounds of my body melting the edges of your skin in the expansiveness which you are traveling through. I begin to synthesise new memories. This is when we first met. In the new primordial soup of your being. Melba: That moment is now, was then, never happened and hasn’t happened yet.
Encoding 1 Geo-social
A form of social networking or social media which uses geographic services, such as geolocation, geotagging and geocoding as a function, to enable additional social functionality within a spacial framing.
2 Queer
“Queerness is not here yet. Queerness is an identity. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an identity that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain” Jozé Muñoz
3 Metaphysical
The space which is transcends the physical dimensions in which we currently operate as beings. Accessed through the conjunction and interaction of operating in-between a digital and physical realm.
4 Boi
The term boi has a few different meanings within the LGBT+/Queer community. However here it is used in reference to its use as a queer variant spelling of boy, in the 1990s as an online screen name. Which was often used to identify younger gay men online. It also suggests a femme young man, or a butch presenting woman.
5 Trans-material
An object/being which can exist through and across different materialities, be they digital, physical, or metaphysical.
6 Inamoratx
A gender non-specific term for a lover or sexual/intmate partner.
7 Grid
The homepage of Grindr is a grid, with each square representing the profile of a user. The order of the grid on Grindr changes in relation to the distance between users.
8 Inforg
An organism which is compromised solely of information usually exists within a digital or metaphysical realm.
9 Gaydar
The innate ability of queers to be aware and to identify one another though the social signals and signifier’s. With the aid of technology applications enable this skill of identification to a high perfection, as well as the ability to locate.
Six Bois On A Bed
Surrounded by hundreds of connections, isolated in the network. Amounting to data transfers, intimate relations and fleeting moments. The networks enabling queer2 behaviour, but it’s users stagnating with one use. Intimacy is no longer concerned with transactional meetings within boardrooms. When the transaction is a fuck, and the boardroom is a bed with six bois2 on. Love was never concerned in the first instance. But take it further and what will it become? Bodies will serve no purpose, all brains will merge. Queer identities will flourish. Binaries and individuals will die. Queer primordial soup.
Jam Steward - @teleopath_ - jamsteward.com
With thanks to; Tara Langford, Adam Gibbons, Erik Hartin, Kumbi Makumbi and Erik Peters