MANUKA GLASS

The Manuka Glass collective manifests itself through this video, “Incantation,” constantly evolving through remote online cooperation,

expanding and contracting, morphing its way across various platforms on the internet. It adapts its duration, format, and content according to the medium that presents its ethereal message.

The text was written, and the project was initiated just before COVID-19. In retrospect, it was an unsettling harbinger of the months (and years) ahead of its creation.

We use our only tools- digital transmission: mindenergy-body-computer-body-mindenergy. Meet me to mediate through sound, language, social cues. Or through vision, texture, objects, spacial dimensions. We lick. Brush up against. Float through each other.

The work is informed by eco-philosophies of writers such as Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway, and inspired by artists like Ian Cheng and Hito Steyerl. Where does the post-future begin?

It begins with our consciousness now, our present decisions. Maybe it begins as far as our original primal history. What are we building? As we destroy, what fertile ground are we creating for the birth and rebirth of new organic and data-driven systems and mutations ?

Groundless, Without a horizon, we climb the singular wall, not knowing where it leads ...but carrying our tools for seeding a new community.

We are living between vertical rock and empty air.

Worlding together, investigating Cheng’s infinity-games, “Incantation” entangles in the causal/aesthetic dimensions across current realities and fiction. What does the world look like beyond our own reference frame?

Personally, I never know when to fight or fly. You can often find me disoriented on a high platform, watching my limbs becoming detached, then believing other peoples’ limbs are my own.

Following human consciousness through deep time, how does our self-perception change? And when we expand reflection out to understand other species, other objects, other times.. can we envision the post-anthropocene, a time beyond what we consider a human-centric planet?

Are we the wind, or the land that birthed us? The dirt of the desert gave rise to me, and when things become too wet I search for the arid places, the ones with shrubs and dust and spikes.

Do we begin to realise the impact of the superimposed algocene? As we travel through a post-apocalyptic landscape, can we feel the numerical transversal ghosts of algorithms, narrating and directing our reality?

Apocalypse occurs all the time. (Aside from the many histories of humankind... )

Being born is a death, some say orgasm is a death. As a transformative organic creature- just being alive brings loss after loss. And new worlding, new beginnings.

At this collective apocalyptic threshold from man to machine, we create new languages to replace the ones we no longer understand.

We have experience from which to source our new cosmogony.

When and how do we claim the aspects of ourselves that are uniquely human?

Viral memes infect us with parasitic mind control. Nano infusions recode our DNA.  The oral histories we pass down are intuitive mimicry of our DNA passing stories to the next generation. Reproduction is an Epigenetic Incantation.

We build a home that reminds us what it means to be carbon-based, life-form.

NACOCA KO
(2019-2021)