Angelic Materialism

 

As a profession

Back-office






Forty years back in 1985, the author of Whole Earth Catalogue, Stewart Brand noted: ”Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.” Contra wholeness, last years prove that the planetary imaginary of Earth is fragmenting, crumbling into pieces. All we are left today are samples, readymades of communication. Automation of human has accelerated over the course of the dumb century, and soon there won’t be anyone left who can love.

Connection is not guaranteed in communication, but it can be approached with Angelic Materialism as a practice of Epistemic Diplomacy that develops open-sourced techniques of playful communication for various environments. We unleash spaces that resist the totality of gamification, bringing the play instinct back to hold both intuitive and analytic forms of being with others. Angelic Materialists recognise attention as the central faculty of players's involvement with what matters.



For us, misunderstanding is as important in communication as coherence and rapport. We know we cannot look at angels, just hear them. Angels are abstractions, but they are real. If seeing the image requires one to stop looking at the pictures, hearing the meaning obliges one to unlearn the patterns of listening. Angelic sonification is performative, not representational, it search for ways that messages can be misdelivered, habitual talking scripts misperformed. 

Enough translation: Angelic communication starts in transduction. The so-called autonomy of humans, experienced while speaking, dwells in the alienation, the core of the Technique. After gathering the inputs, we sample phrases, gestures, and other bits of meanings, rearranging them in a new structure of signification. This process reminds us of the viral and contagious nature of language, that is, to be desemanticised and re-enchanted.

The office will serve as a portal for miscommunication, disrupting habitual behaviors, and embracing misunderstanding as a creative tool. While most sampling today happens in the context of Machine Learning and the training of large language models, we want to focus on the sampling of human miscommunications, which we redefine as Angelic Matters. Attending angelic matters is not a mere speculation. Times when we’ll be able to live, love and again negate the speculative from 3 angles. Show us a newborn space, and we will triangulate it. 

Anti-Spectacular: living your Life means embracing the everyday ordinariness with a degree of wonder, leaving space to be surprised by the most common, and quotidian chores. As technics reveals its nature only d malfunctioning, the radical presence ( immanence ) is possible through such transduction of everyday speech. So we will sample bracket the meaning of sampled bits of speech and gestures, re-ordering their structures.




 Anti-Secular: Searching for the antidote to the nihilist abundance of irony and sarcastic cynicism as a defence from the current obscurity and the dumb 20th century, that totally shielded a person from the vulnerability of holding beliefs, Angelic materialism preache immanence or radical presence through Laghter as a centre of being able to see the sacredness in profane, that gift one audacity to face the absurd conditions of being thrown in the worlds, that requires us to learn how to sit still and fall properly. Anti-Specular: 
true love waits outside the realm of mimicry, or accommodative adaptation to the object of your desire, Angelic Materialists refuses to become absorbed by affection to become one. The technique respects distinctions and nourishes forms of symbiosis that are organic, requiring non-specular, non-repetitive reflection in the space of broken mirrors.





The Angelic Office is less of a church, and more of an orifice, a series of portals opening in various places. The orifice offers services of de-automation, bracketing, and suspending the natural attitudes of all-too-practical knowledge. We consider love and smiles to be antidotes to the automation of humanness into normative bodies without senses. Get the picture? For angels like us who are truly sensitive, the deeper meanings of the common speech are more visible on the surface of the ordinary mishaps. 






Alva Roselius







Clara Rudin Smith



Savva Dudin



Stephen McEvoy 


Sean Being