Incantation by Manuka Glass

ABOUT

Manuka Glass is an international collaboration conceived by Nacoca Ko in Autumn, 2019. It is made of artists, architects, designers, and musicians, who are interested in subjects such as the impact of algorithms on society, computer generated aesthetics, biomimicry, entanglement with nature, and post-anthropocene futures.  

With dreamlike prose, “Incantation” wanders past a posthuman apocalypse, reverberating the prophecies of our current and near-future dystopias.

The video constantly evolves 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. 

Keeping with the rhizomatic nature of the internet, contributors were connected through the unknown algorithms of Instagram. After reading the text, they responded with relevant video clips to sections that resonated with them.  

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

Instagram: @manukaglass
Email: nacoca23@gmail.com

“Incantation” screening, and videos of individual artists from Manuka Glass at The Wrong Biennale 2021
↳Watch here

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.

TRANSCRIPT

The Orchid has a naughty will.

It tortures an insect through its tunnel

until the escape through a narrow pollen-filled canal.

It wants licking, floating through, brushing up against.

With flamboyant complexity, it charms other species

that originally had nothing to do with its survival.

The Jerboa hops through deserts for millions of years

Eating the water. Breathing in the sand-filtered oxygen.

The oasis grows humans, and villages.

We meet for the first time once again.

One day soon, you will look up,

and all the colors of the sky will have changed.

Maybe because the atmosphere is different than before

or maybe because your eyes can now see more colors.

We watch the Antigravity Floating Orbs, Descending Oracles.

They launch the ask-access codes

beyond limited human language.

Your phone glows.

You scroll, feeling.

We build a home that makes us remember

what it means to be carbon-based, life-form.

A desire for free will. A desire for destiny.

A desire for apocalypse. A desire for redemption.

The oral histories we pass down

are intuitive mimicry of our DNA

passing stories to the next generation.

Reproduction is an Epigenetic Incantation.

Viral memes infect us with parasitic mind control.

Nano infusions recode our DNA.

We risk disappearing from the inside out.

By now, anyways, how many times has the world already ended?

We gather leaves trying to save them from burning.

In the Grand Battle between Logic and Faith

Phoenixes come out from their solitary castles

flocking together in the form of a Prophet.

At the edge of the forest they watch Robots till the fields.

Dancing, we are  chaoïde.

Dreaming without language.

Limitless expression without

the dictatorship of knowledge.

Sometimes alone, gathering leaves,

we dream of joining the Air Force.

We silence our delirium for those that need us

building a strong defense from the ground up

around our vulnerable Clan.

When to fight or fly.

Meet me by tiptoeing on plasma steps.

Jump off the platform.

You only feel vertigo 

if you are attached to control.

Soft drones break our fall.

We walk with the mythical creatures

of Steampunk and Sympoietic Systems.

Here we are together

in the Eye of the Storm

in the Eye of Providence

in the Eye against the Evil Eye.

Snails have conquered the arches

that peek through a geometry of trees.

The Orchid is a Mantis Shrimp with Technicolor vision.

You can see new colors, but still not as many as the Mantis Shrimp.

The Mantis Shrimp’s consciousness has evolved.

But still it cannot understand the moon and tides the way you do.

You take me for a joy ride.

We scavenge Demounted Planes

for minerals and wires and foam.

Rare metal mines.

New ways to mend flooded systems.

The ironic Earth is pulsing its infinite pendulum.

Flashes from a time before this one.

Objects trigger the psyche of childhood.

Cheap souvenirs, hybrid guardians of naivete.

Aesthetic glue for time and memory.

A giant monolith blocks the view.

But it was just a wide loop,

transparent when you change perspective.

We see landscapes that engender

site-specific living and nonliving hybrids.

Time passes through you.

Objects pass through you.

Space itself passes through you.

You can see the defining moment between prehistory and history.

Our work is to make the invisible seen.

We can use a canvas or a digital screen, whatever.

They become part of the wall. The wall is a shelter.

The shelter is comfort. From the constant storm.

Bacteria colors the canvas and we are consoled

by the marks of ash left by our predecessors

on the cave walls.

Even as we shape-shift and transmute

and assimilate and propagandize

we suffer the loneliness

of being distinct, categorized,

separate, withdrawn.

There are many things I recognize in you

and one is that you are not afraid to smile

in full confrontation of the Void.

We will autonomous objects into existence.

But even we cannot know them.

We are an invisible network collected by algorithms.

We lick, brush up against, float through each other.

I point to the Sewer Hatch in the sky.

Could we get out through there and escape our bodies?

Maybe no one wants a friend anymore.

We just need soundbytes and video clips.

She spreads out a tentacled wing

through the space between stars.

She glides on the current of a magnetic wave

coming toward us diagonally

because straight on would be too much.

She wants to talk to the other side.

Old parties of majestic aliens. Ether Fields. Lakes made of sun.

Villages  she no longer has time to visit.

She plays forward backward with light.

Root expansion, crown expansion.

Keeping us sane here on this burning ground.

You don't have to say,

‘I don't want to die.’

Just say,

‘I don't want to die anymore.’

↳ Visit RHIZODOME by AutoSave

This is an extract from the DAF online Festival, DAF-Tivi, where the video was sent out on a “Blind Date,” and matched with an unknown soundtrack. NuR is now part of the collective...