THE TWISTING MANIFESTO
SHIN HANAGATA
0
I think the apple's rotten right to the core
From all the things passed down
From all the apples coming before
…
Short-form videos that loop in my mind like a tinnitus—-every time I’m conscious of myself watching them, I realize that I’m just a module incorporated in the system. My eyes, my hands, and my entire nervous system, which were formed over the past 3.5 billion years, exist only to perceive short-form videos and to scroll the screen.
Now, I feel all the weight I bear and every chain I’m tied to. Shames, manners, labor, time, and gravity I have been wearing on myself, were not outcomes of my desire, but realities that were already built in since I was born.
We tie ourselves down to
this only reality,
this only behavior,
this only way of thinking,
and this only frame of being “human.”
Technology accelerates this frame infinitely.
Algorithms designed for the sake of productivity optimize our bodies to modules, so that one can extract our functions effectively. They give us lives as information processing nodes that constantly view advertisements, or as actuators of cheap labor incorporated in the gig economy. This is the reality of the man-machine system.
When AI with more advanced capacity of logical thinking than humans think, and when robots with advanced physical abilities operate, the meaning of being a “human” is only limited to checking the boxes of a consent form that no one would ever read and taking their responsibility.
Realize this only reality.
1
Then, how do we get out of this only reality?
There is a presupposition to this reality: this body.
Two eyeballs in front of the skull, a mouth below them, and the four limbs hang perpendicular to the force of gravity. This arrangement created the chair, the staircase, the structure of a toilet, the ticket gate, and the shape of a display.
Our eyes, ears, and skin are input terminals, our hands, muscles, and vocal chords are output terminals, and other human beings and techniques related to them. The system is structured based on this bodily arrangement.
What happens if we “re-wire” the presupposition of this reality?
Let’s say I transplant my eyes to my toes.
The vision shakes. I can’t grasp where I am. Suddenly, a strange arm with five protrusions comes into sight. It is a hand. The sense starts to synchronize. Soon, my foot becomes the head, my leg becomes the neck, and my arms become the hind legs. Functions start to transform. I am born again. The world enters into me vividly.
Alternatively, rather than sitting on a chair, I become the chair.
I transform from a user of the tool to the tool itself. I am identified as a chair, and I am sat on. The moment when someone else’s butt sits on my shoulders, I sense a pressure between my shoulders and the floor. And, my shoulder blades and collar bones that existed to hang my arms now become the rim of the chair.
Here, the interrelationship between humans and technology transforms, and the presuppositions of the man-machine system that dominated us from the birth of humanity turn over with the sound Gwwrip.
The newly re-wired sensory receptors transform our memory, ethics, habits, and behaviors, and the reality we have been following to pure disparateness. Even so, the existing reality does not disappear but co-exists with the new reality with constant friction between them. Here, we see a non-human, non-machine, and non-animal existence: a twisted chimera.
The re-wired reality and the existing reality are grafted together, and they continuously twist each other.
We call it “twisting.”
2
The twisted body confronts a “new defect.”
The staircase rises like a precipice, the door knob becomes ungrabable, and eating becomes a challenge. We are faced by the reality that the entire environment we have unconsciously embraced was designed for “normal” bodies.
However, at the same time, the sheer existence of the twisted bodies signifies the twisting of the world.
For them to live, new ways of walking, eating, excreting, and sleeping are created.
To realize them, prosthetics, tools, and structures are invented.
To interact with others, gestures, languages, and ethics are acquired.
For them to exist, the world is reconstructed.
As a result, there will be a domain where conventional bodies as “humans” cannot accommodate. It erupts in a place where twisted bodies appear, and it forms an island-universe-like external space within the “normal” living space.
The twisted body twists the world.
3
Realize this given reality.
——Sense that you are living a life controlled as one of the billions of modules of the massive man-machine system.
Twist this given body.
——Re-wire the sensory receptors, body structure, relationship with others, and every presupposition of this reality. Sense the reality of living with that new body.
Twist this given world.
——Follow the desire of the twisted body, and make necessary tools, prosthetics, and a place to sleep. Rearrange the domain with your own standards.
Do not limit time and space. Execute this principle anywhere. Bring it into your house, on streets, on subways, in mountains, in your search history, and in your dialogues with AI. Re-wire it carefully, to existing bodies and existing infrastructures.
At that moment, the ethics, time, space, and gravity that were supposed to be the one and only collapse, and the existing reality becomes definitively “relativized.”
The absolute reality that dominated us in every aspect, from birth until now, is “demoted” to one of the infinite variations of reality.
“Twist” that body.
And, “demote” this reality.
Translated by Shogo Ishikawa