Greetings from a computer

STRUCTURAL FORMAT

Each entry combines words, prose, flash essay, poetry and camera phone snapshot captions (indicated as [X]) to curate a mixed memory collage. This format circulates themed meanings in layered loops, spiraling out to reveal the contiguous nature of a changing reality and expression encountered en route. 

THEMES & GOALS 

Theory, art and practice as a strategy of mobility // Starting June 2013, I will travel around worlds by backpacking, busking, hitchhiking, ridesharing, cheap public transportation hopping, wild and urban free camping, couch surfing, dumpster diving, leaving my (eco) foot print as a traveler in terrestrial locomotion. I share the fragment perspective of an animated humanoid body living out concretely the experiences, memories, visions, dreams, illusions, nightmares and hallucinations that today's world so generously offers to those who seek out its fruits and poisons. 

Having completed an undergraduate degree in anthropology, I am compelled to embark on this voyage that will push me across unfamiliar territories, beyond the imaginative realm of textbook stories and mythical representations. In the European continent, I will witness where the ‘ancient and modern’ meet in moving mediation, write white out blank spaces. 

This method of survival is, of course, not going to be so easy – physically, mentally, emotionally, nor spiritually. But as someone whose identity status – Filipina-finally 'American' – is on census margins and who refuses to buy into the programmed system in place, I mobilize my desire to live and learn from the edges through this multi-pronged strategy of direct action, artistic expression and ethnographic engagement.

This is not to say that I have the right answers or attitudes, nor am I unique to seek such a life of distant dreams, hidden struggles or secret hustles. Nevertheless, I will not justify my participation in a society whose so-called ‘developed’ operations I deplore; instead I will justify my actions in a life that survives through resistant emotions. 

Memoir as a mirror // Rather than aiming to absorb a coherent picture of reality in the interest of acquiring ‘knowledge,’ a perspective on the road forces a confrontation of contradictions in the real and in the mind as the storyteller, listener, writer and reader become you and everyone you meet all at once. Every interaction speaks to and against each other. Without the firing of synapses, without the friction of movement, these possible passageways cannot link together. 

So-called ‘knowledge’ of a place and its people loses its relevance as illuminated truths reveal themselves at each street light and sound: the book, postcard, travel guide, missionary report and internet website fall subject to revision by the direct and deep insight accumulated on the road about what the world is really like today, how it is lived and struggled through by its people, how people of all walks of life help to manage or challenge its popular logics through daily behavior and practice, or how subjectivities resist and reformulate normative forms of being-hood, collective assemblage, and mass reproduction over and over again against the power of the institutional nation-state and other spectral governing bodies defining the ‘you’ in ‘us.’ 

Partly an experimental method and partly a methodological experiment, this auto-ethnographic project pursues the chaos of techno-modernity and comes to face it as a test to the imagination: because what are we willing to confront if not ourselves and each other?

Fracture past, present, future // Before the innovations of modern plumbing, automobiles, mass transport, concrete roads, street signs, shopping malls, supermarkets, coffee shops and all the paved pathways of interconnection that the western states of late capitalist modernity so uniquely designed in the interests of building its idealized image of our collective future for daily consumption, unequal degrees of luxury and poverty, accumulation and dispossession – inequality – already plagued the 'civilized' worlds in the so-called ‘pre-modern’ times. 

The story to be told of here and now is therefore nothing 'new,' but ancient, shared, and deeply embedded, like our human genes or expressions of memories aided by diverse recorded histories of destructive and creative assemblages: religion, war, commercial trade, artistic literary and scientific enterprises helped to flourish the globe's structural history of imperialism and colonization, as it too co-evolved with the development of capitalist abstraction founded in the familiar contradiction of invested value and discounted waste.   

Here and now, the dominant narrative of humanity written by the survivors, suppliers and supporters of imperialism, colonialism and capitalism would show its writing of [our]selves as characters auto-fictionally produced out of its mechanics: you are what was done and what will become in this history of violence. Today, you and I have the capacity to materialize as different subjective selves through active participation in the elaborately fabricated global network of sensorial and attentional commodities, where fulfilling the emptiness of the inherited ego demands a high property value and a huge social network. Buy and become who you are, says the advertisements on our built-up walls. But remember that in the end, all we are is humanimal. Forthwith, the world's privileged and poor share the same story of ancient and advanced life on Earth, despite the trajectory of violence writing out a past and future of heightened differences against inherent sameness. 

Left unattended as our eye’s focus gazes through the shop window, television and computer screen, the inequalities, contradictions, and disproportionate differences inherited from our collective pasts become invisible and imprisoned in the machinery of the contemporary moment, where it is believed that all of this is what is and was meant to manifest. On the contrary, we have no idea where ‘we’ are going: climate change, economic crises, political conspiracies, legal turnovers and social revolutions constellate and fork our very experience of now as we confront the shadows of shared trauma. A major premise of this travel-writing journal is to dynamically mediate and communicate the past’s, present’s and ultimately future’s infinite possibilities of direction. 

Become the beastly body // Just as various kinds of vagabond voyaging throughout the continents and open seas in priorpostcolonial centuries stimulated alternative spaces of creative and commercial transaction (think pirates!troubadours!spices!tea!), a travels through the European peninsula in 2013 likewise opens a page to a physically embodied moment both singular and contextual to the sensing subject, the land, and its peoples. Therefore the road traverses through living histories becoming transformed; a reel traveler floating across virtual vectors does not simply snap a photograph of itself in front of a landmark and call it a flight fulfilled, for the world is moving and we must fly fluidly like its creatures in the wind.

If this project confronts storybook logics as pure as the ‘home’ and ‘unknown’, ‘me’ or the 'map,’ one must first acknowledge the continuously changing constitution of self, community and territory. From the hyper stimulation of senses in global factory stores to the deep repression of trade history in ordinary consumer life, today's billions of human bodies continue to be overridden by the ongoing capitalization of rooted resources. Highly exploitative and non-consensual modes of economic extraction disguised as capitalist exchange (think tea!sugar!coffee!plastic!) industrial structure global relations of difference. 

The lands and seas, if not already transformed by trash and radioactive toxins, continue to absorb the excess energy trapped in the atmosphere due to the influx of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emitted by anthropogenic activity. Fragments of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste and thought of everyday sickness go forever anesthetized by the numbing sum of reality. Instead of collapsing a mind-body’s orientation of the world into one supposedly fixed set of normatively modulated senses anchored by the institutional cycle of virtual violence, I mobilize my sensorial vision across a spatial-temporal terrain that is constantly being moved by the forces of its living spirits; at heart, I become the post-atomic beast.

Challenge the channel // At one end of the spectrum, this project is (subversively) scholarly: it is a common understanding now that the discipline of anthropology formed out of the voyages of colonial encounter, by those writers, researchers, journalists, archivists wishing to make into representational understanding the human at the other end of the species continuum. And yet, their ‘objective knowledge’ of the ‘other’ stood in solidarity with the very European colonial powers that authorized and financed such so-called ‘discoveries,’ as well as the capitalist extraction of native resources and the exploitation of native labor around the world. 

But the Indigenous still survives today, continuing to engage in her people’s cosmology of being, relating and becoming despite the force of foreign authorities that have dispossessed her peoples and tried to impress otherly notions of what a human mind should think and how its body should operate on this finite planet. Because us seven billion humans cannot all be car drivers and consumers of capitalist production even if we convinced ourselves that this should be the future of tomorrow – it is not sustainable to think this; if you or I or we seek an alternative, the Indigenous, her people and their land still struggle to survive. 

Therefore, on the contrary, this project operates in the opposite trajectory that mobilized anthropological thinking in the first place: This project is explicitly political because it is part of a larger decolonization process that prioritizes disentangling the human body, mind, and spirit from the forces of control that subjugate its creative potential and cosmological signification in the contemporary world. 

At the other end of the spectrum, this project is deeply personal. I am ‘writing’ it alone, but not really, because I am riding it with everyone else who encloses and embeds me into a moving assemblage larger than myself – this is the ultimate form of transcendence that humans seek. At its root, this is a story of family, friends and the power of love. It is not easy to talk about, not only because it involves real people, but also because real people consist of complex biological, chemical and neurological processing that sometimes makes it difficult to communicate without the inevitable interference of misunderstanding. I hope that you the reader and I the writer (we are the same) might find intersections of mutual understanding through art expressed from heart’s (w)hole.