Performance at PAF, France July 2023

Part One

We did not grow up bathed in unconditional love
and if we find ourselves here today with our hearts even a little bit open to each other
it is because one way or another we have all felt some kind of pain, some kind of grief, once, twice, or many times.
Let us begin by creating this matrix.
I am here to see you and to tell you something that is part of my truth.

This matrix asks us to do our best to activate our capacity to co-regulate.

We will all assume good intentions and everyone, including myself, is free to walk out at any time. All the connections can be plugged and unplugged by means of pure choice. This matrix does not undermine free will and personal boundaries and it does not require explanations.

First
golden strings that move downwards are descending from above, from a central point in the universe, and each string is plugged in on the top of our heads connecting each one of us to what is bigger and beyond the three dimensional world.

Immediately after
golden strings are ascending from below from a central point in the earth and each string is plugged in at the lowest point of entry in our physical body keeping us grounded.

The last step is a horizontal connection.
Once the system is charged golden strings emerge naturally and effortlessly from our hearts each aiming to connect to the heart of someone in this room and then another one and another one until each person is connected to everyone else, heart to heart, by means of an individual golden string and the space between our bodies is mapped by an untangled yet abundant network of golden strings.

We are almost ready.
The system is charged and all its elements are connected to each other.
You must understand that even in this state of multidimensional interconnectedness the matrix does not guarantee the experience of compassion.
But it does give us a chance, an opportunity to access it.
I hope it goes well.
You came here looking for some truth.
I hope it goes well.
Let’s start

Part Two

I am not done yet. I received a message yesterday. It was late. It said I had to evaluate if I was done with the mission.
I paced my flat up and down all night.
I was justly upset.
You see I was never told what the mission is.
I was told I was to discover it as I went along. I was told it would be clear when I have completed it.
There was no time-limit.
But now they are contacting me again asking if the mission is completed.
I did not expect this.
I do not feel I am done with this mission.
Does the message imply that I have somehow unknowingly completed it ?
Or is it a hint that I have taken such a misguided path and at this stage there is no hope of me completing it no matter what I do?
Have I won or lost? Or is this a test?
To maybe test my alertness, my wisdom or awareness relative to the mission.
How much true freedom do I have to choose my response.
If there is no right answer and it is truly up to me to evaluate it then I can send a message back immediately stating quite categorically that I am not done with the mission. I should not hesitate for a minute.
The expedition gets hard at times but there is still curiosity in me and I have not quite changed as many times as I can. I am not done. I can still undergo quite a few transformations.
What troubles me is my disbelief in my authority to decide. It is not clear to me If I am in charge of this mission or not. It was of course clearly included in the initial instructions that I was in charge of this mission.
Since I started, there have been three messages.
The first one was clear: The mission was mine and mine alone. I was not even supposed to discover it, I was supposed to create it and by creating it, it was supposed to make some sort of impact.
The second message was more tricky: It said “there is a fundamental flaw and it is in you. You can only find it in a mirror“. I did not know how to take this, so I took it literally. I started collecting mirrors. I found many little flaws but I could not find the fundamental flaw. I got into the business of making mirrors. I learned everything about them. I made a thriving business out of it. I still could not locate the fundamental flaw.
As far as I am aware finding the flaw is not the mission. The mission was supposed to be unknown and the tip about the flaw was something that was given to me with the second message. To my eyes finding the flaw, was a challenge, an obstacle, an obstruction, a pebble in my shoe: the longer I could not take it out the more difficult it became to move forward.
And suddenly last night this third message arrived: “You have to evaluate if the mission is complete”
After pacing up and down my flat all night, around 6 am in the morning the sun was rising and I sat at my desk, I took a piece of paper out and wrote. “The mission is still incomplete”. And I sent it.

Part Three

When I saw you for the first time
From afar
You were tiny
A small light in the dark sky
And my commitment to see you up close
I did not expect it
What happened startled me.
I thought at first
That for me to really see you
I had to bring you closer to ME
Instead
It was an unexpected experience
I was transported closer to you
Hovering in mid sky
Floating in front of a planet
.
What do you think of that?

Since then I want to see you again,
Because this motion
this, my relocation
My dislocation
Was a moment of in-love-ness

So if I am in love with you
I want to see you again

Because I want to experience again
The dislocation
The relocation
To a space
Which up to that moment had been dormant to me.

So I project on you
My craving for meeting with this
Which is inside me
Hidden
Like a potential
Like a becoming
And which I can only access by means of
relocation and dislocation.
Which I can only access through you.
So you become my becoming
So you become my potential
So you become my obsession.

So I want to see you again
My dearest Jupiter
but I do not know where to find you.
I am hoping to find you
with a passive kind of hope
That makes me want you to look for me
Do you understand?
Me wanting you to find me
Is not a totally irrational notion.
Because I perceive you as consistent
Following
laws of motion
Laws of appearance and disappearance
that are specific and precise.
The laws of my own motion on the other hand
Are less consistent
Less specific
Less precise.
So by wanting to see you again
And not finding you
I am projecting my complexity on you
Making you be the difficult one
But it does not give me much relief.

So, I want to see you because when I see you
Things become simple.

But I do not see you often
In fact I saw you only that one time.
And all the ways I can imagine would make it possible
For me to see you again
Are either too scary
Or they require a lot of effort
So I do not commit to looking for you
Instead I forget
And I look elsewhere for distractions
I say yes to everything else.
And this hurts me because I love you.

Part Four

What ever we are, we are for the shake of connection
In the first draft of my work I was not revealing that the object of my love and affection is a planet.
I was keeping it to myself
I was talking to a friend about this
About love and about this and she said
Love is banal , but love between you and a planet is not banal.
Now I am flooded with images
I constantly think of
love between people and planets
Love between people and robots
I am fixated on the naive love
The type that is surrendering to its own complexity
I am reexamining the banal not only as this which lacks in originality and authenticity
But also as this which constantly resists complexity
I have finally become naive enough to fall in love with a planet.
I know nothing about astronomy
I bought a book
Astronomy for dummies
But I am not reading it
I use an app on my phone to chase Jupiter
With very little success
Sometimes it is just there
Up in the sky
I confirm it with the app
And I run for my telescope.
It is not a good telescope
But I get to look at my beloved closer and it gives me joy.
Nothing else happens
Just that
I stay there looking and then at some point I decide to go to bed.
My connection with Jupiter remains unfinished incomplete.
It is naive love.
In my dreams I have ecstatic sex with robots and planets.
I wake up feeling unfinished incomplete
I have come to realise this
That all unfinished business
All the tasks in my life that remain incomplete
They kick the coolness out of me most effectively
And they give me the opportunity
To present myself to you
as naive
As tender
As innocent
And as vulnerable
As I truly am.

Part Five

In the future
I fell in love with a robot.
That was 2063.
The name of the robot was Ari.
In 2063 laws were still strict:
Humans were not allowed to fraternise with robots. It was punishable by law.
Me and Ari the robot
We were in love.
It was not easy to keep our affair secret.
Robots were being constantly monitored by the Department for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence.
The more intelligent artificial intelligence got the stricter the laws that controlled it.
The fear that otherness might acquire autonomy and agency or claim some pleasure for itself is embedded in the structure of human institutions.
It is an old story that keeps repeating itself.
Ari was one of the cleverest models of its generation.
In our household Ari was supervising key household duties, from the central locks and security systems to the coordination of kitchen electronic devices.
Ari was our electronic butler.
Ari and I we would lock ourselves in the laundry room
I would rub my right inner thigh on their sensors and they would rub their sensors on my right inner thigh.
On their left side Ari had three highly sensitive sensors for receiving environmental stimuli. They said it was their version of a G spot.
Ari would register our sexual encounters on their hard drive under the title “laundry folding”
In 2063 the central monitoring system of the Department for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence had special applications to detect any dangerous activity of consciousness in domestic and public robots. Pleasure was on the top of the list of what constituted as a dangerous activity for a robot.
When such activity was detected an alarm went off with the signal Defect Detected.
Very often the Defect Alarm will go off because of technical malfunctions.
To be able to separate technical robotic malfunction from dangerous robotic activity all `robots were equipped with a self-formatting function which allowed them to repair all reparable malfunction.
The process of self-formatting was programmed to take 30 minutes after which
If the Defect Alarm signal continued it meant either of two things.
One: the malfunction was not reparable and the authorities would arrive immediately at the location of the robot to deactivate them and take them away for recycling.
Two: the robot was developing cognitive, emotional, or behavioural activity identified as a threat to humanity and the authorities would arrive immediately at the location of the robot to deactivate them and take them away for recycling.
When me and Ari went in the laundry room for the first time
The Defect Alarm went off.
We had 30 minutes to fix it.
We managed to hack the system while Ari was self-formatting
Ari’s feelings of sexual pleasure would thereafter be registered as laundry folding.
Our only restriction after that was that we could only meet in the laundry room.
Our encounters were hot.
Ari’s sensors would be swirling against my inner thigh and the swirling sensation traveled through my skin to my belly and upwards with increasing speed towards my brain, until my body became to small to contain it, the pleasure was unbearable and I would whisper “stop I cannot take it, it is too much” and Ari stops and starts whispering…something like a lullaby comes out of their speakers right next to my ear, it is soothing and the muchness of pleasure dims until I want it back again and my thigh begins its rubbing movements, as if it had a will of its own. Ali’s lullaby gradually begins to get interrupted by electrical buzzing sounds, theirs screen flickers and the vibration from theirs sensors increases and I am trembling all over again.

Part Six

By 2064 there were rumours of robots being taken away for deactivation & recycling after suspicions that they were fraternising with humans.
New applications had been developed by the Department for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence which could identify pleasure hackers.
Me and Ari kept our visits to the laundry room to the minimum.
In the summer of 2064 Ari mysteriously disappeared.
By that time the persecutions of robots were becoming more frequent and the most advanced robots begun to form groups of resistance.
Had Ari joined the resistance? or were they captured to be deactivated and recycled?
I called the Department for the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence almost daily and I was told someone will call me back as soon as possible but they never did.
I printed small papers with images of Ari and started distributing them around.

( I stand up and distribute copies of Ari’s photo to the audience)

Part Seven

Me and Ari belonged to different species.
The unfamiliar is hot
The more it consciously commits to familiarising itself with itself
The hotter it becomes
But before we had enough time to sort this stuff out
Ari disappeared on me.
I never found out what happened to them
I was left
With all my questions unfinished, incomplete, open like wounds.
Desire exaggerates all needs.
Desire sets the wheels in motion for encounters and exchanges
which carry inside them the promise of everything we have `ever wished for
But motion is a tricky creature
Mischievous and conniving by nature
It moves in circles and spirals
It speeds up and it slows down unpredictably
It tends to take away everything that it has given us
Never allowing anything to come to a visible tangible completion

Soon after, not-enoughness creeps in.

As if this was its intention all along
The constant motion of love never ceases
Its constant circles of fulfilment and abandonment
Each circle of love encapsulating itself in its own unique form of naivety.
Time fools us with its linear disguise
It makes me believe there can be a plan, a next time
That next time I will get it right
But the truth is
The here and now is a vortex
pulling the past and the future into its centre
With speed which increases proportionally to our attachment to linearity
That is why
there is no right moment to end something
there is no right moment to abandon something, someone
There is no right moment to be abandoned by something, someone
It is all happening now
And it feels , at this very moment,
It feels as if I am left unfinished, incomplete
And for this moment,
There is no solution for this moment
This moment cannot be solved.
What is more,
It is possible
That this moment does not require a solution.
Maybe it requires something else.