Universal Will to Become
As we hurtle towards the consumation of superpower hegemony and ‘total information awareness’, what continues to keep me going is what Kurt Vonnegut’s refers to in his 1959 (the year of my birth) (Sirens of Titan) as the principle of the ‘Universal Will to Become’ (UWTB).
Nothing can extinguish it.
Vonnegut powered his Martian space craft with it .
Trees have it, SARS viruses have it, mad cow prions have it. We can feed on it if we want to.
I guess this is the ‘flow’ principle that I am so fascinated by. It’s easy to see UWTB all around us coursing through growing plants. This energy when it courses through living systems is preserved as flow form. Wood grain for example, maps UWTB in its flow patterns, so even a dead piece of plywood shows (fossil) UWTB. I spent the day planting big ropy rhizomes of Phyllostachys nuda and Phyllostachys rubromarginata bamboos, each studded with nacsent subterranean growth shoots, epicentres of UWTB. Powered by UTWB, these buds can shoot up into 2 inch thick culms that will grow from 0 to 20 ft. high in a month And yet there is nothing there now but some onion- like layers of cells and a whole lot of photsynthetic intent. Left to its own devices UWTB will prevail.
The burning question of course is that of nanotech. Will our own artifacts exhibit UWTB? and morph into the dreaded ‘gray goo’ that Neal Stephenson posits in The Diamond Age? Computer viruses certainly have shown this tendency. If this happens, (and the ‘blue goo’ police nanobots don’t prevail), it could be curtains for the DNA based ecosphere (global ecophagy). UWTB will still prevail though, even in a techno-ecology. Life forms or sim life forms are only conduits through which UWTB expresses itself.
this just in from my friend laura:
Cockroaches to have Buddhist funeral
Thailand is preparing to cremate more than 1,000 giant cockroaches – and then hold a traditional Buddhist funeral to appease their owners. (I love those giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches, they definitely have UWTB!)
20 years ago in my installation ‘Posthuman Culture’, I populated a model city with their more common relatives- Periplanata americana- and gave them a photosynthetic ‘algae ocean’ to provide food and oxygen. I was trying to figure out how things would look when cockroaches finally replaced us. They exceeded expectations, breeding rampantly and eventually broke out of their sealed chambers and infested the Ontario College of Art.
Vonnegut also writes:
“It took us that long to realize that a purpose of
human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love
whoever is around to be loved.”
Ailanthus altissima trees erupting out of a building
in New York City, showing UWTB
