Sitting on a mountain in Saas Fee, up in the valley, a short walk outside of town, surrounded by the mountains, these fortress citadels looming above, gateways to heaven, to ski slopes, to someone else's idea of paradise, the glacier looming overhead. I am here for a fight - I know - that I will be orienting myself in opposition to arguments of the psychoanalytical agenda, against Lacan and Lacainism and Lacanianists, and all other isms for that matter. There is another dilemma yet to be solved: an absence, alienation from the sense of community, a palpable present absence, the feeling of lack, of connection, of activated individuals with whom I may draw from, comrades, true peers, but maybe I'm being pretentious, removing myself again, making excuses to not be more involved with the lives of others... Surely there are those sympathetic to my own cause - to the extent that I can articulate it, which is difficult, I should extend the same patience - others wish to observe and learn from me as well. Where are my collaborators? How much of this program can I entertain before removing myself, recoiling back into my project, dismissing the death-stench repetition as more of the same? Bratton and Beesely and Fynsk may be divergent tangents out of pure psychoanalytic method, so be patient, see how it plays out, keep the eyes and ears open. What am I doing: collecting information to hone my instruments and orient my scope sights towards an articulation of subjectivity that is not based in objective empirical knowledge - (beyond ontology?) - although it is clear that there are structures to my research that are lacking and contributing to the difficulty I have been sensing in clearly laying them out. I need a bibliography, to site my sources in their primacy, to begin amassing an arsenal of quotes appropriated from others in order to steer, direct, mold, sculpt the conversation towards what I want it to be. If my art is concerned with conversation then I must begin directly utilizing it as material, something I have been aware of since NM or earlier but have yet to put into practice. All of these conversations are fostering a dissensus, a dissidence, more than a harmonious agreement or alignment among peers or faculty, amounting to a certain textual/textural interference pattern - the making visual of the communicative array. The libretto as dissertation will be leveraged towards the dissonances arising from my disagreement with the structures of the program, of thought, of the thesis of others, charting the frequencies at high fidelity and high resolution - visually. I may venture into weaving upon my own loom from all the threads of meta-complexes of understanding: DeLanda's assemblage theory, systems theory, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, physiology, topography of the institution of education, architectures of epistemology - all potential nodes which can be put into an ecological relation, the structural terms of the opera. I will spend the next 4 years elucidating, clarifying, mapping, increasing the fidelity of the relations, between these points.

I'm here to articulate my own process of becoming as clearly as possible: it's a matter of fidelity.

I keep thinking about curtains on C-stands, moveable walls, and other fixtures of the studio, but why? I'm imagining a void without a clear idea of what will emerge from it, which is the point, but it feels absurd. Just set it up and let it form itself, of course it must beging with a great nothing, with a frame, an erasure or negation that creates a separation from the surrounding world.

It's from research that my practice arises, not the other way around - a risky proposition. Experimentalism feels excessive, wasteful, grotesque - I don't need to try things out I need to make decisions, to trust what I know and put processes into motion that will lead towarsd the unknowable, and there I can take back up the project of general experimentalism. The danger of mindless experiments is repeating results I have already observed: this creates a paranoia which inhibits me from acting, hence the gargantuan project conducted over the last 1.5 years on compiling all my experiences, notes, researches, and minutiae so as to account for the territory already surveyed. In a way this is an underlying principle of the entire project. So what does it mean to conduct a "research-based practice?" How does research in an artistic sense differ from the academic research in other disciplines like philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, theology? How does research differ from experimentalism? From my research my practice will emerge, but perhaps my practice is not research. It is from the bedrock of research that my practice arises, upon which it sits, but they function differently and should not be used interchangeably - this all requires intensive meditation and articulation of course. I am not merely an experimenter, a mad scientist experimenting on myself, or colonial explorer violently pushing and prodding through the morass of worldly peoples and materials seeking for my reflection in the landscape. I wish to remain nomadic, constructive and intentional, determinate and driven by certain clear imperatives, and it is from psychoanalysis that I may delineate these limits. I am not driven by woo woo or want to be wooed, pure intuition, some transcendental abstraction that is unquantifiable, ineffable, incommunicable, incomprehensible, irretrievable, irrevocably invisible (or otherwise "in-"). I am invested in increasing clarity, by way of articulation, along with the ethics of response-ability towards my being and those being observed, allowing for other ways of thinking-through and feeling-wish the definitions proliferating in the world, and in clarifying who and how and what they do and are, to observe the limits, if only in order to better understand myself in relation, certainly beyond the parameters of the psychoanalytic imperative: to turn it all out, outside of my body, beyond my mind. From this all content flows. From this the old tired concepts of self are cracked and new models will be molded. From this primary oscillation I will articulate my relation to art-at-large and epistemology in general. From this I will gain a fundamental attunement to an earth authentically felt, that makes sense through being senses, to be active in the sensing through making sense of other modes of sensing, as well as to serve as a platform upon which others may stand and relate in their own manners and matters.

The timeline is 4 years, beginning now. I don't always need to be recording sound and video aimlessly, filling hard drives with excess - always already excessive information. I don't need to move in order to figure out how to move as I am always moving, always have been moving, or to make sound in order to feel out what sounds are possible or hear those beyond which I can recall. I've been doing this my entire life and now I wish to act with intention, to craft the sound I wish to be heard, form the frame around the content I wish to meditate upon, or at least to apply a finely attuned focus upon the world to be able to capture those spontaneous efflorescent emergences of alien intelligences when they rear their heads. I require the solid architectural lattice to hold this research - as I have been describing to myself for some time now, at least since January of 2016 when I first articulated the OOFKAUU. It is a project of patience. There's much to be garnered from Bratton's idea of the stack as a model, a Guattarian diagram (chaosophic diagram).

Word lists, reading lists, compilations and juxtapositions of conceptual approaches, even the most superficial excavation of obscure psychoanalytical archetypes will all feed directly into the OOFKAUU character development and the narrative mythologizing, forming essential relations to literary and philosophical story telling - "his" story and "her" story and "geo" stories.

Crafting music could be correlated to other media and processes, not necessarily to strictly tied to text or visual notation forms or the abstract modalities of space/time: perhaps bound to sculpture, props, construction of stage elements, articulations of the body, orientation of the camera in capturing the dynamics of performance to allow a novel physics to emerge, scenarios of awareness allowing affect frequencies to modulate with invisible forces/influences. Could I still borrow ___'s modular synth to compose interactions upon a larger frequency spectrum?

I need funding for all of my micro concerns and meta narratives - this was also programmed into the project from its initial conception. I could spend the next year to solidify my experiments and have something concrete to refer to: publish the text on the internet or in physical formats like leaflets or posters or boradsides or fine art prints, to print the visual diagrams, to perform the music and capture the performances or record in a professional manner in the studio, to conduct all kinds of narrative and cinematic experiments in the studio. This is only the starting point, and there would still be 3 more years to make it more cohesive and increase the fidelity even further. More focus on the narrative forms: comedic, drammatic, tragic scenarios being conducted through various subject/objective materialisms of time and space. I must elucidate the "research" in the research-based practices and situate this monologue within ongoing dialogues with peers and faculty and others far beyond the reach of the program - collected in an interactive tableau like a WEBSITE to cultivate the interactions, to allow others access, to entice others to exchange with me. I need to write rigorously, daily, a text which is taken seriously (ref: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's statement that taking theories seriously doesn't mean they are believed, and not taking a theory seriously doesn't mean it is not believed). The sculptural props occupy the negative space of the architecture: material instantiations of the lack, containers of absence, fetishes for mourned spirits, totems to rituals whose significance has been forgotten, placeholders for forgotten economies - this is important and must be remembered. Once I can talk about it, once I find the language to describe it, then it becomes real and I can proceed to act upon it. Upon returning to Oakland I need to dedicate time towards unpacking all these ideas, splaying it out, collating it into a form that I can read through and follow, to serve as an chronological instruction manual for the execution of a concrete opera which is currently only flickering in my own dim consciousness, to put it in relation to itself, confront its facets - and to open it up, to make it truly collaborative in substance and material not just some vague idea which I cannot do justice to with my weak words. The potential will emerge through the labor, it is an opera of immaterial labor, a model of ecology beyond the machine (and possibly the human).