I'm on a train to Pomerania in emergency mode because my nearly 90-year-old dad has developed acute bronchitis, and I'm deeply worried.
This is my own personal crisis unfolding at a civilizational moment when we're simply overloaded by escalating problems: a humanitarian crisis, the threat surrounding Taiwan and the factories that oversee the production technology behind the world's only cutting-edge microprocessors. We're literally facing the possibility of a reset—a return to factory settings, BIOS screens, IRC, and the atmosphere of the 1990s internet.
There's the threat of nuclear war, American interventions in defense of the dollar (Russia and Iran are not only tyrannies, but also economic zones and members of the BRICS alliance). We're living amid an intense struggle for power and money. On top of that comes the religious crisis, orthodoxies, and Zionism, which lately seems to have completely lost its mind.
Inflation, the housing crisis, the Anthropocene, and microplastics. We are literally exhausting ourselves. This is also the era of black boxes and algorithmization.
Culture is underfunded, yet it no longer offers decadence, escapism, or the highly artistic drift into the void of metaphysics. Instead, we have a humanities and an art that are at once rational, empirical, and posthumanist, where transparency in the use of digital tools is more of a slogan than a priority. Calls for intervention and applied art often feel hollow. We no longer know how to rebel effectively or organize meaningful forms of expression.
And in the middle of all this, there's me—just a small fish, a thinking reed, academically occupied with a tiny fragment of sonic culture.
Still, I believe that if there's anything truly worthwhile I can take away from this research, it is a call to restore the radicalization of art in the aesthetic sphere—not as a simulacrum, but as an ever-living Baudrillardian virus. The power of money over the imaginary, the desire for prestige, the desire for recognition and awards—these are things genuinely worth letting go of, or at least treating as contingent and temporary states. Instead, it's worth organizing ourselves as communities, in the way live coders do.
The entry threshold in algorave is paradoxical: it is demanding, as if to say, earn your skills honestly; yet at the same time it is radically inclusive: we'll show you, step by step, how to get there.
I've drifted a bit into psychology here, but raw art brut, the radicalism of imagination, code and the consciousness of code—as the 8-bit demoscene has been demonstrating for forty years, as blind Homer once did, and even our prehistoric ancestors who created lithophones—are fragments of culture that have been with us from the very beginning. I simply believe that in an age of crises this profound, they deserve to be more visible than ever.