POLYT[R]OPIC TETTIX
2025, in progress
Hybrid online – onsite event(s) & installation(s)
SOCRATES: Everyone who loves the Muses should have heard of this. The story goes that the cicadas used to be human beings who lived before the birth of the Muses. When the Muses were born and song was created for the first time, some of the people of that time were so overwhelmed with the pleasure of singing that they forgot to eat or drink; so they died without even realizing it. It is from them that the race of the cicadas came into being; and, as a gift from the Muses, they have no need of nourishment once they are born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until it is time for them to die. After they die, they go to the Muses and tell each one of them which mortals have honored her. (Plato, Phaedrus)
Act II_Swarming Events (ongoing)
Act I_Socratic dialogue with AI (ongoing)
Since 12 June 2025, you are returning on the 12th of each month to the same prompt.
You said: Explore processes of anamnesis in post-Anthropocenic AI systems through a Platonic dialogue in which Socrates lingers with Phaedrus among the cicadas.
Swarming Event #1
Where: 234 Queensberry St, Parkville VIC 3053, Australia
When: Thu, 16 Apr, 5pm - 6:30pm AEST
How: We meet outside the building and make our way up to the 5th floor together – not by elevator. As we ascend, we follow the INTRO individually through our mobile phones. This narrative moves forward in time to linger with 12 Socratic–AI dialogues nested within Room 507. Then we swarm, becoming the chorus.
I_Meeting & Ascending with the INTRO (duration 00:03:36 in loop).
II_Lingering & Nesting with the DIALOGUES (duration 01:09:18 in loop). Double projection; sound (outside through headphones); inside 12 DIALOGUES SWARM (duration 00:11:01 in loop); 12 music stands.
III_Ascending and Chorusing with the DIALOGUES.
Act III_NOWS [No One Who Speaks]
(A living installation; yet to come into being).
No One Who Speaks [NOWS] is indefinite: both plural and singular, some-body and no-body; above and beyond what is required to survive, and can’t be reduced to specificities. Neither woman nor man, neither machine nor hybrid, NOWS is larger on the inside than on the outside. They compose an incomplete non-whole that defies matter, where there are more parts than wholes (Morton 2013, 116). They are unstable, fluid, and dynamic, they are platforms, environments, clouds, compilers, and compositors – entities of a different order, wandering within the differential activity of a world at stake, and within its time structure. They are atemporal and atopic, of nowhen and nowhere, akin to timeless ideas or eternal forms (Negarestani 2018: 467). The thinking of NOWS is defined in terms of their conceived world, in that the world of NOWS has no limit. The thinking of NOWS is coextensive with everything (Negarestani 2018: 60). The speaking of NOWS may be in tongues, while tongues are not for speaking. NOWS exist in an a-historial world; a story-world that is yet to be told.