Rise and Fall of the Mechanical Mind
By: Alive Machine
Tags: Mechanical Mind, Learning, Artistic Research, Awareness, Empathy

The difference between looking for human in the machine and creating with the machine is very thin and constantly escaping us. However, one can create a futuristic Terminator genesis hellscape and the other may free our minds and souls into harmony. And when your company as millions of dollars and the power to make actual change, the distinction matters. This applies to you as an individual and to organizations of all scales. Having spent my life with computers I can tell you that finding something fulfilling in the machine as proven itself to belong to fantasy. Then what are we still searching for with the machines?

Learn to Feel again

The possibility of finding anything basically humanly fulfilling in the machine is destined to fail in our current conception of the world. The idea that anything else but the moment we share together can give us joy and fulfillment is what leads our lives into fear and suffering. Technology today must be used as a catalyzer of human emotion, not become the pale copy of this emotion but vehiculate it honestly and transparently in order to preserve the essence of the experience and by consequence the potency of the expression. This means that to guarantee the quality of the experience a platform, an interface, a service, a product, as opposed to content itself, must aim to become invisible to their content and their audience to be fully emotionally impactful. This mind-frame allows to think the experience first. The Experience meaning the emotional narrative that we go through. When we design an experience or a work for an idea, everything that’s between your audience and your feeling is literally between your audience and your feeling. It literally constrains the emotional connection. Therefore wishing to feel more connected with machines is utter absurdity when you consider how low-efficiency the bandwidth of information is between human to machine to human. To create a computer avatar, a friend or companion out of plastic and electricity and pixels sounds like a Frankenstein nightmare. The affection that we have for people and for things only exist through the Time spent with them, not from their material constitution.

The development of an emotion takes Time. You grow emotions in your garden. Most people have lots of bad grass but you can have beautiful Oaks and Roses and such. Those emotional creatures in you have been fed for years and can move very fast but build up progressively strongly and are in constant motion. They are in constant motion because your reality is in constant motion so they follow the flow of events that you find yourself in, but they also build momentum. When they build momentum is when you can grow and alchemize feelings inside you and build up affection. You literately learn emotions. You are born an animal and you are made into a human and you spend all your life trying to become a human.

Teach to Feel

To transmit an emotion, an idea, or a possibility to someone you have no other choice than to be it. If what you are trying to teach lives inside you strong enough the message may go through across many mediums. But it is still a process of growth. If you are not able to learn/grow from the moment you are working you can stop what you are doing and take a few breathes. The possibility to gain harmony with your life, yourself and others requires you to start this work right now. It is not a work that is hard to endeavor, it is hard to follow a coherent direction because our emotional life is so moving! Because we do not have the perspective of our life with things so we get lost into taking care of certain emotions while letting others die. We become able of less and less types of emotions/experiences. And we become consistently “kind of” unfulfilled. The will to question your world frequently or enter confusing spaces or stand in front of suffering is the emotional food that is needed for your garden to remain diverse and balanced. If your bouquet of flower is varied and radiant, you may always find known places to you in this big universe. The work of an artist or anyone who lives an artistic life is a work on emotionality and your capacity to play with your emotional garden. Your capacity to heal and protect certain plants and let others go is the emotional engine that you summon while you create. If this emotional energy is absent, you are making nothing.

Emotions are very easy to understand. They literally function like everything else that’s alive around you. Because they very literally move you. They are responsible for every inch of your little behaviors. That’s why when you deal with a bad emotion you often place it in someone else around you because they make you think of that side of you that hurts you. This is exactly the same problem as looking for help in the machine. It is a misplacement of attention. It means your attention is placed on the trivial characteristics of what you think is the subject (aka “it looks like me, so it is me”, further aka “I think therefore I am”), when instead your attention should be on the narrative you are going through. Everything that you chase should always keep a temporal dimension. Meaning that if it is static, like an object, a memory or an idea, it doesn’t obey the law of time anymore which means that it drains your own fluid progression through time and weigh you down like a rock in the river. The entire immeasurable community of living species on earth is here to remind you. You are made of them. Your emotions are their reflection inside you. By consequence, everything that doesn’t move you doesn’t move them. Your emotions want you to grow an emotionally rich life. Do not make the mistake of seeking sensationalist experiences, it is like helping your plants with poisonous chemicals which will make them grow artificially but give tasteless fruits. I am talking about your ability to feed them.

Learn to Teach

You feed an emotion by feeding it impressions of itself. You can reinforce an impression incredibly easily by simply moving your attention toward it. This will add more of the same electromagnetic frequency inside your nervous system which resonate longer and can imprint slowly a different behavior. You have to think that emotions, thoughts and sensations are the same thing. If you address one you will affect all of them. But emotions build up at a slower pace than thoughts and therefore modify your behavior more consequently and are easier to notice and work with. Everything that you live through shapes your body. Sensations first of course but emotions then. Your body is your interface with the world. Everything that happens in your life happens through your body. So you could say that you must think at the pace of your body. Thoughts move fast and barely change the current condition of your experiential vehicle. Emotion is the level of experience that you should always seek first because it is the only wavelength which really can move your life toward its balance. Emotions are the fire of your life, if you ignore them you will miss the energy that is needed to be brave and creative. And you can start growing them right now by simply feeling.

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Sit in yourself before you work

The mechanization of our lives and the relay in the background of our emotions is very much linked to the way society as been designed lately. The desacralization of spirituality, the lost meaning of art in education and the loss of popular and esoteric knowledge are symptoms of our decrepit gardens. Our own lives has lost meaning when our emotions crave contact but our minds are constantly confused. We end up seeking flourishment through “fake idols” which are stuck in Time, dead and provoking nothing but deception. The possibility for your work to fulfill you and fulfill others comes from the blossoming of your garden. It is an activity that one can practice at any time and involves care and re-occurrence. But you will thrill in the contemplation of your growing inner-work. This energy is important as much as it is for others for only a project lead by your emotional awareness will inspire the same level of experience. Only a work that makes you grow can make other people grow. Your attention must be on the flow, not closed on a slice of a definite phenomena but on the progression of things, on their balance, their movement, their direction. Your service, project, product aim at people to have an emotional response and you can cultivate their emotions by cultivating yours when you create. It is the only possible way that you can produce this effect. Major events in one’s life create the most artistic work because it is created through feeling.

All work should always remain a work on oneself, remain a movement, a momentum in accordance with the rest of your life, of your objectives. Do not feed the material things with your attention more than you feed your garden. Whatever you work on, you play a role in society by feeding people with your energy. If this energy is mostly placed out of time, on things that don’t make you grow or learn, this energy participates to the decay of all our gardens. You cannot pretend to work on something you are not actively cultivating inside you. The tools and products you are making are the vehicle of your learning experience. Technology became the answer we think we need but it has been taken apart from its artistic dimension, that is its emotional capacity. The machine must remain what it is, a machine, a tool. Next time you sit at your chair and stand at your desk, ask yourself, what energy are you creating for the world around you right now? Then pick your tool and say it.