We’re feeling kinda AHHHHHH!
10.2023
Beyond the obvious ills and injustices of existence, the general texture feels off. Life has undergone a sort of flattening. Things trend toward the efficient and quantifiable. People can present as curated brands rather than nuanced living beings. Means of pleasure are co-opted by corporations then sold back to us as consumer choice. Humor and ideas are recycled then mimicked then echoed into an ever-fluctuating media void. New technologies creep into culture without consent, swiftly altering our behavior & baseline. Identities and aesthetics are packaged into categories and cores. Consumptive incentives lend us pseudo-needs and fabricated desires. Frenzied media cycles privilege accumulation over awareness. Style overrides substance. Conspicuous clout impresses more than genuine expression. It’s a certain frictionless quality, a low hum of banality, an all encompassing vibe shift I’d prefer to not survive.
Figuring out what exactly is off feels a bit like asking a fish to point out the water. It’s ambient and atmospheric, hardly recognizable as anything distinct. But I sense this is a shared conundrum: feeling bored with the cultural current but floating along with mild discontent; feeling disappointed in the social order but little ability to alter its infrastructure; resenting distraction yet craving it; seeking connection but finding spon-con littered distraction loops; longing for more then dismissing this intuition as earnest naivety.
I also sense it’s getting harder to recognize the tiny and myriad ways that life is shaped by unseen inputs. The dominant mythologies of our time are misguided at best, sinister at worst. Be it the productive linearity of late capitalism, the contrarian passivity of the extremely online, the quantified post-humanism of techno-utopists, the rumbling undercurrent of misogynistic conservatism, the dysfunctional neoliberalism of the “left.” The fragmented narratives scaffolding our world have a way of co-opting our desires, capitalizing on our creativity, and stunting our curiosities… usually for some meaningless ends that nobody truly wants.
What if it could be otherwise?!
We found ourselves asking this often, laying around the floor of our Bushwick basement while thinking up visions of how we’d like to exist. We both derive from a world of mythology, each raised in evangelical small college towns in the South. In them, we longed for greater meaning and ran up against objective Truth, we submitted to normality then rebelled against it, we reached towards questions and grew tired of easy answers, we swung into cynicism then spiraled toward awe.
As we’ve stretched from our origins, the mythic impulse remains. CYBEL is an attempt to seek new mythologies and question old ones – to join the chorus of people asking how things could be otherwise. The act of questioning alone summons a sort of active stance, a sturdy armor with which we can resist the consumption-oriented algorithmic order that swallows authentic desires and replaces them with a palatable yet altogether mundane substitute!
CYBEL space is an open invite, not an exclusive scene. It’s a means of looking alive out there, paying attention, getting curious.. about?
In the spirit of otherwise-ness, anything goes! Cyberworlds and cybernetics; mythologies and magics; solarpunk and symbols; stories and signs; techno-mediated existence; feelings, figures, fakes; rethinking and rerouting; the spiritual and scientific; the everyday and the infinite; selfhoods and origins; media and mediums; life online and life off.
Through this lens, all press is good press. All questions, ideas, experiences, & thoughts contribute to a vast and robust dataset from which we can fetch new and varied visions of how we’d like to exist. Because there’s no single vision, no objective answer, and no particular aesthetic or idea to adhere to. There’s only a portal of possibility that we’ve always felt drawn to. Through it, we hope to find other people who want (as cybernetician Norbert Wiener put it) to pursue the uphill battle against the prevailing tendency towards the commonplace and banal!!!
Figuring out what exactly is off feels a bit like asking a fish to point out the water. It’s ambient and atmospheric, hardly recognizable as anything distinct. But I sense this is a shared conundrum: feeling bored with the cultural current but floating along with mild discontent; feeling disappointed in the social order but little ability to alter its infrastructure; resenting distraction yet craving it; seeking connection but finding spon-con littered distraction loops; longing for more then dismissing this intuition as earnest naivety.
I also sense it’s getting harder to recognize the tiny and myriad ways that life is shaped by unseen inputs. The dominant mythologies of our time are misguided at best, sinister at worst. Be it the productive linearity of late capitalism, the contrarian passivity of the extremely online, the quantified post-humanism of techno-utopists, the rumbling undercurrent of misogynistic conservatism, the dysfunctional neoliberalism of the “left.” The fragmented narratives scaffolding our world have a way of co-opting our desires, capitalizing on our creativity, and stunting our curiosities… usually for some meaningless ends that nobody truly wants.
What if it could be otherwise?!
We found ourselves asking this often, laying around the floor of our Bushwick basement while thinking up visions of how we’d like to exist. We both derive from a world of mythology, each raised in evangelical small college towns in the South. In them, we longed for greater meaning and ran up against objective Truth, we submitted to normality then rebelled against it, we reached towards questions and grew tired of easy answers, we swung into cynicism then spiraled toward awe.
As we’ve stretched from our origins, the mythic impulse remains. CYBEL is an attempt to seek new mythologies and question old ones – to join the chorus of people asking how things could be otherwise. The act of questioning alone summons a sort of active stance, a sturdy armor with which we can resist the consumption-oriented algorithmic order that swallows authentic desires and replaces them with a palatable yet altogether mundane substitute!
CYBEL space is an open invite, not an exclusive scene. It’s a means of looking alive out there, paying attention, getting curious.. about?
In the spirit of otherwise-ness, anything goes! Cyberworlds and cybernetics; mythologies and magics; solarpunk and symbols; stories and signs; techno-mediated existence; feelings, figures, fakes; rethinking and rerouting; the spiritual and scientific; the everyday and the infinite; selfhoods and origins; media and mediums; life online and life off.
Through this lens, all press is good press. All questions, ideas, experiences, & thoughts contribute to a vast and robust dataset from which we can fetch new and varied visions of how we’d like to exist. Because there’s no single vision, no objective answer, and no particular aesthetic or idea to adhere to. There’s only a portal of possibility that we’ve always felt drawn to. Through it, we hope to find other people who want (as cybernetician Norbert Wiener put it) to pursue the uphill battle against the prevailing tendency towards the commonplace and banal!!!