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Maya Hackers designs ritual
objects for the Re programming of collective imagery, inspired by shamanic practices applied in the
social and political realm.
Maya Hackers promotes research and development of projects at the interface
between art, social design, ecology and sustainability.
Maya
Hackers produces collective experimental art works in public spaces to promote
the Maya Hackers projects and implied
concepts.
Maya
Hackers is an experiment in social
healing. The societies product
of the colonization and exploitation manifest many symptoms caused by war techniques applied to the population.
The
short term and local goals of the project aim to create bridges, to provide a
way for Guatemalan people to approach the Mayan cultural and genetic heritage,
on a neutral ground far from the heavily charged stereotypes created by the
colonization procedure. And in
this way the project lies at the heart of the unsolved problem of creating a “Guatemalan” identity.
The
long-term philosophical goal of Maya Hackers is the preservation of Bio Diversity and Cultural Diversity, on the
grounds that interconnected diversity is what gives rise to emergent phenomena
such as life, culture, science, techniques, memes, etc. In the same way integrated information is what gives
rise to consciousness.
Although
Maya Hackers refers to the Mayan culture and the local Guatemalan situation,
the ideas can be applied directly to other colonial
societies, but also have a global relevance since corporations have
successfully applied the colonization techniques to the world population.
The
ancient divide and conquer has been applied to the extreme producing an
“atomized” society of detached individuals in the centre of their own
“universe” created specially for them by an ensemble of techniques driven by
corporations.
FOOTNOTES AND SOURCE CODE:
THE DUTCH
DESIGN WEEK AND THE EINDHOVEN EXPERIMENT.
Maya Hackers designs ritual objects, not to be considered by themselves outside the
context for which they have been designed, because its purpose is not design by
itself, but to provide an answer to a question, solution to a problem, to
create a link between two disconnected things.
MAYA
HACKERS AND THE CYBER-SPATIALIZED NATION STATE.
This article by American
sociologist Diane Nelson talks about the way Mayan Cultural groups have Re
Programmed the meaning of words and created new terms in colloquial language to
change long standing prejudices in Guatemalan society. It shows an excellent
view of the process of construction of a national indigenous identity, and how
it fails to embrace the population that tries to deny their cultural and ethnic
heritage to avoid racism and discrimination. This has inspired many Maya
Hackers projects and the idea of Re Programming the collective imagery. The
name was hacked by Guatemalan writer Alan Mills to represent these collective
efforts of re-programming. [BACK]
RITUAL OBJECTS
The ritual object acts as a catalyst accelerating a hidden
potential to manifest itself, and it can be anything, from a stone monument to
the scent of a perfume, the sound of a new instrument, an educational program,
a documentary film, sound recording, clothing, etc. Every situation that needs to be intervened may require a
totally new object, performance or ritual action.
These objects are created
(or destroyed) for the purpose of re creating experiences that lead the
individual trough a process of changing the point of view, re-evaluation,
assimilation, re programming of meanings, etc. [BACK]
SHAMANIC PRACTICES
This is
possible because shamanic practices assume everything is
interconnected and is animated by a soul that is susceptible to illness, and
healing. And this fits well with the actual state of development of the ensemble of
all techniques, where a change in one technique generates changes in many
others, and where the purpose and function of an object is determined by an
immaterial set of constraints imposed by the system (such as moral, economical,
political, racial, cultural, etc).
Therefore if
you equate the soul of the mystics with this emergent system property of a
network (Synergy) you see that it is not a farfetched idea, and you understand
why the shamanic practices are in use since many thousands of years.
A meme, or a
technique, like a gene, will spread onto new generations if it does provide an
advantage. And shamanic practices do their job, regardless of the explanations
given to them. [BACK]
Ancient civilizations
discovered that the psyche of the individual projects out to the social nature
of the collective, giving an organic structure to a society. Some rites are
carried in public for the population to engage in Re enactments of portions of
their History, philosophy, mythology, etc. To induce a collective state of
mind. The Psycho Ritual technique used by Cristóbal Jodorowsky is a
contemporary example of the way this re enactment can be used to re-program a
traumatic event.
(modern powers
have their own rites with different names). [BACK]
In this era
many people define themselves by the products they consume, clothing, music,
books, art, etc. And so the Maya
Hacker projects seek to create consumption design products that sell because or
their functionality, but contain the message we want to convey. [BACK]
GOOD MEMES
FOR THE GLOBAL MEMETIC POOL
Mayan culture has resisted
more than 500 years of brutal abuse and repeated attempts to destroy it, and
some of these memes that remain, can be traced back to many civilizations, even
before the Mayan, and therefore are very interesting to study when we consider
social design. [BACK]
Techniques such as to
divide the population, avoid their technical development and access to science,
the elimination of leaders and virtuous people, repress all forms of
organization, and many others, but one I want to single out is the creation of
a social class of people, of the same genetic type as the original population,
but with the culture of the colonizing country, to serve as intermediaries
between the oppressed population and the foreign corporations exploiting the
country, because this is the focal group of the short-term goals in the
project.
Those are ancient
techniques, described already in The Art of War by Tzun Tzu, or the Politics by
Aristotle, and have been applied successfully trough millennia, but they have
also evolved in different directions, and they have been applied to the whole
world population by the transnational corporations. [BACK]
The wrong interpretations
of Darwin ideas leading to the “survival of the fittest” and to consider
evolution as progress in a one dimensional view of the universe are the cause
of many system diseases of our modern society including the extremely wasteful
“economical” system. [BACK]
The main problem about
these colonial societies is that are located near the most Bio diverse
ecosystems and the mindless exploitation of people and natural resources
eventually will destroy the remnants of those ecosystems. [BACK]
Life is the
most valuable thing we have on earth, this should be evident to everyone, but
even the most successfully brainwashed should understand that this is not a
poetic or ideological statement. Four billion years of evolution has produced a
vast, astronomically huge amount of chemical products, solutions to
environmental problems, engineering problems, design problems, etc. that we are
only beginning to explore. If we loose the bio diversity there is no way we can
get it back, other than waiting some millions of years.
Life on earth
has been trough 5 massive extinctions that reduced a highly rich ecosystem to
very few species of animals and plants. And every time recovers to form a very
bio-diverse ecosystem. And so, our human activities, even if we manage to wipe
ourselves out this planet, will matter little for the history of life in this
part of the universe. [BACK]
We know how modern
national identities have been designed by the execution of an assembly of
techniques, including propaganda, education, advertising, creating heroes,
monuments, myths, laws, institutions, symbols etc. Corporations inherited those
techniques and nowadays people define themselves by the products they like. [BACK]
Integrated Information
Theory by Giulio Tononi defines consciousness as an emergent synergic property
of integrated information, and it is the difference in the information carried
by the sum of the parts, and the information implied by the whole. [BACK]
By Jaques Ellul is a book
on the theory of Techniques as they are at the present state of technology,
which differs qualitatively from early stages of development, at the moment
that the ensemble of techniques acquire internal entanglement, giving rise to
the emergent synergic properties of automatism. [BACK]
How The Corporatism
Conquered The World, and How We Can Take It Back. By Douglass Rushkoff. The
book explains how we’ve become disconnected from our world and from one
another, and how to come back to a real and human-scaled society. It is very
interesting to see that many of the solutions proposed are similar to practices
that are still present in indigenous societies around the world, and certainly
in the ancient civilizations. This doesn’t mean a return to an old and less
developed state, instead, this shows that those techniques are very natural and
get rediscovered all the time, everywhere, and we should pay attention with
different eyes. [BACK]
Algorithms and ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS
The maya hackers are
decoding and re programming familiar binary opposites such as ancient and
modern, indigenous and cosmopolitan, past and future, mysticism and logic, the
scientific and the spiritual.
The general purpose of the
projects is to revert the instructions to enslave a population given by
Aristotle in his “Politics” (chapter IX) in discussing the means to preserve a
tyranny. Basically the projects aim to create mutual confidence, to give
recognition to people, to spread culture, promote collaborations, create
symbols of identity, etc. [BACK]
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