Maybe Day 2022
A contribution...
Happy Maybe Day, fine friends!
Bobby Campbell is once again hosting the annual Maybe Day which celebrates the work and ideas of Robert Anton Wilson. A webring at New Trajectories provides curious explorers with a merry-go-round of maybe logic and creativity. Be sure to wander about the work of other RAW-heads.
My contribution to the webring is a teaser booklet for my current project, Reality Tunnels, a book which builds on RAW and Leary’s idea of a reality tunnel. About three years in the making so far, I have mined the deep waters of cybernetics, propaganda, psychedelic metaprogramming, neurology, simulation theory, and psychology to construct a model which (hopefully) can bring the meme into the Information Age. As most of us are consumers of information at this point, the idea that information-creates-perception is more relevant to our personal and collective realities than ever before. And as we become increasingly embedded in a world mediated by digital computing and images, it shows no signs of stopping.
To tease my project and gather fellow creatives, Saint Tuesday (curator at The Great Library of Eris) and I have put together a booklet which provides outline of the book and a very brief overview of the ideas explored in each chapter.
Each piece of art was created using two AI image generators, Dall-E and Wombo Dream. They are rough interpretations of images which have occupied my head for many months and I think they hit the mark in portraying the theme of each chapter. My favorite images are Section 3.0 which represents the reality tunnel model, an appropriation of Alfred Korzybski’s structural differential, and Section 7.0 (Layer 4) which accurately represents the constriction of information down to a layer of narrative and identity through which one views the world. One finds it difficult to see the world beyond their abstraction at this layer, making ones reality tunnel that of personal identity based on certainty and confirmation.
As an experiment, the identity of Doctor Richard Waterloo (DRW) remains veiled in the matrix and open to new formation. Just as our increasingly post-modern world repurposes the identities of real people for use in meta-narratives, the author of Reality Tunnels serves as a meta-character to undergo such treatment. If characters are who we portray them to be within a moment, DRW embraces this ontological bug as a feature of malleability and appropriation. We shall see what comes of him as the book is written, published, and inserted into the world.
My goal with this teaser booklet is two-fold: Test the waters for the idea of reality tunnels within the info-culture, and to gather others who are interested in participating in its construction. If you are interested in following along with the project or creating with these ideas, the project’s Discord server is open.
Download the teaser booklet on the Reality Tunnels website here.
Take care and stay weird.
DRW