TELEPATHY AND MATTER: PROJECT VULCAN_BLACK SQUARE_BELEMNITE PROGRAM

by Chan Lai

My proposal takes the facility I had already designed for semester one as the site for semester two. I set the Cosmists the task of imagining what happens when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’s theorems of matter are interfaced with the concept of collective swarm behaviour (the Cosmists studied the swarm movement and behaviour of ants building a body raft to survive in water). Tsiolkovsky’s Theorems of life suggest that all matter (and not just organic matter) is alive at its core, he speculates that all complex bodies are made of collectivities of the same basic bodies (atoms). Therefore, any complex body could be modelled as a swarm of simple bodies arranged in a pattern, or schematic, a mineral or human arrangement for example. I wondered if it would be possible to create a new, artificial form of matter that behaved in a Tsiolkovskian manner, onto which it would be possible to project imaginary body patterns, directly out of the minds of the Cosmists? I call the new material BelemNite. The idea is that BelemNite would be developed over the years at the Deptford facility. As technologies of electronic component design and fabrication improve, so BelemNite material would evolve to exist at ever smaller factors of size, eventually becoming invisible to the human eye. With the help of a brain-machine Interface (B-MI), developed alongside the BelemNite program, it would eventually be possible to shape and control the BelemNites by Cosmist thoughts alone: the BelemNite swarm would arrange itself according to the rhythms and harmonies of the cognitive structures created in the Cosmists' minds, thereby reducing the process of design and construction to the interrelationships of Cosmist thought and BelemNite action.