In 1997 at one of the first Therefore public performances, we advertised with a handbill that listed a partial set of thesis statements:

• cultural ecosystems and the threat of media consolidation
• horizontal aesthetics in opposition to socio-political hierarchies
• art and economics through the lens of broken science
• the cost of freedom – evaluating the benefits of security and privacy
• politics of noise, preaching to the choir, and the relevancy of the feedback loop
• privatization of culture and the illusion of the avant-garde
• the patronizing of radical thought as a means of suppressing radical action

The ensuing decades have seen us trying to answer these questions. The only answers we have are more questions. What follows is our best attempt at answers or questions of not only these original statements but also a documentation of the full extent of our collective knowledge. This is a manifest of our understanding or lack thereof, and we leave it here.

In time our methodology and cosmology will be revealed, its many shapes and colors and cardinal directions. We must first consider the movement of sound, the celestial and infinitesimal, vibrating invisibly as it moves through us and to the farthest reaches of our perception. How do we slip past this infinity, viewed as a catch-all for the limits of our consciousness? Sound moves, pushing its way through emptiness and silence, through cartography beyond our constructions and considerations. We dance our way through this space unchoreographed to a music that serves as clock and compass.

This manifest is a force field against the complexity of the cosmos, questions of a start and a finish, a here and a there, and what is between and beyond. We are not writing to understand but rather to create the illusion we understand so that we can go on despite not having answers against a backdrop of the endless.

Crawling in, over, under and around this silence are entropic agents patiently digesting memory and pain as we go on mimicking the machines. Dust mites are holding congress, trajectories outlined with jittered-doodles on bone lava, tree roots, and capillary mutations. This kind of accuracy is something hard to imitate. We dig with our hands into that which permeates sweet and pungent as we look to the canopy.

We search for new vernaculars in lost methodologies using metaphysical exercises and compiling cryptic glossaries. We consider overstretching theorization, willing to champion the unseen out of obsolescence. Hypotheses of deep space mathematics, soft-core chronography, snail-shell-shaped architecture, golden-meaned and spiraling. But why and for what? For the communion with lost spirits, the reunion with ancestors, the longing for new language, one we have pined for, to speak quietly and intimately and simultaneously with heart, mind and soul. We hear a new song, the rush of revelation, a pulse through the bloodstream.

We seek to assemble these, to put our ears to ideas and whispers, transcribing this music that resonates more harmoniously without noise-canceling headphones. Drawing the listener into the shadowy place behind thought and apprehension, a cavernous room. The music outliving the mortal and metal, beyond us and our industrialized babbling. Its chorus, sing for the living not for the dead.

Manifestos and utopias are a form of ideological supremacy. Soft Manifest is slow and steady, not a declaration, not a deliverable, not a platitude, not an expectation. Like our music it is a performance of mantras, never the same, always undoing the mantra before, but rooted in a practice and a livelihood of uncertainty.

The moments directly before and after a performance slowly erode as distinct boundaries becoming a singular transitory state. This state then expands in all directions to encompass all states. There is no on or off for Therefore, there is no binary of playing or not playing, listening not listening, performing not performing. Therefore is an attitudinal alignment toward a constant embrace of the unknown, and is the unknown.toward a constant embrace of the unknown, and is the unknown.