In the fall of 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

We have been trying to answer these questions for the last twenty five years, and the only answers we have are more questions. What will follow is our best attempt at answering or questioning not only these original statements, but the full extent of our collective knowledge. In the process, we leave the remaining work to the reader in an effort to liberate ourselves from our current dimensionality, to something completely new. This is a manifest of our understanding, or lack thereof, and we leave it here.

Our methodology and cosmology will reveal itself in time, with its many shapes and colors and cardinal directions. As we start, we must first consider the movement of sound. Celestial infinitesimal unperceived intestinal, vibrating invisibly as it moves through us and to the farthest reaches of our perception. How do we slip past this infinity, that has been established as a catch-all for the limits of our consciousness? Sound can only move, because it pushes its way through emptiness and silence, whose own cartography is beyond our constructions and considerations. We dance our way through this space unchoreographed, to a music that serves as clock and as 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 the what is between and beyond. We are not writing to understand, but rather create the illusion we understand, so that we can then go on despite not having an answer against the backdrop of endless silence.

Crawling in, over and around this silence are entropic agents patiently digesting memory and pain, as we go on mimicking the machines. Dust mites are holding congress, their trajectories outlined with jittered-doodles of 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 cryptic glossaries. We consider overstretching theorization, willing to champion the unseen out of obsolescence. Hypotheses of deep space mathematics, soft-core chronography, helical toroid architecture. But why and for what? For the communion with lost spirits, the reunion with ancestors, the same longing for a new language; one that we pine 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; though a cavernous room at the center, it is still remarkably empty. This place is dust and divine. Alive in death of mortal and metal, beyond us and our industrialized babbling. Hear it say, sing for the living, not for the dead.