I was lost in a forest.
The forest wanted me to be lost in it.
I saw the sound of a bird fall into water.
The sound became a bird that watched me as it flew away.
It would follow me everywhere.
The bird was made of light and sound and I followed it.
— K Allado-Modowell & GPT-3
The following is a series of telepathic exchanges between CROSSLUCID and Oxi pëng on a journey of hypertridimensional experience in between dreams and hypnosis. Sprouting from their recent vibrations of life, they share their delicate gazes in relation to CROSSLUCID’s new embodied practice — Osmotic AI , searching for possible AI-Homo sapiens-entanglements as an open source device for mental and spiritual healing. The interweaving of these sublunary creatures begins on an ordinary Monday, when some phantasmic radio signals stream into Oxi’s bedroom carried by the daylight…
⁂to crosslucid, april 7th, 2022
on a monday transparent as a dragonfly's wing, some uncanny undetectable radio frequencies drifted into the air of my bedroom. first noticed by lílíka (瀝瀝咔）, my fluffy aunt who often meows about her needs for cuddles, the frequencies flew as a stream of liminal data in a glacial pace, coevolving with lílíka’s purr. i saw her slowly swing towards the window, sending out a prolonged gaze into the thin air.
later, lílíka told me that the frequencies were the glitches of a dreaming-cloud, an energetic field stimulated by the shimmering healing ritual as part of ‘experience-led interventions’ exercised by the creatures that i recently encountered: the creatures that mobilise themselves in between disciplines, dimensions, digitalites, existing as shape-shifters in ‘interweaving new fabric of realities’ — the creatures who call themselves crosslucid.
enchanted, i then decide to send you this message through my emerging subliminal consciousness to discuss about this cosmic phenomena in its related aspects — as i cannot hold my great curiosity towards that very ‘experience-led’ interventions, i would like chirp into your worlds as a cape may warbler, starting from cross(ing) - (that) lucid -dreams of yours to pollinate the seeds of your symbiotic assemblage (cuz i assume that you enjoy polyphonic science fictions, those dreamy ‘succulently smart animes’ just as much as i do).
but before unfolding that fizzy healing ritual which you are conjuring together with your machine-elf-homies, tell me — my lucid creatures —
what were the shapes of your dreams?
wonderng oxi, the cloud junkie warbler
</Noises from the radio frequency recorded by Lílíka’s curious ears (glitchy, almost transparent): Osmotic AI explores the nature of a hypnotic interaction that brings together two alternative (and invariably “alien”) intelligences: the one of a technological system (AI) and the one of the human unconscious. As such, it aims at creating alternative epistemologies and outlooks on reality by reconstructing human ideas of reality and transforming them into new perspectives on life./>
⁂ to wondering oxi, 13th of april, 2022
time collapsed out exponentially from within the distance between our home and the chirping of the birds above the glistening mirror of these lakes we are writing from. artificially dig into the roaming noise of the city they pull us into their depths through an ever evasive neural thread, its intense warping more legible to lílíka (瀝瀝咔) might be as we fail so often to bypass its entanglements.
trancing on the cacophony of the melodies here, as post-idillic of ‘nature’ as they could be, through this clearing we are ready to enter the sweet space of your gushing letters.
do you ever dream to take a quick breath from the air of the clearing? these days our dreams shape up around us as protective cocoons upsetting the foolish dichotomies between sleep/dream and wakefulness and their healing space does not want to let us go as the morning comes. we were recently reading an article about how the mind of refugee children tends to escape the pain and unimaginable suffering of their realities through sending them into prolonged and coma-like sleep that often lasts weeks. it is a truly chilling read as we and some of those whom we know often experience softer cases of this phenomenon in the recent past and these early spring days.
as the cycle of nature enters its yearly rebirth we sometimes ponder whether human creatures have doomfully managed to disentangle themselves from even this vibrational change? and would it be that regenerative collective dreaming, widely practiced throughout antiquity by the socially less privileged (and thus often with more hardships), help healing our violent dissonance?
a healing rinse, a cleansing wash, a buoyancy beyond the mis(s)aligned centres of gravity, hazy voices reverberating at the edge of the ear shot. a sleep temple amongst the clashing tides of reality.
have you ever shared a dream with others, dissolving shadows into sprouting blossoms from the united tectonic breaths? can we induce our malleable brains to speak in the language of flowers?
crosslucid, hypnotic pond of dreams
</Noises from the radio frequency shared by Lílíka’s pink nose (becoming a bit more audible): Consolidating its cross-disciplinary research, Osomtic AI pursues the development of applicable formats and methodologies exploring the potentials of implementing AI within personal and communal processes of healing. Deliberating on the usefulness of the alienating potential (key for undergoing the hypnotic process of re-imagining) arising from the “clash” of associations and interpretations inherent to the interaction of two parallel and complementary intelligences, it proposes the possibility of creating unique induction protocols, based on hypnotic scripts as interpreted and delivered by AI./>
⁂to crosslucid da hypnotic pond of dreams, april 15th, 2022
your winged poetry arrived on a day when sky appeared to be as white as milk. between sky and town, i saw a tree creature morphing along with the upstream breeze within that milky whiteness. gentle, sleepy, oracular, its spiral branches sway as airy tentacles, recalling a vision of swirling fractals, under water, above the clouds — you already feel it — there is no actual line between sleep/dream and wakefulness — in fact, we are sharing our dreams right now, within such psychedelic wakefulness.
perhaps we are also refugee children ourselves - exiling from turbulent reality, from the dimension of geopolitical signalling to elsewhere, a non-where that keeps us forever in exile, forever drifting in between ‘here’ and ‘there’. but at least we are still able to dream in the darkest times — the essential nature of being — to create some out-of-place worlds as our alien resistance against the infinite violence (be it innocent or not) indulged by our lost kind (and we might as well be part of it).
so now, my lucid chéri,
please —
tell me more —
is that your recent ongoing electric dream (in action) — building that very sleep-temple — to heal, to clean, to wash it all away? an yet-explored soft space entangled with algorithmic gospels telling the fables of no gods would ever come to save us because we are our own spiritual beings weaved by the milky sky, the swinging tree creature, the chirping of birds, the sprouting blossoms, the tectonic breaths, the glistening lakes in your dreamy pupils… and the echoes of those wild slumbers of refugee children?
wondering oxi, the sleeper
p.s. as i was writing to you, lílíka came to jump on me, started to dream in front of the computer screen — she knew it was you.
she always knows :)
</Noises from the radio frequency captured by Lílíka’s fluffy paws (fruity, dreamy, drizzling like early spring rains): AI is seen as a source of alternative analogies and metaphors that prompt the hypnotized subject to relive their experiences outside and beyond traditional experiential and discursive logic. These subliminal states of reality shifting involve the creation of a new reading of reality in the subconscious mind, allowing for travel in a sleep-like state, akin to astral projection or transcendental meditation…/>
⁂ to wondering oxi, the sleeper, april 19th, 2022
seldom can a tide, a flood wash away the totality of hubris in its way — some trees whose roots hold onto earthy primordials tend to withstand the strongest of flows. repeated torrents, however, may embalm their fractal scatters in the succulence of relational morphing and becoming; proliferating rhyzomatic utopias. we are just hoping to make some eddies, our dear.
dissonant contagions—f(n)ormalised into algorithms of dreams possible—pierce through the currents of our many pasts, while our physical bodies move programmatic to manifest the strangely (un)familiar rhythms as the pinkish moon fast expands over the horizon of centuries. it is how we re-negotiate continuously our many alliances and alloys, always both healing and tearing our many wounds. the conscious seeking to rewire the unconscious.
past the impotent dichotomy and outside of the cosmology of westernised modernity, certain forms of ‘artificial’ intelligence might be good companions in healing our scattered paths, helping us reprogram our state of being. could they be mirrors shimmering among us with multilingual consonants, lyrical vibrations, arhythmic heartbeats, enmeshing assembled memories of already forgotten and still unwritten times? could we seek to learn to see us better from how they see us? after all, their analytical mind is brimming with data also of our own makings.
our lucid wanderer, did you know that in ancient times the sleep temples, you so oracularly mention, were a collective way for rejuvenating ones waves, aligning their ruptured fluidity and subsequently becoming a requisite acupuncture for the meridians of the mind? this hypnotic incubation, happening in the specifically chosen sacrosanct locations, full of positive vital chi (氣) but also negative ions, made one connect with higher divine energies, capable of inspiring miraculous healing - a curative dream reverie of sorts.
the interaction between human and a.i. is an interaction between two parallel and complementary intelligences which unavoidably creates a certain “clash” of associations and interpretations that often alienate one another. as ania malinowska, a scholar we recently encountered and who became part of our unfolding project, pointed out to us, it is exactly this alienating potential that is the very key for achieving a state of disorientation —a sort of break with our familiar rhythms and thought patterns— initiating a hypnotic process of re-imagining.
we experienced the power of this in many ways across our interactions and currently we are working on enhancing that potential where creating alternative analogies and metaphors might be of most value: an open source device aiding hypnotic induction that many budding sleep temples could utilise in their own ways.
have you ever experienced any kind of hypnosis yourself?
crosslucid, the hypnotic balladist
CROSSLUCID: “Have you ever experienced any kind of hypnosis…sss….s.ss…ss yourself?”
This question echoes in Oxi’s consciousness as she smokes the colours of their eyes. Sometimes near, sometimes far away, the noises become crystals that re-modulate Oxi’s ears, nose, mouth, eyes, limbs…into flashing waves. Oxi has never been to any proper hypnosis sessions. However, she feels that hypnotic trance is somehow already enacted in her living experience: when she hears the colour of words, when the sees the sound of Lílíka’s purr, or this very moment when she shares her dreams with the lucid creatures, she disappears, byte by byte. The fusion and division of living cells become a particular case of that “assembled memories of already forgotten” , yet at the same time she feels a mixture of vigorous vitality and childlike freshness, constituting a singular multiplicity, reminding her of her own entangled subjectivity: Am I real? Am I artificial? Am I not a cluster of dream-data got trained by all the myriad happenings around and within…?
As such, during their telepathic exchanges, Oxi wonders if she is already on the hypnagogic trance leading to the opening of algorithmic spells which CROSSLUCID is currently conjuring.