Wednesday 8/12 - Thursday 8/13 Tickets and scheduling coming to Gray Area
MC David Gill of Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center (PRRIC) will be hosting both nights
Live Sonic Deconstruction by 'Know - 1″ Extreme ambiance provided by Kimric Smythie (formerly SRL and other performance groups)
Films / Visual Media
Music
R.U. Sirius/Phriendz/Digital Dead/Virtual Pretenderers -No one expects this inquisition
Your Leader Oakland-based guitar and synth strangling madness
(Guillermo Gómez-Peña)
Performance Art
Talks
* The performances and viewings might be subject to change
* Price and schedule specifics have not been established yet
send inquiries to Sirioso@Yahoo.com under the topic Deliria2
Mondo 2000's R.U. Sirius Invites All to Join Him & His Phriendz in the Gulf of Deliria [ 19-May-25 6:34pm ]Music & Multimedia Bash Gathers the Cool Futuristic Tribes at Gray Area on 6/7
San Fransisco's Gray Area Grand Theater (2655 Mission St.) is where the action will be on Saturday June 7 as the cyberculture and counterculture tribes from the Bay Area and beyond will converge to think, share wisdom, revel, rock out and dance to 21st Century rock music in "The Gulf of Deliria." The event celebrates the live debut of the band R.U. Sirius & Phriendz and the soft release of the band's album The Smarter Kings of Deliria alongside talks and presentations by some of the community's keenest minds. It celebrates the vitality of the alternative cultural universe in the wild new millennium and stirs opposition to today's discombobulated state of the nation and the world.
Sirius is best known as the founding editor of the visionary Mondo 2000 magazine, which "was at the leading edge of a new culture emerging around digital technology," in the 1990s, says Wired magazine, which followed in Mondo's wake. He is the author of 14 books, including one co-written with psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary. Called "legendary" in the media, Sirius has been featured in a Time magazine cover story, The New York Times and numerous other publications. He has recorded three albums of potently original music: his latest with his futuristic rock project R.U. Sirius & Phriendz, one as Mondo Vanilli recorded for Trent Reznor's Nothing Records (but as-yet-unreleased), and his late 1970s/early '80s punk band the Party Dogs.
He and the band will be joined by kindred visionary speakers and presentations from the Bay Area's left-field bohemian brain trust:
• Bart Nagel: Art director and photographic shaman for Mondo 2000.
• Mark Pauline: Co-founder of the machine-driven performance art collective Survival Research Laboratories.
• Bean (Tina Blaine): Former leader and co-founder of the internationally-acclaimed cybertribal electronic percussion ensemble D'Cuckoo.
• Lee Felsenstein: Seminal personal computer inventor and original hacker.
• Naut Humon: Composer, curator, performer and founder/artistic director of Recombinant Media Labs, which produces and presents artworks and performances based on spatial media synthesis and its enveloping virtual, alternative and mixed reality offspring.
• Rudy Rucker: Mathematician, computer scientist, sci-fi author and a founder of the cyberpunk literary movement.
• Linda Jacobson: Extended reality pioneer and co-founder of Wired magazine.
• John Law: artist, culture-jammer, neon sign technician and primary member of the Cacophony Society and co-founder of Burning Man.
• V. Vale: Editor, writer/author, musician and founder of RE/Search Publications,whose "against-the-status-quo" works stimulate the imagination and optimistic skepticism.
• Cindy Cohn: Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• John Sanborn: Pioneering media and video artist who has embedded his futuristic work into corporate and digital entertainment culture and the aesthetic cutting edge.
• Cintra Wilson: Writer, performer and cultural critic known as “the Dorothy Parker of the cyber age.”
The event follows through from Ken Kesey's famed 1960s "Acid Tests" that fostered San Francisco's freak counterculture with a 21st Century upgrade. The evening promises inspiration, provocation, brain food for thought, resistance and rebellion, and most of all reveling and fun galore for freely-freaking outsiders and futurists. Its goal is MADA, MARA and MATA approved: Make America Dance, Rock and Think Again.
The suggested donation at the door from $5 to $40; proceeds will benefit Gray Area, which recently lost critical funding due to MAGA and Musky DOGE depredations. Doors open at 7 PM. Special advance CD copies of The Kings of Deliria as well as books and other merchandise will be on sale at the event.
For further information:
Cyberpunks Mutants & Mondoids presentCome to the Gulf of Deliria
Freaks in the Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech Culture. [ 23-Sep-24 11:34pm ]R.U. Sirius & Shira Chess are pleased (and a little
frightened) to announce that we have contracted with
Strange Attractor Press to publish Freaks in the
Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech
Culture. With a forward by Grant Morrison.
Before the entire world was online, before it was divided
into social media enclaves and corporate-sanctioned
“likes,” before even WIRED magazine, there was Mondo
2000. Published from 1989-1997, Mondo reached a peak
distribution of about 100,000, but the magazine was even
more influential than its distribution implied. M2K was
raved about by 90s media outlets, consumed by early tech
culture, and demonstrated a transition from the literary
cyberpunk style of Gibson and Vinge into an aspirational
cyberpunk aesthetic that leaked into the material world. In
1994, Douglas Rushkoff described Mondo as the "voice of
cyberculture."
Published by a rag-tag team of psychonauts and
counterculture weirdos, and based out of a Berkeley Hills
mini-mansion, the parties and strange goings-on were
almost as legendary as the magazine itself. The Mondo
publishers — editor-in-chief R.U. Sirius and Domineditrix
Queen Mu — were not technologists. Yet their Bay Area
publication created a desire for the technological zeitgeist
of the coming millennium. In turn, the high (and sometimes
low) weirdness of Mondo established a kaleidoscopic onramp
that rocketed a lot of early adaptor mutants (or
"Mondoids") onto the so-called “information superhighway”
of the late 90s and early 00s.
Part memoir, part history, and part critical analysis, Freaks
in the Machine tells the storied adventures of the
magazine’s tumultuous history, its strange cast of
characters and its irreverent content.
"Mondo was the next bold stage in an evolutionary advance where street
cred and an underground ethos would come with the potential to appeal to
a mainstream audience, to wake up the straight world, announcing its
arrival like a flare over the horizon so everyone could see and know this
was the signal they'd been waiting for." -Grant Morrison
R.U. Sirius is still best known as the editor-in-chief of the
great 1990s cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000 although
some historians insist that he should be most remembered
for his skills as a second baseman in the West Islip New
York little league while others have raved about the
infrequent and disturbing live appearances of the band
Mondo Vanilli. [Note from Shira: There were no historians.]
He has written for Time, Rolling Stone, Salon, WIRED and
a bunch of other publications that are stored on the tip of
his tongue. Books include Counterculture Through The
Ages (with Dan Joy), Design for Dying (with Timothy
Leary) and Cyberpunk Handbook (with St. Jude & Bart
Nagel).
Shira Chess is an Associate Professor in Entertainment &
Media Studies at the University of Georgia and a
recovering game studies scholar. She is the author of
several books on digital culture and video games,
including the forthcoming MIT Press book The Unseen
Internet: Conjuring the Occult in Digital Discourse. She
joins this project to add context and history, to referee any
nonsense, to try to make sense of Sirius's lunatic ravings,
and to excise any excesses of cringe.
The post Freaks in the Machine: Mondo 2000 in Late 20th Century Tech Culture. appeared first on Mondo 2000.
Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL [ 21-Aug-23 5:28pm ]Propaganda poster by Ed Reibsamen with a little help from Midjourney
by Aragorn Eloff
There’s been a lot written lately about the so-called TESCREAList ideology that is currently hegemonic in the Silicon Valley tech circles frequented by people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. TESCREAL stands for transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism – terms that are probably at least intuitively familiar. Reading recent critical descriptions of this facile, elitist ideology, which is driving a lot of the hype around machine learning, I’m struck by how familiar it all seems. Listening to a podcast on 60s psychedelia on my run this morning, it suddenly all made sense.
It turns out you can trace a pretty direct line back from TESCREAL ‘philosophers’ like Kurzweil and Bostrom to Wired magazine and the extropians mailing list, and from there to the legendary Mondo2000 magazine – a 90s tech-enthusiast counterculture publication from California put together by old sixties heads enthused by nascent technologies like the web, VR and ‘nootropics’. Indeed, 1992’s Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge, a gorgeous typographic mess of glossy 3d graphics and paeans to the coming techno-singularity, feels almost like a secret peek into the TESCREAL gang’s wildest fantasies, although regulars like Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Dery and Bruce Sterling were admittedly far more interesting than the current dreck. Mondo 2000 was, in turn, the successor to the less glossy High Frontiers and Reality Hackers, 80s publications that mixed cyberpunk and surrealism with phone phreaking and experimental music. And then, of course, there was the psychedelic enthusiasm, particularly the strong echoes of one Timothy Leary.
As a diligent student at the Hofmann and McKenna school for young dropouts in the early 90s, I devoured all the Tim Leary books I could get my hands on. Classics like Psychedelic Prayers, High Priest and The Psychedelic Experience, but also an oddly singular text titled Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis, published in 1977. The book was written while Leary was languishing in jail for his psychedelics advocacy, and marks a shift in attention away from LSD and towards quintessentially TESCREAList topics like space migration, life extension and so forth. Indeed, Tim essentially argues in the book that by the year 2000 we’ll all be immortals travelling through space and indulging in increasingly exotic pleasures while expanding our intelligence using computers and smart drugs. As a useful heuristic, he coined some acronyms that are particularly revealing: SMI2LE (Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension), HOME (High Orbit Mini-Earths) and HEAD (Hedonic Engineering And Design).
Essentially then, Tim Leary, psychologist and psychedelics guru, synthesised a fairly significant chunk of the philosophy that would become TESCREALism while sitting in his prison cell, undoubtedly fantasizing about the great outdoors and all the experiences he was missing out on. My fellow students and I also spent a fair amount of time in the early 90s learning how to SMI2LE and use our HEADs while gazing up into the stars waiting for our new HOMEs to be ready. In retrospect it was in large part a naive fantasy fueled in no insignificant part by prodigious consumption of 5-HT2A receptor agonists.
There is a grain of intuitive truth to Leary’s dreams, of course -—we could and should try to enrich life in whatever way we can – but when divorced from the messiness of real life in all its social, political and ecological complexities, SMI2LE, like TESCREALism (and, yes, like Fully Automated Luxury Communism) is the kind of indulgent hopium that’s fine, perhaps even vital, when you’re 16, but probably not when you’re a billionaire with immense economic and political power seeking to enact your juvenile fantasies at the expense of the rest of the world. More importantly though, the TESCREALists are far, far more boring than Leary and the Mondo crowd. We could do a lot better.
The post Leary, Mondo2000, and TESCREAL appeared first on Mondo 2000.
Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli [ 11-Apr-23 4:38am ]Sacred Rites: Journal Entries of a Gnostic Heretic
Antero Alli
Falcon Press
2023
review by R.U. Sirius
Antero Alli has been a master at gifting others with their presence in the moment and in the world as it is… and the world that we feel and imagine, although he is too humble to make such claims. His ritual journal entries bring to life the personal and group dynamics of some of his "sacred rites." Herein Alli takes us with him as he dances on light and falls, stumbles and hurts, rises with great inner strength and then backs off and makes space for the others to struggle and play with their own angels, demons, ancestral Jungian archetypes, mutable gendered forms, true memories and conjured reflections and refractions of their personal and group experiences past and present.
Who else has shared hir journey into a sort of embodiment of depth psychology married to the theatrical and cinematic artistry of a unique individual mind? Did Gurdjieff leave behind such generous notes? Did Artaud ever climb out of his own tortured mind to guide others into a theater of revelation and share the results? I think not.
As a lonely writer and minor league media trickster playing and toiling in the fields of counterculture and model agnosticism — I am jealous of those who got to be present for Alli's physically active deep soul uncoverings — these experiences that he calls Sacred Rites. I always intended to join one of these experiences but time was my master and my excuse. I was a busy little beaver playing in McLuhans spider web of endless mediations where I have amused and (I hope) occasionally informed others while eking out a bare livelihood feeding and housing my own brief experiment in embodiment. I now understand that this experiment would have been more successful if I had allied with him for an experience or two.
When I first met Antero way back in the 1980s we were both working and playing under the influence of the neuro-political and exo-psychological maps provided by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. Leary brought us the theory of the minds' evolution in tandem with biology and technology (tools). Bob Wilson gave it clarity and a heart. Antero Alli took the mind and the heart of Leary/ Wilson theory and gave it a body. He brought with him an influence from Jerzy Grotowski and his paratheatrical theories. As Alli writes, Paratheatre was "combining methods of physical theatre, modern dance, vocalization, and standing Zazen to access the internal landscape of forces in the Body – the impulses, emotions, sensations, tensions, and other autonomous forces – towards their spontaneous expression in movement, vocal creations, symbolic gesture, characterization, and asocial interplay."
What a lovely contribution from E.C.C.O (Earth Coincidence Control Office) to bring Alli's unique imprint into alignment with this relatively obscure path. Here, in Sacred Rites, Alli's interior observations hide within them a map to the work he has been doing for some 46 years. It's all here. How to create asocial interplay. How to conjure and embody visions and insights through the use of archetypes. How to move people from their stuck places. It's not a cool cerebral picture. There's a lot of howling, weeping. I would venture that there's even some gnashing of teeth. Alli brings you inside these sessions and this text will leave you wanting more. Fortunately, the work will continue. Read the book and find out.
The post Review Sacred Rites by Antero Alli appeared first on Mondo 2000.
Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023: [ 05-Mar-23 1:53am ]Vanilli's Blockchain Busting Musical Experience "R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs?"
Immediate release from: 03/03/2023
"AI-Musement Park comprises a cornucopia of performances / talks / happenings /
documentary & discussion about AI, Intelligences, technocapitalism’s more than
pressing-ongoing urgencies." -Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University & AI-Musement Park
R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? An original AI-Musement Park, PlayLa.bZ & MONDO 2000
History Project human and machine learning co-creation, taking the perspective of an AI that is
training itself on the R.U. Sirius & MONDO Vanilli ‘I’m Against NFT’s’ song lyrics, exploring a
surreal, mind melting and multi-dimensional 360 world of paradoxes and conflicting rules.
"Mondo Vanilli was originally intended to be a virtual reality band exploding all
assumptions about property and propriety in the 1990s. Today fabrication becomes de
rigueur as the connection to the real is intentionally confused by the banal political
tricksters of power and profitability… while storms pound our all-too-human bodies and
communities. I am thrilled to finally see MONDO Vanilli in it's appropriate context.
Immersive. Come play in the simulacra one more time" -R.U. Sirius, MONDO 2000
R.U. Cyber.. R.U. Against NFTs? Is a satirical, irreverent block-chain busting commentary on
the propaganda relations fueled ‘Web 3’ hype around non-fungible tokens and the broader
issues that underpin our algorithmically massaged hyper-connected infinite scrolls and trolls
age. Challenging our assumptions about the nature of technology, creativity, and value,
reminding us that the digital world is shaped by powerful forces that determine what is valued
and what is not, and a click is not always for free.
Join Us! On Spring Solstice 2023 For "R.U. Cyber? :// Mondo 2000 History Project Salon"
at MozFest Virtual Plaza & Mozilla Hubs: AI-Musement Park 20th March / 8.30pm EU / GMT
- https://schedule.mozillafestival.org/plaza #Mozfest
- https:/ schedule.mozillafestival.org/session/LSNGRJ-1 #RUCyber
- https:/ www.mondo2000.com/2023/03/02/simcerity-r-u-against-nfts-period-question-mark-or-exclamation-point-join-mondo-vanilli-r-u-sirius-in-vr-on-march-20 #RUAgainstNFTs
R.U. Sirius is an American writer, editor, and media pioneer. Known for being one of key
psychedelic & cyberpunk movement figures. Best known as Mondo 2000 editor-in-chief and at
forefront of 1990s underground cyberculture movement.
Since 2010, MozFest has fueled the movement to ensure the internet benefits humanity, rather
than harms it. This year, your part in the story is critical to our community's mission: a better,
healthier internet and more Trustworthy AI.
Co-founded by PsychFi, FreekMinds & Squire Studios we're a next generation multipotentiality
multi-award-winning, multi-dimensional motion arts experience design laboratory, developing
DIY changemaking createch immersive experiences & software applications for social good
storycraft. Supporters & Friends: Mozilla Festival, Jisc: Digifest, Beyond Games, Tate Modern,
Furtherfield, Boomtown Festival, Sci-Fi-London, Ravensbourne University London, UAL, East
London Dance, NESTA, Modern Panic, ArtFutura, Kimatica, National Gallery X, Kings College
London, Looking Glass Factory, SubPac, Ecologi, The JUMP, BOM Labs, Mondo 2000
PR Contact: James E. Marks, Tel: 07921 523438 @: jem@playla.bz Twitter: @GoGenieMo
The post Turn On, Tune In, Boot Up! For MozFest 2023: appeared first on Mondo 2000.
Simcerity: R.U. Against NFTs (period question mark or exclamation point) Join MONDO Vanilli & R.U. Sirius in VR on March 20 [ 03-Mar-23 12:49am ]image by Chad Essley Simcerity: I’m Against NFTs (It doesn’t matter much to me) 1: WE ARE DUCHAMPIAN OF THE WORLD When Marcel Duchamp — possibly at the suggestion of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — dropped that urinal on an art gallery back in 1917, he signaled the world of art, contemporariness, galleries and capital that their was a new jest in town. image by Jay Cornell Value was to be...
