Thesis Advisor: Amit S. Rai

Thesis: Selected Findings from Anarchaeology of Presence: on Dealing with Futurity and Grasping the Possibility of a Now.

June 2021

Abstract

This document is the accompanying piece to the research and findings materialised as electrically charged cells in a server in Auckland, New Zealand, it’s a sort of instruction manual for the operation/interpretation of an electr(on)ic artifact / fossil / ruin / glitch / ghost file. The collected shared materials and parallel text entries are the search for said artifacts, the remains of a “present in ruins”, a present perceived as devoid of presence, lost in future-oriented extractivism and stiffened by western metaphysics’ understanding of it. The text and materials that follow, comprise a summoning of ghosts not as hauntings, but as nonlinear entanglements that exist within and around us.

Digital body LanaVaja, Hyperpop musician JuneP, Ritual-Poet Karloz Atl, Anarchoqueer-DJ snakeswithhumantraits, Wild Kid-Monk Tilghman Goldsborough, Transmedia Investigator Arjan Guerrero and Digital Curator Doreen Ríos teamed up with me, bringing their different capacities and involvements to the blank page and that one folder in cyberspace(time). This fictocritical exercise on collaborative creation, research and being concernes itself with the question: how are we dealing with with, and grasping to the possibilities of coexistence in the thiccc (sic.) present now?

Author Miiel Ferráez