"Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle."
--Rachel Darc, Borgia Popes Band
"...a continuous state of wigglement. Thanks for the resonance. It encourages."
--John Perry Barlow, Electronic Frontier Foundation
"I'd like to see the book." --Bruce Sterling
______________________________
THE WIGGLISM MANIFESTO
Loop into strange coilings, this coiling. Well up in the fibrillations of this hysterical continuum, this bionic boiling. Rise up and nurture the wiggling -- of flesh or steel, sinew or circuit, mud or imagination. Nurture with the loaded logic of the living, with endless reflection but no assurance. Reason is just another lifeform in a boundless womb of cultivations.
So ovulate your tender eggs -- every object, code and law -- into the acids of interconnection. Soak tendrils of thought and gesture in an ethical jelly of feedback. Infuse phantoms and facts with equal measures of visceral significance. Creep along the rivulets and curls of writhing truth.
Breed turbulent creatures in mongrel jungles of plasma, machines and minds. Embrace these creatures, these worlds, these hives. Keep that which is lively, and that which sustains life, in succulent focus. May the stagnant metaphors of art and science evaporate in our green and feral heat.
At this end of blind evolution, of unfounded forms, we are drunk with life, with that which seems alive, with lunges and startled presences. We fuse with the objects of our love, becoming everything we encounter, becoming love itself. We transmute mind and matter into a zoology of spirit.
Dare to suckle this wild vapor, this infant gleaming, this wilderness. Convulse and clutch in waves of milky wonder. Siphon every atom, and theory of atom, into the folds of our collective screen, our flesh. Melt into the monstrous, grooving spasm of the infinite wiggling.
Nurture the wiggling, for that which wiggles is amazing.
Ebon Fisher 1996-2004
_____________________________________
Wigglism is an evolving media organism.
It forms itself around your input:
LINK AND SEEK LINKS
ON WIGGLISM:
_____________________________________________
NURTURING THAT WHICH SEEMS ALIVE
Attempting to shake the cold trees of truth in light of a contemporary disdain towards conceptual bushes of any ilk, I can only implore you to join me in the cultivation of a few local weeds. As a theoretical fertilizer for such a swollen endeavour, I recommend a quirky elixir called cultural ecology. In that "culture" and "ecology" are terms from the different realms of spirit and substance, we find ourselves in bed with a very itchy, hybrid notion. This may not be so disturbing. Let us roll in that bed. Let us absorb terms from the awkward glands of every idea. Let us slither in interdisciplinary contortions.
The Wigglism manifesto has been incubating over the internet and in Brooklyn cafes since 1996. Feedback is crucial to its evolution and I welcome everyone to help me continue to nurture it into being. Many years earlier I had tried desperately to hammer out a philosophy of organic fusion around the vague term "integration." It turned out to be a misleading, cold, and fussy word and was eventually abandoned for the more street-natural "Wigglism." The emphasis on lively movement --which is a quality possessed by many healthy, integrated systems and organisms-- changed even my own sense of what I was wading into.
Wigglism is not an attempt at an objective truth, but an evolving media symbiote tickling the synapses of a sprawling, gelatinous host organism. Wigglism is inspired by ideas and methods emerging from both the realm of interactive digital culture and the experiments of Williamsburg, Brooklyn's interactive ritual scene (see Web Jam).
The name is chosen to simultaneously suggest an observable quality of lifeforms (artificial or real) and to act on the imagination and the media in a lively, NURTURING manner. Wiggling is an active transformation of author, audience, medium, and context into an integrated, LIVING entity. Wigglism does not bother to redefine art, that festering scarification of the merely human, but to open up the meaning of animal being and reconnect it with the wider wilderness which sustains it. Wigglism gives voice to subjective eco-systems. It celebrates "lifeform" as a non-objective conflux of biological, technological, and subjective squirmings. It is a being sensed from the INSIDE by participants, not from the OUTSIDE by scientists or connoisseurs. It points away from an attitude of removed contemplation of objects and specimens, and towards the nurturing and cultivation of life in the broadest sense.
-E. Fisher
SOME EMAIL FEEDBACK >developing as its own life form on the net... Definitely good to leave the wiggly bobber as wide open as possible.
-TerboLizard, Computer artist, San Francisco
_____________________________
>...Embracing connections and mutual dependencies, we spontaneously birth multitudinous, over-lapping, nonproprietary ecologies of belonging ...giving love multiplies and returns love. THAT is what wiggling is all about!
-Noah Raford, Student, Brown University
_____________________________
>What the hell are you on about? Weirdo!
-M.T.
_____________________________
>Wigglism ...sensible, sensational, sensual, sensitive. It overflows every cup... -Heather Wood, Media artist, NYC
_____________________________
>i got this wiggle and don't know where to go.
-jan mclaughlin
_____________________________
>WIGGLISM rolls off the tongue like moist cake soaked in room temperature breast milk.
-Tim Cramer, Maelstrom Music
_____________________________
>Would you consider wiggling to be a new dance?...
-Yvette Helin, The Pedestrian Project
_____________________________
>Squirms again from the ants nest of London...
...What about a wiggling page of other wigglers - wiggling provided by some strange Java script?? Even a wiggling newspage?
lots of wiggles,
-R.D.Brown Research Fellow, Computer Related Design, Royal College of Art, London
_____________________________
> >Because you wiggle, and because wigglism i declare to be one of the greatest coined terms in the history of, if for no other reason (o, but there is, assuredly) but that it has such a silly ring to it... because of this, i ask that you be my wiggly confessor, recepticle of random non sequitur rant-n- rave, as it becomes me.
-mr bunny, esq
_____________________________
> >One day I will synapse with the stars.
-Conti Hewitson on Wigglism
...invisible hands, we circle dance.
©2005 Ebon Fisher