Var(2x): The Extreme Experimentalism of Andrew C. Wenaus (Sections 3-5)

Section 3

Official Report On The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori: Appendix 8.2.3

Official Report On The Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori:
Appendix 8.2.3

Series Introduction to Appendices 1 - ■∞

The Ministry of Transrational Research into Anastrophic Manifolds formed in response to the breakdown in relations that followed the Assembly of Patamathematical Micronations in August 2041.[1] Assigned with the confidential “Chronotopological Portfolio,”– which later took a top secret status and was rechristened the “Official Report on the Intransitionalist Chronotopologies of Kenji Siratori” – the Ministry seeks to collect, aggregate, and offer exegesis on the w₁ asemic signals and etheric flows intercepted by the Assembly in November 2084.[2] In contradiction with accepted physical law, the signals, originally suspected to be either a simple computing error or transgressions in spacetime, ultimately indicated a glitch occurring at the atomic level of both alphanumeric form and physical matter. Consequently, it is the position of the Ministry that these signals complicate even the most eccentric models of calculation, measurement, formalism, agency, and representation. Nevertheless, the investigations offer transrational insight into the role that self-(dis)organized criticalities may play in disremembering, dys-representation, and alocalism in the context of the critical artificial development environments upon which epistemic certainties have been treated as axiomatic. After the illnesses and deaths of the first three directors of the ministry, Canadian literary theorist Dr. Andrew C. Wenaus accepted the role as Director of the Ministry; despite his own yet-explained death and the disappearance of his body five years prior to his birth in 1983, Wenaus now communicates regularly with the Ministry in the form of a watermeal frond kept in an undisclosed spacetime intersection.

Shortly after the inauguration of the Ministry, a special team was assigned the task of identifying the source of the asemic signals and etheric flows. Beginning in 2056, the Ministry made the important discovery that the source of the signals of interest could not be located via distance, angle, or area (that is, the signals could not be geographically located), but were instead functions of shapes, relational positions, and connections. The Ministry turned their research to the field of topology to see if they might find topologically self-similar but visually iconic homeomorphic spaces and surfaces. By decoding the signals into language, the Ministry discovered a repeating pattern of deliberate, carefully crafted, glitch gestures[3] that one member described as “horror, science fiction, Dadaism,” whereas another suggested that it appeared to be congruent with the 20th century genre of cyberpunk or Japanoise. Sending some of the signals back to the late 1990s, the Ministry found that the signals themselves were suddenly being published online and in paperback at an astonishing rate. The author of these works was a mysterious Japanese multimedia artist based in Sapporo named Kenji Siratori.

The Ministry maintains that it is uncertain as to how Siratori was able to intercept the signals and harness them for his own art. There remains disagreement within the Ministry as to whether or not Siratori was, indeed, the instigator of the signals from the future in the first place. As the signals became public, Siratori began catching the attention of certain literary and cultural critics. “Kenji Siratori,” a critic whose identity remains unknown contends, is “a […”]. While the Ministry found these insights fascinating, they were convinced that it would be more fruitful to continue considering the signals (hereafter designated Siratori Signals) mathematically and, especially, topologically. The Siratori Signals themselves are, the Ministry contends, divinely neutral in the absolute sense. Indeed, the signals hinted at something more ubiquitous, axiomatic, and essential than any planetary-bound cultural, affective, or aesthetic activity.

The Ministry thereafter turned their attention to translating the Siratori Signals into various forms of data, but their attempts were complicated by two peculiar phenomena. First, researchers who attempted to homeomorphically deform and reform the signals began to report sensations not unlike being marionetted by an invisible xenoforce.[4] Initially, researchers were able to conclude that the Siratori Signals were homeomorphically invariant. No matter how the researchers relentlessly deformed, stretched, bent, or knotted the Siratori Signals, there was something essentially immutable about their conceptual shape and ultrametric contours. On the very day that this conclusion was reached, the reports of possession began. There remains disagreement as to whether this was a marvel or an abyss. Members of the Ministry closest to the project began to experience emergent states of auto-glossolalia and somniloquy. Researchers reported that, as if marionetted by some invisible force while awake or asleep, they would begin repeating 317 identical iterations of the same words and phrases. These utterances ranged from narratives, traceable and untraceable academic sources, unknown languages, poetry, strings of numbers, and even commentary on Siratori himself. This was simply the beginning of the mystery: researchers shortly afterwards began to notice the self-same utterances that interrupted their days and plagued their sleep began to appear independent of any author in the data itself as footnotes. Examining the data logs to see if a competing research group was perhaps playing a prank or, worse still, attempting to sabotage the Ministry’s ethos, the Ministry discovered that the footnotes mysteriously appeared in the logs at timestamps ranging from 5 billion years ago to 700 trillion years in the future. Secondly, in a few, rarer instances, researchers experienced a faint pulsating vibration behind the nasal cavity, near the soft palate; these vibrations were eventually recorded, amplified, de-noised, and decreased in speed and pitch by 900%. Astonishingly, the vibrations revealed themselves as full musical compositions with recognizably human voices.[5] Determining that the glossolalia, somniloquy, impossible chronology of the footnotes, nasal irritation, and music were not computing errors or software glitches and were, in fact, genuine, they turned their attention to the Siratori Signals as chronotopes or, what they would later designate in acknowledgement of the signals’ invariant homeomorphic plasticity, chronotopologies. Perhaps the easiest way to conceptualize a chronotopology is to consider it a pliable version of “block time” – that omnidirectional version of spacetime viewed from outside reality as a four-dimensional block. In this sense [… …we]ak anthropic model [… …i]ndeed, Siratori seems to treat the principles of superdeterminism as a kind of super-détournement.[6]

[… …Th]e chronotopological properties of the Siratori Signals were smooth, invariant, and complex. Researchers who tried to merge the surfaces of the Siratori Signals using Bolyai-Wilson Adhesive modeling software would become severely ill and experience aggressive hair loss. In one tragic instance, Ministry member Dr. David Roden attempted to cut the surface of the signals and instantly disappeared[7] leaving behind dangerous trace amounts of neutron emissions.[8] In response, the Ministry placed new restrictions on the ways in which the surfaces of the Siratori Signals could be deformed. By decompressing the Siratori Signal surfaces and making the smooth contours into sharp or spikey polyhedral surfaces, the Ministry proceeded with the process of triangulation whereby the polyhedral surfaces are divided into “triangles” with the necessary condition that each side of a triangle be shared by two adjacent triangles. By doing so, the Ministry was able to more easily record the countability of vertices, edges, faces, and angles of the Siratori Signals’ surface. They discovered, to their terror and astonishment, that the Siratori Signals’ Euler characteristic was chrono-homeomorphic with the known universe itself. The Ministry has yet to comment on the significance of this finding claiming that the project no longer has concerns of an epistemological nature. Nevertheless, Wenaus has generously offered the following elegant statement that, the series editors trust, speaks for itself and should suffice as adequate for the reader: x(t)=■∞-1.

-Andrej Shakowski
(Cairo, March 1922)

[1] The timeline of the disagreements is recorded, with commentary, in Official Report on the Intransitionalist Topologies of Kenji Siratori Vol. 13920, “On [O w₁) and other Braggarts,” pps. 6207-6328.

[2] A description of the nonlinear chronotopic processualism, elegantly modeled by the Kruchenykh-Hysteron Proteron Working, can be found in Vol. 364, Appendix 3.1.7. This negentropic phenomena is not accepted by the Department of Atopic Poetics and Radial Hieroglyphic Vortices and is the cause of its official schism from the Ministry. See Vol. 981, Appendicitis 2.8.

[3] See ----------------------------------------, p. 3---3--.

[4] See Wenaus, Ω - 1 Chronotopologic Workings, (Schism Press, 2023), pps. 347-451.

[5] These recordings are comprised of over six hundred hours of music, ambience, and speaking. You can find samples in the attached CD.

[6] See Wenaus, Ω - 1 Chronotopologic Workings, (Schism Press, 2023), pps. 699-716.

[7] There is disagreement among Ministry Members on whether or not Roden did, in fact, disappear. Days after the incident, several members’ computers were infected with a virus. The virus’ source code included what some Members maintain are transmissions from and attempts at communication by the late Roden. One Member, since institutionalized, asserted that this source code always was Roden and what the lost colleague was communicating was, at once, “petrifying…or radiantly blissful…ontological mutinying in the most galvanic, even crystalline, sense!” See Chronotopological Portfolio Vol. 78.9, “Postmortem Report on the Hyperstitional Superpsychosis of Dr. aaaaaasssaa.”

[8] This event led to the relocation of the Ministry’s research facilities as documented by Rajakumar (2094).