AFFECTS & DREAMS:
A MANUAL FOR BECOMING (2023)


by niko mas
Affects & Dreams: a manual for Becoming, the first book authored by niko mas, is a relatively quick dive into the waters of Becoming; a schizo-guide to our publishing practice (why, how, and for what cause do we publish/transmit). We tell the story of a radio show that bridged our project Crossdressing Diogenes with our latest project, Becoming. In telling the story of how we arrived here at all, we have a chance to index all of the fields and domains that Becoming has entered into so far, and begins to maniacally draw lines through many subjects.

In telling the story of how a radio show hosted by a record label lead to a publishing practice in such a way, we have a chance to begin explicating our take on the changing winds in those most dirty of social sciences and biology. For thousands of years, the West has held music as a matter of pure rationale, something purely of the intellect, but when the body is just an ear itself, and when one might say we are all, at once, being-in-music (or becoming-as-music), how we think about music has to change dramatically, how we speak music or speak about music has to change – music must be able to become something radically "unmusical", to cast off the Image-of-itself that it, like and as philosophy, has become; we must once again pursue a non-music fit for a non-sociology; or better, we must approach a quantum musical social ontology. This book is our first attempt to write towards a theory of a Musica Universalis of the social, the noise (harmony) of the social sphere(s).

Naturally, given the context of the project, we wanted to launch this book alongside a revamped version of our radio show, beginning today on Lumbung Radio at 9am (the live show is aimed at insomniacs who refuse to sleep so that capital may never dream), but the shows are immediately archived for everyone else to access.

EXCERPTS


“One of the most interesting ideas for us at Becoming is the concept of Quantum Foam, a sort of porous membrane underneath everything, sometimes imagined as a surface of densely packed bubbles on an infinite pool of liquid, but also sometimes romantically imagined as a complex mycelium anchoring the actual into the virtual (Ford & Wheeler, 2000: 522). This Quantum Foam is virtually unknowable to us, and its existence suggests that below the threshold of our perception exists a dynamic, bubbling pool, and everything we can know and understand bubbles out of that pool, rising up like waves on turbulent waters. As waves rise out of the water, they pass across the threshold of what is knowable to us, and appear to jump into existence as some solitary event, some self-contained particle jumping in and out of existence.”
— Chapter I:
Impulses-becoming-traces

“While the speaker cone moves in and out by a matter of millimeters, the air around your ears is fully in flux, shifting around your ears in large extrapolated analogies of the original signal. The signal propagates through the air as the machinery forces the air to move in a way that is analogical to the original code. The particles that make up the air move closer together and further apart, in waves; it is a matter of compression and rarefaction. This is how the original impulse is encoded into the air, as the way particles move can be controlled. The ear captures the encoded air like the backboard of a basketball hoop, the air falls down the ear hole into a new series of conversion machines. These controlled patterns of motion enter the ear, and are captured by the ear drum, a tiny filament that moves back and forth in a way that is analogous with the motion of the air, almost as if imitating the way the speaker cone dances. The speaker cone, the eardrum, and the needle are at that moment aligned, all caught in a moment of imitation.”
— Chapter II:
Analogical Becomings

“We can imagine all of these entities, Barking Cats, Crossdressing Diogenes, Becoming, Noods Radio, Coral Bay, and so on, as particles, and as they come together, they collide and interact. It was at this time that the protagonist particle of this story, Lumbung Radio, appeared. This story, and by extension this book, propagated out of that collision. Lumbung, an extension of Documenta Fifteen, was looking for participants in a radio-based project called Lumbung Radio. The word Lumbung was important to Ruangrupa’s organization of Documenta Fifteen, a word that means “Communal Rice Barn” in Indonesia. It is not difficult to imagine the kind of interpretations one could have of a Lumbung, and the idea of Lumbung Radio was to create this communal barn, but for radio shows, which is why they were reaching out for participants.”
— Chapter III:
The Roots of This

DETAILS


• Authored by niko mas
• Illustrated by Angeliki Koutsodimitropoulou
• CAT #BECOMING02 (Out of Stock)
• ISBN: 978-9925-7984-45 (Print)
• ISBN: 978-9925-7984-52 (Digital)
• 18x11cm, 113 pages
• September 2023

TO BE CITED AS


Mas, N. (2023) Affects & Dreams: A Manual for Becoming. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming. 978-9925-7984-45

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