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== <small>'''Video'''</small> ==
 
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https://vimeo.com/21013493
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'''Video:''' https://vimeo.com/21013493
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'''Abstract'''
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''In 2009  I  started  writing  the  essay Digital  Anthropophagyiand its companion  piece, the  manifesto-poem Anthropophagic  Re-Manifesto  for the Digital Ageii.Being an artist from Brazil,I could not escape thecultural mystique  of ‘Anthropophagy’.For  those unfamiliar  with  the  term, the etymologyhas  a  Greek origin dating  back  to  the  mythological Kronos(Saturn) eating his own son–‘Anthrōpophagia’: ‘Anthropos’= human being + ‘phagein’=to eat, i.e., an eating of a human. The words ‘Anthropophagy’and ‘Anthropophagus’weretransplanted by the European conquistadors in the late 1400s/early 1500s to the land massesrenamed ‘America’and ‘The Caribbean’at the onset of colonialism.Starting at this period, some native ethnicities of the ‘Amerindian’populations have been described as practitioners  of  ritual  Anthropophagyand/orCannibalism. ‘Cannibalism’itself supposedly finding its root in a misspellingor ironic naming ‘Canib’iii–by Columbuswhen  describing  the  Carib  people  of Antilles/Caribbean Islandsduring his navigational enterprises between 1492-1504. In  1928, Oswald  de  Andrade  devouredBrazilian  colonial  history  itselfwritingthe  ‘Manifesto Antropófago’,  an  adjective  form  of  the  term, meaning a Manifesto thatpossessesthe agency to eat. The proposition of the Brazilian Moderns  was  to  devour  what  comes  from  outside  (‘First World’novelties),  absorb  their  useful‘otherness’in  order to  output something  uniquely  Brazilian.Thus ‘Antropofagia’isappropriated  and forever transformed in  the1920s  São  Paulo  into  a  Brazilian  avantgarde. Antropofagia  isconsidered  by  some critics to  be  perhaps  the  only  true Brazilianartistic canon. Theconceptsof this cultural iconhaveinevitablyimpregnatedmyown artworks, especially in my condition of migrant since the age of 19, living in a constant state of becoming ‘other’somewhere.''
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'''Keywords:''' digital anthropophagy;anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the digital age;manifesto antropófago; Oswald de Andrade;antropofagia;Brazilian modernism;digital age;colonisation;Vilém Flusser;Aílton Krenak; Bauhaus
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Anthropophagyofferscomplexities  that  defy  even  the  fields  which  have traditionally  dealt  with such  a theme.  My  fieldsof  interest and  research focuson Ritual    Anthropophagy,    its    cultural    constructions,    their appropriation in the arts and through the arts, and the ensuing generative potential for innovation constituting both a philosophy as well as a method of  creativity,  especially  in  moments  of  crisis.  Ritual  Anthropophagy has been described anthropologically as a switch of perspective. Especially in warring rituals, the winner supposedly consumes the strong enemy (weak individuals are never desired), in order to see oneself as the enemy sees him. This constitutes a motion toward acceptance of otherness in oneself, instead  of  negation  of  a  dissimilar  entity.  A  foreign  strong  body as a formidable bodyand its consumption an openness to the highest form of alterity.
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While  I  was  moving  from  New  York  City to  Berlin,  Germany,  in  2009,  I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyicontaining a companion piece,  the  manifesto-poem  Anthropophagic  Re-Manifesto  for  the  Digital Age. Drawing  from  my  experience as  a  migrant of  continuous  cultural transformation,  a  constant  motion  toward  the  unknowable‘other’, experimenting with a multiplicity of worldviews and perspectives, I felt an embodiment  of  the  concepts  that  enliven  Anthropophagy/Antropofagia. In  my  artistic  practiceat  thattime,  being  a  video  and  film  editor,  I  was hand-making  films  from discarded16mm  film  pieces,  creating  new narratives for these materials that I found in dumpsters, donated archives, and  bulk  purchases  of  undeveloped  rolls from Ebay.  After  receiving  the Distinction  Prize  of  the  Vilém  Flusser  Theory  Award  in 2011  at transmedialeiv, theannual  festival  for  art  and  digital  culture  in  Berlin,  I presented    my    essay    and    manifesto    globally    as an audiovisual performance-lecture and a communal ritual. When I finishreciting the Re-Manifesto,  handwritten  on  rice  paper,  I  eat  a  piece  of  it  and  pass  the communion wafer to the public, a translation gesture of one of the most disseminated and recognised (ecumenical) meanings behind ‘Anthropophagy’: eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus as bread and wine. The gesture also points to a turn against itself, eating one’s own words, a de-programming act: cor inversum in se ipsum[The heart turned against itself] '''(Flusser, 2008: 28).'''
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''Anthropophagyin''  Brazil  has  been  constructed  initially  from  the ethnographic descriptions by German adventurer Hans Staden, recounting his  captivity  with  the  (ritualistic  anthropophagic)  Tupinambá  indigenouspeoplein 1553/54. ''Staden’s Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft  der  Wilden  Nacketen,  Grimmigen  Menschfresser-Leuthen  in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of  Wild,  Naked,  Grim,  Man-eating  People  in  the  New  World,  America)'' became a global best-seller upon publication in 1557 and remains forever ingrained  in  the  global  imaginary,depictingthe  Americas  as  a  wild territory.This worldviewhas endured, especiallyafter Theodor De Bry (b. Liège) replicatedthe images created byStadensome decades later,in his art  studio  established  in  Frankfurt, in finer, yetimagined  details. De  Bry never travelled to the Americas, his imaginaryinterpretations executed on copper  prints were  based  on  Staden’s  texts  and  woodcut  prints.Furthermore, De Bry’s two sons continued his  creative  productions and replicationsin  the  1600s.  These  images  influenced  the  drawing  ofworld mapsof  that  time  period,  illustrated  showing ‘men-eating’savages inhabitingthe  Americanterritories.  This  was the Anthropophagic history told by Europeans of the ‘new’continentin the 16/17thCenturies, during Shakespearean time.
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In  my  Anthropophagic  Re-Manifesto  for  the  Digital  Age,  I  reflect  on  theentanglements  of  wildly  different  cultures  coming  into  contact and  the uneven  reciprocities  that  ensued. InPindorama–Landof  Palm  Trees, mythical place of the Tupi-Guarani peoples–the ‘native’wereseduced by European trinkets,  such  as  whistles,  mirrors,  rattles,  giftedto  them  in exchange  for  the  far  more  valuable ‘Pau-Brasil’wood.Trees which the natives had to fell, chop, carry and load into the Portuguese caravels in a system  of  uneven  value  exchange  and  exploitation.It  is  worthwhile  to reflect here on the significance of that encounter from the native’s perspective.  Aílton  Krenak,  one  of  the  most  recognised  voices incontemporary indigenous thought explains:
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''...well before the [European] geographicdemarcation  of  Brazil  as  a country, the narratives of our ancestors built our own histories, which are  many.  Their  recollection  are  populated  by  narratives  sounded  in more  than  500  languages,  just  accounting  for  those  spoken  in  South America...In  each  of  these  ancestral  narratives  was  the  prophecy announcing  the  arrival,  the  return  of  the  white  brother.  These narratives  dating  back  to  four  thousand  years  already  mentioned  the life  of  this  other  brother,  always  identified  as  someone  who  left  our coexistence and was no longer traceable. Having left us, he also lost the sense  of  humanity  we  had  been  building.  He  had  gone  to  a  faraway place  and  lived  there  for  many,  many  generations.  In  this  time,he learned another technology, developed other languages and learned a different type of organisation than ours. In our ancestral narratives, he appeared time and again as someone who was returning home, but his thoughts were no longer known, nor what he was searching for. We no longer knew what he wanted. [He learned many things away from us, but also forgot where he came from and found it difficult to know where he  was  going].  The  ancestral  narratives  are  reminders  in  the  form  of prophecy  or  warning  of  the  arrival  of  the  white  brother.  But  the narratives also carry within them a message: the promiseto relink with, to  reencounter  our  former  brother.'' '''(Krenak,  2015:160-162,author’stranslation)'''
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In  1920sBrazil, during  therise  ofthe  modernistandindustrial  era, Anthropophagyexperienced    a    revival throughBrazilian    artistic productions–the  Anthropophagic  act  was  transformed  from  taboo(European  construct  of  indigenous  social  practice)  into  (artistic)  totem. Anthropophagy  was  thus  invigorated  with  two  remarkablebracketing events: Semana de Arte Modernain São Paulo in 1922, and theManifesto Antropófagovby writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928, published in his newly founded Revista de Antropofagia. Andrade’s Manifesto was a punch in the stomachthat laid deglutition claim to just about anything, from all ‘-isms’toFreudian  thought  and revolutionary  enterprisesacross  time. All  the while, the Manifestodemandedaccess to ‘the other’, an open license totaste    the state-of-the-art    influences    from    outside    Brazil    without committing  to  any  of  them,  an  unapologetic  attitude  toward  devouring history  itself,  while  fully  embracing  and  celebrating  indigeneity  and  its values,  in  order  to  spit  out  something  new,  original,  worthy  of  envy. Feeling the  effects  of swift industrialisationclashing  with abreasttraditional  cultureswithin  reachthroughout  the Brazilian  territory, Andradealso  introduced  a  characterin  his  Manifesto:  [Hermann Alexander Graf] Keyserling’s ‘technified barbarian’'''(Andrade,  1928:  3)''',  a role played by the North Americans.
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Almost 100 years later,the role ofthat‘technified barbarian’, an important allegory in Andrade’s Manifestobegets the question: ‘Who isconsidered theBarbarian now?’Who, in fact, is the barbarian at the gate, controlling the inputs and outputs of the digital age? This new erawas mycueto write the‘Anthropophagic Re-Manifestofor the Digital Age’in 2009, a remix of concepts birthed from a paradigm shift, sensing deep changes brewing in the imminent increase of interconnectivity speed about to take over the world via broadband internet service embedded in more advanced mobile digital  devices.  I  translated  this  new  reality  into  a  latent  cultural cannibalism  in  the  age  of  digitalculture, of  whichunceremonious information  consumption  practiceswould  push  the  internet-worked information  society  toward  a  new  type  of  colonialparadigm.  Acolonisation via viral ideas with the conquering of new types of property, where digital data becomes an extremely valuable raw resource and new currency, and anyone can be a coloniser. A new practice of consumption –ingestion,  digestion  and  excretion –involving  a  technological  mediation. Using  Anthropophagy  as  both  metaphor  and  strategy  to  navigate  the rough  seas  of  internet  constitutionalism  and  innovation,  I  set  out  to consider new power structures favouring ‘embrace, devour, share’within a  new  code  of  ethics  as  a  holistic  natural  transparent  approach  for  our socio-economic  survival.All  the while  maintaining  a  healthy  ecosystem online –based  on  net  neutrality –and  also  offline,  to  support  ethical information  traffic  and  a  safer  metabolism  of  such  large  amounts  of information.
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But how could this new online frontier be explored any differently than in the  past  terrestrial  colonial  scenarios  of  exploitation?  It  would  not  take very  long  indeed  for  wild  exploits  to  loom  in  the  horizon.  The  online community –if  there  has  been  ever such a thing as a ‘community’–steering  wide-eyed  in  a  Jules  Verne’s  Nautilustype  ofvesseldid  not manage to reach the cost of utopia.The hope was perhaps to get to the destination  navigating  theinternational online waters  free  from  land-based  government.However,in  a  space  of  just  ten  years,  roughly  2009-2019, the online worldhasgone from innocent ebullient optimism to fear, scepticism and pollution. A vertiginous trajectory from an environment of relatively equal stake-holders at the beginning of the internet era with a horizon  built brick  by  brickto  thecurrent world entirely calculated to  fit into a smartphone –the new acculturation tool.Its degenerativedynamics alikea‘Requerimiento’(penned in 1513 by jurist Juan López de Palacios, to  be  read  out  loud  even  in  empty  beachfronts  with  the  purpose  of submitting  non-conforming  indigenous  to  the  complete  rule  of  Spanish kingdom,  under  penalty  of  death).  And  although  history  teaches  us patterns, models and structures of dominance and subjugation, the long journey  traced  since  the  15/16thCentury  Iberian  caravels  only  shows  us how  much  today's  internet-worked  culture  has  fallen  into  those  same patterns, models and structures.
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Digital  Anthropophagy, a  term  I  coined  in  2009,  whose  sentiment permeates my Re-Manifesto, reflectsa globalised user-based practice and cultural  manifestation  occurring  online  and  outwards  into  the  physical world and back online as a resonating never-ending feedback loop of vast cultural  consumptionand  transformation.  Whereas  there  have  been plenty  of  profound  exchanges  and  symbiotic  profiteering  online,  it  has become increasingly apparent that a lesser form of Digital Anthropophagy is unfortunately also possible, namely: cannibalism. While Anthropophagy produces  new  forms,  bodies,  effects,  original  expression,  synthesis; cannibalism is an act of poor destruction, at bestit produces just a copy, without imagination, without ritual, without magic.
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To compound the lesser favourable winds of development, this new era of consuming ‘The Other’in a supposedlyimmaterial way has only revealed that the digitalworldis heavily material. All the apparatus that supportitarebased  on  materials:bodies  implicated  in  the  production  of  devices, content and data; rare metals extracted from the earth and ocean to make our digital lightness/heaviness of being, colourful, pleasant, and chic. We have been payinga  high  price  for  the  commodification  of  life.Nevertheless,  it  is  nearly  impossible  to  imagine  a  world  without  these technological companions and coadjutants to our lifestyles, they have so profoundly  changed  our  humanity.  The  conveniences  and  addictive happiness these devicesafford usersexist in the very tension between the material  world  and thedeep  level  of  abstraction  invisible    and impenetrable to most who have embarked in this great digital adventure.
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Looking  back  at  my  Re-Manifesto,  I  recognise  it  as  a provocation –what does  it  mean  to  be  Anthropophagic  in  the  Digital  Age  with thesupreme interconnectivity  of  the informationsociety, in  whicheveryone  is consuming  the world,and  each  other,at  an  unprecedented  pace  and intensity?    By  opening  up  a  new  blank  map  on  which  to  inscribe  a  new history,  I  was  exploring  potential:  both  high  and  low.  In  this  tension,  I recognised that our cannibalistic relations,not only toeachother, but also with  technology,werecausing  an  ontological  shift  in  the  way  we  see ourselves  as  human,  an  ontological  turn  proposed  by philosopher Vilém Flusser  in Für  eine  Philosophie  der  Fotografiein  1983. Flusser  proposes that,starting  with  the  invention  of  photography,  human  beings  began orienting  themselves  from  the  images,  which not  only stand  as  surfaces (mediations) between human and world, but also veil what stands behind its algorhythmic representation.
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I  had proposed ''Digital  Anthropophagyasa''  valuable  cultural  concept  for our  time, neither  euphoric  nor  pessimistic.  Now,  reflecting  on  what  the Internet  has  become  in  these  last tenyears,  I  see  that aglobal ‘user culture’has succumbed in the digital era to meta structures that engulf us and transform  us  intocannibalised bodies.I  am  reminded  of  a  constant theme inFlusserianphilosophy  that  speaks  of  our  highly  technological moment: ‘The change of codes is far more important than the invention of new media...the function of codes is not dependent  on  a  metaphysical ‘eidos’ of the medium, but on how the medium is handled’'''(Guldin, R. et al, 2008: 5)'''. Flusser himself states: ‘Indeed we are actively generating our tools and through them we are generating the world, but it is also true that those tools are hitting back on us and are generating us’'''(Flusser, 1991).'''
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The  question  now  seems  to  be  what  world  should  we  generate  next  in widely and wildly divided global societies?Do we needanother paradigm shift,  a  radical  discontinuity  to  sever  deep  dependencies  on  the  control mechanisms of the digital age?Flusser believed that the artist is an agent who can intervene in programmed apparatus, be it a technological black box or institutions of control. If anindigenous ritual-philosophy informed artistic and cultural production in the 1920s, why not consider indigenous art production, which has managed to transcend time and western artistic cannons, to informa new imagination?Aílton Krenak and Bené Fonteles offer the following:
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''[Indigenous artistic  expression]  is  born  from  a  magical  world  that unveils the unconscious and reveals the ‘third bank’ of a river that can’t be reached with an actual canoe. In order to cross it, what we need is the technology of a mind with imagination, but also an invisible canoe that  may  take  us  to  that  bank  without  expecting  goals  or  outcomes. Everything  requires  more  than  a  mystical  and  magical  trance,  a  free transit between visible and invisible worlds that are not separated. As the Toltec shaman Miguel Ruiz says, ‘you are both the dream and the dreamer’.''
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''In  order  to  be  that  primordial  dream  and  to  compose  it,  indigenous peoples  need  to  be  left  in  peace  in  the  forest,  unaffected  by  the barbarism of ‘civilisation’, continuing to create an art that can navigate thedifferent banks with interdisciplinary independence, with solidarity and  interaction,  involved  with  everything  rather  than  developed, without  losing  its  creative  body  and  its  cultural  and  spiritual  essence, which persists from cave and rock painting to the plural and instigating contemporary art forms.'' '''(Krenak et al, 2019: 148)'''
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To  dream  new  worlds  and  new  frontiers  is  the  only  way  out. But  to cultivate one’s birth ground or chosen home is the only way in,  which  is what the original populations of the many places called ‘America’will tell us. Likewise,Flusser, having escaped the Holocaust seeking refuge in Brazil in  1941, but losing his  family  in  concentration  camps,  was  well  aware  of Nationalism’s project. He saw in the zero-dimension  of  pure  numbers  a dangerous capacity to generate (i.e., to project) and effectively change the worldsupported by meta-apparatus. The danger implicatedin a changeofour  subjectivity,potentially transformingour  species  into  an  entirely programmable and predictable subordinate apparatus to be fully utilised in mechanisms of control.But history bears no obligation to repeat itself just  for  the  sake  of teaching  lessons. It  is  useful  to  once  again  devour history against neo-colonialrule, against cannibalistic destructive binaries that erasediversity,  against  techno-escapism,andto  movetoward  a multiplicity  that  celebrates other  forms  of  alterity, different  modes  of living,  fluid  identities  and  the  pursuit  of  happinesslanding  with  our  feet back on earth, our home. To embrace the dissimilar absolutely, but away fromthe obsolete neo-liberal patriarchy andinto the welcoming wild arms of‘matriarcado de Pindorama’'''(de Andrade, 1928)'''... ‘From this Earth, on this Earth, for this Earth. And it’s about time’'''(De Andrade, 1944, author’stranslation).'''
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'''Acknowledgements'''
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The  author  gratefully  acknowledges  the  support  of  the  Bauhaus-Universität  Weimar  through  a Bauhaus  Promotionsstipendiumand  the Bauhaus  University’s  Equal  Opportunity  Office  for  travel  support  to present at the Conference Bites Here and There: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism across Disciplines, 11.2018.
  
 
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'''URL:''' https://vimeo.com/21013493
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'''URL:''' https://vimeo.com/21013493 https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/article/view/465/444 https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/article/view/465
  
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[[Categoría:Manifiestos]]
 
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[[Categoría:Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez]]
 
[[Categoría:Vanessa Ramos-Velasquez]]

Revisión actual del 20:18 29 abr 2022

Video

Video: https://vimeo.com/21013493

Abstract

In 2009 I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyiand its companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Ageii.Being an artist from Brazil,I could not escape thecultural mystique of ‘Anthropophagy’.For those unfamiliar with the term, the etymologyhas a Greek origin dating back to the mythological Kronos(Saturn) eating his own son–‘Anthrōpophagia’: ‘Anthropos’= human being + ‘phagein’=to eat, i.e., an eating of a human. The words ‘Anthropophagy’and ‘Anthropophagus’weretransplanted by the European conquistadors in the late 1400s/early 1500s to the land massesrenamed ‘America’and ‘The Caribbean’at the onset of colonialism.Starting at this period, some native ethnicities of the ‘Amerindian’populations have been described as practitioners of ritual Anthropophagyand/orCannibalism. ‘Cannibalism’itself supposedly finding its root in a misspellingor ironic naming ‘Canib’iii–by Columbuswhen describing the Carib people of Antilles/Caribbean Islandsduring his navigational enterprises between 1492-1504. In 1928, Oswald de Andrade devouredBrazilian colonial history itselfwritingthe ‘Manifesto Antropófago’, an adjective form of the term, meaning a Manifesto thatpossessesthe agency to eat. The proposition of the Brazilian Moderns was to devour what comes from outside (‘First World’novelties), absorb their useful‘otherness’in order to output something uniquely Brazilian.Thus ‘Antropofagia’isappropriated and forever transformed in the1920s São Paulo into a Brazilian avantgarde. Antropofagia isconsidered by some critics to be perhaps the only true Brazilianartistic canon. Theconceptsof this cultural iconhaveinevitablyimpregnatedmyown artworks, especially in my condition of migrant since the age of 19, living in a constant state of becoming ‘other’somewhere.

Keywords: digital anthropophagy;anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the digital age;manifesto antropófago; Oswald de Andrade;antropofagia;Brazilian modernism;digital age;colonisation;Vilém Flusser;Aílton Krenak; Bauhaus

Anthropophagyofferscomplexities that defy even the fields which have traditionally dealt with such a theme. My fieldsof interest and research focuson Ritual Anthropophagy, its cultural constructions, their appropriation in the arts and through the arts, and the ensuing generative potential for innovation constituting both a philosophy as well as a method of creativity, especially in moments of crisis. Ritual Anthropophagy has been described anthropologically as a switch of perspective. Especially in warring rituals, the winner supposedly consumes the strong enemy (weak individuals are never desired), in order to see oneself as the enemy sees him. This constitutes a motion toward acceptance of otherness in oneself, instead of negation of a dissimilar entity. A foreign strong body as a formidable bodyand its consumption an openness to the highest form of alterity.

While I was moving from New York City to Berlin, Germany, in 2009, I started writing the essay Digital Anthropophagyicontaining a companion piece, the manifesto-poem Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age. Drawing from my experience as a migrant of continuous cultural transformation, a constant motion toward the unknowable‘other’, experimenting with a multiplicity of worldviews and perspectives, I felt an embodiment of the concepts that enliven Anthropophagy/Antropofagia. In my artistic practiceat thattime, being a video and film editor, I was hand-making films from discarded16mm film pieces, creating new narratives for these materials that I found in dumpsters, donated archives, and bulk purchases of undeveloped rolls from Ebay. After receiving the Distinction Prize of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award in 2011 at transmedialeiv, theannual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin, I presented my essay and manifesto globally as an audiovisual performance-lecture and a communal ritual. When I finishreciting the Re-Manifesto, handwritten on rice paper, I eat a piece of it and pass the communion wafer to the public, a translation gesture of one of the most disseminated and recognised (ecumenical) meanings behind ‘Anthropophagy’: eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus as bread and wine. The gesture also points to a turn against itself, eating one’s own words, a de-programming act: cor inversum in se ipsum[The heart turned against itself] (Flusser, 2008: 28).

Anthropophagyin Brazil has been constructed initially from the ethnographic descriptions by German adventurer Hans Staden, recounting his captivity with the (ritualistic anthropophagic) Tupinambá indigenouspeoplein 1553/54. Staden’s Warhaftige Historia und beschreibung eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen in der Newenwelt America gelegen (True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America) became a global best-seller upon publication in 1557 and remains forever ingrained in the global imaginary,depictingthe Americas as a wild territory.This worldviewhas endured, especiallyafter Theodor De Bry (b. Liège) replicatedthe images created byStadensome decades later,in his art studio established in Frankfurt, in finer, yetimagined details. De Bry never travelled to the Americas, his imaginaryinterpretations executed on copper prints were based on Staden’s texts and woodcut prints.Furthermore, De Bry’s two sons continued his creative productions and replicationsin the 1600s. These images influenced the drawing ofworld mapsof that time period, illustrated showing ‘men-eating’savages inhabitingthe Americanterritories. This was the Anthropophagic history told by Europeans of the ‘new’continentin the 16/17thCenturies, during Shakespearean time.

In my Anthropophagic Re-Manifesto for the Digital Age, I reflect on theentanglements of wildly different cultures coming into contact and the uneven reciprocities that ensued. InPindorama–Landof Palm Trees, mythical place of the Tupi-Guarani peoples–the ‘native’wereseduced by European trinkets, such as whistles, mirrors, rattles, giftedto them in exchange for the far more valuable ‘Pau-Brasil’wood.Trees which the natives had to fell, chop, carry and load into the Portuguese caravels in a system of uneven value exchange and exploitation.It is worthwhile to reflect here on the significance of that encounter from the native’s perspective. Aílton Krenak, one of the most recognised voices incontemporary indigenous thought explains:

...well before the [European] geographicdemarcation of Brazil as a country, the narratives of our ancestors built our own histories, which are many. Their recollection are populated by narratives sounded in more than 500 languages, just accounting for those spoken in South America...In each of these ancestral narratives was the prophecy announcing the arrival, the return of the white brother. These narratives dating back to four thousand years already mentioned the life of this other brother, always identified as someone who left our coexistence and was no longer traceable. Having left us, he also lost the sense of humanity we had been building. He had gone to a faraway place and lived there for many, many generations. In this time,he learned another technology, developed other languages and learned a different type of organisation than ours. In our ancestral narratives, he appeared time and again as someone who was returning home, but his thoughts were no longer known, nor what he was searching for. We no longer knew what he wanted. [He learned many things away from us, but also forgot where he came from and found it difficult to know where he was going]. The ancestral narratives are reminders in the form of prophecy or warning of the arrival of the white brother. But the narratives also carry within them a message: the promiseto relink with, to reencounter our former brother. (Krenak, 2015:160-162,author’stranslation)

In 1920sBrazil, during therise ofthe modernistandindustrial era, Anthropophagyexperienced a revival throughBrazilian artistic productions–the Anthropophagic act was transformed from taboo(European construct of indigenous social practice) into (artistic) totem. Anthropophagy was thus invigorated with two remarkablebracketing events: Semana de Arte Modernain São Paulo in 1922, and theManifesto Antropófagovby writer Oswald de Andrade in 1928, published in his newly founded Revista de Antropofagia. Andrade’s Manifesto was a punch in the stomachthat laid deglutition claim to just about anything, from all ‘-isms’toFreudian thought and revolutionary enterprisesacross time. All the while, the Manifestodemandedaccess to ‘the other’, an open license totaste the state-of-the-art influences from outside Brazil without committing to any of them, an unapologetic attitude toward devouring history itself, while fully embracing and celebrating indigeneity and its values, in order to spit out something new, original, worthy of envy. Feeling the effects of swift industrialisationclashing with abreasttraditional cultureswithin reachthroughout the Brazilian territory, Andradealso introduced a characterin his Manifesto: [Hermann Alexander Graf] Keyserling’s ‘technified barbarian’(Andrade, 1928: 3), a role played by the North Americans.

Almost 100 years later,the role ofthat‘technified barbarian’, an important allegory in Andrade’s Manifestobegets the question: ‘Who isconsidered theBarbarian now?’Who, in fact, is the barbarian at the gate, controlling the inputs and outputs of the digital age? This new erawas mycueto write the‘Anthropophagic Re-Manifestofor the Digital Age’in 2009, a remix of concepts birthed from a paradigm shift, sensing deep changes brewing in the imminent increase of interconnectivity speed about to take over the world via broadband internet service embedded in more advanced mobile digital devices. I translated this new reality into a latent cultural cannibalism in the age of digitalculture, of whichunceremonious information consumption practiceswould push the internet-worked information society toward a new type of colonialparadigm. Acolonisation via viral ideas with the conquering of new types of property, where digital data becomes an extremely valuable raw resource and new currency, and anyone can be a coloniser. A new practice of consumption –ingestion, digestion and excretion –involving a technological mediation. Using Anthropophagy as both metaphor and strategy to navigate the rough seas of internet constitutionalism and innovation, I set out to consider new power structures favouring ‘embrace, devour, share’within a new code of ethics as a holistic natural transparent approach for our socio-economic survival.All the while maintaining a healthy ecosystem online –based on net neutrality –and also offline, to support ethical information traffic and a safer metabolism of such large amounts of information.

But how could this new online frontier be explored any differently than in the past terrestrial colonial scenarios of exploitation? It would not take very long indeed for wild exploits to loom in the horizon. The online community –if there has been ever such a thing as a ‘community’–steering wide-eyed in a Jules Verne’s Nautilustype ofvesseldid not manage to reach the cost of utopia.The hope was perhaps to get to the destination navigating theinternational online waters free from land-based government.However,in a space of just ten years, roughly 2009-2019, the online worldhasgone from innocent ebullient optimism to fear, scepticism and pollution. A vertiginous trajectory from an environment of relatively equal stake-holders at the beginning of the internet era with a horizon built brick by brickto thecurrent world entirely calculated to fit into a smartphone –the new acculturation tool.Its degenerativedynamics alikea‘Requerimiento’(penned in 1513 by jurist Juan López de Palacios, to be read out loud even in empty beachfronts with the purpose of submitting non-conforming indigenous to the complete rule of Spanish kingdom, under penalty of death). And although history teaches us patterns, models and structures of dominance and subjugation, the long journey traced since the 15/16thCentury Iberian caravels only shows us how much today's internet-worked culture has fallen into those same patterns, models and structures.

Digital Anthropophagy, a term I coined in 2009, whose sentiment permeates my Re-Manifesto, reflectsa globalised user-based practice and cultural manifestation occurring online and outwards into the physical world and back online as a resonating never-ending feedback loop of vast cultural consumptionand transformation. Whereas there have been plenty of profound exchanges and symbiotic profiteering online, it has become increasingly apparent that a lesser form of Digital Anthropophagy is unfortunately also possible, namely: cannibalism. While Anthropophagy produces new forms, bodies, effects, original expression, synthesis; cannibalism is an act of poor destruction, at bestit produces just a copy, without imagination, without ritual, without magic.

To compound the lesser favourable winds of development, this new era of consuming ‘The Other’in a supposedlyimmaterial way has only revealed that the digitalworldis heavily material. All the apparatus that supportitarebased on materials:bodies implicated in the production of devices, content and data; rare metals extracted from the earth and ocean to make our digital lightness/heaviness of being, colourful, pleasant, and chic. We have been payinga high price for the commodification of life.Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible to imagine a world without these technological companions and coadjutants to our lifestyles, they have so profoundly changed our humanity. The conveniences and addictive happiness these devicesafford usersexist in the very tension between the material world and thedeep level of abstraction invisible and impenetrable to most who have embarked in this great digital adventure.

Looking back at my Re-Manifesto, I recognise it as a provocation –what does it mean to be Anthropophagic in the Digital Age with thesupreme interconnectivity of the informationsociety, in whicheveryone is consuming the world,and each other,at an unprecedented pace and intensity? By opening up a new blank map on which to inscribe a new history, I was exploring potential: both high and low. In this tension, I recognised that our cannibalistic relations,not only toeachother, but also with technology,werecausing an ontological shift in the way we see ourselves as human, an ontological turn proposed by philosopher Vilém Flusser in Für eine Philosophie der Fotografiein 1983. Flusser proposes that,starting with the invention of photography, human beings began orienting themselves from the images, which not only stand as surfaces (mediations) between human and world, but also veil what stands behind its algorhythmic representation.

I had proposed Digital Anthropophagyasa valuable cultural concept for our time, neither euphoric nor pessimistic. Now, reflecting on what the Internet has become in these last tenyears, I see that aglobal ‘user culture’has succumbed in the digital era to meta structures that engulf us and transform us intocannibalised bodies.I am reminded of a constant theme inFlusserianphilosophy that speaks of our highly technological moment: ‘The change of codes is far more important than the invention of new media...the function of codes is not dependent on a metaphysical ‘eidos’ of the medium, but on how the medium is handled’(Guldin, R. et al, 2008: 5). Flusser himself states: ‘Indeed we are actively generating our tools and through them we are generating the world, but it is also true that those tools are hitting back on us and are generating us’(Flusser, 1991).

The question now seems to be what world should we generate next in widely and wildly divided global societies?Do we needanother paradigm shift, a radical discontinuity to sever deep dependencies on the control mechanisms of the digital age?Flusser believed that the artist is an agent who can intervene in programmed apparatus, be it a technological black box or institutions of control. If anindigenous ritual-philosophy informed artistic and cultural production in the 1920s, why not consider indigenous art production, which has managed to transcend time and western artistic cannons, to informa new imagination?Aílton Krenak and Bené Fonteles offer the following:

[Indigenous artistic expression] is born from a magical world that unveils the unconscious and reveals the ‘third bank’ of a river that can’t be reached with an actual canoe. In order to cross it, what we need is the technology of a mind with imagination, but also an invisible canoe that may take us to that bank without expecting goals or outcomes. Everything requires more than a mystical and magical trance, a free transit between visible and invisible worlds that are not separated. As the Toltec shaman Miguel Ruiz says, ‘you are both the dream and the dreamer’.

In order to be that primordial dream and to compose it, indigenous peoples need to be left in peace in the forest, unaffected by the barbarism of ‘civilisation’, continuing to create an art that can navigate thedifferent banks with interdisciplinary independence, with solidarity and interaction, involved with everything rather than developed, without losing its creative body and its cultural and spiritual essence, which persists from cave and rock painting to the plural and instigating contemporary art forms. (Krenak et al, 2019: 148)

To dream new worlds and new frontiers is the only way out. But to cultivate one’s birth ground or chosen home is the only way in, which is what the original populations of the many places called ‘America’will tell us. Likewise,Flusser, having escaped the Holocaust seeking refuge in Brazil in 1941, but losing his family in concentration camps, was well aware of Nationalism’s project. He saw in the zero-dimension of pure numbers a dangerous capacity to generate (i.e., to project) and effectively change the worldsupported by meta-apparatus. The danger implicatedin a changeofour subjectivity,potentially transformingour species into an entirely programmable and predictable subordinate apparatus to be fully utilised in mechanisms of control.But history bears no obligation to repeat itself just for the sake of teaching lessons. It is useful to once again devour history against neo-colonialrule, against cannibalistic destructive binaries that erasediversity, against techno-escapism,andto movetoward a multiplicity that celebrates other forms of alterity, different modes of living, fluid identities and the pursuit of happinesslanding with our feet back on earth, our home. To embrace the dissimilar absolutely, but away fromthe obsolete neo-liberal patriarchy andinto the welcoming wild arms of‘matriarcado de Pindorama’(de Andrade, 1928)... ‘From this Earth, on this Earth, for this Earth. And it’s about time’(De Andrade, 1944, author’stranslation).

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar through a Bauhaus Promotionsstipendiumand the Bauhaus University’s Equal Opportunity Office for travel support to present at the Conference Bites Here and There: Literal and Metaphorical Cannibalism across Disciplines, 11.2018.

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Aparece en https://www.digitalmanifesto.net/manifestos/22/

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