[for arts and politics seminar in Prague beginning November 28 , called “Czechpoint”. will have more info in the coming weeks or feel free to contact us for more details. ]

In legal language of nation-states, an alien is a person who is not a native or naturalized citizen of the land where they are found. And to stay or work within a country’s borders aliens may need special immigration documents or permits that authorize them to do so. Then at the opposite end of the vocabulary and ontological spectrum there are those regions where poetry reigns with anything from rhythmic transcendance to out-stretched tentacles of personal and crystallized meaning where our “papers” and our “i.d.s” are not fixed data for compressing individuals into external functions, but an element of an entire living system and an archive of mysterious desires and expansion, often proportional to our capacities for mutually assured pleasure. But neither nation-states nor poetic territories have absolute sovereignty, rather they are the 2 sides of an intertwined viral host conspiring to feed on each other’s flesh from opposing angles. Yet one is a debilitating disease that proliferates the “all you can eat” varieties of fear, terror and isolation; a cannibalistic smorgasbord of maladies turned to capital by gluttons, politicians, vested interests and state agendas. The other is a hungry and seductive open mouth which perpetuates the need for connection to something with the power to both delicately and catharticly override the mother tongue.

Inbetween these 2 worlds lands the XL TERRESTRIALS, the current breed of humans, that prime anomaly of all the earth’s inhabitants, which holds the fate of the planet in its grasp, and the title of an intentionally amorphous group project which is poised to cross the boundaries between arts and activism and social praxis. Technically speaking, and given the times, we find ourselves behind enemy lines, penned into the finite and non-abstract, material circumstances which we have concluded are, to an Xtra Large extent, of our own making. Thus we cannot be locked into US vs. Them, but certainly can appreciate those wise words of those on the front who say “The earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.” Matthew Fox, a religious scholar living in California, takes it another step when he says, “It is now mostly people with Ph.d`s who are fueling the causes for the extinction of thousands of species a year, if not already PER DAY. ” Actually back in 1991, environmentalist David Orr tabulated that during a typical day anywhere from 40 to 100 species are lost.

With that as a fairly undebatable and utterly dismal scenario, the XL Terrestrials attempt to set in motion a deconstruction of our educational misdirections, to set in motion a NEXT LEVEL of Arts In Action, in order to devise another navigation system for our critically damaged vessel. To do that one must be ready to confront the core of Spectacle ( as in Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” ), that which has replaced learning and evolving with diversions, entertainment and a catastrophic socio-economic programming. To be precise, a mass “Operating System” which has reformatted humanity to play the endgame of numbers and machines.
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XL Terrestrials first began as a concept for a DIY magazine during NASA’s launching of the Cassini Mission in 1997, which as part of its payload had 72 pounds of plutonium aboard. To the public it declared straight-faced that there was no danger, and yet information leaked that there actually existed a detailed evacuation plan for the entire state of Florida in the event of some technological glitch on the launch pad. And acclaimed physicist Michio Kaku was one of many who also pointed out that had Cassini exploded in the atmosphere that at least half the planet would suffer from the radioactive fallout. Its Titan booster rockets had a failure rate of 1 in 20. Favorable enough odds apparently for NASA, that glorious pinnacle of post-modern military science/lunacy.

In fact this military and Ph.d-fortified arrogance was not in the least surprising, but what the real cultureshock at that time was how both concerns and dissent from socially conscious citizens and scientific communities alike were portrayed, sidelined and/or sabotaged in the media. This cold-blooded irrationality with its business agenda at the root was like another form of radioactivity spreading throughout the atmosphere, and it had thoroughly overtaken, our mass media, our public communications, and our reason.
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We had already been immersed in media activism and various arts and communication strategies for some years and then last year an invitation to participate in an investigation and “remix” of Walter Benjamin opened a new window on the crises. The project for Artist Televsion Access in San Francisco was called “ The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” This was for the XLT a chance to re-examine the effects of the new media environments as a whole, and to consider how to bring up-to-speed the “media ecology” critique, whereby we might produce a negative exposure of digital culture.
There with its technicolor trance reduced to an inside-out, a stark black and white, all that so-called technological “empowerment” started more and more to look like an insidious commercial for a looping stripmall panopticon, selling one virtual humiliation after another, and further, WE, have been enticed to spend our leisure/off-the-clock time in its cubicle, cellular, labor architecture producing little mental pavlovian treats for all our friends to follow us into the black arcade with all its solitary assembly lines, firewalls and reinforcements, and perhaps everything you`ll never need. Are we now our own showroom dummies manufacturing ourselves as self-styled avatar-inmate-shoppers baring all in the windows of Jeremy Bentham´s crime and punishment fantasy gone upscale-commercial ?

From this perspective the XLTs are coming to explore the Czechpoint themes to reveal the “Digital Bantustans” of the fully-equipped and networked 1st world, spreading like a wildfire virus to enrich the lives of all those impoverished unplugged neighborhoods across the globe.