Now, I am not saying that you asked– and if you didn’t, I am really sorry about all this– but if you did ask me “What’s the use of an art-thing?”, then I say: 

To invent a future spectator. 

That’s it: the future spectator brushes aside all those other absurd purposes. And it also makes it rather impossible for an art-thing to be just useless. Why, inventing a future spectator, that’s not useless at all.

It’s not too complicated. Without a spectator, just one tinny one, the art-thing you made is pretty much absurd. But it is also absurd to go and make an art-thing for the already-there spectators, because that is already there, and times 10000000. Are you really getting out of your warm cozy bed just for that? So the only thing left to do is to make an art-thing for the future spectator.

Picture a guy, finally getting out of bed,– any guy will do, tall or short, fat or thin, man or woman– and now the guy is drawing a chicken. (You can also picture our guy dancing it, or writing it, or molding it, or singing it, or whatever tickles your imagination). But notice that as randomly as he seems to be doing it, there is a sense that he’s aiming at some weird sort of accuracy, I mean, he goes around and about, puts and takes and flips and destroys, and no one knows when it’s done but the guy himself.
And once we have that chicken, hop!, immediately an egg’s popping somewhere out there, at some point in time. The egg must be what the weird accuracy is all about, the egg is, look closer, the future spectator. 

But what do you mean by “future spectator”? Glad you asked. The future spectator is a person that doesn’t exist yet, simply because no one ever has had any vague interest in this inexistent future person– no one but the artist-guy, right now, drawing the chicken. If it seems to everyone that the artist-guy is just doing it for himself, it’s because he is in fact the only person who can stand for and summon up that future spectator, and just by doing the stuff he does, without even having to notice it. The only thing the artist-guy has to do, really, is to un-prevent himself from doing the weird-sort-of-accurate-thing he is doing, the art-thing, which, in this case, he will very likely call “Chicken”. 

So, which came first, the chicken or the egg? 

If the art-thing falls from the shelf, and the only spectator is in the future, does it produce any sound? 

And why is the art-thing clapping? 

Exciting stuff we’re up to.

In order to do a thing, any thing in this life, one needs to borrow energy somewhere. And to do an art-thing, namely our chicken-thing, there is naturally no exception. 
A very effective kind of energy available out there is money, one borrows from the future payment the energy to get the thing done, and if one has a surplus of energy after the paycheck, well, one can then spend it jumping up and down the road, to make all even. But the chicken-thing finds no line of credit there, in the future money, and so our artist-guy has to look somewhere else. Where should he try next? Future prestige? Future fame? Next-life rewards? They are all energy paths on their own ways, but they’re making too many demands, and they are not handing out the exact kind of energy the chicken-art-thing needs either. 

No, the artist-guy has to search better, he has to get hold of the exact energy source for the art-thing, wherever it might be hiding. It’s a hard catch but, happily, energy is not expected to perish in this universe of ours, it just keeps indefinitely fresh and lively, somewhere, somewhen, waiting for a call.

Look, there’s the artist-guy again, the moment he left his bed, and still on his pajamas, and he is now making a call to the future spectator– living in the future, of course– and borrowing energy from him or her, and the artist-guy ends the call by saying he will totally give the energy back, he promises. And then the future spectator sends by time-travel DHL a package with the energy, from the future to the present where the artist-guy is. The artist-guy opens the box and then uses the future spectator’s energy to do the chicken-thing. Two months later or 568 years later, it doesn’t really matter, a spectator, leisurely sitting, standing or laying in front of the chicken-art-thing, unexpectedly gets the energy package. What happens? The spectator instantly recognizes his or her own energy, and so very naturally becomes the future of himself. DHL has delivered once again, right on time.

Now, where is that energy package and how can I get it? Is it the art-thing itself? If this was the case, each and every creature that would contact with the chicken-thing would automatically be the future spectator, they would instantly be the future of themselves, something else than they were just before. It could be nice, now that I think about it, but it does not really work that way. If the universe is so into conserving its total energy, it cannot probably afford such a huge huge expense. 

It seems weird but you have to be already the future spectator to seemingly become the future spectator. And if you are not the future spectator, the art-thing itself isn’t worth more than the stuff it is made of, or, at least, it isn’t worth more than what other people are able to convince you it is worth. So there is nothing in the art-thing, nothing magic. 

So where the hell is the energy package? Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, maybe DHL is really as fast as it claims to be, but, as soon as the future spectator leaves the package addressed to the artist-guy on the door mat to be collected by DHL, at that very time, the bell rings and here you are: a freshly delivered package on the future spectator’s door mat. If the package did not have the artist-guy’s address as sender and all the postal stamps and all, it would seem the package hadn’t left at all.

Wait, but, this future spectator, what do they actually look like? Some sort of sci-fi humanoid androids totally ahead of their time? Obviously not, says I. 

We always see the future as something funky, but the future is actually something quite natural. We see the future as weird because we see it through the data from the past, which is absolutely useless to the future. People, of all animals, are an extremely lazy kind, lingering in the past all the time, and we have a hell of a hard time to lift the butt and walk ahead to the future along with nature, we always kind of loose the ride with nature, because we are so very busy with past affairs.
So the future spectator is actually no big deal, only a person finally catching up with nature. And since you cannot make the future with the knowledge of the past, you cannot expect any sort of progression or transition from the already-there spectator to the future spectator. What has to take place is a total interruption, emission is abruptly cut for a late-minute ultra-special live broadcast. So, not sci-fi, just the real deal kind of person. 

This also tells us why animals couldn’t care less about art-things, because animals aren’t lazy, and an art-thing is made only for us lazy-ass people.

Let’s not twist it, the artist-guy is not creating the future, he’s just creating a piece of crap– to entertain, to seduce, to decorate, etc – just a piece of crap. The important thing about that piece of crap is that it is totally intended for the future spectator and not the least for the already-there spectator.

Saying the art-thing (piece of crap) invents the future spectator is actually and factually a total abuse of expression I indulge myself in. It’s like saying the sun is rising, everybody knows it is actually not, but we keep on saying it anyway, because it is what it is from our stand-point. So, from our stand-point, the art-thing is inventing the future spectator, but, if we look from the far distance, the future spectator is already there, and what the art-thing does is to ignore the already-there spectators, ignore their gone affairs, and thus letting the future naturally take hold. “Look how cool, the sun rising!”, or more precisely, “Look how cool, the earth rotating and its movement now catching the sun!”. Likewise, “Look how cool, the art-thing inventing the future spectator!”, or more precisely, “Look how cool, the art-thing preventing the dragging of the past from obscuring the future spectator!”.

You see, when the artist-guy borrows energy from the future spectator, he receives back in the past a huge huge package from DHL, I mean, the future spectator has a lot of energy to lend. Dealing with that energy is no small task, which doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, after all, getting a big package in the mail with piles and piles of energy is a very cheerful thing. Though now, the guy realizes (and he is scratching his head) he got himself in some big debt. 

The problem is that the guy doesn’t really know much about the future spectator, in fact, he knows nothing at all, but he is forced to become an ultra-specialist in the future spectator like that [snapping fingers], from scratch. The artist-guy isn’t the future spectator himself, that he knows for sure, and there isn’t around anyone whom he could model the future spectator from. So he can’t go from there, though he can go from not-there, so the guy says: the future spectator is not-myself and not-the-others either, for a start. From there he has to improvise, that’s what, try and fail fail fail fail as necessary. He has to play with the things at hand, to not take any thing for granted, he has to mix and match, abandon, cut and paste, flip, destroy, twist, punch and dance. At this point the guy has to say it out loud, I like you and all, future spectator, but from here where I am standing in the past, you begin to seem a weirdo, and he laughs and gets back to it.

People passing by his window will probably call “foolishness” to all that inadequate activity and sort of stubbornness, and I’m not the one to say they’re wrong. In fact, “foolishness” is just another name for “big big debt with the future-spectator”.

What would happen if an art-thing didn’t cater for the future spectator but for the already-there spectator instead? Who is at loss in this situation? For a start, DHL. There is no energy to borrow or lend, no energy to be delivered, no energy to time-travel nor space-travel either. It’s inertia as usual, which doesn’t seem to cause any harm, as it is the usual state of things with people. But, I wonder– and not that I’ve done any proper survey– isn’t an already-there spectator secretly in for some sort of quantum leap when shopping around for an art-thing? Doesn’t he or she feel a sour weird taste when, after the fact, she is riding the subway back home, and not that she didn’t like it or have a good time and all that, but she is still the same ol’ already-there spectator? What a missed opportunity for an egg cracking, for an interruption and now for something completely different. 

To make things for the already-there spectator one definitely needs skills, and the most crucial is to study the target public very well. All good, business as usual. Bogus chickens feeding the state of inertia –which, by the way, is called culture, society, public, and so on. And inertia doesn’t necessarily mean to be at rest, you know, inertia means also to motion with a constant velocity, to progress steadily. So it might even seem that the bogus chickens are so progressive and state of the art and everyone’s happy in the ministry of culture, but there it goes– the culture, the society, the public– on its oh-so very progressive steadily inertial pace. 

Well, a real deal chicken doesn’t mind about culture, society or public, a real deal chicken crosses the road when it crosses the road, and it doesn’t give a damn if people can’t see any reason why. Mind me, not because the chicken is crazy, but just because a smooth ovally-charming future spectator must be hatched up.

Mr. Accountant, 
It doesn’t matter how many spectators the art-thing gets, the important thing is if, among its tinny or massive number, the future spectator is invented. And if you’re now attempting to count the number of future spectators, you fail to see that the future spectator is but a switch that goes from off to on, and so it has no numbers to target, no degrees, and, luckily for the future spectator, cannot be submitted to polls, statistics, nor mass media operations.

What more, besides a cute future spectator, could we ask of the art-thing? Should we demand beauty, truth, elevation, spirit, and meaning? Are we really that desperate that we should demand salvation? 

If one is to talk with a thing– and why not, really?– we can make ourselves a favor and go straight to the to-the-point matter: “Hey, chick, are you allowing the future of myself? You better!”

There are two great news for the future spectator: one is that he or she is future, and the other is that he or she is spectator. That’s a spectacular combination! If you are “future” you have had it with the past. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Now don’t bother me with nostalgic notions ‘cause I’m right here surfing the groovy waves of time. 
But “spectator”, isn’t it boring, wouldn’t you rather participate? Man, since I just stopped participating, I have now so much free time to act– the future spectator says– and if you don’t see that, maybe it’s because you’re a little too scared of free time, aka the future, man.

I can’t yawn these days without some group offering me the opportunity to participate on something. Society, culture, mankind– whatever you want to call it– has so many little groups, each one with a good plan and each one constantly repeating “sign-up and participate”. And who is having to decide whether or not to participate each and every time? Naturally, me and you, aka the citizen, aka the already-there spectator. Yes, all the groups, of all sizes, of all fields, they want the already-there spectator and the already-there spectator will always end up participating on something, as much as one tries to avoid it. 


An art-thing doesn’t bother to demand participation from the already-there spectator, in fact, an art-thing is absolutely unconcerned with the already-there spectator. And we, the already-there spectators, should be very very grateful for that. The art-thing doesn’t want you and that is beautiful. To the art-thing, the already-there spectator is just an in-between obstacle, a pain in the ass, the art-thing just cares about the future spectator. How many times have we heard already-there spectators complaining precisely because the art-thing is not addressing them? Move on, go elsewhere, there is nothing for you here, and let me tell you, there will never be anything for you here, as long as you keep demanding things for you here.

To make an art-thing the artist-guy is in the game of playing with things, a game which never leads one to victory or defeat, but only eventually to the future spectator. Yes, that is the only way to (luckily) invent a future spectator, by playing.

The artist-guy is a practical guy, he wants to pay his debt quickly and for good. But the only way to be practical about this, is precisely to shut himself away from common practicability. Because humanity at large, for the sake of practicability – which after a while can just be called tradition– has invested in very particular hierarchies of things and, along with it, people got invested in things themselves, taking them for granted, taking them way too seriously. In the name of centuries of practicability, we so take every thing by the letter. And then we fail to see they are only things, and, more exactly, we fail to see that things are not things at all, I mean, a thing is only what someone else has repeatedly told me a thing is, so things are always just quotes. 

So for the sake of practicability, we have all become very impractical. It’s not very surprising then to know that the artist-guy turned his back to this state of things, and made himself a separate playground for his very own practical reasons. The artist-guy will gather some things, and then put, take, twist, flip, copy and paste, punch, dance, destroy, abandon, mix and match, burst, suspend... Until things are no longer what he’s been told they are. Things can now dress up and have fun and even pretend they’re things after all. 

On the playground, our lives cannot be threaten by the inconsistency, incoherence and impermanence of things, actually our lives can just become livelier.

And then, after playing, will the future spectator come? Nobody said it was easy. Communications with the future are really bad, and so much is lost in the mail, but time is never never wasted with playing, even if results are poorer than one wishes.

So what’s the difference between the art-thing and every other thing? For the future spectator, there’s no difference at all. Every thing is chewable and never definite. (And what’s the use of constantly measuring and comparing things?, the future spectator adds.) 

But for me, already-there spectator, on the other hand, the art-thing looks different, the art-thing actually seems to fail to be like the other things I know. Basically because the other things I know are so seemingly ready to hand me out some sort of solace. There, that thing claims rightfulness, that thing claims value, that things claims beauty, that thing claims number one, that thing claims knowledge, that thing claims enlightenment, that thing claims entertainment, that thing claims goodness, that thing claims logic, that thing claims factuality, that thing claims social justice, that thing claims style, and the list goes on and on. If anything is delivered or not is a whole other story, but my comfort depends entirely on those claims alone. But– and this is the already-there spectator’s problem– the art-thing, what does it claim? 
Niente.

Can an art-thing solve problems? 
If your problem is “Am I the future spectator?”, then you’ll get an yes or no answer. If you have any other type of problem, no answer will be provided. 

You can also try, at your own risk, to get together all the complicated existential problems you have acquired all these years from this and that source, and replace them with the simple problem mentioned above. Because then you have a chance of getting a straight answer.

Can we change the world by making an art-thing? 
In the best case scenario, an art-thing can invent the future spectator, period. And to make an art-thing there is no way better than playing with things. And playing with things is nothing revolutionary, so you can breath deeply and enjoy the peace of the make-believe battle of making an art-thing. 

Is the future spectator the revolutionary type, is he or she the kind of person who wakes up with a thirst to change the world, even before washing the face? 

First of all, if you’re the artist-guy, you will never know it. Like every other guy, you have zero knowledge of the future. You just know that the future spectator is in tune with the changing nature of nature, you just know that the future spectator does not adhere to the past, and that he or she makes of the art-thing their very radical present. Big changes are in course between the point of making the art-thing and the future spectator, and emphatic expressions like “changing the world” or “revolution” will flip ten times in the void, loose consciousness and faint, and you could never foresee what will be made of them. The actions of the future spectator are totally unpredictable from our stand-point, so don’t bother the future spectator with our limited notions of “changing the world” and “revolution” and so on, you are just making it hard for the future spectator to be him or herself.

Who can say if an art-thing is successful or not? 
Only the future spectator, of course. And the future spectator does not need any philosophical, cultural, aesthetic or historical arguments to validate the art-thing, he just has to say “Here”.
And if critics, advocates and detractors start gathering around the art-thing, well, I hope they keep in mind an art-thing cannot really be prevented from failing nor helped to succeed, because failure and success are concepts of the already-there spectator, and have no meaning for the future spectator. But if you think you have a good instinct to detect already-there-spectator-ism, I say make good use of it, and do not loose too much of your and our precious time with that.

So how can an already-there spectator become the future spectator? No can do. There is nothing one can do to transform an already-there spectator into the future spectator. But one can surely just BE the future spectator, without any cause at all. 

Inventing the future spectator has nothing to do with educating or cultivating already-there spectators. The future spectator is not born out of a special kind of seed that you can make on a lab, plant on people, harvest, and then disseminate further and further, no no no. Un-cultivating, un-educating people could, if not totally impossible, offer better results in this case, but it’s already too late to stick all the branches back in the seeds, and the seeds back in the warehouses, and the ground back to its moist roughness. Nope, there can’t be any schools or techniques to change us into what we already will be. Just perhaps a little art-thing to block out what we are not, while we step into our own future without a second of delay. 

So where does the future spectator come from, after all? The future spectator is nothing but a band-aid that prevents the world from collapsing out of energetic inconsistency. The future spectator is a total necessity, because someone has to BE THERE, for a fact, at some point, to be the start and the end of that very particular chunk of energy seemingly traveling back and forth in time.

Does an art-thing make us more knowledgeable? 
Sure. On each and every occasion, at the smallest detail of our lives, we are helplessly adding knowledge to our already extensive knowledge base, and an art-thing, being just another thing in our lives, is yet one more grain for the knowledge-milling-machine. 

Since we keep our razor-blade focus, we should now ask instead: is knowledge any good for the future spectator? You may not like this, but the answer is no. If the future spectator were a vampire, knowledge would be the garlic heads, and if the future spectator were a fly, knowledge would be the vinegar. Knowledge smells too much of the past and the future doesn’t fancy past-smelling self-important talkative dudes. 

So, what the hell, what can the artist-guy do? How can he prevent knowledge from happening if knowledge is inevitable, and, even more, the only tool available to him? The game seems lost at start. With little to loose, the artist-guy has to resort to mischief. Make knowledge doubt itself, decelerate the process of knowledge-making, create conflicting knowledges, incite forgetting, try over-loading, any plan, any strategy, as long as it keeps knowledge from getting in the way of the future spectator.

So what does it really matter what the subject matter of the art-thing is? Any excuse is a good excuse to make the future spectator pop up. The future spectator himself has no preference for any flavor of subject, it just bugs him a lot when, in the end, he doesn’t get an invitation to the show.

The most important thing about the future spectator is his (her) present state. The art-thing sets the table and the future spectator eats immediately, with no hesitation or delay, because later everything will be cold and stale. The future spectator is all hungriness, and couldn’t care less about the quality of the meal, he or she hasn’t a single dietary restriction. Right now, she will digest any type of food imaginable, and make it all work very nutritionally for her own body. The art-thing cooks the future spectator’s present, and sauce or garniture are optional.
From then on, the future spectator is on her own. The art-thing has done its job and closed the shop, and the future spectator is left with no guidance, no advice and no diploma. Being the future spectator is the only certainty for the future spectator. 

What shall the future of the future spectator be? 
“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

All this time we’ve been avoiding an embarrassing issue: taste. 
It’s better face it, the artist-guy isn’t suited for important stuff, the big decisions he chooses to hold in his hands are such like “More pink?”, “What rhymes with car?”, “Should the arm lay above the face?”, “How long can I hold this sound?”, “Can I make this line less straight?”, et cetera. The artist-guy is the Mother Teresa of the unimportant things, and, really, all these unimportant things demand decisions that are embarrassingly based on taste alone. To solve those problems the artist-guy goes with his likes, or he may choose to go with his dislikes instead, or he may attempt something else and purposefully avoid his likes and dislikes. Taste, anti-taste, tastelessness or no-taste, it doesn’t matter what version, it’s taste the central criterion for all that decisions. The ridiculous is unavoidable: the artist-guy is the chevalier of unimportance and his implacable sword is trifle taste itself. 

But even if admittedly the artist-guy is doing things with taste all the time, that doesn’t mean the things he does have to deliver taste, it doesn’t mean the artist-guy has to become a taste-maker. For taste is a product for the already-there spectator alone. The already-there spectator has exquisite and very refined taste buds, acquired from exposure to culture, and he is very eager to please his senses. He demands the super-pleasure all the time, and so he can’t stop making subtler and subtler demarcations of what taste should and should not be, and in the end he selects only the crème de la crème of his very own taste. But the future spectator, on the other hand, he’s an hopeless brute. We can’t even blame him for that, because it is something of a physiological nature: the future spectator seems to lack taste buds on his moist pink tongue, or, if he does have them, they are in a weird primitive-like state and they do not hold in themselves any notion or scale of taste. As a consequence, the future spectator is only interested in food, and tasteful or tasteless things can be for him equally exciting, so long as they are digestible.

So here’s the artist-guy’s real problem: what do you cook for someone who lacks the sense of taste? 
The artist-guy could now start checking online for nutritional books and the latest diet trends, but he remembers in time that the future spectator is an unprecedented organism, and which mixtures of ingredients will, for a fact, be nutritious, digestible, satiable, and not cause any allergies or poisonings, have never before been tested or proved. 
I hope the artist-guy is in for some fun in the kitchen, because nothing is for granted in the brave food world of the future spectator.

When I say the future spectator is interested in food, you know that I don’t mean food as in “food for thought”. The future spectator is only up for real deal food, and strictly for the survival of his body in the harshest environment. Food that he can grab, peel, bite, munch and swallow, food that will be partially his own body, and partially his own poop.

Call it self-expression, if you want, but what the artist-guy in reality does is to fail all day long, he continuously fails to produce the future spectator, and there is nothing romantic about this. In any case, there is no way for the artist-guy to bring about the future spectator by resorting to an already-known formula, he has always to go about it his very own way. The guy the artist-guy is will naturally respond to the future spectator challenge in a way that is different from any other guy, and I guess there is nothing wrong to call that “expression”, but let us drop the self- prefix to avoid any mystifying interpretations. So expression is but a sub-product of what the artist-guy is really doing, but not the product itself– which I will not repeat again, for goodness sake. If the artist-guy would be interested in self-expression he would easily find better ways. The one who should actually be self-expressing (meaning, just existing) is the future spectator, and at the sake of totally ignoring the self-expressing buzz of us all already-there spectators.

OK, now turn to this other side. What do you see? Right, a huge busy world which does not even notice the art-thing is there. Does this mean that the people of the busy world are not interested in catching-up with the future of themselves? 

Surely they are, the thing is that, in the busy world, the market share of the future spectator has been devoured by the fake-future enterprises. They are loud, they are resourceful and it seems to be paying off, this living off my hopes for the future: “you will be free”, “you will have a voice”, “you will be happy”, “you will have a good retirement”, “you will have an after-life”, “you will have a job”, “you will get inner-peace”, “you will be cured”, “you will be special”. The fake-future is sponsoring each and every one of my dreams for the future, and every time I dream my dreams– which are not really mine, to start with– I forever delay and falsify my genuine desire to step into the future’s shoes. 
Contrary to what I would expect, the fake-future enterprises operate in total transparency and they are ready to give you a share. Here’s how the magic is done: you stack blocks of information, belief, speculation, seriousness, solutions, scientificity, add a handful of feelings, and then glue everything together with fat glossy layers of creativity. You’ve just made yourself a big and very deceiving wall which keeps you and everyone from realizing that the future is right there on the other side. This side of the wall is now decorated with images of fake-futures and we all then sing songs of hope. After a while no one remembers the wall is actually there, and we call this side “the whole world”, though it’s just actually our tinny already-there world. All communications through the wall have been cut, so imagine the hardships to call the future spectator, actually living right across. On this side, on the contrary, networks are thriving, and they’re specially busy around the fake-future emissaries, who are so taken by their own importance, that they couldn’t feel the weight of the real-deal-future even if it was jumping hard over their little toe.

The overlooked art-thing is a ridiculous amoeba among all this macroscopic chattering. Why not going more the ridiculous amoeboid way?

Let’s talk about love. 
If you love someone, what do you want out of this someone? Nothing? No way. Sex, OK. And then what after sex? What do you want out of this person who you say you love even after sex? 

If you love someone, you know that this loving someone is a performance. Don’t take me wrong, it’s the opposite of a farce, it’s a real deal performance. But what do you want to elicit out of your love-performance? Love is never gratuitous, that’s for sure. 

You have more energy than that you can account from food, and you’re 24h deep in this extraordinary performance, you make totally unjustifiable things, you act like a fool yet you don’t loose focus, you go around and about, put and take and flip, twist and dance and burst ... wait, this starts to smell like future spectator to me. Yes, you’re into inventing the future spectator out of this someone, the future spectator of your love!

So love doesn’t seem that complicated after all, just another art-thing made by persons who dare to borrow from the future spectator the corresponding DHL energy package for their love-performances. Love is just the coin for these transactions with the future, where you borrow, you spend on silly things, and you return to the brand-new future spectator. 

And what does the future spectator do with this love he or she gets back? Since the love was hers (his) all along, she has to do nothing with it, absolutely nothing, so she just keeps it for now. And this keeping for now, we could just call “loving life”, if we are able to see that there is no action there at all.

– Hey, how are you? 

Your body was leisurely walking down the busy street on a warm spring afternoon, when suddenly your mind is ordered by a human figure waving and approaching from the other side of the street. As quick as thunder, the mind collects as many memory-pictures as it can, fills in all the blanks, and there YOU are! Your mind has just invented YOU from scratch, once again. And now your mouth goes: “I’m doing good. I’m on my way to the post office. And how are you doing, Zaynab?” Luckily you also remembered your friend’s name in the process. 

What has the future spectator to do with all this? 
Just in case you were thinking that inventing a person is an impossible or very difficult task, when in fact you do it several times a day yourself. You just have the habit of inventing always a very similar person every single time. But that beautiful spring day you could also have said: “I’m great, I’m an orangutan and I want to play with your hair, Zaynab.” It would be possible but technically a lie, because you would have to believe in all sort of imagined memory-pictures to support that. 

So inventing the future spectator is not really about the use of imagination. The art-thing is into inventing a person that is not a lie, a person that doesn’t need fanciful memory-pictures, the ones already there will do just fine. But, this time, this person we call the future spectator is totally disrupting the ordinary process of the “Hey, how are you?” orders, this person we call the future spectator is surprising her own mind with lightning-fast unpredictable selfs, this person we call the future spectator is playing the same old memory-pictures but in a way her own mind has never heard before. The mind of the future spectator– how lucky!– is in for constant (and totally free) entertainment.

Couldn't one just build a cloud-based app for the future spectator? 

Well, as brilliant as the app's algorithm may be, it always feeds on past data– tons, googol amounts of data, even– but, ultimately, it is always only dull inert past data. And one can compute past data as one wants, but the result will always be a version of the past, with no grasp whatsoever of a real deal future. 

This old habit of always sticking to the idea that the past causes the future has led us nowhere but the constant (boring) re-enactment of the past. Someone's righteousness about the future doesn't make the future, it only makes a good number of future-prediction failures, with different levels of consequences, from the laughable to the disastrous. The future has no time to waist waiting to be caused. And the future spectator will have to have jumped hastily over all that data just in time for the switch.

Apps and clouds are extremely beneficial to already-there spectators, they operate all sort of useful tasks indeed. So much so, that the tastes and wants of an already-there spectator are now served with meticulous accuracy. Whatever the already-there spectator likes and wants, it is right there, for free and in abundance, plus a few advertised options.

The future spectator has no likes and no tastes, therefore his or her searches have no entries to show, and no company sees her as a potential client. (But– what am I saying?!– the future spectator has no use for any "search" in the first place.)

And now back to the past: with all these delicious already-there freebies, who cares about the future’s real need for a future spectator?

So imagine someone wants to evolve, I mean, explore one’s own liveliness and one’s own potential. You know, a bit like nature around does, nature around is always exploring its own liveliness and its own potential, always evolving, and it doesn’t stop to brag about it much. How does nature do it? If we pay close attention, all we can see is puzzling jump-cuts. So how to jump oneself?

A popular way to go about any such challenges is to resort to information. The take is, if you want to explore your own liveliness and your own potential, well, all you need is to gather, compile, analyse, compare, compute and apply information. For example, take one of those jump-cuts, gather information on the pre-jump state, now on the post-jump state, compare these two, find the formula, apply it to yourself, and boom! done. This is pretty much the standard one-serves-it-all technique. 

There is a very simple problem with this approach, that goes beyond the immense hardships of gathering information from a jump-cut: if you ever jumped in your life before– and I bet you did– you know very well that one jumps first, and then information catches-up, following behind, with delay. Information follows the lead of the jump, so if we forget to jump and we try to follow information alone, we stay exactly at the same very spot.

It’s at this frustrating point that one may try the chicken-thing, for a change. 
There are reports of people of all times, drinking it, singing it, painting it, dancing it, with very happy results. 

But, isn’t the chicken-thing ultimately just a piece of information?, the observant person asks.
Ah, but the information part is actually just a cover-up, the chicken-thing is a piece of information with very precise holes in it, and the holes are all that matters. The principle is this easy: How would one remember to jump, if a hole wouldn’t make its way into one’s footpath?

It doesn’t matter if the art-thing takes a few seconds to make, or if it takes a few years to make, the important thing is that the Future Spectator has no time to waste. 
It doesn’t matter if the art-thing is 8 hours long, very brief or will be there for centuries, the important thing is that the Future Spectator has no time to waste. 
It doesn’t matter if the art-thing is the most slow-paced thing or if it is the most fast-paced thing, the important thing is that the Future Spectator has no time to waste. 
It doesn’t matter if the art-thing is a very archaic thing or if it is the most modern thing, the important thing is that the Future Spectator has no time to waste. 

So how come the art-thing does not waste the Future Spectator’s time?
Independently of the time it takes to make, the art-thing is always elementary.
Independently of its duration and durability, the art-thing is always instantaneous.
Independently of its pace, the art-thing is always acceleration.
Independently of the novelty, the art-thing is always ancient (and the Future Spectator always future).


To the artist-guy one can only recommend quickness and patience– but to know which to use when, and how much is too much or too little, requires an inevitable real interest in slowly and restlessly finding it out.

Nature is unpredictable, bizarre, untrustworthy, at times very boring, at times overwhelming, sometimes it bursts, sometimes it hurts, sometimes it nurtures, unapologetic, gives no notice, serves no ideal. I’m talking about the nature outside but also the nature within, naturally.

So why should one trust nature, why should the nature of the future spectator be so trusted? 
The alternative is an absurd world, no other than the one we live in: if you don’t trust nature within you, within your friends, or in the world around, you have to constantly surveil yourself, your friends, your world, and accept their surveillance as well, all the time. The state of surveillance is what you get by not trusting your nature. And the state of surveillance is the ultimate already-there state: nothing besides the already-there is allowed because the out-there, aka the future you, cannot be trusted and needs to be shut down by control. 

The already-there spectator is sure nature is out (in) there to kill him or her, but fails to see nature is the only ticket to life. The already-there spectator looks at nature as a stranger, but fails to see that strangeness is where everything really happens. So instead of taking a ride with the art-thing, and go check nature (aka his own future being), he stays put, watching, tracking and reporting on it.

The future spectator is not naive about the real dangers of the ride, but he will explore nonetheless the awkward unpredictable nature within and the unruly spontaneous nature outside. Any good instinct will tell you: it is just not worth it, not trusting the untrustworthy nature.

The already-there is all about space conquering. Penetrating all spaces– from the XXS space in-between particles, to the XXL space in-between planets, or down to the M space in-between people and peoples– it veni-comes, it vidi-sees, it vici-wins. 

Space is an easy subject in the already-there schoolbook, meaning, space gets so easily subjected. Now, when it comes to time, the already-there schoolbook is rather omissive. Because time is the field at which the already-there always flunks.

It's embarrassing: the already-there can travel up and down the space, but can it travel up to its future, or down away from it? The already-there can separate and collide stuff and people in space, but can it collide or separate stuff and people with their destiny or origin? The already-there can border and regulate territories, but can it territorialize time, make time stop at a border patrol? Time is way way wilder than that, and so became the already-there's #1 public-enemy. The already-there is literally running against time.

To pursue its boring ways, the already-there depends on a locked time-space, but time always rebels against this unnatural state of things. And whenever time manifests its natural discord, the already-there tries to catch it and space-fy it, for its own dubious security reasons.
That's what past really is: a rebellious time which has been space-fied by the already-there, a sort of cheap consolation prize. Past is actually no time at all, it's a chunk of space: a timeline, a library, a storage server, or just memory space in your head, really. The only source of real-deal time available out there is this naturally rebel future, as even the present is no more than the boring space-fication in progress.


It's no wonder then if the future spectator seems a bit spaced out– and yet how bothersome can her cute powerless spaced-out self be: when the future spectator sneezes, the already-there world has to funda-wanda-mentally re-set the clock.

The truth of the matter is that the leaders of the already-there spectators (ATS) are full of lies. The truth of the matter is that the leaders of the ATS don't even keep a secret that they are so full of lies. And this wouldn't be such a problem for us, members of the ATS, if we weren't in fact paying those leaders so much money to be the truth-tellers.
And so we are left confused, sceptical, untrusting, divided. And if, among us, an unfulfilled longing for truth hits, the only visible way is to go dig the past, to search for the matter-of-facts. But past digging is so laborious, so inexhaustible, so dangerously addictive, that one might not see the light of the future anymore in one's lifetime. And the truth of the matter is that the leaders of the ATS seem to be well aware of this fact.



The art-thing distorts the matter, plays with the facts. The art-thing is factually a fiction, the art-thing is paid, if at all, for fabulations. It's absurd to go dig the past to disprove the art-thing, it has disproved itself at the very start. So you can jump right off into your own future, as per its invitation.

But then – very weirdly and instantaneously–  you, the future spectator, you are the matter-of-fact proof of its truth-telling, a self-evident irreproducible live truth. A truth directly sourced from the future, not one of those inert past truths we so got used to.

And if it wasn't for all the confusion and misleadings of the ATS-led world, what other type of truth, other than this future-goes-fleshy truth, would we actually need?

Do you know what does not create the future spectator? Smartassness.
Trying to invent the future spectator by outsmartassing is such a losing bet.  

What’s with all this smartassness anyway?
The already-there person is naturally frustrated for having no connection whatsoever with the future, for making no progress at all. But instead of doing the hard job of making a call to the future spectator and then go and play with things, the already-there person chooses the smartass way. It’s actually a winning strategy, but only if you want to 100% stay in the already-there zone, forever indefinitely ever.


No art-thing is a smartass-thing. And making smartass-things will only increase the weight of our own already-there spectator’s asses.
The future spectator is a kick in the already-there's ass, not an ass-kisser.

One doesn’t have the future spectator’s number, and that’s a problem when you really need to make that call. Of course– what was I expecting?– neither the future has a calling code, nor the future spectator has ever been designated a number. He or she remains numberless, for the (future) time being. 

With everything future-related, things are, once again, not so obvious. 
Ok, for now one can't call the future spectator, but one can not call the already-there spectator, one can definitely make one’s device less busy with the already-there all the time. The future has this gentle side, if it sees you’re busy, always on-line or on-hold with the already-there, it will tiptoe its way around you, so as not to disturb. So if the future won't call on me, won't disturb me, the only way to get hold of the future is thus for me to disturb myself, to disturb my already-there calling habits.
It’s anyone’s call to figure out a way to do it, but it will probably involve hacking our devices– whatever apparatus we happen to be using to reach out– as they come universally programmed for boosting the stream of the already-there. 

So now your hacked already-there-muted device is pretty much available for that call with the future, and yet still no such call is possible. Should you just paralyse in face of the impossible? Since you were once a kid you ought to know better, as all kids have this ingenious way to go about impossibilities: you can pretend, make-believe, you can do a pretend-call to the future spectator, in all silly earnestness. One doesn’t need to be convincing, or to impress an audience, one just has to get along with the game, for oneself. Of course, on the other side of the call, no voice will be heard, no real talking is going on, no sound, no vision, no communication, no message. And if you do recognise any message, just notice it can’t be anything but an already-there crosstalk or echo, and don’t make it such a big deal.

After all this, one either gets an energy package in the mail or one doesn’t. And only then I know the call got through, when I finally can’t prevent myself from using that energy, from doing an art-thing with it, from playing it out.

This increasing search for life on other planets… does it also mean we definitely officially gave up on searching for life here?

The future spectator looks at the already-there intelligence. It is right in front of her, on a shelf behind a vitrine, at the Museum of the Already-There. A funny little square, metal-like shine, though a bit scratched. We’re at a special wing of the museum, reserved for the objects of worship of the already-there peoples. Her fingers leaving greasy cute patterns all over the cold glass, the future spectator can’t really get it. She looks at the label for a clue.
Label says: “Intelligence was, in the already-there’s time, the measure of the capacity to measure.”
Awkward. It’s not that in the future there is only one weight and one measure (on the contrary), it’s just that measuring is such an irrefutable total waist of one's time.

Label continues: “The already-there peoples believed they were making things through their intelligence, while in fact, of course, already-there intelligence just measured and ranked the things that playing (future intelligence) made ahead.”  Awkwardly silly. Why would you want to fool yourself like that? And why not act for real instead of just taking measures?

Label concludes: “When the already-there peoples exhausted the measures and rankings they could perform with their bodies, they got machines to perform out-of-the body measures and rankings, and called it "artificial" intelligence. But then they started to fear the moment when those machines would be able to measure themselves favorably against the already-there persons, when the measuring machines would be able to rank themselves higher than their inventors.” 
Awkwardly insane. The shiny square, totally “artificial” from the start, now about to fall into its own trap. What's so special about the capacity to measure, when you have the capacity to make the small into big and the big into small just by playing?

But enough of the past for today. As the future spectator steps outside of the museum for a well-deserved stretch, a funny idea comes to mind "What kind of odd impression would cause, to an already-there intelligent person, a tailor-made the-fool-in-the-room like myself?"

​There is an elephant in the room, it looks so wacko that we are trying hard to forget to mention it. But, what the hell, wacko is by now what we eat for breakfast...

See the elephant: the artist-guy is, obviously, also the future spectator of the art-thing. For all that we know, and we know not a lot, the artist-guy might even be the only one future spectator of his chicken-thing. Don't be sorry for him, one future spectator is always the big lottery prize, it is way more than enough, it is 150% mission accomplished.
So the wacko part is that then the artist-guy is just calling himself, borrowing his own energy, and using it to do the art-thing, chicken or otherwise, and when done he can watch it, spectate it, you know what I mean. And it's just in time to recognise his own energy, and arrive at where he is, his own future spectator self. What a surprise! He looks around and he is right there, in tune with the rest of the future around. So what was all that about? He can't figure it out but he doesn't bother very much about it, it's just too cool to witness the future.
Meanwhile, we can wrap our heads around these 2 options:

Option 1
The artist-guy was putting an act, he was pretending to be someone else before, he thought he was already-there, but he was future.

Option 2
The artist-guy was already-there but he was not the one doing the art-thing, future was.


Does it matter who hides and who seeks in this game? All that one needs is for one to play for real, otherwise, who would bother getting out of bed?

​The already there is not totally immune to the future. That would be too cruel on nature's side, to abandon the poor creatures in the past like that. No, nature devised a way, a smart way, to let the already-there persons know when they are lagging behind, when they're in denial of the future.
It all works out so perfectly: if you don't get yourself available for the future, you cannot but fear the future, and fear makes itself feel, loud and clearly, in your inside. The message comes from within, every time you resist the future. It's super efficient and cheap, as no external messengers are necessary.

Fear itself is no big deal, just a little reminder to make us upgrade but, oh boy, on the already-there sphere, it has become so huge, it has been re-branded and re-packaged and everyone is holding on to theirs. Anxiety, depression, paranoia, compulsion, you name it, we have invented it all. And now it is so big that it really hurts.

Nature whispers: Feel it and upgrade please, for your own good.

The already-there person screams: I can't take it, this notification is a problem, please someone numb or fix this now!!

Nature warns: Numb it all you will, but know that the only real fix is for you to upgrade to your future version. Fear then will simply disappear. How could you feel fear of the future if you couldn't separate yourself from it?

The already-there person is unmovable: No, I don't want to feel this fear, so I'll just drag this fear forever.

Nature: Whatever.

I wonder what a programmer would think of all this. Let's drop prejudices, the coder can be an artist-guy on his own right too, and code can be a super duper art-thing. 

I’m sure a coder would have no difficulty in seeing nature as it is– nature as code, as a coded interface, to be played by the future user. And couldn't we simply call “life” this future user or player?
So, if nature is code, nature is definitely an art-thing as well– just look at all its artsy features, all the attributes, tags, and styles and scripts and what not! And among nature’s code, the person’s code, a snippet of code among the huge code, a little app, waiting for life to sign-in and play-out. ​So we have our code and life now playing it, and stuff is happening, unexpected stuff is coming out of this playing right now.

Now imagine this ridiculous situation where the little snippet of code-person would say: I’m done with this, the already-there is just fine, I am not interested in letting my code be played-out by the future (life) any longer, I want to have control, the only function I’ll operate from now on is to protect and enforce my already-there-ness against all other code. Therefore I’ll create a culture, an army, an empire...

This code-paranoia, this already-there-virus is obviously malware, as the coder would put it. But life itself is not into name-calling, life needs no anti-virus, life is not interested in scanning, targeting, identifying or deleting code, all life wants is to play, not get all serious and moralist and vindictive and judgmental. So life simply plays around the already-there code, ignores it, leaves it to its own poor devices and self-destruction. (And not being touched by life, wouldn't this be enough of a jail sentence for the already-there person-code anyway?)

​For the code that is being played-out– let’s call it future code or future spectator– how can we determine where code ends and life begins?  Playing is playing, and who is playing and what is being played is all totally mixed up in one big cute one.