The Heroic Epoch of the Virtual Surrealists
written by Carl Merchant & Julie Cencebaugh.

The essential is always to look ahead, to remain sure that one has not
forfeited the burning desire for beauty, truth and justice, toilingly
to go onwards towards the discovery, one by one, of fresh landscapes,
and to continue doing so indefinitely and without coercion to the end,
that others may afterwards travel the same spiritual road
--Quote from Andre Breton


Andre Breton, the leader of our spiritual ancestors, forged a path
during a time of almost unimaginable chaos and destruction. We assert
that like the intellectual avant-garde before us, we are living in an
age wherein infinite possibilities emerge as a result of our subjective
perception of the constant flux of change that swarms around us.

We are intrigued by the Surrealists some 50 years later, like the
Surrealists themselves who worked from a pantheon of artists that
preceded them by 50 years. The Surrealist epoch enlightened humanity
and instilled in it a revolutionary zeal for personal interpretation of
the states of dream and reality being merged into an absolute state, or
surreality.

Our ultimate goal herein is not only to maintain an accurate historical
representation of who the Surrealists were and why they so profoundly
changed the world. We must extrapolate their beliefs with the
assistance of technology and our emerging global consciousness .
Surrealism cultivated every experience to challenge the imagination,
and we accept this as our own. By recognizing our own realities, we
attempt to regain control over the destiny of humanity.

We therefore assume the identity of the Virtual Surrealists.

We feel compelled to immigrate from the safe-haven of mainstream
society and into the mostly unexplored virtual community. This time the
path less traveled has taken the form of the geometrically expanding
borders of the global information network. We are no longer enslaved by
the traditional forms of media. Instead we are free to explore and to
create a different form of reality while at the same time producing a
more gentle and humanitarian future. The old mechanistic view of the
universe must be superseded by a more flexible systems theory, which
stresses the importance of the individual as a crucial part of the
whole.

The illusion of materialism has shielded the view of life and threatens
to destroy the very civilization that created it. Never before have
the values of society been so morally exhausted. We are a movement in
reaction to the spread of ignorance and intolerance in a morally
bankrupt society who has mortgaged its future for the benefit of a
select few, instead of the for the whole. The individual must be
empowered with the opportunity to experience a heightened level of
awareness. Only then can each of us make the decisions necessary to
change our present course and be responsible for our own actions as we
credit the individuality of the mind with the power of change.

We feel it necessary to set forth in public protest.

We desire a more passionate consciousness and will therefore explore
both the traditional and esoteric arts toward that end.

This emerging consciousness already manifests itself in multiple ways,
and we take it as our responsibility to examine, and disseminate that
plethora of information. Both mystical and marvelous spaces inhabit the
same regions of the mind as cyberspace, that of imagination. We define
the marvelous as an impassioned fusion of wish and reality, through
which it is intended to express a magical or circumstantial quality of
both intimacy, and an objective reality.

Our task is one of information dissemination, the bringing of the truth
to the people. We recognize that this may not be the most popular of
undertakings. If this makes us unpopular and undesirable to the status
quo then so be it. Today, we can no longer accept limitations imposed
upon the mind, and imagination. We react against the establishment of
ignorance with the empowerment of the individual.

We plan to accomplish these ideals through the use of the global
information network, especially the World Wide Web. Already, this
system of hypermedia documents has changed the way some of us live and
work. It promises to deliver vast amounts of information to the
individual, if only its true utility can be correctly nurtured and
allowed to grow.

This will entail both commercialization and privatization of the Net,
coupled with a grassroots movement to provide quality content of every
conceivable subject. Certainly there are many diverse challenges that
await us during the deployment of such an initiative. However, if the
virtual community will expand and unite, humanity has it's best chance
yet at overcoming it's societal challenges, and moving into a true
golden age.

These endless possibilities offer us a chance to reclaim some semblance
of control over our own destinies.

It is for the possibility of that era that we take action.

Join us then, in a continuing effort to expand the possibilities of
change. There are other groups about with similar intentions in mind,
and we join them here in cyberspace to celebrate the diversity of
culture, and the holographic infinity of the human mind.

Written by Cencebaugh and Aquarian
June 23, 1995

[Courtsey : [link]