All of this should be quite disturbing to a concerned public as undoubtedly what will follow will be a corporate sponsored version of these events.  Instead of the public being allowed to review the evidence for themselves and come to their own conclusions, behind secret doors lawyers will go through them determining what they deem acceptable for public consumption.

If you’ve been following the story you may know that a piece of media related to the events was also dropped in the ARK repository.  Originally we planned to release this media in conjunction with The Repository’s public date.  Since then however, The Repository itself has been griefed, we believe from private interests threatened by our existence.  The damage was pretty minimal and the works are all still protected, but recuperating has been a slow process.  As such we’re going to be pushing the public date for The Repository back to November 10th while we take the time to regroup.

That said because the court ruling has no legal grounds on The Repository, we feel it is our public responsibility to release the media we have received.  While we do not have the documents to backup the claims made in the video, we have little reason to doubt their validity, particularly considering the lengths to which Time News went to suppress them.  There is a crime for which the courts are currently pursuing action, but you must ask yourself what is the true crime here.  If there is indeed to be justice then all of the facts of the case must be explored.  If you are motivated to action, the future of WikiLeaks is currently being discussed at Superstruct.

Follow the Money from Art R. Knowles on Vimeo.

In our official statement about the Malaysian Financial Hack, and a recent interview by GEAS Volunteer J.F. Pickard we claimed no responsibility for the recent security breach.  We maintained that there was no connection between ARK and hackers, and denied that the person in question was an ARK member.  We’re going to recant that statement, but it should be noted that in doing so we are in fact reinforcing our open sense of organization.

We now have reason to believe the person in custody may in fact be a member of ARK.  In his first public statement he said that before turning himself in he had passed on documents obtained during the breach to WikiLeaks, and a piece of media summarizing it all had been passed on to be dropped in the The Repository.  Late last night we received that piece of media and accept it as proof that the person in question is indeed connected to ARK.

That said, our early denials were because of the fact that this person (or these people) were not told to do this work for ARK, but did so of their own initiative.  Their decision to use The Repository as a drop for their media is a testament about their view of their work as falling under the umbrella ‘art’.  There was long discussion about whether ARK agreed that it is indeed art, the result of which was yes.

Since the media was dropped in The Repository a court has ordered the whistleblower site WikiLeaks to be shut down, based on a request from the Time News Corporation.  WikiLeaks is hard at work on an appeal to have these documents publicly released.  In the meantime the media is still in The Repository where it can currently be viewed by members of ARK and will soon be made available to the public when we open up the drop next month.

[Note: As of writing this we are considering changing the date for publicizing The Repository.  Stay tuned to the site for more details.]

In the past couple of months, ARK (Art Replacing Knowledge) has garnered a significant amount of public attention, both in its disavowal of reponsibility for the high-profile hack of the Republican Bank of Malaysia and, more recently, in relation to the group’s comments on GEAS’s decision to include said financial hack in the promotional material for the “Outlaw Planet” superthreat.

Having responded to the group’s appeal for an independent journalist, Superstruct volunteer jfpickard was lucky enough to be asking the questions in ARK’s first official interview.

ARK on ARK’s origins

jfpickard: I thought I’d start by asking about ARK’s origins.  You’ve made it explicit that the group was founded in 2013, but – for the majority of us – you’ve only really been on the cultural radar for the last couple of years.  I wondered whether you could tell us any more about the initial days, weeks, and months of ARK, not to mention the group’s founders.  You now identify as a “global arts collective”, but was it always thus?  Where does your story begin?

ARK: Artists are an interesting breed.  Where not individually minded, they tend to operate in small circles.  But, those circles always seem to overlap.  You tell an artist that you’re going to Australia and they will tell you four or five artists you need to check for while you’re there.  In the early days this is what ARK was – a word of mouth network of artists.  It would be hard to say if there were any founders.  There were likely discussions being held at various locations around the same time, which all foreshadowed what would become ARK.  But it wasn’t until the Artists are an interesting breed.  Where not individually minded, they tend to operate in small circles.  But, those circles always seem to overlap.  You tell an artist that you’re going to Australia and they will tell you four or five artists you need to check for while you’re there.  In the early days this is what ARK was – a word of mouth network of artists.  It would be hard to say if there were any founders.  There were likely discussions being held at various locations around the same time, which all foreshadowed what would become ARK.  But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the 2012 election cycle and the changes in Intellectual Property and Media Rights that followed that ARK really became a cohesive group (if you can even call it that).

By this time the global economy was shot.  Finding work was becoming difficult, let alone work as an artist.  You found many who were trying their hands at their fallback fields, only to find those careers were no longer secure, and rarely left time for them to do what they loved most – create art.  It was around this time that No Starving Artist started spreading, and as it did the nature of that artist network started changing.

It grows exponentially because of the nature of those small circles.  In each place, ARK would appear to be something else.  It could have one member or one hundred members, all with one drive, which is to create art.  It has been the means with which we have learned as artists to survive.  And this before we had any concept of ‘superthreats’.  The ‘superthreat’ to us was that we were living in a society that had marginalized art to the point that the artist was an endangered species.  Where we could no longer count on that society to support us and our work, we took it upon ourselves to learn to support ourselves, and in doing so support the art.

ARK on organization

jfpickard: You’ve invoked Ursula Le Guin’s Odonians [see: The Dispossessed] when attempting to describe ARK’s system of organization, while also stressing the need to balance the creative impulse with the practicalities of existence.  How would you describe your wider political leanings?  What holds the collective together, and how are decisions made on a day-to-day basis?

ARK: Kudos to you for recognizing that reference.  We say Odonian as an alternative for anarchist, because the media has the copyright on that word.  Public perception of anarchists stems from late 90′s early 00 models which for the most part were immature understanding of what anarchy really represents.  LeGuin’s Odonian’s faced similar challenges, but through a social struggle were allowed the space to define themselves, outside of the law, through something more of a natural organization as opposed to forced one.  The majority of our legal systems are established to reinforce fears about human nature.  You have to have laws to protect yourself from the socio-path.  Yet it’s the laws themselves that create the pathology.  The Odonian model chooses to trust not just ones fellow human being but also their ability to handle issues without the need for dogmatic law making. Instead develop relationships, work with in them and share the results.

On a day to day basis decisions are made by those who they affect, and are never written in stone as the way things HAVE to be done.  One’s day to day activities aren’t ARK minded, meaning one isn’t trying to find the ultimate way to do something so that it can become an ARK standard.  Instead they are working to find a solution to the issue at hand.  They share that solution and where it is useful it may pop up in the work others are doing.  There is no ARK activity in the day to day, the only ARK related activity is the final output.  The artwork.

ARK on privacy, anonymity, and the public realm

jfpickard: ARK has gone on record as describing itself as “Banksyesque”.  I wondered if you could say something about Banksy’s influence on your work and, indeed, your decision to remain anonymous.  Also, I ‘d like to ask whether you’d cite any other groups or individuals whose work or actions have influenced ARK as a whole?

ARK: One of the major themes in ARK is our recognition of the social aspect.  Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  It is an on-going conversation between the muse and society where the artist is the mediator.  When the social fabric begins deteriorating, the art should reflect that.  When the social fabric has been weaved to protect private corporate interests, the art tends to reflect that as well, but with the legal structures established as they have been, such art is marginalized if not criminalized.  Artists are required by law to follow the company lines to protect their livelihood.  What ARK has done is put the livelihood of the artist in their own hands so that they can be freed from the tethers of private interests.

One of the things about this is that public opinion is still controlled by those private interests.  As such there remains a hurdle of sharing that work with the society.  Without the normal access to channels to expose the public to work, other ones must be created.  In this way ARK is Banksyesque.  We put the art unabridged for you to see.  In the early years a lot of ARK members were doing public art, often considered outside the law.  Private interests condemned it, but those who were able to actually digest the art, saw it as an honest reflection of their society.  The media tends to focus on the legality of the work and as such our reputation as an outlaw group.  But what exactly is illegal art?  That’s a question which artists have been challenged with for generations.  Unfortunately its one which the artists themselves cannot define, but lays solely in the hands of the public.  Where the public allows private interests to define that for them, that’s how you arrive at a collective of illegal artists.

ARK on hackers & hacking

jfpickard: Moving on to the whole Malaysia Financial Hack … were you surprised that the primary suspect was willing to invoke their membership of ARK?  Obviously, precise details are still a little, well, vague, but I wondered if you could further clarify on your claim that ARK’s membership are not hackers, but artists – and only artists.  From ARK’s perspective, can you say that art and hacking share nothing in common?

ARK: It was the first time a claim like this was made.  Previously it was always the media claiming ARK involvement, never the accused, so yes it was a bit surprising.  Mostly because anyone that is an ARK member would recognize that claiming ARK in such a context makes absolutely no sense.  What does art have to do with the Malaysia financial system?  So we’re sceptical.  It would seem this is the latest attempt by the media to reinforce its definition of us, possibly because of our announcement about going public.

Specifically on the notion of hackers, if you were to parallel the work ARK does with that of hackers, the similarity would be both are focused on reflecting the modern social organism.  An artist uses a corporate logo in a piece to expose that corporations connection to crimes against humanity.  A hacker breaks into a corporate server to expose the fallacy of their claims of security.  That’s two votes for putting the corporation under investigation.  Instead the hacker and the artist are targeted.  ARK neither condones or condemns the work of hackers in the same way we neither condone or condemn the work of our artists, but do not let that lead you to believe that there is some sort of ARK conspiracy which includes hacking the system.

ARK on Outlaw Planet

jfpickard: Which brings us to the whole GEAS issue.  Your official reaction to the report placed the bulk of the blame on the global markets.  As a Superstruct volunteer, my feeling is that we need to recognize that Outlaw Planet isn’t simply a matter of weak technology, black hats and bad guys.  How is ARK approaching the Outlaw Planet superthreat?

ARK: Well let’s begin with the word ‘outlaw’.  A compound word – out law, or outside the law.  To be an outlaw is to live one’s life outside the law.  It comes from the English common law system which sentenced convicts to the status of outlawry stripping them of legal protections, or alternately giving the people living in the law the legal right to do as they pleased with the outlaw, usually involving a decent sized ‘legal’ mob.

Its important to understand this in a localized context. “The Law” protects those within the physical bounds of its jurisdiction.  Outside the walls of town, where the laws held no merit, the outlaw could shoot you.  Inside the walls, you could shoot the outlaw.  And so the outlaws lived outside the boundaries.  Extend that to become a culture of people, no longer socially deemed outlaws, but self defined as such.  People who choose to live outside the law.  Why would they choose this?  Not because they are criminal necessarily, but because they don’t agree with the laws.  These outlaw societies have existed for as long as societies themselves, be they forced, voluntary or indigenous in nature.  There have always been people who lived outside the law.  Unfortunately, the rise of our homogeneous society has sought to fix the whole globe under the law, and thus deem outlaws punishable within a global jurisdiction.  So the question rises, why in this context would one choose to be an outlaw.

There are any number of reasons to choose to live outside of the law.  For over a decade the altruism of legal authority has been consistently tarnished by criminal politicians, profit minded legislation and the precedence private interests take over those for whom the legal system was supposedly created – the public.  Keying in on that last bit, living one’s life inside the law today means abiding by rules in which a citizen is a serf to private corporate interests.  In many jurisdictions a corporate entity has more legal rights than a human being.  As such the laws are built not to protect the human being, but the interests of the corporation.  And to be clear a corporation has only one interest – profit.

Combining these, an outlaw in today’s society is someone who does not want to live under the rule and thumb of corporate interests.  The interesting thing about modern times is that the world exists not just within physical jurisdictions, but virtual ones as well.  Where the two meet is perhaps the front-line of today’s struggle between the law and the outlaw.  In today’s society, one’s virtual presence is as much an extension of their rights as their physical presence.  In that context one must secure and protect their virtual presence just as they may protect their physical presence.  The major question is from what.

Private corporate interests want you to believe they have the means of protecting you, when in fact they are really protecting their right to profit off of you.  They claim by going through them you are protected from the outlaws out to steal your identity, this despite the fact that the majority of identity theft crimes are inside jobs.  Despite the fact that ninety-eight of the top one hundred large scale hacks resulted in no loss of wealth to individuals.  They will tell you they were attacks on their customers but in fact they were hacks on the institutions.  Another interesting statistic is that seventy-five percent of the hackers who have ever been caught, turned themselves in.  A common theme amongst them all is they were “pulling the pants down” on the corporation’s sense of security for their customers to see.  This reinforced by the fact that the hacker was able to protect their own identity.

jfpickard: And if the danger of Outlaw Planet is targeted at those who are undermining the privacy of the individual, how would ARK suggest that we think about tackling this superthreat?

ARK: Well it begins with taking personal responsibility for oneself.  We could ask that of the corporations but they are legally allowed to do anything in their power to avoid responsibility if it threatens profit.  So one must take ownership of the issue personally.  And its not just around issues of privacy, its really about control.  Who controls your identity and for what purpose?  In the nineties they called this the information age.  People thought it was because of their broadened access to information, but in fact it was the broadened access to information about you the consumer for which the title was coined.  Like the industrial age, it is defined by the manner technology has affected business, only the technology is focused on gathering information about you.  The successor to the information age is the age of control, because who controls the information controls, and the public has been scared into giving away that control.

So if we are to solve the threat of losing control of ourselves, then we must make reclaiming ourselves a priority.  There are many options to the traditional channels of access provided by the profiteers.  It does take effort, but as you learn about them, you also learn how you are protected by them.  You’ll realize how they are more secure than those traditional channels, and you have access to even more information.  The more people that do this, the less of a demand for their services.  The less demand they have, the less profit, and that is all that they care about.  They’ll spin it, with talk about hackers and pirates ruining their business, but the truth of the matter is they lose customers because people don’t want to be controlled.

ARK on knowledge

jfpickard: Next, I’d like to focus in on the name of your group.  Does your decision to use the title “Art Replacing Knowledge” imply that you approach knowledge as something harmful – something that we, as a species, should strive to replace or overcome?

ARK: The replacing of knowledge is more around the value base it holds in society.  Right now empirical knowledge is held up as the foundation of our society.  And yet how often is the truth as derived from empirical knowledge wrong?  The reification of empirical knowledge feeds a psychosomatic need to know, even when knowledge is not possible.  Art isn’t so black and white.  Rather it says lets reflect upon what we’ve observed and see how that can guide us in our behaviour moving forward.  We are in a society that has weaved itself into a multitude of knowledge traps – if what we know is true than we are obliged to act as such.  If/when what we know ends up not being true, everything we’ve built upon it breaks down.  And so rather than risk the complete collapse truth itself is compromised.  As the saying goes, “oh what a tangled web we weave.”  The modern weavers of course being privatized corporate interests.

As artists we hold ‘art’ pretty high up.  Art is like the ether.  Its all around us if we choose to perceive it.  It doesn’t take fancy formulas, or legal precedents, just the perception of it.  There is an art to walking in the city.  There is an art to walking in the forest.  There is an art to youth.  There is an art to growing old.  There is an art to sleeping.  There is an art to dreaming.  There is an art to falling in love.  There is an art to raising a family.  There is an art to being a neighbour.  There is an art to being a friend.  There is an art to planting a seed.  There is an art to harvesting a crop.  There is an art to preparing a meal.  There is an art to life.  That’s what ARK is about.  Capturing and living through art.  If you’re looking for what that is in opposition to, read all of those phrases replacing the word ‘art’ with ‘way’ or ‘law’ and think about all of the ways the media supports that point of view.

jfpickard: And is there anything else that you’d like to say?  Any final thoughts, or messages you want to get out?

ARK: We’re working on the establishment of a public NSA (No Starving Artist) network aimed at reseeding in a sustainable manner.  Amongst our members we’ve got an amazing selection of heirloom seeds and where there’s a member, localized starter kits, which provide the seeds and information about the growing cycles for your area.  NSA is but one way to take that first step to taking back control of yourself.  Even if you’re not an artist (which is impossible because we are all artists), you can join the NSA program in your area or start one.  Stay tuned to the ARK blog for more details coming in the near future.

- – - – -

Superstruct volunteer jfpickard lifestreams at http://rhizomorphic.tumblr.com.

The recent announcement by GEAS has raised the importance of going public.  First there is our style of organization and what it has been able to accomplish.  By example, before The Repository was even created, an ARK member wrote a short story called NSA – No Starving Artist.  It tells the story of a young boy raised on a farm who lives for painting, but has family obligations that take his time away.  He tells his father that he wants to go to go to the city to be an artist.  His father tells him the only thing he’ll learn about art from the city is how to starve.  That what he’ll learn from being on the farm will mean he’ll never have to go hungry.  The artist lives inside and will always find its voice.  It will be most thankful that the hands which are used to create the art are also the hands that feed the muse.

Unfortunately, it won’t be included in The Repository as the author has not made it so available.  But in the early days of ARK it was taken to heart.  And so members of ARK worldwide really made it a point then to become sustainably self sufficient.  Today many of us house other ARK members who come to learn how to be self-sufficient themselves.  It isn’t really an organized effort but it works just as effectively.  The only organization is organizing oneself to make the personal commitment.  Even if you don’t house other ARK members just that commitment to feed the muse.  It’s powerful.

It’s not just learning how to farm mind you.  Its regionally based, so its about knowing what is around you.  What is already being produced.  What can be produced.  What is can be produced that needs to be produced.  And most importantly how you can fit into it all.  That sounds very organized but believe us when we say, its more about personal passion than organizational directives.

We’re talking with ARK members about making this network open to the public.  It may not be much in terms of the numbers we’d be able to accommodate, but where there is room we would like to make it available to anyone wanting to learn.  ARK members we’re still plotting locations so if you feel you are available for this type of service leave a message with your location and how many you think you can manage.  If you are not a member of ARK follow up here in the coming weeks for more information on the network.  In the meantime even if you are not a member of ARK, if you are in a sustainable location and can facilitate the resources to help others learn how to provide food for themselves, leave a message in the comments and we will be in touch with you.

Another resource that has grown out of our lack of organization is the manner by which we share resources.  One of our members was a network specialist and built a server farm which we use partially for The Repository (caching all of the drop data), but also for our Cached Web Archive.  Since 2014 ARK members have been saving relevant information through diigo which is then cached on our servers.  In terms of capacity the Cached Web Archive is twice the size of The Repository.  Within it are some amazing resources dealing directly with the issues raised by the GEAS report.  And so we’ve started tasking out the selection of relevant work from the Cached Web Archive to share.  We’ll be updating this space regularly with some of the things we find, or join us on diigo.

Additionally we’ve created groups for each of the superthreats (Quarantine, Ravenous, Generation Exile, Power Struggle, Outlaw Planet) into which we will add resources appropriate to the threat.  We encourage everyone to contribute any information they may have, as we’ve come to find  pooled resources are often more resourceful than we can do on our own.

On top of all of that is the work going into the first public release of The Repository. It promises to be quite a collection, which of course requires organization, but perhaps, in our own ARK way, does not.  Stay tuned.

And like the people in the famous Douglas Adams novel we stand perplexed.

ARK spent the better part of yesterday trying to understand the implications of the GEAS report.  The shock of it is pretty obvious.  There are only twenty-three years left.  But as astounding as the report seems, there also would appear to be a lot that has been left out.  Human extinction is a huge proposition, and for us it’s rather difficult to grasp how the factors named add up to the total extinction of the human race.

If by example the extinction was due to ReDS alone things might make a little more sense.  ReDS is a communicable disease.  If it was proposed that by 2042 ReDS would have spread across the globe, then yes we can see how that leads to human extinction – all humans get ReDS, all humans die.  But it isn’t just ReDS.  There are four other factors, or as they are being called ‘superthreats’, the combination of which is  the cause for concern.  Yet, exploring those threats, something is awkward.  Quotes below are from the report.

Quarantine covers the global response to declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis.

Critical phrase here – global response.  Indeed this is a global issue born from a lack of global response to early warnings about the contamination of our atmosphere leading to it becoming inhabitable.  However, the report makes it pretty clear that even more than the disease, is the human and financial response to the disease.  On the human level the fear of the terminal disease has pushed some to actions of genocide.  Similarly on the financial level, the health care industry, unable to find a solution to the crisis has begun abandoning those that made it the one of the most profitable industries of our times, their patients.

You have people dying from the disease, people killing because of the disease and ‘even worse’ no means of profiting off the disease.  Why is the financial aspect ‘even worse’?  Because ultimately the fabric of our society has been built on a notion of the economics not people.  Something becomes a crisis when it has a negative affect on our economy.  Lets not forget that AIDS and cancer have been killing people for decades but aren’t considered an extinction level crisis because they are profitable.

One can imagine the number crunching of the supercomputer, when plotting out the trajectory of ReDS, realizing that the rate of illness and death was happening way too fast for a suitable economy to be established around it, with the necessary controls on population to sustain profit.  Yet there’s no mention in the report of the correlation.  Could the conclusions have been reached without acknowledging this symbiotic relationship?  Not as it is written.

Ravenous focuses on the imminent collapse of the global food system, as well as debates over industrial vs. ecological agricultural models, and basic issues of access, energy, and carbon.

Again here we’re dealing with a global food system. But if the global food system collapses does that mean the end of the local food system as well?  Probably not, but rather than develop a society that is informed about how to sustain itself locally, for the sake of profit our society has become reliant on a global industry to feed people.  To be fair, GEAS has done well to mention the connection, and even gives a nod to the exploration of ecological solutions, but only as they correspond to industrial adoption.  Have we forgotten that industry created this problem?

The idea of feeding the planet was not altruistic but directly related to profit.  What we predictably lost in the corporate race to feed the planet was bio-diversity, and bio-diversity makes the world go ’round, perhaps more than people.  Corporations meddled with genes to create proprietary strains and even worse (no quotes here) suicidal strains, based on profit models from the lab to the supermarket.  When that chain of production to distribution breaks down, as it has, people are at a loss for how to get food.  So in solving this crisis is it better to think of solutions to revive the industry, or prepare people so that they can create their own sources for food?  As the saying goes, ‘give a man a fish…’

Power Struggle tracks the results of energy resource peaks and the shifts in international power as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions.

Do you see the pattern here?  Reliance on global powers to come up with global scale energy solutions when it’s perfectly reasonable for individuals and small communities to do so on their own.  There was an old saying back in the mid 00′s, “Think global, act local.”  Unfortunately it wasn’t very popular amongst CEO’s and government officials who since that time have acted globally without even thinking about it.  All of the superthreats seem reactionary to the failure of the global model.  Are we to conclude that if the global model falls apart humanity will go extinct?

Not that we shouldn’t take these threats seriously, we definitely should.  But if we are to find the solutions we must be completly honest with ourselves.  We should have begun dealing with these issues a long time ago, but instead we looked to industry to fix it for us.  There was a meme around 2008 of ‘market based solutions’ to the climate change problem which meant a solution was only viable if it accounted for market stability, putting the protection of the market ahead of the protection of the earth.  It doesn’t take a supercomputer to see the fallacy of that notion, and it shouldn’t take a supercomputer’s threat of extinction to see what’s in front of our faces.  Especially when the supercomputer seems to parallel human existence with stability of a global infrastructure.

Addendum: Perhaps the most tragic outcome of this report is the level of fear it has created.  We’re getting reports that the sucide rates worldwide are climibing since the announcement, a statistic that troubles us greatly.  Did the supercomputer take this into account when tallying all the data.  Does it see itself as responsible for this outcome?

Media Map by brian holmes

Remember the good old days when there were seven media giants that controlled just about everything that could be considered mainstream media?  Yes, the good old days.  Good because back then you could at least pretend that since there were seven of them it was fair and balanced.  Today like a ‘good democracy’ there’s only two choices – VVSD (Viacom Vivendi Sony Disney) or Time News (Time Warner, News Corp, Bertelsmann), both of whom have holdings so braod that they aren’t even opposites, but merely more of the same.  That same of course being paid entertainment.

They don’t seem to get the fact that people don’t want to pay for embeded ads from advertisers that pay.  You think they would have got it during the decline of television, but rather than cut their losses and come up with something better they pooled their resources and set their fangs on the net, attempting to control not just access but content, in much the same way they did the broadcast spectrum.  Little did they know a P2P shortwave radio experiment in Brazil would snowball into the technology that practically freed the internet to anyone willing to solder some wires.

Of course that didn’t stop them, they just got the lawmakers to make shortwave net illegal.  But downloading cable shows was illegal too wasn’t it.  And as people learned what they were getting for their paid internet services, the shortwave version, as illegal as it might have been, became far more attractive.

Of course not everyone indulges in lay-illegal activities.  There are a good number of consumers who are tethered to their VVSD Time News media, not because they feel its credible, but because they believe the message that it is their only choice.  They believe the media when they say people steal identities using the illegal nets, despite the fact that the biggest identity theft in history was a hack into the Time News subscriber list.  They hold on to their audience with fear, where they used to at least give the illusion of credibility.  The credibility factor of the Big Two today has been completely lost.

Take the recent GEAS announcement, fifteen years ago they would have set up a press conference with all the major news outlets, giving exclusive interviews to the morning show with the highest rating, and then appearing on all the other morning shows the following week, the main purpose, to drive up ad sales.  This when there was a clear separation between content and advertisement.  Today even the news is a series of product placements.  But that is beyond the point.

The point is GEAS didn’t need that.  They put the message out there themselves because it was the message that was the most important.  Of course you can tune into any of the hundreds of sponsored VVSD / Time News outlets right now and start getting their sponsored spin with teams of experts etc. but why would you need to?  The experts have already spoken.  The time for debating for profit is in the past, now is the time to begin taking responsibility for our actions.

We raise this now because shortly after the GEAS announcement, a Time News reporter extended an offer to do an interview with a member of ARK for a segment they are doing on the Outlaw Planet Superthreat.  We of course turned the offer down.  Yes we are going public, but no we do not believe all publicity is good publicity, especially when others stand to profit from it.  ARK is not to be your morning show entertainment while some fanatic yells off a bunch of lies and cuts to commercial before we can have a word.  Let them do that without us.  And we trust they will be doing that, but is that what you’ll be paying attention too?  We sure hope not.

We do know that there is a lot of interest in ARK, and so the idea of an outside interviewer has some appeal.  But it would have to be on open terms.  So if there are any independent journalist who are interested in a possible interview with ARK leave a message here and we’ll contact you.  Even if you aren’t a journalist, if you have a question, leave it in the comments and we’ll see what we can do to address it.

As for the Big Two, 43 years ago a screenwriter put it best:

That said there is a reason why ARK is always mentioned when attacks like this happen and it is one of the primary reasons ARK was created – we are living in a culture of fear, particularly driven by two specific types of fear: fear of the unknown and fear of responsibility.

Fear of the unknown is an age old human condition.  It is out of this fear that humans first began organizing themselves into the small communities which grew to be the nations of today.  It was thought that by coming together in these groups we could eliminate that fear, but instead the fear has only grown with the populations.  Today fear is the primary cause of war, which perpetuates the fear into governing policies that limit the freedoms of citizens.  Fear of the unknown creates the desire to control the unknown, which is the foundation of government.  Even more institutions of commerce have been erected based off of that fear.  People spend good money so that they do not have to be afraid, and yet even with all the ‘protections’ of the modern world, that fear continues.  A society based on fear, particularly one whose economic base is significantly driven by fear, simply is not a sustainable social order.  We see the evidence of this in every news report today, and as the social order disintegrates the fear increases.

Which brings us to the second fear – responsibility.  These institutions rather than face their own responsibility for perpetuating and even more capitalizing on that fear are quick to pass the blame.  While ARK in no way condones the attacks which have been made on governments and financial institutions, it is easy to understand why they are being targeted.  It is the fear turning in on itself.  We know that these things are failing on their own without the aid of hack attacks.  How many banks have gone under in the last year alone?  How many governments have dissolved into chaos?  This is not the result of tech savy gamers, but of the failure of those instituions to own up to their responsibility in not creating a sustainable social order.  The hacks are but another excuse for them to not take responsibility for their actions.

ARK is a scapegoat because to this point we have remained unknown.  The institutions are thus able to use their media outlets to put the responsibility and the fear onto us.  But we are mere artists.  What does it say about a society that is afraid of its artists?  We recognized the fear that was evolving around us and it was for this reason that we made the decision to take the responsibility for our image and go public with our efforts.

There was a great debate about whether we should move forward with this in light of the recent events.  Some among us fear that the latest arrest is a creation of the media and those that back it to bring ARK down, and that by going public and opening up our membership, future attacks could achieve just that.  But on the whole, we are determined not to be driven by fear in our actions.  And so we move forward as planned.  We will be making work from The Repository available to the public on November 1st, and our membership is still open.  If you are an artist we hope you will join us.  If you are concerned about our society and its future, we encourage you to stay tuned to the work we are doing.

Philosophically we are organized like the fictional Odonians.  Each member is responsible for their own work, and in maintaining that responsibility are representative of the whole.  Members may come together in a collaboration but only by mutual consent not prearranged organization.  In fact the only organized effort in ARK is the Repository.

Some may find this hard to believe.  A collective that has sustained it self for the past six years without any organization?  The social organism we live in tells us, ‘that’s impossible,’ and out of that impossibility the imagination fills in fantastic blanks as to what one thinks ARK really is.  The most fantastic of those, and so naturally the one the media loves to put out, is that we are terrorists hackers, hell bent on bringing down civilization.  More than one black hat hack has seen blame pointed at ARK, until the real culprits are actually caught.  Interestingly enough though, no one ever issues an apology.

It is in part to dispel these myths that we have decided to publicize some works from The Repository.  It should be said that not all of the members are in agreement about going public.  This process alone is making it pretty clear that our methods of non-organization are much better.  Still we all do agree that something needs to be done to ensure the safety of The Repository and being open about it seems to be the most viable option.

In our most recent discussion of this new public phase of ARK it was raised that if we really are to dispel those myths not only must the work be open but indeed the access to the collective as well.  Turn a phrase, if you can’t beat them, invite them.  In other words we are opening up our membership.

Some are concerned that doing this opens us up to those that would wish us harm.  Others say that the vary nature of our organization makes it impossible for one to do harm even if they so desired.  The worst any individual could do would be to publicize works from the Repository, and we’re already planning to do that.  So, we move forward with the open membership, but with precaution.

If you are genuinely interested in joining ARK, the one benefit of doing so being the ability to contribute your art to the Repository, you will need to find your way to an invitation in a virtual drop located in a real location.  You can search for the drop here.  The following is a clue to the location of that drop, borrowed from those fantastically filled in blanks:

Clue:  Seven years to the month after the most incredible terrorist attack of modern history, the most incredible hack of modern history was executed by a group that went by a number (that is not the clue).  The drop is located at the target of that hack, and will be easiest to find with the proper Longitude and Latitude coordinates.

UPDATE: If you look in the comments section there is a hint to help with finding the drop location. You’ll still need the Longitude and Latitude though.

A few years ago an ad agency tried to take ARK through the coolspotting ringer with a campaign that showed guerilla artist splattering the company logo on the billboards of their competitors.  It was a joke inside of a joke meant to marginalize our efforts.  If only they knew how our membership has grown since then, they would spend good money for our mailing list.

But as a collective money is not our objective.  Our aim is simply to present the public with an artistic lens, or set of lenses with which to see our world, and how the compromises we’ve made with creativity have threatened not only the human soul but the soul of the very planet.  A wise woman once said, “Creativity is closest to godliness, for god is in creation.”

So here we are.  You didn’t think that we existed, and perhaps reading this are still doubtful.  Where’s the proof?  A few paragraphs on an anonymous public site?  Hardly.  This is but only the beginning.  It was decided in our ranks that we should begin publicizing (PR speak not intended) our work.  And so on November 1, 2019 we will be releasing the first series of works from our repository.  Stay tuned.

UPDATE: In light of recent events we are reconsidering the exact public date for The Repository.  Stay tuned to this site for details.