An excerpt from The RCA Luddites Glorious Manifesto: Revolution not Evolution:
We the people, first of all granted to God, in pursuit of alternate technologies that will prospectively supersede those which rely on finite mineral resources in preparation for a future world in which such resources have been depleted. We the Luddites of the RCA hereby set out to create a pseudo-verse that is only to be looked at and never to be used. In pursuit of such a glorious goal, we declare these six statutes to be summatively binding and brass-bound.
- We commit ourselves to transcribing the perpetual ephemerality of the digital back into its rawest form.
- Throughout our journey, we remind ourselves and our disciples that we don't aim to save the world as our journey is purely a selfish one.
- We hereby dedicate our processes of making to be purely of the absurd, cretinous, sardonic, pastiche, and satirical variety.
- Our commitment to this supreme task shall not be bound by the rules of efficiency.
- The same commitment shall be bound to the physicality of our output — a priority placed upon excessive making of analog material.
- Pursuing the discussion between the binary & digital, interactivity should be our core — we seek to return to the tactile & the universe which has been constructed for mortal existence.
Take this how you will.*
*This manifesto is found to be null and void if the impending spectre of non-organic intellect rises up to eliminate all natural life and artistic freedom.
—
Coming together as a group with a shared interest in the analogue and the increasingly limited place for it in the digital world, we aimed to poke fun at how ridiculous the online has become. We also attempt to translate the humour of our digital reality back into the real world through physical pieces of work.
We used a plethora of physical making techniques: hand-setting and printing the type for our manifesto, creating a wax seal stamp from scratch to "certify" our documents, gold foil stamping hand-cut leather covers, and bookbinding our hymnals by hand.
Throughout our process, we became interested in the creation of lore surrounding the documents we were making. With this in mind, we decided upon a pseudo-religious format for any work created. This linked our obsession with pastiche to our outcomes. The written portions of both the Manifesto (The RCA Luddites Glorious Manifesto: Revolution not Evolution) and the Hymnal (Binary Benedictions: Hymns for Cyber Souls) reference the pseudo-verse we created in an excessive manner, with hundreds of pages of content generated.
The manifesto was the first bit of work we created as a group; it was important we had a set of statutes to keep our work grounded within our common interests and sense of humour. This was painstakingly hand typeset in the Kensington letterpress studio, and then certified with our wax stamp — embellished with our collective's symbol.
Our hymnal is a collection of AI-generated hymns — over 20 topics related to the digital sphere that we decided upon as a group and prompted ChatGPT to assist in our writing. Each hymnal was translated into binary code, and placed alongside the english version for translation. These hymnals were then printed to A4 size, onto bible paper, and hardbound with leather covers. We also spent time in the letterpress studio foil blocking the covers.
