85
(literally “Bear Hand Frog”; it serves as an equation
to the problematic of the human condition).
Lucky Larry was around at the beginnings of
time, when the first molecules started to reproduce
themselves and it all started. He’s Lucky and he
would like to share it with you. As a way of bringing
some of these elements together, the Lucky Larry’s
Cosmic Commune project for the Saint-Etienne
Biennale in 2017 could be seen as a model for a
new society, and the non-existent Lucky Larry as
an attempt at a post-religious mode of belief.
Throughout the Biennale, Lucky Larry’s Cosmic
Commune functioned as a living organism, growing
and mutating over time.
Everything needed for living and working was
built step by step, with participants from the local
school, the community, the Dirty Art Department
and beyond contributing a host of interventions,
works, lectures and performances that would
inform the commune itself. The Macao
organisation’s projects of Freedom Coop (a legal
corporation for activists, occupied spaces, refugees
and collectives) and Common Coin (a blockchain
currency with a restriction on speculative
manipulation) formed a real basis for the new
world economy. By interconnecting the many
Lucky Larry’s Cosmic Communes that exist around
the world, the next step is to attract the
infrastructure of energy, industry and economy
to drop the past and be part of an egalitarian future.
Infrastructure and Hegemony: Towards the
Creation of the New World
Back to reality, and for sure these are blazing high
hopes! But paraphrasing the left-wing
accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
from their book Inventing the Future, and their
proposal of a universal basic income, if we wish
to create a future based on liberty and equality,
it is a new hegemony and the practical
infrastructure that we must address. It is perhaps
a far hope that speculation between national
currencies can be abolished, but it seems we cannot
avoid the fact that the basic value of global labour
should be equal or at least equivalent. Anything
else constitutes slavery (a re-reading of the United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
is very good). It is of course a long-term project to
change both the cultural discourse and the
infrastructure that it creates and is
supported by.
For now, with the Dirty Art Department we are
considering opening a night club called the
Universal Association for a New Property Rights,
with the idea of buying up property and creating
the new commune. At the same time, I am working
with the Cucula workshop for refugees in Berlin
to help them create products, and together with
Magis and Macao I have initiated a research project
into children’s education. They are the future and
the new world is for them.Jerszy Seymour, designer and artist, was born
in 1968 in Berlin, where he lives and works.