about the NKdeE

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about the Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (NKdeE)

The Neue Kathedrale des erotischen Elends is an open, anti-elitist and a-commercial development and remediation program for creative research and development. The research focuses on contemporary forms of creative experience, the possible functions of the author therein.

The NKdeE is thus a program that makes programs for the benefit of contemporary authors. From that perspective, the NKdeE prefers to develop programs that can be beneficial to the mental health of the individual.

Ultimately, anyone who wants to should be able to create their own Cathedral for themselves and/or their environment by running a personalized version of this NKdeE app on any hardware, including the human body as an operating system

The NKdeE ideally focuses on writing and drawing and writing as a bridge between the two creative activities.

As a program, the NKdeE itself is a set of running writing programs, some of which are already somewhat documented. Currently, these programs are more or less active ¹the NKdeE is currently undergoing a metamorphosis, most of the programs are silent during the Works:

• Anke Field
• the LAIS program
• #DREAM
• SaNDGRaPH dev

programs that are currently inactive:

• the Poem of the Day program
• the Purple Citation program
• the MENG program
• the Harusmuze program
• the Herakleitos program
• the Asemic reading
• the LYRIC program
• the Meditative Writingprogram
• the Nietzsche Quotations program
• the Rodin program

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The above description is further explained below:

open, a-commercial and anti-elitist: everything the NKdeE does, makes or proposes is freely available and as much as possible accessible to everyone. the NKdeE does not employ a production logic with producing authors and consuming ‘readers’ but an experience logic in which everyone is equally an author. it thus takes Joseph Beuys ‘ old cry that everyone is an artist out from under the Documenta mothballs. However, the NKdeE wants nothing to do with ‘art’ because in its view that flag only covers up an outdated view of creativity merciless exploitation of individuals and a pernicious production logic for all concerned with the love of fame and money.

it is a development program, i.e. it seeks to develop tools for a healthy creativity experience for all

it is a remediation program because, particularly in the more philosophical echelons of its movement, the NKdeE seeks to purify human thought from what it sees as the ontological “disease”: a compulsive reduction of the event to Things and Being. To this end, the NKdeE designs a dynamic replacement module for the old theory of Being, namely Gignomenology, a kind of nonphilosophical and useful theorization of the Event as happening. The old ontology itself as well as large parts of mathematics and the sciences are certainly not rejected (the NKdeE knows no waste, everything is recycled) but reduced to its true human force of validity.

the NKdeE is a program, i.e. it is really conceived as a mock-up for a possible program. In its first form (2004-2010) the NKdeE was therefore a working web application. A partial reconstruction of this can be viewed at nkdee.be, but much of the functionality based on java and xml technology is unfortunately no longer in working order

the NKdeE does research in a fairly systematic way and gradually makes its research results available online, accompanied by the necessary documentation. for the time being (and since 2004) it is a one-man operation of the Cathedral author, so do not expect any miracles in that respect…the research would like to be scientific, but at the moment it cannot be because it is a one-person research project (I do try to work as ‘scientifically’ as possible)

creative experience: the NKdeE seriously questions our current form of creative experience. In the culture industry as we know it today, any authentic creative experience is lost and the human need for it is replaced by an empty and addictive form of consumerism. The many critical analyses of this are well known, but the analysis and the criticism immediately fade away when the personal position of the ‘artist’, the ’theorist’ or the ‘author’ is compromised. Logically, nobody wants to saw off the branch on which they are sitting

Pour en finir: the NKdeE wants to add the anonymous deed to Antonin Artaud’s martyrdom and finally put an end to the in our days abominable discord of the white male author genius. 2500 terrible years of the disgusting dictatorship of paternalistic Being and the general collapse of that system, which was announced with Nietsche, put on the agenda by Derrida, which since 2008 with the banking crisis for everyone with eyes to see and a remnant of cultivated thinking visibly unraveled into an unstoppable cataclysm and which at the moment can be read socio-culturally from the #metoo movement, the resounding planetary ungovernability during the COVID crisis, the total surrender of the once so prosperous West to the madness of Big Tech, the erosion of the separation of powers in what is supposed to pass for ‘democracy’ – and all in all, anyone who does not now see that there is something fundamentally wrong in the human Bodies is hopelessly lost because if that lack of insight applies to you, from that kind of deeply embedded insanity what I am writing here will certainly not make you change your ‘opinion’.

having an opinion is what prevents you from thinking soundly.

for those who do feel addressed by this overly rough sketch: on morose.be there is a forum planned for the defence of the inviolable physical integrity of the human Body, for that is the only point on which any activism can still be of any consequence, all the rest seems to me irrevocably programmed for the downfall of the ‘Free West’ if not the whole of humanity.

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by being completely independent of any revenue model, the NKdeE is‘branch-free‘ and I don’t have to show the same diffidence. The result of a 14-year-long sustained a-commercial practice is a complete demystification of the creative field where previously everything ‘simply is what it is’. the NKdeE shows that the impossible, if not possible, can already be made imaginable, and she does this not through highfalutin theory but through followable practice

In doing so, the NKdeE employs the concept of‘exemplary activism’: we do not criticize, we do not say how things should be done, we set an example that may or may not be emulated. This, of course, is entirely in keeping with the idea that everyone is an author and also a reader, and that the person who can read or write most adequately to the current situation will be the one most likely to be followed: we believe in the reader and the user as the driving force for the future, and not in the fictional genius who dictates some course of action for a ‘public’ that has been thought numb. The NKdeE has nothing to sell and therefore has no target audience: it gives to every human being what it does not have itself, it undermines the dictatorship of Envy from a position deemed impossible exterior to every economic order, to humanity as we (think we) know it

This impossible position, following Antonin Artaud and others, is made conceivable, taken and realized by working in the unique duration. The NKdeE is an ongoing Apocalypse, a revelation of itself initiated by the Cathedral Author on September 27, 2004. The author himself – in this instance of the Cathedral it is Dirk Jan Egied Vekemans, born in Lier, Belgium on 30-07-1962 at a quarter past eight in the morning henceforth indicated by the acronym dv – is in this configuration reduced to a polyvalent little app which, in the whole of routines, performs the tasks that the program itself does not yet

everyone is an author, so that requires a thorough investigation of the function that is thereby named

because I myself saw no possibility in 2004 to connect with the then current practice of (literary) writing, I decided to set up my own writing environment in which systematically the (for me already long lost) working literary functions (think of ‘Audience’, nKdeE has from the outset resolved to make the author function in particular its field of research and uses all its available resources to that end.

the author is conceived as an essential ‘gateway’ to the event: no creativity is conceivable without that typically human ‘agent’, which is not to say that the author function cannot be fulfilled by AI implementations. on the contrary: the tentative AI implementations give us a quasi-external image of the human author, an image that was previously unthinkable and is enormously stimulating for the rethinking of the function itself

the main motivations of dv for this research, insofar as they are visible to the author himself

1. remorse for the stupidities previously committed and the decision to be able to avoid them in the future
2. dv’s strictly personal incapacity to function properly as an author in this world, in this reality: producing books is simply not dv’s cup of tea, I do not see the point of it for myself and I simply cannot do it, I am not capable of it because it seems too stupid to me to stop a fruitful creative process for the sake of the proceeds. only ‘Playing Dat Het Donker Wordt‘, the second lyrical movement that fell to me in 1993-1995, was still murdered by me in this way, stupidly, for the benefit of a completely imaginary ‘public’. that stupidity is entirely my property, but that is of course peanuts and entirely negligible in the shining git of the unforgivable lumpeness with which I have made my way through this life so far, an undeniable trail of destruction which, to my great shame, I only got to see on 21-01-2022 around 19h45.
   from that moment on, when I got that insight, all that was left for me was the path of Repentance
   , so even that is of no merit to me, it is a choice with the only alternative being a cowardly death
3. the radical position that the creative experience of man must be completely freed from the commercial yoke and put back into the service of the mental health of the people who participate in it Meditative Writing or the Asemic Reading.

The original Cathedral of Erotic Misery was initiated by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters gave this name to a column of the Merzbau in his home in Hanover, see Elizabeth Burns Gamard ’s book : Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2000, ISBN 1-56898-136-8