Us "Bigwigs" here at LiminalMart Corporate believe in believing. That is to say; Liminalmart is that space. Oh yes. THAT space. Youre thinking about it correctly. I know youve seen stranger things, I know stranger things have seen you! After losing our minds, we found out that artists channel magic from the third space, bringing their subconscious directly into the conscious reality! Why? TO FEED IT TO YOU!

Truly! Dont think about it too hard, thats our job. Well dont let us tell you what to do. Shit, thats also telling you what to do. Suzan, strike that from the record.

Randy were live.
Okay were live, were live.
Well folks lemmie tell ya its not gonna get any better out here. No sirree. Not without stirring the pot.

Im not talkin soup anymore. After REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED. Liminal Mart Admin saw it necessary to start learning Kung Fu.

The machine interfaces are not just stores for financial gain, so we can buy yachts and REDACTED. They are portals. A stationary point in a field that is always moving.

The object inside it was made by someone in a state of access; access to something most of us can only receive, not produce.

Every object has a function. Even you. Artists bring function back from nothing, and press it into a physical form.

Look me in the eyes, I think you understand me loud and clear.

Look up Deepok Chopra's The Way of the Wizard ...

"A time comes when silence is betrayal."
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

With this quote, I like to imagine that Dr. King isn't referring to a single event ignored,
or a single entity being betrayed,
rather warning us about what happens when people become too scared
to share their own voices with the rest of the world.

The abstract betrayal then becomes one of self.

My parents were Gen X —
a generation told to shut up and figure it out,
wounded and often ignored kids who never got the chance to sort through it themselves.
Products of the counter culture movement and its backlash.

I didn't fully understand that then.

What I do know is that I'm grateful I got to sort through my own wounds
before life swept me up and made me someone else's foundation.

After 9/11 we moved from California to Northern Minnesota.
I grew up in a town of 1200 people.

When I was in 5th grade, learning about the civil rights movement was confusing to me —
how could a world that seems so innocent and joyful come from such an evil past.

I continued to cherry pick my existence throughout junior high.
I cared more about SpongeBob and hopefully snapping my crush's silly bandz to get a kiss.
(Yeah, that was a thing.)

Truly, a part of us has always been awake,
but at the time I cared chiefly for myself, my belongings,
and how I was perceived with those two things.

Once my frontal lobe developed and I got a girlfriend I deemed out of my league,
I slowly became wary of my fellow man.

I didn't want to lose what I built "all on my own."

I sought to be alone,
and to build a world around the things that made me comfortable
rather than what challenged me to be greater.

After my second tour in Iraq ended in a divorce,
I worked so hard to prove to myself that I wasn't a loser and that I belonged,
all while hiding from the versions of myself
that wouldn't tolerate the bullshit I was accepting;
because I knew once I started the work I could never go back.

I accepted the reality that I couldn't do anything to change my situation,
so I might as well destroy it and dance around the flames.

Drugs and alcohol became my friends
and, inversely, it seemed like my friends were always on either.

If any of this is relatable, it's because it's by design.

Karl Marx used the word "alienation" to describe the feeling of being disconnected
from your own labor, your own product, your own humanity
through the process of capitalism.

Alien to us now is a world where people live connected to a sentient planet,
sold to us through sci-fi movies.

We turn magic into Harry Potter —
sorting it into houses, giving it rules and a Ministry,
making it something you either have or you don't.
The same thing we do to ourselves.
Fix it young, label it, medicate it, and stop asking questions.

We turned telepathy into sex,
sex into a sales pitch,
and the sales pitch into a substitute for actual human connection.

The living thing gets captured, repackaged, and sold back to you
until you forget what the living thing felt like —
this is the architecture of dissolution.

A death spiral that begins the moment you can no longer name what was stolen from you.

We have become conditioned to accept less and less
until the enclosure we called society has become managed by the pigs instead of the farmers.

The world doesn't seem to care much for the sensitive or the powerless
unless they are generating sense or power.

The community seems to care more about the aesthetic of consent and compassion
rather than the practice of either.

It comes from a lack of education and a lack of care,
but both can be gained with time and love.

All of this takes a toll we feel in our bodies.
There's a squeeze that comes with late stage technocapitalism that most of us recognize but can't name.
That feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place with no way out and no way forward.
Just living until someone else comes to save you.
A soul in a cage, walking in circles, looking for a hole in the wall.
Western society has intentionally steered us away from even talking about that —
the somatic experience of what we call normal life.
But the body keeps the score whether we talk about it or not.
And that pressure is making us evolve.

Art, and artists, are one of the fastest ways I've been able to touch the real thing again.

I've found my people
and therefore have found security and stability enough
to cast my voice into space and time,
calling you all here now.