Lowgo Manifesto | Christy Rupp

The Obsolete Self: Lowgo Manifesto 2004 by the Artist Formerly Known as Christy Rupp

The world is getting smaller but it is not coming together. As economies draw closer, neighborhoods, cities and countries are torn apart. Increasing numbers of humans are not needed because they are too poor to buy things.Like cells, nations are multiplying by dividing.

As it is unlikely that I am on the Armageddon express A- List, I decided to imagine a different type of survival model.

Due to racism, greed and war, being an individual has passed it’s era of relevance. I declare myself obsolete as an individual and am now to be regarded as a brand. The featured product of my corporation is the making of messes. Our logos may be found primarily in the indigenous textiles of Guatemala. where we seek to patent this tradition as our own intellectual property, and we plan to defend ourselves against would be competitors in court.

Just as biopirates have now claimed the rainforests,and heritage agricultural species as their personal laboratories, Lowgo asserts it’s claim to the visual traditions of indigenous peoples. We are selfish and greedy, but we are, after all, a parody.

All over the world, biotechnicians are scouring the landscape for unique heritage species used since the beginning of time by indigenous peoples for medicines and nutrition. Desperate to patent marketable organisms, biotech and pharmaceutical corporations hold hostage the life forms of rice, wheat, corn and a variety of other traditional crops in an effort to control the market, forcing farmers to purchase licensing agreements on genetically modified crops, preventing even family farmers from saving seeds for the next year. I was inspired by the empty earth or “Terra Nullis” worldview, and decided it was time someone registered a patent on a visual tradition, and fell in love with those artworks of the Mayan peoples, living as they do, so close to the edge of the Global precipice.

As our mission statement says—we make messes. The lowgo board of Directors has engaged Guatemala’s indigenous weaving tradition as a metaphor for the ability to corrupt and claim anything. In our appropriation of Traje (or native dress), we attempt pre-market branding, suggesting the tentacles of corporate hunger reaching up to the highlands and into the clouds where traje is still an important part of the landscape.

Our logo features a one celled animal because the Lowgo Brand puts forth the idea of the corporation as protozoa, or single celled universe.

Embracing the values of greed, we pretend we are a single celled organism independent of all other organisms. As though our actions occur in a vacuum of profit induced euphoria, as though there are no consequences.

The sperm like organism in our logo, was lifted from the Gaia theory which proposes that the biosphere, like a single living organism, thrives through natural feedback mechanisms. Not unlike Keynes’s invisible hand of the marketplace which justifies greed. if we choose wealth as an applicable feedback indicator. By choosing to view environmental and sociological problems as fixable with technology, we ignore the fact that we are part of a system with a delicate balance. Belief that we exist separate from nature creates unfeeling, merciless cravings for power. We seek to replace nature with fantastic achievements of human cleverness and marketing.

The Goddess driven worldview called Gaia, describes a planet regulated by tiny individual organisms, evolving in a material environment where growth is strongly constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry. On their own however, organisms are incapable of self regulation.

Like all corporations, our company prefers gobbling up existing material resources, fending for itself using any means available to consume rivals. Unfortunately, our corporate model falls apart in a few ways, but we can sell our products anyway with the right branding.

Ushered by our fabulously successful sales teams from Wall Street to Walmart, we are living in the midst of a great extinction, comparable in intensity to the period when the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago. Because globalization stifles participation by all but the most competitive of entrepreneurs, it breeds a sameness in its race to the bottom, and diversity disappears.

As a war power, in times when the “F” word stands for freedom, we don’t need trading partners. We have no need to outsource a war, no need for allies as we redesign the world in our own image. Our cleptocracy affords few of us even a personal shoplifter, much less a conscience.

Our logo features a one celled animal because the Lowgo Brand puts forth the idea of the corporation as protozoa, or single celled universe. Embracing the values of greed, we pretend we are a single celled organism independent of all other organisms. As though our actions occur in a vacuum of profit induced euphoria, as though there are no consequences.

Just as biopirates have now claimed the rainforests and heritage agricultural species as their personal laboratories, Lowgo asserts it’s claim to the visual traditions of indigenous peoples. We are selfish and greedy, but we are, after all, a parody.