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What is the F.R.R. ? What is the purpose of the F.R.R.?

Here is our Q&A section. Everything about our Fanclub is in Romanian but to make things clear we will try to explain our purpose, our mission, something about our obscure beginnings in English. We really don't want to become a new Art Heaven's Gate cult. That is why we tried to subdue our need to repeat the name ParadisGaraj. ParadisGaraj became for us and others a sort of Art Heaven's Gate. You surely remember the apocalyptic sect that committed suicide in the hope of escaping earth? We tried to escape the conditions of art in Bucharest Romania 2010. It didn't work out and it nearly destroyed us, made us victims of our own doing and fame because we thought we could play the sarcastic rock stars. We made a laughingstock of everybody and many got sore or sick of us in turn. This kamikaze bum style made us loose our small space on Batistei Str, made us alienate our public and it made us abandon the Kunsthalle Batistei project that was so hopeful, clean, new and white. We realized we have pulled other people, students, artists, friends and teachers into misery and deceit. We didn't ask anybody to get vasectomy, eat sleeping pills grounded in apple juice sauce and thus abandon Romanian art and enter with us in another state of being on top of a spacecraft, but we came very close to it. So it was time for a new beginning. Now we also abandoned our dream and hope for a foreign curator, a foreign captain (the wishful German Schwab or Saxon curator that would have become the well-connected director of the Kunsthalle Batistei). Because there is no turning back to the gay but incredibly irresponsible days of ParadisGaraj we are well aware that nowadays only deployed impersonal algorithms, quantum computing or resilient clouds could be our director and lead us ahead.

Now we are part of the Fanclub of Romanian Achievements. The F.R.R. is acting like a sort of Damaged Data Recovery Foundation from a decaying and hegemonic future. We live in this disaster area of the third millennium future so we have to deal with the problems of the present. The market economy ushers in the new dark ages, where everything is imbued with spiritualistic-wellness-consumer-doctrines have-it-all of plastic shamanism for managers and achievers while batmanesque corporate knights and role-playing Temlars run amok in our minds and imagination. This is the cutting-edge realism of digital capitalism with its own corporate henchmen and drone terminators that act with no remorse or mercy, having an army of perfect employer symbiont's with flashy totems in their wallets and new ink-jet lettered(the same multi-head technology used for printing dates on eggs in supermarkets) and artificially scented candles COPYRIGHTED BY THE OFFICIAL ROMANIAN CHURCH, bought for their expensive ceremonies. Intellectual propriety, copyright control and standardization is part of the faith.
The opium of the masses underpins the rapacity of the new church economy. While extremist groups manipulate our fears against technology, biometrics and implants, the orthodox Romanian church regularly employs sound systems, electronics and disco shows of light to continue deceiving the common people and strengthening its grip on the collective psyche by amassing entertainment value. The theological upgrades spell out how well gadgetry, faith and control match a new formula - a formula mimicking other similarly shiny pseudo-interactive capitalist trinkets.

The history didn't end in 1989 like Fukuyama said, but what followed was very much like the Planet of the Apes here in the East.

The F.R.R. hovers in a space-time incongruity and we are trying to put a finger on the time warp of today, get access to the basic codes and programming that will help us untangle what is going on around us. We feel secure in our irreverent new materialism trying to dispel the holograms of the new managerial and financial priestdom, the rising superstitions of today harbored inside malls, financial institutions, magazines, cognitive advertising, public relations, expert power, showbiz, politics and finally art.

Without fear we patiently and joyfully dig for all the forgotten citizen science, DIY practices, astronautics, zootechnology, forestry, aerobics, cooking/pickling technics, botany, alternative medicine, manuals, agriculture, genetics, ecology, nutritionist science, paleontology, cosmology that was once considered part of the popular culture with all its naive illuminstic outbursts, its progressive and anti-racist convictions, while we also accelerate the cauchemardesque and mephistophelic dimensions of Romanian techno-scientific lost or simply ignored knowledge.

The "Achievements" in the name of our Fanclub should also be understood in this critical and dialectical way as a token of the nationalistic and jingoist ego-trip science and technology ended up playing. As an example of what Jameson called dialectical reversal, suprematist "Achievements" are nearly always prepackaged and applied for the ruling political and monetary purposes of the moment, yet they keep on back-firing. What are the achievements and under-achievements of a given moment? The victories of today may be the defeats of tomorrow and vice versa. A healthy skepticism should guide our steps into the lab and inside history books. We try to achieve what also the book Dark Medicine urges us to do - to always consider and never close a nation's books on the past of its disaster science, bioethics, technoeuphoria or ideological impetus.

The omniscient capitalist apes of today think that there was nothing before them. We are searching for ways to retrieve precious data as a way to fight the biocratic regimes of today.
Painfully aware of our post-Darwinian condition we are conscious of being all apes enslaved by other technological and militaristic apes that think they are superior, that think they have a specialized and unique knowledge over the barbarous and fearful masses. Did you notice that none of the success literature of today; all the the team-building, time-management, eugenic, goal-setting, motivational literature of today - none of it seems to have any past? The title of the 2008 volume AGNOTOLOGY: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger opens up a new area of research. As Londa Schiebinger puts it "Agnotology traces the cultural politics of ignorance".



Our present has something to do with that particular version of the future called the Planet of the Apes. In the Planet of the Apes there is a control over the past knowledge, especially scientific and technological knowledge very easily labeled 'Promethean'. The ghosts of the Cold War era are fully inscribed in that version of a Simian future. There is also an obvious bioethical hubris about a change of roles and the fear of losing every civilisation(al) advantage over the so-called inferior species. In that sense The Planet of the Apes is just another piece of white fear pulp literature. But it is also a cautionary tale about exploitation and of not recognizing the intelligence, humanity and worth of other beings than those closely resembling yourself.
In a reversal of fortune we are becoming the lab animals, the primitives, the hunted and the caged. And what we see is that powerful weapons of mass destruction are becoming the true and very tangible embodiment of the divine, the mythological entities of our post-atomic future. Such a world was already prepared by the NORAD and all the cold war silo's that were standing cathedrals, what better idolatry of the ultimate weapon than to keep producing and selling it to your allies, while you deny it to others.
Atomic bombs and radioactive material are being naturally worshiped and feared in a high-strung world where the Ballistic Missile Shield is a fervent priority. Just as few seem to remember the arms race or the disarmament movement in Romania nowadays.

The apes had a clear taboo about all the knowledge that had to do with the cataclysmic time of BEFORE(read before 1989, or the forgotten 90s, or even BEFORE nanosecond now), everybody was put out of a job if they just tried to demonstrate that there was a time before the great NOW. It was considered dangerous and forbidden knowledge, but nobody actually tried to find out why it was forbidden! We are not only interested with the knowledge of before, but also with what happened with that knowledge afterward and how it got dispersed, outsourced and finally disposed of. Unsafe data disposal was and is our ally. The knowledge and ignorance management of today has somehow undone its own purpose, even if powerful private enterprises are officially sponsoring data mining activities and unstructured data analysis for their own balance sheets and selfish purposes. And there is also the nationalistic science that pays off financially, the full measure of this retroactive ethnicist country branding fad was the recent grotesquely funny Romanisation of inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla's name into Nicolae Teslea.

No, it is not a bad joke, popular inventors and wondrous scientists have been regularly hijacked in the name of big national campaigns and religious pride shows in Romania and elsewhere. While we don't feel condemned or banished in any way, the F.R.R. works in a clandestine climate, it gathers unwanted knowledge, tries to share it freely and hopes that all the future generations will learn to decrypt and keep on rediscovering and redistributing it. Most of our lost knowledge lies in our growing library (THE F.R.R. LIBRARY) that is being hauled like junk DNA in the genome from one generation to the next, while we are quite sure that it has some hidden usage value in times of need. We are greatly indebted to many F.R.R. benefactors, donating materials for our F.R.R. Treasury/Library (TEZAUR). We really don't have a great capacity, and our conditions and means are generally very poor. Still, we learned our lesson from the great libraries of the past - even if just a mere fraction from the library of Alexandria has survived, it is enough to give us a glimpse today of all the other wonders that were kept there. The response was positive from many and we think that there are other crypto-F.R.R. members doing and working in the same direction as ourselves. Here are some recent donations:

A book about LIFE & DEATH published in 1962 by the Council of the Dissemination of Cultural and Scientific Knowledge.

This is a book about THE COSMIC ERA AND THE EARTH published in 1987.

This last book is about How a geneticist sees the world, it was published in Romania in 1984 by a C. Maximilian, a Romanian geneticist asking questions about our rampant anthropocentrism, about overpopulation issues and solutions, about a growing aging population, about the triumphs and dangers of genetics with many warning stories for the present. There are three objects on top of the book. The first is a soapnut, or soapberry from the Sapindus plant genus (Sapindaceae family that also contains the lychee). The soapnuts contain saponins that are natural surfactants that act as natural alternative detergents. They have been discovered by ancient peoples they are being now sold in the West as an expensive alternative, in the same time as detergent chemical plants are putting out waste products all over the third world - in the countries where soapberry's originated.

The second is a German hazelnut branded with the name KO on top of it. The third is a dried seed cup of the Nelumbo nucifera (or Indian lotus, Sacred Lotus is a plant from the Nelumbonaceae family) that was industrially perfumed and put in an bowl sitting in the toilet of a restaurant in Bucharest as an artificial perfumer for the customers stopping to piss or shit there.