Technically, this is Abrupt Flyer #2, but for all practical purposes, it was our debut poster.
Into the bright chambers of the imagination we fly, red-hot-blooded youths with no obligation to a greying world. Our mission is Meaning, our quarrel is with the mundane. And yet, through our endless quest for new perspectives, we find great meaning where others have become jaded.
When a “revolutionary” idea becomes generally accepted, it can no longer effect change; it can only be refined and resold. Beneath a cosmetic veneer of vitality, the idea is dead. Its potential for undermining control has been co-opted and corrupted by the very forces it sought to defy (as happened to Dada and the Hippies). Frustration becomes fashion, counterculture becomes conformity. Constant change is the only medicine for this dialectic.
Abrupt exists to surprise and amaze. It wants to suck you in and spit you out changed. There is no dogma — Abrupt will confuse you, but all revelations and visions are strictly up to you. Abrupt seeks to expose you to the amazing range of human variability. In a world in which everything has been reduced to “info-tainment” and corporate masturbation, hope is to be found in whatever breaks the homogeneity or defies expectations. Our tactics are surprise, confusion, disgust and enchantment. Better to feel offended, we maintain, than not to feel at all. If you are angry, it is better than being miserable. But we’d just as soon turn around and make you laugh.
The maladies of this society and of this world go far beyond those addressed by traditional “hip” activism. All the “causes” and factions out there — the problems they target are but extensions of the same set of structural flaws. And that flawed structure, ironically, is the very one which has brought the human race to such heights of technology and achievement. No one problem exists in isolation. No human is immune. Now educated, now down in the streets, Abrupt represents the frenetic shivering of the individual caught in the impoverished social relations of our times.
We won’t take our medicine quietly — we will rock the boat to keep it from sinking.
Out on the fringe of society, there can be found a continual welling up of new ideas and creations. Someone has to catalog the advances and monitor the possibilities…
Abrupt is the taxonomy of human mutation.
