What Is The Teleharmonium?

A message to our agents in the field: Damn these things we call hands, and bless them for their leverage.

What is the Teleharmonium?

"Tele", from the Greek for "far". As in telephone, television, telekinesis, teletype. Spooky action at a distance.

"Harmonium", a musical instrument, from "harmony": accord, consonance, agreement.

Thus: teleharmonium. An instrument for bringing distant things into harmony -- or for bringing things into harmony from a distance.

At the turn of the last century there was a musical instrument called a telharmonium, a forerunner of the electronic organ. It was huge, and strange, and technologically ahead of its time.

We live, now, in environments huge and strange; environments made not by nature, but by ourselves, the work of our own minds and hands. A city is a great machine, but it is not mechanistic and it is not mechanical. Streets and buildings follow the lay of the land, but more than that they follow the patterns in ourselves: our psyches, our souls. We surround ourselves with reflections of the endless worlds we hold within us. The built environment is the largest Wunderkammer imaginable.

What is the Teleharmonium?

An organization, a project, a method, a goal. A post-industrial urban illuminati, a meeting of minds dedicated to the use of art and magic (which are the same thing) to restore our machines, our constructed landscapes, to life, to infuse them with purpose, to build order out of chaos with chaos as one of our tools. A conceptual engine, a different way of looking at the world. Every street is a pathway to enlightenment. Every building is a holy temple. The moments of ultimate knowledge that we once sought in deserts and on mountaintops come to us now in bus stops and subways and restaurants and factories. No one loves the city more than we do, except maybe you.

Art and ritual and music and a thousand other things, from cultivated gallery openings to mad preaching on public streets: all these and more are our tools, keys (and each of us carries a key) to unlock the world, the true nature of the Great Machine. We are not building the future. There is no future, only Now. Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow -- but if we want jam today we must jam today.

Build monuments to the strange. Sing hymns to the everyday. There is endless wonder in every moment, every thoroughfare and blind alley, every stone and every nook.

The constructed world is a magical place -- but that does not mean it's nice, or sweet, or cheerful. Endless wonder means endless terror: awe, confusion, fascination, fear -- the supreme shock of understanding, the catastrophe of knowledge. In every phenomenon and every brick, the seeds of destruction, which are the seeds of revelation. Of rebirth.

What is the Teleharmonium?

Exactly what the world needs.

We are your friends.

And we want only the best for you.