bitethehand.org

Manifesto

Posted on September 25th, 2007 by The Captain.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Bite the Hand Manifesto

What sustains us, gives us meaning, and feeds us has been hidden from our senses. For any living creature, the basic question always exists: “How to survive?” The proud people who have attempted to answer the question for us have done so at the cost of our communities, our environment, and our ethics. We, the artists and activists that make up Bite the Hand Productions, do not find anyone’s answers to be sufficient for the complications of our time, so we ask it ourselves.

Many claim to feed us the things we need, but we know this is not true. Are we sustained by other people’s opinions and prescriptions? Or by promises of food, protection, and order? Are we fed by our representatives or our nations? Or by the idealistic notions and esoteric knowledge offered to us by experts? All of these are dependant on systems of administration. They are entirely made out of our ideals and abstract notions that are, at best, supplementary to life’s core. This stuff is part of our life, it is not giving life. To claim so is only an attempt to control life.

We at Bite the Hand Productions maintain that what is administered to us cannot sustain us. These supplements and charming offers delivered by friends, family, businesses, and bureaucrats may serve great purposes, but life itself demands something more real and dependable than simple systems and ideologies. Ideals and hierarchies are not tangible- that is how they get their power. In addition, it makes them are too abstract and elevated from us. Basically put, they are too removed from life to sustain it.

What feeds us must be essential and cannot rely on an inflexible system based on power and dependency. It must have its foundations in inspiration. It must revolve around the creation of personal meaning. Sustenance is much simpler than it has been made out to be and real food is something basic. We have made the choice to get closer to these essential things.

Bite the Hand Productions has found that by focusing on our dynamic relationships with our environment, we can find the sustenance that we are looking for. We are not proposing any grand answers, but instead suggesting a more basic and pragmatic method towards survival. We celebrate in a life that is immediate, where we can be artistic participants in a natural system. We are integrated into networks such as ecosystems and food chains. We are part of cycles such as decomposition and the weather. The patterns of our dynamic world achieve things we could never have imagined. Bite the Hand Productions chooses this to be the crux of our life over the relatively ineffective structures offered by systems of administration.

“Bite the Hand,” means to refuse to be led into a life you had no part in creating and instead find real sustenance in the world around you. It is a call to refuse certain luxuries that are fed to us and above all, to take action in knowing what you need and then working with your environment to provide it for yourself. It means to do thing like grow edible plants, to take part in the management of the local economy, to forge strong communities… It means to feed yourself.

Bite the Hand Productions is not an all-out refusal of modern life. It is an active and artistic analysis of what it takes to sustain life. It is part of the process of feeding yourself.

As a production group, our work is to bring forth the essential qualities of life. What are these essences? By constantly asking these questions, we have found some good directions to put our work into. Through studying the environment, we have found some essences that we can believe in.

There are essential themes in our work. Below are the eight essences that Bite the Hand Productions recognizes and strives to bring out daily. These are the ways we feed ourselves:

Art- Bite the Hand Productions is a collective that is founded on a commitment to artistic vision. We hold it to be essential to walk the thin line between play and practicality and to investigate the artistic space. Bite the Hand is a collective that maintains that life is art, and that art is something that is everyday and for everybody.

Education and Exchange- By education, we mean the acts that lead us out of ruts of ignorance and inability. Through facilitating an open exchange of culture and skills between different types of people, we work to educate each other and ourselves. This involves confronting tensions, finding crises, and working them out together.

The Local Economy- The artists and activists who make up Bite the Hand Productions maintain an ever-increasing consciousness of the abundant life around us. We are committed to getting the most out of the immediate natural systems and working together to share the wealth and prosper as a community.

Creativity and Production- We create everything from physical materials to social environments. Producing what we need and making local systems work is essential to our group. This includes the production of media, materials, food, and social situations.

Events- A Bite the Hand event is one where everyone comes into a shared space. It is a process that revolves around participation, a deep respect for the community and the environment, and joy. As a production collective, Bite the Hand is committed to making such events happen regularly.

Community Governance- A community is a group of empowered individuals that are changing together. It is a shared process that Bite the Hand Productions fosters and rejoices in. A sensitivity to and involvement with the changes of our community must be the basis of any governmental system.

Tools and Technology- We hold it to be very important for artists and activists to be just as conscious of how they do things as they are of what they are doing. Often, the media we utilize speaks louder than the logical message. Therefore, Bite the Hand Productions supports using the objects around us in new ways to create new meanings and situations.

The Built Environment-The philosophy of Bite the Hand is centered on the way that different environments form, and how they sustain themselves. Some environments are cultural, media-based, social, physical, or psychological, but the list goes on. How we build these environments and interact with them is essential to the work of Bite the Hand.

As a production group, Bite the Hand exists to bring forth these essences into our lives. This means our personal lives, our community lives, our public lives, and our global lives. The constant movement of our focus from each level of our lives to the next and from one essence to another creates a kind of pattern of art and activism. That pattern is Bite the Hand Productions. We search for sustenance amid the dynamic and plentiful natural world. “What is it that feeds us?” We repeat the question again and again, and shall continue repeating it forever.

Sonoma County, 2007