THE FIRST MANIFESTO FOR SMALL MOVEMENTS BY OLIVER HUNTER  -  April 18, 2007

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Every movement is cruel. 

Every action carries the potential of having its consequence.

Power resides in the smallest of movements.

It has been said that the human race is a mess. It has been said that we are accidents, mistakes, viruses, cockroaches, survivors, predators, or winners. Hurrah! 

What now needs to be realised is that, while this is all correct, we are also active, conscious creatures who can move inwards as well as outwards, backwards as well as forwards, and speak quietly as easily as we can loudly.

A face gets lost in the crowd, a droplet dissolved in the ocean, a cry lost on the wind. 

Human race, we have approached a moment in our history when we must listen to the dripping of milk all over the kitchen floor. The time has come to find the mop and politely remove the stain on the silence, if only so that we can gleefully stain it again -- again, but as if for the first time.

The collective agenda of all our small movements is to pay careful, considered attention every single one of our freedoms. Their actions are small and precise; they grant us the ability to breathe, dream and move. To grow smaller is to wilfully follow a trajectory of decrease and diminution, as a remedy to the excess and inflation experienced in the obesity of capitalist western culture, which is static. It has not moved from the couch; it never may. Small movements encourage lives independent of fate or finance. They are discernable but uncollectable.

When the great giants died, all the world's children made mountains of their bones. 

Our intensities will be distilled and savoured, intimacy our holy grail. Particularity is a condition of directness. There must be, always and everywhere, the presence of individual human subject(s). 

'Small' is not what you become as you vanish into the distance, like a point on the horizon. Small movements are not steps towards death, acceptance of one's fate or place in life. They are sincere gestures that bear witness to increased potential. They are silent protest, happy subversions, acts of random kindness whose pleasure is giving and whose pleasurable perversity is invisibility. The small movements act like the surgeon's lance that drains an abscess grown painfully large. It is a liposuction on culture, a trimming and loosening through blending and redistribution, a lessening of waste through the reintroduction of matter to itself.

Doctor Who's Tardis is small on the outside, but big on the inside.

The responsibility of all artists at this time is to shrink and cease production. This does not mean to cease art, but to immediately stop the manufacture of cultural pollution. The ostentation of this world has shown us its price and we have borne its symptoms long enough. They include apathy, smugness, greediness and boringness. There are now no spaces for paper flowers amidst the plastic. There are no petrol stations or parking spaces for people.

The smell of rain follows the sound of thunder.

Overabundance is the death of meaning.

Global communications such as the internet require less material costs in communicating representational material over vast distances in time and space, and for this we should be thankful and optimistic. Conversely, the plastic qualities of everyday, forgotten materials assert their vital presences, offering themselves to us and allowing us to love them deeply. The personal sphere, by virtue of its particularity in space and time, is unique and precious. A wealth of language technologies available to much of western society allow us to share this experience, which is essential. Our task is to forge new paths across the old stones, and provide maps to our compatriots in the lingua franca of cultural mediums. Our apprehension of the world, henceforth, will be a phenomenological relation based on lossless exchange, a moment which propels the individual subject ever onwards. We shall keep things only as long as we need them, and then they will literally disappear.

The world will open and deepen as we follow the steps of retreat, close our eyes, and breathe gently out. The time for the big 'NO' has passed: it is now time for the small 'yes' which leads to the first stride.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.