The Incredible Synchronicity of a Randonaut Adventure

If you’re unfamiliar with the art of Randonauting, it is a growing movement of people interested in utilizing the Fatum Bot for various purposes including exploration, creativity, divination, artistry, and self-exploration. The Fatum Bot is a program that generates truly random coordinate locations somewhere in your proximity for you to visit. It creates archetypal adventures allowing participants to explore both their own inner mind and their outer environment in new ways. If you’re intrigued and want to learn more, the website and subreddit contain lots of valuable information.

I’ve been experimenting with Randonauting for several months now and have experienced numerous novel and subjectively mind bending occurances on these random adventures. One time I was led to a meditation garden tucked away in the woods of a small town I was visiting. At the garden sat a journal filled with incredible poems, drawings, and writings from others who stumbled across the garden.

Meditation garden found tucked away in the woods while Randonauting

Another time I was led to an obscure back-road where a motorcyclist pulled up just after I arrived and started flying a homemade drone around a mountain in his virtual reality goggles. I and others in the Randonaut community have uncovered thousands of interesting novelties and stories around the world. There are infinitely many approaches to Randonauting as an art, so it’s up to whoever is using the bot to uncover their own adventure in their own way. I’ve personally been interested in intention setting and using the Fatum Bot as a form of divination. If you’re interested in learning more about the theoretical and technical side of Randonauting, I wrote “Randonauting For Dummies” which introduces the project and dives deeper into it.

In the context of Randonauting, setting an intention is a way to manifest, in some sense, a certain outcome. An intention can be in the form of a question, an idea, a theme, or whatever technique you find to best work for yourself. The idea is that by setting an intention you are immersing yourself within a certain perceptual window from which you can then peer out of throughout the duration of the experience. In other words, it’s a way to narrow your perception down into more specific avenues of memetic content in the environment which directly resonate with your initial intent. An intention is a way to shift along the axis of potential probabilistic outcomes of an experience. By setting an intention you are in essence building a mental model to shape the resulting excursion.

I’ve experimented a decent amount with intention setting and Randonauting, and I want to share an adventure I had a few months ago that demonstrates the power of intention on these anomalous excursions.

To start, I generated a Quantum Point (a truly random location) to serve as my starting point for the attractor adventure. The starting location turned out to be a parking lot off the side of a somewhat busy main-street. From there I set my intention. I thought about The Fatum Project and Randonauts, and I imagined the physical and theoretical processes at work. I thought about novelty and memetics and intention, allowed those ideas to float around in my mind, and intended to better understand the theoretical processes behind the project.

After my intent was set, I generated an attractor point and started walking towards it. It was about a mile away. Starting the peaceful walk to the location, nothing immediately caught my attention until I noticed a bright sculpture a few blocks before the exact location.

The first point of interest, a sculpture titled “New Ideas”.

I stood and contemplated the sculpture from within my perceptual reference frame. It resonated with me deeply. The sculpture stood atop an underpass off the side of the walkway. Across the underpass I noticed a sidewalk winding down towards a small park. If I’ve learned anything from my Randonaut adventures, following synchronicity and points of personal interest tends to lead you deeper into the adventure, even if it diverges from the exact attractor location. It’s always good to go with the flow. I followed this sidewalk down and at the bottom I notice a blue tag on the floor:

The second point of interest: “Change the world” tagged on the sidewalk.

“CHANGE THE WORLD”. I’m intrigued, and at this point It feels like I’m dipping my toes into a field of novelty. I continue on into the adventure. The park is small, situated in a place you usually wouldn’t expect to find a park. It was a beautiful display of fruitful scientific scenery pressed between corporate offices on both sides.

Colorful features of the park

There were sculptures of DNA strands and molecules on display, atomic structures and microscopes stamped all over the concrete, and giant cogs in the creek merging the flow of nature with the mechanics of man. The theme of scientific curiosity vibrated in the air.

creek decorated with gears

After exploring the park, I noticed a trail of pressed greenery leading down alongside the creek. After maneuvering through several layers of obstacles, I walked out into wonderland.

a pocket of nature tucked away from society

A pocket of nature tucked away from the open park. It breathed, unlike the corporate structures encompassing it. I sat on a rock at the edge of the creek where the sunlight beamed through the branches above. I did some more reflection on my intention. After some time alone, I decided to head back towards the underpass. I followed the sidewalk underneath which contained some lovely art.

Love

Something in me told me the adventure was not yet over. I kept following this sidewalk which winded through tall bushes until I came across a sculpture with a sticker on it. The paper side was lying on the floor right next to it, it looked fresh. I had discovered an artifact.

A sticker artifact from the OBEY sticker campaign movement

Once again intrigued, I wondered what it meant. Now that I had achieved my artifact, It felt like a natural ending point to the adventure. I walked back to my car reflecting on the whole of the experience.

After getting home, I immediately ran a reverse image search on the sticker to learn more. It turns out that this sticker is part of a street art movement called the OBEY sticker campaign. It was started by a man named Shepard Fairey in 1989 as an experiment into Phenomenology. From the manifesto on their website, they had this to say about the movement:

“ The OBEY sticker campaign can be explained as an experiment in Phenomenology. Heidegger describes Phenomenology as “the process of letting things manifest themselves.” Phenomenology attempts to enable people to see clearly something that is right before their eyes but obscured; things that are so taken for granted that they are muted by abstract observation.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines Phenomenology as so:

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

I went into this Randonaut excursion with the intent to better understand the theoretical process behind Randonauting, and I came out the other side with a memetic artifact that, at least subjectively, directly resonated with my initial intent. It is an artifact that memetically represents a field of philosophical inquiry which looks into the immediate subjective experience of which is crafted through intention.

Image of street art taken from the obeygiant website featuring the same symbol on the sticker artifact

In my subjective view, this was a perfect manifestation. A direct response to my intention. My wish had been granted. Perhaps I’m looking too much into it, but sometimes that’s the fun of Randonauting.