> In recent times, Pan Transcendental Industries Inc., realising the fundamental problems of twentieth century man, have started to implement our next 25 year plan. Using our extensive resources we intend to celebrate a Utopia unprecedented in history. Our true ambition is to create >
> listen < - a   H E A V E N   totally fabricated by  M A N -

     

In 1978 the Hawklords (aka Hawkwind) released their Hawklords / 25 Years On album - the last Hawkwind release to feature Calvert as lead vocalist and one of the main songwriters.
In the same year the band embarked on a last tour - and again they developed an ambituous conceptual surrounding for it. The show featured projections, performers and a kind of industrial stage-design. The entire concept found it's epitome in the accompanying tour-booklet - this was anything but the usual tour- or band booklet. In fact it came along as a booklet of a huge futuristic mega-trust named PAN-TRANSCENDENTAL INDUSTRIES, that lined out it's futuristic techno-economical visions of the entire planet's future... - based on it's own word of the "industrialisation of religion - (no rock-musician's on stage or what have you...)

PAN-TRANSCENDENTAL INDUSTRIES was the invented international super-trust behind the concept of the Hawklords 1978 record and tour. Calvert frankly admitted that he always hung up to certain conspiracy theories (see QUOTES pages)... now keep in mind that this was written 25 years ago (and 25 years on we are, indeed)- and think of the ACTUAL developments in vitual reality, bio-technology, artificial intelligence & environments.
"To live logically inside fantasy....the responsibilities of a specifically external existense..." - a very apt and precise description of the element of power that is inherent to those who have - or will get their hands on the means of virtuality, genomic trademarks etc.

The booklet outlining PTI's history, philosophy and future plans is a brilliant piece of a visionary concept.
PTI Inc. sets up so called METAPHACTORY'S around the globe to promote their own plan of a messianic capitalism turned into a carefree religion - with definite fascistic undertones. A grim - and in the light of our times - frightfully realistic portrayal of the current bio/tech/economy - dictated socio-structures, taking their worldwide toll.


The means by which PTI Inc. came to power are described as a mixture of developing artificial / virtual realities combined with biomechanical engineering - and human re-programming & 'breeding' technologies - eventually leading into the trusts 'humanistic' vision of creating a man-made Heaven on Earth - offering / enforcing to each and everyone a: SUPERTIME WITH SUPERHEALTH...

The booklet's high-profile pseudo techno-economic-futuristic-lingo, it's inherent criticism wrapped up in a business perspective and combined with Hipgnosis' imagery are documenting one of Calvert's most inspired moments - a conceptual piece of art that Mr. Baudrillard surely would have liked to have written - or Mr. W.S. Burroughs, (or the combined clone of them...) for that matter.

Following you'll find all the texts from the Hawklords / PTI booklet incl. the featured imagery...


     

     

Strong in Hygienic Industry
Founded in 1953, by a dream concurrent with space flight to the moon, Pan Transcendental Industries, together with macroscale investment from the state and corporate captial, found it possible to embark on a wholesale megastructural rehabilitation of the globe. A dream which soon became an enlightened reality and one from which the majority of the world's population benefit today.

The Heaven on Earth Syndrome
In 1966, Pan Transcendental Industries began its historic programme for the industrialisation of religion. To fuse the popular with the metapyhsical and the commercial with the sublime. With our policy of the reduction of culture to commodity. The Transcendental Age began with London selected as the laboratory. This oasis, at the same time real and mythical, where the invention and testing of a messianic lifestyle and its attendant focussed mysteries could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire Universe became an incubator of man made experience.
The first metaphactory was built. Covering an area of 150.000 square acres and straddling the Thames btw. Teddington Lock and the Tower of London on its East-West axis and from Bromley in the South to Highgate in the North, it employs nine million people. Today, PTI is the single largest multi-national-corporate in the world, employing forty five million people with metaphactories in every capacity. This success has been achieved completely through the radical pioneering work of Doctor Griffin and his hypno-physicist theorem.

     

> continue to part II / part III of Pantranscendental Industries

© 1978 by Robert Calvert

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