Professor VJ

The BUDDHACRAT

2012-01-18T19:12:00.006-07:00

It was as if the doctor was finally in the house.

He was ON a mission.

He was IN remission, aesthetic remission.

He was missionary.

An unconsciously motivated free-form trajectory IN commission WITH compassion swerving into discovery.

Discovery of just how MACHINIC he truly was.

How networked he was.

How peripatetic he was.

How paratactically symbiotic he was while perambulating the rolling landscape of his thunderous dreams throwing bolts of lightening like liquid javelins into the hearts of lovers populating the planet he absolutely refused to establish permanent residency in.

What does it mean to establish residency?

He was virtually networked falling into and out of states of presence but never really here.

That is to say, he was neither here nor there.

By not being here, by not being part of this world but living the dream of living in a world INSIDE the dream, he was becoming something like waves of music, undulating, tiding things over IN the UNDERworld.

These in-and-out states of presence the doctor roamed as a transient glow flickering his light form into shape-shifting sculptural space, demanded his patience as he slowly kept moving into yet Higher Phases of Experience.

Losing melting something like Identity, he was phrasing his outgoing riffs as if parsing psychogeographical drifts that fed into his micro-edited mashups of reincarnated forms of both prior and still-to-be-born existences, a multi-layered timeline of parallel lives clustered in 4D media spaces tripping through timeless time, long and light, The Devourer of Images consuming every experience in its way, a liberated mechanism of unlimited force finally emptied of all obstacles so that he can once and for all plant his head deep inside the womb-matrix and swallow it whole.

That's where he was now at.

That's where he could take himself when making.

When making doing becoming mining his own fate.

How do you mine your own fate?

And what creative ore do you expect to extract from the mining process?

These were the kinds of questions you could expect him to ask as soon as he entered the room and began his soul searching.

He wasn't searching for his own soul.

THAT he had already researched to the point of no return.

No, when he now entered the room the soul he was searching for was YOURS and the only way he would be able to access it was if you unconsciously opened up your source code to him.

"What is the source of creativity?" he would start each session and then, after a pause, "what is YOUR source of creativity?"

"What is it - and WHERE is it located?"

The room would inevitably go dead silent as the meta-mediums of artists past permeated the room.

"This is what you can learn from me" (he would say, as he introduced himself to the small group of followers who tapped into his distributed, psychospherical stream).

He never presented himself as the Guru or the Buddha or the Ganja Gandhi gainly employing himself via motivational new age speak.

That isn't to say that he wasn't THAT TOO but there was never any question that he was MUCH MORE than that.

He was a poet, an open sorcerer, a reckless renegade of erotic splendor, the reincarnation of a post-retinal artist transcoding ideas into what he playfully referred to as IMAGE ÉCRITURE.

This image écriture was the script he flipped when scratching his vice into verse, and vice versa.

The trick was to amplify his presence as if he really WERE there.

As if he were really HERE.

A presence.

A permanent resident.

But his guest appearances took on the hue of a ghost appearance, desert apparition of a dream in situ.

As if his tendency toward virtual visitations were all part of the performance, the artist-medium trance-porting unconscious creative energy through the networked space of flows.

Was this performance really nothing more than a 21st century version of the illuminated and illuminating Ghost in the Machine?

He identified himself to the group as both a pataphysician AND auto-affective machine.

After a pause, he would say "Imagine the pataphysician AS machine and imagine what it is you must first BECOME in order to operate this machine."

He was inviting people in the room to tweak his settings so that he would shape-shift into a different version of his persona with each subsequent performance.

"I had a marvelous art-making machine" -- he quoted a famous woman artist who he dreamt was his long time lover -- "my personas. I never knew where it would go."

"What I want to teach you," he would say, but then start over: "What I want you to teach yourself, is how to unconsciously generate solutions to the endless bombardment of problems that you must accept do not really exist."

[transitional sounds]

He said he was a BUDDHACRAT, that Zen-like flow of positive energy who had come to accept his total impermanence in the flux of life itself while recognizing that the devil was always in the details.

It required micro-editing the timeline of existence in order to trick the definitive system into recalibrating its definitiveness.

The idea of being a trickster, one who tricks the definitive system so that it unknowingly recalibrates its definitiveness, coincides with his self-referential tendency to identify himself as a pataphysician, a pataphysician AS machine.

Machine as in MACHINA, the Latin word meaning trickery, that is to say, a device that deceives.

This is also what it means to be a hacker, a player, a gamer who thrives on the will-to-aestheticize.

The doctor was all of these things at once, and this is what fed into his role-playing persona as a substantially present BUDDHACRAT deceiving the definitive system.

"The BUDDHACRAT," he would say, "is incontrovertible evidence of the existence of an unlimited force of aesthetic energy whose job it is to deceive."

"But the doctor," he would say, putting himself back into the third person, far removed from anything close to a falsely rendered "I" -- "the doctor is more than a BUDDHACRAT."

He then quoted himself at length:

The doctor is also a medium.

A simulated form of presence hacking The Now.

And when this simulated form of presence hacking The Now is operating at its highest state of efficiency, when every part of its body is working to unconsciously generate a continuous flow of metamediumistic energy via an optimum ECONOMY OF MOTION, this is when you know you are on your way to the ultimate form of success.

The ultimate form of success.

Success is why we're here, so let's talk about success.

In less than five minutes he would be talking about success and this is when everyone in the small group would come out of the haze of language they had been swimming in and begin focusing their attention on what appeared to be his bodily presence.

Success.

This is what we want now, isn't it?

Is this not what we truly want to find ourselves experiencing?

The ultimate form of success.

Let's talk about what that really means and how we create these abstract concepts that then feed into the way we structure our goals so that we can experience an ongoing stream of satisfactory feelings in pursuit of more complex and fulfilling layers of feeling that make us FEEL successful.

Success cannot be measured numerically.

Success is not a material manifestation of great numerical substance.

Success is not an abstract process of achieving a self-fulfilling prophesy cleverly camouflaging an inevitable endgame.

The masquerade is what must end.

The layers of mascara masking this "sky's the limit" irrational exuberance is the game that must end.

Success [and here he paused, barefoot and pregnant with meaning] -- success can only be experienced as a feeling.

A deep and complex SET of feelings processed by you, the one who EMBODIES these feelings, who embodies these feelings AS success.

They are successive feelings that grow over time and that emerge into Higher Phases of Experience which are then felt as the ultimate form of success.

Do these Higher Phases of Experience which are then felt as the ultimate form of success represent what it means to live in a utopia?

Is it really that simple?

Do you really think that utopia can be sustained for any duration whatsoever?

How long?

And how do you know you've made it?

Made it where?

There?

Here?

It's neither here nor there.

Utopia -- it's all about You, isn't it?

A place like no other, where this deep and complex set of feelings forming into successive states of living INSIDE these Higher Phases of Experience translates into the optimum economy of motion.

The optimum economy of motion.

That reminds me: motion is e-motion.

I'll say it again: motion is e-motion.

A fluctuation of form AS feeling layering itself on top of / in between / deep into other layers of formal feeling creating even more complex modes of experiencing.

You see, feelings form out of formlessness WHILE forming, WHILE leaving the mere traces of success behind for others to inherit and transform into yet MORE feelings of success.

Does this feel good?

What I am saying is that we are all programmed and we are programmed to become feeling machines.

In fact, you could say that we have been SUCCESSFULLY programmed to become feeling machines.

Good job -- whoever wrote that script.

We are programmed to become feeling machines who tap into our unconscious creative potential so that we may trick the scene and in tricking the scene, force the definite system to recalibrate its definitiveness and when we get really good at this, then the mundane media may very well refer to us as a "success story" even though we ourselves know we are something much more valuable than that.

Our goal is not to become a success story.

Our goal is to become an optimally networked feeling machine that uses its embedded algorithms to trick the definitive system into recalibrating its definitiveness even as WE know our enlightened impermanence requires us to disappear altogether.

Do you follow me?

Do you follow me?

Do you follow me?

[Am I still here? …]

Keywords: Mark Amerika, fiction, remixthebook bonus track

Ascension

2012-01-01T14:33:00.002-07:00

For the last six years, I have selected one word on January 1st to unconsciously trigger all of my action-oriented performances throughout the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

For 2009, I was feeling the heat and knew I had to go with intensification.

Looking into my miniscule crystal ball for 2010, I anticipated things remaining as intense as ever but also sensed a noticeable pattern shift occurring in the world all around me, one that I knew was having an effect on all of my new project development, a shift that would ideally enable me to transmute the intensity of daily remix practice into multiple and hybridized forms of actualization. Two years ago, trying to side-step the new age connotations of the term actualization while addressing why it stood out to me as a word indicative of a shift in my perspective [further signaled by the fact that my new words of the year would now begin with the letter 'a' instead of 'i'], I wrote:

By creating more flexible life patterns we may be able to renew our energy (source material) in ways that trigger yet more intense experiences not just for ourselves but for others. Doing this at the level of daily remix practice as part of an intentional strategy to take the creative process deep into ones shape-shifting underground network via a process of mediumistic actualization feels like just the right thing to do.

As Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality, the primordial nature "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential."

How do we network this potential so that it feeds into more intersubjective, remixological practice?

What does it take to enter the primordial source of creativity?

How does one become an artist-medium that positions their daily practice in relation to the greater creative potential of what lies ahead while acting as an accomplice to an ingression performed by timeless entities whose concrescent formation manifests itself as an actual achievement in time?

Is actualization always already just-in-time?

Or is it always on the cusp of "becoming" -- the idealized condition of "being avant-garde"?

Actualization was a term that challenged me two years ago and last year "the secret woid" (Groucho Marx) was agglutination. A year ago, I wrote how my emerging art projects were

... driven by an adherence to my daily remix practice. The bottom line is that I need to maintain my practice as intuitive stick-to-itive-ness. Maybe the word I am looking for is sticktuitive. Setting my mind on autopilot, my aim is to continually remix the patterns into new forms of mosaic. But the mosaic, as fluid as it may be, needs to hold together in order for me to feel the need to proceed. It has to agglutinate.

Therefore, I wrote, "the trigger word for 2011 is agglutination. Even if some elements lose their 'stickiness,' dislodge, and drift away, I will be paying attention to those things that adhere to each other and create greater clusters of potential to actualize."

This year's trigger word is even more difficult for me to write about than actualization. The religious connotations are more severe than some of the new age connotations of prior words. Many of the art projects I am invested in for 2012 have to do with what Whitehead refers to as the "Higher Phases of Experience" and, in some instances, quite literally the concept of soaring. A simple thesaurus check on synonyms reveals only one 'a' word for "soaring" and that is ascend. But ascend is too descriptive and lacks the intensity of what I am feeling right now. So the word-trigger for 2012 is a stretch, even for me. The word is ascension.

Yes, there's something about the mystical act of ascending to another world before dying that appeals to me, and yes I have issues with the whole Jesus thing which is not what I mean by ascension here. But I am into the more literal version of the word. It's more about climbing, flying, soaring. What does it mean to "rise above it all"? To "take it all to another level"? And then some side thoughts: is it possible to rise above it all while staying grounded? What's the relationship between ground and instrument? Instrument and medium?

Or maybe I have simply been influenced by my surroundings, by what opens up to you if you just wake up early enough in the morning, say, the first day of a new year, and open your eyes to what rises before you:

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

Keywords: intuition, improvisation, illumination, intensification, actualization, agglutination, ascension

Mark Amerika Keynote Mashup: "remixthecontext: the transmedia artist in network culture"

2011-12-07T22:15:00.010-07:00

What follows are notes or, if you will, a draft or, even better, a kind of "cheat sheet" that I turned turn to while delivering two recent keynotes, one at the "Regional Narratives" symposium in Rio de Janeiro, the other as part of the three-day "Remix Re-covered" event in Melbourne sponsored by the new Centre for Creative Arts directed by the brilliant Norie Neumark. During the time that elapsed between the two gigs, the notes were modified in pen and then retyped and printed up again.

Although the first book launch party for remixthebook took place in Rio (good timing), the Melbourne event was particularly developed with remixthebook in mind and was one of two texts (the other was Bourriaud's Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World) used to stimulate discussion with the 20+ invited guests at the follow-up symposium.

Here is the "cheat sheet":

I would like my presentation this evening to play with two concepts that are converging in my current practice-based research investigations into theoretical performance: the first is remix or what I have even come to call remixology and the second is transmedia narrative which I will touch on in the second part of my presentation.

Now, when I speak of remix, or remixology, I am actually "going meta" with the concept. What I mean is that I am attempting to expand on the idea of sampling different audio and/or video clips from other artists and reconfiguring them into a specific, self-contained sound or video work. I love to play around with rich audio/visual data just like any remix artist, professional or amateur, does. But for me remixology goes much deeper than that. I don't have a standard definition or, perhaps it would be better to say, that for me remixology is a transformative concept or even conceptual persona that operates as a kind of looming presence in all of my creative and critical work as I have come to play it out over the years.

In an interview with a kind of mainstream art publication last week, when they asked me to explain the term remixology, I said:

If it's true that we're all born remixers who unconsciously manipulate the data of everyday life as part of our ongoing social media or performance art practice -- and I think we are -- then remixology is the study of how we do that and the ways we turn this daily, even ritualized remix practice into emergent forms of personal expression.

I have other versions, or readings, or riff-readings on what remix MAY be for the contemporary artist – and here the word artist too is fluid, but tends to relate best to my sense of the practice-based researcher who integrates images, sounds, texts, codes, and various social media practices and performance in the digital fields of a distribution. For example, in my collection of artist writings, META/DATA, published by MIT over four years ago, I not only go so far as to say that we are all BORN remixers, but that thanks to the proprioceptive qualities of the body and its nervous connectivity to the brain, we are biologically wired to unconsciously generate all kinds of remixes as can be seen in the way we unconsciously manipulate the data of everyday life through dreams, memories, and imaginative bursts of live, performative creativity – and that an applied remixology, if it is to have a pronounced effect on the revolution of everyday life, must – out of necessity – create a new state of active consciousness that programmatologically investigates the relationship between the real and the unreal – for, as my dear friend, the late great postmodern impresario Ronald Sukenick once said – and I quote him this in remixthebook – "Without the Unreal, there is no real."

Sukenick also once wrote, in one of his manifestos, that you need to "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you." In remixthebook I alter that simply into "Remix your life or someone else will remix it for you."

I also just a few days ago tweeted a remixed version of remixology that I mashed up with Jarry's pataphysics where I wrote "Remixology...will measure the exttent to which everyone is stuck in the rut of individuality."

I tell you this not just for the sake of being clever, but to suggest that even these terms we employ when riff-reading are nothing but more source material and their usefulness can be measured by how supple they become to our remixological touch as we rhetorically situate our creative practices into the flow of everyday life.

This is what artists do. It is what they do as they seek their way out to clearing. The impulse to create, it ends up, is mediumistic or, what in the remixthebook I term metamediumystic. The book actually opens with a quote from Duchamp's 1957 lecture in Houston, Texas, entitled "The Creative Act." In this very short presentation (which you can listen to at ubu.com), Duchamp says:

If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.

And there, on page one of remixthebook, I take this Duchamp quote and remix it which, I should note, I had already remixed on my Professor VJ blog three years earlier:

If we are all artist-mediums, we must then accept the fact that we are all in perpetual postproduction and that our aesthetic fitness relies on our ability to trigger novelty out of our unconscious creative potential. All of the decisions we make while performing our ongoing work of postproduction art rest with pure intuition and are envisioned as part of the creative act.

If you think about it, the source material we intuitively select and the way we remix it into our ongoing construction of what we used to call identity but may really be something more like the social media presence of an artistic medium perpetually postproducing their lives in the networked and mobile space of flows, is what it means to creative – and if we are both OF our time and AHEAD of our time – may also signal what it means to be avant-garde. Which leads me to wonder: if we are all born remixers who are simultaneously OF our time and AHEAD of our time as we participate in these acts of perpetual postproduction, then are we not also born avant-garde and, if so, if that's our biological imperative, then how does that relate to the globally distributed networks of social, economic, and political upheaval that are soundly rejecting whatever it is that is trying to kill the impulse that triggers these life-affirming creative acts – these always live, postproduction sets that naturally born remix artists hope to remixologically inhabit as part a larger creative class struggle to survive in turbo-charged, technocapitalist culture?

In remixthebook, I suggest that we may want to turn to remixology as the core principle of novelty – and here I am remixing Alfred North Whitehead who introduces the term Creativity into the philosophical lexicon in his book Process and Reality – where he writes that "Creativity is the principle of novelty" and that via acts of "concrescent prehension" we are biologically wired to experience "the production of novel togetherness."

What does it take for networked scenes of artists who employ strategic remix methodologies to produce [or, in my version – perpetually postproduce] novel togetherness? How would we want to start measuring the value of the aesthetic traces remix artists leave while proactively navigating our practices through these anti-disciplinary spaces we happen to occupy-when-making [and here the terminology is intentionally loaded – "anti-disciplinary" suggesting a mashup of anti-authoritarian and interdisciplinary – and the idea of "occupying" as remixologically inhabiting -- something absolutely connected to the global occupy performances that were initially started by the magazine collective associated with Adbusters, a culture jamming remix crew if ever there was one].

But even as we may want to make the connection between the way we think and dream and write and speak and remixologically inhabit or creatively occupy abstraction as part of an ongoing remixological process, we can also acknowledge that something else is in the mix, something that was barely present in mainstream life even fifteen years ago and that has become more pervasive and embedded in the practice of everyday life like never before, something that has turned everything we do on its head and that has challenged us to innovate the ways we communicate with each other, the ways we make art, the ways we write, the ways we perform our work in the fields of distribution that are available at our fingertips so that we can quite literally (and literarily) become these "intuitive mediums" that Duchamp refers to in his 1957 speech in Houston […] and here, of course, I am referring to the networked and mobile media communications systems that many of us are now – shall I say-- addicted to? – co-dependent upon? – or how about: using to our creative / economic advantage? I'm talking about the Internet, smart phones, and the collaborative forms of social media network performance – what I sometimes refer to as social media performance art practice – which to me becomes an ongoing, nomadic blur of intuitively generated, postproduction styles that are simultaneously and continuously being remixed in various digital editing environments that I port my transmedia narratives through (and I will speak more on transmedia narrative soon).

So let's just run with this a bit: according to the latest version of contemporary remix art theory being generated in remixthebook, we are all born remixers and know that to be the case just through our ability to constantly process reality as intuitive / remixological mediums who autohallucinate while dreaming or who, through daydream postproduction methods manipulate memory and creatively visualize the future present, all the while tweaking our intuitively generated aesthetic filters that we program ourselves to apply so that we can design our creative lifestyle practices with the ever-shifting contexts we perform our postproduction sets in […] (Sukenick: "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you") – and along with this more general and user-friendly concept of remix or remixology that I am opening up to everyone who consciously and/or unconsciously manipulates the data of everyday life as a way to perform in the digital culture, there are these networked and mobile media communication systems and protocols that many of us are intimately attached to (maybe that's better than "addicted to" – let's just say "intimately attached to"), and – something else to throw into the mix now – this is all happening during a time of global crisis because, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are living in a time of radical social, political, economic and technological upheaval. Some might even suggest that the convergence of these factors, technological and biological in the sense that creativity and remixology are embedded socio-psycho-biological processes – is what's DRIVING of a lot of this upheaval. Could it be that to "occupy" as a "movement" is to collectively network social mediums performing on behalf of Creativity so that it [Creativity – or what I am terming remixology] may survive, so that WE – the embodied agents of creativity -- may survive far into the future.

Now, I am not here to lecture on the contemporary state of global politics and the crisis in Wall Street crony capitalism, although as a remix artist, it does provide some source material for my work, as do other politically hot historical events.

This is an image from a recent social media / conceptual art performance I conducted at Occupy Wall Street down at Liberty Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the seemingly geographical center of the #ows action.

But is there really a geographical center?

McKenzie Wark, who has just published a book, The Beach Beneath the Street, with Verso, and that's about the Situationist movements, writes in a blog entry at the Verso web site that the occupation isn't really about Wall Street since "Wall Street" is an abstraction, and as such, represents pr symbolizes a kind of inhuman power exerted by our new robot overlords only these freaks did not come to Planet Earth from Outer Space and are, in fact, man made. The question Wark asks is, "How do we occupy an abstraction?" One way is to physically be there. But another way, the way that this occupation is spreading like wildfire is, of course, by occupying what Wark calls "social media vector." An occupation, Wark writes, is the opposite of a movement:

[…] a movement aims for some internal consistency within itself but uses space just as a space to park its ranks. An occupation, on the other hand, has no internal consistency in its ranks but chooses meaningful spaces that have significant resonance into the abstract terrain of symbolic geography

.What happens when the applied remixologist enters the abstract terrain of symbolic geography?

Here are a few other images to get a feel for the performance:

Here's a story about the applied remixologist entering the abstract terrain of symbolic geography that you might find interesting:

In 2002, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid and I were at the high summit Aspen Institute in Colorado for an elaborate program on Art, Science and Spirituality and when we drove back to Boulder so he could visit my with class, he passed on a VHS copy of Situationist Guy Debord's film Society of the Spectacle" [at this point in time, there was no YouTube to view it on nor was there a boomlet of interest in Debord's work so that it was easily accessible via a DVD box set].

My remix crew in Boulder, DJ RABBI (Rick Silva as Cuechamp, Trace Reddell as pHarmanaut, and myself as Kid Hasid), decided to create a digital remix of Society of the Spectacle. We used Google image search inserting words and phrases from Debord's SOS text – itself a plagiarized mashup of thoughts from diverse sources like Marx and Count de Lautréamont -- who once wrote that "Playgiarism is necessary. Progress implies it" – and from these Google searches we generated all of our visual source material to remix with Debord's own found footage, and applied other remix methods to create the audio and subtitles. This happened just a year or so after 9//11 and I think you'll see how the security state and oligarchy that drove all of the political rhetoric of that time becomes the filter for this specific work. Let's look at about the first half of the remix, a five minute clip.

[show SOS]

So, to reiterate this point just for the sake of clarity, this clip you just viewed is from a work of remix art that is at first triggered by the literal "handing off" or passing on or redistribution of source material – the redistribution of source material wealth for those of us who find value in such things -- and that this trigger – or what in remixthebook -- the Beatnik writer Leroi Jones refers to as a trigger-inference – this trigger-inference is really an embedded social gesture, and this social gesture – the transfer of the source from one artist to another – then leads to the development of experimental and collaborative investigation into "ways of filtering" (and here I am remixing Jon Berger's idea of "ways of seeing"] -- investigating "ways of filtering" common source material as well as delivering this postproduced source material via emergent exhibition contexts in the field of distribution. For this piece, the filters were decidedly politicized and informed by the security state and its conceptual use of terror as a fear trigger as well as a complete collapse of the objective media apparatus that was remixing the conceptual language art of the security state to further its own corporate agenda that it would later mash up in conjunction with Wall Street's Big Financial Crisis.

Now, my work is not always using contemporary politics and/or the whims of the traditional media apparatus as primary source material for socially relevant, aesthetic effect. In fact, if we fast forward about three years after the release of the SOS digital remix, we'll see that my research continues this desire to experiment with "ways of filtering" and investigating different exhibition contexts in the field of distribution in a very different way with my work Immobilité and its unintentional relationship to what some refer to as transmedia narrative.

So I am slightly shifting gears here.

Before I briefly discuss Immobilité and show you some aspects of its eventual production and postproduction, perhaps we should ask ourselves what is transmedia narrative and what value does it have for contemporary artists? The traditional art and entertainment industries would have us believe that transmedia is a powerful marketing concept that uses new media technologies to aggregate fragmented audiences by delivering story information across multiple media platforms. [an early example of this would have been the novice website for the film Donnie Darko but also the various transmedia elements produced in conjunction with films like The Matrix or even Avatar]

But as a remix artist who is investigating these "ways of filtering" and who experiments with his conceptual language art practice in the fields of digital distribution as well as in relation to social media performance, I am hoping to – if you will – reclaim the term "transmedia narrative" for my own uses as I try to imagine how fragmented stories being told by amateur-auteurs resist what the commercially minded academics call "convergence." In fact, the idea of convergence doesn't really match up well when discussed in relation to audience or even story fragmentation. It's part of a very old-fashioned modernist agenda that gets theorized by industry-friendly academics where we are asked to buy into the idea that everything will magically come together in this technologically sophisticated utopia. To me, this seems so anachronistic given how distributed and personalized social media networking feels to me (think Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones) especially in these times of faux prosperity and real-world, dystopian financial ruin. It is my hope that new media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, can now expand the forms of transmedia narrative to foreground this anti-disciplinary approach to encompass both contemporary practice and theory.

Immobilite, is, among other things, an accidental transmedia narrative, one that I composed as part of my hybridized remix / social media art practice. In the summer of 2007, I was invited to be a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the University College Falmouth in Cornwall, the beautiful, you might say wild, southwest region of the UK. This is a location where we not have access to gorgeous country roads or even luscious hideaway coves but immensely dramatic cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean as well as quite good surfing beaches.

When my Cornish hosts asked me from afar what I would like to do when I got there, I wrote back that I wanted to improvise and remix a feature-length "foreign film" shot entirely on mobile phone. This was 2007 and mobile phone video recording technology, though not high-def, was about to take a dramatic leap. And this idea of a "foreign film" as part of a new series of works is related to what Atom Egoyan once wrote. In the introduction to a book titled "Subtitles," Egoyan writes that "Every film is a foreign film." This concept of the "foreign film" relates to my initial impulse to mashup the DIY amateurism of mobile phone video performers playing with the aesthetics of YouTube styled vernacular video with the predominantly European art-house auteur cinema that as an undergraduate film student at UCLA radically altered my vision of the world. My sense was that this was an area ripe for discovery.

In the US, we call films from other countries "foreign films." When I was a teenager, watching foreign films, which none of my friends wanted to do, changed who I was. It turned me on to this alternative way of processing narrative. First of all, since I only spoke English, I had to READ the films every step of the way. This means that my favorite films, the ones that changed my life, are always films that I have had to read. But by reading, I am operating on many different conscious, subconscious and/or unconscious levels, because I am also seeing and listening and even moving too. I'm filtering. For me, movies, or motion pictures, have always been about moving, the art of riding with or ON someone else's rhythm, and learning to process those rhythms and layer them or remix them into my own ever-shifting rhythms. In remixthebook, I refer to this process of embodying rhythms as moving-remixing and I must say, sampling and remixing foreign movements have completely altered both my style and my life's story. Moving with Antonioni is different than moving with Bergman is different than moving with Marker is different than moving with Varda is different than moving with Cassavettes. And here is where I really disturb the commercial theories and premises of so-called transmedia narrative: for me, this moving-remixing of different rhythms – these always-live postproduction sets I am always intersubjectively navigating while reading other narratives – is what informs the ongoing distribution of my own transmedia narrative over the networked and mobile media environments I circulate in, and so the phrase "foreign film" can now, for me, be applied to much more than film per se. I can apply it to this investigation of -- for example -- choreographing the way we mobilize our states of presence over the network (and if were to put a footnote here, which I'm not, but if I were to put a footnote here I would also reference the concept of "choragraphy" in relation to the internet theories of Gregory Ulmer who tells us that "choragraphy" is a state of mind, or a state of "anticipatory consciousness" where invention takes place – and here I am reminded of Mallarme's notion of nothing having taken place but the place [itself] – this is like saying that nothing will have been remixed but the remix process itself, except in this case, and throughout remixthebook, we find that it's the unconscious readiness potential of the postproduction artist who creates novel forms of togetherness that ultimately triggers this performative gesture).

While in Cornwall, the cast and crew would magically convene via a localized social networking scene and the time limit for research and production was something like five-six weeks. Kate Southworth and the team she directed in iRES, the Interactive Art and Design Research Cluster, were incredibly generous and agreed to my proposition. A then brand new, just released Nokia N95 mobile phone with a first generation mobile-phone ready Carl Weiss lens and something like video recording technology was purchased and waiting for me upon my arrival. Once I was there, I was on literally location and in production.

But this is where I want to get a little philosophical with you and suggest that being "in production" is a ruse because, in fact, we are all always already "in postproduction." The digitally born avant-garde remixer is ALWAYS in postproduction. In fact, they must – out of necessity – acquire an elaborate skills-set focused at the interface of electracy [electricity and literacy) – so that they may constantly manipulate the data of everyday life as a way to creatively struggle through their ongoing transmedia narrative AS a work-in-progress distributed across the networked and mobile media environments their social practice unfolds in. For me, this is what being creative is becoming all about (becoming all about). It's something embedded in our unconscious readiness potential – and by that I mean it's something that is quite naturally triggered when we find ourselves caught in the heat of the creative moment – the simultaneous and continuous fusion of moments that comprise the artfulness of what it means to always be in postproduction, to become an intuitive medium engaged with digital media while caught in the heat of the creative act.

To give you a behind-the-scenes idea of what it's like to make an artwork like Immobilité, let me start by saying that Immobilité self-consciously remixes the rhythms and styles of European art-house directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Varda, Cassavettes, Marker, and Ackerman, but also the underground film work of artists like Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and others [and here it should be noted that during our making of the work, in the summer of 2007, one very late night that went into early morning, we found out that both Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day, and this unquestionable fact also fed into our collective and collaborative conversations and mood as we continued socializing the project as an always in-process performance art event] . What would these deaths do to us? How would they tweak our collective social filters as we collaboratively postproduced our feelings while making the "foreign film"?

Now, as an artwork, Immobilité remixes other media besides film. The work not only remixes the stylistic tendencies or rhythms of filmmakers. As I mentioned, the work was shot on location in Cornwall and the wild and beachy landscapes appear throughout. I shot the scenes with this early version of mobile phone video recording technology [the Nokia N95] and really wanted to see what was possible regarding experimental hand-held techniques and very self-consciously used this small device that I could hold in the palm of my hand as a kind of lens-brush, if you will, one that I could manipulate through all kinds of hand-held gestural moves that I would improvisationally choreograph with the actor-players as part of our collaborative spatial and social practice, something that's hard to explain, but that involves building a small network of actors and crew members who basically just hang out together and make the work by sharing their stories, their books, their websites, their music, their food, and their movement through the project as it develops. [I'm sure many low-budget independent films and underground art rock bands have created new work in this kind of environment as well].

The look and feel of many of the experimental landscape shots are absolutely informed by the painterly rhythms of the post-World War II British Abstract Expressionists who, for the most part, resided in Cornwall, along with Surrealist refugees from the European continent who were themselves escaping their war-torn countries but were also, like all artists who eventually come to learn once they live in Cornwall, are dramatically effected by the light. It ends up the lineage of painterly light artists, from the naïve fishermen of the late 19th century, to the British Abstract Expressionists and temporary Surrealist residents, directly inform many of the abstract landscape imagery found throughout Immobilité. And then there is all of the writerly remixes as well, and here I specifically mean the subtitles, 90% of which are sampled and remixed from other films, novels, poems, and philosophical tracts that were circulating within our social network during the making of the film.

[Show remixes from Immobilité]

So what you just saw are remixes of the the 78-minute, limited edition, feature-length "foreign film." As an aside, I would encourage those who are patient enough to experience these kinds of time-based media works – works that experiment with, among other things, duration, repetition, looping, remixing, and altered states of mind or what I think of as dérive-styled or drifting narratives -- to see it from the beginning to end. It had its premiere exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York and was included in my comprehensive retrospective titled UNREALTIME at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. It has also been exhibited in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum, the Seminario of Cinema and AudioVisual in Salvador, the arte.mov festival throughout parts of Brazil, and other venues.

While shooting Immobilité, I developed an improvised, formally experimental strategy of playing against the mobile phone video camera, of outwitting it, of smuggling human intentions into its program, to force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative, and to in many ways show contempt for the phone-as-camera and in so doing reject photography and videography as set formats but to also immediately fall in love with the freedom it gave me to ramp-up my nomadic art-making machine. [These last phrases are all sampled and remixed from Flusser as well.]

But there are other iterations of the Immobilité project too, versions of the work that have appeared in different contexts and in different formats and that have worked against the traditional distribution apparatuses that have enabled the story itself, the story of Immobilité as an art project, to experimentally circulate within the networked fields of distribution.

Looking back, we might say that Immobilité was unconsciously created as an alternative form of what the movie industry now calls transmedia narrative, but one that plays more with social media practices as a way to create intimate relations among the co-conspirators who make it and that does not have to present itself to the corporate entertainment industry as part of an elaborate commercial strategy designed to monetize the fragmentation of audiences.

In a recent dialogue in Portland, where I spend part of the summer, film producer Christine Vachon said that she was focused on being both length-agnostic and format-agnostic. I couldn't agree with her more. Her basic point was that the most important thing is to create the artwork of your time in whatever media formats and genres were open to receiving your creative energy. Once you accept this as the way it is then, all of a sudden, what I am calling spatial practice or the desire to continually tap into one's unconscious creative potential and let the language speak itself, becomes an incredibly vibrant force in REMIXING a life, and in remixing a life, opening oneself up to a social media -- or what we used to call net art -- practice that you can then turn into a nomadic art-making machine which, for me, is another way of phrasing transmedia narrative.

When I say you can turn your ongoing social media practice, with all necessary iPhone or Android accoutrements, into a nomadic art-making machine, what I am really saying is that we are now positioning ourselves to begin investigating the relationship between mobility and immobility, taking pictures and capturing data, and immersing ourselves in a multitude of digital editing environments while transforming ourselves into postproduction mediums who transmit "persona as shareware" [a lovely idea I have sampled from Paul Miller].

Persona as shareware. Or what I like to think of as digital personae as shareware circulating in the networked fields of distribution.

The visual artist Eleanor Antin once said in relation to her prolific practice: "I had a marvelous art-making machine: my personas. I never knew where it would go."

This also relates to the strange tension between the moving image and the mobile image and the emergence of the post-Duchampian artist-medium as nomadic art-making machine. As mobile medium circulating in the networked space of flows.

Let me now show you a few clips of the Immobilité remixes being projected in urban screen environments.

[Show clips of Immobilité on urban screens in Milan and Bucharest]

Is this too not a kind of transmedia narrative?

Think of how the mobile image has transgressed its normal boundaries.

It starts as a gesture where the medium, the artist, the hacker, unconsciously choreographs movement while circulating in the networked space of flow [that is to say, becomes electracy or a chora-graphic performer), holding on to the mobile phone as a data capturing device, but more than that, as part of a prosthetic-aesthetic, an intuitive gesture that meshes with the muscle memory I associate with proprioception --- that is, in the case of the phone, where you hold your eyes in the palm of your hand, and begin performing what dancers sometimes refer to as structured improvisation, capturing data as you slide between proprioception and machinic-vision. This is what it is was like for me shooting "on location" in Cornwall.

These moving gestures capture the data on to the mobile device and then it gets imported into the laptop where it then gets filtered through all kinds of digital editing environments, and one of the outcomes, in addition to the 78 minute version translated into different languages, is a series of remixes that appear on the Web. A curator then downloads those remixes and arranges for them to be projected in urban spaces, like the ones we just saw, and then a web cam captures the images live in the urban setting as part of a datastream over the Internet which I am simultaneously recording using image-capturing software on my laptop as I watch it in some other part of the world, and which I am now, a couple of years later, projecting in a room in Melbourne [Rio, New York, Denver, Istanbul, Sydney, Tokyo, ___].

This is when the moving image becomes a mobile image and the more we can learn from what this may indicate as an outcome of social media practice, perhaps the more we may begin to expand our concept of what it means to construct our lives as a fictionally generated transmedia narrative.

In this case, the remixologically generated transmedia narrative is partly about how the moving image becomes subsumed by the mobile image, how the moving image itself BECOMES mobile just like remix artists are now becoming networked and mobile mediums investigating the emerging forms of creativity.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, keynote, Rio, Melbourne, remixthebook, remixology, Immobilité, #ows

Writing in the Age of New Media

2011-11-16T16:05:00.002-07:00

This upcoming Saturday I will fly from Melbourne to Perth so I can then boogie to Freemantle to perform at Ctrl-Z: Writing in the Age of New Media. I'm really looking forward to an afternoon of heuretic dialogue with many colleagues including Darren Tofts, Niall Lucy, McKenzie Wark, and my undergraduate honors thesis advisor Gregory Ulmer who figures prominently in remixthebook.

From the press release:

In the age of personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter, Word, Photoshop, SMS, email, desktop- and e-publishing, blogging and fan fiction, autocorrect and track changes, who -- or what -- is a writer?

Ctrl-Z is an arts symposium aimed at exploring the possibilities of writing in the age of new media. While the means and opportunities for writing are seemingly forever multiplying, can the same be said for the ways in which we think about what we call writing, or what we call a writer? How, today, does writing take shape: how is it produced, published, distributed and read? How might we account for cultural anxieties over the ill-effects or improper uses of new writing technologies (illiteracy, plagiarism, piracy, cyberbullying), and how might we imagine new ways of thinking about creativity, technology and communication?

Featuring panel discussions, video screenings, exhibitions, live music and more, Ctrl-Z will appeal to anyone with a professional or personal interest in writing as a cultural and communicative practice -- from humanities academics, postgraduates and English and Media teachers to authors, artists and creative media practitioners; from arts patrons to general readers. Cutting across academic, professional and public divides, Ctrl-Z will present an engaging and entertaining occasion to reflect on what it means -- now -- to write and to be a writer.

This will be my third trip to Western Australia where locations shoots for FILMTEXT took place back in 2002. In addition to discussing the issues above with a core group of international theorists who I greatly admire, I will undoubtedly try to sneak in another swim in the Indian Ocean on Australia's west coast. Gorgeous.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Ctrl-Z, Freemantle, writing, digital, new media

Mark Amerika in Melbourne: remixthecontext

2011-11-12T15:53:00.005-07:00

"Remixthecontext: the transmedia artist in network culture" is the title of my upcoming lecture [well, visiting artist presentation] that will take place on Tuesday at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.

From the press release:

The Centre for Creative Arts will hold a free public lecture by La Trobe University’s Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado, Mark Amerika, Tuesday 15 November.

The lecture—Remixthecontext: the transmedia artist in network culture—will cover the potentials of remix practice as they relate to creative writing, audiovisual art, and social media activism.

"Remix artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, are expanding the forms of remix art to foreground an anti-authoritarian and interdisciplinary approach to both contemporary practice and theory," says Professor Amerika.

[more...]

Keywords: Mark Amerika, lecture, transmedia narrative, remixthebook, Melbourne, Australia

Review of remixthebook in Leonardo

2011-10-28T17:12:00.000-06:00

remixthebook has been reviewed in Leonardo by Jans Baetens.

The review begins:

The least one can say of remixthebook is that is an unconventional publication, at least, according to current academic standards (after all, it is published with a very prestigious academic press). From a formal point of view, the volume resembles any other, but contentwise it is astonishing, if not explosive. At the same time, Mark Amerika is doing exactly what we are all doing and experiencing today: copying, transferring, reusing, mixing, remixing, mashing-up in a culture whose key words have become detournement, collage/montage, readymade, quotation. The avant-garde's fascination with the remix, in literary as well as in visual culture, has now become totally mainstream: We write like Lautréamont (the first to claim that "plagiarism is necessary"), we paint and sculpt after Duchamp (whose fountain is now the icon of the 20th Century), and no one who writes can ignore Burroughs's cut-up technique (or one of its multiple variants). Mark Amerika has been, and still is, one of the pioneering authors of this remix culture in the digital age, which Lev Manovich has taught us to understand as an expansion of the Soviet montage principles.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, Leonardo, review

Living Books About Life (Including "Creative Evolution" by Mark Amerika)

2011-10-28T11:16:00.003-06:00

For those who are interested in the future of academic publishing in the arts, humanities, and media/communication studies, here is an important announcement about an experimental project funded by the JISC that features my newly edited book "Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix."

Everyone is invited to contribute.

-------------------------------

Open Humanities Press publishes twenty-one open access Living Books About Life

LIVING BOOKS ABOUT LIFE
http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

The pioneering open access humanities publishing initiative, Open Humanities Press (OHP) (http://openhumanitiespress.org), is pleased to announce the release of 21 open access books in its series Living Books About Life.

Funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and edited by Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall, Living Books About Life is a series of curated, open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Produced by a globally-distributed network of writers and editors, the books in the series repackage existing open access science research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, electronic waste, energy, neurology and pharmacology.

Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge, said: ‘This book series would not be possible without open access. On the author side, it takes splendid advantage of the freedom to reuse and repurpose open-access research articles. On the other side, it passes on that freedom to readers. In between, the editors made intelligent selections and wrote original introductions, enhancing each article by placing it in the new context of an ambitious, integrated understanding of life, drawing equally from the sciences and humanities’.

By creating twenty one ‘living books about life’ in just seven months, the series represents an exciting new model for publishing, in a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future. These books can be freely shared with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, commented: ‘This remarkable series transforms the humble Reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future’.

One of the most important aspects of the Living Books About Life series is the impact it has had on the attitudes of the researchers taking part, changing their views on open access and raising awareness of issues around publishers’ licensing and copyright agreements. Many have become open access advocates themselves, keen to disseminate this model among their own scholarly and student communities. As Professor Erica Fudge of the University of Strathclyde and co-editor of the living book on Veterinary Science, put it, ‘I am now evangelical about making work publicly available, and am really encouraging colleagues to put things out there’.

These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, in the sense they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, updating, remixing and commenting by readers. As well as repackaging open access science research -- together with interactive maps and audio-visual material -- into a series of books, Living Books About Life is thus involved in rethinking ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of open science, open education, open data, iPad apps and e-book readers such as Kindle.

Tara McPherson, editor of VECTORS, Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, said: ‘It is no hyperbole to say that this series will help us reimagine everything we think we know about academic publishing. It points to a future that is interdisciplinary, open access, and expansive.’

Funded by JISC, Living Books About Life is a collaboration between Open Humanities Press and three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the University of Kent.

Books:

* Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars, edited by Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Bioethics™: Life, Politics, Economics, edited by Joanna Zylinska (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* Biosemiotics: Nature, Culture, Science, Semiosis, edited by Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)
* Cognition and Decision in Non-Human Biological Organisms, edited by Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
* Cosmetic Surgery: Medicine, Culture, Beauty, edited by Bernadette Wegenstein (Johns Hopkins University)
* Creative Evolution: Natural Selection and the Urge to Remix, edited by Mark Amerika (University of Colorado at Boulder)
* Digitize Me, Visualize Me, Search Me: Open Science and its Discontents, edited by Gary Hall (Coventry University)
* Energy Connections: Living Forces in Creative Inter/Intra-Action, edited by Manuela Rossini (td-net for Transdisciplinary Research, Switzerland)
* Human Genomics: From Hypothetical Genes to Biodigital Materialisations, edited by Kate O’Riordan (Sussex University)
* Medianatures: The Materiality of Information Technology and Electronic Waste, edited by Jussi Parikka (Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton)
* Nerves of Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, edited by Anna Munster (University of New South Wales)
* Neurofutures, edited by Timothy Lenoir (Duke University)
* Partial Life, edited by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (SymbioticA, University of Western Australia)
* Pharmacology, edited by Dave Boothroyd (University of Kent)
* Symbiosis, edited by Janneke Adema and Pete Woodbridge (Coventry University)
* Another Technoscience is Possible: Agricultural Lessons for the Posthumanities, edited by Gabriela Mendez Cota (Goldsmiths, University of London)
* The In/visible, edited by Clare Birchall (University of Kent)
* The Life of Air: Dwelling, Communicating, Manipulating, edited by Monika Bakke (University of Poznan)
* The Mediations of Consciousness, edited by Alberto López Cuenca (Universidad de las Américas, Puebla)
* Ubiquitous Surveillance, edited by David Parry (University of Texas at Dallas)
* Veterinary Science: Animals, Humans and Health, edited by Erica Fudge (Strathclyde University) and Clare Palmer (Texas A&M University)

Contact the Living Books about Life series editors:
Gary Hall, Joanna Zylinska and Clare Birchall
E: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk
E: j.zylinska@gold.ac.uk
E: c.s.birchall@kent.ac.uk
W: http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org

Open Humanities Press is a non-profit, international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org.

Keywords: Living Books About Life, Creative Evolution, remix, Mark Amerika, JISC

Waves of Remix: MA in Sao Paulo Art Magazine SELECT

2011-10-24T17:15:00.003-06:00

This article / interview in seLecT with the amazingly insightful Juliana Monachesi has been out for a little while, so now I am going to publish the English version of the Q&A that led to the article.

In addition to the well-researched and thoughtful questions posed by Juliana, the spread has my favorite 2011 picture by far and, it should be noted, I am not very vain when it comes to looking at images of myself (quite the opposite, really). But this image captures the spirit of my life (style /practice) since about 1999 when I first started regularly (post)producing new work in Hawaii :)

J: You have described the web as a “public domain narrative environment”, but people engage in this environment very differently and in various degrees of narrativity: how would you say the advent of this new world scenario has changed our narrative forms, be they fictional, historical or journalistic?

M: Yes, in 1997, almost fifteen years ago when I first released GRAMMATRON (grammatron.com), I was imagining a near-future world where online, role-playing personae used network technologies to teleport themselves into open source narrative environments. This was an intentional experiment in creating a pseudo-utopian speculative fiction that took William Gibson's notion of "cyberspace," one that he developed in novelistic forms, and expanded it into what then felt like the wide-open hypertextual spaces of the World Wide Web. I imagined these online, role-playing personae as artist-agents who created on-the-fly posthistorical narratives in the sense that Flusser uses the term. This meant that writing your story was not going to be about developing a setting, a character, or a plot, but would be more about performing an image of yourself in the social media network.

Back in the mid-late '90s, the idea was to create your multiple role-playing personae by linking them through different hypertextual spaces. Because things were less corporate back then, I was intentionally trying to produce a temporary or even semi-permanent autonomous zone for artists to collaboratively build their shared "storyworld" (we did this at Alt-X, now a living archive at altx.com). We still surf these hypertextual spaces today, but that's just one aspect of a more robust networked and mobile media arts practice. Things have changed dramatically in the last five to ten years. It's less about hypertext and more about embedding the mobile network into our daily rituals, or what Michel de Certeau, in a different context, referred to as the practice of everyday life. Net 2.0 artists, for example, are not trying to figure out the Internet, at least not the way the early Net artists had to spend so much time doing fifteen ago. Now you could say that we are all Net artists, or at the very least Internet-aware artists who remix multiple narrative threads via social, web, and mobile media systems. These are not traditional linear narratives. In electronic environments, our multiple and hybridized personae flow through various multi-linear, multi-dimensional, and super-atomized narrative streams, and they all run parallel to each other. Playing these roles comes naturally to The Artist 2.0. I do this too. For example, I role-play different personae on my Twitter stream @markamerika where I am at times an artist, a serious foodie, a poet, a professor, a comedian, and a beach philosopher (to name just a few).

J: I saw an excerpt of your work for the Montréal Biennial at CIAC’s electronic magazine. “Glitch” and “remix” are two of the concepts and aesthetics you keep rehabilitating through all your practices. In your opinion, is everything really and definitely just a version of something else?

M: Seriously, for me, it's not an opinion, it's just a fact of life. For those of us who create our lives out of what, in my new book [remixthebook.com], I call the Source Material Everywhere, we are always versioning the next manifestation of what it means to be an ever-morphing, digitally networked persona, what my friend Paul Miller [djspooky.com] refers to as "a cut-and-paste as-you-go" multiplex consciousness. This may seem unnecessarily "deep" but really, if you think about it, activating your Net presence means you have to start seeing your conceptual personae as shareware, something that lives in the social fields of distribution. For me, this is just life in the 2010s.

J: As a constantly touring VJ and constant VJ-theorist, how do you describe this art practice at the beginning of a new decade? In Brazil, even though there was a cutting-edge VJing scene mainly at the beginning of the 2000’s, it is sort of a no-scene nowadays (as with de DJ-boom, actually, that today is in the hands of pitch-and-sinc-accommodating-software-aided-iPod-celebrity-DJ’s…); how have things evolve elsewhere?

M: Believe me, I know what you mean about no-scenes. Just because you start a lot of scenes, and are lucky enough like I have been able to fall into and out of many different international scenes, does not mean you have to stay stuck in something forever. This is definitely true of VJ culture. I was heavily involved with my international VJ tour during the years 2000-2005. It was great because not only was I able to travel the world and remix my digital video artwork in front of live audiences, but it also informed what came after my VJ tours, which was a series of large-scale, digital video and surround sound installations in various museum spaces. The aesthetics of VJing is what most appealed to me when I started playing live gigs around the world. First, it enabled me to expand my remix practice into something like "live cinema" but even more importantly for me -- and to my surprise -- it also opened up my creative potential as a visual artist and I started rethinking the relationship of my work to the history of painting, especially abstract expressionist and color field work from the 20th century.

My feeling is that you have to keep moving, to change direction or else you will end up where you are heading. So I stopped VJing in 2005 although, like what happened when I stopped making hypertext and my early experiments in Net art, these practices still resonate with what I am doing today. Having spent a great deal of time working with multi-linear narratives, Net art, live A/V performance, experimental sound art, and postmodern novel writing, has really set the stage for my latest series of transmedia artworks like Immobilité (immobilite.com) and my new work in progress, The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, a project co-commissioned by the Abandon Normal Devices festival in the UK in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics, and hopefully the State of Bahia too.

J: Collage, appropriation, intertextuality, cover, remix, bootleg, sampling, mashup, assemblage, combine painting, recombination, remediation, pastiche, postmodernism, postproduction, avant-pop, bastard-pop… Is the century-old (and sort of peripheral until the 1990’s) art practice of collage finally the protagonist of art history? And whatever happened to creativity?

M: Creativity is in the mix! It's inseparable from remix practice. In fact, this is the core principle that I explore in remixthebook (remixthebook.com). The book opens with a remix of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead who is generally considered the main philosopher, with the possible exception of Bergson, to really work the whole concept of creativity into a philosophical platform that reveals how we are all creative entities, creatures who intuitively generate new versions of life by continuously remixing the source material we find ourselves immersed in. The one Whitehead phrase that continually loops throughout remixthebook is "Creativity is the principle of novelty." What I do in the book is string together a connection between Whitehead's notion of creativity, and its relation to novelty, with what it means to be avant-garde (no longer a dirty word), and how being a remix artist who is always ahead of ones time is a kind of necessary condition if one hopes to visualize the next version of "creativity" coming.

So the protagonist of this historical trajectory is not practice-based collage per se, although I see where you are going with that, but the medium itself. In this case, the artist is the medium is the message. The creature as remixological animal.

J: I couldn’t find much on remixthebook, but cannot imagine it’s a theory book, considering the way you work – never dissociating fiction, theory, art and cyberpsychogeography. Is it too written in the form of “action scripting” and by many of your “flux personas” at the same time? Would you tell a bit about this project and how it differs from your other books and projects?

M: This is because I am doing things to theory that are very rarely done. I bastardize and/or compostproduce it so that it comes across as something other than academic theory. One of the main premises of remixthebook is that theory per se has been hijacked by the academic elite who spin their own jargon-laden remixes in very specific scholarly styles that try to shut out everyone else, even innovative theory-artists, so that they can maintain cultural authority over what is and is not considered preordained theory. But why try and maintain the theory status quo even as the world around us has gone through such radical changes and essentially challenges us to invent new forms of theoretical discourse that are relevant to the technological times we live in? Most of the academics who teach theory have, for some reason, chosen not to accept the challenge to reinvent theory for our time, and it's this cultural elitism that makes it impossible for them to maintain their cultural authority. Anyone who pays attention to what's happening, who is actively engaged with networked and mobile media communication technologies, and who reads and composes their own DIY forms of theoretical discourse, is quite naturally remixing theory back into their practice-based research (which is exactly where it belongs).

In the various versions of remixthebook that appear in both the print book and on the Web at remixthebook.com, what you get is the ongoing performance of theory as practice-based art research. The project samples more from artists like Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Kathy Acker, Ad Reinhardt, and Robert Rauschenberg -- or even comedians like George Carlin, Stephen Colbert and Steve Martin -- than, say, the tantalizing post-structuralists, although I do borrow from them too. I should also mention Vilém Flusser since, to my mind, he is a unique theoretical figure, a kind of fictional artist and media theorist hybrid. He once said that he viewed his media theory more like science fiction than media theory per se. In this regard, I see my own media theory more as avant-pop performance art.

J: Is it something of an in-depth research on the “space of engaging co-conspiracy” that you like to call “the world wide web as collectively self-generated collage remix machine”? Do you still see the web that way? Do you still design your Net art works acknowledging the participant a huge role? I mean, reading about your interest in long length movies, I tend to think that you somehow got frustrated or suspicious about the collaborative, crowd-sourcing art making process. Is that so?

M: This is a really good question because I would not want to leave anyone with the impression that I am or have been, for some reason, totally enamored of the concept of an "anything goes" participatory art, especially the kind that champions computer interactivity as some kind of "art form of the future." For me, participation is and always has been less about the user-generated content side of things and much more about the intimate social connectivity of people. When I make a work like Immobilité, it's very transmedia in its design, and so, yes, there is a longer, feature-length version of the work that has been exhibited internationally as a large scale installation, but it has also been remixed into other distribution, exhibition, reading, and screening contexts including large-scale public screenings, an iPhone app, various remixes playing on urban screens across all seven continents, an elaborate Web site with video and audio remixes, and a downloadable artist e-book, etc. For me, the making of the work is where the intimate participation, the social energy, manifests itself. It's really about the creative process, of making things intimately, among close collaborators or even people who I have never met but who are open to taking the shared source material and postproducing a version that is part of their own revolution of everyday life.

J: And would you tell a little about the site of remixthebook? Is it really the entire book remixed by other artists?

M: It's fantastic. Vernacular video as digital theory, e-book as conceptual art, Net art as performance writing. The artists and theorists are all amazing in their own right and what they are doing is remixing different chunks or excerpts of source material from the written text or my audio recordings reading the text remixes or even videos of me faux-lecturing the text as "course material," etc. There is also an entire section that we call The Course where the idea is to look at the history of collage, appropriation, literary cut-up, détournement, DJ/VJ and live audio visual sampling and remixing, activism, and what Nic Bourriaud calls postproduction art. The idea is to take what we used to think of as A Book, and recontextualize it for social media art and culture. This is not that unusual. The 19th century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé was trying to do something similar in his own intermedia way (Mallarmé: "Everything in the world exists in order to end up in a book." My remix: "Everything in the world is Readymade Source Material that exists so it can end up being remixed.") My hope is that students as well as random web visitors to the site will also remix the book.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, theory, select magazine, remixthebook, contemporary art practice, experimental writing, net art, détournement

The Art of the Literary Mashup

2011-10-20T17:01:00.002-06:00

My guest blog post at the University of Minnesota Press begins:

Media theorist, artist, and novelist Mark Amerika explores the book as a live, "liquid" object and uncovers its potential beyond the printed word. Today, he discusses his own research-and-perform methodology as well as a sampling of remix projects that utilize the works of Jack Kerouac, Jacques Derrida, and Sol Lewitt, among others.

One of my collaborators on the new remixthebook.com website, Gary Hall, also a University of Minnesota Press author, recently published a blog post entitled "What do we have the right not to call a 'book'?". In the post, Hall writes:
What seems much more interesting is the way certain developments in electronic publishing contain at least the potential for us to perceive the book as something that is not completely fixed, stable and unified, with definite limits and clear material edges, but as liquid and living, open to being continually and collaboratively written, edited, annotated, critiqued, updated, shared, supplemented, revised, re-ordered, reiterated and remained.
This description of the emerging forms of what we might refer to as a book per se, directly applies to the recent appearance of remixthebook, my new hybridized print / web / publication / digital / performance of contemporary art theory [...]

Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, University of Minnesota Press, new forms of publishing, blog

Everything, All At Once: A Review of Mark Amerika's remixthebook

2011-08-19T16:45:00.004-06:00

remixthebook: Everything, all at once. (a review of Mark Amerika's hybrid book/web project by Mark Hancock for furtherfield)

The challenge in trying to review a book like Mark Amerika’s Remixthebook, is the feeling you can only do justice to the text by doing the same with your review. The apparent simplicity coupled with the multifarious outcomes are intoxicating. You could be mistaken for believing that every possible remix would produce fresh and exciting outcomes. The key of course, is to have good source material in the first place. Also, to have developed a keen eye for what blends and meshes together and what doesn’t. Even the most disparate work requires judgment and prior awareness. Remixthebook asks us to consider the idea of remixology as part of the work of modern artists. The tone and style of the book is a blend of ideas, voices and thoughts with a myriad of concepts, which attempts to be the very embodiment of the ideas it espouses.

Read more here.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, review, furtherfield

remixthebook.com is live

2011-08-05T12:47:00.002-06:00

The remixthebook.com website, the digital component to my new book, remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press), is now live.

From the About page:

One of the main reasons remixthebook is more than a print book published by the prestigious University of Minnesota Press is that the work expands the concept of writing to include multimedia art forms composed for networked and mobile media environments. The remixthebook.com website is the online hub for the digital remixes of many of the theories generated in the print book and features the work of artists, creative writers and scholars for whom the practice and theory of remix art is central to their research interests. Since one of the primary aims of the project is to create a collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to the way contemporary theory is performed, and to anticipate future forms of art and writing that challenge traditional modes of scholarly production while still taking on the philosophical issues of our time, the remixthebook project could be considered an open content platform for others to use as source material for their own art work, literary creations, 21st century multimedia theory, and/or innovative coursework.

I highly recommend checking it out as it features amazing art and writing from some of our most provocative artists, theorists, literary writers, and musicians including Janneke Adema, Giselle Beiguelman, Julie Carr, David Gunkel, Gary Hall, Frieder Nake, Out-of-Sync, Craig Saper, Joe Tabbi, Darren Tofts, Gregory Ulmer, Chad Mossholder, Michael Theodore, Michelle Ellsworth, Rick Silva, Will Luers, Yoshi Sodeoka, Mark McCoin, Curt Cloninger, Kate Armstrong, Maria Miranda, Norie Neumark, mez, jonCates, Mark River, and Tim Whid.

If anyone is interested in teaching the book and website to their classes, please feel free to email me directly with any questions you may have.

Keywords: remixthebook.com, Mark Amerika, remix, book, writing

(Re)Mixed Realities

2011-07-12T23:12:00.002-06:00

Niels Bohr:

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Ron Sukenick:

Without the unreal the real is unreal.

[...]

Bad innovation serves up ignorant repetition of the past; good innovation is the thumbprint, the genetic code, of the innovator.

Good innovation will pass the same criteria of taste as other writing, while at the same time changing them.

The question is not taste but who has the power to impose it.

Collage and cutup are ways of interrupting the continuity of the controlling discourse - mosaic is a way of renewing discourse.

Mosaic: new tiles, old fragments, odd scraps - remix. Out of remnants new design. Continuous not discontinuous.

Professor VJ:

The audiences are changing so it's very tricky to try and anticipate what kind of art experience one can deliver to an imaginary other. For example, some of my live performances are also simultaneously distributed over the net and then archived for future research or remix purposes. One is tempted to say that these changes are almost all technologically induced. But then again, I am the one pulling the trigger. Although once I am performing a live set or enable my online presence to get distributed 24/7 over the matrix, then I start feeling like a network distributed "other" more than I feel like anything I might want to call "me" ("me" who?). This might have something to do with the way we now "play ourselves" as we live out the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote "I am another." I too am another. And another, and another, and an/other ...

Given the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives, how essential is it for (con)temporary artists to develop a networked practice?

Metadata: remixed reality, networked practice, temporary art

Out On the Edge

2011-06-23T23:46:00.008-06:00

Barbara London, the Video and Media Curator at The Museum of Modern Art, has written an insightful overview of Net art, then and now. The piece is titled "Out On the Edge" and includes a nice riff on Immobilité.

In the beginning, say, around 1994-5, there was something called Net art. It's amazing that we can now take a long view back at something called Net art, or at least the earlier incarnations of network-based art forms that came under that name (and many other names too including net.art, Web art, online art, hypertext art, etc.) No one knew what this emergent media art form really was or what it would become. Wild experimentation was happening within a core group of internationally connected artists and writers, most of whom had never met, but who were able to simultaneously and continuously collaborate with each other over the Internet. Those artist networks and the scenes they created have for the most part dissipated although many of the early Net artists and theorists (sometimes embodied in the same person) are still very active and wildly experimenting with making new media artworks while simultaneously role-playing a tech-nomadic raconteur whose intersubjective "social networking style" challenges the all-too-familiar models of institutionalized art-school studio critique that so many MFA students, digital as well as traditional, seem to depend on for their psychic stability.

In the beginning, say, around 1994-6, it was clear to me that one of the key compositional methods that initially emerged on the Net, and that was driving a lot of "cutting-edge" Net art practice (if we could even call it that back then), was hypermediated remix art. In 1996, writing for the German-language online art journal Telepolis, I published one of my Amerika Online columns entitle "Surf-Sample-Manipulate: The Pseudo-Autobiography of A Work-In-Progress." In this early and surprisingly very influential column, I wrote:

[T]he strategy of "surf-sample-manipulate" (i.e., to surf the culture, sample data and then change that data to meet the specific needs of the narrative) works on two fronts: one, the so-called "creative content," that is, the text, images, music, and graphics are many times sampled from other sources and digitally-manipulated so that they become "original" constructions that are immediately imported into the storyworld as supplementary data and, two: the so-called "source code" itself is many times appropriated from other designs floating around the Net and eventually integrated into the screen's behind-the-scenes compositional structure. The great thing about the Net is that if you see something you like, whether that be "content" or "source code," many times you can just download the entire document and manipulate it to your needs. In fact, it wouldn't be entirely suspect to suggest that "content" and "source code" are one and the same thing, since as far as the Web goes, one cannot simply exist without the other.

Now that I am about to release my next major book of contemporary art(ist) theory, remixthebook, I can see that I have been postproducing these thoughts for over almost two decades and that the new book is packed with much more freestyle composition and flava (as well as insider personal narrative). I guess you could say that I am getting more comfortable in my own skin as my body (of work) continues to form.

Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, surf-sample-manipulate, Net art, Barbara London, MOMA

Video Book Trailer for remixthebook

2011-05-25T19:04:00.007-06:00

The video above is an experimental "book trailer" that plays with source material from my forthcoming book of new media art / remix theory.

The book, now available for order here, is being published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Here's what the YouTube site says:

A provocative textual performance that is at once a dazzling model of the literary remix and a state-of-the-art reflection on remix culture, REMIXTHEBOOK captures the unique and continually shifting digital moment in which we live and situates the remix as an art form and literary intervention. To coincide with the publication of REMIXTHEBOOK, Amerika will launch a companion website, remixthebook.com, to facilitate new ways of participating in remix culture by inviting other artists and writers to create remixthebook mashups of their own, pushing the boundaries of art and literary culture further, beyond the current publishing paradigms.

Video Remix: Rick Silva
Audio: Chad Mossholder
Micro-Cam Footage: Mark McCoin
Voice: Mark Amerika

"Think of remixthebook as DJ Tool made from rhythms downloaded, ripped, mixed, spliced, diced, and burned into our collective hard drives, then re-uploaded. It's a piece of conceptual hardware that exists somewhere between how we experience information and how information aesthetics has transformed the human condition. It's that deep."
—Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

Keywords: Mark Amerika, remixthebook, remix, mashup, DJ Spooky, University of Minnesota, theory

Pre-Production on Musuem of Glitch Aesthetics Starts This Week

2011-05-15T15:45:00.005-06:00

Things have been really busy as I crank up pre-production on my next artwork, a [transmedia] narrative titled The Museum of Glitch Aesthetics. The past two weeks I have been hiding out primarily in London writing a lot of the back-story about the "digital persona" who will drive the narrative forward. Starting on Tuesday, I will start preliminary location shooting in various parts of Northwest England, particularly the gorgeous Lake District, Lancashire, and Manchester/Salford. Future location shoots in late July and August (Brazil's winter) are being scheduled in Salvador, Bahia, and some of the surrounding regions.

While in Brazil, in addition to more production on the new artwork, I'll be involved in two unassociated gigs: 1) conducting a workshop on mobile cinema / remix / performance as part of the Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual in Salvador where I had the South American premiere of Immobilité last summer, and 2) delivering a closing keynote presentation in Rio at a conference on transmedia narrative sponsored by the Federal University there. All of this momentum in Brazil is somewhat unexpected, and since there are three open weeks in between the various gigs there, the question I am now asking myself is: "Shall I just stay for half of the summer?"

Keywords: Brazil, Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics, Mark Amerika

The Nam June Paik / Allen Ginsberg Boulder Connection

2011-05-01T16:54:00.004-06:00

Now that the semester is over, I am about to start developing my newly commissioned art work as part of the AND Festival and the London 2012 Olympics.

The first set of meetings and series of trips scouting locations in the Northwest of England took place in February. While I was there I saw an excellent retrospective of Nam June Paik's work at FACT and the Tate in Liverpool. It included multiple versions of Paik's TV Buddha, much of the art, material and documentation from his first-ever "electronic television" exhibition in Wuppertal in 1963, and his hypnotic laser cone art.

Paik's work has been instrumental in my recent practice-based research and theoretical investigations into the transformational aspects of video as an aesthetic/semiotic medium that enables one to experiment with signal processing and glitch performance. My writing on Paik can be found spread throughout this blog, and much of it has been remixed into "Artist, Medium, Instrument (The Nam June Paik Remix)," which is the third chapter in my forthcoming remixthebook now available for pre-publication ordering.

After a viewing a lot of Paik's video art that day in FACT's media lounge, I was genuinely surprised by how much he had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg. There is a work entitled Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint that features Allen Ginsberg and Allan Kaprow. According to Electronic Intermix, "In Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, the influence of Jewish fathers on their sons and the complexity of familial relationships are explored in a witty, poignant portrait of two artists." Ginsberg, whose network poetics I remix into "Mind Bank Network (The Allen Ginsberg Remix)" as chapter two in remixthebook, appears in many of the experimental videos created by Paik that I viewed at the UK retrospective. Perhaps most interesting to me was that in Allan 'n' Allen's Complaint, Paik "take[s] the viewer on a journey from the Mideast (where Kaprow performs his Stone Happening and makes an ice sculpture in the desert), to a New York poetry reading with Ginsberg and his father, to Boulder, Colorado, where Ginsberg's companion Peter Orlovsky plays his banjo." I had no idea that Paik came to Boulder as part of his video art work featuring Ginzy. All of a sudden, parts of remixthebook are taking on added resonance as my own extemporaneous theories play with the remixological potential of intermedia collaboration, the programmatic blurring of art and life, and the psychic move toward prophetic illumination.

Since my visit to the UK a mere two and half months ago, I have spent a great deal of time back home in Boulder, and I am trying to imagine just what exactly it is that draws so many leading edge artists and designers into its vortex. Yesterday I tried to count how many incredibly talented artists and designers have passed through Boulder in the first four months of 2011 and who I have had the luck and pleasure of hanging out with. These magically appearing international and national artists and designers, most of whom shared their experimental work composed in an endless melange of hybridized media environments, were in the scores. I had to stop counting when I got to forty.

And now, lucky me, gets to go check out the scene in the UK and meet and/or reconnect with many more artist-accomplices. In addition to starting production on my new art work with a small cast and crew, I'll be hanging out at Future Everything, so if you will be there too, drop me a direct message on my Twitter:

Tags: Nam June Paik, Mark Amerika, Allen Ginsberg, Allan Kaprow

The New MarkAmerika.Com Website is Live!

2011-04-21T09:07:00.004-06:00

The new markamerika.com web site is now live and features links to many aspects of Mark Amerika's interdisciplinary art practice including a link to his forthcoming book of new media theory titled remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, September 2011).

"Redesigning the new site took some insight," says web developer Tom Zamir. "Mark is a serious artist with a multitude of works extending in many directions that experiment with different media types. The previous version (see classic site) was designed about a decade ago by artist Joel Swanson who was the first undergraduate at the University of Colorado to graduate with summa cum laude honors in digital art. Joel is currently director of the Technology, Arts & Media program in the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado where I also studied. As a student of both Mark and Joel, I feel that my redesign is closing one circle while starting the next one."

The main features of the new markamerika.com website are searchability, accessibility, relativity, and sociability. Visitors to the site now have easy access to Amerika's net art works, new media books, Twitter streams, Professor VJ blogs, and other electronic publications.

"Merging elements of the previous design with new trends in web technologies, we created an innovative design style that represents Mark's multitude of works," said Zamir.

For more information on remixthebook, you can visit the remixthebook web page University of Minnesota Web site.

Categories: Mark Amerika, markamerika.com, new design, remixthebook

Going Back to Glitch Gulch

2011-04-06T17:15:00.010-06:00

Here's the French version of the wall text that will live outside my installation at the 2011 Biennale de Montréal:

Dans Immobilité (Extraterrestrial Glitch Remix), un film créé à l’aide d’un téléphone cellulaire, Mark Amerika poursuit l’aventure d’un tournage sans scénario. Il laisse l’improvisation dessiner la diégèse. Acteur majeur de la culture Remix américaine, Amerika compose avec l’esthétique accidentée du glitch informatique et du Video Jockey.

The move back into glitch is intentional. I have been playing with glitch aesthetics for over a decade and, I guess it could be said that I was practicing a form of glitch writing in my first novel The Kafka Chronicles (1993). Just read the 1998 "To Do" section that I remixed awhile back for the adaweb website in response to a series of identity hacks performed on artists and curators such as myself.

Some big news: my co-commissioned artwork for the AND festival in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics is a go and will also heavily play with glitch aesthetics, although I'll save the details for an appropriate posting later in the year. As always with my large scale digital art commissions, I will start by developing the source material as I travel the world. For this artwork, the places I'll be using for locations shoots include Colorado, London, the NW region of the UK, Portland, Salvador-Bahia, Rio, Istanbul, New York, Sydney, Melbourne and, of course, Hawaii. It will be a busy time (clocking up the frequent flyer miles) and will happen in conjunction with both preplanned and improvised production shoots, a smattering of keynotes/lectures/workshops, and ad hoc postproduction studio "visitations" wherever these facilities may be. I also hope to use this nomadic "artworlding" to read from and/or perform excerpts from remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, September 2011).

There's more to spill here in Blogland, but it will have to wait for now. The microblog is always active:

Keywords: Mark Amerika, 2011 Biennal de Montréal, AND Festival, remixthebook

Immobilité iPhone App Back Online!

2011-03-14T23:06:00.000-06:00

The Immobilité iPhone app has been disabled for a few months but is now back online here. It's free.

The iPhone app remix is different than the other versions that have been exhibited around the world in that it focuses on using still images and subtitles, as well as an original remix of the 75 minute soundtrack, to redistribute the cinematic flow of the work so that it coincides with your own rhythm, your own touch. In this way, I think of it as a mash-up of Chris Marker's Le Jette style with early iPhone app potential.

I discuss Marker's influence in the making of Immobilité, as well as others like Antonioni, Varda, Bergman, and Godard, at the Rhizome interview here. An excerpt from that interview reads:

Besides, I am especially attracted to some of the more experimental, visionary artworks composed by artists like Chris Marker and Agnes Varda as well as the work of Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, and Kar-Wai. There is something about the way that these other artists oscillate between interior and exterior landscapes that really speaks to me. I have also seen multi-media exhibitions by both Godard and Varda and have navigated through CD-ROMS by Marker, so it's not that odd to go in the other direction, i.e. from novel writing and net art and VJ performance into feature-length filmmaking-as-art. Although it should be said that my idea was not to make a film per se, but to literally remix the form of a feature-length foreign film so that it felt like something you would see in an art-house theater but that was clearly not a major motion picture and would be best experienced as a museum installation. To achieve this, I went very D-I-Y, and shot the work entirely on mobile phone and essentially mashed-up a more amateurish visual aesthetic with my over-the-top auteur-ish methods. For example, there are many of these "painterly" scenes that point back to the abstract expressionist roots of the art scene that has come out of the Cornwall region of the UK where the work was shot. These painterly images were made not in After-Effects, in fact there are no slick, Jeremy Blake-like composites in the work, but rather flickering color fields and character portraits created using experimental hand-held techniques, something that you can really play with once you get a feel for the mobile phone as capturing device. As odd as it may sound, I imagined the mobile phone as part image capturing device, part paintbrush, and part communications gadget during the entire production.

More updates soon ...

Keywords: Mark Amerika, Immobilité, iPhone app, Chris Marker

Blink!

2011-03-12T17:22:00.007-07:00

I guess I don't need to blog anymore.

"the artist formally known as mark amerika" is doing it for me.

Apparently, they saw me at the opening of Blink! at the Denver Art Museum.

It's a great show and I'm thrilled to be a part of it (my contribution is the 2003 digital video / surround sound art piece CODEWORK, now included in their permanent collection).

The electronic media art scene in Colorado is really starting to feel its organic oats.

The Blink! exhibition helps contextualize the history of electronic media art in Colorado by featuring an array of international artists as well as artists from Colorado (some with international reputations, some not).

There were scores of college students at the opening and they seemed to really dig it and are perhaps conferring with each other right now on how this validates their current trajectories into interdisciplinary media arts practice.

What's cool about this show is that many people from around the Rocky Mountain region are now becoming exposed to this kind of work in a mainstream museum context.

The prior exhibition in this space was King Tut.

By far the best experience for me on opening night was this: not having seen my CODEWORK exhibited for about seven years, I decided to go inside the installation and watch it loop through from beginning to end. It takes about eight minutes to experience the whole thing. After it had looped through once, someone called out my name inside the installation. They introduced themselves as a museum patron and queried me about what it was like seeing the piece after so many years and then they introduced me to their (probably) five year old daughter who was sitting on one of the raised bean bag chairs.

"I have been trying to go see the rest of the show for awhile now," he said, "but when I asked her if she was ready to go, she said 'I want to stay inside here forever.'"

Hearing that was as cool as my work being in the exhibition itself.

My Video Relations (Before and After Twitter)

2011-02-14T14:37:00.012-07:00

The blog continues to suffer from a Twitter-related disease.

I have seen this disease spreading among some other peeps in my network.

The disease comes on fast.

You do not even need to "give up" blogging per se so that you can then "micro-blog."

Rather, what happens, is you start thinking: how best can I feed the birds?

Not that the birds need feeding.

Or that they specifically need feeding from you, or me.

The bird feed is like info ammo and you are surrounded by it all.

Ambushed.

So, OK, you have your bullet-proof shit detector ramped up to High Alert.

Your role-playing character armor reveals its shiny impenetrability.

But the string of pixelated purposelessness you once subsided on is now buffering while a distant server is about to crash.

The End Is Nearing ...

... but then something else kicks in and surprises you.

It's a riff.

Something that streams the way a Breton manifesto or an Ornette Coleman solo or a postmodern novel circa 1975 (Barthelme's The Dead Father, for instance) might have done.

Formal flashback?

You've actually caught a wave and are transcribing what it feels like to become the wave.

As Ken Kesey once wrote, "It isn't by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves."

Becoming the wave as a realtime riff with no Oulipian or Twitter constraints could be dangerous.

You might actually feel like you are going somewhere.

But where?

You write yourself into the narrative and decide you will locate this self-caricature, that is to say, this nomadic flux-like drift, into the Northwest region of the UK.

This nomadic flux-like drift actually resembles you, or some version of you that is part 1996, part 2005, and part 2012 (which is scary -- because this means you can literally "play yourself" into the future, which makes you something of a freak).

While in the UK, you see the Nam June Paik retrospective.

It's more elaborate than the reconstruction of his 1963 Wuppertal exhibition you first saw in Bremen in 2006 while attending Paik's (only) European memorial.

To start, you walk through the various rooms in Tate Liverpool, checking out the old TV gear, the shishkabob turntable mixer, the documentary photographs from the Wuppertal show including the severed cow's head right at the entry, and eventually make your way into gardens and aquariums and TV sculpture-portraits.

But it's the 1963 show, seen from a completely different curatorial perspective than the Bremen show in 2006, that really lingers in your mind.

You are now in auto-muse mode, struck by how much you have fictionalized this 1963 show in the Nam June Paik Remix you have performed for your forthcoming remixthebook.

I don't mean fictionalized as in embellished to the point of lying, I mean how you fictionalize things by reading way more into them than the normal person would, and in reading way more into them begin creating new forms of historical narrative for your own digital flux persona to wander through.

All of a sudden, your story gets remixed into Paik's story, into his-storical context.

Of course, Paik's story is too complex to encapsulate in a large scale retrospective, an hour long doco, or a chapter from remixthebook.

But that's not the point (these complexities wear us all like business suits on consignment).

Next, you walk across town and go sit down on the comfy sofas, put on the headphones, and watch the incredible, vintage video art footage composed by Paik that plays inside the media rooms at FACT Liverpool.

You are surprised by just how much Allen Ginsberg stars or makes cameos in these videos.

There is even one that features the two A-boys, Allen Ginsberg and Allan Kaprow, and the weird thing is that to make it, Paik follows Ginzy to Boulder.

(Your remixthebook has a remix of Ginsberg as well so the ensuing Ginsberg/Paik mash-up in chapter three was not that arbitrary after all.)

What was really amazing about the Paik retrospective at FACT in Liverpool, was how you could finally see how he was able to take his collaborative, interdisciplinary, social networking practice, and gradually monetize it by remixing his primary themes over and over again.

It wasn't until he began versioning his TV Buddhas and TV sculptures that the art market really took off for him.

You can't blame him for that, and he was able to keep a regular stable of studio assistants employed over the long haul, some of whom matured into incredibly important artists themselves.

Now Paik is being revered for the way he used his video camera to socialize the art of video relations.

Socializing the art of video relations is what the information superhighway (his term) has become.

As Paik once wrote, "Cybernetics, the art of pure relations, has its origins in karma. The Buddhists say karma is sangsara, relationship is metempsychosis. Cybernated art is important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated."

Metadata: Nam June Paik, Mark Amerika, remix, Allen Ginsberg, Tate retrospective, Twitter

Blog Meets Twitter Meets Letter Makes Better?

2011-01-26T19:11:00.002-07:00

Making a new work for the Biennale de Montréal opening on May 1st.

As I told the curator, it's great just to be in the same sentence as Sophie Calle.

The exhibition theme is "Elements of Chance" and draws its inspiration from Mallarmé who, it must be said, I am always drawing renewable energy from.

A nice overview of the exhibition can be found in the Montréal Gazette.

The Denver Post blurbed Immobilité in the context of Sundance. Maybe I should have submitted it to the Sundance "New Frontiers" program? Oh well, there's still time to crash that scene too.

Crashing scenes. Making scenes. Circulating within and (when necessary) without scenes. That's what I attempt to model as an artist-in-residence at The University of Colorado.

Strange that I would refer to myself as "an artist-in-residence at The University of Colorado" given that I'm a tenured Full Professor. But that's what it feels like.

One of my prints from the Subtitled series produced in conjunction with Art & Culture Editions is showing at the CU Faculty show next door to the Visual Arts Complex on the University of Colorado campus where my huge studio is located. Not bad for "an artist-in-residence."

Danielle, my editor at the University of Minnesota Press, emails to tell me it's time to make some suggestions for the cover of remixthebook. The first idea that pops into my mind is a kind of Beatle's White album where remixthebook is barely visible in the white cover impression. A kind of Malevich white on white with slightly raised lettering in book type.

That brings me back to Mallarmé and his blank white page.

But how does the blank white page, which haunted Beckett too in homage to Mallarmé, as well as Godard, relate to remix, to the Source Material Everywhere?

"Faced with the invisible," Godard once said, "with Mallarmé's blank page, I find myself seeking the corner of memory."

This must have something to do with where the source of creativity emerges from.

But don't ask me. Ask John Simon.

Is it as obvious to you as it is to me that my blog posts are now totally contaminated by Twitter?

That's totally fucked up, but that's the way it's been going these last few weeks (my pleasure).

As I wrote in a recent letter to a legendary computer artist from the Stuttgart group circa 1965 and who is now in his 70s:

I am nothing now but a sequence of pixelated purposelessness, strangely engaged with the semiotic machine, producing what Flusser might have called "acts of ritual magic" while playing the computer keyboard. But the keyboard is just a typewriter. It's a QWERTY instrument that I do not even know how to play, at least not traditionally, so that I hunt and peck for keys, but I do it as if my eyes were closed, since it all happens as part of an incredibly fast, unconsciously generated interactive performance between me (or not-me, the flowing thing that becomes something like a semiotic animal) and the machine (which ironically feels more human to me than ever, I think, because I am learning from my digitally networked and mobile-addicted students how to transform aesthetic practice into aesthetically felt performance with emerging info-prosthetics). Aesthetic prosthetics, semiotic animals, semiotic machines, and the potential of sensuous computing. Processing life without computers is no longer possible. The good news is that we can intersubjectively (socially) mash-up personas, feelings, practices, and pleasures into the ongoing scene of desire ... the bad news is that the older I get, the less literate I become. Now I have to ask my assistants, younger colleagues, and advanced students to help me realize the semiotic impulse so that we can then feed them back into the field of distribution.

It was a long letter. The anti-Twitter.

Metadata: Biennale de Montréal, Sophie Calle, Mark Amerika, remixthebook, Twitter, anti-Twitter

VOICE ... Vocal Aesthetics

2011-01-24T16:12:00.004-07:00

Here's a link to VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media
Edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson and Theo Van Leeuwen and published by MIT Press.

According to the site, "Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games [...] Chapters cover such technologies as voice mail, podcasting, and digital approximations of the human voice. A number of authors explore the performance, performativity, and authenticity (or 'authenticity effect') of voice in dance, poetry, film, and media arts; while others examine more immaterial concerns—the voice's often-invoked magical powers, the ghostliness of disembodied voices, and posthuman vocalization."

Besides myself, contributors include Isabelle Arvers, Giselle Beiguelman, Philip Brophy, Ross Gibson, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Levin, Helen Macallan, Virginia Madsen, Meredith Morse, Norie Neumark, Andrew Plain, John Potts, Theresa M. Senft, Nermin Saybasili, Amanda Stewart, Axel Stockburger, Michael Taussig, Martin Thomas, Theo Van Leeuwen, and Mark Ward.

Rhizome recently reviewed it here.

And, as always, Paule at effetdepresence is on it too (in French).

Metadata: theory, voice, digital art, Mark Amerika

Rocky Mountain High (Art)

2011-01-17T16:16:00.004-07:00

My CODEWORK 1 (2003-2004), a self-contained digital video / surround sound installation, will be included in "Blink! Light, Sound and the Moving Image" at the Denver Art Museum this spring. The show opens on March 10th.

And don't forget, Immobilité, my current solo exhibition running at the same museum, is still up until the end of the month.

Go Denver!

Metadata: Immobilité, Denver Art Museum, Mark Amerika, Fuse Box, Blink!

Agglutination

2011-01-01T16:03:00.005-07:00

UPDATED:

For the last five years, I have selected one word on January 1st to unconsciously trigger all of my action-oriented performances throughout the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

For 2009, I was feeling the heat and knew I had to go with intensification. As an eerily uncertain 2009 stood before me, I thought that this might be the final year that I employ this one-word triggering device. I wrote:

Knowing what lies ahead all throughout 2009 and knowing that there are a lot of unexpected things that will invite me to unknow the known, there is only one word for me turn to now.

In 2009, the word is intensification.

One way to acknowledge my embrace of this universal pattern shift is to change the way I visualize my practice. This will require my continued adherence to a daily remix practice in conjunction with what Whitehead calls the higher phases of experience. This will, in part, require that I further expend time, energy, and money into the successful blurring of art and life just as Allen Kaprow once imagined. This intentional investment strategy wherein I unconsciously expend energy in the simultaneous and continuous remixing of art and life will enable me to co-respond to the emerging blur culture that I see manifesting itself as part of the universal pattern shift. So there's some irony in all of this, as usual. It ends up that the way toward more focused actualization is by initiating a more aesthetically pronounced method of prehending all that is blurring my creative vision.

Today, one word from that entry a year ago stands out: adherence. There are a lot of new developments already in place for 2011, not the least of which is remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press), the continued exhibition of Immobilité at the Denver Art Museum, my participation in group shows in Denver, New York, Boulder, Manchester and beyond, as well as the final bit of postproduction on my next feature-length "foreign film" and the editing, producing and packaging of my stand-up comedy art installation.

Somehow all of the above is driven by an adherence to my daily remix practice. The bottom line is that I need to maintain my practice as intuitive stick-to-itive-ness. Maybe the word I am looking for is sticktuitive. Setting my mind on autopilot, my aim is to continually remix the patterns into new forms of mosaic. But the mosaic, as fluid as it may be, needs to hold together in order for me to feel the need to proceed. It has to agglutinate.

The trigger word for 2011 is agglutination. Even if some elements lose their "stickiness," dislodge, and drift away, I will be paying attention to those things that adhere to each other and create greater clusters of potential to actualize.

I once wrote about agglutination in another context, riffing on the work of Ulmer.

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

Metadata: actualization, intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation, agglutination

Outer Space / Inner Space / Aloha Space

2010-12-27T14:07:00.003-07:00

Amazing daze / the complete collapse into aloha space

What does it mean to play oneself as moving visual code

Slipping into tanned oblivion?

In the distance a whale spouts its regal presence

Closer by a green turtle floats atop the aquamarine

Now a Lanikai sunset that peels my eyes of any pretense

Layering newfound skinflicks on timelines still to be edited

Into sequences that otherwise would never exist

Metadata: Lanikai, aloha, time, space

Flusser Studies: Photography and Beyond

2010-12-20T12:51:00.002-07:00

The new issue of Flusser Studies is now online and includes a smart roundtable of invited artists and scholars contributing to "Photography and Beyond: On Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography."

An excerpt from my section reads:

In my own work, I apply a kind of Flusser "theory filter" to transform the photographer into what I term a digital thoughtographer, one who is using emerging media apparatuses to expand the concept of writing. In this way, the gesture of writing is reconceived as a live, networked performance where the artist morphs into a remixologist who creatively postproduces images that are magically conjured up by playing with their fingers on a computer keyboard. Of course, the questions Flusser asks us to consider are, "How is the envisioning gesture being directed?" and "Where are the fingers pointing?"

Flusser is a fantastic source for those of us searching for philosophy tracks to sample from and remix into a contemporary form of networked theory/poetics. Phrases from his "Into the Universe of Technical Images" are threaded throughout my next publication project, remixthebook, to be published by the University of Minnesota Press next year.

I was very lucky in that while I was in Falmouth (UK) during the production of Immobilité, I had the pleasure of meeting and hanging out with Nancy Roth, who will also publish her translation of "Into the Universe of Technical Images" with the University of Minnesota Press in March 2011. Early access to that "source" was crucial to the storyline and remix theory to follow.

Written as "[a]n examination of the promise and peril of digital communication technologies," Flusser by way of Nancy's translation, totally influenced the creation of my Immobilité now on exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. In fact, micro-samples of his text are remixed into the narrative subtitles that push the Immobilité story to its inevitable conclusion (wherein the voyeur's vision of a double rainbow illuminates the sky like a post-World War II British Abstract Expressionist painting just before they commit information-suicide).

As the UM Press notes about the newly translated Flusser book,

Flusser charts how communication evolved from direct interaction with the world to mediation through various technologies. The invention of writing marked one significant shift; the invention of photography marked another, heralding the current age of the technical image. The automation of the processing of technical images carries both promise and threat: the promise of freeing humans to play and invent and the threat for networks of automation to proceed independently of humans.

In discussing his prior book, "Toward a Philosophy of Photography," I put it another way in my interview with Word Riot:

DH: What book are you reading now?

MA: Vilem Flusser's "Toward A Philosophy of Photography" (for the fourth time). It's a pre-Internet inquiry into the way humans are turning to "ritual magic" in a post-historical context. According to Flusser, images are taking over the world and are controlled by apparatuses that challenge humans to remain human. He envisions a world where writing disappears and the robots take over. At first, the robots are external to human experience. Even though we are the ones responsible for creating them, it's as if we don't see them coming. Slowly but surely, things "progress." Humans program the robots to do things. The robots get better and better at doing them and soon are able to begin programming the humans. The humans start losing their will-to-aestheticize, their innate need to do things intentionally, and eventually become robots themselves. Apparently, Flusser considered his speculations a kind of anti-philosophy and privately referred to them as science-fiction.

Soon I will indicate how all of the above points to current trends in creating practice-based art theories and how the changes taking place in networked and mobile media culture are challenging the by now near-ancient post-structuralist book culture of the theoretical 80s and 90s.

One question the remixthebook project will propose to traditional scholars of 80s-90s styled "contemporary theory" is "What is the future of theory in post-print culture?"

Metadata: theory, Flusser, photography, Immobilité, Mark Amerika,

remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press)

2010-12-15T14:29:00.002-07:00

My next publication project, a hybrid of print, web, mobile media app, and various forms of digital performance, is titled remixthebook and will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2011.

Most of the source material created for this new cooperative adventure was generated right here in the Professor VJ blog.

More on all of this in the days, weeks, and months ahead ...

Meanwhile, the first couple of weeks in TwitterLand have been worth the effort and I will continue to perform there as well:

Thanks to Bruce Sterling who I had a great time hanging out with in Brazil last month. His constant Twittering convinced me it's a viable medium to play ones presence in.

Metadata: remixthebook, digital theory, Mark Amerika,

World Technology Award in Art Finalist

2010-12-04T11:51:00.002-07:00

It looks like I was a finalist for a World Technology Award in the Art category in New York this past week. According to the press release:

The World Technology Awards have been presented annually since 2000 to the outstanding innovators from each sector within the science and technology arena for innovative work of the greatest likely long-term significance - both as a way to honor those innovators, and as a vetting mechanism to determine the newest WTN members. Nominations come from both current individual members of the WTN as well as through submissions made by nominees or representatives acting on their behalf. Individual WTN member then vote their preferences from among the nomination pool. The Awards are announced each year in a gala ceremony at the close of the annual World Technology Summit.

The 2010 World Technology Awards were announced on Dec. 1, 2010, in a gala ceremony at the TIME & LIFE Building in NYC by Ali Velshi (Anchor and Chief Business Correspondent) and James P. Clark (Founder/Chairman of the WTN).

The actual winner in the Art category this year was Tod Machover of the MIT Media Lab.

Meanwhile, the double exhibition/screening in Brazil went well. The team at arte.mov were incredibly hospitable and I can't wait go to go back.

Or, in other words: "Amerika loves Brazil and Brazil loves me" ...

I was Twittering away while I was there and will continue the Twitfeed on a regular basis.

Metadata: Mark Amerika, World Technology Award, arte.mov, Twitter

Another Twit Enters the Scene (Or: For Metadata Purposes: Mark Amerika Twitter)

2010-11-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

There's no way I'm going to blog the upcoming events in Brazil so I'm finally going to put my Twitter account into use. For those who want to do the virtual Jonestown thang and become a follower, you can track my feed by clicking the button below:

Metadata: Mark Amerika, Twitter

Immobilité in Brazil -- The Sequel

2010-11-16T10:35:00.003-07:00

The Brazilian premiere of the Portuguese-language version of Immobilité will open in two cities over the next two weeks: Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte.

The English-language version of Immobilité had its South American premiere in Salvador, Brazil, in July, as part of the VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual. The event was unlike any other "opening" I have ever experienced and led to some unexpected developments: for example, here's a story about my and Immobilité's unintentional mystical connection to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The Portuguese-language events are being sponsored by Arte.Mov and, as always, I will be in good company. For example, the program in Belo Horizonte will include appearances by Bruce Sterling and Arcangel Constantini as well as my Brazilian hosts the artists Lucas Bambozzi and Marcus Bastos.

(The traveling festival blog has some great links to happening scenes all around the globe.)

In addition to screening Immobilité, I will be exhibiting Mobile Phone Video Art Classics. This playful 2007 work premiered in my solo exhibition in London in 2007 and then was featured in my MPVAC solo exhibition in Australia in 2008.

These mobile phone artworks are intimately connected to my creative writing and serve as aesthetically-modified transducers that, in addition to transforming my unconscious energy into the development of new feature-length films, also spur on the creation of new books, including META/DATA and The Postproduction of Presence.

Metadata: Arte.Mov, Immobilité, Mobile Phone Video Art Classics, Mark Amerika, Brazil,

Front Page at AC Editions

2010-10-27T17:57:00.001-06:00

And just like that, the Immobilité limited edition prints are now featured on the front page of AC Editions.

As mentioned in previous posts and emails, these prints are created from low resolution screen captures and are visibly pixelated per my intentions and include one of the work's subtitles.

The three Immobilité print works are actually sold as a diptych of 2 prints measuring in three different dimensions made with archival pigments on fine art rag paper and come with a signed Certificate of Authenticity.

All sales benefit the Denver Art Museum, the artist, and AC Editions.

Metadata: Immobilité, Denver Art Museum, Mark Amerika, ACeditions, limited edition prints

Limited Edition Prints from Immobilité

2010-10-22T11:19:00.001-06:00

As part of the launch of the new solo exhibition of Immobilité that opened at the Denver Art Museum on Wednesday evening, I am partnering with Chris Vroom's ACeditions and am offering three limited edition prints to interested buyers.

These prints are created from low resolution screen captures and are visibly pixelated per my intentions and include one of the work's subtitles.

The three Immobilité print works are made with archival pigments on fine art rag paper and come with a signed Certificate of Authenticity.

The three Immobilité print works are actually sold as a diptych of 2 prints measuring in three different dimensions and are titled "Subtitled" (instead of "Untitled"). See the site for a visual representation.

All sales benefit the Denver Art Museum, the artist, and ACeditions.

Many thanks to DAM Contemporaries for sponsoring this four and half month exhibition run inside The Fuse Box on the fourth floor of the Hamilton building at the Denver Art Museum.

Metadata: Immobilité, Denver Art Museum, Mark Amerika, ACeditions, limited edition prints

Immobilité Exhibition Opening At Denver Art Museum

2010-10-11T11:01:00.001-06:00

Here's the link to the Denver Art Museum Contemporaries (DAMC) website. DAMC is sponsoring the exhibition of Immobilité in The Fuse Box:

Immobilité │ October 20, 2010 │Opening Reception and Denver Premiere

5-5:30PM Champagne reception
5:30PM Denver Premiere screening
7-8:30PM Mark Amerika’s Logan Lecture
8:30-10PM Après Lecture reception at MadWine

Please join DAM Contemporaries in celebrating the new installation of the Fuse Box featuring Mark Amerika’s film Immobilité, a feature length film shot entirely with a mobile phone camera. Immobilité has been exhibited at the Chelsea Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (Athens, Greece) and the VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual (Salvador, Brazil). Remixes of the work have been exhibited in many venues including Tate Media, the Streaming Museum and the BBC Big Screens project throughout the United Kingdom.

Reservations: 720-913-0152 by October 18

The exhibition runs through February 2011.

For those who are new to this blog, you can read a couple of interviews I have had about the Immobilité project at Interview magazine and Rhizome as well as an excerpt from the interview with curator Daphne Dragona as part of my UNREALTIME catalog from the Athens show (The 100 page color catalog can be purchased for 10 euros by sending an email to [protocol@emst.gr]). You can also view a video interview about the project that was conducted in the Tate Britain museum by curator Kelli Dipple at the Tate Intermedia Art website.

Hope to see you at the Denver opening!

Metadata: Immobilité, Denver Art Museum, Mark Amerika, Fuse Box, mobile phone art film

Some Mystic Forgets Himself

2010-10-08T11:16:00.002-06:00

In one of his artist's writing, "Cybernated Art," the video artist Nam June Paik wrote:

Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.

Riffing on this, I would slightly remix his sentiment and write that making contemporary forms of electronic media art involve the creative use of mediating technologies that are situated to augment our experience of life as we look to achieve other states of mind, but are not in and of themselves the literal portals to these other states of mind. Rather, these portals are still part of a deep "interior shot" that feeds off a network of fringe-flow sensations as we experience them via socially interconnected relations.

"Cybernetics," wrote Paik, is "the science of pure relations, or relationship itself" and "has its origin in karma."

Something I learned from Paik, and that heavily informed the creation of Immobilité, was how to use the creative process to put oneself into a trance state that then unconsciously triggers unexpected visions or what in the work I refer to as autohallucinations. In early 2005, I was invited to the European memorial following the death of Paik, and there in Germany I came upon the loose, handwritten notes from an essay he had written around in the early Sixties called "Experimental Television" – that's what he must have called video art in those days – and I was struck by how he too really found it important to write down, to poeticize, what he felt was happening to him as he became this electronically-infused, experimental persona "out of nowhere" – as when he says, referring to the word (in quotes) "ecstasy"

* to go out of oneself...

* completely filled time

* the presence of eternal presence

* unconscious, or super-conscious

* -- some mystic forgets himself (go out of oneself)

* abnormal

* the world stops for three minutes!

This last phrase of Paik's, "the world stops for three minutes!" seems to come out of nowhere too, but also anticipates Carlos Castaneda's "Journey to Ixtlan" where the impersonal "I" of the narrator is being guided through his philosophical life journey by the teachings of Don Juan, the shaman-trickster. Don Juan says to Castaneda's persona:

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn't mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.

I am teaching you how to stop the world. Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I'm going to give you what I call "techniques for stopping the world."

Is this what Paik means by to "go out of oneself..." the way "some mystic forgets himself"? This is my state of mind too while I automatically generate my fictional personas as shareware. Creating my so-called foreign films (so-called in that they are anything but a film of any kind), I realize that forgetting oneself is a necessary aspect of envisioning the work.

The experimental artist Stan Brakhage, who some would say was to experimental film art what Nam June Paik was to video art, often referred to "film as visual music" and spoke about how "the work has to suggest its 'going-on-ness.'"

Which brings up an immediate question: How does a work suggest its 'going-on-ness', especially when you take into account issues of duration, Internet-era attention span, creative momentum, narrative, (re)mixed reality, and interactivity? Immobilité was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] style similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube.

By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house film, the work begins blurring the distinction between the auteur and the amateur, though both may recognize in themselves the desire to become a lover of forms (of formal innovation – as a survival strategy in the co-evolutionary push-pull of the still semi-stable environment).

Brakhage spoke about "a magicwork that makes itself" – a creative force that is filtered through the unconscious and that can only happen once one has freed themselves of the weight of commercial success and other burdens that come with a life fettered with unnecessary attachments. Only then, says Brakhage, can an artist finally blaze the path that they intuitively know they have to make (I'm adding my own associative word-thoughts here now). But before this can happen, you first have to take on the role of prophetic visionary who literally visualize their next creative becoming. How else is the life-art-work continuum to get made?

Sampling from more of Brakhage's phrases that I gleaned from a local TV interview in Boulder, Colorado, we hear him frequently refer to the "buzzing of mind" and "vision of muse" that fills his head like bees in a beehive as the work gets created on its own terms without any interference. He was cautious enough to make clear that not every work will be a magicwork, and any artist who has stuck it out over decades of trial and error via an intense, post-studio, art-research practice knows this to be the case. Sometimes it just comes out, sometimes not. And when the creative momentum one experiences while making a specific work is lost, you are never really sure if you will get it back. These are the risks one takes when developing their new material in a variety of media/mediums, especially when it's time-based new media that they are porting their poetic vibes through.

The instrument needs constant tuning.

The beehive mind needs to buzz.

Some mystic needs to forget themselves.

The unconscious experience of the intuitive body becoming new media...

Think of it as creating an active unconscious momentum, where the proprioceptive artist-medium "knows" where they are going without ever having been there before.

Or: imagine the artist-medium playing out their aesthetic potential via an innate body intuition, flushed with the illogic of sense (data), operating on autopilot.

The history of new media is the history of the world. For example, we can time-travel back to Germany in 1805, where we find a short essay written by Heinrich von Kleist, collected in his now out of print An Abyss Deep Enough. The essay is entitled "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking," where the author intuits the unconscious neural mechanism that triggers creative thought and writes:

For it is not we who know; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'

Metadata: Nam June Paik, Stan Brakhage, cinema, image, writing, remixed reality

Immobilité on a Tear (UPDATED)

2010-09-25T16:42:00.000-06:00

Immobilité in all of its iterations is indeed on another tear.

Last year it appeared in solo shows at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York and The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens as well as many public or urban screen settings throughout the world including Milan (check out an excerpted clip of the event here), Melbourne, Bucharest (YouTube excerpt here), Bangkok, and Seoul. It played in seventeen cities in the UK via the BBC Big Screens.

The latter half of this year is a busy time for the work as well. Soon I will send out a press release for its five month run in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum (Colorado peeps mark your calendars: I'll be delivering the Logan Lecture at the museum on October 20th). It will also premiere in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in November/December as part of Arte.Mov (I'll be in both cities for the openings as a follow-up to my presenting it in Salvador, Brazil, this past July). The remixes are also getting major play again this fall including the current exhibition at Google's Headquarters in New York, inclusion in The 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, an upcoming four week appearance at The Big Screen Project in New York, and the Tina B. : The Prague Contemporary Art Festival. The initial remix that premiered at the Tate Media site, played at the Media Facades festival in Berlin this month as well.

I think I'm forgetting a couple of others but you get the picture: it's been busy! And I am hitting a hard and fast deadline for the final draft of my new book, Remixology: On Becoming A Postproduction Medium, a 250 page remix of this blog, to be published next year by an incredible press (more on this later).

Metadata: Denver Art Museum, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Google, Big Screen Project, Arte.Mov, exhibitions, urban screens

Micro-Editing Difference in Time

2010-09-22T20:40:00.001-06:00

From an interview with Chantal Akerman:

MR: The text is like a mark in time, while someone's reading, and afterward.

CA: When you read a text, you're on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you're dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn't the same thing for you as it is for me. And five minutes sometimes seems long, sometimes seems short. Take a specific film, say, D'Est: I imagine the way each viewer experiences time is different. And on my end, when I edit, the timing isn't done just any way. I draw it out to the point where we have to cut. Or take another example, News from Home: How much time should we take to show this street so that what's happening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we can go from the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete--or move forward in another way. I'm the one who decides. At times I've shot things and I've said, "Now this is getting unbearable!" And I'll cut. For News from Home it's something else, but I have a hard time explaining it. I'm in the middle of writing a book about all this, and I'm finding it very difficult to explain. Today I'll write about time--I write more or less every day because I have very little time to do it--and it's too soon.

Akerman's sense of measure as it relates to cinema, writing and time, resonates with some of the strategies explored in Immobilité and reminds me of how much Agnes Varda also is able to time-trip through cinematic forms of writing or what she calls cinécriture. I have explored similar themes in a different (new media?) context in META/DATA, especially in relation to what I refer to as image écriture.

Metadata: Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, source material, image, writing

Flashback

2010-09-18T10:38:00.001-06:00

Having just taught Flusser again in relation to remix, magical keyboard gestures, and the ruling layers of apparatus that attempt to predetermine our behaviors for us, I was reminded of this interview in Word Riot:

DH: What book are you reading now?

MA: Vilem Flusser's "Toward A Philosophy of Photography" (for the fourth time). It's a pre-Internet inquiry into the way humans are turning to "ritual magic" in a post-historical context. According to Flusser, images are taking over the world and are controlled by apparatuses that challenge humans to remain human. He envisions a world where writing disappears and the robots take over. At first, the robots are external to human experience. Even though we are the ones responsible for creating them, it's as if we don't see them coming. Slowly but surely, things "progress." Humans program the robots to do things. The robots get better and better at doing them and soon are able to begin programming the humans. The humans start losing their will-to-aestheticize, their innate need to do things intentionally, and eventually become robots themselves. Apparently, Flusser considered his speculations a kind of anti-philosophy and privately referred to them as science-fiction.

Metadata: Flusser, photography, remix, apparatus

Henri-Mix

2010-09-16T11:30:00.000-06:00

Henri Bergson once wrote:

[...] there is no perception without affection. Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity. (emphasis mine)

Professor VJ Remix:

[...] there is no source material without remixology. Remixology is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body in which we mix imaginary situations with the image of external bodies; this body-image to body image remixing is what it means to become a postproduction medium.

What new works are you spawning now?

Metadata: Bergson, source material, remix, affection

These Reservoirs of Energy and Genius

2010-09-14T21:51:00.000-06:00

As William James once wrote, "[m]ost people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. We all have reservoirs of energy and genius to draw upon of which we do not dream." James is on to something here that those of us who successfully break out of that restricted circle can relate to. Let's face it, most of the time we can never even get close to knowing how we might BEGIN to tap into these reservoirs of potential. Which means we can't even dream about it because it doesn't even show up on our bullshit detectors when trying to self-regulate our ambition.

But then you have this other possibility, right? The one that may differentiate you from the moribund mass (or so you would like to believe). This other possibility is where you actually DO have a sense of your creative potential or even better -- or worse, depending on how you look at it -- your creative potential starts taking on a life of its own and begins dictating to you the new conditions of your daily existence so that you really have no choice but to meta-mediumistically render your image reservoir in perpetual postproduction (what, as a sometimes live A/V performer, I occasionally refer to as my ongoing postproduction sets).

I can hear this dictatorial voice of energetic creative potential speaking to me now:

"You vill now lose yourself in four to eight hours of chemical decomposition a day and ven you avake from your performative stupor there vill be no one there to applaud your amazing, ney, your SUBSTANTIAL fortitude. All you vill see, hear, and feel is this physically exhausted sack of skin drained of its vital force and hope that it vas vorth it."

But it's never worth it, even if, as in my case, you end up releasing some of your more structurally consistent outcomes into the world and the institutionalized jurors and/or corporate media hacks deign it (semi-)successful. How could it be "worth" it? The race to the end of the wire has one guaranteed finish line and that's one line you will eventually cross whether you want to or not. No, it's not ever worth it, but there is a silver lining to this black cloud that hangs over your inevitable demise and do you know what it is? Sustenance. Sustenance, when optimally converted into energy that is then put to use to generate more unconscious creative activity (i.e. deep interior shots), plays havoc with my incorruptible sense of worthlessness. Loser corporate entities often die because of their uncontrollable burn rate, but as an artist-medium creatively losing himself in his ongoing postproduction sets, I'm only as good as my burn rate. If I'm not burning at my optimum rate, then the sense of worthlessness that accompanies all process-oriented works of art can become overwhelming and truly kill whatever potential there may be left to actually dream of.

To dream the actual while achieving ones optimum burn rate is the only way to move beyond "being" per se and this moving beyond "being" per se is the path that can keep you out of the quicksand impropriety of your so-called genius (this is where I part ways with James - it's not our "genius" that we have difficulty dreaming into existence but our optimum state of aesthetic presence-as-process).

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that burning through these immersive processes is the only way OUT and that the real trick is continually connecting with and feeding off of all that sustains you as you reach optimum burn rate. This is another way of saying the creative act demands that the artist-medium intuitively know how to achieve maximum burn rate without succumbing to ultimate burn out.

Sustenance is another way of saying source material. My source material sustains my remixological practice as an ongoing durational achievement that takes place in asynchronous realtime.

To totally remix something David Foster Wallace, a true genius of heartbreaking proportions, says in a Rolling Stone interview of almost 15 years ago and that only recently got published, what's the best case scenario here? You get lucky enough to achieve a modicum of success early on in your creative years so that you can find out EARLY that this fleeting feeling of having successfully "emerged" as an artist in your contemporary moment doesn't really mean JACK SHIT. Right? Which means you get an unexpected EARLY chance to start figuring out what really DOES mean something in this fucked up space-time cavity you keep decaying in (my words, not his). That is to say that at least you now KNOW this decaying process better than you could have ever dreamed of knowing it and can, if you want, start experimenting with what you want to fill this topographically morphing cavity with.

These "reservoirs of energy and genius" James speaks of are really cleverly disguised cauldrons of source material doubling as sustenance to help get through your next postproduction set.

What is currently bubbling at the surface of my cauldron of swirling source material these days?

Blood music sex rhythms, sustainably grown fruits and vegetables being distributed through the locavore foodie scene in the Pacific Northwest, and various process-oriented experiments in multimedia forms of remixology.

You?

Metadata: remixology, creativity, potential

Creating A Scene: Art as Life Performance

2010-08-30T13:44:00.002-06:00

From a conversation between Tania Bruguera and Marina Abramovic:

MA: ... performance has never been accepted as a real form of art because it is so ephemeral. But maybe almost not being material lends to its strength and vitality.

TB: I think in my case, the only way to deal with this is through the approach to documentation as the tangible trace in the aftermath of the experience -- but not as a given. It's always a requirement to think about ways of transferring information, about transferring the experience as part of the tangible side of performance, even if it doesn't manifest as an object.

MA: To me, a part of doing the workshops and trying to make the students great performance artists is to give them advice about how they can live from their own work. They can't live from their performances, but they can live from the products out of the performance [...]

TB: [...] When I teach about documentation, I want to them to problematize documentation -- not only to assume the traditional ways of documenting with photo and video but to try to see how they can problematize ways of transmitting the experience. Because the idea of having a photo taken from a performance is almost like making that performance an icon, meaning making the lived thing dead and taking away the most important part, which is the experience.

MA: But there is one possibility if you don't have the public. If you just have the camera, and the camera is this imaginary public. So the product is different; then actually the flm or the photo becomes the artwork.

TB: [...] A performance is not like an object, and it shouldn't be forced to follow the rules that come with making objects. Performance should bring with it new ways to conceive old solutions; it should keep its revolutionary and evolutionary qualities [...]

The conversation goes deeper with Bruguera at one point saying, in relation to the role of so-called art school in the developmental process of making new art projects:

[...] I want the members of the project to learn how to work within limitations -- either the limitations society puts on them or the ones they have to create for themselves. I don't know, maybe it's not that you have to have a school. It's maybe about creating a moment, like opening a space where people can go in, interact, get stimulated, and get out of there with something to be developed later. The challenge is to rethink continuity and collectivity.

This got me thinking about how contemporary artists who also happen to be professors can best serve our more advanced graduate and undergraduate students. Whether it's "creating a moment" or developing an ongoing situation for the participating students to curate events that enable their creative energies to collide and mix, the thing that must happen is that these emerging student-artists need to begin imagining themselves as role-playing artist-performers who are part of a group who, by way of structured and/or ad hoc collaboration, are able to prove themselves capable of moving beyond all of these preconceived notions of discipline that corrupt contemporary higher arts education. More generally, an open and experientially improvised collaborative environment needs to evolve so that the students can then participate in the activation of a potential scene that is so in sync with the future perfect that it literally makes history.

This is not as easy as it sounds because it demands that the emerging student-artists conceive of themselves as role-playing performers, albeit ones who are not "acting like" emerging student-artists but who are simply finding alternative ways of "playing themselves." As Ambrovic says earlier in the same conversation:

[...] in performance, acting is such a big obstacle. If a performer was a dancer before, we must reprogram them. If they were actors, we must make them forget what they learned in order to be able to deal with a real performance attitude. We have to de-dance them, de-act them, somehow take it away.

The reason why most art schools are predictable, mediocre, or even just downright suck is because many of the faculty are not able to "somehow take it away" and, in fact, through the rigid compartmentalization of space and other resources, work hard to find ways to keep the old programming structures firmly in place. How can we expect to de-act / de-program a student artist performing the role of painter, printmaker, darkroom photographer, sculptor, installation artist, etc., when the division of space within most art school architecture dams up these potential interdisciplinary movements? Unfortunately for many art students today, the micro-disciplinary dictatorships that rule over these territorial domains have become so comfortable in their time-worn studio art practices that they themselves have very rarely sought out ways to de- and re-program their own research methods in relation to the increasingly networked relationship between art, technology, and life performance. The network society may be leading contemporary Conceptual practice into a more fluid, post-studio environment, but don't tell that to most senior art school faculty or even most junior faculty who are hired in their own (i.e. their senior colleague's) image of themselves well into the future. This is an issue staring in the face of art school administrators across the country. Will most of them look the other way?

It's not just an issue with a lot of disciplinary-driven faculty either. Art students across the country today seem pretty passive and accept these divisions at face value. You might even say that many if not most of them embrace it since they are able to stay within their disciplinary comfort zone. Are there ways to experiment beyond these embedded programmatic blockages? What about investigating the way that networked media technologies reveal how our digital culture is now blurring the difference between expert professionals and expert amateurs? For example, could the seemingly professional faculty stand to learn something from creating a scene with their emerging yet still amateur artist-students? For what it's worth, I do not consider the term "amateur" a condescending word at all, and in fact quote from my late colleague Stan Brakhage's essay "In Defense of Amateur" all of the time. In this essay, Brakhage reminds us that "an amateur works according to his own necessity" and "is at home anywhere he works." In my recent work, Immobilité, one of the main experiments I was running looked at how a "professional" artist, in this case a self-proclaimed "auteur," might mash-up their art-house narrative style with some of the more amateurish styles we associate with mobile phone video capturing and the anything-goes flood of content found in YouTube culture. Besides presenting this intense challenge to myself, i.e. creating a feature-length art-house narrative modeled after the great works of European cinema but filtered through a very amateurish or DIY mobile phone lens, I wanted to also experiment with and am in fact still experimenting with its distribution into both the network and art world cultures.

Part of the problem in developing a post-studio practice lies in the way art schools and the art world it helps sustain buy into the standard measurements of "success," most notably the dreaded gallery exhibition. To remix Marianne Moore's famous quote about modern poetry, "I, too, dislike it." She is right to suggest that "there are things more important beyond all this fiddle." But fiddle we do as we pursue our recognizable outcomes. Not that I myself never show in galleries or would poo-poo my national and international colleagues who do. For some, it's a sheer survival tactic that plays in nicely with every artist's need for the occasional ego-boost. It's definitely part of the art world culture whether mainstream/commercial or alternative/non-profit, and as Ambrovic says in the interview quoted above, it's important to teach young artists the art of the deal (her word is "negotiate"). But there are all kinds of potential deals out there that have nothing to do with commercial gallery culture. I guess the problem is you can't teach what you yourself don't know from experience.

Are there any alternative forms of art research and development that are moving beyond commercial gallery / art world culture and that are looking to invent other approaches to contemporary Conceptual practice that experiment with digital media in the field of distribution? Besides the TECHNE practice-based research initiative currently staged at the University of Colorado where, in addition to serving as faculty director for the initiative I am also a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, the folks at Artereality located at Stanford University write in their introduction for Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century):

The following is both a report on an ongoing experiment and a speculative application of that very experiment to the future of advanced-level arts education. It seeks to rethink some of the most productive institutions and moments from the modern past—the Arts and Crafts workshop, the Bauhaus, the laboratory of Constructivism, among them—in terms of the altered cultural and economic circumstances of the late industrial era. It assumes that art’s autonomy, one of the decisive conquests of the modern(ist) era, has led not only to an extraordinary proliferation of artistic forms and freedoms, but also to the current impasse which places arts education in the service of up-market commodity culture and at arm’s length from other forms of knowledge production and, in particular, from the very technology and media transformations that are reshaping the cultural norms of the present era. (emphasis mine)

What if art school ceased to position itself as the programmatic gateway to commercial gallery success? Art history is littered with forgettable artists who bought into the readymade art school -> commercial gallery -> mainstream art magazine -> musuem culture trajectory that creates a predictable situation where the role of the art school is to continually position itself as yet another professional program forever in the service of up-market commodity culture.

Are there other options? What kind of post-studio arts curriculum could emerge that would call into question the role of art schools still modeling themselves on 19th century studio arts practices? How could this post-studio curriculum that by its very nature would require a much more fluid interdisciplinary approach to experiential research, enable the emerging artist-students to create their own art scene as expert amateurs playfully engaged in the field of distribution? Would we risk steering these students in the wrong direction, i.e. somehow take away their right to create art in the service of up-market commodity culture? Would their artwork lend itself to more commercial exploitation as they found themselves becoming on-the-fly digital media entrepreneurs changing the curve of contemporary culture? These are questions that we need to be addressing now but that university cultures in general prefer to side-step or only pay lip service to (how about another new committee on "The Effects of Digital Media on Higher Education" to suck up our time while we explore our limited / limiting options?).

Along these lines, my university is in the process of discontinuing its School of Journalism and Mass Communication in an attempt to not only save money but to also begin rethinking its mission given the impact digital media is having on all aspects of contemporary life. Journalism, of course, is easy pickin's. All one has to do is read the latest on USA Today for a further indication of where that profession is heading. This makes me wonder: can art schools whose programmatic structures rely on older studio arts practices that demand a rigid distribution of space and resources to maintain the individual-artist-as-genius studio model really assume that they will never face a similar fate of gradual but sooner than expected discontinuance and extreme makeover? Am I the only higher arts educator wondering these things aloud?

If change is to happen sooner rather than later, then I am convinced it will have to come from and be demanded by the students themselves. This will most likely require emerging artist-students to begin performing the kind of "de-actified" performance that Abramovic points to indirectly in her discussion with Bruguera excerpted above. I realize that to some this may all seem very pie in the sky, or the worst kind of abstract wishful thinking, especially when matched against the entrenched forces of production bound by 19th century models of studio arts practice. So be it.

Still, from my own very biased perspective, as far as I can tell, the best way to develop a post-studio, networked media arts practice, is to experiment with ones conceptual performance in the field of distribution, and to do it in such a way that you collectively and collaboratively create a scene. But who can teach that? Probably someone who has spent a lot of time out of art school.

Metadata: performance, conceptual practice, art school, the field of distribution

Immobilité at Google NYC

2010-08-20T05:41:00.001-06:00

A new exhibition of digital art will open today at the New York headquarters of Google. The title of the exhibition is "We Write This To You From the Distant Future," a phrase from one of the scenes in my feature-length "foreign film" Immobilité.

As part of the exhibition, a distributed stream of various remixes from the work that you can find at the immobilite.com website will now be recontextualized as experimental art projections inside the Google headquarters in the Chelsea area. The show with the Immobilité remixes runs from August 20 - October 22, 2010 in conjunction with The Project Room at the Chelsea Art Museum.

You can see the digital flyer/postcard here.

Here's the PR that just went out:

Digital Art @ Google: We Write This To You From The Distant Future
Opening: August 20, 6 – 8pm
RSVP required: rsvp@chelseaartmuseum.org

Location:
Google, Inc.
75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor

Google and The Project Room for New Media at Chelsea Art Museum (CAM) in New York launched an exhibition program, Digital Art @Google NYC, in June to engage Googlers with the art world and promote creativity with digital technology. The exhibitions and artist talks, which take place at Google, Inc, are open to guests at times indicated below.

We Write This To You From The Distant Future, opening August 20, is a multi-media exhibition of work by visionary creators in the arts and sciences that focuses on a future world imagined and possible to build. Included in the exhibition are Mark Amerika, Rachel Armstrong, Marc Barasch, Ed Bilous, etoy, Mitchell Joachim, Eduardo Kac, StudioIMC-Tunick/Elston/Schiller, Jack Toolin/C5, Marina Zurkow, Google UK, Clean Energy 2030, Andrew Senior, Cordero/Senior/Weston.

The exhibition title is a line spoken by the narrator in Immobilite, a feature length art film shot with a mobile phone video camera by Mark Amerika, with music score by Chad Mossholder. Immobilite evokes questions - how will a technologically advanced world effect what it is to be human and what is the world with advanced technology to become?

Digital Art @Google NYC is curated by Nina Colosi, Curator of The Project Room for New Media at CAM and founder of its public art program, Streaming Museum, which presents exhibitions in cyberspace and public spaces on 7 continents. The programs were inspired by pioneer video artist Nam June Paik who in the 1970s envisioned the Internet, predicting an “information superhighway” as an open and free medium for imagination and exchange of cultures.

According to Colosi, “A natural synergy exists with Google in this partnership. The Project Room’s program showcases artworks and educational programs, which incorporate technology and the Internet in the creative process.”

Digital Art @Google emphasizes the correlation of Google’s mission in organizing the world’s information and making it accessible, with the ability of artists to reflect and synthesize information in the creation of artwork that expresses the contemporary world. The exhibitions and speaker programs will inspire, entertain, and help envision the world in new ways.

The exhibition program was initiated at Google by Josh Mittleman, User Interface Software Engineer, and supported by the Google Community Affairs committee at Google New York City. Mittleman described the motivation of the exhibit, “Art is one of many tools that can help to organize and make sense of the world's information. Digital Art @Google NYC is the first step toward introducing the digital arts community to Google, and to starting a conversation that will lead to a rich, ongoing collaboration.”

The first Digital Art @Google exhibition, Data Poetics, opened June 11 with works by well-known international digital artists, Scott Draves, R. Luke DuBois, Aaron Koblin, Mark Napier, W. Bradford Paley, Lincoln Schatz, John F. Simon, Jr., Thomson and Craighead, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. The exhibition and artist talks, were open to the public on July 29, August 5 and 12.

The opening reception for "We Write This To You From The Distant Future" will be held on Friday, August 20, 2010 from 6-8 PM. Visitors may attend the opening, view the exhibition, and participate in the artist speaker program taking place at Google, Inc., 75 Ninth Avenue, 2nd floor, by sending an email to RSVP@chelseaartmuseum.org.

Metadata: Digital Art @ Google, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, New York

Images in my head and out

2010-08-17T09:41:00.004-06:00

Trip Journal Remix

First, there's the interview for Bahian TV as part of the promo campaign for Immobilité in Salvador. I'm standing in the media lounge at Semcine while local VJs remix the Immobilité remixes.

I'm saying something like "The manipulation of the image as destiny"

And then: "Remixology as moving visual thinking"

But also going out of my way to suggest that the viewer is "shadowing the psychoacoustic mind of the writer telling the story"

Meanwhile knowing full and well how odd it is to be trading in these images that are spouting from my head but that had been originally captured on ancient mobile phones of another era ...

Thinking to myself: these deep interior projections are somehow manifested as what comes after cinema but are still part of cinematic culture.

Or, to put it another way:

"Immobilité," I say to the audience in the huge theater, "is not a film per se ..."

I say it as if it's part of a dream, a lucid dream, one that I am not necessarily eager to wake up from.

"It borrows from cinema's past but is itself not cinema per se," I go on. "In an ideal world, the work would loop eternally and you would be able to enter and exit the work at will, closing your eyes and opening them on to the film whenever you wanted. But this is not an ideal world."

[Loud applause]

Metadata: Immobilité, remix, Brazil

Deep Interior Shots

2010-08-10T18:32:00.003-06:00

From a June, 1981, note on "the nature of images," Bill Viola writes:

I am interested not so much in the image whose source lies in the phenomenal world, but rather the image as artifact, or result, or imprint, or even wholly determined by some inner realization. It is the image of that inner state and as such must be considered completely accurate and realistic. This is an approach to images from an entirely opposite direction -- from within rather without.

This inner realization that Viola speaks of is explored in the Immobilité project as a series of "deep interior shots" (a playful remix of what in standard Hollywood script-dogma is often referred to as an "interior shot"). In my Director's notebook, The Postproduction of Presence, I refer to these deep interior shots in relation to movement or more specifically an inner choreography that postproduces (in real)time:

There is a deep interior movement or what I now refer to as an inner choreography that becomes para-ritualistic for practicing remixologists who are optimally situating their bodies to convert experiential matter into muscle memory that triggers emergent forms of fictional (literary) presence.

But why a fictional or literary presence?

This must have something to do with persona construction and the way we train ourselves to tap into our creative potential by unconsciously projecting these image-artifacts that Viola refers to and that today, in the digital culture, are easily manipulated and put into play via the networked field of distribution.

A bit further along in the Director's Notebook, I wrote:

Is it true that perception per se consists of a cinematographic process wherein we take snapshots from the passage of time and string them on a becoming that is at once abstract, uniform, and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge?

Does the "streaming togetherness" of instantaneous sections that can freeze into elongated pseudo-photographic moments in postproduction position the work of time-based media in a state of aesthetic paralysis?

Or is that time-based image that now embodies a duration of its own really taking place in a body-brain-apparatus achievement that we hallucinate into the fluid (moving) picture frame?

Creating the impression of a continuity of movement is one thing.

Remixologically synthesizing a sequence of image events in perpetual postproduction is another.

In the first instance, one is merely living with their eyes wide shut.

In the other, one is engaged in the revolution (practice) of everyday life (as a projection of interior shots, meta-tagged with experiential potential).

The durational drift of the remixologist’s bodily rhythms postproduces an intuitively generated lifeform that can be translated into a time-based media fiction [narrative event].

This time-based media fiction unfolds in time while duplicating itself in the virtual.

What You See Is What You Forget.

The postproduced image and its body double.

During the making of Immobilité, we asked ourselves: "Do we need to script reality from the outside-in in order to make an 'indie film' or can we hyperimprovisationally play multiple roles in unscripted realities as a way to mobilize our thoughts outside the movie industry system?"

The tensions between interiority/exteriority, being in the system or outside of it, or even playfully dancing on the tightrope of our micro-existence so as to challenge ourselves to maintain a balance without giving into the forces of gravity, permeate these kinds of beyond-indie productions.

Our response throughout the entire [post]production process was to just keep moving.

Upon further reflection, it could be said that to have literally completed the project is one thing. To witness it going live in variable forms via scalable exhibition and screening contexts is yet another. But to maintain a balance above it all without giving into the forces of gravity is the greatest challenge of all.

Metadata: Immobilité, postproduction, image, remix aesthetics, Bill Viola, Mark Amerika, remix aesthetics, inner realization, inner choreography

From Salvador

2010-08-02T17:21:00.004-06:00

Auteur Theory (iPhone version)

To paraphrase my short introduction to Immobilité in front of the huge crowd in Salvador:

Immobilité is not a film per se.

It borrows from cinema's past but is itself not cinema per se.

In an ideal world, the work would loop eternally and you would be able to enter and exit the work at will, closing your eyes and opening them on to the film whenever you wanted.

But this is not an ideal world.

The response was beautiful. The first person to come up to me and discuss the work's effect on him was a local Salvadoran well into his eighties. It ends up that he was the founder of one the city's universities and he told me that he "understood everything" and that this was "the most important" he had seen in a long time. The most important what, I wondered.

The next person to talk to me was a young man about eighteen or nineteen. He said viewing Immobilité "changed my life." He was with his girlfriend. At first, she didn't like it, he said, because of all of the English subtitles which, I explained in my intro, was intentional and no shortfall of the event organizers.

"But," continued the young man, "I would whisper my translation for her during the playing of the work and she began to not only fall in love with the work but felt that she understood why you did not use the Portuguese translation."

"My reading to her," the young man told me, "was similar to the people in your images reading to each other and feeling their presence."

Yes, I concurred, that's beautiful.

"It brought us closer together," he smiled and his girlfriend seemed happy too.

The following two days were full of these kinds of conversations.

Of course, there were those who walked out within the first 15 minutes, and in some ways, who could blame them?

But for the hundreds who stayed throughout the entire screening and everyone else who provided their amazingly warm hospitality, thanks for sharing. It changed my life too.

Metadata: Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil

Serendipitous Theorems

2010-07-29T11:04:00.004-06:00

Tonight Immobilité will be screened outside of a museum exhibition context. It is playing at the Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador, Brazil, and I will be there for it.

But I have already mentioned that a few times on this blog so why blog about it again?

Because I have a little story that means a lot to me that I want to share.

When I first came up with the idea of making a feature-length "foreign film" shot entirely on mobile phone in Cornwall, UK, with the incredible support of the University of Falmouth's iRES interactive media group and Tate Media, I really did not have a clue what the final work would look like or if it would really ever get made. It was just an idea, and nothing else. Part of my Conceptual practice. An attempt to further expand the concept of writing while investigating the role of the artist-medium in the field of distribution. The work, I had decided, would be made improvisationally with a small cast and crew of non-professional actors. The flow of social events in our lives, i.e. what we were reading / eating / listening to / surfing / watching / or otherwise informally discussing, would trigger the source material that could then be manipulated in whatever way the project deemed necessary (yes, the project itself deems it necessary, this is what artist-mediums intuit from the get-go, although we are aware that the project cannot evolve without us a creative co-conspirators).

The first collaborator on the project was one of the actresses, Camille Lacadee, who I met at E:vent, the London gallery I occasionally exhibit new work in. Our first conversation was a three hour film in its own right. At the end of the long conversation we had already decided that my new work would "introduce" her. Before we parted, she insisted that I let her lend me a DVD she had with her, a film she said was her current favorite and that made me realize that the work still yet to come, Immobilité, could be more exciting than I at first may have imagined. The DVD was Pasolini's Theorem.

There's no need for me to discuss Pasolini's film here in this post; the web has ample information on the dreamlike sexual ambiguity and mysterious resonance of the players who populate the scenes.

What's really cool about the gig in Salvador, though, is that while they are only showing a few films in total, a major part of the festival is its massive Pasolini retrospective that is being screened in another Salvador venue, the Goethe Institut – ICBA. This Pasolini retrospective occurs in conjunction with the few other screenings and roundtables at the Teatro Castro Alves and this is where things get interesting because now there is a lingering resonance between these two works (Theorem and Immobilité).

In fact, when Immobilité screens tonight in Salvador, guess which Pasolini film will be playing at ICBA as part of his retrospective? Yes, Theorem.

I'm sure this proves something although I am unable at this time to demonstrate what exactly that proof is.

Metadata: VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil, Pasolini, Theorem

Remixing the blog: sampling my artist theories into discussions on the future of film

2010-07-24T13:32:00.001-06:00

For what it's worth, here is a transcript of an interview I just gave for a large daily newspaper in Brazil that will soon go live in conjunction with my appearance in Salvador this upcoming week. I have slightly modified the grammar of the questioner for clarification purposes only and have added quite a few links to other posts throughout this blog as a way to indicate how staying attuned to ones thought process via blogging quite naturally feeds into their thought process when having a dialogue about their Conceptual practice no matter what venue that dialogue takes place in.

Q: Some movie critics (as a local one, André Setaro) believe that "making films has lost its mystery, its magic, because now anyone can make it." What is your opinion about it?

A: If films have lost their mystery it's probably because too much big money controls their distribution and then the bottom line of finance dictates how stories should be told for entertainment purposes. It's still to early to tell, but maybe the new media art that is starting to get made with mobile phones, Flips, webcams, etc., will challenge artists to relocate the mysterious resonance of cinema's past in totally new ways. At least this was the challenge I set for myself with Immobilité.

Q: Semcine‘s director, Walter Lima, believes that it is important to discuss not only form, but also content. Do you think that form is less valorized then "story"?

A: It's hard for me to make a distinction between form, content and even context too. Obviously, when you write a novel or compose a soundtrack, or direct a movie, you develop formal strategies that will indicate a particular style or state of presence for the work to operate under. But you can't even start this process without some sense of what the content will be. For me it's about accessing the content or what, as a remix artist, I would call the source material, and then taking that source material and manipulating it through all kinds of aesthetic filters, some of which I invent before I make the work, some of which I borrow from others, and some of which I discover while making the work. These days I would say that content feels like story data, image data, literary data, philosophical data, etc. For example, with Immobilité I wanted to tell both a love story and a story of loss and so I researched and remixed all kinds of philosophical and literary texts and from these texts I assembled a pool of source material that then became my reservoir of content-data that I would use to tell the story of Immobilité. But the actual form of the final work is very fluid because it takes on many different scales and passes through many different distribution systems. The work is not just the 78 minute screening. It is the entire field of distribution because this too effects the formal inventiveness of any work of art.

Q: Is form as important for fictional films as it is for video art? Do you believe that there exists any differences between them (films and video art)?

A: This is a good question because something that I am discovering is that I am now composing digital narratives that are at once in the tradition of avant-garde film, experimental video art, and postmodern metafiction. Can you imagine what it would be like to look through your mobile phone camera as a literary novelist, capturing low-quality video images, and thinking to yourself that you are in the process of making a feature-length film that is no longer tied to the mainstream or even independent movie distribution system? If you can imagine this, then you are starting to enter my world during the making of Immobilité.

Q: Your name does not appear at the IMDB website, one of most famous film search websites. Does this prove that the film industry does not see connections between art and films?

A: Yes, or it proves that up to this moment I have been successfully resisting the entire movie world apparatus in all of its manifestations. For example, I don't send out DVD screeners, I don't really publicize the film in a traditional industry way, I never enter film festivals, I find funding sources that require no specific product from me but want to support my vision as an artist who makes new work for no other reason than to see what happens, and I work with actors and crews who are friends, fellow writers, intellectuals and media artists. These are people who are not connected to the film industry, not even on the margins. But this may change soon. The fact that, for the first time since I premiered the work in New York at my solo exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum, I am now screening Immobilité outside of a museum exhibition context, says something. Perhaps screening Immobilité at Semcine in Salvador is an indication that we are witnessing a significant turn in the life of this work of art.

Q: Why do you consider Immobilité a "foreign film"?

In the US, art house cinema from abroad has always been referred to as foreign film. But more importantly, as Atom Egoyan once wrote, every film is a foreign film. This is a beautiful idea that directly correlates to the philosophical impetus of Immobilité.

Q: Immobilité received financial support grants for innovative art research, artist residencies, and Tate Media. In the future, do you think that big studios can put money on experimental films made using cell phones, for example?

A: Sure, why not? The big studios can do whatever they want. Like the banks, in a way, they are "too big to fail," but again, what kind of mobile phone film would attract this kind of funding? The film's story would probably have to be severely compromised to guarantee a better ROI [return on investment). But what happens when the entire field of distribution goes through its next phase of radical transformation? For example, have you ever viewed cinematic works of art on an iPad? Personally, I find it hypnotic. Do I really need a big studio to produce my work for iPad distribution? There must be a creative alternative.

Q: More and more, people are getting used to watching home-made quality videos at YouTube. Do you think that the industry can find a way to make the public pay to watch this kind of work in theaters?

A: Maybe not theaters, but museums are trying to develop this audience. There is a new initiative, for example, between YouTube and the Guggenheim museum. It is called YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video. So it's already happening, it should be noted, without the traditional film world. The future of cinema is the Googleheim.

Q: What has been the public reaction after viewing Immobilité?

A: As always with very difficult work, I think it's mixed, but mostly positive. Someone in Athens, at UNREALTIME, my comprehensive retrospective exhibition, said that after seeing the whole thing it felt like they had read nine novels. Others said it reminded them of Warhol's experiments in "duration art" and voyeuristic "screen tests." The screen will definitely test any voyeur who tries to sit through it.

Q: At the Tate website, people can download your film. Lots of artists are against free-distribution, and now in Brazil we are having lots of discussions on this topic. What is your opinion about it?

A: Well, people can download the trailer at the Tate and a few other trailer remixes at the film's website which, to my mind, is also part of the entire work. This means the work is not just the 78 minute feature-length "foreign film" although of course that is the main attraction. But the video and audio remixes, the Director's Notebook, the limited edition poster, the experiments in the field of distribution, etc., it all comes together to create something that is modeled after art house or auteur-styled cinema but is in fact something else altogether different.

Metadata: VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil

Immobilité in Brazil (and beyond)

2010-07-08T18:57:00.003-06:00

In addition to an upcoming solo show of Immobilité at a major American museum this fall, the work will be screened and presented by yours truly in Brazil both this summer and fall.

In less than three weeks, I'll be Salvador, Bahia, for the VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual. This event looks "totally awesome" (to quote a local high school kid) in that both the screening as well as my artist presentation will take place in a viewing theater with a 1300 seating capacity. The screen is huge which should make for a very unique projection of the entire work. For more on how Immobilité is more than just a film / video art work and positions itself in the field of distribution as part of a larger Conceptual practice that experiments with scale and location, read this post on "Trading in Images".

In addition to my presentation and screening as well as an exhibition of another one of my shorter works in the exhibition gallery inside the main venue, the event program will feature a huge Pasolini retrospective. My hosts have also invited a few other international film directors / screenwriters including Lucrecia Martel, the wonderful Argentinian film director and founders of the "New Argentinian Cinema" movement, and Tariq Ali, the British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, and political campaigner who co-wrote the new Oliver Stone movie "South of the Border".

I am honored to be invited to the fantastic Afro-Brazilian city of Salvador, home of reggae samba as well as the rhythms of Candomble rituals and the martial-arts dance style known as Capoeira. I have had my eye on this location for a long time.

Immobilité will also be featured and premiere in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte in the fall as part of Arte.Mov, where I'll be touring both cities to discuss not only the screening of the work but also the position of the networked artist in digitally distributed economies. There will also be an exhibition of my work Mobile Phone Video Art Classics in both cities as well. More on all of this, including the solo show in the big US museum, soon ...

Metadata: VI Seminário Internacional de Cinema e Audiovisual, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil

The Coming of Googleheim

2010-07-06T12:28:00.001-06:00

In a recent post of just a bit over a month ago, I wrote:

Our goal should be to produce a multi-media, collective autobiography of practice that spatializes the narrative of new media forms of art and the mutant offspring that will grow out of this network distributed mind-mesh (what in other posts I have referred to as a co-poietic unfolding).

How will this co-poietic unfolding alter the art market of the 2020's?

One of the more difficult aspects of investigating this last question as deeply as one would like to relates to the use of sociological methods that challenge the subject-position of the voices of the artists themselves, many of whom invent their digital personae as instrumental narrative devices to further build their own personal mythologies on the Internet and thus continue the creative process of making (art) history up as they go along.

This will serve as a wake up call to contemporary media art historians who think they have the final say on how history gets read.

Especially given the fact that by the time the 2020's roll around, history will no longer be read per se but rather will be invented (yet again) as part of this collaboratively generated, network distributed creative act.

But what has emerged in that last month that makes me want to take it all back?

How about:

Digital Art @ Google

YouTube Play: The Creative Biennial of Creative Video

Adobe Museum of Digital Media

Art Basel's special panel on "Contemporary Art and New Media: Toward a Hybrid Discourse" featuring Nicolas Bourriaud, Peter Weibel, and Michael Joaquin Grey

Forget the 2020s. And while we're at it, let's delete this whole idea of the voices of the artists themselves, many of whom invent their digital personae as instrumental narrative devices to further build their own personal mythologies on the Internet and thus continue the creative process of making (art) history up as they go along..

These developments above will serve as a wake up call to contemporary media art historians who think they have the final say on how history gets read.

Make no mistake about it: we are all working for Google now...

... which makes everything so much easier.

I just need the perfect all-in-one mobile tablet to serve as the distribution medium and exhibition display context.

Oh wait, that's already out now too: the iPad.

But is there more to the future of digitally networked media art than i-Apps chained to the iOS?

Apple, what's your next move?

Metadata: Apple, Google, YouTube, Adobe, where art thou art now?

2 Young Punks

2010-06-30T11:49:00.001-06:00

As the image below seemingly attests, there is an underground / transgressive art film from the mid 80s shot in the New York area with the working title "2 Young Punks" that features my former self as one of the leads.

This would be around the same time I was running my own "freelance courier artist" business during the height of Reagan-styled Yuppie Culture.

I had forgotten about this until someone recently sent me some of the stills ...

Metadata: New York, 80s art scene, transgressive art, cinema

Our Town

2010-06-27T13:38:00.000-06:00

Check out the green bud featured in today's New York Times business section.

It was just a few weeks ago that, upon returning to the Rockies from a quick trip to Europe, we came across not one, not two, but three articles in the NYT business section featuring Boulder's virtual gold rush toward digital capitalism.

The techno-entrepreneurialism that the journos at the NYT highlighted a few weeks ago is now replaced with a look at "cannabis capitalism" i.e. the for-profit medical marijuana mom and pop shops opening up all over town.

What's interesting to me is how without even looking for it, these Boulder-based feature articles in our national newspaper keep presenting themselves to me as source material for my new novel-in-progress which, as luck would have it, features a remixological figure I imagine to be "Walt Whitman Benjamin" who, in addition to being a kind of professorial con man, regularly visits one of these sinsemilla shops to relieve himself of a contemporary condition yet to be properly diagnosed (he can't help but wonder if it may not be the curse of writing itself ... Cocteau: "Writing is a sickness." ... Bataille: "I write not to be mad." But then again, he thinks it could just be his Conceptual practice in general, something that creeps into his morning fog of thoughts on a daily basis which, he figures, is due to his ongoing performance art project where he portrays an enigmatic sculptor / skull-rupture who is the illegitimate brain-child of Marcel Duchamp and a late-night college radio station DJ: "I was all rupture all the time.").

There's more than a bit of satirically rendered techno-entrepreneurialism in the new novel too, as well as a heavy dose of self-effacing new age lifestyle coaching (writing it out from an undisclosed location in the Pacific Northwest is giving me the perfect distance I need to render this storyworld into vision).

Early drafts can be found in reverse order here (scroll to the bottom and read the entries as you go up).

Metadata: Boulder, novel, marijuana, Conceptual practice, writing, digital capitalism

The Field of Distribution

2010-06-10T15:47:00.003-06:00

As always, summer lingers before it even begins and that's a good thing.

In fact, it's so good, I think I'll raise a glass of Argentinian red and consider this:

The definition of artistic activity occurs, first of all, in the field of distribution.

And do you know who wrote that?

No, not me circa the Avant-Pop Manifesto, though it could have been.

It's Marcel Broodthaers; the quote opens the "Dispersion" .pdf I just downloaded from Seth Price's site at distributedhistory.com.

Price's opening salvo starts with this:

One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has been most successful is in claiming new territory for practice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today it seems that most of the work in the international art system positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the "Conceptual painter," the "DJ and Conceptual artist," or the "Conceptual web artist." Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has an evident charge for artists working today, even if they aren’t necessarily invested in the concerns of the classical moment, which included linguistics, analytic philosophy, and a pursuit of formal dematerialization. What does seem to hold true for today’s normative Conceptualism is that the project remains, in the words of Art and Language, "radically incomplete": it does not necessarily stand against objects or painting, or for language as art; it does not need to stand against retinal art; it does not stand for anything certain, instead privileging framing and context, and constantly renegotiating its relationship to its audience. Martha Rosler has spoken of the “asif” approach, where the Conceptual work cloaks itself in other disciplines (philosophy being the most notorious example), provoking an oscillation between skilled and de-skilled, authority and pretense, style and strategy, art and not-art.

Sometimes it's "asif" when I read things like this I can't help but think that the author -- who most likely has no idea who I am or at best has caught tiny flecks of my work on the fringe of their data mitt -- is writing about me. But that's par for the course: I once had a passing thought that Bourriaud must have been writing about me in Postproduction but that after he wrote it, he realized it was too risky for his bureaucratic trajectory, and so he then just applied all of the language originally designated for my work to the few relational aestheticians like himself whose careers he is heavily invested in. Besides, isn't this how certain strands of art history get solidified in the network discourse?

Of course, I totally understand how a curator like Bourriaud uses these PR forms of narrative mythology to "make" art history since I too perform a similar function in my own work, but needless to say, I do it in a totally different way, i.e. I just remix myself again and again by exporting my creative energy through a wide range of conceptual filters that are programmed to attack genres and formats that I find culturally constipated and in need of a good flushing (maybe my new Conceptual artist role will be that of the Network Roto-Router ... in fact, maybe I could start a new "online-only gallery" called "Roto-Router" and put the logo on my Prius so that I can use it as a tax write-off).

In Postproduction, Bourriaud writes:

Throughout the eighties, the democratization of computers and the appearance of sampling allowed for the emergence of a new cultural configuration, whose emblematic figures are the programmer and the DJ. The remixer has become more important than the instrumentalist, the rave more exciting than the concert. The supremacy of cultures of appropriation and the reprocessing of forms calls for an ethics: to paraphrase Philippe Thomas, artworks belong to everyone. Contemporary art tends to abolish the ownership of forms, or in any case to shake up the old jurisprudence. Are we heading toward a culture that would do away with copyright in favor of a policy allowing free access to works, a sort of blueprint for a commmunism of forms?

He then goes on to quote Debord from his "Methods of Détournement" and the desire to "leav[e] the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of 'citations'" (of course, Bourriaud, good bureaucrat that he is, properly footnotes the Debord quote).

But Debord is a supporting actor in Bourriaud's narrative mythology. The lead is played by -- who else? -- Marcel Duchamp. This is consistent with most narratives that morph contemporary Conceptual practice into various versions of remixological theory. According to Bourriaud, Duchamp "completes the definition of the term creation: to create is to insert an object into a new scenario, to consider it a character in a narrative."

Now imagine if the new object in the Conceptual narrative were a remixologically inclined rhetorical figure that we have dubbed the VJ (a live audio/visual performer), one whose spontaneous writing or image écriture is embedded in their interdisciplinary art practice. In META/DATA, I wrote:

A VJ could be a hyperimprovisational narrative artist who uses banks of quicktime movie clips to construct on-the-ﬂy stories composed of images processed in asynchronous realtime and through various theoretical and performative filters.

Which is another way of saying that a live audio-visual performance artist is forever playing the lead in their Conceptual narrative where they portray a methodology (yes, portray a methodology) that develops a lifestylepractice in the field of distribution.

At this point, the Conceptual artist of the 2010s should be addressing questions like, "What are the most innovative ways to continually release yourself into the field of distribution? Do you place more value on inward bound links or those that go out? How is your link strategy tied to your fictionally generated narrative mythology? What does it mean to create a value-added network and how does this relate to both your public persona/presence and your right to privacy and freedom of speech?"

For me, having started addressing these questions in the early 90s, I am still inclined to treat the field of distribution as a core thematic context located in the heart of networked art practice. Conceptually, this is what it means, what it has always meant, to be a net artist.

Of course, by now I realize that I'm just part of a phenomenological moment that contains my lifestylepractice in its concept-polluted gulf. That is to say, I'm just more gushing ego oil in the Google sea. Talk about a job for the Network Roto-Router! Is this another way of saying it's time for a system-wide self-cleansing?

One thing that's kind of cool that's been happening these days is that artists and critics and other nomadic slummers, many of whom do not identify with anything even remotely clued in to the avant-garde lineage that a movement like Art + Language springs forth from, are all jacked in to the same field of distribution. As such, we are all by nature evolutionarily enabled to remixologically inhabit the Source Material Everywhere ("the archive") so that we may create on-the-fly versions of our creative selves as instances of short-term illumination that, if we're lucky, shine in the darkness for just enough time to convert our high-def personas into cash equivalents. This is the American way, no?

But then the question becomes, "How do you sustain this conversion process over the course of lifetime?" That's a question that comes up in a million variations with Graduate art students all over the world. Of course, there is no one perfect answer that can be applied to everyone. The reason? Fictionally generated narrative mythology in the field of distribution requires a constantly innovative Conceptual remix practice at the core of ones artistic skills set. You should probably throw in hard work and good timing as well, i.e. the intangible qualities of historical luck, although this is something that pervades every budding lifestylepratice no matter how one may occupy their time.

Of course, for some, hard work results in wasted labor and good luck is as easy as being born into the right set of circumstances. For example, what are the advantages given to artists whose parents help pay for their advanced college education, generously provide the down payments on their mortgages, and promise even certain "guarantees" on future net worth via contracted inheritance procedures? I have no idea since those are not the circumstances I have lived under (though many artists I know do have at least some of that in their background). Still, how does one create their own luck? How do they distribute their morphing creative selves so that they are in the right place at the right time? Is that distribution / release strategy now to be considered the ultimate Conceptual art form?

One option available to a select few Conceptual mythmakers is to ramp up postproduction on their micro-edited existences so that they can then up-rez their latest imaging to such a degree that it turns into ... what? Debord would say capital. But I would disagree. I up-rez my postproduction imaging to the utmost possible degree so that it creates yet more superhuman potential. One needs superhuman potential if they hope to ward off the complete commodification of their persona. If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it's that you can't let the corporate culture (in whatever form it manifests itself in) write your story for you. You lose the narrative, you may as well throw in the towel. This is why, as Price writes in his electronic dispersions, "you must fight something in order to understand it."

This is what drives the contemporary Conceptual artist to keep reinventing themselves over and over again. You can do it all: write novels, invent new forms of creativity like "net art," deliver international keynote speeches on body-brain-apparatus achievements, engage in a series of international live A/V (VJ) tours, produce - write - and direct feature length films shot on mobile phones or Flips or webcams, sustain a vast web publishing empire for 25 years or more, produce your own comedy album, talk to yourself while developing a new strain of yoga on the beach, or simply go to the gym and challenge yourself to do 500 more sit-ups while singing your own version of Johnny Lydon's "Psychopath."

The field of distribution is itself the space where Conceptual art is most ideally processed in the 2010's. One conceptual strategy would be to do it all throughout this upcoming decade without ever once signing up for Facebook. This act of defiance would signal to all of those who do sign on to Facebook that they have essentially given up, have truly caved in to the corporate death routine, as it were.

But that's just a Conceptual work of mine I am still in the process of performing. Perhaps the work will change over time. It usually does.

Metadata: distribution, conceptual art, persona

Savant

2010-06-07T19:40:00.006-06:00

Finally finished (or finally unfinished? as in "can never reach closure because the resonant effects of the literary frequency will always ring true, even when lost in translation ...") The Savage Detectives. I put off finishing it, slowly pacing myself as much possible so as to savor its sacrosanct hold over me, but then I found myself back in Kailua, dreaming new iterations of the "Foreign Film Series" and writing a new novel that has me by the balls and won't let up, so something had to give, and that something was Bolaño's book.

To celebrate, two Bolaño quotes:

He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.
- from 2666

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.
- from The Savage Detectives

Metadata: comedy, Bolaño, reading, creative process, foreigness

The Visceral Remixologists

2010-05-29T11:22:00.001-06:00

I had a marvelous art-making machine – my personas. I never knew where it would go.
– Eleanor Antin

Creating this identity allowed me to spin narratives on several fronts at the same time and produce persona as shareware.
– DJ Spooky aka That Subliminal Kid

And what about hybridized, collective personas of an interdisciplinary nature?

This is where the Visceral Remixologists come in.

The Visceral Remixologists explore the narrative potential of what is sometimes referred to as collective autobiography or autoethnography.

The collaborative or group voice that emerges ideally transforms the data of everyday life into a performance-based narrative that looks and feels like a peer-to-peer art historical experience.

With so many of the major figures in new media art and literary culture still active in their careers, what better time than now to directly address this distributed network of artistic innovators and tap them for their insights into this revolutionary style of self-consciously made / collaboratively generated (art) histories?

But where are these histories being made?

Interestingly enough, one of the primary goals of my first net art seminars back in the late 90s and early 00s sought to address this problem. The end result was the Histories of Internet Art: Fictions and Factions (HIAFF) site. Look at what the (primarily undergraduate) students have achieved building HIAFF over a sequence of laser-focused semesters and compare it to more commercial sites like art+culture or higher profile non-profit resources like Rhizome.

Just by focusing on these three sites and perhaps a fourth, Alt-X, you can still see, after various fits and starts, an evolving tribe of co-conspirators intersubjectively jamming in a network distributed mind-mesh.

Our goal should be to produce a multi-media, collective autobiography of practice that spatializes the narrative of new media forms of art and the mutant offspring that will grow out of this network distributed mind-mesh (what in other posts I have referred to as a co-poietic unfolding).

How will this co-poietic unfolding alter the art market of the 2020's?

One of the more difficult aspects of investigating this last question as deeply as one would like to relates to the use of sociological methods that challenge the subject-position of the voices of the artists themselves, many of whom invent their digital personae as instrumental narrative devices to further build their own personal mythologies on the Internet and thus continue the creative process of making (art) history up as they go along.

This will serve as a wake up call to contemporary media art historians who think they have the final say on how history gets read.

Especially given the fact that by the time the 2020's roll around, history will no longer be read per se but rather will be invented (yet again) as part of this collaboratively generated, network distributed creative act.

Metadata: remixology, theory, practice, creative process, history

The Secret Word

2010-05-20T18:38:00.009-06:00

(When we last left our synchronized protagonists, Walt and Virginia, they were taking an intermission:

Like many alien satellite adventurers
wandering the desert of unrealtime

Virginia and Walt are going underground

Will they return?

Angela seems to think so

She says that that they are
unconditionally spinning
in the death-defying
double somersault of love

Their unusual story, previously captured in excerpted form in this blog here and here and here, is still, behind the scenes, developing into another novella. Herewith is another draft excerpt from this work-in-progress...)

Angela corrects herself and says that
it's not so much that Walt and Virginia
are going underground as much as
they have always been underground

Underground in an overground sense

What I mean (she said)

is that they have always been surfacing

You would think that a couple such as them
would have by now become something like
a part of the traditional or mainstream discourse
a kind of George and Mary Washington
for the elitist culturati who throw money around
buying shares in the prestige markets

But really there are very few people who even know
who they are or what they have to offer

and by offer I don't mean offer as in "deal"
although they too of course must deal
with and in things that have some value

some currency

Which brings me to another subject
and that is the intimate relationship
between the currency markets and the prestige markets

I'm not talking about the 15-year high
for the yen against the dollar
or how much the euro is worth or not worth
in relation to the pound
or why the Chinese keep artificially deflating
the value of the yuan
so that they can keep
exporting the hell out of everything
so that they can then reinvest their voluminous profits
back into the US bond market and essentially own us all forever

No (said Angela ... but who was she talking to?)

What I mean is the aesthetic currency
that comes with being en vogue
and how that gets translated into
value-added networking opportunities
(opportunities to see and be seen
but also opportunities to fuck and be fucked with)

This all has to do with how we maintain
(said Angela with elegant emphasis)
or not just maintain but enhance
our ongoing digital lifestyle practice
(and with this she unconsciously checked
her iRod for incoming dissemination)
as if such a thing were possible
given the state of our ongoing
Global Great Recession

How (she once again drew an emphasis)
to at least maintain that value-added
state of presence (literary presence)
in the networked space of flows

And she really meant it
when she said literary

As if she were saying something more

But more what?

The alchemy of emotions

The mysterious resonance

The absolute need to mirror neurons

Ah, but what about the networked space of flows?!
(asked Virginia [somewhat rhetorically] --
now that she had entered the picture --
but what does it mean to enter the picture
that is to say where does the picture live
so that phantom figures in the time slot of history
may use their generative figures to pervade
the quantum uncertainties that a picturesque
series of occasions intends to deploy)

You're here! (screamed Angela, genuinely surprised)

Indeed I am (Virginia responded -
a bit snarky but still ready willing and able
to alter her persona at a moment's notice
in order to accommodate what had become
a flux-like situation)

I was just talking about aesthetic currency
and how it might relate to what I think of
as the prestige markets -- the culture business
specifically the high end segment that seems to be making
a rebound in the minds of many but necessarily
involves the comfort of experiencing
an accumulating i.e. on the verge of orgasm
sense of entitlement due to the wealth effect
which can be measured in ones pure liquidity
if you know what I mean

I do know what you mean, Dear

At which point Walt walked in too

(Was he out parking the car?
Was there such a thing as a car in his
flux-like situation? Cars seemed like
such a thing of the past -- were they not
for the very worst off of society
poor slobs risking their lives every day
motorizing themselves through the death traps
while trafficking in the sublime slime of
mere dollars and sense?)

I have a new idea (announced Walt)

What?! (asked Virginia and Angela in tandem)

Power Pataphysique

PP! (screamed Angela)

OK (Virginia was playing with him)
please make your Power Point
and let's get on with it

Is it a new business idea? (asked Angela)

Could be (replied Walt)

I am not sure I want to go into business
although in theory I was made for business

But that's just in theory
and in theory anything can be a business
even the business of theory

He's in the theory business (said Virginia)

She's always giving me the business (said Walt)

At least you will never go out of business
not as long as she's around (said Angela)

True (said Walt)

And this reminds me of something
Yogi Berra might have said
had he ever been around in our time
to actually say it

and that is

"In theory there is no difference
between theory and practice.
In practice there is."

There was no immediate response
from the two women who were
performing the role of hostage audience

But the issue (Walt continued)
is not whether Power Pataphysique
is or is not a viable business model
because let's face it

(and here he cleared his voice)

anything is a viable business model
as long as people will pay for it

Yes (said Virginia)
but we are not interested in cash dollars anymore

We agreed that only aesthetic currency
would drive our purchasing power
in the so-called prestige markets
as Angela calls them
and even if we were to discover
the ultimate form of Picturesque Theory
we would not then turn around and market it
so as to generate more cash dollars
to fiddle away as we lose ourselves in the alter time

Losing ourselves in the alter time
repeated Angela in a kind of delay-pedal effect

Even if you say so yourself
said Virginia as if stepping on a flange

Yes (replied Walt)
and I mean every word of it

Just as you and Angela mean every word of what you say too

But that's not what concerns me right now

What concerns me is how we go about
filling our various domains with a network of objects
that when programmed correctly
would behave in such a way as to

a) alter time
b) intensify our pleasure
c) intellectually challenge our discovery process
d) ...

--- don't say it! (begged Virginia)

d) take us beyond the realm of metaphysics!

There (said Walt) -- I said it

Besides (he went on) you can't sell that sort of thing

(But then he self-corrected)

Well OK you can sell that sort of thing
and that's where Power Pataphysique comes in

Let's look back at what Alfred was investigating
before his untimely demise in his thirties

-- his thirties!

He claimed that pataphysique was
"the science of imaginary solutions
which symbolically attributes
the properties of objects
described by their virtuality
to their lineaments."

Here there can be no question (Walt elucidated)
that we have in one fell swoop entered the realm of
The After Physics

And yet everyone is so hooked on their body glam

that is to say

on making their body glam
and its concurrent "virtuality"
a networked reality sensation

that we know for a fact that The After Physics
will now and forever distend the laws of both
physics and chemistry while creating
another kind of -- dare I say -- alchemical
postproduction process that is powered
by the imaginary performance of the pataphysicians

What this means is that we can now
autohallucinate our own cinematic adventures
as ongoing works of time-based media
where we all play multiple personas
each persona informing the quanta of energy
that exists as a statistical flux or range of
possible states of mind for our digital images to embody

Digital images to embody ... ? (Virginia was skeptical)

Yes (insisted Walt)
in the age of digitally postproduced images
we have all essentially become body-images

Body-images (repeated Angela)

Yes digitally embodied images that think

That roam and charge and download and delete

That form and disperse and fragment and play

That condense into aesthetic currency trading
on the foreign prestige market

Foreign prestige market?

Yes since prestige itself has become foreign
at least to the vast populace

You are so elitist Walt

No! I am the exact opposite --

Remember this: the adjustment of reality
to the masses and of the masses to reality
is a process of unlimited scope

and the instant the criterion of authenticity
ceases to be applicable to artistic production
the total function of art is reversed --

we no longer find ourselves drowning in ritual
but rather engage in another kind of practice

Politics

This is our networked condition
and in this condition I think I have relocated
what I thought I had lost

Aura

although this aura is not unique
i.e. it has nothing to do with
the unique art object
and has everything to do with
the democratization of innovation itself

This is what it means to be avant-garde!

Now if only you could market it (said Angela, half serious)

But that's just it (said Walt)

Market it for what?

Cash dollars?

Who needs that?

I have a perpetual Internet connection

I have unending spools of pleasure unwinding
from the depths of my very being becoming something else

I have access to the most beautiful woman in the world

Women (said Angela -- where was Virginia?)

I have the ability to creatively inhabit
all of the source material the world has ever produced
so that I too can playfully postproduce
the very networked condition that now
after all of these years of self-denial
suggests that life itself is an aura worth investing in ...

Great (interjected Virginia -- she was back)

So how do you monetize it? (one of them asked)

Especially since you are obviously not going
the route of dollars and sense (added Angela)

BUT THAT'S JUST IT!

(Walt was getting pleasantly agitated
and by that he meant that he was setting himself up
for yet more bouts of defeat and deflation
and was going to let everything bug him
in a positive way because he was sure
more sure than he had ever been
that he was on the right track this time
and nothing -- not even catastrophic failure --
was going to get in the way of him
playfully signaling from the flames
while burning down in auto-affect mode)

What's it? (asked Virginia)

My idea: Power Pataphysique

Go on ... (they prodded)

It's the future and it can be summarized in one word

"Say the secret woid and you win a hunerred dollahs"
(said Virginia auto-morphing into a tranny hybrid of
Elenor Roosevelt and Groucho Marx)

And the word is? (asked Angela)

Walt waited for their undivided attention:

The word

(he said -- pausing yet again for prolonged effect)

is

...

supplements

Written On A Napkin

2010-05-18T12:16:00.002-06:00

I still get a kick out of using napkins as spur of the moment canvases for improvised language works and occasional drawings. For example, my Napkin Series is comprised of found (OK, permanently borrowed) high end white cloth napkins from restaurants that I then, later in the evening or the next day, use as a canvas to trace the outlines of my hand using archival markers of various colors. So, for example, the work "Napkin Series (Green)" includes a heavy white napkin from an excellent foodie joint in Miami and the hand tracing is done with an archival quality green marker. The thing is, I always trace the outlines of my right hand with my left and then I write inside the palm of the traced-out hand with my left hand as well. But, as you may have guessed, I'm right-handed, so the fun is in trying to write something that fits in the palm of my hand, is relatively centered and justified within the contours of the line, and that says something that I'm really feeling that day. With the "Green" version, now with a private collector, I wrote: "My right hand does not know what my left hand is doing."

To be sure, that one line says a lot about my contemporary arts practice.

I have a few paper napkin works selectively displayed in my studio as well, including the first study I did for the colorful Napkin Series. A "study," in this case, is my attempt to sell myself on an idea I have, and if I find it worthwhile, I invest more time in its development and see where it takes me.

In fact, many of the paper napkin studies I have around the studio and in archived boxes are where my works, some of them major, get seeded. Another example: the opening quote in Immobilite, "Every story is a travel story -- a spatial practice," comes from a napkin study following a critical reading of Michel de Certeau that I conducted with an artist friend in a Boulder coffeehouse (that one has a small self-portrait drawing too).

The reason I even mention all of this, as if it were important (it's not, but that's why I find it useful today), is that there is a cool breeze complementing the 75 degree heat of this spring afternoon and the breeze has allowed one of the brown paper napkin studies to take flight and land right in my lap. This particular napkin must have been splayed in a location I do not normally frequent because I had forgotten about it. There is no drawing on it but the fine dark blue marker combined with my "feel-good" flourish creates a kind of drippy absorption into the paper so that, to me, it feels like art.

Musing over the words, I read and then re-read the text:

Body-wind

breath spirit

rhythmic contours

of the shapely mediums

"coming to terms"

with itself as

creative process.

Where do these 

generative thoughts

come from?

Is it The Deep Interior

or is it more

a manifestation

of the surface appearance

of things --- of mind grabs

(the same way we think 

of "screen grabs")

captured as digital

imprint on network

projection?


The third eye sees.

*

Obviously, it looks and reads better on paper.

Metadata: napkin studies, seeding, drippy

Creative Class Struggle

2010-05-15T11:06:00.003-06:00

I have a long routine in my forthcoming comedy album / new media installation that focuses on what I call "creative class struggle," particularly as it plays out in my home town of beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

There's no need to give the comedy material away online, not just yet, although I'm tempted given how topical the subject is. Having just flown back to Boulder from another beautiful city (Lisbon, where I was lucky to have seen some excellent local contemporary art), I was semi-surprised to find not one, not two, but three articles in today's online version of the New York Times that cover Boulder's growing "creative class" and/or what passes as the next wave of high-tech entrepreneurialism powering the supercapitalist engine that keeps our local economy humming. Don't let the decades old hippy-dippy reputation of Boulder fool you. People move here and continue to live here because this a total money-town and the forever-entitled citizenry of this pseudo-progressive lily white culture totally dig the upper-crust lifestyle that big money can buy (even if it means having to immerse oneself in the total boredom of monocultural provincialism, one that tries to pass itself off as eco-hipsterism meets "my shit don't stink" aromatherapy [as Moon Unit used to say: "Gag me with a spoon!"]).

The articles are

Boulder, Colo., a Magnet for High-Tech Start-Ups

The recipes of other cities for creating the next Silicon Valley usually leave out a few main ingredients. Richard Florida, who wrote “The Rise of the Creative Class” and studies why certain cities foster creativity, cites three crucial factors: talented people and a high quality of life that keeps them around, technological expertise, and an open-mindedness about new ways of doing things, which often comes from a strong counterculture.

"Boulder has reached this beautiful sweet spot, where it has many advantages of a university town — tech and talent and openness — but without many of the costs and traffic and congestion that may disadvantage incumbent centers of innovation," Mr. Florida said.

A Digital Boot Camp to Groom Talent for Agencies

The university had had a strong undergraduate program in advertising, and it is one of the top majors, said David Slayden, executive director of Boulder Digital Works. When he thought about creating a graduate program, though, he wanted to take a technology-focused approach.

Many other graduate programs "were built on a platform of creative based on Bill Bernbach," he said, referring to the founder of the agency DDB who paired copywriters with art directors and had the teams churn out portfolios of creative concepts. "It was very analog," Mr. Slayden said.

He began asking ad agencies what they needed in new hires, and agencies like Exopolis, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners had a near-unanimous response. "They weren’t getting what they needed to grow and develop," Mr. Slayden said, especially in areas that combined creative approaches and technology.

To Nurture Boulder, Back-to-Basics Venture Capital

"We’re not obsessed with finance, exits, the industry macro, the global macro," Mr. Feld said. "We’re in Boulder so we can avoid that stuff being in our face."

Metadata: Boulder, comedy, entrepreneurialism, creative class, countercouture

The Creative Act of Postproduction

2010-05-11T09:02:00.000-06:00

Here are the opening quotes to my new book, REMIXOLOGY:

"If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."

Marcel Duchamp, "The Creative Act"

"If we are all artist-mediums, we must then accept the fact that we are all in perpetual postproduction and that our aesthetic fitness relies on our ability to trigger novelty out of our unconscious creative potential. All of the decisions we make while performing our ongoing work of postproduction art rest with pure intuition and are envisioned as part of the creative act."

from Professor VJ's Big Blog Mash-Up

Metadata: creative act, postproduction, art, remix aesthetics

Oil Painting Is Back

2010-05-06T18:44:00.000-06:00

Controversial as ever, and very European in a decidedly avant-garde sort of way, Ubermorgen writes in their recent artist statement:

The supreme discipline of art - oil painting - is back. It has been 13 days since a BP oil and gas exploration well blew out, setting fire to the drilling rig, which sank, killing 11 people. Ever since, crude oil has been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, raising the prospects of a historic environmental disaster. Winds from the southeast have nudged the slick northward, where it floated Saturday near the coasts of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi and has begun to paint the coastlines.

Finally oil painting has evolved into generative bio-art, a dynamic process the world audience can watch live via mass media. Never before has this art form been as relevant and visible as today - only 9-11 was nearly as perfect, but in the genre of performance art. An oil painting on a 80.000 square miles ocean canvas with 32 million liters of oil - a unique piece of art.

The entire artist statement is here.

Perhaps this is what we mean by the phrase Picture Theory (as in: "picture it in your satellite mind"):

More digital oil paintings a la the Gulf Coast here.

Metadata: oil painting, picturing disaster, environmental theater, performance art, rigged markets

Underground Art School

2010-05-04T20:02:00.008-06:00

The last few weeks here at Professor VJ have been relatively quiet. First, it ends up that experiencing image actualization is much more fun than sitting down to write about it. My own thoughts are coming out in realtime a lot faster than this blog can accommodate them. I can see how this will lead to some format changes in the near future (could it be Twitter?).

Where have I been? Besides New York, L.A., Austin, and Grand Forks, I have been deep in The Zone. The comedy album is more work than I could have ever imagined and is slow-going, but turning out great. The second feature-length film to follow Immobilité has gone from being 95% finished to about 97.2% finished. My new book of artist writings, REMIXOLOGY, is now under review at a major academic press. And before I forget, my students, who were featured in the new CIAC magazine last month, have just finished their final projects, all of which were included in a huge end of the school year blow-out event we titled INVASION. The projects were wonderfully experimental and featured live A/V performance, digital video remix and installation, sound installation art, a zine, an interactive net art manifesto, and a never before attempted collaborative text message performance with live video and poetic remixing of the incoming messages, many of them appropriated texts such as Tiger Wood's naughty grams, aphorisms from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, excerpts from a Japanese text message novel, and random text messages from others out in the network.

Bringing both remixology and some of the material from my comedy album into the conventional studio art styled classroom has been a trip. Something that differentiates me from a lot of my colleagues around the country is that even though I am a Professor of Art and Art History, I never went to art school. So that means I do not carry any of the baggage associated with that whole studio art critique model of learning. My "higher" arts education took place in various art scenes around the globe. This means that instead of creating the perfect environment for individual studio artists to pursue their genius only to be stomped on by my institutionally supported critiques that are meant to give them a dose of reality that I feel they need to struggle with especially if they ever hope to become successful players in the elitist commodity art world circuit, I just try and inform them how interdisciplinary art (and writing) scenes organically evolve out of hybridized social networking discourse while at the same time introduce them to some of the ploys used by collaborative networks and digitally manipulated personas to build these scenes of contemporary practice from the underground up. Most of them appreciate it, even if they prefer to stay above-ground and prepare themselves for the white cube.

Metadata: comedy, theory, practice, art school, art scenes

Samuel Beckett: Political Advisor

2010-05-01T18:48:00.003-06:00

The man who is turning the British election season upside-down has just written a column for the Guardian entitled Nick Clegg: My hero Samuel Beckett.

In the piece, he writes:

[...] amid the bleakness, there is also humour, and it's no surprise that there are so many comedians among Beckett's fans. His appeal lies in his directness – the sparse, unembellished prose that can make his meticulous stage directions unexpected. He leaves you with a sense that you knew what he meant, even if explaining it back would leave you lost for words. Direct and disturbing – it is impossible to grow tired of Beckett.

Metadata: comedy, art, laughter, philosophy, politics, Beckett

Art School

2010-04-23T13:41:00.004-06:00

Behind the scenes I am still building my material for a comedy album I'm producing on "Art School," "Creative Class Struggle," "Critical Thinking," and "What It Means To Always Be IN Character."

A more academic yet equally interesting investigation into similar themes can be found in Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century). I'm just getting a taste of it now. The collection includes this article which begins:

Artereality: the flow of mediating channels

In summary and with respect to an integrated Arts education, Artereality is an expanded model of humanistic scholarly practice and communication oriented upon cultural production and making, with a revised notion of craft as reflexive and critical practice. Artereality implies diverse ecologies of interest, skill and activity that subsume disciplinary boundaries without sacrificing expertise in specific subject domains. Quite the opposite, in our experience in Stanford Humanities Lab, Artereality is about the management of flows through articulated fields of deep and expert knowledge, articulations made through matters of common human and humanistic concern — broad themes such as the politics of association in modernity, the management of presence in contemporary media, the representation of historical time, the expression of local identity in relation to substantive fields such as the architecture of Berlin, revolutionary poster design, contemporary performance art, Asian-American artists, military simulation. These are the basis of integrated practices producing research, pedagogical experience and manifold publication.

The following is both a report on an ongoing experiment and a speculative application of that very experiment to the future of advanced-level arts education. It seeks to rethink some of the most productive institutions and moments from the modern past—the Arts and Crafts workshop, the Bauhaus, the laboratory of Constructivism, among them—in terms of the altered cultural and economic circumstances of the late industrial era. It assumes that art’s autonomy, one of the decisive conquests of the modern(ist) era, has led not only to an extraordinary proliferation of artistic forms and freedoms, but also to the current impasse which places arts education in the service of up-market commodity culture and at arm’s length from other forms of knowledge production and, in particular, from the very technology and media transformations that are reshaping the cultural norms of the present era.

We have coined the neologism Artereality to designate some guiding principles that could contribute to repositioning arts education closer to the center of the contemporary knowledge economy. As we envisage it, Artereality places the design and production of art objects and goods in a more discipline-dynamic context, shifting the focus away from “pure” creation toward the management of networks, links, flows, translations, and mediations —in short, arteries and nodes. It implies a number of things: teamwork-based education as a complement to the traditional individualized studio, a turn towards process as essential complement to product, the embrace of project-based and performance-based learning, and a conception of arts practice coterminous with research and pedagogy. We draw upon our experience in the Stanford Humanities Lab to outline the features of Artereality as a kind of manifesto for a new model of arts education within the Academy: a model embodied by the Ph.D. in Arts Practice. The M.F.A. was an institutional expression of the modern(ist) era in university-level arts education. The Ph.D. in Arts Practice is the expression of the distinctive complexities, demands, and opportunities provided by the present era. Its time is now.

Emphasis mine.

Metadata: comedy, theory, practice, art school,

Playing It As It L.A.ys

2010-04-20T08:56:00.000-06:00

Just back from a visiting artist gig at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in their Graduate Media Design Program chaired by the best media designer I have ever worked with, Anne Burdick (among other things, Anne is the Design Editor of the electronic book review which I have been publishing for 15 years now).

The students in the Graduate course "New Modes of Reading and Writing" were investigating "the range of issues in the design and production of texts by designing a writing ecology (interface / technology / environment / system) to support a very specific, previously unaddressed (or poorly addressed) need." The students were asked to literally take on a fictional persona who would present a specific social group, institution or individual and their unique communication need (real or imaginary) and the constraints that make current technologies inadequate.

The projects that emerged played with conceptual 3-D picture languages, invisible messaging, and prehistoric remixologies. I was there for their final critiques.

While in L.A., which was awesome, I visited the house I rented in Beverlywood while going to film school at UCLA all those years ago (it's actually up for sale) and caught a couple of killer art shows, including this 30 year retrospective at Geffen's MOCA. It's great to see how SoCal supports their nationally and internationally recognized artists (wish I could say the same thing about the Denver art scene but unfortunately our big show the second half of this year is going to be King Tut).

For those visiting L.A. in the future, as always you need to be prepared to rent a car, and my experience was actually fantastic: the good folks at simplyhybrid.com were waiting for me as soon as I arrived at the airport. They had driven a fully loaded Prius to the airport and literally within ten minutes after arriving I was driving off into GPS-instructed Drive-Thru Land. The price was right and they also met me at the airport upon my departure so that the return took less than five minutes as well.

And for coffee lovers, the top barista in Boulder, Greg at Ozo, who was also in L.A. competing in the U.S. Barista Championships, suggested L.A. Mill which has the best iced coffee I have had (except for Ozo). They also had an organic roast from Bali that is unlike any other coffee I have ever tasted. Great vibe inside the place as well. Runner-up in the cafe experience: Intelligentsia on Sunset Boulevard where I got through another 50 pages of Bolaño.

I'll be back (soon).

Metadata: Art Center, Media Design, MOCA, L.A. Mill, Intelligentsia, Roberto Bolaño, L.A.

Webspinnas (Canadian Remix)

2010-04-13T21:36:00.000-06:00

My Remix Culture students are featured in the just released issue of CIAC, the electronic magazine of the International Center of Contemporary Art out of Montreal.

Their collaborative work is presented as an audio-visual edit-remix of their live Webspinna performance of March 18, 2010. Appearing in sequence, each webspinna uses the sounds available on the WWW to generate a live, continuous remix of an array of sounds they have selected from the net.

The editor of the magazine, Paule Mackrous, is visiting CU-Boulder this semester conducting her PhD research in the presence-effect or effect of presence. Her blog, an excellent diary of theoretical thoughts on issues related to contemporary practice, recently took issue with some of the ethnocentric and phallocentric aspects of remix culture.

CIAC is a gem of an online publication. My conversation with the previous editor was published in the 2002 Explorations sonores issue. For this new issue on sound and the Internet, the editorial introduction reads:

Dear readers,

Net Sounds, the issue no 36 of the CIAC's (International Center for Contemporary Art) Electronic Magazine, is now online! http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/

The issue contains comments on hypermedia sound artworks and essays by Mark Amerika, Stanza, RYBN Collective, Magali Babin, Dominic Arsenault, Tom Zamir and Benoit Bordeleau. You will also find sounds from the Webspinna peformance (Rhythm Scientists) and a video-interview with Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky.

My essay is located in the perspective section entitled Becoming a Remixologist : Art, Theory and Sound Practice.

Metadata: remix, webspinna, CIAC, DJ Spooky, Mark Amerika

Where Does Creativity Come From?

2010-04-08T11:37:00.001-06:00

Let's not get all voodoo about it. Let's just answer the question. Or if it cannot be answered in any definitive way, then let's speculate.

Or let's let Robert Moog, inventor of the synth, speculate for us:

As Moog muses:

I can feel what's going on inside a piece of electronic equipment ... It's something between discovering and witnessing ..."

Metadata: electronic, discovery, creativity, visualization

Theory (In Practice)

2010-03-28T20:26:00.003-06:00

In theory, theory is the same as practice. In practice, it isn't the same.

Did Yogi Berra really say that?

I actually think it's just a clever remix of one of his more famous quotes, i.e.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

However you read it, I personally find it interesting that after ten days based out of New York, this is all I have to write right now.

Metadata: philosophy, theory, practice

Mind the Gap

2010-03-23T07:14:00.003-06:00

Check out this exciting schedule of activity taking place at the UND Writers Conference in Grand Forks this week. I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

As the conference website says, "Now in its 41st year, the Conference enjoys a national reputation among writers as one of the best run, most interesting events of its kind, especially because of its strong public audiences, attracted by its free and open format."

In addition to attending the readings, exhibitions and receptions, I'll be creating a new series of print works in their master print shop (more on this soon). All of the invited writers also made one selection for the parallel film festival that runs during the conference. My choice, Sans Soleil, plays right after my reading. I blogged about why I chose this film here.

Metadata: writing, UND Writing Conference, FGrand Forks

OUT

2010-03-17T10:21:00.001-06:00

From the opening of OUT:

It all comes together. Don't fall. Each of us carries a
stick of dynamite. Concealed on his person. That does
several things. One it forms a bond. Two it makes you
feel special. Three it's mute articulation of the conditions
we live in today I mean not only us but everybody the
zeitgeist you might say if not the human condition
itself and keeps you in touch with reality. This is your
stick. Don't fall. We know one among us is a government
agent that's inevitable. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's me. The
way we deal with that is as long as everyone does his job
what's the difference. You're either part of the plot or
part of the counterplot. Everybody's got to be either one
or the other they all have their own opinions about which
they are. Personally that's not part of my assignment. Part
of it is having meets. This is a meet. The way you have
meets is you take out your stick of dynamite that's your
i. d. Don't fall. This is a two person meet there are
bigger ones. When we get all our dynamite together we have
a bomb. Then we set it off. It's all chance. Don't trust
anyone you don't know that's the big thing. It's all who
you like who you can work with who you fuck. Personal
affinity. Of course we don't have real names we have
aliases. Today I'm Harrold. Two r's. Tomorrow I might be
someone else. Don't fall. Of course all this probably
sounds wacky to you. That's because none of it is true.
It's just a joke a way we have of testing people's
reactions. The dynamite stick's a dud. Light the fuse and
see. Or maybe you better not. Maybe it'll blow your head
off. Well you never know till you try. Right?

OUT was the first work published in the Alt-X Electronic Virtual Imprint Series in 1996. The original was published in book form in 1972 ...

Metadata: Sukenick, OUT, Alt-X

Natural Selection for Evolving Remixologists

2010-03-10T08:46:00.003-07:00

It may seem obvious to some, but as the New York Times recently published in an article titled Human Culture, an Evolutionary Force, "Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection."

My question is: "How can it not be a powerful force of natural selection?" As a postproduction medium who creates intense experiences as aesthetic facts, this is the most natural thing in the world. For a thriving remixologist, naturally sampling your source material for aesthetic mutation is what developing a daily practice of everyday life is all about. Without this powerful cultural force synchronizing with your bio-being, there is no possibility of actualization.

I wrote about this in a different context for a VJ Theory essay in relation to an evolving philosophy of life that positions the artist as a postproduction medium who participates in daily remix practice:

In Pre-Internet writerly terms
Ginsberg taps into the poet's ambition
"to write during a prophetic illuminative seizure"
where the artist-medium finds themselves
"in such a state of blissful consciousness
that any language emanating from that state
will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness
from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate."

The vibratory effects of ecstatic expression
can be programmed into contagious media events
and are particularly useful in stimulating
developments in alternative arts and culture
(they are also useful in performance pedagogy
where a good teacher will always find ways
to integrate these effects into their
studio workshops and seminar sessions
creating an empathetic relationship with
the networked energies that form the "student body")

For Ginsberg this ecstatic expression
catalyzes into spontaneous transmissions

If you are practicing spontaneous transmission
(Ginsberg says in one of his Boulder lectures)
and by this he means to say
"transmission of your thought"

"how do you choose then what thoughts
you need to put down" while in trance?

The answer (he says, playing Guru)
"is that you don't get a chance to choose
because everything's going so fast."

"It's like driving on a road
you just have to follow the road;
And take turns, 'eyeball it'
as a carpenter would say.
You don't have any scientific
measuring rod, except your own mind.

I don't know of any scientific measuring rod
that's usable. So you have to chance
whatever you can and pick whatever you can.
So there's also a process of automatic selection.
Whatever you can draw in your net is it,
is what you got."

i.e. Remixology forms as a process of
natural selection

intuitive netting of the source material

which then can be manipulated into
the physiological forms of ecstasy
that occasionally appear and are disseminated
during your ongoing postproduction sets

(this interiorized postproduction process
turns the pure mobility of ones durée
into the ongoing satisfaction of becoming
more source material / experiential data
for others to intersubjectively jam with
during heightened states of co-emerge-agency
that can then lead to Higher Phases of Experience

in raw terms what you do is lay your data out
for everyone to use, re-use, and abuse
as "source" for a generative remixology)

Generative remixology then emerges out of
both the inherited gestures of muscle memory
and the mutating reconfigurations of style
that are embedded in the production of novelty

Creativity as a form of novel advance
becomes performance art when embodied
by the postproduction medium
whose spontaneous transmission
is transcribed into more source material

more hard code

embodied as the measuring rod
whose job it is to sense
when best to intervene
in the creative process

This measuring rod is the instrument
used in the natural art of selection
"so you have to be a little athletic about that"
says Ginsberg

(If the species remixologist
is about anything at all
it's about aesthetic fitness
i.e. using the creative process itself
to attract more intense aesthetic experiences)

The Times article states that "[W]ith archaic humans, culture changed very slowly. The style of stone tools called the Oldowan appeared 2.5 million years ago and stayed unchanged for more than a million years. The Acheulean stone tool kit that succeeded it lasted for 1.5 million years. But among behaviorally modern humans, those of the last 50,000 years, the tempo of cultural change has been far brisker. This raises the possibility that human evolution has been accelerating in the recent past under the impact of rapid shifts in culture."

Things are shifting so fast I can't even measure the measuring rod (too much noise in the mix, interference in the calculations, turbulence in the system ... though somehow I still like it -- does that make me an entrepreneur at heart, one who thrives on chaos?).

My tool kit is in my body operating in auto-affect mode as it expands like a sequence of sartorial electric impulses into my laptop connected to a network that distributes my thoughts for me in asynchronous realtime.

This "powerful force" the article above refers to is not an overgeneralized "force of nature" reimagined as cultural cachet. It's what I feel like right now, a vector of liquid lightening striking the source material that's ripe for the picking so that I can keep playing in the open field of possibilities where my aesthetic potential forever seeks actualization.

Make no mistake, ends the Times article, "Culture has become a force of natural selection, and if it should prove to be a major one, then human evolution may be accelerating as people adapt to pressures of their own creation."

And their own actualization as well.

Metadata: postproduction, evolution, performance, remix, the use of force

Spring with Gun

2010-03-09T08:32:00.000-07:00

Spring is in the air and with it comes the new issue of Springgunpress.com. SpringGun is published by two of my former students, Erin Costello and Mark Rockswold, and the new issue does all of the right things a small press publication needs to do in order to mark its editorial territory. In this case, we have a variety of experimental writing that covers both literary-infused artworks that are clearly made-for-the-web and easy to read poems, interviews, and flash fictions in a print-cum-web e-book style courtesy of issuu.

Check it out -- and if you have something to share, submit.

Metadata: literary, new media, web publishing

Dancing with the Dempsey Dumpster

2010-03-06T17:14:00.003-07:00

UPDATED 3/6/10 @ 5:14 PM

One cannot begin to describe how difficult it is to seriously build and maintain an archive.

First of all, once you go interdisciplinary with your contemporary art and writing practice and fall in and out of many scenes over the course of multiple decades, sometimes even pioneering those scenes and thus, out of necessity, becoming an activist cultural producer who networks like crazy, this can then lead to the accumulation of all kinds of archival material that eventually calls out for more attention to detail. My archive grows and grows and exhibits itself to me in BOLD CAPS that always say the same thing: MANAGE ME.

In my case, this archive is ridiculously broad in that it includes letters, manuscripts, drawings, collage works, digital prints, photos, video tapes (VHS, Beta, etc), audio tapes (cassettes, DAT, etc.), 16mm and 8mm film, DVDs, CDs, floppy disks, zip disks, hard drives, endless media articles and features covering work produced in all of the above forms, various pieces of hardware kept on hand as the only way to make some of the work run, art stickers, flyers, posters, postcards, xeroxes, DIY (maga)zines, books (print and e-book), performance documentaries, QuickTimes of heretofore unseen erotic art shot on HD, napkins (yes, a series of art works self-consciously made on napkins), a handwritten novel-in-a-day, and a hefty bag full of mail art from the 80s (these are especially precious -- I totally dig their scale and the way they indicate how I became a practicing remixologist).

And this is only the beginning: the laundry list goes on. What's surprising is that I'm not even a pack rat. This is just the result of deciding that if I am going to make new work and struggle to locate audiences that will eventually go out of their way to experience my creative output, then it would be counter-productive to throw it all away as soon as I have finished working on it. If the work gets exhibited, published, and/or performed in public, and if material as well as digital artifacts to those outcomes emerge as part of its historical context, it seems only prudent that I keep more than just the work itself in the ever-growing archive.

Still, though, I cannot help but ask myself: Does ALL of this ephemera REALLY create a cultural and historical context for the work and do I REALLY need to document/archive not just the artworks but the creative process itself not to mention whatever networked feedback might have accompanied each work's release into the world? I certainly don't want to do that (and by that I mean I don't want to spend my time doing it: I barely have enough time to follow through on my continuous creative impulse to generate new art/writing).

But therein lies the dilemma. Why, for example, would I just ditch all of the digital files, DVDs, images, writings, catalogs, media articles, etc. related to my recently released Immobilité project? And if I keep everything as part of my archive, then it's important that I take the archive seriously and make sure it "speaks" for me. This means properly boxing, labeling, and even notating what is the what.

The thing is, I know people whose lives have become overloaded with having to make sense of or otherwise execute the estate and archives of their famous artist or writer parents and I don't want that to happen to my follow-up team.

Of course, it's a HUGE assumption that anyone will even give a shit about my archives.

But when I look at the special collections landscape and see how it is shaping up, and particularly how the conventional archival process is being challenged like so many other fields by the Digital Everything Culture, I can see where the unique qualities of my archive, where the avant-garde literature scene meets the Internet art scene meets the electronic literature / hypertext scene meets the more mainstream art world scene could be of value to the right collection.

So what does this all really mean?

Well, one thing for sure is that it means that I have to do some things that I do not particularly like doing. Going through ones vast archives is simply not fun. How could it be? There is very little creativity going on there. I always want to "make it new" ("Creativity is the principle of novelty") and am having difficulties thinking of ways to do that while painstakingly going through endless boxes, files, tapes, DVDs, CDs, etc. I don't even want to touch those stacks of zip drives.

Sometimes the process has its better moments. Like when I find a torn off sticker from where? an NYC subway? that has some written graffiti I tagged on it and that says Reel Pol "i" ticks and that's used as a bookmark in an old issue of Film Culture featuring the work of Paul Sharits. Or when I unexpectedly unearth one of the mail art works that indicates to me my twentysomething fascination with NYC-styled Reagan Yuppie Culture in the Age of AIDS. All of a sudden, opening a shoebox full of mail art works from the 80s becomes more than just a cliched trip down memory lane -- rather, it situates the work in its cultural/historical context indicating where/when I paid my dues (lower Manhattan) in the most pleasant of poverty-stricken ways.

Or what about the first draft manuscript of a major work-in-progress (OK, another novel) that pseudo-autobiographically portrays the life and times of David Star who also, looking back and trying to make sense of his retrospective at the Guggenheim sometime in the near future, attempts to teleport his consciousness to the vibe of NYC-styled Reagan Yuppie Culture in the Age of AIDS? Does the fact that I printed it up and then made pen marks in the margins make that version a more "valuable" part of the archive than, say, the next version that got saved with a different title as a MS Word doc with no corresponding print-out?

But the thing that becomes clear to me is not the value proposition of this archive as it exists today or may look ten or twenty years from now. No, what is clear, is that I actually am unable to work on this monster without falling into the cliched trap of going down memory lane which, for me at this moment in my postproduction flow, is like going down a rabbit hole of time that wants to suck the creativity out of me.

"Back then," I think to myself, reading through the draft manuscript of this major (says who?) work-in-progress that takes place partly in the 80s, "some us thought we were experiencing first-hand the final death knell of American culture, that we would soon be entering an age of artist concentration camps, and that the disparity of rich versus poor was the worst it was ever going to be. But now we live in a post-G.W.Bush plutocracy greased by a hegemonic oil-garchy with no end in sight and although the concentration camps never materialized, keep your eye on the tea baggers and their "going rogue" inclination to suck the propaganda balls of anything Rush Limbaugh dunks down for them to eat."

But I digress. The bottom line is that this archive project is a total time killer. If I can finish it in two years, then hopefully I can just add to it as stuff accumulates and continue on with my merry prankster way of making DIY art for the few who choose to connect with what it is I am doing. But if I wait until later to get to it all, if I put it off because I have better things to do like release my next feature-length film in the Foreign Film Series (already near final cut), or focus all of my attention on my forthcoming comedy album, or start production on the third work in the aforementioned Foreign Film Series, then I'll never get this monster (i.e. the archive) under control, and that would be a cruel thing to do to the follow-up team that will have to deal with it all after I do my victory dance in the End of All Time Zones.

Unless, of course, they (the follow-up team who survives in the digital afterlife) just decide to ditch it all in a Dempsey Dumpster.

In which case, why wait? The thought has crossed my mind -- almost daily -- but I can't get rid of the impulse to save save save. Apple-S -- is that an aesthetic impulse? Literary? Biological?

Metadata: archive fever, creativity, time, value

How I became a remixologist (or one version thereof)

2010-02-19T10:54:00.007-07:00

Sometimes I feel less like a college professor and more like a "collage" professor.

My entire practice is composed of an ongoing assemblage of ripped styles, sampled source material, and embodied rhythms that I sync myself with by re-imagining the (literal) body or bodies of work (post)produced by others.

Instead of asking myself the corporatized "Where do I want to go today?" (wherever my daily practice takes me, thank you very much) -- I ask myself "What do I want to be today?" and then just become it. Or perhaps IT becomes ME (personally, I'll take it any way I can get it).

Sometimes these "becomings" are fuzzy in that I really cannot label what it is I am doing-while-becoming. But other times I like to play with the idea of becoming-something-specific even when it's practically impossible to articulate what it is I feel when becoming, like when I label myself a "collage" professor.

But today I feel like more than just a "collage" professor.

"There must be a better tag," I tell myself, as I conjure up more imaginary solutions to problems that don't really exist (perhaps I'm a 21st century pataphysician?).

After an hour of driving through the morning fog, I realize that today I consider myself a sculptor. At least that's how I'm relating to the world at this very second (things can change very fast here in Professor VJ-land).

Here's something funny: when I was young, very young, I used to get the words mixed up and referred to the one who sculpts as a sculpture.

Really -- I used to think that artists were great sculptures.

Now I know better --

and by that I mean that artists are, in fact, great sculptures, i.e. shape-shifting alchemists of embodied remixology who sync their creative flow in auto-affect mode.

Maybe their reputations are sculptures too.

Or their careers.

Obviously I have a very loose definition of what a sculpture is. For example, it's not static, solid, or stoic. For me it's a much more organic, supple, and even invisible process of energy transformation. Perhaps in this way my thinking is not very far removed from Beuys' Expanded Concept of Art where what is "social-in-forming" creates an ever-widening community of aesthetic interest that comes with an accompanying political suggestiveness.

But back in my playing hooky days of yore, I really did think of artists as sculptures plain and simple.

This is like thinking that a plumber is plumbing.

Under this logic, maybe a net artist is a thinking machine attached to a network of tubes, like the Internets.

But a sculpture with tubes is not plumbing.

That's art (something that I don't really produce, at least not when unconsciously expanding its parameters).

And this is why I think of myself as not so much a college professor but as a "collage" professor. It's because I can assemble myself as whatever I damn well please on any given day. There's a certain inner power that enables me to drive through this early morning fog as I move toward a temporary clarity of vision, one that enables me to see my day begin to take shape as my body feels w-r-i-t-e.

So today I feel like a kind of disintermediated sculptor operating in perpetual postproduction.

Although when I was in my twenties living in the New York underground art scene which is really a nice way of saying the underground economy which is a nice way of saying BEYOND STRUGGLING and not even rich enough to live in a roach-infested shit-hole the size of a pantry closet, back in THOSE days, I still could not bring myself to call myself a sculptor, even though I totally knew that that was the proper term and not sculpture.

Actually, truth be told, in my twenties I referred to the work I was making back in New York the 80s as skull-ruptures.

Skull-ruptures were what led to my continual creative output.

By creative output I mean to suggest a kind of procedural outcome similar to what we think of when seeking some form of digital art output (like a C-print or a DVD) except what I put out back then was less art per se and something more like a series of collage works across the media spectrum.

I was all rupture all the time.

The creativity, to remix Jello Biafra, was just pouring out of my ears.

What I am saying is that I taught myself to become an emotional alchemist who could transform my shape-shifting body language into heavily manipulated skull-ruptures and that's how I became a remixologist.

Now the residue of those early methodological experiments in ritual transformation have become part of a larger Life Style Practice that keeps me juiced in a positive feedback loop.

Metadata: sculpture, shape-shifting, collage art, performance, professor

Groucho Marxism

2010-02-08T08:14:00.003-07:00

From Bob Black's manifesto on G-Marxism:

Comedians who fail to synthesize theory and practice (not to mention those who fail to sin at all) are un-Marxist.

[...]

Because G-Marxism is practical, its acheivements can never be reduced to mere humor, entertainment, or even "art." (The aesthetes, after all, are less interested in the appreciation of art than in art that appreciates.) After a genuine Marxist sees a Marx Brothers movie, he tells himself: "If you think that was funny, take a look at your life!"

Comedy needs to be more philosophical than funny, and if possible, it should inject itself into you like a good virus you have no control over, one that alters your perception. Laugh until you hallucinate, is what I say. Just make sure when you come down from it all you are still capable of going to war.

An excerpt from my "philosophiction" on Seinfeld was published many years ago here.

Metadata: comedy, art, laughter, philosophy, Seinfeld, Marx

Sit-Down Comedy

2010-01-25T19:50:00.006-07:00

Did I mention that I am about to produce my first comedy album?

Well, it's really my latest work of art. Similar to the way my feature-length foreign film series remixes the methodologies of the art-house film directors, this project will attempt to embody the formal qualities of the recorded live comedy performance. This recording will then be distributed into various "situations" that I am still developing.

Scripting the work has been major league time consuming, thus the slow drip of blogs lately. But it has been exhilarating since so much of the writing feeds off of the energy and warp speed sensibility of the manic lead character being portrayed in the performance.

For regular readers of the blog, you will recall a few blog posts related to comedy or comedic themes back in 2008, particularly here and here.

From my review of Steve Martin's Born Standing Up, entitled As the Comic Muses:

Writing is not routinized
in a pathetic attempt to repeat
what has already been written
but is a projected energy pattern
something embedded in muscle memory
and clarified through improvisation
and constant re/envisioning

If it sounds a lot like comedy
that's because it is

Slowly perception by perception
each instant timed to follow each
next instance of measurable body flow
the poet and the comic must relate
their own internal clock
with the feel of vibratory becomings
so that the nuance of experience
can not only be captured but trigger
an alternative sense universe
of unexpected patterns of communication

Whether performing ones act
stand-up / spoken-word / deadpan
plain idiom or even esoteric collage
of simultaneous data reconfigured in
the presentational immediacy of the event itself

however it is composed
(on the fly by the bye)

it all comes down to timing

body timing
mental timing
sense timing
delivery timing
world-historical timing
the timing of reception

This is where the compositional playing field
topographically morphs into shape-shifting
metamediumistic event

a space where there is no out of bounds per se
but where the players still locate a framework
to unravel their elastic duration in

Is comedic timing visionary?

George Carlin once said
"I'm a visionary. I'm ahead of my time.
The only problem is I'm only
about one and half hours ahead."

Every comedian who knows their shtick
will tell you first and foremost

Timing is everything

and being in time with your material
is one way to get a leg up
in any performance's pure potential to embody
the force-field of being funny
(even when doing absolutely nothing)

Or, I might add, when being absolutely not funny. Intentionally creating a comedy album that's not funny is difficult work, especially if you're trying to get a laugh. Regarding laughter, Henri Bergson once wrote:

What does laughter mean? What is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odor or their delicate perfume? The greatest of thinkers, from Aristotle downwards, have tackled this little problem, which has a knack of baffling every effort, of slipping away and escaping only to bob up again, a pert challenge flung at philosophic speculation. Our excuse for attacking the problem in our turn must lie in the fact that we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand [...] Begotten of real life and akin to art, should it not also have something of its own to tell us about art and life?

Metadata: comedy, art, laughter, remix

Ongoing Ungoing

2010-01-17T19:45:00.000-07:00

David Wojnarowicz:

Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.

Some quotes you just keep coming back to. The one above totally kicks ass.

Metadata: freedom, destiny, death

Pseudo-Autobiographical Animals

2010-01-14T10:50:00.001-07:00

Derrida, in "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," writes:

Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the immune, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, as is every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, auto-referential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography; poisonous for itself in the first place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-affected.

Céline:

"... [l]ife itself is a fiction, and biography is something we invent afterwards."

Professor VJ (circa 2006):

My point is: fiction itself is an unstable signifier. For example, what if you were to take "fiction" as your starting point, that is, you are born a blob of nothingness waiting to write yourself into being, which you then construct over the course of your life. In this case, the writer becomes an instrument that creates their own pseudo-autobiographical narrative through the writing process itself. It's pseudo-autobiographical because you make it up as you go along. This is the only way to tap into your unconscious (readiness) potential as you turn to your instincts to perform the narrative momentum you are creating for yourself. In this regard, writing becomes no less than surviving. But even if you get to the point where you are able to succcessfully write your story into being so that you can then simultaneously become what you are writing, who is to say that you yourself are the author? Is it really You? Or is it the "not-you"? My research suspects that it is the "not-you," that is, the Unconscious Player inside you who you have no control over and who you must become in order to write your story. If you are having difficulties tapping into or processing this "not-you" when you write, then you may be having difficulties locating your readiness-potential as an instinctive artist-medium trying to survive as a writer.

But then, if as I suggest above, "you are born a blob of nothingness waiting to write yourself into being," how do you differentiate between fiction and not-fiction, or is it all a big blur? In my experience, it's all about training yourself to play with your unconscious power to create, that is, to locate a space of creative action where you can live up to your potential as an artist-medium capable of using the writing instrument itself to prophesize your future tense.

Metadata: autobiography, remixed reality, fiction, creative unconscious

Begin the Begin (again and again, even and especially in winter, the anti-renewal space of renewal)

2010-01-11T10:24:00.002-07:00

"The artist is always beginning," wrote Pound, and the creative process does not "live in a vacuum."

"Any work of art which is not a beginning," wrote Pound, "an invention, a discovery, is of little worth."

As far as I can tell, and tell it I will, the writer as postproduction medium is a novelty-generator, one who operates in auto-affect or auto-remix mode and, as such, is forever role-playing the next version of metamediumistic becoming each new beginning begets. Operating in auto-affect mode means that the artist-as-remixologist is always beginning the begin. The (re)layering and filtering effects one applies to each moment of concrescence is part of an ongoing process of image actualization where each new experiential composition manifests itself as an occasion for discovery.

Since so much of my artwork grows out of a digitally-expanded concept of creative writing, whatever intentions I may have in beginning a new artwork will, out of necessity, take into account the unconscious process of building a receptive audience. This does not mean that the imaginary or potential audience that may eventually receive my work must always be happy with or otherwise enjoy the work, or that I must create work that is less difficult so that I can have a better shot at locating a receptive audience. The idea is not that they will receive the work only if it's something they can relate to or that fulfills their expectations or, even worse, is somehow worth their time and/or money. I've been working against potential audience expectations for as long as I have been making art. But if my artwork grows out of a digitally-expanded concept of creative writing which automatically situates the work in our networked condition, then the idea that each new experiential composition manifests itself as an occasion for discovery means that, for me, this occasion for discovery transforms into an occasion for connectivity via the networked experience. This occasion for connectivity already implies a potential audience is there to experience the artwork.

And yet: if you publish a daily blog post and no one is around to link to it, is it networked?

These blog posts are my postcards (sometimes very long postcards). In the early 90s, pre-blogosphere, it was the Alt-X Floating Theater of the Mind that I utilized for my networked postcard distribution. Back then, when Alt-X was just starting, the Floating Theater of the Mind created an alternative route one could take through the site just by clicking on the images planted inside each fiction, essay, article, etc. We were experimenting with simple things like integrating images and alternative navigation/linking systems into our web page design, and we decided to scan some of our 1980s mail art and resize them to fit into the web pages we were publishing. In those days, screens were small, so we had to adjust our images accordingly.

DeKoonig's Bike
Scanned image of early mail art by Mark Amerika
1984

And yet, Derrida, in The Post Card, writes what we all know, i.e. that the postcard may never arrive at its destination and thus may never be "present."

To mash-up these early morning quotes and thoughts:

The artist is always beginning, a novelty generator in auto-affect mode, and even though the formal traces they leave behind may never be actualized by their intended audience, their having been actualized as part of the artist's own flow of metamediumistic postproduction is worth living for.

Why does that matter? Because none of us really have "followers" per se. I no longer know whom I am writing to when I post a blog, and blog posts are always postcards: "neither legible nor illegible, open and radically unintelligible."

Metadata: blogging, postcards, writing, performance

Architectural Actualization

2010-01-10T10:07:00.008-07:00

New digs for Professor VJ and his lab of merry remixologists ...

Images of the new studio coming shortly ...

Metadata: actualization, Visual Arts Complex

Artists Postproducing / Animals Consuming

2010-01-08T10:56:00.002-07:00

Jonathan Safran Foers' avant-pop food manifesto, Eating Animals, includes a few interesting asides of a literary nature, including references to Kafka's vegetarianism critically apprehended by Walter Benjamin as well as a digression into the alterna-animot vision of Derrida who is one of the few well-known philosophers (besides my friend and colleague Cary Wolfe who first introduced to me to Derrida when we were all in Albany) to challenge the singularity and homogeneity of the word "animal."

Foer relates a story about Kafka who, visiting an aquarium, looks closely at the fish in the tank and feels really good about the fact that he does NOT eat them. He refers to these creatures swimming before him as his "invisible family."

The issue of speciesism is addressed by Wolfe in this ebr essay, where he writes:

... to broach the question of the institution of speciesism, as Derrida does with particular force in "Eating Well," is to insist we pay attention to the asymmetrical material effects of these discourses upon particular groups; just as the discourse of sexism effects women disproportionately (even though it may theoretically be applied to any social other of whatever gender), so the effects of the discourse of speciesism fall overwhelmingly, in institutional terms, on non-human others. But the effectiveness of the discourse of species when applied to social others of whatever sort relies upon a prior taking for granted of the institution of speciesism -- that is, the ethical acceptability of the killing of non-human others. What this means is that the ethical priority of confronting the institution of speciesism, and the pressing question of the ethical standing of non-human others, does not depend upon whether or not you like animals. Rather, it involves stakes for us all, human and non-human alike.

This review of Wolfe by Matthew Calarco in ebr (disclamier: I am the publisher of ebr), suggests that "Wolfe brings Derrida's work on the inhuman trace into dialogue with the scientific writings of Maturana and Varela in order to deepen the thought of inter-species language outlined in Derrida's writings on animals." The review prefaces these remarks by saying that "Derrida has, from the very beginning, insisted that his thought of the trace (the mark, iterability, etc.) cannot be restricted to the human." In a roundabout way that perhaps only I can make sense of, this connects with my own take on remixology as an innate creative process that is imbued in all life forms but that expands into more metamediumistic methodologies when filtered by humans whom I refer to as artist or postproduction mediums.

What is it about the artist-medium's bio-image as a durational achievement that makes human forms of remixology more privileged? Or, regarding the so-called artist-medium, is this entity to be construed strictly in human terms? Can a cactus be an artist-medium? A bee? Lately I have been questioning whether this aesthetic performance, one that is not species specific and that, following Whitehead, occurs with all entities who participate in the concrescence of novel forms of creativity, is part of an interconnected, self-sustaining autopoietic system of production such as the one Maturana and Varela have suggested, or, rather, a co-poietic unfolding of collaboratively generated intense experiences to be postproduced from here to eternity (the last part of that sentence is a mash-up of Whitehead, Ettinger, Bourriaud, and even Fellini).

There is a difference to be made here -- perhaps the difference that makes a difference -- but I prefer to articulate this difference in my philosophical films, novels, and installations instead of in academic essay form which I cannot help but notice my body resists, even as I write these words, even as I write these words knowing how much I admire and enjoy reading Derrida, Wolfe, and the writers I publish at ebr. As we begin our move into Web 3.0 and beyond, I am still searching (but not necessarily Google searching) for an indication of where "theory per se" is going (i.e. where it is moving so that it may survive as theory if it is to survive at all in digital culture).

The question is not so much why this difference, but how to participate in the making of this difference. Or so my instincts lead me to believe.

Metadata: animals, instinct,eating, writing, performance, art, postproduction

Actualization III (Teleportation)

2010-01-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

Suburban Sublime

(iPhone image captured by Mark Amerika Nature Photography)

Metadata: actualization, mobile thoughtography, creative input, universal output

UNREALTIME (Extended Version)

2010-01-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

Recently found out that UNREALTIME, the comprehensive retrospective of many of my digital art works showcased at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, is now extended until January 10th.

A few links for those who are still catching up:

UNREALTIME exhibition

Interview with Rhizome

We Make Money Not Art review

Short chat with my sponsors at the US Embassy in Greece

In Greek: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Metadata: UNREALTIME, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition, Athens

Actualization II (Image Transfer)

2010-01-02T12:22:00.002-07:00

What It Means To Be Avant-Garde

(iPhone image captured by Mark Amerika Nature Photography)

Metadata: actualization, image achievement, creative process, intuitive scripting

Actualization

2010-01-01T06:22:00.008-07:00

For the last four years, I have selected one word on January 1st to unconsciously trigger all of my action-oriented performances throughout the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

For 2009, I was feeling the heat and knew I had to go with intensification. As an eerily uncertain 2009 stood before me, I thought that this might be the final year that I employ this one-word triggering device. I wrote:

Knowing what lies ahead all throughout 2009 and knowing that there are a lot of unexpected things that will invite me to unknow the known, there is only one word for me turn to now.

In 2009, the word is intensification.

It ends up that I was right on target: 2009 was, in fact, the most intense year I have had in over a decade. And yet it's good to know that intensity, and its aftermath, can create greater clarity and distinctness and may even lead to a further increase in the "good" or productive kind of intensity that one needs in order to unconsciously trigger their creative potential.

Looking into my crystal ball, I anticipate things remaining as intense as ever in 2010, but there is also a noticeable pattern shift occurring in the world today, one that is unquestionably having an effect on all of my new project development, a shift that will ideally enable me to transmute the intensity of daily remix practice into multiple and hybridized forms of actualization. As I envision what lies ahead in my daily remix practice, I can see where I will still employ an eclectic mix of customized, hyperimprovisational performance methods while intuiting scenes of illumination that are taking my personal narrative in directions I could have never imagined even five years ago.

Given the ongoing intensity of the "writing scenes" I find myself directing, as well as the small team of assistants that I am collaborating with to build these new projects over the next two to three years, I have decided that I still need to locate a single word as trigger-inference, but that this word can no longer start with the letter i since the universal pattern shifts taking place worldwide are too all-encompassing to ignore and my trigger-word must shift in emphasis as well. Therefore, the word-triggers will now start with the letter a instead of i and it's clear to me that the first a word I am triggering this year to help participate as a co-respondent in this universal pattern shift is actualization.

One way to acknowledge my embrace of this universal pattern shift is to change the way I visualize my practice. This will require my continued adherence to a daily remix practice in conjunction with what Whitehead calls the higher phases of experience. This will, in part, require that I further expend time, energy, and money into the successful blurring of art and life just as Allen Kaprow once imagined. This intentional investment strategy wherein I unconsciously expend energy in the simultaneous and continuous remixing of art and life will enable me to co-respond to the emerging blur culture that I see manifesting itself as part of the universal pattern shift. So there's some irony in all of this, as usual. It ends up that the way toward more focused actualization is by initiating a more aesthetically pronounced method of prehending all that is blurring my creative vision.

As I intensify my desire to locate alternative zones of potential discovery, one where "an intense experience" always becomes "an aesthetic fact" (or so says Whitehead), I can see that my conscious effort over the last ten years to actively engage myself in the dreamworld of international culture has finally paid off and I am now feeling pleasantly immersed in the multitudes. Once you are able to hit this key, the first thing that pops into your mind when schmoozing with others in the distributed social network is: "What can I do for you?" This may be something I have been feeling and acting upon for a long time now, but for some reason it feels more intense.

By creating more flexible life patterns we may be able to renew our energy (source material) in ways that trigger yet more intense experiences not just for ourselves but for others. Doing this at the level of daily remix practice as part of an intentional strategy to take the creative process deep into ones shape-shifting underground network via a process of mediumistic actualization feels like just the right thing to do.

As Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality, the primordial nature "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential."

How do we network this potential so that it feeds into more intersubjective, remixological practice?

What does it take to enter the primordial source of creativity?

How does one become an artist-medium that positions their daily practice in relation to the greater creative potential of what lies ahead while acting as an accomplice to an ingression performed by timeless entities whose concrescent formation manifests itself as an actual achievement in time?

Is actualization always already just-in-time?

Or is it always on the cusp of "becoming" -- the idealized condition of "being avant-garde"?

As I oscillate between process and achievement I find myself playing with the idea of self-actualization, first by destroying the self per se, but also by filling some other body.

This brings up an important question that I must not avoid and that is, "Just what exactly are my intentions when positioning my avatar so that it creatively processes the art-life blur toward greater achievement?"

Tao Te Ching muses:

Oftentimes without intentions I see the wonder of Tao.

Oftentimes with intention I see its manifestations.

Both of these are the same in origin;

They are distinguished by names after their emergence.

Their identification is called mystery.

From mystery to further mystery there is an entrance to all wonders.

Metadata: actualization, intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation

Extended Play Remix

2009-12-09T12:41:00.000-07:00

It looks like I'm ending the year the same way I started it, i.e. with another peer-reviewed artist writing published in an international journal devoted to network cultures. Here's the feed from Fibreculture:

The Fibreculture Journal is affiliated with the Open Humanities Press - http://openhumanitiespress.org/

The Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

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What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix

http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/

Issue Editors: Darren Tofts (Swinburne University of Technology,Melbourne) and Christian McCrea (Swinburne University of Technology,Melbourne)

Articles

The Renewable Tradition (Extended Play Remix)
Mark Amerika
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_amerika.html

Cultural Modulation and The Zero Originality Clause of Remix Culture in Australian Contemporary Art
Ross Rudesch Harley
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_harley.html

How can you be found when no-one knows that you are missing?
Lisa Gye
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_gye.html

Sputnik Baby
Ian Haig
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_haig.html

James Brown, Sample Culture and the Permanent Distance of Glory
Steve Jones
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_jones.html

Materialities of Law: Celebrity Production and the Public Domain
Esther Milne
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_milne.html

Materiality of a Simulation: Scratch Reading Machine, 1931
Craig Saper
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue15/issue15_saper.html

This publication perfectly book-ends the year which started with the publication of Source Material Everywhere: The Alfred North Whitehead Remix in the special "Pirate Philosophy" issue of Culture Machine, another high-brow international peer-reviewed journal that is part of the Open Humanities Press. I say high-brow because to think these thoughts and to unravel them as part of an ongoing narrative that positions itself at the uncategorizable writing space where fiction meets memoir meets creative nonfiction meets theory is not the easiest thing in the world to either write or read. But it's the only way I know how to live (writing is surviving). For example, the Source Material Everywhere concept evolved out of nowhere while hyperimprovisationally blogging a few new riffs on remixology in relation to the process theory of Whitehead. These initial "discoveries" (unconsciously projected deep interior shots captured in asynchronous realtime) took place exactly two years ago in Hawaii. Those initial blog riffs then fed into the Culture Machine article which was then remixed into a few seminar sessions in my Remix Culture course. These ideas then got transcoded into some of the narrative material i.e. storyline (if you can call it that) that I finally unfinished as part of my feature-length mobile phone art film, Immobilité, which then fed into my thinking through more general issues relating to contemporary media arts practice that I waxed (poetically?) on in the Rhizome interview.

Make no mistake about it: to remix is to become. It's the only way creatures who perform the role of "postproduction medium" can survive in an age of aesthetics.

Metadata: philosophy, remix, Fibreculture, Culture Machine, postproduction, aesthetics