Actualization III (Teleportation)

Suburban Sublime

(iPhone image captured by Mark Amerika Nature Photography)

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Metadata: actualization, mobile thoughtography, creative input, universal output

UNREALTIME (Extended Version)

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]

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition, Athens

Actualization II (Image Transfer)

What It Means To Be Avant-Garde

(iPhone image captured by Mark Amerika Nature Photography)

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Metadata: actualization, image achievement, creative process, intuitive scripting

Actualization

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.

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Metadata: actualization, intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation

Extended Play Remix

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.

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Metadata: philosophy, remix, Fibreculture, Culture Machine, postproduction, aesthetics

Embassy Interview

While I was in Athens for the UNREALTIME exhibition, one of the sponsors, the U.S. Embassy, arranged for a short interview that I totally forgot about until someone brought it to my attention yesterday. The short interview is here (I like that it's short as it requires me to say what I want to say as a kind of soundbite whereas an interview like the one with Rhizome required quite a bit of extended articulation).

Here is an excerpt from the embassy interview:

Q: Where do you get your inspiration from?

A: Mostly from experimental novels and film. For example, I love the films of Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, and Jean-Luc Godard. And since I started my career as a published novelist, some of my best friends are the most interesting writers of our time. My interactions with them always trigger new ideas for me.

Q: What is the role of today's technology in forming tomorrow's art?

A: Everything is still in development and you must be open to change. For example, my latest project Immobilité, now on exhibit at EMST, is a feature-length film shot entirely on mobile phone. This kind of complex work of art would have been totally impossible even five or six years ago. Of course, just because technology enables us to advance the forms of creative expression does not mean that it will also automatically lead to important works of art. You still must develop a core practice and aesthetic strategy over time.

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, U.S. Embassy

Fabric Samples

Over forty years ago, Barthes anticipates the course of/on remixology:

We know now that a text consists not of a line of words, releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God), but of a multidimensional space in which are married and contested several writings, none of which is original: the text is a fabric of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture.

But try telling that to the liberal humanist cacademics for whom, according to Planned Obsolescence:

We have long acknowledged the death of the author, in theory, at least – but have been loath to think about what such a proclamation might mean for our own status as authors, and have certainly been unwilling to part with the lines on the CV that are the result of the publishing.

If it is language that speaks and not the author, then letting the language speak itself requires what of the artist-medium? How does an artist-medium prepare for their next (postproduction) set, their next (writing) scene, their next choragraphy?

Ray Federman, in Before Postmodernism and After, taps the surfictional muse and writes:

But one could ask, to continue in the questioning mode: Why did Postmodernism allow itself to be swallowed and digested by the culture, or to be stifled by academic theorizing? And the answer would be: Because Postmodernism, and more specifically Postmodern fiction, moved from continuity, from fluidity, coherence, linearity (in history as well as in literature) to discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, plurality, metafictionality, intertextuality, decentering, dislocation, ludism, to become series of disconnected states, combinations of impulses, incoherent lists and verbal doodles, it eventually destroyed itself.

But, one could also ask, isn’t literature language? And isn’t language always stable? Yes, of course, literature is made of language, but language limited by the permutations of a restricted number of elements and functions. However, what made Postmodern fiction interesting and important, and vulnerable too, is that it tried to escape these restrictions, it tried to say what is beyond language, that is why Postmodern fiction was doomed from the beginning. Even though the unspeakable can never be spoken, Postmodernism attempted to speak the impossibility of speaking the unspeakable.

How then does the artist-medium facilitate the discovery of writerly performance beyond language, especially if the role of the artist-medium is to become a remixologist who lets the language speak itself? Can language speak beyond itself?

Federman again:

But isn’t literature an invention, and as such can it not invent its own language? [My imaginary questioner is very stubborn]. No, literature is always a re-invention, it never creates anything new, it simply re-invents the nothing new, in other words — just as the sun every day, having no alternative, rises on the nothing new. Postmodern fiction only re-invented what had been banished, hidden, or expelled from individual or collective memory, this is why it was accused of being plagiaristic, and of working Against Itself.

This is the plight of the remixologist as they per force launch themselves into the renewable tradition.

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Metadata: writing, language, performance, art, postproduction

ReMixed Reality

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 interviewed in last week's edition of Rhizome:

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."

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

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Metadata: remixed reality, networked practice, temporary art,

Ludic Dialogue

My curatorial collaborator at Ludic Pyjamas (where one can immerse themselves in various forms of dreamplay), has an excerpt from the UNREALTIME catalog interview:

DD: Postproduction and remix have played a central role in your work. When discussing your approach you refer more to ideas such as the détournement of the Situationists rather than Bourriaud's or Manovich's positions on postproduction and remix culture. Could you explain to us how do you understand postproduction and remix with reference to your work's development?

MA: You could say that my approach to remix and/or postproduction culture is more akin to a philosophical investigation of what it means to be creative, that we are all born-remixers, and as such we are continually sampling from the datum that surround us and innovating new forms of aesthetic viability. I call this datum Source Material Everywhere – it's literally and metaphorically in the air, ready for downloading, and how we access it, what we do with it once we sample from it, that is to say, how we manipulate it as postproduction artist-mediums, is what makes us unique artists, what Alfred North Whitehead might call "actual entities" ... There can be no doubt that the seemingly very banal concepts of "remix" and "postproduction" are being applied to all kinds of contemporary art practice perhaps to the point where the methodologies that are triggered by the concepts start to lose their value as an avant-methodology. If everything in art can be reduced to "remix" then do we risk simplistically applying it to a wide array of media forms where it soon loses its power to intervene in the mainstream meaning-making process? It's like what has happened to the word "creativity" i.e. there is always the risk of it becoming completely neutered by the corporate behemoth. But for me, there is a deep connection between the desire to create, to innovate new forms of becoming-artist, and the quite natural way we are all operating in auto-remix mode. The idea of remix has to be more than just a conceptual linchpin that someone reports on as in "hey, look at this, everyone is remixing!" I'm not interested in the commodification of remix theory for a self-referential academic or institutional art audience. For me it's an alternative way of approaching life, a grand philosophical principle that fuels the development of creative – what I call postproduction – mediums. It just so happens that as a self-conscious performance artist playing with intuitive remix technologies, I am lucky enough to be living in a time of great transformation thanks in large part to the beauty of digitally networked culture.

(The entire catalog can be purchased for 10 euros by sending an email to [protocol@emst.gr])

Actually, this is a key point I felt needed to be made in relation to my recent work. Jaded types will immediately roll their eyes when encountering anything that even smells like a reference to remix culture because it seems so, well, passé. But to me that's the same as saying that life itself is passé and that to remain energized about ones creative (i.e. remixological) potential is to be totally naïve, I mean, so what if we are all born-remixers who have to continuously generate or "creatively visualize" emergent bio-imagery in order to compose our lives as part of the socio-cultural mosaic?

Of course, I beg to differ (I don't refer to myself in this blog as a "professorial remixologist" for nothing). The thing is, my approach to remix is not an academic or trendy art-world reading of what certain artists "do" as part of a larger creolization of forms inherent in contemporary art practice. As I mention in the Rhizome interview from last week:

...we find ourselves becoming not so much contemporary artists (i.e. "of" our time) but temporary artists, something much more fluid in the sense that we are continually caught in the postproduction process which for me is the same thing as the creative process. Being creative is what it means to be an aesthetic creature, i.e. one who remixes forms and content as part of their ongoing quest for novelty.

I discussed this a bit at the beginning of my artist presentation in Athens. It feels to me like we are moving away from the need to justify our desire to remain "contemporary" and heading toward a more fluid field of discovery and practice that captures what is "temporary" in art. Sure, capturing the temporary plays against the more speculative aspects of the art market, but looking into my crystal ball I am reading the signs and they all say the same thing, i.e. future forms of curatorial practice must deal with the temporary nature of art if they hope to survive in network culture.

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition, Athens

Through A Quantifiable Presence, Abstractly

"Wait ... I'm getting a signal ..."

"Are you ready for signification?"

"Sorry. Repeat question."'

"Are you ready for signification?"

"Not ready. Repeat: not ready."

"Sorry. Are you transducing?"

"Repeat?"

"Are you transducing?"

"Resolving, over."

"We're still looking for a concrete network."

"Check."

"Can you indicate if you are experiencing a loss of information?"

"Repeat?"

"Can you indicate if you are experiencing a loss of information?"

"We are experiencing a vision of ..."

"Sorry. Lost you."

"..."

"Say again? Can you repeat?"

"We are experiencing a vision of pre -- what was that? Sorry. Pre-existence."

"Can you indicate more concretely? Over."

"Hard to characterize. Think emotivity. Proclivity toward motion. Perceptive worlds. Praxis. Moving visual thinking that places the body in a-subjective flux."

"Roger."

"FYI: we are losing power."

"Repeat?"

"Power. We are losing power."

"Negative on that. Can you read me?"

"Shit. I think we lost the signal."

"Can you read me? Repeat: can you read me?"

"Negative."

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Metadata: communication, cybernetics, control

Rhizome interview

Thanks to Rhizome for publishing an extended interview with me where I discuss the exhibition in Athens, why Immobilité is a "foreign film," and how to navigate the trickier aspects of locating a distributed audience to deliver various remixed forms of multi-media work to. I also give props to Alfred North Whitehead whose philosophical texts have recently resonated with my thinking on remixology and postproduction art. The interview was conducted by Rick Silva.

Here is an excerpt:

RS: This idea of 'remixing the form' goes all the way back to your first new media work GRAMMATRON, where you basically wrote a novel as a multimedia hypertext website. Do you think we are in a post remix era, as in post taking-content-directly-from-other-people's-works, and maybe more about remixing aesthetic or structural forms?

MA: My sense is that it's an "all of the above" situation that has been happening for awhile now and that, out of necessity, we find ourselves becoming not so much contemporary artists (i.e. "of" our time) but temporary artists, something much more fluid in the sense that we are continually caught in the post-production process which for me is the same thing as the creative process. Being creative is what it means to be an aesthetic creature, i.e. one who remixes forms and content as part of their ongoing quest for novelty. This is something that we can trace back to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead whose books, particularly Process and Reality, highlight how we quite naturally select useful source material, what he calls datum, and reconfigure it for our own creative needs. So yes, on a practical level, remix culture is about sampling content and manipulating it for temporary effect, but on a philosophical level it goes much deeper than that, where we are intersubjectively jamming with the cultural moment we are part of while at the same time sampling from cultural forms we have inherited. With GRAMMATRON, I am noticeably remixing the formal experiments we find in metafiction, hypertext, and conceptual art+language works while unknowingly helping usher in a new genre that we have since come to call Internet art. The buzz from the discoveries made during the making of GRAMMATRON is then integrated into PHON:E:ME, where I remix the form of the concept album with forms I associate with Conceptual Art while at the same time expanding the concept of peer-to-peer networking, and then with FILMTEXT I try to mash-up a lot of different forms including interactive cinema, games, cyberpunk fiction and what had by then become net art.

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition, Athens, Immobilité, Rhizome Interview

Mutable Manifesto

My 1996 rant (some would say manifesto), "Leaving the Virtual Ghetto," has been virtually republished at Mutable Sound. It's actually hard to articulate what I must have been thinking while flourishing this 1996 writing style. It is part manifesto to be sure, but as I re-read it almost 14 years later I realize why things took a turn in my so-called career right around this time (a year before before launching GRAMMATRON but having presided over Alt-X for three years already). Basically, very few peeps were willing to vocalize what was to me the most obvious thing in the world:

Alternatives to this End of Intelligent Writing and its potential distribution channels are quickly coming into view. The vast untapped lands of cyberspace, the place where any number of commercial, governmental and alternative computer internetworking environments come together to form webs of virtual (or niche) communities, has opened up the possibility of a truly democratic means of creating and disseminating the creative writing of our near-future. Instead of a multi-layered Author-Agent-Editor-Publisher-Printer-Distributor-Retailer-Consumer formula, we may be entering the age of True Dispatch, that is, Author (Sender) - Interactive Participant (Receiver). Visionary writers of the near-future are desperately trying to transgress the dead weight of book matter so as to secretly enter the realm of the Electric.

At the time, it seemed strange to me that there were still a lot of peeps bemoaning the fact that a lot of our citizenry did not really read much any more and that we were witnessing the rise of an illiterate America. But who out there was reading the books and magazines published by the sophisticated literary and intellectual elites in the first place? The high school drop outs in Small Town, USA? Sure, there were and still are way too many people who do not have the basic literacy skills in place to take their skills-set to the next level, but it seemed pretty clear to me back in '96 that not only would intelligent forms of reading and writing move to the networked screen environment, but that new forms of digital rhetoric, what my colleague Greg Ulmer refers to as electracy, would evolve with the rise of digital culture.

No doubt that the creative writing style in this ghetto-rant had an edge to it and was not quite yet Time magazine material, but since we were blasting this kind of message via Alt-X and Alt-X was one of the premiere online publishing networks with a crossover audience covering the literary, art, academic, theory, and underground culture scenes, the word got out and it was all the more easy to write these rants as part of an early online strategy to make the difference that made a difference.

Alas, it paid off.

Nowadays, I turn on the TV and tune in to PBS where I find Time magazine columnists and D.C. lobbyists arguing about how quickly the print publishing establishment will disappear or whether their new media strategies are too little too late.

Basically, my feeling about all of that these days is, "Who cares?"

If you are someone who has an urge to personally express yourself and have figured out how to experiment with the emerging forms of digital rhetoric one can code and distribute over the network, then just get to making new work and if you feel like "going public" with it, then that's easy enough.

Case in point: this blog post.

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Metadata: Alt-X, Mark Amerika, web publishing

arte.mov

The Immobilité remixes are featured in the arte.mov festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil this week. Although I was sorry that, just like with Cimatics in Brussels this month, I had to decline a generous invitation to attend the event in Brazil, the festival producers have a nice blurb in Portuguese right off the home page that also (on page two) includes a translation of my interview with Ana Finel Honigman in Interview magazine. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Ana: So far, the most famous cell-phone films are the "Happy Slapping" evidence movies of kids performing acts of violence. Were you hoping that the beauty of your film would redeem the medium from its associations with "Happy Slapping," amateur porn and DIY recordings of other anit-social behaviour?

MA: Yes. Having lived through both postmodernism and poststructuralism, I think it's safe to say that we are on the verge of something that feels much more intense and requires a new attitude about our approach to life in an age of aesthetics. Instead of feeling jaded by everything there is now this feeling that we need to tap into this enormous creative potential that we're just beginning to connect to via the network. One word that people keep using to describe both Immobilité and my role as the artist who made it is "romantic." At first, I was suspicious of that term, but now I embrace it. We are definitely living in a pre-romantic era and the "pre" is disappearing quickly. The election of Obama has totally verified that.

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Metadata: arte.mov, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, Brazil, exhibition, Interview magazine

TV Time for Unrealtime

Techne TV

The art program on Greek national TV opened their recent show with a long segment on my UNREALTIME exhibition in Athens. Even if you don't speak Greek (I sure don't), you can begin to get a slight feel for the exhibition by watching the video.

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Metadata: UNREALTIME, Immobilité, Mark Amerika, National Museum of Contemporary Art, exhibition, Athens