VJ Persona as Trickster

Random notes toward a philosophy of the VJ (continued):

1) Laptop improvisations by the Monkey Grammarian are part of an art-research investigation always on the verge of asking the burning question.

2) The VJ practices a nomadic, occultist aesthetic, as in: Hermes is "[s]ly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card. . . he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play" (Derrida, 1991, p. 122). Their criticism would be unpredictable, like the divination methods Apollo gave to Hermes, and ultimately uncharacterizable. A truly unpredictable, divinatory criticism would greatly contrast the deductive tendencies of contemporary cultural theory by opposing them with the "slide rule of intuition" (Ulmer, 1994, p. 206) and deliberate cultivation of contingencies that would prevent an identifiable method from congealing. This very absence of essential identity would align Hermes with the Fool in the tarot deck, "who is always on the road, always in the process of becoming" (Semetsky, 2001, p. 59), and hence allows nothingness to acquire a positive value.

3) Live performance or activist Life Style Practice as unconscious triggering of image-events beyond cinematic language, disrupting narrative, challenging the experiential qualifier generally referred to as "realtime" while immersing oneself in a proprioceptive wandering through "realspace" via acts of improvisational composition that "take place" during and outside of the affective interval.

4) Ulmer: "The strategy of chorography for deconstructing the frontier metaphor of research is to consider the 'place' and its 'genre' in rhetorical terms -- as a topos. The project is then to replace topos itself (not just one particular setting but place as such) with chora wherever the former is found in the trivium. In order to foreground the foundational function of location in thought, choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer's specific position in the time and space of a culture." That is, what "takes place" in the affective interval is an improvisational remix of bodily perception composed by the VJ as an aesthetic experiment in chorography.



Metadata: VJ, philosophy, theory, narrative, cinema, writing