I Can Relate (Miami Version)

I. South Beach offered its homeboy a very warm (80 - 82 degree, daily) welcome.

The soft pastels on the Art Deco buildings blended in perfectly with the serene white light of the sun and the near full moon too, although the moon was jaundiced.

II. Bourriaud, in his Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms The World, says:

while the detournement of preexisting artworks is a currently employed tool, artists use it not to "devalorize" the work of art but to utilize it ... art today manipulates Situationist methods without targeting the complete aboliton of art.

This is true. In a work like "Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)" the art collective DJRABBI not only manipulates Situationist methods without abolishing art, it actually remixes ("postproduces") Situationist works like Debord's films, writings, and sounds, and instead of attempting to abolish the spectacle itself via Marxist ideology, turns spectacle against itself as a way to respond to the chaos of forms being produced en masse by the network culture. The problem, it seems, is not so much the inability to counter spectacle in the media culture, but to find the right poetic tempo to stylize an original remix that captures the flow of the moment one lives in as part of their intersubjective relationships with other people in the world ("ya gots to keeps your peeps").

III. In Pat Cadigan's groundbreaking novel, Synners, first published in 1991, one of her characters, Visual Mark, is what I would call a remixologist (in the book he is a "synner" or a professional visualizer, someone who has the ability to construct on-the-fly, dreamlike music vids out of his creative unconscious and stream them in realtime to his distributed audience that happens to be tapping into his networked mindshare). At one point in Synners, Visual Mark is simply there:

"The sense of having so much space to spread out in - a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought."

A remixologist, I have noted elsewhere, referencing Bergson, locates

the capacity to affectively assemble data into an image (even if the image itself no longer exists, that is, becomes a dense distribution of data that slides by / through / with your subjective body as it selectively filter-enframes it -- tagging it with your personal signature-style effects so as to give it more meaning).

In this excerpt above, I am beginning to reference (we might even say reinvent) an artistic body or operating system that comes with The Secret. The question is: how do you intuitively know that the Metaverse you are navigating is not a consensual hallucination being produced by the vectoralist spin meisters who want to control your code?

From one machine to another, and you can trust me on this, we need to postproduce...

IV: Burroughs: "A paranoiac is someone who has all of the facts at their disposal."

V. But back to Miami. I caught the Red Eye to Artsville, then fell into a budding gallery scene that opened its doors to the idea of second nature. But it was the Moving Images show of Monsieur Warhol, featuring his Screen Tests, not to mention Blowjob and The Kiss, that made the trip premium (I'll take mine with Patron Reposado, por favor).

These "stillies," as Andy may have called them, featured screen test shots of Edie, Dennis Hopper, James Rosenquist, a very young Susan Sontag, Baby Jane Holzer, and the recipients of said blowjob and kisses, and were every bit as body numbing as I thought they would be. This must have something to do with my own series of "Foreign Films" now in production, and their "stillie" effect.

VI. The French Europop band, Air, has a song called Electronic Performers, that I used in postproduction fashion to perform a kind of cross-media mash-up with the silent stillies. The lyrics to Sontag, Baby Jane, Edie, and the rest went:

We are the synchronizers
Send messages through time code
Midi clock rings in my mind
Machines gave me some freedom
Synthesizers gave me some wings
They drop me through twelve bit samplers
We are electronic performers
We are electronics

We need to use envelope filters
To say how we feel
Riding on magnetic waves
We search new programs for your pleasure
I want to patch my soul on your brain
BPM controls your heartbeats
We are the synchronizers
We are electronic performers

Well, not really. I mean, I did hear that tune play in my head sometime during the day, probably in the middle of a long beach walk, but the stillies are silent, and played at silent speed (16 frames per sec). Still, I can't help but wonder, could I have turned my Warhol movie experience into another useful if not valuable work of postproduction art just by adding my iPod playlist to the scene?

VI. Postproduction reminds me that in "The Practice of Everyday Life," de Certeau reveals the hidden movements beneath the surface of the Production-Consumption pair, showing that far from being purely passive, the consumer engages in a set of processes comparable to an almost clandestine, "silent" production.

This is especially true if your artwork is being made with older mobile phone technology, the Warhol flicks are your otherworldly source material, and the museum guards are breathing down your neck. Making art has never been so difficult.

"Using Warhol" is the same as "Using Freud." The interpretation of dreams goes deeper than watching Baby Jane Holzer playfully tease my body as I see her chew gum as if she were slowly chewing me. It's about my body turning on, and in turning on, turning remixological, and in turning remixological, becoming a kind of sinner (synner), an electronic performer, an alchemist in search of his next crude discovery.


JPEG Classic
(Portrait of A Factory Worker)
Signed: Mark Amerika

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Metadata: philosophy, relational aesthetics, art, artists, remix, Miami, Warhol, The Secret, Synners, Air, Burroughs