Remixological Gestures

In a prior post, I quote the artist Robert Smithson:

"...the artist seeks.... the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate." - from “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968)

Then I suggest that we think of that phrase in relation to Jean Cocteau's quote that

"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."

Remixing these two quotes together while dreamsleeping through Eurostar tunnels and various airports that transmit “me” through Paris, London, Copenhagen, and Karlskrona over the last week, I manipulate the data, and come up with this:

"The artist unconsicously visualizes the fiction of the moment; meanwhile, time is always trying to catch up with them so that they become a part of the past (and if it - time - succeeds in catching up with them, then it will absorb and neutralize their creatively visualized fictional becoming making them irrelevant unless they can intuitively postproduce (remixologically inhabit) another version of their ongoing spatial practice."

Somehow this kind of remixological tendency helps me process the ongoing trajectory of my (travel) story.

For me, remixologically inhabiting language by hyperimprovisationally jamming with the source material so that I can manipulate the experience of telling my own pseudo-autobiographical story, is what it means to proactively engage in a hactivist, postproduction process that informs whatever interdisciplinary or hybridized practice I may be forming at any given time.

But whose pseudo-autobiographical story is it, really?

Mine?

Remixologically postproducing the source material that I select so as to create another version of myself as who?

In META/DATA, I quote Henri Michaux who says "There isn't one me. There aren't ten mes. There is no me. ME is only a position of equilibirum. An average of 'mes', a movement in the crowd."

This sense of the not-me follows my practice wherever I happen to be and totally infects -- like a virus -- my postproduction processes whether I am writing experimental novels like the just-released 29 Inches, creating elaborate, interactive works of net art, hovering over the cameras when directing my foreign films, and especially when performing my live AV sets. It has also infected my seminars, visiting artist presentations, and workshops, like the ones I delivered this past week in Sweden.

At various times throughout the META/DATA book, I refer to the "not-me," as when I look at the all of the work I have produced over the last two decades and focus on the various media platforms that this work gets distributed through, and think to myself: "That's just not me."

Isn't life funny that way? If it wasn't me, then who was it? And how on earth did I create all of this multi-media, hybridized, interdisciplinary artwork when I clearly didn't know what I was doing?

At one point during the workshop at BTH in Karlskrona, I thought I heard myself say:

The artist’s gesture, just the gesture, even when presented in jest, is an attempt to tap into the future. The future of freedom. Political freedom.

Then I opened up a file that has a collection of pull-quotes from a draft translation of Flusser’s “Into the Universe of Technical Pictures” and read the following (out loud, improvisationally bringing it into the mix, and digging the resonance of what was fast becoming an intersubjective jam session with the past [Flusser published the original in 1991]):

And in spite of it all I experience my writing gesture concretely as a free gesture, in fact free to such an extent that I would rather give up my life than give up my typewriter. “Writing is necessary, living is not.” For my being is concentrated on my fingertips when I am writing: My entire will, thought and behavior flows into them and through them, past the keys, past the particle universe those keys command, past the typewriter and the paper, and into the public sphere. This, my “political freedom,” my key-striking, publicizing gesture is my concrete experience of keys.

To repeat (or make that “loop back into the mix”):

But whose pseudo-autobiographical story is it, really?

Mine?

Remixologically postproducing the source material that I select so as to create another version of myself as who?

The artist as technologically mediated filter / affective agent of remixology / postproduction writing machine / intersubjective jam persona who "plays to play"?

What do we learn from this projection of political freedom, this gesture toward the future manifested in the concrete experience of keys?

Images leave their mark.

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Metadata: net art, postproduction, VJ, artists, remix, politics, META/DATA