Professor VJ: 2007-03-04

In the margins, with Calvino

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Is it not literature's implacable duty to destroy literature?

The literature machine's poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and his society.

Is not the artist-medium a ghost's ghost, the alien entity who uses unconscious triggers to reveal the paradoxical state of the specter, which is neither being nor non-being?

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

And yet:


      Desire 
         A Poem 
            Waiting to be Disseminated 
              into a Field of Action
               where the artist-medium
                  shape-shifts into
                     counter-protocol.

To expectorate what has been expelled.

Metadata: philosophy, poetics, literature, art, Calvino

MEGA/DADA

The endorsements for META/DATA are in.

Thanks to all of these intelligent agents, hackers, and doom patrollers for their blurbs.

Also, MIT Press is just coming out with this catalogue for the MOMA exhibition, "WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution."

The cover is beautiful and reminds me of a scene from one of the VJ fictions in META/DATA.

Long live the revolution!

Metadata: writing, net art, VJ, feminism, hype

Captain America Is Dead

On the heels of Baudrillard's recent passing, our superhero, Captain America, the victim of an assassin's bullet, is finally gone:

...in the current issue of his title, Captain America takes bullets in the shoulder and stomach while on the courthouse steps. The assassin is alleged to be Sharon Carter, an intelligence agent romantically involved with Captain America. She was apparently under the control of Dr. Faustus, a supervillain. “It seemed a little radical when it was first brought up,” said Dan Buckley, the president and publisher of Marvel Entertainment, about the hero’s death. “But sometimes stories just take you places.”

Will this mean I'll stop hearing all of the Captain Amerika jokes that inevitably make their way to me all throughout the year?

One can only hope.

Metadata: philosophy, Baudrillard, death, Captain America

The Simulated Life

My voicemail has the voice of a sexy French actress reading lines straight from the teleprompter:

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

"That's Jean Baudrillard," she says, "and I just heard he passed away yesterday. It's different than when Jacques [Derrida] died. Then I was looking at the play of language as a way to construct reality and the role of death in the dance of différance. But here, it's something else that comes to mind, something about an absence of reality to begin with. Godard, Debord, the manipulation of data so that image becomes an ultra-dense form of capital ... the conspiracy of art, oui? I'm not sure he himself was in it for the money -- maybe it was more about his ability to bring substance to his presence as philosopher by simply simulating one model of subjectivity veering toward unintelligibility that informed his identity as a communicator of the hyperreal. How many times during our drives across the Rocky Mountain West, cher love, did you -- or maybe it was me -- refer to the view outside the windshield as alternative TV, the desert of the real, a space for intervention, a zone to engage in symbolic exchange. Those days on the road, wasting time, talking shit, playing ourselves in absentia. Not a bad way to go..."

And then her voice is gone.

Time has run out and the machine has cut her off.

The machine is cutting us all off, and we live to see another day.

Metadata: philosophy, Baudrillard, death, TV, money

Incoming: Big Net Artist

Just in from the gym.

Big Net Artist on the wireless, talking in my ear, saying, "...that part of your blog, where you equate, what was it? Pataphysics and psychogeography with an alchemical, counterintuitive flow? I was thinking about that in relation to intuition. You write about intuition too, yes? "

"Sure. I guess I was riffing on the artist-trickster."

"But not as a kind of spontaneous poetics of net art, because the code always gets in the way, right? Code corrupts flow, no?"

"Well, no, not necessarily, it's a matter of --"

"--intention? Right? I mean it's about becoming counter protocol while disrupting narrative, isn't it?"

"I'm not sure I see what you mean, but speaking of disrupting narrative, I just got home from the gym and wanted to take a shower."

"The shower scene can wait! Maybe it should wait. Remember Norman Bates."

"That would be a gruesome end to an otherwise prolific online second life."

"Yes! So, as I was saying, improvisation --"

"You were saying 'improvisation'?"

"Yes, improvisation, intention, intuition, as far as all that net art jazz goes, you still have to corrupt the flow with counter protocol which is code writing itself."

"Counter protocol is code writing itself? Who is this Counter Protocol character, I wonder."

"Fuck characters! They're destined for plots. Narrative will bury you."

"So you suggest I just hang up and what? Drift into the shower scene, knives ablazing?"

"If you must. But I have an imaginary solution to a problem that doesn't exist and was hoping you would at least listen to it."

"Sure. Can you send it to me as an mp3?"

"No! I mean, I want to tell it to you now, over the phone."

"But I'm not on the phone. I'm on the iPod. Bluetoothing my Mac-mini all temporal data. In fact, I'm not even here right now. Or didn't I tell you that?"

[Silence]

[Loud screetching]

[Host closed connection?]

Metadata: pataphysics, psychogeography, narrative, net art, flow, code, intuition, iPhone/iPod