Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction Art ...

What is remixology?

What is Postproduction Art?

What is hactivism?

What is net art?

What is a disrupting narrative?

These will be the questions I open the "Disrupting Narratives" symposium with on Friday.

They are straightforward with no hidden agenda although I am back to my old ways and am finding it hard not to turn this artist presentation into more fictional performance.

The digital flux persona who, as artist medium, becomes a kind of compositional instrument acting on whatever ground is available, is sure to turn up.

From the scatternotes now in development:

Vilém Flusser, in Toward A Philosophy of Photography writes:

"The task of the philosophy of photography is to question photographers about freedom, to probe their practice in pursuit of freedom."

Here, the photographer is not just someone who uses a camera to take pictures, but is a kind of fictional philosopher who is using emerging media apparatuses to expand the concept of writing.

To probe ones practice in pursuit of freedom seems a rather lofty ideal given our supposedly post-ideological environment, oui?

But then he (Flusser) goes on to write that "one can outwit the camera''s rigidity," "one can smuggle human intentions into its program," "one can force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative," and "one can show contempt for the camera" by turning away from it as a thing and focusing instead, on information. In other words, freedom (for Flusser) is "the strategy of playing against the camera."

But how?



I too (a kind of fictional philosopher proposing this electronic figure I call the remixologist) am in the final stages of postproduction. But those final stages are never really final, or at least they don't feel that way as I push myself further into the Infinite, that unidentifiable space of mind where the unconscious projections of near future events always keep me on the cusp of what it is I am in the process of creating while experiencing this all-over-sense of "being in perpetual postproduction" as my remixological methods smudge together with what I used to think of as simply being in production...

It makes we wonder if we are always already in a state of "unfinish" (to remix Duchamp's phrase) and leaves me feeling as though my creative process is operating on the edge of forever in the realm of the borderless otherzone.

This is literally what goes through my mind as I use my mobile phone to capture the data that surrounds me so that I can then, later, bring it back into the postproduction studio and further manipulate this disrupting storyworld I find myself acting in.

I'll also be reading some of the fictions from my new book META/DATA and playing some VJ Persona, DJRABBI, and new mobile phone film "reels" ...

---

Metadata: net art, postproduction, VJ, artists, remix, digital photography, mobile phone video art, Tate Modern, hactivism