2008: An Intense Experience

2008 has been an intense experience all around.

Who knows where it's all really going? In September, while riffing on pre-Internet forms of remixology, I wrote:

Remixology puts into practice the prophetic art
of making things with and out of code
whether it be a poet's direct presentation
a programmer's hacking aesthetic
a net artist's targeted action scripting
or even a live A/V artist's generative performance

In Pre-Internet writerly terms
Ginsberg taps into the poet's ambition
"to write during a prophetic illuminative seizure"
where the artist-medium finds themselves
"in such a state of blissful consciousness
that any language emanating from that state
will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness
from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate."

[...]

For Ginsberg this ecstatic expression
catalyzes into spontaneous transmissions

If you are practicing spontaneous transmission
(Ginsberg says in one of his Boulder lectures)
and by this he means to say
"transmission of your thought"

"how do you choose then what thoughts
you need to put down" while in trance?

The answer (he says, playing Guru)
"is that you don't get a chance to choose
because everything's going so fast."

"It's like driving on a road
you just have to follow the road;
And take turns, 'eyeball it'
as a carpenter would say.
You don't have any scientific
measuring rod, except your own mind.

I don't know of any scientific measuring rod
that's usable. So you have to chance
whatever you can and pick whatever you can.
So there's also a process of automatic selection.
Whatever you can draw in your net is it,
is what you got."


i.e. Remixology forms as a process of
natural selection

intuitive netting of the source material

which then can be manipulated into
the physiological forms of ecstasy
that occasionally appear and are disseminated
during your ongoing postproduction sets

This was from a section called "Ghost Tendencies" but earlier in the year, July 17th to be exact, I wrote about the "Autohallucinating New Media Artist":

How does one successfully bioengineer
the pure mobility of their body-image rhythms
so that the affective remixing of all
the selected source material they postproduce
transforms their ongoing life experience
into an intense aesthetic fact?

[...]

Remixology uses the continual emergence of agency
as a way to spontaneously discover
creative processes that enable the artist-medium
to invent an alternative ontological drift
for Creativity to get lost in

and assumes that if the computer has been
associated with artificial intelligence in terms
of expert systems then the Internet
is the prosthesis not of the expert mind
but of the creative unconscious

A couple of weeks earlier, in June, an entry titled "The Simultaneous Data of the Actual Sensory Situation" suggested that:

For those of us using deep interior projections
to turn intense experience into aesthetic fact
the trick is to become Creativity itself
i.e. the actual sensory situation of Remixology
as it once again enacts the principle of novelty
(a principle of spurring on the further advance
of our ongoing creative momentum via
an applied aesthetics that both manipulates
and is unquestionably manipulated by
the environment that each novel situation
presents to us in its state of immediacy)

and another June entry entitled "Creative Apparatus" revealed some lessons learned from Bob Creeley:

What uses me is what I use and in that complex
measure is the issue," says the Creel
laying down a bottom-line principle
in our remixological poetics

"I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety
of its relation to image and rhythm,
offers an intensely various record
of such facts. It is equally one of them."

"An intense experience is an aesthetic fact,"
Whitehead reverbs and then anticipating
the psychosomatic plasticity of causal feelings
"each ultimate unit of fact is a cell-complex
not analysable into components with equivalent
completeness of actuality."

Remixologically speaking, I would say
my basic sense of measure is
experienced as an image-thing
or an intense aesthetic fact
highly manipulable as just-in-time
source material in an open source lifestyle
that in the very subtlety of its relation
to image and rhythm and embodied praxis
offers an intensely various record
of such facts (and is equally one of them)

Sampling in some new philosophy for new media into the mix, was it any surprise then that the applied remixologist concluded thus:

The processual relayerings of our sense data
remixed as intense aesthetic experiences
leads us to develop a sense of measure
that vibrates with the morphic resonance
of a stimulated economy of motion that readies
our brewing creative potential to intuitively
design our "always live" postproduction sets

I am convinced that I could have only written all of these lines above in Kailua, Windward Coast, Oahu, Hawaii.

These thoughts could only have been generated from a postproduction medium cleverly situated "out of time" and yet simultaneously just-in-time as a body-image projecting into the world. Body-image as wave. Perhaps this is why I would even quote Ken Kesey sometime in May:

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

What was I trying to teach myself through these remix-writings? Looking back, I was teaching myself how to write this book.

My new writing project, Remixology (The Book), will try and locate useful points of intersection between the unconsciously projected frequencies of the artist-medium who "can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because [h]e become[s] the waves" and the compostproducer who turns to the detritus of digital / pop / consumer culture as source material one can remix in on-the-fly versioning of their flux persona.

For me, this is the best way to write autocriticism as biological formalism as fiction.

At times it felt like a Dream Cum True:




Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

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Metadata: creativity, aesthetics, remix, postproduction