Creative Apparatus

Subsidizing the advance of Creativity itself
is like performing a Robert Creeley
that is to say you go out of your way
to acknowledge that Creativity rules
on its own terms using the artist-medium
as the conduit for experiential thought
expressed in units that bypass intellect
and find themselves climaxing
in ongoing acts of transmitting ones feelings
and that to become the creative apparatus
in a hacker-driven age of aesthetics defined
by the design culture that fashions us into being

is to "give witness not to the thought of myself,
that specious concept of identity
but, rather, to what I am as simple agency,
a thing evidently alive by virtue
of such activity."

(Evidently performing a Creeley
is no mean trick.)

"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)

This does not mean we are destined
to resemble the computers and/or
algorithmically engendered "thinking machines"
we jam with when engaged in "always live"
remixological sessions

nor does it mean that the brain is
a kind of software that we program
with metaphorical algorithms
to selectively filter/render the data
of everyday life

and no our legs are not robo-limbs
but most of the artists I know
can relate to what I'm saying when I suggest
that we do process these image-things
as body-brain-apparatus achievements

(Ginsberg: "Yes, but can it make you come?")

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

(in a perfect world the economy of motion
would guarantee no wasted energy in pursuit
of optimum electrochemically charged momentum
formally felt as an ongoing satisfaction
triggered by the intensities of our experience)

Think of your ongoing "story" as a generative fiction
one that operates on the uncertainty principle
while surfing that wave of quantum undecidability
one always seems to find themselves riding on
as they mobilize their neurolingusitic thought-processes
into whatever open compositional field they happen
to be playing in ("the ground of the moment"
to sample from Vito Acconci who in his essay
"Steps Into (and Out of) Performance" tells us

"...if I specialize in a medium, then I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another - so, then instead of turning toward 'ground' I would shift my attention and turn to 'instrument,' I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was available"

)

In its many iterations of becoming philosophy
Remixology envisions the artist as a postproduction medium
who becomes instrument while conducting
radical experiments in unconsciously projected thought and experience
(a double agent of distributed aesthetics whose work
quite literally "draws" on/with/from
an open source lifestyle practice
always on the morph)

Many artist-mediums working with new media technologies
are developing (multiple/hybridized/integrated)
daily practices as an alternative approach
to the regimentation of consumer bureaucracies

(perhaps we could call it an epic struggle
one the creative or hacker classes
continually commiserate over as a kind
of informal unionization that collectively
accumulates into some kind of bargaining power

the radical spirit of "always becoming"
a postproduction medium?)

Artists-as-Instruments play out their performances-to-be
on whatever compositional playing fields
they happen to be (re)cycling through when
caught in the heat of postproduction
(think of it as developing an economy
of motion targeted at turning the body
into a renewable energy source)

That playing field would be the ground
of the moment, not one they would
have to dig themselves out of continuously
but one that they would act on as part
of their constructed persona(s) moving
through the networked space of flows

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Metadata: postproduction, visual art, literature, philosophy, artist theory, remix, Robert Creeley

Play

Summer reading is always the best, especially when you can tie it in with a visit to the beach. Right now I'm finishing up Steve Katz's Kissssss. Katz writes fiction in jazzstyle. He plays with trickster mana-language as source material to riff on at will. In one section of the new book entitled "Sawttore," Katz squeezes language poetry out of a tube of spam and devotes the riff to the jazz artist Steve Lacy:

sick juice blues   no clean greens   big bomb charm   
crush cups cupboard   blow house sleep down dreams   
monkey poison person    chicken no more scratch   
chicken sickens   big beef eruption fluck   the nurse  
be killer   mole meat me   roll tanks on you  
mosquito dreams blow truck   nuck

Katz and I saw Lacy together in Denver one night many years ago (I write about it in META/DATA) and in 1997 while touring Sicily I had the pleasure of seeing and breifly meeting Lacy in Taormina as part of the town's awesome film festival. Lacy played live to a silent movie shot in Sicily, walking through the crowd as the movie rolled and talking with the crowd as if deploying sonic metacommentary to what unfurled on the screen, a kind of sax stand up routine to bring even more humor to the Chaplinesque flick we were all watching. When the movie was over and the lights went up, I realized that the person sitting directly in front of me and who had been laughing more heartily than most, was none other than Bernardo Bertolucci. I touch on the Taormina experience here.

Katz's Kissssss is as wry and hip-notic as all of his other books. Sometimes it's good to take your post-pomo fiction medicine in small doses and in this regard Kissssss really has that quick tonic effect. The group hallucination scene that comes as a result not of drugs but of an unusually fantastic evening of mysterious northern lights in Cape Breton, Canada, is classic Katz:

"Do you see them?" Tessa asks. She sees a stage backdrop with a whirl of ballerinas spinning past on point, or leaping into the arms of men with powerful thighs. "See what?" her mother asks. She really doesn't know how to talk about what she is seeing.

But even if you don't know how to talk about what you are seeing, this does not mean that you cannot, as artist-writer, project unconscious thoughts into the realm of the visionary:

Kevin stands up, his jaw slack. What he sees he has trouble believing. What he makes out is horses -- fine Belgians and Percherons, Norics, and Clysedales, each of them pulling a plow across an empyrean, striating the night sky into glowing furrows. "I would do that," says Kevin. "Do what?" Alice rises and sips her vodka and cranberry. She blinks. She can't believe how the sky is unfurling in a broad tartan of light. It stretches as far and as silent as her smile.

Do what? Do the unimaginable, especially when seeing is not believing. Visualizing is another story altogether. I still can't believe I am living in Hawaii. But I keep visualizing its effect every single day.

Reading Katz is ideal summer reading because summer is all about release. It's about liquifying. De-crabbing (and I say this as a Cancer/Moon-baby). It's about play, or unlearning the rote and rerouting the desire to play it as it lays.

Steve Lacy as quoted by Art Lange ...:

"I prefer the word “play”…it’s too long a word, improvisation, and there is no time – it’s gone already. What you do is gone. It goes back to the time you were a child playing with blocks. What we do is play with [musical] elements, given elements, and we play with them the way a child plays with a set of blocks. It’s no different really, except that we sort of know what we’re doing."

Play your Katz and soon you'll be riding a free form writing wave that gets your mind to places its never been and needs to know if you want to blow fiction out as far as it can go.

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Metadata: Steve Katz, Steve Lacy, jazz, fiction, method, summer reading, literary