Spiderbot Synchronicity, Ingenious Formulations, and Living in Auto-Affect Mode

The Google-bots have found an archive page to my 2006 net art work, Passagen-Work, and the web traffic keeps coming. The archived page has some prosaic body language and images that the bots seem ready to consume and tag with meta-difference so that unsuspecting searchers-of-porn all of a sudden find themselves in the middle of a ten-week blog art performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art's "Decades of Influence" exhibition the work was produced for.

As the opening entry to the work posted on June 16, 2006, states:

Lately, I have been looking at blogging as theory-performance. Not as an academic space for the theory of performance (though that's OK too - go for it) - but a place to play out my own theoretical performances in personal blogstyle. I now want to filter that impulse through an "imaginary plug-in" I will call Passagen-Work.

Speaking of methodology, here is what Benjmain wrote in his file on methodology for Passagen-Work:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Of course, he contradicted himself in the best of possible ways and actually said a lot - and so one can imagine that I will attempt to do this too, whether I want to or not. Another difference between Benjamin's approach and mine is that "the rags, the refuse" that I want to make use of are easily sampled from the vast library of information waiting to be aestheticized (performed with, manipulated) on the Internet - and I also have a lot of material I myself have contributed to the electrosphere, material I intend on recontextualizing for this 10 week performance.

It ends up that the idea for my version of Passagen-Work did not come into my head as a spontaneous announcement telling me to repurpose Benjamin's Arcades project in blog form. Rather, the idea began forming in a random Professor VJ blog entry on Blogging: Theory as Performance a couple of months earlier, proving once again (at least to me) that only by innovating new works of (post)production art in a kind of unconsciously generated style of interconnected networking / publishing can I even begin to immerse myself in the aesthetic environment my body traverses while operating in auto-affect mode. As I have mentioned many times before, I can no longer write (which for me is like saying I can no longer live) without a connection to the Network. If the Net connection is down, I cannot postproduce (write, edit, play, create, construct). I can read what I have already written, say, something produced in an MS .doc format, at which point I may be able to lightly edit/revise. But to innovate another version of myself via whatever next work of postproduction art I happen to be creating (collaborating on) at any given time, I must have immediate access to the Network so that I can intersubjectively jam with and/or remixologically inhabit the data. This is the only way I can continually become the postproduction medium my lifestyle practice demands of me.

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Metadata: philosophy, postproduction art, remix, literary montage, Networking, theory as performance as blogging