Friday, January 16, 2009

Artist's Aside

If an embodied digital flux persona performing
their daily practice as an artist-medium
becomes a kind of compositional instrument
acting on whatever ground is available

then we may also view them as a kind of
remixological body electric
affectively mixing their source material
body-image to body-image
via an oscillating string of excitation modes
accelerating on the edge of a “forever composition”
that is then experienced by the artist-medium
as the ongoing becomingness of postproduction

This ongoing becomingness of postproduction
catapults the artist-medium further into the Infinite
that unidentifiable space of mind where
the unconscious projections of near future events
always keep us on the cusp of what it is
we are in the process of creating while experiencing
this all-over-sense of "being in perpetual postproduction"
even as our "novel togetherness" smudges together
with what we used to think of as simply being
in production...

[Artist's aside: Can one perform this
(aesthetic? creatively destructive?
innovative? entrepreneurial?)
function within an economy of motion
i.e. one that wastes no time-movement?

For that matter should one pursue
this optimized state of self-efficiency?

What would be the opportunity costs?

I ask this because sometimes writing out
artist-generated theory feels like wasted motion
as it takes away from the more primary bursts of
creativity immersed in its own potential

but then I have second thoughts in questioning
the interior need to write out my poetics
wondering if this is a further formal extension of
my remixological style-meets-source performance
that like other forms I continually lose myself in
attempts to tap into an ongoing concrescence of prehensions
thus rendering into vision the body-image rhythms
my meta/data longs to become while in distribution

What's an artist-medium to do?

My sense is that the reasons why many artists
novelists poets and performers still take on
the role of philosopher or timely rhetorician are many

To be clear
it's not an attempt to over-academicize ones practice
or to generate extra "brownie points"
for some abstract reporting system
that supposedly benefits the workaholic professor

hardly

this is more about unconsciously projecting
an artist theory or poetics on the contemporary state of
practice-based art research
period]

This kind of autocannibalizing discourse
generally evolves as a way to pragmatically
take into account why these primary bursts of
creativity immersed in their own potential
exist in the first place and how they may relate
to new forms of knowledge that grow out of
what has been remixologically inhabited in the past

Question:

Is remixology Creativity's chosen methodology
for artists cum evolving postproduction mediums?

We don't even really have to be aware of
our past influences while we participate in
these "primary bursts of creativity immersed
in their own remixological potential"

They reside in the body like a second
or third or fourth -- nature ...
something that enables us to "play ourselves"
without having to think about it
(and who better to play you
than that on-the-fly persona you keep
generating in asynchronous realtime)

Acker and Robbe-Grillet are in me
in ways I have no control over
(and this makes me more creative
than I would otherwise ever be
even though they might have totally
disagreed with me and thought that
I was making it all up [as I go along])

Another question emerges:

"Where does this creative potential reside in our bodies?"

Even as we pull these stories out of
our constructed (some would say conceptual) personae
while magically tapping into the keyboard console

it is more apparent than ever that our micro-potentials
are nowhere to be found inside the body
even though that's where they must be stored

You don't have to be a 21st century Einstein
to know that there are still some things that
one must believe will never be discovered

Do we really think we will ever discover
where the residual effects of moving-remixing
are stored as images in the body?

Crack open my brain
and all you have is brainmush

The images won't leak out then or ever
(especially if you crack open my brain –
let me live a while longer and I'll remix what I've got)

Besides

as another formulaic remixologist once said:

"The secret to creativity is
knowing how to hide your sources."

As far as I can tell there is no advanced biophotonic
imaging technology on the market that can come close
to visualizing our past influences in any concrete way
so we are left to our imagination -- our dreams --
our advanced mnemonic devices triggering neural fireworks
in the thick pod-pool of body-brain-apparatus achievements

My experience in making art across the medium spectrum
suggests to me that the subjective events we process
while we tap into our unconscious readiness potential
are themselves the only creative acts worth investing in
and that they are generated by an ongoing sequence of
embedded remixological styles -- styles that organically mature
via a process of innovation that -- in an ironic twist of
unintentional alliance -- seem to sit well with
the herding charge of technocapitalism and
its insistence on the direct presentational immediacy of
the creatively destructed things we bring into the world

[Artist's aside: if this current market crash indicates
what the early theorists of entrepreneurialism
refer to simply as creative destruction
then it's one helluva way to initiate creativity --
global financial meltdown where the very few
totally made-off like Ponzi scheme bandits]

Taking creative destruction to its avant-extreme
it's time for society's artists to reclaim
the mantle of revolutionary provocation:

"If a work is immediate enough," Acker writes,
"live enough, the proper response isn't to be academic,
to write about it, but to use it, to go on. By using
each other, each other's texts, we keep on living,
imagining, making, fucking, and we fight this society
to death."

This often leads to an inevitable co-dependency
on the creative apparatus one turns to when making
(what Burroughs refers to as the algebra of need)

Yes it's true there is Source Material Everywhere
so that I can perpetually postproduce the present
with each new technological advance making that
postproduction process all the more intense for me
as a digitally inclined applied remixologist

but if it's everywhere all the time
does that also not mean that I will never
be able to truly get away from it?


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