Saturday, June 06, 2009

Space Age

Co-Evolution Quarterly circa 1977 via the Whole Earth Catalog:
A basic mutation in consciousness is necessary. No patchwork will do the job. Nobody sitting in his body is egoless. What is the nature of this drastic step into the unknown? As Korzybski said, "I don't know. Let's see." This is the Space Age. Space is a dangerous and unmapped area. It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.
Who was destined to write this, even as they had no idea this was the role their medium was to play?

Chogyam Trungpa? Bruce Lee? Will Lee?

Only the tinyurl knows.


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Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Writing Space


Meta-Tag

"There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose 'story' or 'plot' 'continuity.'"--William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1959): 221
What you sense at the moment of writing (drawing, painting, dancing, jamming, etc.) is not the conventional self, as if self could be easily packaged as some kind of "categorically impaired" thing. According to Burroughs:
Whatever you may be, you are not the verbal labels in your passport any more than you are the word "self." So you must be prepared to prove at all times that you are what you are not. Much of the force of the reactive mind also depends on the falsification inherent in the categorical definitive article THE. THE now, THE past, THE time, THE space, THE energy, THE matter, THE universe. Definitive article THE contains the implication of no other. THE universe locks you in THE, and denies the possibility of any other. [...] The whole reactive mind can be in fact reduced to three little words -- to be "THE." That is to be what you are not, verbal formulations.
How does writing facilitate (trigger) the dissemination of unconscious projections without becoming verbal formulations that are merely reactionary or trapped in the logosphere of false consciousness?

Calvino:
The preliminary condition of any work of literature is that the person who is writing has to invent that first character, who is the author of the work. That a person puts his whole self into the work he is writing is something we often hear said, but it is never true. It is always only a projection of himself that an author calls into play while he is writing; it may be a projection of a real part of himself or the projection of a fictitious "I"--a mask, in short. Writing always presupposes the selection of a psychological attitude, a rapport with the world, a tone of voice, a homogeneous set of linguistic tools, the data of experience and the phantoms of the imagination--in a word, a style. The author is an author insofar as he enters into a role the way an actor does and identifies himself with that projection of himself at the moment of writing.
How does a contemporary writer, using all of the intermedia forms available to them in digital culture, become a creative apparatus that intuitively senses the poetic measure of their next live performance?

Proving at all times that you are what you are not requires an acute sensitivity to ones inner choreography: a choragraphy that feels w-r-i-t-e.


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Sunday, May 31, 2009

Video as Object

No surprise here, but video is an object. A time-based object but an object nonetheless (and I don't mean the DVD is the object).

Bruce Nauman was once interviewed on PBS and said this about his early experiments in video art:
You can watch for a while, leave and go have lunch or come back in a week, and it's just going on. And I really liked that idea of the thing just being there. The idea being there so that it became almost like an object that was there, that you could go back and visit whenever you wanted to.
True, there is a difference between casting plaster and casting feature length "foreign films" ...

... but the one thing a lot of artists share no matter what medium they happen to be working in is the sense of discovery that takes place while caught in the heat of composition. As Nauman remarks in the same interview:
[T]hat's what keeps me in the studio, the not knowing part and always being surprised.
It's what keeps me outside the studio as well not to mention what keeps me intersubjectively jamming in my network-connected deep studio.

Speaking of deep, here's a short remix video that artist Rick de la Silva sent me where he messes with the "deep - data - dub" of this very blog.


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