Agglutination

UPDATED:

For the last five years, I have selected one word on January 1st to unconsciously trigger all of my action-oriented performances throughout the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

For 2009, I was feeling the heat and knew I had to go with intensification. As an eerily uncertain 2009 stood before me, I thought that this might be the final year that I employ this one-word triggering device. I wrote:

Knowing what lies ahead all throughout 2009 and knowing that there are a lot of unexpected things that will invite me to unknow the known, there is only one word for me turn to now.

In 2009, the word is intensification.

It ends up that I was right on target: 2009 was, in fact, the most intense year I have had in over a decade. And yet it's good to know that intensity, and its aftermath, can create greater clarity and distinctness and may even lead to a further increase in the "good" or productive kind of intensity that one needs in order to unconsciously trigger their creative potential.

Looking into my miniscule crystal ball for 2010, I anticipated things remaining as intense as ever but also sensed a noticeable pattern shift occurring in the world all around me, one that I knew was having an effect on all of my new project development, a shift that would ideally enable me to transmute the intensity of daily remix practice into multiple and hybridized forms of actualization. Actualization was a term that haunted me last January 1st and I knew my daily remix practice could not really be taken to the next level without it, just as it could not take shape without an open approach to improvisation, a keen connection to creative intuition, a desire for illumination, and continued immersion into the postproduction process as an intense aesthetic fact.

Given these ongoing intensities, and my willingness to participate as a co-respondent in the unfolding co-poietic scenes I am part of, I saw that this was what actualization was all about. As I wrote last year:

One way to acknowledge my embrace of this universal pattern shift is to change the way I visualize my practice. This will require my continued adherence to a daily remix practice in conjunction with what Whitehead calls the higher phases of experience. This will, in part, require that I further expend time, energy, and money into the successful blurring of art and life just as Allen Kaprow once imagined. This intentional investment strategy wherein I unconsciously expend energy in the simultaneous and continuous remixing of art and life will enable me to co-respond to the emerging blur culture that I see manifesting itself as part of the universal pattern shift. So there's some irony in all of this, as usual. It ends up that the way toward more focused actualization is by initiating a more aesthetically pronounced method of prehending all that is blurring my creative vision.

Today, one word from that entry a year ago stands out: adherence. There are a lot of new developments already in place for 2011, not the least of which is remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press), the continued exhibition of Immobilité at the Denver Art Museum, my participation in group shows in Denver, New York, Boulder, Manchester and beyond, as well as the final bit of postproduction on my next feature-length "foreign film" and the editing, producing and packaging of my stand-up comedy art installation.

Somehow all of the above is driven by an adherence to my daily remix practice. The bottom line is that I need to maintain my practice as intuitive stick-to-itive-ness. Maybe the word I am looking for is sticktuitive. Setting my mind on autopilot, my aim is to continually remix the patterns into new forms of mosaic. But the mosaic, as fluid as it may be, needs to hold together in order for me to feel the need to proceed. It has to agglutinate.

The trigger word for 2011 is agglutination. Even if some elements lose their "stickiness," dislodge, and drift away, I will be paying attention to those things that adhere to each other and create greater clusters of potential to actualize.

I once wrote about agglutination in another context, riffing on the work of Ulmer.

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

---

Metadata: actualization, intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation, agglutination