Mark Amerika Keynote Mashup: "remixthecontext: the transmedia artist in network culture"
What follows are notes or, if you will, a draft or, even better, a kind of "cheat sheet" that I turned turn to while delivering two recent keynotes, one at the "Regional Narratives" symposium in Rio de Janeiro, the other as part of the three-day "Remix Re-covered" event in Melbourne sponsored by the new Centre for Creative Arts directed by the brilliant Norie Neumark. During the time that elapsed between the two gigs, the notes were modified in pen and then retyped and printed up again.
Although the first book launch party for remixthebook took place in Rio (good timing), the Melbourne event was particularly developed with remixthebook in mind and was one of two texts (the other was Bourriaud's Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World) used to stimulate discussion with the 20+ invited guests at the follow-up symposium.
Here is the "cheat sheet":
I would like my presentation this evening to play with two concepts that are converging in my current practice-based research investigations into theoretical performance: the first is remix or what I have even come to call remixology and the second is transmedia narrative which I will touch on in the second part of my presentation.
Now, when I speak of remix, or remixology, I am actually "going meta" with the concept. What I mean is that I am attempting to expand on the idea of sampling different audio and/or video clips from other artists and reconfiguring them into a specific, self-contained sound or video work. I love to play around with rich audio/visual data just like any remix artist, professional or amateur, does. But for me remixology goes much deeper than that. I don't have a standard definition or, perhaps it would be better to say, that for me remixology is a transformative concept or even conceptual persona that operates as a kind of looming presence in all of my creative and critical work as I have come to play it out over the years.
In an interview with a kind of mainstream art publication last week, when they asked me to explain the term remixology, I said:
Sukenick also once wrote, in one of his manifestos, that you need to "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you." In remixthebook I alter that simply into "Remix your life or someone else will remix it for you."
I also just a few days ago tweeted a remixed version of remixology that I mashed up with Jarry's pataphysics where I wrote "Remixology...will measure the exttent to which everyone is stuck in the rut of individuality."
I tell you this not just for the sake of being clever, but to suggest that even these terms we employ when riff-reading are nothing but more source material and their usefulness can be measured by how supple they become to our remixological touch as we rhetorically situate our creative practices into the flow of everyday life.
This is what artists do. It is what they do as they seek their way out to clearing. The impulse to create, it ends up, is mediumistic or, what in the remixthebook I term metamediumystic. The book actually opens with a quote from Duchamp's 1957 lecture in Houston, Texas, entitled "The Creative Act." In this very short presentation (which you can listen to at ubu.com), Duchamp says:
In remixthebook, I suggest that we may want to turn to remixology as the core principle of novelty – and here I am remixing Alfred North Whitehead who introduces the term Creativity into the philosophical lexicon in his book Process and Reality – where he writes that "Creativity is the principle of novelty" and that via acts of "concrescent prehension" we are biologically wired to experience "the production of novel togetherness."
What does it take for networked scenes of artists who employ strategic remix methodologies to produce [or, in my version – perpetually postproduce] novel togetherness? How would we want to start measuring the value of the aesthetic traces remix artists leave while proactively navigating our practices through these anti-disciplinary spaces we happen to occupy-when-making [and here the terminology is intentionally loaded – "anti-disciplinary" suggesting a mashup of anti-authoritarian and interdisciplinary – and the idea of "occupying" as remixologically inhabiting -- something absolutely connected to the global occupy performances that were initially started by the magazine collective associated with Adbusters, a culture jamming remix crew if ever there was one].
But even as we may want to make the connection between the way we think and dream and write and speak and remixologically inhabit or creatively occupy abstraction as part of an ongoing remixological process, we can also acknowledge that something else is in the mix, something that was barely present in mainstream life even fifteen years ago and that has become more pervasive and embedded in the practice of everyday life like never before, something that has turned everything we do on its head and that has challenged us to innovate the ways we communicate with each other, the ways we make art, the ways we write, the ways we perform our work in the fields of distribution that are available at our fingertips so that we can quite literally (and literarily) become these "intuitive mediums" that Duchamp refers to in his 1957 speech in Houston […] and here, of course, I am referring to the networked and mobile media communications systems that many of us are now – shall I say-- addicted to? – co-dependent upon? – or how about: using to our creative / economic advantage? I'm talking about the Internet, smart phones, and the collaborative forms of social media network performance – what I sometimes refer to as social media performance art practice – which to me becomes an ongoing, nomadic blur of intuitively generated, postproduction styles that are simultaneously and continuously being remixed in various digital editing environments that I port my transmedia narratives through (and I will speak more on transmedia narrative soon).
So let's just run with this a bit: according to the latest version of contemporary remix art theory being generated in remixthebook, we are all born remixers and know that to be the case just through our ability to constantly process reality as intuitive / remixological mediums who autohallucinate while dreaming or who, through daydream postproduction methods manipulate memory and creatively visualize the future present, all the while tweaking our intuitively generated aesthetic filters that we program ourselves to apply so that we can design our creative lifestyle practices with the ever-shifting contexts we perform our postproduction sets in […] (Sukenick: "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you") – and along with this more general and user-friendly concept of remix or remixology that I am opening up to everyone who consciously and/or unconsciously manipulates the data of everyday life as a way to perform in the digital culture, there are these networked and mobile media communication systems and protocols that many of us are intimately attached to (maybe that's better than "addicted to" – let's just say "intimately attached to"), and – something else to throw into the mix now – this is all happening during a time of global crisis because, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are living in a time of radical social, political, economic and technological upheaval. Some might even suggest that the convergence of these factors, technological and biological in the sense that creativity and remixology are embedded socio-psycho-biological processes – is what's DRIVING of a lot of this upheaval. Could it be that to "occupy" as a "movement" is to collectively network social mediums performing on behalf of Creativity so that it [Creativity – or what I am terming remixology] may survive, so that WE – the embodied agents of creativity -- may survive far into the future.
Now, I am not here to lecture on the contemporary state of global politics and the crisis in Wall Street crony capitalism, although as a remix artist, it does provide some source material for my work, as do other politically hot historical events.
This is an image from a recent social media / conceptual art performance I conducted at Occupy Wall Street down at Liberty Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the seemingly geographical center of the #ows action.
But is there really a geographical center?
McKenzie Wark, who has just published a book, The Beach Beneath the Street, with Verso, and that's about the Situationist movements, writes in a blog entry at the Verso web site that the occupation isn't really about Wall Street since "Wall Street" is an abstraction, and as such, represents pr symbolizes a kind of inhuman power exerted by our new robot overlords only these freaks did not come to Planet Earth from Outer Space and are, in fact, man made. The question Wark asks is, "How do we occupy an abstraction?" One way is to physically be there. But another way, the way that this occupation is spreading like wildfire is, of course, by occupying what Wark calls "social media vector." An occupation, Wark writes, is the opposite of a movement:
Here are a few other images to get a feel for the performance:
Here's a story about the applied remixologist entering the abstract terrain of symbolic geography that you might find interesting:
In 2002, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid and I were at the high summit Aspen Institute in Colorado for an elaborate program on Art, Science and Spirituality and when we drove back to Boulder so he could visit my with class, he passed on a VHS copy of Situationist Guy Debord's film Society of the Spectacle" [at this point in time, there was no YouTube to view it on nor was there a boomlet of interest in Debord's work so that it was easily accessible via a DVD box set].
My remix crew in Boulder, DJ RABBI (Rick Silva as Cuechamp, Trace Reddell as pHarmanaut, and myself as Kid Hasid), decided to create a digital remix of Society of the Spectacle. We used Google image search inserting words and phrases from Debord's SOS text – itself a plagiarized mashup of thoughts from diverse sources like Marx and Count de Lautréamont -- who once wrote that "Playgiarism is necessary. Progress implies it" – and from these Google searches we generated all of our visual source material to remix with Debord's own found footage, and applied other remix methods to create the audio and subtitles. This happened just a year or so after 9//11 and I think you'll see how the security state and oligarchy that drove all of the political rhetoric of that time becomes the filter for this specific work. Let's look at about the first half of the remix, a five minute clip.
[show SOS]
So, to reiterate this point just for the sake of clarity, this clip you just viewed is from a work of remix art that is at first triggered by the literal "handing off" or passing on or redistribution of source material – the redistribution of source material wealth for those of us who find value in such things -- and that this trigger – or what in remixthebook -- the Beatnik writer Leroi Jones refers to as a trigger-inference – this trigger-inference is really an embedded social gesture, and this social gesture – the transfer of the source from one artist to another – then leads to the development of experimental and collaborative investigation into "ways of filtering" (and here I am remixing Jon Berger's idea of "ways of seeing"] -- investigating "ways of filtering" common source material as well as delivering this postproduced source material via emergent exhibition contexts in the field of distribution. For this piece, the filters were decidedly politicized and informed by the security state and its conceptual use of terror as a fear trigger as well as a complete collapse of the objective media apparatus that was remixing the conceptual language art of the security state to further its own corporate agenda that it would later mash up in conjunction with Wall Street's Big Financial Crisis.
Now, my work is not always using contemporary politics and/or the whims of the traditional media apparatus as primary source material for socially relevant, aesthetic effect. In fact, if we fast forward about three years after the release of the SOS digital remix, we'll see that my research continues this desire to experiment with "ways of filtering" and investigating different exhibition contexts in the field of distribution in a very different way with my work Immobilité and its unintentional relationship to what some refer to as transmedia narrative.
So I am slightly shifting gears here.
Before I briefly discuss Immobilité and show you some aspects of its eventual production and postproduction, perhaps we should ask ourselves what is transmedia narrative and what value does it have for contemporary artists? The traditional art and entertainment industries would have us believe that transmedia is a powerful marketing concept that uses new media technologies to aggregate fragmented audiences by delivering story information across multiple media platforms. [an early example of this would have been the novice website for the film Donnie Darko but also the various transmedia elements produced in conjunction with films like The Matrix or even Avatar]
But as a remix artist who is investigating these "ways of filtering" and who experiments with his conceptual language art practice in the fields of digital distribution as well as in relation to social media performance, I am hoping to – if you will – reclaim the term "transmedia narrative" for my own uses as I try to imagine how fragmented stories being told by amateur-auteurs resist what the commercially minded academics call "convergence." In fact, the idea of convergence doesn't really match up well when discussed in relation to audience or even story fragmentation. It's part of a very old-fashioned modernist agenda that gets theorized by industry-friendly academics where we are asked to buy into the idea that everything will magically come together in this technologically sophisticated utopia. To me, this seems so anachronistic given how distributed and personalized social media networking feels to me (think Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones) especially in these times of faux prosperity and real-world, dystopian financial ruin. It is my hope that new media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, can now expand the forms of transmedia narrative to foreground this anti-disciplinary approach to encompass both contemporary practice and theory.
Immobilite, is, among other things, an accidental transmedia narrative, one that I composed as part of my hybridized remix / social media art practice. In the summer of 2007, I was invited to be a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the University College Falmouth in Cornwall, the beautiful, you might say wild, southwest region of the UK. This is a location where we not have access to gorgeous country roads or even luscious hideaway coves but immensely dramatic cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean as well as quite good surfing beaches.
When my Cornish hosts asked me from afar what I would like to do when I got there, I wrote back that I wanted to improvise and remix a feature-length "foreign film" shot entirely on mobile phone. This was 2007 and mobile phone video recording technology, though not high-def, was about to take a dramatic leap. And this idea of a "foreign film" as part of a new series of works is related to what Atom Egoyan once wrote. In the introduction to a book titled "Subtitles," Egoyan writes that "Every film is a foreign film." This concept of the "foreign film" relates to my initial impulse to mashup the DIY amateurism of mobile phone video performers playing with the aesthetics of YouTube styled vernacular video with the predominantly European art-house auteur cinema that as an undergraduate film student at UCLA radically altered my vision of the world. My sense was that this was an area ripe for discovery.
In the US, we call films from other countries "foreign films." When I was a teenager, watching foreign films, which none of my friends wanted to do, changed who I was. It turned me on to this alternative way of processing narrative. First of all, since I only spoke English, I had to READ the films every step of the way. This means that my favorite films, the ones that changed my life, are always films that I have had to read. But by reading, I am operating on many different conscious, subconscious and/or unconscious levels, because I am also seeing and listening and even moving too. I'm filtering. For me, movies, or motion pictures, have always been about moving, the art of riding with or ON someone else's rhythm, and learning to process those rhythms and layer them or remix them into my own ever-shifting rhythms. In remixthebook, I refer to this process of embodying rhythms as moving-remixing and I must say, sampling and remixing foreign movements have completely altered both my style and my life's story. Moving with Antonioni is different than moving with Bergman is different than moving with Marker is different than moving with Varda is different than moving with Cassavettes. And here is where I really disturb the commercial theories and premises of so-called transmedia narrative: for me, this moving-remixing of different rhythms – these always-live postproduction sets I am always intersubjectively navigating while reading other narratives – is what informs the ongoing distribution of my own transmedia narrative over the networked and mobile media environments I circulate in, and so the phrase "foreign film" can now, for me, be applied to much more than film per se. I can apply it to this investigation of -- for example -- choreographing the way we mobilize our states of presence over the network (and if were to put a footnote here, which I'm not, but if I were to put a footnote here I would also reference the concept of "choragraphy" in relation to the internet theories of Gregory Ulmer who tells us that "choragraphy" is a state of mind, or a state of "anticipatory consciousness" where invention takes place – and here I am reminded of Mallarme's notion of nothing having taken place but the place [itself] – this is like saying that nothing will have been remixed but the remix process itself, except in this case, and throughout remixthebook, we find that it's the unconscious readiness potential of the postproduction artist who creates novel forms of togetherness that ultimately triggers this performative gesture).
While in Cornwall, the cast and crew would magically convene via a localized social networking scene and the time limit for research and production was something like five-six weeks. Kate Southworth and the team she directed in iRES, the Interactive Art and Design Research Cluster, were incredibly generous and agreed to my proposition. A then brand new, just released Nokia N95 mobile phone with a first generation mobile-phone ready Carl Weiss lens and something like video recording technology was purchased and waiting for me upon my arrival. Once I was there, I was on literally location and in production.
But this is where I want to get a little philosophical with you and suggest that being "in production" is a ruse because, in fact, we are all always already "in postproduction." The digitally born avant-garde remixer is ALWAYS in postproduction. In fact, they must – out of necessity – acquire an elaborate skills-set focused at the interface of electracy [electricity and literacy) – so that they may constantly manipulate the data of everyday life as a way to creatively struggle through their ongoing transmedia narrative AS a work-in-progress distributed across the networked and mobile media environments their social practice unfolds in. For me, this is what being creative is becoming all about (becoming all about). It's something embedded in our unconscious readiness potential – and by that I mean it's something that is quite naturally triggered when we find ourselves caught in the heat of the creative moment – the simultaneous and continuous fusion of moments that comprise the artfulness of what it means to always be in postproduction, to become an intuitive medium engaged with digital media while caught in the heat of the creative act.
To give you a behind-the-scenes idea of what it's like to make an artwork like Immobilité, let me start by saying that Immobilité self-consciously remixes the rhythms and styles of European art-house directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Varda, Cassavettes, Marker, and Ackerman, but also the underground film work of artists like Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and others [and here it should be noted that during our making of the work, in the summer of 2007, one very late night that went into early morning, we found out that both Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day, and this unquestionable fact also fed into our collective and collaborative conversations and mood as we continued socializing the project as an always in-process performance art event] . What would these deaths do to us? How would they tweak our collective social filters as we collaboratively postproduced our feelings while making the "foreign film"?
Now, as an artwork, Immobilité remixes other media besides film. The work not only remixes the stylistic tendencies or rhythms of filmmakers. As I mentioned, the work was shot on location in Cornwall and the wild and beachy landscapes appear throughout. I shot the scenes with this early version of mobile phone video recording technology [the Nokia N95] and really wanted to see what was possible regarding experimental hand-held techniques and very self-consciously used this small device that I could hold in the palm of my hand as a kind of lens-brush, if you will, one that I could manipulate through all kinds of hand-held gestural moves that I would improvisationally choreograph with the actor-players as part of our collaborative spatial and social practice, something that's hard to explain, but that involves building a small network of actors and crew members who basically just hang out together and make the work by sharing their stories, their books, their websites, their music, their food, and their movement through the project as it develops. [I'm sure many low-budget independent films and underground art rock bands have created new work in this kind of environment as well].
The look and feel of many of the experimental landscape shots are absolutely informed by the painterly rhythms of the post-World War II British Abstract Expressionists who, for the most part, resided in Cornwall, along with Surrealist refugees from the European continent who were themselves escaping their war-torn countries but were also, like all artists who eventually come to learn once they live in Cornwall, are dramatically effected by the light. It ends up the lineage of painterly light artists, from the naïve fishermen of the late 19th century, to the British Abstract Expressionists and temporary Surrealist residents, directly inform many of the abstract landscape imagery found throughout Immobilité. And then there is all of the writerly remixes as well, and here I specifically mean the subtitles, 90% of which are sampled and remixed from other films, novels, poems, and philosophical tracts that were circulating within our social network during the making of the film.
[Show remixes from Immobilité]
So what you just saw are remixes of the the 78-minute, limited edition, feature-length "foreign film." As an aside, I would encourage those who are patient enough to experience these kinds of time-based media works – works that experiment with, among other things, duration, repetition, looping, remixing, and altered states of mind or what I think of as dérive-styled or drifting narratives -- to see it from the beginning to end. It had its premiere exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York and was included in my comprehensive retrospective titled UNREALTIME at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. It has also been exhibited in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum, the Seminario of Cinema and AudioVisual in Salvador, the arte.mov festival throughout parts of Brazil, and other venues.
While shooting Immobilité, I developed an improvised, formally experimental strategy of playing against the mobile phone video camera, of outwitting it, of smuggling human intentions into its program, to force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative, and to in many ways show contempt for the phone-as-camera and in so doing reject photography and videography as set formats but to also immediately fall in love with the freedom it gave me to ramp-up my nomadic art-making machine. [These last phrases are all sampled and remixed from Flusser as well.]
But there are other iterations of the Immobilité project too, versions of the work that have appeared in different contexts and in different formats and that have worked against the traditional distribution apparatuses that have enabled the story itself, the story of Immobilité as an art project, to experimentally circulate within the networked fields of distribution.
Looking back, we might say that Immobilité was unconsciously created as an alternative form of what the movie industry now calls transmedia narrative, but one that plays more with social media practices as a way to create intimate relations among the co-conspirators who make it and that does not have to present itself to the corporate entertainment industry as part of an elaborate commercial strategy designed to monetize the fragmentation of audiences.
In a recent dialogue in Portland, where I spend part of the summer, film producer Christine Vachon said that she was focused on being both length-agnostic and format-agnostic. I couldn't agree with her more. Her basic point was that the most important thing is to create the artwork of your time in whatever media formats and genres were open to receiving your creative energy. Once you accept this as the way it is then, all of a sudden, what I am calling spatial practice or the desire to continually tap into one's unconscious creative potential and let the language speak itself, becomes an incredibly vibrant force in REMIXING a life, and in remixing a life, opening oneself up to a social media -- or what we used to call net art -- practice that you can then turn into a nomadic art-making machine which, for me, is another way of phrasing transmedia narrative.
When I say you can turn your ongoing social media practice, with all necessary iPhone or Android accoutrements, into a nomadic art-making machine, what I am really saying is that we are now positioning ourselves to begin investigating the relationship between mobility and immobility, taking pictures and capturing data, and immersing ourselves in a multitude of digital editing environments while transforming ourselves into postproduction mediums who transmit "persona as shareware" [a lovely idea I have sampled from Paul Miller].
Persona as shareware. Or what I like to think of as digital personae as shareware circulating in the networked fields of distribution.
The visual artist Eleanor Antin once said in relation to her prolific practice: "I had a marvelous art-making machine: my personas. I never knew where it would go."
This also relates to the strange tension between the moving image and the mobile image and the emergence of the post-Duchampian artist-medium as nomadic art-making machine. As mobile medium circulating in the networked space of flows.
Let me now show you a few clips of the Immobilité remixes being projected in urban screen environments.
[Show clips of Immobilité on urban screens in Milan and Bucharest]
Is this too not a kind of transmedia narrative?
Think of how the mobile image has transgressed its normal boundaries.
It starts as a gesture where the medium, the artist, the hacker, unconsciously choreographs movement while circulating in the networked space of flow [that is to say, becomes electracy or a chora-graphic performer), holding on to the mobile phone as a data capturing device, but more than that, as part of a prosthetic-aesthetic, an intuitive gesture that meshes with the muscle memory I associate with proprioception --- that is, in the case of the phone, where you hold your eyes in the palm of your hand, and begin performing what dancers sometimes refer to as structured improvisation, capturing data as you slide between proprioception and machinic-vision. This is what it is was like for me shooting "on location" in Cornwall.
These moving gestures capture the data on to the mobile device and then it gets imported into the laptop where it then gets filtered through all kinds of digital editing environments, and one of the outcomes, in addition to the 78 minute version translated into different languages, is a series of remixes that appear on the Web. A curator then downloads those remixes and arranges for them to be projected in urban spaces, like the ones we just saw, and then a web cam captures the images live in the urban setting as part of a datastream over the Internet which I am simultaneously recording using image-capturing software on my laptop as I watch it in some other part of the world, and which I am now, a couple of years later, projecting in a room in Melbourne [Rio, New York, Denver, Istanbul, Sydney, Tokyo, ___].
This is when the moving image becomes a mobile image and the more we can learn from what this may indicate as an outcome of social media practice, perhaps the more we may begin to expand our concept of what it means to construct our lives as a fictionally generated transmedia narrative.
In this case, the remixologically generated transmedia narrative is partly about how the moving image becomes subsumed by the mobile image, how the moving image itself BECOMES mobile just like remix artists are now becoming networked and mobile mediums investigating the emerging forms of creativity.
Keywords: Mark Amerika, keynote, Rio, Melbourne, remixthebook, remixology, Immobilité, #ows
Although the first book launch party for remixthebook took place in Rio (good timing), the Melbourne event was particularly developed with remixthebook in mind and was one of two texts (the other was Bourriaud's Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World) used to stimulate discussion with the 20+ invited guests at the follow-up symposium.
Here is the "cheat sheet":
I would like my presentation this evening to play with two concepts that are converging in my current practice-based research investigations into theoretical performance: the first is remix or what I have even come to call remixology and the second is transmedia narrative which I will touch on in the second part of my presentation.
Now, when I speak of remix, or remixology, I am actually "going meta" with the concept. What I mean is that I am attempting to expand on the idea of sampling different audio and/or video clips from other artists and reconfiguring them into a specific, self-contained sound or video work. I love to play around with rich audio/visual data just like any remix artist, professional or amateur, does. But for me remixology goes much deeper than that. I don't have a standard definition or, perhaps it would be better to say, that for me remixology is a transformative concept or even conceptual persona that operates as a kind of looming presence in all of my creative and critical work as I have come to play it out over the years.
In an interview with a kind of mainstream art publication last week, when they asked me to explain the term remixology, I said:
If it's true that we're all born remixers who unconsciously manipulate the data of everyday life as part of our ongoing social media or performance art practice -- and I think we are -- then remixology is the study of how we do that and the ways we turn this daily, even ritualized remix practice into emergent forms of personal expression.I have other versions, or readings, or riff-readings on what remix MAY be for the contemporary artist – and here the word artist too is fluid, but tends to relate best to my sense of the practice-based researcher who integrates images, sounds, texts, codes, and various social media practices and performance in the digital fields of a distribution. For example, in my collection of artist writings, META/DATA, published by MIT over four years ago, I not only go so far as to say that we are all BORN remixers, but that thanks to the proprioceptive qualities of the body and its nervous connectivity to the brain, we are biologically wired to unconsciously generate all kinds of remixes as can be seen in the way we unconsciously manipulate the data of everyday life through dreams, memories, and imaginative bursts of live, performative creativity – and that an applied remixology, if it is to have a pronounced effect on the revolution of everyday life, must – out of necessity – create a new state of active consciousness that programmatologically investigates the relationship between the real and the unreal – for, as my dear friend, the late great postmodern impresario Ronald Sukenick once said – and I quote him this in remixthebook – "Without the Unreal, there is no real."
Sukenick also once wrote, in one of his manifestos, that you need to "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you." In remixthebook I alter that simply into "Remix your life or someone else will remix it for you."
I also just a few days ago tweeted a remixed version of remixology that I mashed up with Jarry's pataphysics where I wrote "Remixology...will measure the exttent to which everyone is stuck in the rut of individuality."
I tell you this not just for the sake of being clever, but to suggest that even these terms we employ when riff-reading are nothing but more source material and their usefulness can be measured by how supple they become to our remixological touch as we rhetorically situate our creative practices into the flow of everyday life.
This is what artists do. It is what they do as they seek their way out to clearing. The impulse to create, it ends up, is mediumistic or, what in the remixthebook I term metamediumystic. The book actually opens with a quote from Duchamp's 1957 lecture in Houston, Texas, entitled "The Creative Act." In this very short presentation (which you can listen to at ubu.com), Duchamp says:
If we give the attributes of a medium to the artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out.And there, on page one of remixthebook, I take this Duchamp quote and remix it which, I should note, I had already remixed on my Professor VJ blog three years earlier:
If we are all artist-mediums, we must then accept the fact that we are all in perpetual postproduction and that our aesthetic fitness relies on our ability to trigger novelty out of our unconscious creative potential. All of the decisions we make while performing our ongoing work of postproduction art rest with pure intuition and are envisioned as part of the creative act.If you think about it, the source material we intuitively select and the way we remix it into our ongoing construction of what we used to call identity but may really be something more like the social media presence of an artistic medium perpetually postproducing their lives in the networked and mobile space of flows, is what it means to creative – and if we are both OF our time and AHEAD of our time – may also signal what it means to be avant-garde. Which leads me to wonder: if we are all born remixers who are simultaneously OF our time and AHEAD of our time as we participate in these acts of perpetual postproduction, then are we not also born avant-garde and, if so, if that's our biological imperative, then how does that relate to the globally distributed networks of social, economic, and political upheaval that are soundly rejecting whatever it is that is trying to kill the impulse that triggers these life-affirming creative acts – these always live, postproduction sets that naturally born remix artists hope to remixologically inhabit as part a larger creative class struggle to survive in turbo-charged, technocapitalist culture?
In remixthebook, I suggest that we may want to turn to remixology as the core principle of novelty – and here I am remixing Alfred North Whitehead who introduces the term Creativity into the philosophical lexicon in his book Process and Reality – where he writes that "Creativity is the principle of novelty" and that via acts of "concrescent prehension" we are biologically wired to experience "the production of novel togetherness."
What does it take for networked scenes of artists who employ strategic remix methodologies to produce [or, in my version – perpetually postproduce] novel togetherness? How would we want to start measuring the value of the aesthetic traces remix artists leave while proactively navigating our practices through these anti-disciplinary spaces we happen to occupy-when-making [and here the terminology is intentionally loaded – "anti-disciplinary" suggesting a mashup of anti-authoritarian and interdisciplinary – and the idea of "occupying" as remixologically inhabiting -- something absolutely connected to the global occupy performances that were initially started by the magazine collective associated with Adbusters, a culture jamming remix crew if ever there was one].
But even as we may want to make the connection between the way we think and dream and write and speak and remixologically inhabit or creatively occupy abstraction as part of an ongoing remixological process, we can also acknowledge that something else is in the mix, something that was barely present in mainstream life even fifteen years ago and that has become more pervasive and embedded in the practice of everyday life like never before, something that has turned everything we do on its head and that has challenged us to innovate the ways we communicate with each other, the ways we make art, the ways we write, the ways we perform our work in the fields of distribution that are available at our fingertips so that we can quite literally (and literarily) become these "intuitive mediums" that Duchamp refers to in his 1957 speech in Houston […] and here, of course, I am referring to the networked and mobile media communications systems that many of us are now – shall I say-- addicted to? – co-dependent upon? – or how about: using to our creative / economic advantage? I'm talking about the Internet, smart phones, and the collaborative forms of social media network performance – what I sometimes refer to as social media performance art practice – which to me becomes an ongoing, nomadic blur of intuitively generated, postproduction styles that are simultaneously and continuously being remixed in various digital editing environments that I port my transmedia narratives through (and I will speak more on transmedia narrative soon).
So let's just run with this a bit: according to the latest version of contemporary remix art theory being generated in remixthebook, we are all born remixers and know that to be the case just through our ability to constantly process reality as intuitive / remixological mediums who autohallucinate while dreaming or who, through daydream postproduction methods manipulate memory and creatively visualize the future present, all the while tweaking our intuitively generated aesthetic filters that we program ourselves to apply so that we can design our creative lifestyle practices with the ever-shifting contexts we perform our postproduction sets in […] (Sukenick: "use your imagination or someone else will use it for you") – and along with this more general and user-friendly concept of remix or remixology that I am opening up to everyone who consciously and/or unconsciously manipulates the data of everyday life as a way to perform in the digital culture, there are these networked and mobile media communication systems and protocols that many of us are intimately attached to (maybe that's better than "addicted to" – let's just say "intimately attached to"), and – something else to throw into the mix now – this is all happening during a time of global crisis because, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are living in a time of radical social, political, economic and technological upheaval. Some might even suggest that the convergence of these factors, technological and biological in the sense that creativity and remixology are embedded socio-psycho-biological processes – is what's DRIVING of a lot of this upheaval. Could it be that to "occupy" as a "movement" is to collectively network social mediums performing on behalf of Creativity so that it [Creativity – or what I am terming remixology] may survive, so that WE – the embodied agents of creativity -- may survive far into the future.
Now, I am not here to lecture on the contemporary state of global politics and the crisis in Wall Street crony capitalism, although as a remix artist, it does provide some source material for my work, as do other politically hot historical events.
This is an image from a recent social media / conceptual art performance I conducted at Occupy Wall Street down at Liberty Plaza in downtown Manhattan, the seemingly geographical center of the #ows action.
But is there really a geographical center?
McKenzie Wark, who has just published a book, The Beach Beneath the Street, with Verso, and that's about the Situationist movements, writes in a blog entry at the Verso web site that the occupation isn't really about Wall Street since "Wall Street" is an abstraction, and as such, represents pr symbolizes a kind of inhuman power exerted by our new robot overlords only these freaks did not come to Planet Earth from Outer Space and are, in fact, man made. The question Wark asks is, "How do we occupy an abstraction?" One way is to physically be there. But another way, the way that this occupation is spreading like wildfire is, of course, by occupying what Wark calls "social media vector." An occupation, Wark writes, is the opposite of a movement:
[…] a movement aims for some internal consistency within itself but uses space just as a space to park its ranks. An occupation, on the other hand, has no internal consistency in its ranks but chooses meaningful spaces that have significant resonance into the abstract terrain of symbolic geography.What happens when the applied remixologist enters the abstract terrain of symbolic geography?
Here are a few other images to get a feel for the performance:
Here's a story about the applied remixologist entering the abstract terrain of symbolic geography that you might find interesting:
In 2002, Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid and I were at the high summit Aspen Institute in Colorado for an elaborate program on Art, Science and Spirituality and when we drove back to Boulder so he could visit my with class, he passed on a VHS copy of Situationist Guy Debord's film Society of the Spectacle" [at this point in time, there was no YouTube to view it on nor was there a boomlet of interest in Debord's work so that it was easily accessible via a DVD box set].
My remix crew in Boulder, DJ RABBI (Rick Silva as Cuechamp, Trace Reddell as pHarmanaut, and myself as Kid Hasid), decided to create a digital remix of Society of the Spectacle. We used Google image search inserting words and phrases from Debord's SOS text – itself a plagiarized mashup of thoughts from diverse sources like Marx and Count de Lautréamont -- who once wrote that "Playgiarism is necessary. Progress implies it" – and from these Google searches we generated all of our visual source material to remix with Debord's own found footage, and applied other remix methods to create the audio and subtitles. This happened just a year or so after 9//11 and I think you'll see how the security state and oligarchy that drove all of the political rhetoric of that time becomes the filter for this specific work. Let's look at about the first half of the remix, a five minute clip.
[show SOS]
So, to reiterate this point just for the sake of clarity, this clip you just viewed is from a work of remix art that is at first triggered by the literal "handing off" or passing on or redistribution of source material – the redistribution of source material wealth for those of us who find value in such things -- and that this trigger – or what in remixthebook -- the Beatnik writer Leroi Jones refers to as a trigger-inference – this trigger-inference is really an embedded social gesture, and this social gesture – the transfer of the source from one artist to another – then leads to the development of experimental and collaborative investigation into "ways of filtering" (and here I am remixing Jon Berger's idea of "ways of seeing"] -- investigating "ways of filtering" common source material as well as delivering this postproduced source material via emergent exhibition contexts in the field of distribution. For this piece, the filters were decidedly politicized and informed by the security state and its conceptual use of terror as a fear trigger as well as a complete collapse of the objective media apparatus that was remixing the conceptual language art of the security state to further its own corporate agenda that it would later mash up in conjunction with Wall Street's Big Financial Crisis.
Now, my work is not always using contemporary politics and/or the whims of the traditional media apparatus as primary source material for socially relevant, aesthetic effect. In fact, if we fast forward about three years after the release of the SOS digital remix, we'll see that my research continues this desire to experiment with "ways of filtering" and investigating different exhibition contexts in the field of distribution in a very different way with my work Immobilité and its unintentional relationship to what some refer to as transmedia narrative.
So I am slightly shifting gears here.
Before I briefly discuss Immobilité and show you some aspects of its eventual production and postproduction, perhaps we should ask ourselves what is transmedia narrative and what value does it have for contemporary artists? The traditional art and entertainment industries would have us believe that transmedia is a powerful marketing concept that uses new media technologies to aggregate fragmented audiences by delivering story information across multiple media platforms. [an early example of this would have been the novice website for the film Donnie Darko but also the various transmedia elements produced in conjunction with films like The Matrix or even Avatar]
But as a remix artist who is investigating these "ways of filtering" and who experiments with his conceptual language art practice in the fields of digital distribution as well as in relation to social media performance, I am hoping to – if you will – reclaim the term "transmedia narrative" for my own uses as I try to imagine how fragmented stories being told by amateur-auteurs resist what the commercially minded academics call "convergence." In fact, the idea of convergence doesn't really match up well when discussed in relation to audience or even story fragmentation. It's part of a very old-fashioned modernist agenda that gets theorized by industry-friendly academics where we are asked to buy into the idea that everything will magically come together in this technologically sophisticated utopia. To me, this seems so anachronistic given how distributed and personalized social media networking feels to me (think Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones) especially in these times of faux prosperity and real-world, dystopian financial ruin. It is my hope that new media artists, many of whom identify with the historical avant-garde, can now expand the forms of transmedia narrative to foreground this anti-disciplinary approach to encompass both contemporary practice and theory.
Immobilite, is, among other things, an accidental transmedia narrative, one that I composed as part of my hybridized remix / social media art practice. In the summer of 2007, I was invited to be a visiting professor and artist-in-residence at the University College Falmouth in Cornwall, the beautiful, you might say wild, southwest region of the UK. This is a location where we not have access to gorgeous country roads or even luscious hideaway coves but immensely dramatic cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean as well as quite good surfing beaches.
When my Cornish hosts asked me from afar what I would like to do when I got there, I wrote back that I wanted to improvise and remix a feature-length "foreign film" shot entirely on mobile phone. This was 2007 and mobile phone video recording technology, though not high-def, was about to take a dramatic leap. And this idea of a "foreign film" as part of a new series of works is related to what Atom Egoyan once wrote. In the introduction to a book titled "Subtitles," Egoyan writes that "Every film is a foreign film." This concept of the "foreign film" relates to my initial impulse to mashup the DIY amateurism of mobile phone video performers playing with the aesthetics of YouTube styled vernacular video with the predominantly European art-house auteur cinema that as an undergraduate film student at UCLA radically altered my vision of the world. My sense was that this was an area ripe for discovery.
In the US, we call films from other countries "foreign films." When I was a teenager, watching foreign films, which none of my friends wanted to do, changed who I was. It turned me on to this alternative way of processing narrative. First of all, since I only spoke English, I had to READ the films every step of the way. This means that my favorite films, the ones that changed my life, are always films that I have had to read. But by reading, I am operating on many different conscious, subconscious and/or unconscious levels, because I am also seeing and listening and even moving too. I'm filtering. For me, movies, or motion pictures, have always been about moving, the art of riding with or ON someone else's rhythm, and learning to process those rhythms and layer them or remix them into my own ever-shifting rhythms. In remixthebook, I refer to this process of embodying rhythms as moving-remixing and I must say, sampling and remixing foreign movements have completely altered both my style and my life's story. Moving with Antonioni is different than moving with Bergman is different than moving with Marker is different than moving with Varda is different than moving with Cassavettes. And here is where I really disturb the commercial theories and premises of so-called transmedia narrative: for me, this moving-remixing of different rhythms – these always-live postproduction sets I am always intersubjectively navigating while reading other narratives – is what informs the ongoing distribution of my own transmedia narrative over the networked and mobile media environments I circulate in, and so the phrase "foreign film" can now, for me, be applied to much more than film per se. I can apply it to this investigation of -- for example -- choreographing the way we mobilize our states of presence over the network (and if were to put a footnote here, which I'm not, but if I were to put a footnote here I would also reference the concept of "choragraphy" in relation to the internet theories of Gregory Ulmer who tells us that "choragraphy" is a state of mind, or a state of "anticipatory consciousness" where invention takes place – and here I am reminded of Mallarme's notion of nothing having taken place but the place [itself] – this is like saying that nothing will have been remixed but the remix process itself, except in this case, and throughout remixthebook, we find that it's the unconscious readiness potential of the postproduction artist who creates novel forms of togetherness that ultimately triggers this performative gesture).
While in Cornwall, the cast and crew would magically convene via a localized social networking scene and the time limit for research and production was something like five-six weeks. Kate Southworth and the team she directed in iRES, the Interactive Art and Design Research Cluster, were incredibly generous and agreed to my proposition. A then brand new, just released Nokia N95 mobile phone with a first generation mobile-phone ready Carl Weiss lens and something like video recording technology was purchased and waiting for me upon my arrival. Once I was there, I was on literally location and in production.
But this is where I want to get a little philosophical with you and suggest that being "in production" is a ruse because, in fact, we are all always already "in postproduction." The digitally born avant-garde remixer is ALWAYS in postproduction. In fact, they must – out of necessity – acquire an elaborate skills-set focused at the interface of electracy [electricity and literacy) – so that they may constantly manipulate the data of everyday life as a way to creatively struggle through their ongoing transmedia narrative AS a work-in-progress distributed across the networked and mobile media environments their social practice unfolds in. For me, this is what being creative is becoming all about (becoming all about). It's something embedded in our unconscious readiness potential – and by that I mean it's something that is quite naturally triggered when we find ourselves caught in the heat of the creative moment – the simultaneous and continuous fusion of moments that comprise the artfulness of what it means to always be in postproduction, to become an intuitive medium engaged with digital media while caught in the heat of the creative act.
To give you a behind-the-scenes idea of what it's like to make an artwork like Immobilité, let me start by saying that Immobilité self-consciously remixes the rhythms and styles of European art-house directors such as Bergman, Antonioni, Varda, Cassavettes, Marker, and Ackerman, but also the underground film work of artists like Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and others [and here it should be noted that during our making of the work, in the summer of 2007, one very late night that went into early morning, we found out that both Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day, and this unquestionable fact also fed into our collective and collaborative conversations and mood as we continued socializing the project as an always in-process performance art event] . What would these deaths do to us? How would they tweak our collective social filters as we collaboratively postproduced our feelings while making the "foreign film"?
Now, as an artwork, Immobilité remixes other media besides film. The work not only remixes the stylistic tendencies or rhythms of filmmakers. As I mentioned, the work was shot on location in Cornwall and the wild and beachy landscapes appear throughout. I shot the scenes with this early version of mobile phone video recording technology [the Nokia N95] and really wanted to see what was possible regarding experimental hand-held techniques and very self-consciously used this small device that I could hold in the palm of my hand as a kind of lens-brush, if you will, one that I could manipulate through all kinds of hand-held gestural moves that I would improvisationally choreograph with the actor-players as part of our collaborative spatial and social practice, something that's hard to explain, but that involves building a small network of actors and crew members who basically just hang out together and make the work by sharing their stories, their books, their websites, their music, their food, and their movement through the project as it develops. [I'm sure many low-budget independent films and underground art rock bands have created new work in this kind of environment as well].
The look and feel of many of the experimental landscape shots are absolutely informed by the painterly rhythms of the post-World War II British Abstract Expressionists who, for the most part, resided in Cornwall, along with Surrealist refugees from the European continent who were themselves escaping their war-torn countries but were also, like all artists who eventually come to learn once they live in Cornwall, are dramatically effected by the light. It ends up the lineage of painterly light artists, from the naïve fishermen of the late 19th century, to the British Abstract Expressionists and temporary Surrealist residents, directly inform many of the abstract landscape imagery found throughout Immobilité. And then there is all of the writerly remixes as well, and here I specifically mean the subtitles, 90% of which are sampled and remixed from other films, novels, poems, and philosophical tracts that were circulating within our social network during the making of the film.
[Show remixes from Immobilité]
So what you just saw are remixes of the the 78-minute, limited edition, feature-length "foreign film." As an aside, I would encourage those who are patient enough to experience these kinds of time-based media works – works that experiment with, among other things, duration, repetition, looping, remixing, and altered states of mind or what I think of as dérive-styled or drifting narratives -- to see it from the beginning to end. It had its premiere exhibition at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York and was included in my comprehensive retrospective titled UNREALTIME at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. It has also been exhibited in the Fuse Box at the Denver Art Museum, the Seminario of Cinema and AudioVisual in Salvador, the arte.mov festival throughout parts of Brazil, and other venues.
While shooting Immobilité, I developed an improvised, formally experimental strategy of playing against the mobile phone video camera, of outwitting it, of smuggling human intentions into its program, to force the camera to create the unpredictable, the improbable, the informative, and to in many ways show contempt for the phone-as-camera and in so doing reject photography and videography as set formats but to also immediately fall in love with the freedom it gave me to ramp-up my nomadic art-making machine. [These last phrases are all sampled and remixed from Flusser as well.]
But there are other iterations of the Immobilité project too, versions of the work that have appeared in different contexts and in different formats and that have worked against the traditional distribution apparatuses that have enabled the story itself, the story of Immobilité as an art project, to experimentally circulate within the networked fields of distribution.
Looking back, we might say that Immobilité was unconsciously created as an alternative form of what the movie industry now calls transmedia narrative, but one that plays more with social media practices as a way to create intimate relations among the co-conspirators who make it and that does not have to present itself to the corporate entertainment industry as part of an elaborate commercial strategy designed to monetize the fragmentation of audiences.
In a recent dialogue in Portland, where I spend part of the summer, film producer Christine Vachon said that she was focused on being both length-agnostic and format-agnostic. I couldn't agree with her more. Her basic point was that the most important thing is to create the artwork of your time in whatever media formats and genres were open to receiving your creative energy. Once you accept this as the way it is then, all of a sudden, what I am calling spatial practice or the desire to continually tap into one's unconscious creative potential and let the language speak itself, becomes an incredibly vibrant force in REMIXING a life, and in remixing a life, opening oneself up to a social media -- or what we used to call net art -- practice that you can then turn into a nomadic art-making machine which, for me, is another way of phrasing transmedia narrative.
When I say you can turn your ongoing social media practice, with all necessary iPhone or Android accoutrements, into a nomadic art-making machine, what I am really saying is that we are now positioning ourselves to begin investigating the relationship between mobility and immobility, taking pictures and capturing data, and immersing ourselves in a multitude of digital editing environments while transforming ourselves into postproduction mediums who transmit "persona as shareware" [a lovely idea I have sampled from Paul Miller].
Persona as shareware. Or what I like to think of as digital personae as shareware circulating in the networked fields of distribution.
The visual artist Eleanor Antin once said in relation to her prolific practice: "I had a marvelous art-making machine: my personas. I never knew where it would go."
This also relates to the strange tension between the moving image and the mobile image and the emergence of the post-Duchampian artist-medium as nomadic art-making machine. As mobile medium circulating in the networked space of flows.
Let me now show you a few clips of the Immobilité remixes being projected in urban screen environments.
[Show clips of Immobilité on urban screens in Milan and Bucharest]
Is this too not a kind of transmedia narrative?
Think of how the mobile image has transgressed its normal boundaries.
It starts as a gesture where the medium, the artist, the hacker, unconsciously choreographs movement while circulating in the networked space of flow [that is to say, becomes electracy or a chora-graphic performer), holding on to the mobile phone as a data capturing device, but more than that, as part of a prosthetic-aesthetic, an intuitive gesture that meshes with the muscle memory I associate with proprioception --- that is, in the case of the phone, where you hold your eyes in the palm of your hand, and begin performing what dancers sometimes refer to as structured improvisation, capturing data as you slide between proprioception and machinic-vision. This is what it is was like for me shooting "on location" in Cornwall.
These moving gestures capture the data on to the mobile device and then it gets imported into the laptop where it then gets filtered through all kinds of digital editing environments, and one of the outcomes, in addition to the 78 minute version translated into different languages, is a series of remixes that appear on the Web. A curator then downloads those remixes and arranges for them to be projected in urban spaces, like the ones we just saw, and then a web cam captures the images live in the urban setting as part of a datastream over the Internet which I am simultaneously recording using image-capturing software on my laptop as I watch it in some other part of the world, and which I am now, a couple of years later, projecting in a room in Melbourne [Rio, New York, Denver, Istanbul, Sydney, Tokyo, ___].
This is when the moving image becomes a mobile image and the more we can learn from what this may indicate as an outcome of social media practice, perhaps the more we may begin to expand our concept of what it means to construct our lives as a fictionally generated transmedia narrative.
In this case, the remixologically generated transmedia narrative is partly about how the moving image becomes subsumed by the mobile image, how the moving image itself BECOMES mobile just like remix artists are now becoming networked and mobile mediums investigating the emerging forms of creativity.
Keywords: Mark Amerika, keynote, Rio, Melbourne, remixthebook, remixology, Immobilité, #ows
posted by Professor VJ at 10:15 PM
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