Philosophy as Cinema / Pedagogy as Performance

Slow mantra misunderstanding:

I'm thinking, I'm thinking again.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking again.

I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning again.

I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain.

These words, a bastardized remix of an old Talking Heads song, floating inside my head, but then I realize, as I roam the sun-infused city streets, that I am actually speaking these words aloud as I project my voice into my all-purpose mobile appendage sounding not very different, grain-of-of-voice-wise, from the vocal microparticulars of John Cage and wondering if I am impersonating him and why:

I'm thinking with my iPhone ...

I'm thinking with my iPhone as I navigate the circumstance of my next virtual becoming ...

I'm thinking with my iPhone as I navigate the circumstance of my next virtual becoming while recording and editing (sampling and manipulating) the experiential metadata of my peripatetic journey in what feels like asynchronous realtime ...

Simultaneously wondering what these nomadically produced voice-memos will morph into ... a remixable vocal track for my next work of new media / cinematic / video art?

Maybe they can stand on their own as conceptual roadmaps to the distant lands of Dharmagone ...

Simultaneously wandering through urban landscapes and lush green neighborhoods in Portland creates a beautiful tension that earmarks certain aesthetic applications for pet projects always already in the pipeline ...

Walking the trails and hypertextually digressing into deep philosophical thoughts have always been part of the same stream for me ...

Communing with nature often manifests the most innovative dreams I could ever hope to remix in my fertile body and so it's no wonder that in my pleasantly agitated state of mind, walking itself is somehow equated with some of my best go-to ca-ching moments ...

Money in the bank while erotically discharging the next deposit into even greener pastures.

The danger is in becoming-pasteurized.

Or even worse: irradiated.

In a way, it doesn't even matter how these sentences read or if the blog format does them justice. They are scripts for future voice-memos that will be adapted for mobile films in the next millennium. What's key is that they will continually morph into something else and have only become manifest as a result of having morphed the voice-memos that came before them.

Maybe I could postproduce these conceptual personae into scenes of pedagogical performance. The bastardized remix lines from the Talking Heads that start of this blog post could be further remixed into a strangely composed hip-hop track, part Woody Allen / Ingmar Bergman, part David Byrne, part Eric B. / Rakim. That would be easy for me.

This new hip-hop track could then be used as the opening segment of my (always) soon-to-be released Professor VJ YouTube show that will eventually fill in for me as professor. Yes, my network avatar will perform in the seminar room for or as me while I, a shape-shifting body that instantaneously teleports to other exotic locales, am far away consuming the desserts of the unreal.

This is not about escapism. It's not the higher-ed version of iPhoning it in (although if I were to teach a virtual workshop in the "Aspects of Aesthetics in Telecommunications Performance Art" using Moholy-Nagy's "telephone pictures" as tutor-verks, then why not?). It's about the future of higher education (I should write Higher since it really feels like a capital moment). Think multi-media pedagogical performance art. Think distributed audience / student body. Think "long tail" revenue streams ...

Besides, in the context of the contemporary higher education experience, isn't FTF contact highly overrated? Who needs professors in the flesh anyway? (According to an older, emeritus colleague of mine who says that she is glad to be out of the university system and had no idea how oppressive it was to her artistic development until after her retirement, "there was a time in the 60s, 70s, and even 80s when 'professors in the flesh' could make out like bandits since the commodification system of the time would accommodate such exchange, but nowadays most universities are run more like corporations stuck in a bankrupt credit system and it's no secret that many believe that they may have outlived their usefulness." What, universities have outlived their usefulness? Already? But the digital revolution is barely ten years old!)

Can't we just Googlize everything and keep the paychecks coming? What I need is a customized content management and delivery system that will make my networked avatar performance even more valuable than my regularly scheduled ftf encounters. This is not to suggest that I am anti-social or looking for an easy way out of performing my "pedagogical artwork" before groups of students. Rather, it should signal my open-mindedness to becoming more distributed in my social networking presence and, if successful, could create a few new jobs to help keep the production flowing.

What I am calling the postproduction of (pedagogical) presence challenges the old footprint of disciplinary regimes in by-now outmoded academic institutions. Whether I am performing online, in class, or inside a club space, I never wear a particular (disciplinary-revealing) hat. I could be a novelist, a net artist, a web publisher, a live A/V performer, a professor, a cultural entrepreneur, etc. Today I feel like an iPhone voice artist remixologically inhabiting the space of "process philosophy" as I compose my next feature-length foreign film.

Who needs English or philosophy departments when you have iPhones, Flips, netbooks, Kindles, Google, and the WWW? For that matter, who needs film studies programs as they presently constitute themselves given the ease with which one can record and edit image-data to express themselves in online social networking environments? That is to say, who needs a college education when we have each other?

Perhaps we need to reinvent the way we design the interactive learning environment so that everyone who is present can work together while a) maintaining their solo spirit of creativity and b) collectively contributing to the intersubjective and interdisciplinary meta-tag team adventure of the moment?

We have to break away from this "Artists Only" mentality as best captured in the Talking Heads song of the same name:

I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm painting, I'm painting again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning again.
I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning my brain.
Pretty soon now, I will be bitter.
Pretty soon now, will be a quitter.
Pretty soon now, I will be bitter.
You can't see it 'til it's finished
I don't have to prove...that I am creative!
I dont' have to prove...that I am creative!
All my pictures are confused
And now I'm going to take me to you.

It almost sounds artist-professorial ...

But it's not:



Or maybe it is ...

(Is the above song by the RISD graduates an intentional provocation deriding the whole art school experience? Imagine four concurrent grad students at any art school or art department today producing the contemporary equivalent of "More Songs About Buildings and Food" -- you might-could become the #1 art program in the US News and World Report rankings ...)

How can the university recalibrate its pedagogical function so that students who were born-digital can participate in the learning process by rethinking their relationship with all of the technology they already feel so comfortable integrating into their creative lifestyles? I was always told that you can't "teach creative writing" and hear much the same about visual art too. Something about natural or innate talent. But that's a very individual-centered reading of where talent is to be found and, besides, most students today have already used new media technologies to teach themselves how to collaboratively participate in innovative networks of action, purpose, and even artistically generated meaning-making. How would this apply to developing a new philosophy for new media that turns not to literature per se but cinema as a model of collaborative and creative discovery?

So, just as Plato dominated semblance with allegory, saving the image in the very place of Truth with his immortal "myths," we can in the same way hope that cinema will be overcome by cinema itself.

After the philosophy of cinema must come -- is already coming -- philosophy as cinema, which consequently has the opportunity of being a mass philosophy. -- Alain Badiou

But do the mass iPhone philosophers with their customized cinematic language already in hand really stand a chance? Won't the expert elitists guard the fortresses of knowledge and blockade incoming amateur infiltration with all of their exceptional might? Seriously, does anyone really think we are witnessing the inevitable demise of the university?

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Metadata: philosophy, Badiou, cinema, the university, iPhone, education

An Aesthetic Singularity

As he always does, Pinocchio Blog goes deeper than most into the tragic life and death of Michael Jackson:

The point of a successful aesthetic singularity is that it crosses over directly into the form of the universal, without all those mediations that usually come between. Something is so absolutely unique (even when we can trace all the sources from which it arose) and so absolutely, achingly, joyously or heart-wrenchingly right, or just itself, that it becomes a kind of universal value. (In philosophical terms, this is what Kant was getting at with his insistence upon the universal communicability of an aesthetic judgment devoid of cognitive principles and rules; or what Badiou is getting at when he speaks of an event; or what Deleuze was getting in his account of what he called “counter-actualization”). There was a kind of crack or a rupture, something absolutely inimitable in the way it was inscribed in Michael Jackson’s own body, and proliferated throughout that body’s performance. But balanced on the edge in this way, always just short of collapse, it was something that resonated with “everybody” (and in Michael Jackson’s case, the empirical extent of this "everybody" was larger than it had ever been before, and larger, probably, than it will ever be again, at least in any future continuous with our present).

It was good to read this a couple of weeks after the fact, now that the post-death media spectacle itself has died down. When the death came into public view, I was living in a place with no Internet or cable TV which was a kind of Godsend.

One thing about Michael that Pinocchio Blog also points out is that the kind of aesthetic singularity that he represented and the way he located a global "everybody" as his audience (in the same way that, say, The Beatles, did) can never really happen again in Internet culture with its niche marketing and fragmented yet still semi-linkable communities of interest. No matter what you may have thought of his talent or monstrously physical transformation over the latter years of his life, there will never again be a superstar like Michael Jackson in any of our lifetimes.

Where were you in 82?

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Metadata: death, aesthetics, Michael Jackson

Exacta Monde

Flusser:

The word processor’s text is a "thrown" game, a result that has been predicted. Can this thrown result be distinguished from my own text -- or is this too a thrown game, achieved by different means?

Mallarme:

A throw of the dice will never abolish chance

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Metadata: writing, Flusser, Mallarme, game breaker

Fruit of the Loom (Without Stain)

The destabilization of textuality as dispersed in techno Gaia chaos, humming its splits, divisions, discontinuities and informalities in the language of being perfectly reasonable without the slightest sense of angst while instantaneously articulating a vision beyond any cosmogony yet dreamed of, I had no choice but to overnight it in the city and become the locus of my own measure, which felt like a most logical alternative to the steady impulse of ego-structure I had been weaned on so as to maintain the cruise-controlled holding pattern my entire persona had become submerged in. This may seem like a strange way to open a blog entry and is certainly not the direction I thought my new work would be going in, but this none-too-subtle need to succumb to an organic mode of thought that plays at the inner linings of a conceptual feasibility blanketing my entire body seems to be producing something coherent inside my head today. The fact that it feels perfectly coherent says something brutally real and honest about the state of nomadism in contemporary art practice or so I like to think so. Perhaps it signals (as far as the eye can see) the cut-and-paste open source lifestyle practice of the collage professor whose university of ruins entombs yet more iconoclastic potential.

Yet as one of my more assertive young disciples recently said, "You don't want to go there." And it's certainly true, I do not really want to go there. Still, the detour artist sometimes has no choice but to go there, diversions being his bread and butter, the sustenance of his primordial being, a tantric media zone of hyperimprovisational performance where the rubber hits the pavement while he materialistically disseminates loose transfigurations of thought in his field of expertise, a field that is so uncommon given the total lack of interest in playful metatourism but that enables him to quite easily meet his monthly nut, something that seems unimaginable given the current state of the economy.

My big revelation this past week, one that is not new but that seems to persist and feels fresh with each new iteration of screenal manifestation: in art, anything can happen. For example, I have a laptop, a Mr. Coffeemaker, and a bored workman outside my front window pressure-washing a brick building that looks as ugly as it did before he started dusting up his immediate surroundings. The industrial smackdown that kicks up the micro-debris so that it filters through my window screen and up into my morning nostrils creates something like a full body allergic reaction.

OK, got it, pressure-washing bricks, stagnant air, micro-debris, morning nostrils ... what does this have to do with art?

Let's just say that I decided I would use my allergies, and all of the [insert official word for snot] coming out in my continuous sneezing, as real material to spray on my canvas even as I laid on my back perched up on a couple of pillows in bed. Since all I could do was sneeze then why not just turn my hanky into a damp canvas (14" X 14") and then, looking at the ensuing patterns congealed in the cloth, do something with that as my latest siren song to the world? It need not be an appropriated readymade ("Why Not Sneeze?" Duchamp once asked .. my answer this morning though is "Why not indeed?"). Weirdly, I am calling the work "Fruit of the Loom (Without Stain)" and now it will clearly signal my mid-life "crisis of meaning" where I consciously "turn my back" on everything digital.

But that could never happen, could it?

These conceptual drawings are playfully etched into the keyboard and soon will be distributed over the Net as a pure figment of the imaginary. How can that ever not be digital? In these times?

"If you don't change direction, then you just might end up where you are heading."

That's my assertive disciple speaking up again. Suddenly, in a different tense than the one I thought I was operating in, I realize that I can close the window (which I do), shut out the noise and dust, and turn on Cy Twombly's latest album, not really an album, but a playlist in my iTunes app and listen to Narcissus, Poems to the Sea, Untitled, and Untitled. Some people think it sounds like kid's drawings. Anyone can compose these illegible sounds, transfer them to their iPod, and even upload them on ThruTube (they say this in unison, as if making critical sense is the only every God). Maybe so, but what's wrong with that? We can only wish that every kid would feel creative and free enough to scribble imaginary languages on to the medium of their choice (try scribbling on a laptop -- even with a digital sketchpad and optical stylus it somehow doesn't make sense as scribble, which is sad, since scribbling has its material sensibility already built-in like so much bloatware). Besides, anyone with a serious education would know that Twombly's latest mp3s touch on what Valéry, in Rolling Stone, calls "a lengthy hesitation between sound and sense." Maybe he means "sound and sensibility," but I won't quibble (would rather scribble and then move on to whatever comes next). Listening to the Twombly mp3s, I can't help but wonder: "Is there any doubt that the human qualities of multimania are seeping through my earbuds right now?"

One of the liner notes that came with the Twombly mp3 download kind of nailed it when he wrote that "each line is the actual experience with its own innate history" and has the potential to create a dreaminess that inevitably comes with ones continued violation of standard narrative sequencing.

For instance, while listening to one particular mp3 crayon drawing with heavy ballpoint pen tracks mixed in the background (the name of the composition eludes me, something like "Delian Ode,") I realized that a loose and untimely verb-person, that is to say a swift ghost of electronic money energy, had made its way into my latest video remix just as I was drifting off into another one of my pixelated daydreams. The ghost, referring to itself as a "ghost note," was quick with its delivery: "Dear Trance-Artist...How to Cusp Your Sex on My Calloused Lips") and so to counteract any urges that may have started pulsating in my future repertoire, I too began scratching illegible markings on a thin piece of so-called "paper" just to see what a handwritten wave-poem that was "not-me communicating verbally" would look like.

What came out was not really a drawing per se (though I would market it as such) but a secret code that I would use to confuse myself about which way was up and which way was down and it felt like I was discovering a kind of infantile yet iconic status of "becoming" that related to my direct presentation of the thing, this time an intransitive sign that had no trouble declaring itself an error, an error masquerading as a phantom figure in the time slot of history, even as I knew no such history existed and that for the phantom figure it always comes down to the simple dictum of "space or nothing"!

But then what about the past as source material remixologically inhabited by the artist-medium whose job is it to postproduce the present? Is there no historical sense to be found in that most human of telling gestures? Eliot said that historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence and that as much as we may carry our own contemporary context deep inside our bones, there is still the simultaneous existence of everything that came way before we even knew how to hold a crayon in our tiny little hands.

How vital is this sense of historical perception to the throbbing intensities of our collective memory thriving amid the network of associations we immerse ourselves in when reinventing the latest version of our avatar-portrait? Transmitting our ghost energy from the heart to the line should be the most natural thing in the world. Twombly's liner notes suggest that he too wants to avoid anything "that looks arbitrary or self-consciously placed. To me, it looks as if it happened naturally, and that's the point I strive for."

A mosaic of quotations then, a point further emphasized by her gorgeous dream which she (uncharacteristically) recalled in vivid detail as soon as I finished my drawing / writing / listening this morning: according to her deep data dub, we drove our deceased 1984 Honda Civic back to Colorado from Hawaii (note: we did not ship it, we drove it), the car was loaded with all of our worldly possessions, and soon after she dropped me off at "home" (an undisclosed location) she stopped by the place she no longer worked to pick up her mail but there was no mail there, and none of the people looked familiar, except for the Swami who we both saw yesterday morning meditating in front of the same brick wall on North 1st Street in Williamsburg that AT THIS VERY INSTANT was still being pressure-washed by the workman while we ate our Goji Berry Granola with sliced banana and Trader Joe's organic soy milk along with a glass of organic orange juice (no pulp).

Knock-Knock?

Who's there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock-Knock?

Who's there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock-Knock?

Who's there?

Banana.

Banana who?

Knock-Knock?

Who's there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange you glad I didn't say banana?

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Metadata: Williamsburg, June 26-29, 2009

The question of identity (media reflection)

The Arizona Republic caters to the generally conservative Phoenix/Scottsdale crowd but that does not mean that their art reviewer has to play it that way. The first article I read by Richard Nilson in early 2007 was nominally about celebrity culture and art:

We all admit we're drowning in a culture of celebrity. Heck, if you asked Paris Hilton, I'm sure even her trenchant social analysis would be that we pay too much attention to celebrity. At least, she would admit we pay too much attention to Lindsay Lohan.

They're having babies, they're adopting babies, they're abusing babies. They're getting married, getting divorced and being "just friends." They drink and drive, wreck cars, pick up hookers and cuss out cops. They are racists or are in therapy for it. They're having work done or denying it. They eat too much or not enough. They kill their wives and ex-wives. They sing songs about global warming or genocide, front foundations to help the helpless. And, finally, they visit Oprah for absolution.

And that's just the news: It is the journalistic equivalent of Gresham's Law: Bad news coverage drives out good. Weigh the two hands: Do we know more about how the Bush administration came up with its energy policy, or about how many boys Michael Jackson has slept with?

Well said!

Nilson's just now published a new article about net art and how it may point to a future art scene that challenges conventional gallery culture. Titled The Cyber Canvas, the article, which has many quotes sampled from a phone interview we had a few weeks ago, broaches a subject that was initially addressed over ten years ago but that may be on the verge of becoming a more active part of the art world dialogue again now that we are beginning to see some galleries dropping like flies.

The article lists "5 Concerns," the first three of which I'll list here:

5 CONCERNS

There are five concerns in Net art that seldom come up with older media.

• First, it's free.
  
  "Anti-commercial is not quite the right word," Amerika says. "It is an art commons, a sharing of work.
  
  "My advice to students is that if you are in it to make a living, you're in the wrong business."
  
  
  
• The second is the question of sampling and remixing. Much of Internet art is a world of finding something on the ether and altering it: the "ether/or" phenomenon.
  
  "There have been collage artists and post-production artists and the literary cut-up artists," Amerika says. "Maybe the difference is that digital remixing is so easy. What does it take for a young kid to go on the Internet and download an image and open it up in Photoshop and use it to express himself?"
  
  But this raises legal questions about copyright laws and the ethics of using someone else's work as a foundation for their own.
  
  "For young people, this is just day-to-day in their lives," Amerika says.
  
  Many Net-savvy users find copyright laws miserably out of date. They may ignore those laws or, at the very least, fudge them.
  
  
• The third concern is the question of identity. Who are these artists? Some use their own names. Others, like Amerika, have noms-de-Net. Others simply appropriate identities. If you read something online that purports to be by Mark Amerika, for instance, you may be reading something written by a hacker who simply signs Amerika's name. It's a free-for-all.

One question that keeps coming up in conversation in the Manny Hanny / Billyburg art circles I am networking in this month is whether the Deep Recession and general bubble-bursting of the art market with possibly even greater dips to come will radically change behavior in such a fundamental way that artists will be forced to reconfigure not only their art practice but their business practice as well. Artists were on the net way before the vast population moved into cyberspace. While scientists like Tim Berners-Lee were inventing http for the easy linking of scientific papers over the first layer of netspace, a core group of distributed artist communities were immediately at the ready and were treating cyberspace as conceptual art performance theory space (I wrote about this a million years ago here). Now Berners-Lee, in sired scientific fashion, has essentially created a new field of study called Web Science. When I think of Web Science in relation to the science of writing and rhythm science and filter it through a philosophy of remix as Life Style Practice, I can't help but wonder where will it all go next?

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Metadata: net art, iPhone, Mark Amerika, web science, hackers

Score for Black Mountain Language Art Dance in the Year 2009

you know
I scan these quotes
as I read-write-play-perform
and I have to extract them
for spiritual unraveling

...in a basic sense art cannot be taught, and we do not try to. Yet paradoxically it can be learned -- in the beginning from other artists, and then from oneself.

[Motherwell -- A Personal Expression-- given as a lecture on art education in 1949]

no amount of guru think
is going to prehend the reptile
so that they finally stop squirming
in the nestled darkness of
their own special form of oblivion

We are the last 'first' people. We forget that. We act big, misuse our land, ourselves. We lose our own primary.

[Charles Olson -- Call Me Ishmael]

fracking the unconscious
using hydraulic pressure
to unearth the hidden source material

There is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it. Which is why the man said, he who possesses rhythm possesses the universe. And why art is the only twin life has -- its only valid metaphysic. Art does not seek to describe but to enact.

[Charles Olson -- Call Me Ishmael]

it's as easy as your ABCs
i.e. "what we do not know of ourselves
coiled or unflown
is the marrow in bone"

i.e. the rhythm in image
the image in knowing
the knowing in moving
the moving in envisioning

to find in the night where our bodies are unnerved

a structural imbalance that performs a series of inquiries

notating the rough coordinates of the bobbing flotation device

as it leaves open the question of what it means to feel as though

these things that come

are always still

in tangential

in

perpetuity

even while perishing

(while making it nude)

---

Metadata: black mountain college, poetry, interdisciplinary arts education

META/DATA in Paperback (October 2009)

It looks like META/DATA (The MIT Press), my collection of artist writings relating to the early net art years, VJ culture, electronic literature, and the blurring of fiction with memoir in the embodiment of digital persona, will be available in paperback in the fall.

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Metadata: creativity, aesthetics, remix, postproduction, net art, paperback, META/DATA

Formal Invention

Of all of the American poets to have ever lived, there is really only one who persuaded me that the best way to approach writing was to interface the idiomatic with the visual. William Carlos Williams:

To make two bald statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant.

[...]

When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them -- without distortion which would mar their exact significances -- into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity. Your attention is called now and then to some beautiful line or sonnet-sequence because of what is said there. So be it. To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance. What does it matter what the line "says"?

There is no poetry of distinction without formal invention, for it is in the intimate form that works of art achieve their exact meaning, in which they most resemble the machine, to give language its highest dignity, its illumination in the environment to which it is native. Such war, as the arts live and breathe by, is continuous. It may be that my interests as expressed here are pre-art. If so I look for a development along these lines and will be satisfied with nothing else.

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Metadata: illumination, intensity, William Carlos Williams

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.

---

Metadata: writing, Burroughs, travel, living

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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Metadata: writing, Burroughs, Calvino, acting

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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Metadata: video, aesthetics, remix, object, deep studio, Nauman

electronic / urban / visual poetry

Nice public art vibe still happening in Asia ...

Immobilité had its Asian premiere on May 1st for a month-long exhibition in Seoul at the COMO / SKT Tower in the center of the city. The COMO facility is amazing. Curated by the Art Center Nabi, I was able to visit it in 2007 and saw some fantastic video works being screened on the digital walls distributed inside one of Seoul's most technologically advanced buildings. Immobilité has been part of a special "Mobility:Immobility" exhibition running throughout the month of May.

For some reportage on what I was doing in Seoul in 2007, and how it relates to Korean cinema, Zen Buddhism, Nam June Paik, and my own recent artworks, check this out.

Other public exhibitions of my VJ-inspired video works have recently played in another cool pubic venue in Seoul, the W-Walkerhill hotel, which led to my interview in Interview.

Why is my video art going major-league public in Seoul? Hard to say, really. But the abstract color fields and experimental postproduction techniques of the VJ material as well as the formally innovative hand-held techniques of the mobile phone video artwork do lead to a kind of hypnotic or trance effect that may speak an alternative digital / urban language stoked in visual lyricism (translation: it's not only aesthetically pleasing to look at but may resonate with some deeper visceral reaction that the viewer processes in "realtime" without even knowing it -- and this realtime processing may point toward an operative lyricism that signals the emergence of an electronic / urban / visual poetry beyond mere words). Now if only the Korean collectors would take the next step and buy the work.

Immobilité also had its Bangkok premiere on Wednesday night alongside "Buddhist paintings depicting the concept of the great cycle (pathichak samuhapata)."

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Metadata: Immobilité, Bangkok, Seoul, trance, Buddhism, mobile phone art film

Another Trigger Inference

The heat is about turn up here in Boulder and the dry, hot summer will persist as it always does until September.

The local coffeeshops will soon fill with visiting summer poets, the vegan Venetian Creams will be poured over ice, wi-fi connected laptops and iPhones will compete for downloads, and an overall sense of how the Beat past may be informing the post-Beat present will once again surface in random conversations (the Naropa summer writing program aka The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics will be in full swing by then).

But even if you are not spending any time in the Colorado Rockies this summer, there are still ways to imagine how the Beat past can inflect its presence on the writerly present.

LeRoi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, who I met briefly in 1994 when I was first posting my Amerika Online columns on the web 15 years ago, once wrote his "Letter to the Evergreen Review about Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose" (collected in The Portable Beat Reader) and riffed on what it means to be an alive postproduction medium caught in the heat of chemical decomposition.

To start things off, Baraka quotes from Kerouac's "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose":

"MENTAL STATE. IF possible write without consciousness in semi-trance (as Yeat's later 'trance writing').

Then Baraka goes on to write:

This is not be interpreted as 'clinical consciousness' (which hardly exists ... but that is a philosophical question) , but as other consciousness, that is, the 'writer's voice' or the 'painter's eye.' This is the level or stratum of the psyche that is the creative act. The 'writer's voice' dictates the writing just as the 'painter's eye' dictates the strokes the painter makes for his picture.This is the consciousness that supersedes or usurps the normal consciousness of the creator (though even the usual or uninspired consciousness of the creator can hardly be called normal). For it is during this so-called normal state that the artist's peculiar and/or latent impressions are gathered; but it is only during this 'unconscious' state that the writer's voice becomes his only voice ... and the creative act itself is accomplished.

Baraka then tells the story of Billy the Kid who whips out his gun and from the hip shoots a hole through a thin reed. When asked how he can do this without even aiming, Billy replies: "I aim before I pull out the gun." Baraka goes on to say that this relates to spontaneous writing as well. The spontaneous writer

aims before even drawing the gun. That is, the spontaneous writer has to possess a particularly facile and amazingly impressionable mind, one that is able to collect and store not just snatches or episodic bits of events, but whole and elaborate associations: the whole impression intact, so that at the trigger inference the entire impression and association comes flooding through the writer's mind almost in toto. The resultant impression, of course, has been thoroughly incorporated and translated into the supraconsciousness or writing voice of the writer. The external event is now the internal or psychical event which is a combination of interpretation and pure reaction.

Baraka ends the essay by writing about the "pure ecstatic power of the creative climax" of the writer writing, something that the reader can never fully achieve even though they may have successfully traced the writer's path toward unconsciously projected nirvana that he tags "that final 'race to the wire of time.'

"The actual experience of this 'race' is experienced only by the writer," says Baraka, "whose entire psyche is involved and from whence the work is extracted. And no matter how much we 'identify' or are extended by the work, it remains always a work and not ourselves. [...] only the writer is 'relaxed and said' [Kerouac]; the reader is finished, stopped, but his mind still lingers, sometimes frantically, between the essential and the projected, i.e. what we are and what the work has made us, which is the writer's triumph."

There are so many ways of writing just as there are innumerable ways of seeing. The trigger inference style projects a particularly male type of writing that I can relate to (Derrida's dissemination on vegan steroids).

Meanwhile, in the postproduction studio, I am hard at work investigating my own brand of "trigger inference" by interfacing remixology with deconstruction while choreographing a few new moves with écriture féminine...

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Metadata: writing, remixology, unconscious, Beat, Keroauc, Derrida

Immobilité in Bangkok

The 10-minute Streaming Museum remix reel of Immobilité that's been playing on various urban screens the world over, including public spaces in Milan, Melbourne, Montevideo, and all throughout the UK, is going to screen as part of the opening of a new exhibition at the Sombat Permpoon Gallery, one of the most prominent art galleries in Bangkok, Thailand, on May 27th.

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Metadata: Immobilité, Bangkok, art gallery, remix identity,mobile phone art film