2008: An Intense Experience

2008 has been an intense experience all around.

Who knows where it's all really going? In September, while riffing on pre-Internet forms of remixology, I wrote:

Remixology puts into practice the prophetic art
of making things with and out of code
whether it be a poet's direct presentation
a programmer's hacking aesthetic
a net artist's targeted action scripting
or even a live A/V artist's generative performance

In Pre-Internet writerly terms
Ginsberg taps into the poet's ambition
"to write during a prophetic illuminative seizure"
where the artist-medium finds themselves
"in such a state of blissful consciousness
that any language emanating from that state
will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness
from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate."

[...]

For Ginsberg this ecstatic expression
catalyzes into spontaneous transmissions

If you are practicing spontaneous transmission
(Ginsberg says in one of his Boulder lectures)
and by this he means to say
"transmission of your thought"

"how do you choose then what thoughts
you need to put down" while in trance?

The answer (he says, playing Guru)
"is that you don't get a chance to choose
because everything's going so fast."

"It's like driving on a road
you just have to follow the road;
And take turns, 'eyeball it'
as a carpenter would say.
You don't have any scientific
measuring rod, except your own mind.

I don't know of any scientific measuring rod
that's usable. So you have to chance
whatever you can and pick whatever you can.
So there's also a process of automatic selection.
Whatever you can draw in your net is it,
is what you got."


i.e. Remixology forms as a process of
natural selection

intuitive netting of the source material

which then can be manipulated into
the physiological forms of ecstasy
that occasionally appear and are disseminated
during your ongoing postproduction sets

This was from a section called "Ghost Tendencies" but earlier in the year, July 17th to be exact, I wrote about the "Autohallucinating New Media Artist":

How does one successfully bioengineer
the pure mobility of their body-image rhythms
so that the affective remixing of all
the selected source material they postproduce
transforms their ongoing life experience
into an intense aesthetic fact?

[...]

Remixology uses the continual emergence of agency
as a way to spontaneously discover
creative processes that enable the artist-medium
to invent an alternative ontological drift
for Creativity to get lost in

and assumes that if the computer has been
associated with artificial intelligence in terms
of expert systems then the Internet
is the prosthesis not of the expert mind
but of the creative unconscious

A couple of weeks earlier, in June, an entry titled "The Simultaneous Data of the Actual Sensory Situation" suggested that:

For those of us using deep interior projections
to turn intense experience into aesthetic fact
the trick is to become Creativity itself
i.e. the actual sensory situation of Remixology
as it once again enacts the principle of novelty
(a principle of spurring on the further advance
of our ongoing creative momentum via
an applied aesthetics that both manipulates
and is unquestionably manipulated by
the environment that each novel situation
presents to us in its state of immediacy)

and another June entry entitled "Creative Apparatus" revealed some lessons learned from Bob Creeley:

What uses me is what I use and in that complex
measure is the issue," says the Creel
laying down a bottom-line principle
in our remixological poetics

"I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety
of its relation to image and rhythm,
offers an intensely various record
of such facts. It is equally one of them."

"An intense experience is an aesthetic fact,"
Whitehead reverbs and then anticipating
the psychosomatic plasticity of causal feelings
"each ultimate unit of fact is a cell-complex
not analysable into components with equivalent
completeness of actuality."

Remixologically speaking, I would say
my basic sense of measure is
experienced as an image-thing
or an intense aesthetic fact
highly manipulable as just-in-time
source material in an open source lifestyle
that in the very subtlety of its relation
to image and rhythm and embodied praxis
offers an intensely various record
of such facts (and is equally one of them)

Sampling in some new philosophy for new media into the mix, was it any surprise then that the applied remixologist concluded thus:

The processual relayerings of our sense data
remixed as intense aesthetic experiences
leads us to develop a sense of measure
that vibrates with the morphic resonance
of a stimulated economy of motion that readies
our brewing creative potential to intuitively
design our "always live" postproduction sets

I am convinced that I could have only written all of these lines above in Kailua, Windward Coast, Oahu, Hawaii.

These thoughts could only have been generated from a postproduction medium cleverly situated "out of time" and yet simultaneously just-in-time as a body-image projecting into the world. Body-image as wave. Perhaps this is why I would even quote Ken Kesey sometime in May:

It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world ... by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.

What was I trying to teach myself through these remix-writings? Looking back, I was teaching myself how to write this book.

My new writing project, Remixology (The Book), will try and locate useful points of intersection between the unconsciously projected frequencies of the artist-medium who "can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because [h]e become[s] the waves" and the compostproducer who turns to the detritus of digital / pop / consumer culture as source material one can remix in on-the-fly versioning of their flux persona.

For me, this is the best way to write autocriticism as biological formalism as fiction.

At times it felt like a Dream Cum True:




Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

---

Metadata: creativity, aesthetics, remix, postproduction

As the Art World Turns III

In addition to his "Theory of Feelings"
Whitehead uses the occasion of processing
his version of mixed reality
to investigate what he matter-of-factly terms
Higher Phases of Experience
and is it only me
or does reading Whitehead sometimes feel like
a kind of non-drug induced autohallucination?

He quotes himself in Process and Reality
by pulling a few lines from the first of his books
I actually ever read back when I was 19
a book entitled Religion in the Making
a title that when I first saw it on the reading list
immediately turned me off
since I was now becoming an adult
and wanted to be independent of whatever it was
that my parents may have tried to imbue
culturally, politically, prehistorically and religiously
and I was not interested in making anything
but my own artwork at the time
(religion was simply out of the question)
and in those days "artwork" for me translated as
"creative writing" and drawing and something like music
but what I would now generically refer to as "sound art"

But then something strange happened and I realized
at age 19 that I was now being pulled in
by Whitehead's Religion in the Making
a book that caught me totally by surprise
mostly due to its holistic use of language
which at the time felt like it was simultaneously
so abstract in a metaphysically incoherent way
as well as visually concrete in the way
it would focus my attention on the experiential qualities
of my life-story as an enduring aesthetic fact

An enduring aesthetic fact?

At 19 and with still no formal education
unless you call going to public high school
in Miami in the 60s and 70s a kind of formal education
how could I (someone who between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen had been working
full-time at the greyhound race tracks)
come to conclude that my life-story
was an enduring aesthetic fact
i.e. how could I be swayed by the confidence
of Whitehead's self-assured writing style
that my own life was associated with the rhythms
and physical vibrations that arise out of
the conditions for intensity and stability,
a tough balancing act if ever there was one?

Reading Whitehead's book at 19
began stimulating that part of my brain
that was ready to play with the philosophical-poetic
source material at my disposal
so that soon I was using the book's writing
as source material to dream up new versions of self
(quickly disposing of religion per se
that is to say diminishing its influence on my then
wildly flirtatious relationship with an experimental lifestyle
that would rid myself of the need to encounter God --
for what was God to a secular 19 year old
former race track employee transforming
the disjointed multiplicity of his flux identity
into fictional decharacterizations in novel form?)

[novel form -- / -- 70s norm -- / -- mixed reality -- / -- in the making]

The quote in his Process and Reality
that Whitehead pulls from Religion in the Making
follows a comment on what he terms
"an intense experience"
one that he assigns to an enduring object
that gains the enhanced intensity of feeling
arising from the contrast between inheritance
and novel effect (what's already there
and what we do with it, remixologically),
all the while tapping into its free-flow sensation
as an embodied praxis syncing body-image rhythms
with the flux of data waiting to be selected
while performing the ultimate balancing act
between intensity and stability

"An intense experience is an aesthetic fact,"
writes Whitehead and then he begins to lay down
some "categoreal conditions" as he calls them
that are to be generalized "from aesthetic laws
in particular arts"

(the art of living life "today"?
this is what we mean by the term remixology)

He then samples from Religion in the Making
two of these conditions / aesthetic laws
and remixes them into Process and Reality:

"1. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve some identity of the character with the ground.

2. The novel consequent must be graded in relevance so as to preserve some contrast with the ground in respect to that same ground of character."

These two principles (he goes on to say)
are derived from the doctrine (what doctrine?) that
"an actual fact is a fact of aesthetic experience.
All aesthetic experience is feeling arising
out of the realization of contrast under identity."

Looking back at my possible reading of this kind of work
back in the late 70s and into the early 80s
I can see where I would have been attracted
to Whitehead's focus on intense aesthetic experiences
and his high valuation of novelty as a way to generate
fluctuating forms of identity /characterization
that would morph the "actual entity" into pools
of differential feelings sinking and swimming
with the flow of whatever life rhythm
they may have been inventing as part of their
ongoing aesthetic practice (he would call this
a "religion in the making" but I would not buy it
and thought of it as something more akin to
the freedom to compose an art lifestyle practice)

Remixologically speaking
"Religion in the Making"
circa 1979-1980
became for me something like
"Art in the Making"
(how was I to become an artist
acting on whatever ground was available
unless I made it up from scratch?)
and now in 2007
becomes something different yet again
let's call it (for lack of better)
"Life in the Making"
(after having pursued an art lifestyle practice
for almost three decades across ten planets
and forty galaxies and seventy blood tranfusions
would it not make utter sense that the biosphere
would be the next best place for me to unravel
the free flow sensations of intense aesthetic experiences?
especially given the fact that the "actual entity"
moonlighting as a "novelty generator" hacking the Real
is always operating in asynchronous realtime?)

but more importantly I would now like to remix
Whitehead's "categoreal conditions"
for "New Media Artists in the Making":

"1. The novelty generator must be valued in relation to their ability to position the energy [source material] they create with the ground they act on while performing their latest remix.

2. The novelty generator must be valued in relation to their ability to position some contrasting energy [source material] with the ground in respect to the already existing energy [source material] they are sampling from while performing their latest remix."

[existing source material -- / -- categoreal imperatives -- / -- experiential sediment]

The experiential sediment of being here in the now
with its fluctuating data rates informing
every instance of novelty generation
takes the "remixologist in the making"
into spaces beyond self - identity - character
and transmutes the conceptual apparatus
they always turn to for their Next Big Idea
into the physical experience of "image rendering"
pulling them into its compositional force field
of seductive knowledge and immanent satisfaction
via the lure of feelings

(something the artist-medium
can never fully sever themselves from)

And yet as Antin writes or transcribes
via his talkstory The Price
"what is locus of the source or ground
of the self [...] what i had in mind
was to look for the place where the self
or what i take to be the self
has its ground"

(resonating as it were with Whitehead again
and his "ground of character")

Now I have never been one who invests much
in concepts of self or character per se
opting for flux personas or even
the idea of an erotically charged
fictional decharacterization of said self
(said who?)

looking back to 1986 a mere eight years
after having left the greyhound race track in Miami
and absorbed all of the Whitehead I could
I wrote my first published short story
"Alkaloid Boy" as part of The Kafka Chronicles
where I went off on this improvisatory riff:

Decharacterization:  
    
      first and foremost / high on the list of things


           To     Do


1)   evil eyed optimist
2)   puritanical pessimist
3)   retrograde renegade
4)   easygoing numskull
5)   taxing interest
6)   megalomaniacal monsterman
7)   persevering wanderer
8)   sunshiny souvenir
9)   sovereign veneer
10) venereal vegetarian
11) pornosophic filmmaker
12) college student
13) bank president
14) beatnik historian
15) girl watcher
16) punky playboy
17) diseased dyslexic
18) monkey grammarian
19) existentialist outlaw
20) linguistic statesman
21) novelty generator
22) effervescent eunuch
23) egghead eavesdropper
24) neoconservative butcher
25) egotistical holyman
26) harmonic hegelian 
27) continue the discontinue
28) still crazy after all these years
29) butcher the butcher
30) wearisome whacker
31) where art thou waterfall?
32) butcher the butcher
333) dead meat   dead meat   dead meat    dead meat
421) off to the boonies
5X1r#217) name address social security perforation
dis
int
egr
ati
on!


final mishapover
 B L O W N
pro  ./  por   ./   tions



                eros intensification

"self need not be so unitary as all that,"
(Antin continues in The Price)
"it depends on what kind of ground it emerges from
how it emerges from it
how continuously it emerges and how uniformly
it presents itself on emerging
and maybe it doesn't really emerge
maybe it only hovers about a certain place
this hovering a kind of complex act performed
by a number of actors whose interaction
we could call the self"

Here is where we enter the realm
of what I have been calling intersubjective jamming
which is different than the idea of a Networked Author
or Collaborative Groupthink Mentality that pries
on the lifestyles of the Source Material Rich
and seemingly forever Almost Famous

for this "hovering" is a "complex act"
that is "performed" by "actors"
who interact in the gestural manipulation
of a "narrative in the making" that just may be
the story of our lives (sounds like a soap opera)
but is more likely something along the lines of
a complexity of events being made by those who
in the presentational immediacy of their selectively manipulated data
form an aesthetic experience that we might call novelty
novelty as the immediate present
one that is capable of establishing the mysterious resonance
of social relatedness as currency in an ongoing
narrative environment that "like a cloud changes as it goes"

This interactive form of intersubjective jamming
that takes place via the gestural manipulation
of a "narrative in the making" points back to Flusser
who in his Into the Universe of Technical Pictures
writes about all kinds of gestures that inform novelty
(writing gestures, visualizing gestures, codifying
gestures, photographic gestures, publicizing gestures):

"The question of what technical pictures mean
is first and foremost a question of how
the envisioning gesture is directed.
Which way do the fingertips responsible
for the pictures point?"

And then:

"What is the maker's attitude?

Where does he stand?"

Although I am not in a position to answer
these questions posed by the gestural Flusser
I would borrow from Whitehead and say
the remixologist in the making
stands on whatever ground of the moment
they happen to be playing on as they
port their narrative/network potential
and its manifest aesthetic facts
into the compositional playing field
their novelty generation operates in

Flusser continues:

"To look at this position, this visualizing gesture
with this question in mind is to realize that
in it a revolutionary new form of existence
is finding expression, a powerful and violent
reversal of human beings' attitude toward the world.
This reversal is so powerful and violent
that it is difficult for us to see.
For visualizers, those who produce technical pictures,
stand against the world, pointing toward it
in order to make sense of it.
Their gesture is a commanding, imperative gesture
of codifying. Visualizers are people who
raise themselves up against the world,
point at it with their fingertips
in order to inform it."

(Remixologists of the World, Unite!)

[codifying gestures -- / -- Revolutionary Visualizers -- / -- remixing as "grounding out"]

Perhaps now would be the perfect time
to make a very straightforward confession
one that is neither here nor there
but somehow still relevant given where we are
in this ongoing talkstory about
actual entities laying down commanding gestures
of all types so as to intensify their experience
as an enduring aesthetic fact --

and that is that I have never learned how to type
I mean literally finesse the QWERTY system
and that as a hunt and peck two-bit operator
I have developed a more sensual relationship
to the keyboard than I have with any other thing
in my life (except for the obvious others)
and that in truth when it comes to performing
I actually never see the keyboard as I type
the keys are just simulated microzones of tender
push button potential for me to seduce
whatever knowledge may be residing in the network
of feelings I have accumulated over time
(maybe I'm just wired for this kind of "actualization"?)

this may seem a trivial footnote
but I have to wonder
if the remixologist as novelty generator
is to be valued in relation to
their ability to position some contrasting energy

        [source material] 

with the ground in respect
to the already existing energy

        [source material]

they are sampling from
then what happens when they use their groundedness
to simply lose themselves in the ether
(maybe I'm not wired for this at all
that is to say, maybe I'm wireless
an enduring aesthetic fact
flying high on Tesla-like electrical conduction
and whose remixological potential
is the ultimate source for a renewable
"Energy in the Making")

In describing feeling Whitehead
ends with a final remark writing
"A feeling is a component in the concrescence
of a novel actual entity"
and proceeds to tell us that the feeling
is always novel in reference to its data.
"The process of the concrescence is a progressive
integration of feelings controlled by
their subjective forms [...] feelings of
an earlier phase sink into the components
of some more complex feeling of a later phase.
[...] each phase adds its element of novelty."

The contemporary remixologist can relate
to all of this and remixes Whitehead to
expand on his philosophy:

An image rendering is a component feeling
in the concrete manifestation
of a remixological performance
one where the artist-medium
selectively filters the data
by tapping into their unconscious neural mechanism
and layers the component feelings in varying
degrees of opacity and balance
conjuring more complex imagery
that generates yet more novelty
transmuting the remixologist's life
into the free flow sensation
of an intense aesthetic experience
of ongoing social connectedness
and open creative potential

Whitehead refers to this transmutation
as a "becoming" in the actual world

"In the becoming, it [the subjective form]
meets the 'data' which are selected
from the actual world. In other words,
the data are already 'in being.' There
the term 'in being' is for the moment
used as equivalent to the term
'in realization.'"

Translation: Source Material Everywhere.

That's the Reality.

What we do with it as remixologists
emerges as a process of the concrescence.

Creative Processing of 

   Selectively Manipulated Source Material 
          
          (DATA)
          
       manifests as the becoming

                of

             (Re)

       Mixed Reality

  Embodied in a Complex of Actual Feelings.

___

Postscript: if you have made it this far, then you might be interested in the accompanying soundtrack to these last two blog posts.

You can download the mp3 here (link fixed).

---

Metadata: philosophy, SCOPE Miami, remix, visual art, Mark Amerika, artists, Alfred North Whitehead, David Antin, aesthetics philosophy, feelings

Actualization

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

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

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

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

In 2009, the word is intensification.

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

Looking into my crystal ball, I anticipate things remaining as intense as ever in 2010, but there is also a noticeable pattern shift occurring in the world today, one that is unquestionably having an effect on all of my new project development, a shift that will ideally enable me to transmute the intensity of daily remix practice into multiple and hybridized forms of actualization. As I envision what lies ahead in my daily remix practice, I can see where I will still employ an eclectic mix of customized, hyperimprovisational performance methods while intuiting scenes of illumination that are taking my personal narrative in directions I could have never imagined even five years ago.

Given the ongoing intensity of the "writing scenes" I find myself directing, as well as the small team of assistants that I am collaborating with to build these new projects over the next two to three years, I have decided that I still need to locate a single word as trigger-inference, but that this word can no longer start with the letter i since the universal pattern shifts taking place worldwide are too all-encompassing to ignore and my trigger-word must shift in emphasis as well. Therefore, the word-triggers will now start with the letter a instead of i and it's clear to me that the first a word I am triggering this year to help participate as a co-respondent in this universal pattern shift is actualization.

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

As I intensify my desire to locate alternative zones of potential discovery, one where "an intense experience" always becomes "an aesthetic fact" (or so says Whitehead), I can see that my conscious effort over the last ten years to actively engage myself in the dreamworld of international culture has finally paid off and I am now feeling pleasantly immersed in the multitudes. Once you are able to hit this key, the first thing that pops into your mind when schmoozing with others in the distributed social network is: "What can I do for you?" This may be something I have been feeling and acting upon for a long time now, but for some reason it feels more intense.

By creating more flexible life patterns we may be able to renew our energy (source material) in ways that trigger yet more intense experiences not just for ourselves but for others. Doing this at the level of daily remix practice as part of an intentional strategy to take the creative process deep into ones shape-shifting underground network via a process of mediumistic actualization feels like just the right thing to do.

As Whitehead wrote in Process and Reality, the primordial nature "combines the actuality of what is temporal with the timelessness of what is potential."

How do we network this potential so that it feeds into more intersubjective, remixological practice?

What does it take to enter the primordial source of creativity?

How does one become an artist-medium that positions their daily practice in relation to the greater creative potential of what lies ahead while acting as an accomplice to an ingression performed by timeless entities whose concrescent formation manifests itself as an actual achievement in time?

Is actualization always already just-in-time?

Or is it always on the cusp of "becoming" -- the idealized condition of "being avant-garde"?

As I oscillate between process and achievement I find myself playing with the idea of self-actualization, first by destroying the self per se, but also by filling some other body.

This brings up an important question that I must not avoid and that is, "Just what exactly are my intentions when positioning my avatar so that it creatively processes the art-life blur toward greater achievement?"

Tao Te Ching muses:

Oftentimes without intentions I see the wonder of Tao.

Oftentimes with intention I see its manifestations.

Both of these are the same in origin;

They are distinguished by names after their emergence.

Their identification is called mystery.

From mystery to further mystery there is an entrance to all wonders.

---

Metadata: actualization, intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation

Creative Apparatus

Subsidizing the advance of Creativity itself
is like performing a Robert Creeley
that is to say you go out of your way
to acknowledge that Creativity rules
on its own terms using the artist-medium
as the conduit for experiential thought
expressed in units that bypass intellect
and find themselves climaxing
in ongoing acts of transmitting ones feelings
and that to become the creative apparatus
in a hacker-driven age of aesthetics defined
by the design culture that fashions us into being

is to "give witness not to the thought of myself,
that specious concept of identity
but, rather, to what I am as simple agency,
a thing evidently alive by virtue
of such activity."

(Evidently performing a Creeley
is no mean trick.)

"What uses me is what I use and in that complex
measure is the issue," says the Creel
laying down a bottom-line principle
in our remixological poetics

"I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety
of its relation to image and rhythm,
offers an intensely various record
of such facts. It is equally one of them."

"An intense experience is an aesthetic fact,"
Whitehead reverbs and then anticipating
the psychosomatic plasticity of causal feelings
"each ultimate unit of fact is a cell-complex
not analysable into components with equivalent
completeness of actuality."

Remixologically speaking, I would say
my basic sense of measure is
experienced as an image-thing
or an intense aesthetic fact
highly manipulable as just-in-time
source material in an open source lifestyle
that in the very subtlety of its relation
to image and rhythm and embodied praxis
offers an intensely various record
of such facts (and is equally one of them)

This does not mean we are destined
to resemble the computers and/or
algorithmically engendered "thinking machines"
we jam with when engaged in "always live"
remixological sessions

nor does it mean that the brain is
a kind of software that we program
with metaphorical algorithms
to selectively filter/render the data
of everyday life

and no our legs are not robo-limbs
but most of the artists I know
can relate to what I'm saying when I suggest
that we do process these image-things
as body-brain-apparatus achievements

(Ginsberg: "Yes, but can it make you come?")

The processual relayerings of our sense data
remixed as intense aesthetic experiences
leads us to develop a sense of measure
that vibrates with the morphic resonance
of a stimulated economy of motion that readies
our brewing creative potential to intuitively
design our "always live" postproduction sets

(in a perfect world the economy of motion
would guarantee no wasted energy in pursuit
of optimum electrochemically charged momentum
formally felt as an ongoing satisfaction
triggered by the intensities of our experience)

Think of your ongoing "story" as a generative fiction
one that operates on the uncertainty principle
while surfing that wave of quantum undecidability
one always seems to find themselves riding on
as they mobilize their neurolingusitic thought-processes
into whatever open compositional field they happen
to be playing in ("the ground of the moment"
to sample from Vito Acconci who in his essay
"Steps Into (and Out of) Performance" tells us

"...if I specialize in a medium, then I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted for another - so, then instead of turning toward 'ground' I would shift my attention and turn to 'instrument,' I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on whatever ground was available"

)

In its many iterations of becoming philosophy
Remixology envisions the artist as a postproduction medium
who becomes instrument while conducting
radical experiments in unconsciously projected thought and experience
(a double agent of distributed aesthetics whose work
quite literally "draws" on/with/from
an open source lifestyle practice
always on the morph)

Many artist-mediums working with new media technologies
are developing (multiple/hybridized/integrated)
daily practices as an alternative approach
to the regimentation of consumer bureaucracies

(perhaps we could call it an epic struggle
one the creative or hacker classes
continually commiserate over as a kind
of informal unionization that collectively
accumulates into some kind of bargaining power

the radical spirit of "always becoming"
a postproduction medium?)

Artists-as-Instruments play out their performances-to-be
on whatever compositional playing fields
they happen to be (re)cycling through when
caught in the heat of postproduction
(think of it as developing an economy
of motion targeted at turning the body
into a renewable energy source)

That playing field would be the ground
of the moment, not one they would
have to dig themselves out of continuously
but one that they would act on as part
of their constructed persona(s) moving
through the networked space of flows

---

Metadata: postproduction, visual art, literature, philosophy, artist theory, remix, Robert Creeley

Intensification

For the last three years, I have selected one word to trigger all action into the new year.

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

This year could very well be the final year that I employ this one-word triggering device. Knowing what lies ahead all throughout 2009 and knowing that there are a lot of unexpected things that will invite me to unknow the known, there is only one word for me turn to now.

In 2009, the word is intensification.

2008 was an in intense experience for us all.

The key takeaway from re-reading Whitehead over the last fifteen months is that "an intense experience is an aesthetic fact." That line gets remixed in one way or another throughout the Remixology book.

Getting at another kind of intensity to be found in "The Languages of the Body," Kathy Acker develops a list starting with "The languages of flux. Of uncertainty in which the 'I' (eye) constantly changes. For the self is 'an indefinite series of identities and transformations." She also lists the languages of wonder, materiality, and play -- but

8. Above all: the languages of intensity. Since the body's, our, end isn't transcendence but excrement, the life of the body exists as pure intensity. The sexual and emotive languages.

9. The only religions are scatology and intensity.

10. Language that forgets itself. For if we knew that chance governs us and this world, that would be absolute knowledge.

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Metadata: intensification, illumination, intuition, improvisation

Autohallucinating New Media Artist

How does one successfully bioengineer
the pure mobility of their body-image rhythms
so that the affective remixing of all
the selected source material they postproduce
transforms their ongoing life experience
into an intense aesthetic fact?

The State of Immediacy is not very different
from an endless State of Creative Emergency
(Emergency being a heightened state of emerging agency
where the "always live" artist-medium gives itself
extensive powers to develop an integrated
open source lifestyle that customizes responses to
these hyperimprovisational projections from the creative unconscious
that come out of nowhere and require
ones immediate remixological attention)

Remixology uses the continual emergence of agency
as a way to spontaneously discover
creative processes that enable the artist-medium
to invent an alternative ontological drift
for Creativity to get lost in

and assumes that if the computer has been
associated with artificial intelligence in terms
of expert systems then the Internet
is the prosthesis not of the expert mind
but of the creative unconscious
(to quote Ulmer)

Pre-Internet remixologists like Ginsberg
play with intense visionary experiences
as enduring aesthetic facts
and develop their spontaneous poetics
as a strategic philosophical device
to better apprehend the nature of
"synchronicity, because it was darkly inevitable"

Ginsberg said that at age 26
he heard a voice that was
his own mature voice
his mature voice being the voice
of William Blake

He describes the voice of Blake as
"completely tender and beautifully
... ancient."

"I saw into the depths of the universe,
by looking simply into the ancient sky.
The sky suddenly seemed very ancient.
And this was the very ancient place
I was talking about, the sweet golden clime,
I suddenly realized that this existence was it!
... in other words that this was the moment
I was born for."

"Anyway, my first thought was this was
what I was born for, and the second thought,
never forget -- never forget, never renege,
never deny. Never deny the voice -- no, never
forget it, don't get lost mentally wandering
in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds
or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds.
But the spirit of the Universe was what
I was born to realize."

Religion in the Making?

But he later remixes this version
of the mystical experience into
a more digitally inclined poetics
that grows out of the thinking of his
Paterson patron, WC Williams:

"Since a physiologic ecstatic experience
had been catalyzed in my body by
the physical arrangement of words [...]
I determined long ago to think of poetry
as a kind of machine that had a specific effect
when planted inside the human body,
an arrangement of picture and mental associations
that vibrated on the mind bank network:
and an arrangement of related sounds & physical
mouth movements that altered the habit functions
of the neural network."

Now he sounds more like
an autohallucinating new media artist
experiencing a kind of metempsychotic flashback
thanks to the nano-neuro-narcotic effects
of the Networked Buddha in ecstatic form

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Metadata: philosophy, aesthetics, remix, postproduction, Ginsberg, artists, Alfred North Whitehead, William Blake, Gregory Ulmer

Ten Essays I am (not) Writing While in Paris

Ten Essays I am (not) Writing While in Paris:

"Autohallucinating in Asynchronous Realtime: Experiential Research and the Art of Ubiquitous Performance"

"Undermining the Subjective Production of Indebted Man: Hacking Professorial Identity by Reconfiguring the Nomadic Post-Self"

"'The Simultaneous Data of the Actual Sensory Situation': the black art of making things without code"

"'To write during a prophetic illuminative seizure': hacking reality by intuitively faking your way through it"

"Beyond Digital Being: Becoming and Perishing in the Age of Glitch Aesthetics"

"'An Intense Experience is an Aesthetic Fact': Becoming-Whitehead in Philosophy's Trippy Aftermath"

"Unfollowing Oneself as a Measure of Ontological Complexity: Prehending Thingness in the Practice of Everyday Wife"

"Mirroring Neurons as Literary Agency: How Postmodernism Changed Our Character(s) and Spawned the Coming Reign of Conceptual Personae"

"Prosthetic Aesthetics: The Internet as Collaboratively Generated User-Consciousness in the Age of Connection Addiction"

"Do Vegans Swallow? Protein Substitutes for An Artificial Intelligentsia Always Already Craving Processed Organics" (hat tip: http://cltampa.com/bedpost/archives/2014/04/02/do-vegans-swallow-and-other-radical-sex-queries#.UzyqM5K9KSM)



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Keywords: Paris, essay, philosophy, prophesy, academic papers, experience, nature, food, excess, being, becoming, living, life

The Simultaneous Data of the Actual Sensory Situation

Ginsberg gloms on to Pound's phrase of
direct presentation and applies it
to his vision of originating spontaneous imagery
as part of a larger strategy to "get the mind high"
(echoing Whitehead's call for Higher Phases of Experience)
and if all the synaptic firings and unconscious
deep interior projections are operating on
perfect pitch autopilot and you're ready for take-off
the measure then turns into something unique like
"a collage of the simultaneous data of
the actual sensory situation"

For those of us using deep interior projections
to turn intense experience into aesthetic fact
the trick is to become Creativity itself
i.e. the actual sensory situation of Remixology
as it once again enacts the principle of novelty
(a principle of spurring on the further advance
of our ongoing creative momentum via
an applied aesthetics that both manipulates
and is unquestionably manipulated by
the environment that each novel situation
presents to us in its state of immediacy)

Keywords that keep generating connective tissues
and morphic resonance within the thought clusters
inhabiting these language excursions into The Deep
include artist-medium / postproduction art
enhanced intensity / novel effect /
sense of measure / embodied praxis /
mirroring neurons / aesthetic fact
not to mention the endless flux of data
waiting to be selected and further manipulated
while performing the ultimate balancing act between
intensity and stability
in the live postproduction environment
the contemporary remixologist risks
their entire livelihood in

all of it picture-perfect source material
ideally situated for customized open source
lifestyle practice researching an applied aesthetics
that grounds itself in creative achievement

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Metadata: creativity, aesthetics, remix, postproduction

Creating A Scene: Art as Life Performance

From a conversation between Tania Bruguera and Marina Abramovic:

MA: ... performance has never been accepted as a real form of art because it is so ephemeral. But maybe almost not being material lends to its strength and vitality.

TB: I think in my case, the only way to deal with this is through the approach to documentation as the tangible trace in the aftermath of the experience -- but not as a given. It's always a requirement to think about ways of transferring information, about transferring the experience as part of the tangible side of performance, even if it doesn't manifest as an object.

MA: To me, a part of doing the workshops and trying to make the students great performance artists is to give them advice about how they can live from their own work. They can't live from their performances, but they can live from the products out of the performance [...]

TB: [...] When I teach about documentation, I want to them to problematize documentation -- not only to assume the traditional ways of documenting with photo and video but to try to see how they can problematize ways of transmitting the experience. Because the idea of having a photo taken from a performance is almost like making that performance an icon, meaning making the lived thing dead and taking away the most important part, which is the experience.

MA: But there is one possibility if you don't have the public. If you just have the camera, and the camera is this imaginary public. So the product is different; then actually the flm or the photo becomes the artwork.

TB: [...] A performance is not like an object, and it shouldn't be forced to follow the rules that come with making objects. Performance should bring with it new ways to conceive old solutions; it should keep its revolutionary and evolutionary qualities [...]

The conversation goes deeper with Bruguera at one point saying, in relation to the role of so-called art school in the developmental process of making new art projects:

[...] I want the members of the project to learn how to work within limitations -- either the limitations society puts on them or the ones they have to create for themselves. I don't know, maybe it's not that you have to have a school. It's maybe about creating a moment, like opening a space where people can go in, interact, get stimulated, and get out of there with something to be developed later. The challenge is to rethink continuity and collectivity.

This got me thinking about how contemporary artists who also happen to be professors can best serve our more advanced graduate and undergraduate students. Whether it's "creating a moment" or developing an ongoing situation for the participating students to curate events that enable their creative energies to collide and mix, the thing that must happen is that these emerging student-artists need to begin imagining themselves as role-playing artist-performers who are part of a group who, by way of structured and/or ad hoc collaboration, are able to prove themselves capable of moving beyond all of these preconceived notions of discipline that corrupt contemporary higher arts education. More generally, an open and experientially improvised collaborative environment needs to evolve so that the students can then participate in the activation of a potential scene that is so in sync with the future perfect that it literally makes history.

This is not as easy as it sounds because it demands that the emerging student-artists conceive of themselves as role-playing performers, albeit ones who are not "acting like" emerging student-artists but who are simply finding alternative ways of "playing themselves." As Ambrovic says earlier in the same conversation:

[...] in performance, acting is such a big obstacle. If a performer was a dancer before, we must reprogram them. If they were actors, we must make them forget what they learned in order to be able to deal with a real performance attitude. We have to de-dance them, de-act them, somehow take it away.

The reason why most art schools are predictable, mediocre, or even just downright suck is because many of the faculty are not able to "somehow take it away" and, in fact, through the rigid compartmentalization of space and other resources, work hard to find ways to keep the old programming structures firmly in place. How can we expect to de-act / de-program a student artist performing the role of painter, printmaker, darkroom photographer, sculptor, installation artist, etc., when the division of space within most art school architecture dams up these potential interdisciplinary movements? Unfortunately for many art students today, the micro-disciplinary dictatorships that rule over these territorial domains have become so comfortable in their time-worn studio art practices that they themselves have very rarely sought out ways to de- and re-program their own research methods in relation to the increasingly networked relationship between art, technology, and life performance. The network society may be leading contemporary Conceptual practice into a more fluid, post-studio environment, but don't tell that to most senior art school faculty or even most junior faculty who are hired in their own (i.e. their senior colleague's) image of themselves well into the future. This is an issue staring in the face of art school administrators across the country. Will most of them look the other way?

It's not just an issue with a lot of disciplinary-driven faculty either. Art students across the country today seem pretty passive and accept these divisions at face value. You might even say that many if not most of them embrace it since they are able to stay within their disciplinary comfort zone. Are there ways to experiment beyond these embedded programmatic blockages? What about investigating the way that networked media technologies reveal how our digital culture is now blurring the difference between expert professionals and expert amateurs? For example, could the seemingly professional faculty stand to learn something from creating a scene with their emerging yet still amateur artist-students? For what it's worth, I do not consider the term "amateur" a condescending word at all, and in fact quote from my late colleague Stan Brakhage's essay "In Defense of Amateur" all of the time. In this essay, Brakhage reminds us that "an amateur works according to his own necessity" and "is at home anywhere he works." In my recent work, Immobilité, one of the main experiments I was running looked at how a "professional" artist, in this case a self-proclaimed "auteur," might mash-up their art-house narrative style with some of the more amateurish styles we associate with mobile phone video capturing and the anything-goes flood of content found in YouTube culture. Besides presenting this intense challenge to myself, i.e. creating a feature-length art-house narrative modeled after the great works of European cinema but filtered through a very amateurish or DIY mobile phone lens, I wanted to also experiment with and am in fact still experimenting with its distribution into both the network and art world cultures.

Part of the problem in developing a post-studio practice lies in the way art schools and the art world it helps sustain buy into the standard measurements of "success," most notably the dreaded gallery exhibition. To remix Marianne Moore's famous quote about modern poetry, "I, too, dislike it." She is right to suggest that "there are things more important beyond all this fiddle." But fiddle we do as we pursue our recognizable outcomes. Not that I myself never show in galleries or would poo-poo my national and international colleagues who do. For some, it's a sheer survival tactic that plays in nicely with every artist's need for the occasional ego-boost. It's definitely part of the art world culture whether mainstream/commercial or alternative/non-profit, and as Ambrovic says in the interview quoted above, it's important to teach young artists the art of the deal (her word is "negotiate"). But there are all kinds of potential deals out there that have nothing to do with commercial gallery culture. I guess the problem is you can't teach what you yourself don't know from experience.

Are there any alternative forms of art research and development that are moving beyond commercial gallery / art world culture and that are looking to invent other approaches to contemporary Conceptual practice that experiment with digital media in the field of distribution? Besides the TECHNE practice-based research initiative currently staged at the University of Colorado where, in addition to serving as faculty director for the initiative I am also a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, the folks at Artereality located at Stanford University write in their introduction for Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century):

The following is both a report on an ongoing experiment and a speculative application of that very experiment to the future of advanced-level arts education. It seeks to rethink some of the most productive institutions and moments from the modern past—the Arts and Crafts workshop, the Bauhaus, the laboratory of Constructivism, among them—in terms of the altered cultural and economic circumstances of the late industrial era. It assumes that art’s autonomy, one of the decisive conquests of the modern(ist) era, has led not only to an extraordinary proliferation of artistic forms and freedoms, but also to the current impasse which places arts education in the service of up-market commodity culture and at arm’s length from other forms of knowledge production and, in particular, from the very technology and media transformations that are reshaping the cultural norms of the present era. (emphasis mine)

What if art school ceased to position itself as the programmatic gateway to commercial gallery success? Art history is littered with forgettable artists who bought into the readymade art school -> commercial gallery -> mainstream art magazine -> musuem culture trajectory that creates a predictable situation where the role of the art school is to continually position itself as yet another professional program forever in the service of up-market commodity culture.

Are there other options? What kind of post-studio arts curriculum could emerge that would call into question the role of art schools still modeling themselves on 19th century studio arts practices? How could this post-studio curriculum that by its very nature would require a much more fluid interdisciplinary approach to experiential research, enable the emerging artist-students to create their own art scene as expert amateurs playfully engaged in the field of distribution? Would we risk steering these students in the wrong direction, i.e. somehow take away their right to create art in the service of up-market commodity culture? Would their artwork lend itself to more commercial exploitation as they found themselves becoming on-the-fly digital media entrepreneurs changing the curve of contemporary culture? These are questions that we need to be addressing now but that university cultures in general prefer to side-step or only pay lip service to (how about another new committee on "The Effects of Digital Media on Higher Education" to suck up our time while we explore our limited / limiting options?).

Along these lines, my university is in the process of discontinuing its School of Journalism and Mass Communication in an attempt to not only save money but to also begin rethinking its mission given the impact digital media is having on all aspects of contemporary life. Journalism, of course, is easy pickin's. All one has to do is read the latest on USA Today for a further indication of where that profession is heading. This makes me wonder: can art schools whose programmatic structures rely on older studio arts practices that demand a rigid distribution of space and resources to maintain the individual-artist-as-genius studio model really assume that they will never face a similar fate of gradual but sooner than expected discontinuance and extreme makeover? Am I the only higher arts educator wondering these things aloud?

If change is to happen sooner rather than later, then I am convinced it will have to come from and be demanded by the students themselves. This will most likely require emerging artist-students to begin performing the kind of "de-actified" performance that Abramovic points to indirectly in her discussion with Bruguera excerpted above. I realize that to some this may all seem very pie in the sky, or the worst kind of abstract wishful thinking, especially when matched against the entrenched forces of production bound by 19th century models of studio arts practice. So be it.

Still, from my own very biased perspective, as far as I can tell, the best way to develop a post-studio, networked media arts practice, is to experiment with ones conceptual performance in the field of distribution, and to do it in such a way that you collectively and collaboratively create a scene. But who can teach that? Probably someone who has spent a lot of time out of art school.

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Metadata: performance, conceptual practice, art school, the field of distribution

Agglutination

UPDATED:

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

In 2006, the word was improvisation.

In 2007, the word was intuition.

In 2008, the word was illumination.

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

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

In 2009, the word is intensification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hau'oli Makahiki Hou.

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

Notes on Internet Art From An Historical Perspective

Handwritten notes from the artist's introduction to the afternoon dialogue at Mediakunst 2.0:

What does it mean it mean to be a media artist today? Is it really necessary to make distinctions between Internet and web and net art and live A/V or VJ performance art and where does narrative and the creative potential we all have within ourselves to invent fictional personas in and out of social networking spaces fit into the picture?

These will be some of the questions that we ask throughout the day, questions that invite us to reconsider the early history and development of new media practices that engage with the Internet as both a compositional medium and as well as an exhibition or publishing or distribution medium. There will also be questions that take into account the many different forms of media art that are still in the process of finding their foothold in what we still, out of habit, call "the contemporary" – but also questions about how these media art forms that become contemporary are not only co-dependent on technologies and protocols that for some are seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of our everyday life, but that are also in some way triggered by the unconscious creative potential that resides in all of us. In other words, if our collective co-dependency on new media technologies situates most art of today in the shadow (or light) of a growing prosthetic aesthetics, then is it possible that what makes media art today contemporary has more to do with the fact that it materializes from the creative forces of contemporary artists and has less to do with the technologies that help digitally process the work in progress. That is to say, what is more important to contemporary art practice, the creative unconscious as media generator or emergent technologies as tools to help us process the work we're making? The answer, it seems, is self-evident in the question. But that does not necessarily mean that the contemporary media artists who invent these new forms of art are cognizant of what appears to be that fact. ("An intense experience is an aesthetic fact," says Whitehead).

In this sense I might also wonder aloud "How does what is contemporary in media art somehow issue forth, that is to say come from what is actually post-contemporary -- something that the artists themselves are not yet certain they are creating but that is then, later, after the fact, sometimes days after the fact or years or decades after the fact, recontextualized as what the art world tags contemporary or even – and this is particularly illogical -- modern?" Because if there is one thing I can say as one of the early interdisciplinary artists to experiment with the Internet as an artistic medium as well as publishing / exhibition medium for the distribution of my own style of art/writing and the art/writing of my colleagues that I want to publish and curate along the way, it's that in the beginning we never really imagined ourselves to be much more than conceptual performers experimenting with our practice in what was then a new network publishing environment facilitated by the developments in the online culture.

To talk about Internet art in an historical context is then to talk about art history too and yet as an artist whose own artworks and art writings are somehow part of this art history I cannot help but think that being part of art history as a so-called Internet artist is itself a kind of fiction, one that is made-up from scratch and, as such, is an historical fiction that then becomes part of the larger art practice I am still engaged in. Perhaps this is what, from an artist's perspective, making art history is partly about, that is, creatively positioning ones place in the ongoing fiction that is art history so as to keep their own story as an early Internet artist alive in collective memory and, keeping this in mind, you will see how my version of Internet art history is different than any so-called art historian's or new media theorist's version of art history or, for that matter, any other Internet artist's version of art history. Why is that? Why is my fictional version of our shared art history different than yours and yours different than mine even as we collide and mix in the same social space here in ____, together, alive with the creative potential of maintaining our network connection so that we may collaboratively alter the art historical context we create our lives in?

One reason is because we all tell different stories and are still in the process of inventing our personas. The narrative that informs our reading of the world is only partly informed by what we ourselves read or watch or listen to or even interact with when participating in social networking spaces both on and offline. Perhaps more important than all of the interaction we have with the source material everywhere around us is what we do with it, how we manipulate it, recontextualize it to make art, to elaborate on a theory, to build an argument, or to develop a personal narrative.

That part of my own story that takes into account the emergence of Internet art from an historical perspective is a personal narrative that is at once fictional and autobiographical, or what I like to call pseudo-autobiographical. By pseudo- autobiographical I mean that I use the experiential data of my everyday life as source material to remix into my creative and critical media projects so that I am at once telling my own story while at the same time inventing my life as an artist who is working/living/playing within a social/networking universe of creative potential.

That's why in my recent book, META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, I have different sections called Spontaneous Theories, Distributed Fictions, Academic Remixes, and Net Dialogues. At a certain point in ones ongoing story, the fictions we invent, the theories we improvise, the dialogues we engage in, and most importantly the physical relationships we intersubjectively jam with in unrealtime, start to blend into each other and out of these remixes of what some still traditionally call our "real life" and the specific identities we associate with them, start melting into something more like an "unreal life" populated by the many (digital flux) personas we spontaneously become. In this way, it's like turning your ongoing performance art project into a Life Style Practice that feeds into your continuous creative output that then feeds back into your Life Style Practice.

Think of it as a surf-sample-manipulate Creativity feedback loop. This is much more complicated than online role-playing. Perhaps this is no longer role-playing at all as much as it is embodying a performance that you yourself have no choice to become because it's a part that's totally made for you and made by you. It's like what the jazz great Miles Davis once said when he told someone: "Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself."

Which reminds me of something another jazz great, Ornette Coleman, recently said in an interview in the Guardian. Coleman was asked about his own life as a performer and he said: "I didn't know that you had to learn to play – I thought you had to play to play."

That's what it was like in the beginning times of making art on the Internet. There was no training at university; there was no pre-existing model of what it meant to be a net artist. It was not something you could take a course in or teach yourself by buying the latest copy of Net Artist in A Box with a CD and manual (although some net artists did eventually put themselves in a box and now I wonder where are their fictional versions of art history going to be archived?).

No, back in the early days of net art, you just had to play to play. To make art on the net the same way that you would, say, make history. In Derek Jarman's 1977 British film Jubilee, one of the characters, Amyl Nitrate, says, "When I am not making history, I write it." But I would take it further and say that we can make art history and write it and perform it all at the same time. This is what we mean by the term Life Style Practice (LSP).

Now, whereas I know this idea of "making history" vis-à-vis an open source lifestyle that "plays to play" is not going to happen to everyone who decides that they want to find a way to blur the distinction between their art and their life, and that there is in fact a kind of danger in being unnecessarily idealistic or even opportunistic about how one imagines themselves becoming an artist, especially since we then risk commodifying the life of the artist as something one might aspire to unintentionally creating unrealistic expectations that could then backfire and lead to great frustration, all I can do is share my stories and artwork with you and hope that they have some bits of data that you might then find relevant to sample from and remix into your ongoing story.

For me it's like I have no choice because of the way I approach my art practice first and foremost as a WRITER. A multi-media writer, that is, one who approaches all forms of media art from the perspective of someone who turns to the art (act) of writing as the most useful technology to employ when experimenting in the creation of new media forms. The computer, the network, digital cameras, mobile phones, using my video iPod for stereo sound recordings, all of these technologies are just variations of a writing instrument that I always turn to make things.

Coming to the Internet as a writer was, for me, easy. It was 1992. There was no graphical user interface for the WWW. There was no streaming audio, no mp3, no Flash, certainly no Web 2.0 (there was no 1.0 nor even a beta-version). So this meant that there was a complete blank slate. A blank canvas with lots of invisible baggage behind the scenes not the least of which was that the Internet itself, the way the net created this hypertextually distributed environment for me to experiment with, really existed in the first place as a military technology to keep information flowing during times of nuclear war. OK, but still a blank canvas to begin experimenting with. Very primitive text-based interfaces that soon gave way to a graphical user interface like the beta-version of Mosaic, the pre-Netscape, pre-Explorer, pre-Safari, pre-Firefox browser. Can you imagine the Internet without a Graphical User Interface? I can, because that was my net reality when I started working on my first serious work of Internet art, GRAMMATRON.

The beta-version of GRAMMATRON was made in 1993-1996 and finally released in 1997. The first document I opened to start the project was April 3, 1993. The beta-version of Mosaic, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) web browser was still days away. What could I have been thinking?

An interviewer recently asked me: What is GRAMMATRON?

I answered that GRAMMATRON is many things at once. It’s one of the earliest and more elaborate works of Internet art created exclusively for the Web as a way to track the developments of Web culture in a networked-narrative environment. I was especially interested in how some of the vaporware language that was coming out of the growing new media scene could be used against itself, to rub and/or remix alternative discourses together, everything from cyberpunk, dialectical materialism, and California ideology, to experimental narrative riffs from the likes of James Joyce, Arno Schmidt, and Jean-Luc Godard, to name a few.

Then there is the Cabala: the old scripture, the metacommentary, the Book of Creation, and the Golem myth. In many ways, GRAMMATRON is a retelling of the Golem myth remixed with narratological/rhetorical effects sampled from the alternative narratives and discourses mentioned earlier. I also was very conscious that I wanted to experiment with many of the evolving technological features that the Web could offer me—features that I would never have reason to consider when writing my novels. So there are time-based metatags, Javascript-encoded cookies that create alternative and/or random linking structures, some very detailed and labor-intensive animated gifs, and an original digital audio soundtrack, among other things.

It was released to a lot of unintended media hoopla in 1997 and was eventually selected for the Whitney Biennial of American Art in 2000, but by 2001, some mainstream art magazine out of New York casually referred to the work in passing as ancient.

The ancient GRAMMATRON. Already four years old and ready for the status of ruins.

There was a lesson to be learned there.

"You can't have the future every day," Geert Lovink told an interviewer on Alt-X back in 1994 or 1995: "It's always already over with and we just missed it."

And I would add that I'm still missing it.

Missing it like I never missed anything before in my life.

Where did it go?

Maybe it's because we are always creating these so-called contemporary media art works on Internet time.

"The world runs on Internet time," said Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel.

The early Internet artists were, in many ways, ahead of their time (or as the French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau once said, "would appear to be ahead of their time, for it is really the time that is behind the work."). But now that has all changed. Net Art 2.0 like Web 2.0 is embedded in the practices and rituals of everyday life. You can't be a net artist today without taking into account where the impetus for turning the net into an artistic instrument came from. Is it possible that the players in the early history of net art anticipated the socially interconnected "second lives" of the new generation of net artists for whom the digital is but an extension of their body's functionality as it navigates the network culture? Is it really that linear? Does linear development automatically suggest progressive movement? Could it be regressive? Could it be stagnant? Turbo-charged?

I'm not one to usually quote a theorist like Jean Baudrillard, but I'll take exception today and remind you of something he once said, that is "[t]he image no longer even has time to become an image."

I would like to remix that and say that net art never had enough time to become net art but that Net Art 2.0 is more in sync with its time. This may be the reason why so much of the artwork being created by next generation net artists is less avant (ahead of its time) and more pop (in its time) whereas in 1997, it was the other way around.

How soon before the work falls behind the time?

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Metadata: GRAMMATRON, net art, exhibitions, art history, Mark Amerika

Some Mystic Forgets Himself

In one of his artist's writing, "Cybernated Art," the video artist Nam June Paik wrote:

Cybernated art is very important, but art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated.

Riffing on this, I would slightly remix his sentiment and write that making contemporary forms of electronic media art involve the creative use of mediating technologies that are situated to augment our experience of life as we look to achieve other states of mind, but are not in and of themselves the literal portals to these other states of mind. Rather, these portals are still part of a deep "interior shot" that feeds off a network of fringe-flow sensations as we experience them via socially interconnected relations.

"Cybernetics," wrote Paik, is "the science of pure relations, or relationship itself" and "has its origin in karma."

Something I learned from Paik, and that heavily informed the creation of Immobilité, was how to use the creative process to put oneself into a trance state that then unconsciously triggers unexpected visions or what in the work I refer to as autohallucinations. In early 2005, I was invited to the European memorial following the death of Paik, and there in Germany I came upon the loose, handwritten notes from an essay he had written around in the early Sixties called "Experimental Television" – that's what he must have called video art in those days – and I was struck by how he too really found it important to write down, to poeticize, what he felt was happening to him as he became this electronically-infused, experimental persona "out of nowhere" – as when he says, referring to the word (in quotes) "ecstasy"

* to go out of oneself...

* completely filled time

* the presence of eternal presence

* unconscious, or super-conscious

* -- some mystic forgets himself (go out of oneself)

* abnormal

* the world stops for three minutes!

This last phrase of Paik's, "the world stops for three minutes!" seems to come out of nowhere too, but also anticipates Carlos Castaneda's "Journey to Ixtlan" where the impersonal "I" of the narrator is being guided through his philosophical life journey by the teachings of Don Juan, the shaman-trickster. Don Juan says to Castaneda's persona:

I am teaching you how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

Stopping the world is not a cryptic metaphor that really doesn't mean anything. And its scope and importance as one of the main propositions of my knowledge should not be misjudged.

I am teaching you how to stop the world. Nothing will work, however, if you are very stubborn. Be less stubborn, and you will probably stop the world with any of the techniques I teach you. Everything I will tell you to do is a technique for stopping the world.

The sorcerer's description of the world is perceivable. But our insistence on holding on to our standard version of reality renders us almost deaf and blind to it. I'm going to give you what I call "techniques for stopping the world."

Is this what Paik means by to "go out of oneself..." the way "some mystic forgets himself"? This is my state of mind too while I automatically generate my fictional personas as shareware. Creating my so-called foreign films (so-called in that they are anything but a film of any kind), I realize that forgetting oneself is a necessary aspect of envisioning the work.

The experimental artist Stan Brakhage, who some would say was to experimental film art what Nam June Paik was to video art, often referred to "film as visual music" and spoke about how "the work has to suggest its 'going-on-ness.'"

Which brings up an immediate question: How does a work suggest its 'going-on-ness', especially when you take into account issues of duration, Internet-era attention span, creative momentum, narrative, (re)mixed reality, and interactivity? Immobilité was composed using an unscripted, improvisational method of acting and the mobile phone images are intentionally shot in an amateurish or DIY [do-it-yourself] style similar to the evolving forms of video distributed in social media environments such as YouTube.

By interfacing this low-tech version of video making with more sophisticated forms of European art-house film, the work begins blurring the distinction between the auteur and the amateur, though both may recognize in themselves the desire to become a lover of forms (of formal innovation – as a survival strategy in the co-evolutionary push-pull of the still semi-stable environment).

Brakhage spoke about "a magicwork that makes itself" – a creative force that is filtered through the unconscious and that can only happen once one has freed themselves of the weight of commercial success and other burdens that come with a life fettered with unnecessary attachments. Only then, says Brakhage, can an artist finally blaze the path that they intuitively know they have to make (I'm adding my own associative word-thoughts here now). But before this can happen, you first have to take on the role of prophetic visionary who literally visualize their next creative becoming. How else is the life-art-work continuum to get made?

Sampling from more of Brakhage's phrases that I gleaned from a local TV interview in Boulder, Colorado, we hear him frequently refer to the "buzzing of mind" and "vision of muse" that fills his head like bees in a beehive as the work gets created on its own terms without any interference. He was cautious enough to make clear that not every work will be a magicwork, and any artist who has stuck it out over decades of trial and error via an intense, post-studio, art-research practice knows this to be the case. Sometimes it just comes out, sometimes not. And when the creative momentum one experiences while making a specific work is lost, you are never really sure if you will get it back. These are the risks one takes when developing their new material in a variety of media/mediums, especially when it's time-based new media that they are porting their poetic vibes through.

The instrument needs constant tuning.

The beehive mind needs to buzz.

Some mystic needs to forget themselves.

The unconscious experience of the intuitive body becoming new media...

Think of it as creating an active unconscious momentum, where the proprioceptive artist-medium "knows" where they are going without ever having been there before.

Or: imagine the artist-medium playing out their aesthetic potential via an innate body intuition, flushed with the illogic of sense (data), operating on autopilot.

The history of new media is the history of the world. For example, we can time-travel back to Germany in 1805, where we find a short essay written by Heinrich von Kleist, collected in his now out of print An Abyss Deep Enough. The essay is entitled "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking," where the author intuits the unconscious neural mechanism that triggers creative thought and writes:

For it is not we who know; it is rather a certain condition, in which we happen to be, that 'knows.'

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Metadata: Nam June Paik, Stan Brakhage, cinema, image, writing, remixed reality