Not I
Julianna Barwick
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Botched Transendant
I just finished a wonderful meeting with Ajay and Meg.
Mission? Brainstorm and lay the ground work for our final remix project.
And, I'd say Mission Accomplished.
The plan is to have three pico projectors projecting on three walls and a live sound mix involving a text I will write from found sources layered and mixed with the music of Juliana Barwick.
Each projection will contemplate a different layer of communicative and biological transcendence. On one, a person speaking. A second will display various clips of the fusion of the human with machine on a physical level. The third contemplates this again but on a molecular and binary level.
We're still waiting to hear from one of our other group members so hopefully this will be more filled in and thought out.
Still, I think this is a good base. Now two weeks to really get cracking on it.
word,
derrick.
Mission? Brainstorm and lay the ground work for our final remix project.
And, I'd say Mission Accomplished.
The plan is to have three pico projectors projecting on three walls and a live sound mix involving a text I will write from found sources layered and mixed with the music of Juliana Barwick.
Each projection will contemplate a different layer of communicative and biological transcendence. On one, a person speaking. A second will display various clips of the fusion of the human with machine on a physical level. The third contemplates this again but on a molecular and binary level.
We're still waiting to hear from one of our other group members so hopefully this will be more filled in and thought out.
Still, I think this is a good base. Now two weeks to really get cracking on it.
word,
derrick.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Blink!
Last week I had the good fortune to be invited to the opening of Blink, the new exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.
This is a beautiful space that the curators have made optimal -though occasionally distracting- use of in order to display digital and electronic video, instillation pieces, neon art, and sculpture dating from the early 90's to 2009.
Some stand outs:
Dan Flavin's neon displays: The one shown was from all the way back in 1992. It provides an ominously fun glow to the space. His work, to me, seems to mock the notion of minimalist sculpture. In that the minimal form of the piece is juxtaposed with the unapologetically loud pinks and greens, reminiscent of early 902 "street ware." This is meant in the best way possible. I loved it.
Olaf Nicolai: More neon! Nommes de Guerres no. 10 and 13 were on display. Nicolai use of neon was blurry, literally. His two pieces -I think because of the feed he was giving them- made them difficult to focus on. While they could be read it felt as though they at the same time could not be. It hurt my eyes. It fit well with the found text he had taken from post 1945 military campaigns.
Mark Wallinger: This was possibly my favorite piece. His work, Angel (1997) is a video he shot in London's Angel Underground Station. He places himself at the bottom of an escalator walking the wrong direction, films himself as a blind man walking backwards. He then speaks backwards text from Genesis. All of this is reversed in editing and played forward. The technique is right out of Twin Peaks, yes, but I like it nonetheless. It ends with rising classical music and Wallinger's character, Blind Faith, ascending the escalator in a climactic manner. Not sure if he meant it this way but I thought it was hysterical.
In more recent times Wallinger has taken on some more serious material. His 2007 exhibit at the Tate in London displays found protest materials from the Iraq war as well as pro-life protests.
I could go on and on and on about more pieces but, in keeping with the theme of the exhibit, I've chosen to be brief.
It's a great exhibit, see it.
This is a beautiful space that the curators have made optimal -though occasionally distracting- use of in order to display digital and electronic video, instillation pieces, neon art, and sculpture dating from the early 90's to 2009.
Some stand outs:
Dan Flavin's neon displays: The one shown was from all the way back in 1992. It provides an ominously fun glow to the space. His work, to me, seems to mock the notion of minimalist sculpture. In that the minimal form of the piece is juxtaposed with the unapologetically loud pinks and greens, reminiscent of early 902 "street ware." This is meant in the best way possible. I loved it.
Olaf Nicolai: More neon! Nommes de Guerres no. 10 and 13 were on display. Nicolai use of neon was blurry, literally. His two pieces -I think because of the feed he was giving them- made them difficult to focus on. While they could be read it felt as though they at the same time could not be. It hurt my eyes. It fit well with the found text he had taken from post 1945 military campaigns.
Mark Wallinger: This was possibly my favorite piece. His work, Angel (1997) is a video he shot in London's Angel Underground Station. He places himself at the bottom of an escalator walking the wrong direction, films himself as a blind man walking backwards. He then speaks backwards text from Genesis. All of this is reversed in editing and played forward. The technique is right out of Twin Peaks, yes, but I like it nonetheless. It ends with rising classical music and Wallinger's character, Blind Faith, ascending the escalator in a climactic manner. Not sure if he meant it this way but I thought it was hysterical.
In more recent times Wallinger has taken on some more serious material. His 2007 exhibit at the Tate in London displays found protest materials from the Iraq war as well as pro-life protests.
I could go on and on and on about more pieces but, in keeping with the theme of the exhibit, I've chosen to be brief.
It's a great exhibit, see it.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
A Fluctual Space of Human Rhythms, Menomes, Cosmosis, and Insomnia
Web Spinner
First Piece
Second Piece (To Be Repeated)
Offensive for how pretty it is
Eric Baus
Third Piece (Austin Texas)
Fourth Piece (Horsing Around)
Fifth Piece (cosmic loop)
Cosmic debri, big bang remnants, Pulsar PSR, Vela Pulsar, and the heart beat of the sun.
First Piece
Second Piece (To Be Repeated)
Offensive for how pretty it is
Eric Baus
Third Piece (Austin Texas)
Fourth Piece (Horsing Around)
Fifth Piece (cosmic loop)
Cosmic debri, big bang remnants, Pulsar PSR, Vela Pulsar, and the heart beat of the sun.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Fake Introductions (Stephani Nola)
In comparison to artists of her own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Nola lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, she relied on her patients, the America around her, and her own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse.
Nola was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young, a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Nola was thirteen when her first published poem, "Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note," appeared in American Childhood.
According to critic Stephen Burt, “William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Nola how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards.”
Stefanie Nola is a first year poet in the MFA program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied.
Much of what was just said was/is false.
Fake Introductions (Evie McCarthy)
From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in a Ford ammunitions factory in Dearborn Michigan in 1946, American writer Evie McCarthy was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, bringing a refreshing new casualness and spontaneity to poetry.
Critic and friend Igor Stravinsky writes of McCarthy’s work, “God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”
McCarthy attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. She has since become most known for her strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that has made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to her works.
Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment of the Arts.
Evie McCarthy currently resides in Boulder Colorado, where she is pursuing an MFA from the University of Narapo. It is under that pretense that she joins us here tonight.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Remix Theory Manifesto Remixed
Mixing is about creating seamless interpolations between objects of thought to fabricate a zone of representation in which the interplay of the one and the many, the original and its double all come under question.
Egh. Not entirely. Remix can also border on the purposely obtrusive or juxtaposed. Consider a demolition derby or a Jasper Johns. There is the purposeful use of collision.
Does it fit?
Yes
Is it seamless?
No.
Seamless transition in a world without seams. In movement we become memory. In a mix we exist between seams. The shards post impact that glimmer in our collective media mind as we wonder if glass is a remix of sand.
Transform like Megatron and more idea's about cars and recycled plastic.
Sound and the electro-digitized imagination in an ever burgeoning culture is the manifestation of language as a total text. Or as Toni Morrison says, "The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings, as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language.
Ours is the now and heAr of freedom.
Reactivate where you've become a product.
And now the whole world out of the radio.
All the tech used to make art was Napoleon's. Now it's corporate, inherited from our mothers and fathers.
Remix acknowledges who speaks through you based on whose speech threw you.
The photo in my memory, Accidents and Emergencies, committed poetry.
Fugazi inhabits collage space in this way, a product of D.C. reactivated outside of the radio nonetheless a production reaction to the reaction of hard-core and a reaction to and remix of the world view propagated by Reagan, Bush, Nixon, Ford and the rest of the neo-con corporate space of America.
This is an example of remix as reaction to of overly oppressive psychogeography.
Whatever works is the American Modus Operandi.
Ossification, Kali Rising, 1949 phases of the moon in Finnegan's Wake.
Yeah, stuff like that was what was on my mind, mellowed by age, paved into a co-op. Small spots on the landscape, my text with sound. Oral culture in a world of networks.
This is an example of Remix as Obsolescence.
A nihilist parallax view.
Subliminal semiotics transgressing without seam. Sand as glass as collision as movement as memory as an occupied collection of found space through which to create further collisions.
As the boundaries of between blur the boundaries towards a transformation of hermeneutics a quantum account of gravity approaches a dictionary in which each word is translated into several other words becomes affable.
Known languages do not un-reciprocally express the translation of French words or other languages. This makes this dictionary -by means of requirements- find how to classify this hermeneutical order out/out of the disordered sense we accept daily.
There is no known one way communication.
Each language expresses itself reciprocally or not at all. We find what's between in things and play in our mutual known unknown space. We get so Donald Rumsfeld.
Now proceed. Plus a change.
Found objects are memory permutation machines based on determinacy becoming obsolete.
In this way media bombardment approaches the sonic immersed song of a dead dreamer with the flow against the current.
In a different between the nothing that is there and the nothing that is not. In Stevens' Nothing is meant to stand alone. An audio sculpture obsessed with death. Shards of "art" culture caught in the still of a collision.
People are so programmed to accept a media construct, (consolidate for evolutionary gains) that if something isn't affirmed by their peers and/or mass culture, then it might as well not exist.
An Interplanetary Revolution Approach to Remix
or
Exposure to Space
Forget a dead empire and build a living republic.
Proclaim a new era an set up a new calender.
Replace alien language.
Destroy or neutralize alien gods.
Destroy alien machinery of government control.
Take wealth and land from individual aliens.
With the so permanent nature of death forgetting movement, fragments of recording environments -frequencies open within the city of physical culture- detach from their own beings and into collectives.
There's Miles Davis between my ears and yours.
On the corner lectures scream poems of a new science of sight. A new Dub-tometry skewing sciences of perception.
Treating sound as found object, spotted, picked up, felt and displaced. Versioning additive subtraction in a palimpsest of visual sound play.
Remixing the Found Text
Erasure; the voice fragmented and left to drift on shards of itself. It's body taken in quotations.
Writing; May be a little retro but that's cool too. That's why people still where bell bottoms jeans.
A Textual remix is a totally reflexive Guttenberg's galaxy.
An aside is;
(Take Nietzsche. Feel great within his paragraphs. Derrida is there too, if you ever come looking.)
The remix author is a cross medium psychogeographic flaneur set on subjective implosion. Here words are the expressed equivalent of a "found object." Semiotic representation of and on the earth.
The representation becomes the momentary memory. Emotion and catharsis become the cybernetic etymology of art and music and text. That simple. That complex.
This is the occupied complex culture complex.
The moment of revelation -the collision- is encoded in action. The selection becomes a resonative narrative traveling by synecdoche into the space between things as we take words out of and place words into (Insert your Sampler's Here) mouth.
For Duchamp the glitch serves as metaphysical critique. A mistake in frame creates narrative.
In a bombarded media saturated world there is almost no sound. An un-anechoic chamber where the remixer's frequencies supply the glitch.
Progress in an un-vacuum.
Egh. Not entirely. Remix can also border on the purposely obtrusive or juxtaposed. Consider a demolition derby or a Jasper Johns. There is the purposeful use of collision.
Does it fit?
Yes
Is it seamless?
No.
Seamless transition in a world without seams. In movement we become memory. In a mix we exist between seams. The shards post impact that glimmer in our collective media mind as we wonder if glass is a remix of sand.
Transform like Megatron and more idea's about cars and recycled plastic.
Sound and the electro-digitized imagination in an ever burgeoning culture is the manifestation of language as a total text. Or as Toni Morrison says, "The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings, as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language.
Ours is the now and heAr of freedom.
Reactivate where you've become a product.
And now the whole world out of the radio.
All the tech used to make art was Napoleon's. Now it's corporate, inherited from our mothers and fathers.
Remix acknowledges who speaks through you based on whose speech threw you.
The photo in my memory, Accidents and Emergencies, committed poetry.
Fugazi inhabits collage space in this way, a product of D.C. reactivated outside of the radio nonetheless a production reaction to the reaction of hard-core and a reaction to and remix of the world view propagated by Reagan, Bush, Nixon, Ford and the rest of the neo-con corporate space of America.
This is an example of remix as reaction to of overly oppressive psychogeography.
Whatever works is the American Modus Operandi.
Ossification, Kali Rising, 1949 phases of the moon in Finnegan's Wake.
Yeah, stuff like that was what was on my mind, mellowed by age, paved into a co-op. Small spots on the landscape, my text with sound. Oral culture in a world of networks.
This is an example of Remix as Obsolescence.
A nihilist parallax view.
Subliminal semiotics transgressing without seam. Sand as glass as collision as movement as memory as an occupied collection of found space through which to create further collisions.
As the boundaries of between blur the boundaries towards a transformation of hermeneutics a quantum account of gravity approaches a dictionary in which each word is translated into several other words becomes affable.
Known languages do not un-reciprocally express the translation of French words or other languages. This makes this dictionary -by means of requirements- find how to classify this hermeneutical order out/out of the disordered sense we accept daily.
There is no known one way communication.
Each language expresses itself reciprocally or not at all. We find what's between in things and play in our mutual known unknown space. We get so Donald Rumsfeld.
Now proceed. Plus a change.
Found objects are memory permutation machines based on determinacy becoming obsolete.
In this way media bombardment approaches the sonic immersed song of a dead dreamer with the flow against the current.
In a different between the nothing that is there and the nothing that is not. In Stevens' Nothing is meant to stand alone. An audio sculpture obsessed with death. Shards of "art" culture caught in the still of a collision.
People are so programmed to accept a media construct, (consolidate for evolutionary gains) that if something isn't affirmed by their peers and/or mass culture, then it might as well not exist.
An Interplanetary Revolution Approach to Remix
or
Exposure to Space
Forget a dead empire and build a living republic.
Proclaim a new era an set up a new calender.
Replace alien language.
Destroy or neutralize alien gods.
Destroy alien machinery of government control.
Take wealth and land from individual aliens.
With the so permanent nature of death forgetting movement, fragments of recording environments -frequencies open within the city of physical culture- detach from their own beings and into collectives.
There's Miles Davis between my ears and yours.
On the corner lectures scream poems of a new science of sight. A new Dub-tometry skewing sciences of perception.
Treating sound as found object, spotted, picked up, felt and displaced. Versioning additive subtraction in a palimpsest of visual sound play.
Remixing the Found Text
Erasure; the voice fragmented and left to drift on shards of itself. It's body taken in quotations.
Writing; May be a little retro but that's cool too. That's why people still where bell bottoms jeans.
A Textual remix is a totally reflexive Guttenberg's galaxy.
An aside is;
(Take Nietzsche. Feel great within his paragraphs. Derrida is there too, if you ever come looking.)
The remix author is a cross medium psychogeographic flaneur set on subjective implosion. Here words are the expressed equivalent of a "found object." Semiotic representation of and on the earth.
The representation becomes the momentary memory. Emotion and catharsis become the cybernetic etymology of art and music and text. That simple. That complex.
This is the occupied complex culture complex.
The moment of revelation -the collision- is encoded in action. The selection becomes a resonative narrative traveling by synecdoche into the space between things as we take words out of and place words into (Insert your Sampler's Here) mouth.
For Duchamp the glitch serves as metaphysical critique. A mistake in frame creates narrative.
In a bombarded media saturated world there is almost no sound. An un-anechoic chamber where the remixer's frequencies supply the glitch.
Progress in an un-vacuum.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Nicolas Bourriaud has Essay Writing ADD
Reading "Culture as Screenplay: How art reprograms the world" was -for one- really enjoyable. Bourriaud, while highly intelligent and undoubtedly insightful and well read, keeps an nonacademic tone. I appreciate this approach to criticism.
In relation to detournemont I think Bourriaud does a fantastic job of tying the DJ or programmer or contemporary artist in any context to Debord. Also, I completely agree with him on that.
A part of me is still mildly apprehensive to the notion of works without end. While I am one who steals concepts and ideas from other authors and artists I do think of each work individually. Plus, in digital culture most works can be so easily reproduced that there is no need to "end" them. I do see each work as collage of content and idea but . . . I'm still not convinced I guess.
What really caught me with this essay is the work of Matthieu Laurette . "Matthieu Laurette uses newspaper classified ads, television game shows, and marketing campaigns as
the media for his work." I like his hyper conscious approach to postproduction art. His work seems to -very knowingly- step out of the Duchamp, Debord, Warhol evolution of theft as thought. (I meant that in a good way.)
I was really interested in was the bit mentioned in the beginning of the essay. "Laurette is reimbursed for products he has consumed by systematically using promotional coupons ("Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back"), he operates within the cracks of the promotional system."
That seems to be an appropriation right out of Abbie Hoffman's repertoire.
This essay, moreover, has kind of left me in a Keatsian state of negative capability. I'm kind of without judgment on this one.
I'm going to let it soak in for a bit.
In relation to detournemont I think Bourriaud does a fantastic job of tying the DJ or programmer or contemporary artist in any context to Debord. Also, I completely agree with him on that.
A part of me is still mildly apprehensive to the notion of works without end. While I am one who steals concepts and ideas from other authors and artists I do think of each work individually. Plus, in digital culture most works can be so easily reproduced that there is no need to "end" them. I do see each work as collage of content and idea but . . . I'm still not convinced I guess.
What really caught me with this essay is the work of Matthieu Laurette . "Matthieu Laurette uses newspaper classified ads, television game shows, and marketing campaigns as
the media for his work." I like his hyper conscious approach to postproduction art. His work seems to -very knowingly- step out of the Duchamp, Debord, Warhol evolution of theft as thought. (I meant that in a good way.)
I was really interested in was the bit mentioned in the beginning of the essay. "Laurette is reimbursed for products he has consumed by systematically using promotional coupons ("Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back"), he operates within the cracks of the promotional system."
That seems to be an appropriation right out of Abbie Hoffman's repertoire.
This essay, moreover, has kind of left me in a Keatsian state of negative capability. I'm kind of without judgment on this one.
I'm going to let it soak in for a bit.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Deerhoof and Debord vs The Evil Spectacle
I feel as though Deerhoof's new album will be an appropriate soundtrack for this brief essay on Debord's essay Methods of Détournement as well as his film, La Société du spectacle. Why Deerhoof's new album Deerhoof vs. Evil?
Three reasons:
1. Satomi Matsuzaki's voice within such a band feels like an act of detournement in and of itself. There's a consciousness of parataxis. This feels -to me- not unlike Debord's juxtaposed footage of naked women and states men. Yes, at points the music and the vocals function on the same plane, as does any great act of detournemont but, as Debord points out, "Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply." This album, like this band, like La Société du spectacle is past meaning making in the traditional sense. We are involved in and conscious of the spectacle that we usually take for granted in the invisibly abrasively commodity driven spectacle of the daily.
2. The album is called Deerhoof vs. Evil. This has a similar feel to Debord's vision of the remix artist, taking abstractions of what was once the tangible earth, and reconstructing them. "The tangible world finds itself replaced by a selection of images which exist above it and which at the same time has placed itself recognized as the tangible par experience."
While both this essay and this film -as well as Debord's book- are filled with wonderful aphorisms. (Yes, I do think they are wonderful. Things can be bleak and wonderful at the same time. Just look at the spectacle. Just listen this Deerhoof album I'm discussing.) the prior is one of my favorite. The tangible world has become images, these images have become our tangible existence. The simulacrum encounters itself through the viewer, in the case of film.
Also, both seem to be fighting the abstract real. Evil is such a large, ominous unspecific term. For the sake of the album title I think it's facetiously ambitious but no less successful as a result.
It's akin to Debord's spectacle, everywhere and no where. It takes a conscious mind to demolish it while existing with in it. "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among persons mediated by images." The act of remix art or any art form in this way is to almost bubble out, or warp the tangible world. To be overly abrasive tears and to be unwittingly accepting does nothing but stupify.
Good art should be abrasive in a certain sense, to draw attention to it's action and intents, basically. I think Deerhoof and Debord would agree on that.
3. I like it and just bought this record today. It's the reason I'm writing this a little bit late. It was sunny. I like bikes and record shopping. I'm a dirty rotten hipster and forgot I needed to do this today. Sorry. "The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities."
Moving on,
In "Methods of Détournement" Debord discusses some art forms that I have played around with and am interested in. Psychogeography relates directly to a Google Map project myself and several other collaborators worked on a few months ago. The goal of the project was to remix an essay by multimedia artist Mark Amerika. Other remixes of the essay involved an appropriation of Youtube videos, a sound piece mixing various websites, and a short play made almost entirely of plagiarized philosophies and artist statements.
It turns out I invented Guy-Deord. Who knew?
The thing that really fascinated me was Metagraphic writing. It was an absolutely new concept to me, initially. This has since faded. The fleeting nature of the profound moment, as Emerson might put it. Or, as Debord does, "a moment ... grown old and it may never again be rejuvenated."
It faded last night, as I was going to sleep. The English and German alphabet was, initially, an act of Metagraphic writing. Both alphabets use letters from French and Italian. This is why the symbols do not represent the sounds. English is not a phonetic language in this way. Where as French and Spanish are.
Another, older example of this is the Japanese language. Wanting to keep place with the Chinese art of poetry the Japanese used Chinese characters to construct the first Kanji. So, Debord's idea for Metagraphic writing, while not necessarily new, has proven to be revolutionary in the case of at least three languages.
So in the end, like most things, nothing is new. It's always been here. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.
It's a matter of how we deconstruct and reconstruct it. There in lies the rejuvenation.
Hey, come to think of it, Satomi Matsuzaki -lead singer of Deerhoof- is Japanese. Is her voice, placed in an esoteric American rock context, an act of detournemont? A sort of MetaAudiodacticism?
Did I mention they had a new album?
No?
It's pretty great. I just got it. but I like it a lot already.
Three reasons:
1. Satomi Matsuzaki's voice within such a band feels like an act of detournement in and of itself. There's a consciousness of parataxis. This feels -to me- not unlike Debord's juxtaposed footage of naked women and states men. Yes, at points the music and the vocals function on the same plane, as does any great act of detournemont but, as Debord points out, "Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply." This album, like this band, like La Société du spectacle is past meaning making in the traditional sense. We are involved in and conscious of the spectacle that we usually take for granted in the invisibly abrasively commodity driven spectacle of the daily.
2. The album is called Deerhoof vs. Evil. This has a similar feel to Debord's vision of the remix artist, taking abstractions of what was once the tangible earth, and reconstructing them. "The tangible world finds itself replaced by a selection of images which exist above it and which at the same time has placed itself recognized as the tangible par experience."
While both this essay and this film -as well as Debord's book- are filled with wonderful aphorisms. (Yes, I do think they are wonderful. Things can be bleak and wonderful at the same time. Just look at the spectacle. Just listen this Deerhoof album I'm discussing.) the prior is one of my favorite. The tangible world has become images, these images have become our tangible existence. The simulacrum encounters itself through the viewer, in the case of film.
Also, both seem to be fighting the abstract real. Evil is such a large, ominous unspecific term. For the sake of the album title I think it's facetiously ambitious but no less successful as a result.
It's akin to Debord's spectacle, everywhere and no where. It takes a conscious mind to demolish it while existing with in it. "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among persons mediated by images." The act of remix art or any art form in this way is to almost bubble out, or warp the tangible world. To be overly abrasive tears and to be unwittingly accepting does nothing but stupify.
Good art should be abrasive in a certain sense, to draw attention to it's action and intents, basically. I think Deerhoof and Debord would agree on that.
3. I like it and just bought this record today. It's the reason I'm writing this a little bit late. It was sunny. I like bikes and record shopping. I'm a dirty rotten hipster and forgot I needed to do this today. Sorry. "The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities."
Moving on,
In "Methods of Détournement" Debord discusses some art forms that I have played around with and am interested in. Psychogeography relates directly to a Google Map project myself and several other collaborators worked on a few months ago. The goal of the project was to remix an essay by multimedia artist Mark Amerika. Other remixes of the essay involved an appropriation of Youtube videos, a sound piece mixing various websites, and a short play made almost entirely of plagiarized philosophies and artist statements.
It turns out I invented Guy-Deord. Who knew?
The thing that really fascinated me was Metagraphic writing. It was an absolutely new concept to me, initially. This has since faded. The fleeting nature of the profound moment, as Emerson might put it. Or, as Debord does, "a moment ... grown old and it may never again be rejuvenated."
It faded last night, as I was going to sleep. The English and German alphabet was, initially, an act of Metagraphic writing. Both alphabets use letters from French and Italian. This is why the symbols do not represent the sounds. English is not a phonetic language in this way. Where as French and Spanish are.
Another, older example of this is the Japanese language. Wanting to keep place with the Chinese art of poetry the Japanese used Chinese characters to construct the first Kanji. So, Debord's idea for Metagraphic writing, while not necessarily new, has proven to be revolutionary in the case of at least three languages.
So in the end, like most things, nothing is new. It's always been here. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.
It's a matter of how we deconstruct and reconstruct it. There in lies the rejuvenation.
Hey, come to think of it, Satomi Matsuzaki -lead singer of Deerhoof- is Japanese. Is her voice, placed in an esoteric American rock context, an act of detournemont? A sort of MetaAudiodacticism?
Did I mention they had a new album?
No?
It's pretty great. I just got it. but I like it a lot already.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Thoughts on Open Source, Creative Commons, and "Free" Culture in the Vain of Obsolecense
Obsolescence is one of my favorite abstract concepts. Abstract Concepts being of course my favorite, as it eats itself. Obsolescence does something similar. For those within it they exist in a vacuum of sorts. Though -as we all recall from 8th grade earth science- nothing can exist in a vacuum. Yet here we are, existing.
A "vacuum fluctuation" or an error occurs which allowed -from the start- creation. The vacuum was manipulated, a literal paradox occurred in a vacuum. Andrew Joron places the universe corollary to what the surrealists defined as l'hasard objectif. "In such cases, randomness momentarily acquires structure, an arrow-shape that pierces the mesh work of a system's sustaining feedback loops... the Universe itself is thought to have resulted from a random 'vacuum fluctuation.'"
Or as Shelly might put it, "... a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
I know, holy fuck! Right?
While Shelley mentions this in relation to poetry, directly, Joron is discussing the centralized global power structure the U.S. is encountering opposition to by way of terrorism.
What does poetry, a restructuring of global power dynamics, and copy right law have in common?
They all are changing dramatically as a result of the internet. There no longer is a need for centralization.
Web 2.0 realized this a few years ago. I'm listening to ThruYou right now, a site devoted to composing beautiful music pieced together with Youtube clips. Is this the new composition?
Well, yeah, kind of.
Is this different than how I arranged my original thoughts through the lens of Shelley and Joron?
Well, no, not really.
Are either of these copy right infringements?
That's to be decided.
As intellectual copy right becomes obsolete by way of the internet so do we. Our senses have a conscious construct. We are perpetually aware of what makes up our consciousness. As I think of Joron, I hop on Google books and search vacuum before running to my bed-side bookshelf to grab the tangible copy, made by a press on the other side of Denver. I link you to it. My thoughts fade as you become aware of their construct. Your pre-perception fades as you move from my use Joron for obsolescence to Joron's use of vacuums in relation to shifting diplomacy.
You use a vacuum in your own way. Poof! vacuum fluctuation. The Universe is born out of this for the first time. Still, it was here before.
We exist in paradox. Surrealism is the new realism because we're aware of it.
Web art is aware both of it's obsolescence and it's manipulation of open and closed source material. It's conscious connectivity overwhelms us. It's Kant's sublime. It's shitty reggae sublime. It's horrific to compare those two things.
Still, as we step away from that moment we no longer desire it. We've had it. It's wonderful and grotesque. It's living in a large city for a few months, two weeks after realizing the D runs express from Columbus Circle to your stop on 125th.
It's realizing how little you know. It's embracing obsolescence. It's becoming Shelley's unsheathed sword of lightning forever consuming the scabbard that could never contain it. It's existing in paradox.
Poof!
Vacuum Fluctuation.
In this way I wholly embrace open source material and detest copy law in the same way I detest censorship. Both inhibit creativity. Both frighten me.
What interests me, is the awareness of theft. The awareness of the overwhelming puts me in the community of obsolescent art. One example is an erasure of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The work begins with his material but through a process of erasing and then reconstructing I have my own. I've then been sneaking lines of this piece into my own work. I have little clue where his words and my words meet. They've become a new work.
Remix art is the new Lenny Bruce. Or George Carlin
A "vacuum fluctuation" or an error occurs which allowed -from the start- creation. The vacuum was manipulated, a literal paradox occurred in a vacuum. Andrew Joron places the universe corollary to what the surrealists defined as l'hasard objectif. "In such cases, randomness momentarily acquires structure, an arrow-shape that pierces the mesh work of a system's sustaining feedback loops... the Universe itself is thought to have resulted from a random 'vacuum fluctuation.'"
Or as Shelly might put it, "... a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it."
I know, holy fuck! Right?
While Shelley mentions this in relation to poetry, directly, Joron is discussing the centralized global power structure the U.S. is encountering opposition to by way of terrorism.
What does poetry, a restructuring of global power dynamics, and copy right law have in common?
They all are changing dramatically as a result of the internet. There no longer is a need for centralization.
Web 2.0 realized this a few years ago. I'm listening to ThruYou right now, a site devoted to composing beautiful music pieced together with Youtube clips. Is this the new composition?
Well, yeah, kind of.
Is this different than how I arranged my original thoughts through the lens of Shelley and Joron?
Well, no, not really.
Are either of these copy right infringements?
That's to be decided.
As intellectual copy right becomes obsolete by way of the internet so do we. Our senses have a conscious construct. We are perpetually aware of what makes up our consciousness. As I think of Joron, I hop on Google books and search vacuum before running to my bed-side bookshelf to grab the tangible copy, made by a press on the other side of Denver. I link you to it. My thoughts fade as you become aware of their construct. Your pre-perception fades as you move from my use Joron for obsolescence to Joron's use of vacuums in relation to shifting diplomacy.
You use a vacuum in your own way. Poof! vacuum fluctuation. The Universe is born out of this for the first time. Still, it was here before.
We exist in paradox. Surrealism is the new realism because we're aware of it.
Web art is aware both of it's obsolescence and it's manipulation of open and closed source material. It's conscious connectivity overwhelms us. It's Kant's sublime. It's shitty reggae sublime. It's horrific to compare those two things.
Still, as we step away from that moment we no longer desire it. We've had it. It's wonderful and grotesque. It's living in a large city for a few months, two weeks after realizing the D runs express from Columbus Circle to your stop on 125th.
It's realizing how little you know. It's embracing obsolescence. It's becoming Shelley's unsheathed sword of lightning forever consuming the scabbard that could never contain it. It's existing in paradox.
Poof!
Vacuum Fluctuation.
In this way I wholly embrace open source material and detest copy law in the same way I detest censorship. Both inhibit creativity. Both frighten me.
What interests me, is the awareness of theft. The awareness of the overwhelming puts me in the community of obsolescent art. One example is an erasure of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The work begins with his material but through a process of erasing and then reconstructing I have my own. I've then been sneaking lines of this piece into my own work. I have little clue where his words and my words meet. They've become a new work.
Remix art is the new Lenny Bruce. Or George Carlin
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Borges and Derrick and I and Spinoza
This one was really fun. I could go on for a long time again and probably will as an exercise but here's a little sample.
I let him wake up to mulch.
I’m the one who tells him each grass blade licks his face and tells him stories. Though, that’s me telling the stories about the stories. I’m endocrine. I get turned on by light, not chloroplast. Derrick would like to think it’s the other way around; that he’s plant based.
Still though, he’d be partially right to think so. Trouble with distance I suppose; sun to plant to soil to rock to psychic geology. Derrick pushes from his psychic molding. These levers grow longer. These pulleys become stretched.
I’m formed of his geology. Sedimentary. Bits of me slip into bits of him, wear off my palms onto the pumice handled levers. I suppose they brush into his Broca’s area before I have him type. I have no incentive for insight. A lack of endocrine I suppose. No bother though.
He rarely notices me, though he just did.
Right there. Could you tell? No I suppose not.
He’s reading this back to me in our head –more mine than his- while looking at a brain map.
I pull a lever.
I work Derrick through a system of levers and pulleys.
He recalls steam punk.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being. I persist in his. We persist in being.
Derrick seems to persist in memories of movies like Brazil.
Though, to his credit, he has read Ethics. For which I thank him. I do this by secreting shaves of algae into his cerebral cortex.
I let him wake up to mulch.
I’m the one who tells him each grass blade licks his face and tells him stories. Though, that’s me telling the stories about the stories. I’m endocrine. I get turned on by light, not chloroplast. Derrick would like to think it’s the other way around; that he’s plant based.
Still though, he’d be partially right to think so. Trouble with distance I suppose; sun to plant to soil to rock to psychic geology. Derrick pushes from his psychic molding. These levers grow longer. These pulleys become stretched.
I’m formed of his geology. Sedimentary. Bits of me slip into bits of him, wear off my palms onto the pumice handled levers. I suppose they brush into his Broca’s area before I have him type. I have no incentive for insight. A lack of endocrine I suppose. No bother though.
He rarely notices me, though he just did.
Right there. Could you tell? No I suppose not.
He’s reading this back to me in our head –more mine than his- while looking at a brain map.
I pull a lever.
I work Derrick through a system of levers and pulleys.
He recalls steam punk.
Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being. I persist in his. We persist in being.
Derrick seems to persist in memories of movies like Brazil.
Though, to his credit, he has read Ethics. For which I thank him. I do this by secreting shaves of algae into his cerebral cortex.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Stein Exercise in Style
Hi all.
Instead of doing both of these remixes I kind of went with a mash-up of the two. Below is my Stein influenced Exercise in Style.
Hope you like it.
If not, just look at this instead. It's pretty and Dutch.
In the inside of the S bus it is crowded. In the outside of the S bus there is Paris. In Paris there is a crowded midday scene. The midday scene is filled. Filled with commuters. These commuters –some of them- are on the S bus.
Like me.
Like me, I’m on the S bus at midday.
In Paris.
Outside of the city but inside of the bus. Inside the bus it is crowded just as outside the bus the city is crowded with people pouring into the bus. In the bus there is the feeling of shoulders. Shoulders are against other shoulders. It’s the way of the city, shoulders against shoulders. Shoulders, in mid-day, in Paris, along the metro, in route to lunch, which is to say to be in route to meet people for lunch people. People in and about Paris, crowded onto the bus.
Similar to the bus I’m on, the S bus. The S bus in midday in Paris crowded with shoulders. Beyond shoulders there are other body parts contained in coats and trousers crowding the S bus. Trousers containing men’s knees and ankles and calves ready to and taut to kick and shuffle with the shuffle of the city, the city of Paris, and its midday bustle of commuters on the S bus, the bus I’m on. The bus I’m on watching trousers and suit jackets containing men and women bustling about in the midday, lunchtime, by far the busiest part of the day in Paris. Well at least during the week when the midday keeps the bustle at its trouser bustle point of note. Suppose this is a point of note, as it is being noted, the bustle, the midday bustle that is to be noted, specifically on the S bus. This day in June during the midday bustle on the S bus.
In the bus it is frantic. In the outside of the bus it is frantic, as it is midday. Inside the bus the passengers coil in their fabrics. Inside their fabrics their knees buckle a bit and when the bus lets out, in the midday sun outside the bus there is a similar bustle but that doesn’t matter for now. Though the bustle outside the bus is the bustle of thousands, their small lunch movements, all of them, let light on the pavement amidst frantic pigeons consuming the bustles lunch fragments.
Inside the bus I’m sitting in outside the midday sun inside the city of Paris on the S bus. Inside the S bus but on it I see a long neck inside the bus, the same bus that I am inside or on but inside the city of Paris, though not outside of it are my thoughts, not exclusive to the city, as is summer and my thoughts have drifted to the country. I love the city in the summer and its contained day dreams of the country. Wheat fields and such and the way that inside of them outside of the city I think of life with Paris in the distance. Bits of wheat like drips of grapes feeding a city out of grasp of itself. Out of grasp is the city with a view of itself. Anywhere in Paris you can see the Eifel tower except under it.
Outside the city is a bustle in the midday. Inside there is a bus, that bus I’ve been telling you I’m on. Well, inside this young man, the young man with the long neck is inside of my periphery, which is to say he is outside of those outside of the bus but inside the view of those within a few seats of me, as mentioned the bus is crowded in the midday in the midweek in the midsummer.
Outside there are tourists looking inside a midday S bus in Paris in the midday. They take photos, captured in film, taken out of cameras, developed outside of Paris, more than likely in Ohio or Baltimore. Outside Baltimore, in Maryland is a bit of land designated outside of its state held right. Designated as a Capital of a country. The United States of America is outside of Baltimore, inside of Maryland, Virginia and some other state that is currently outside of my memory.
Inside the S bus this boy I’ve mentioned with the long neck –did I mention his funny hat? It sits outside of fashion for the time– is growing upset inside the bus and outside of his contained wits.
“Hey there buddy, You’re in my personal space.”
“Surely not intentionally.” Say’s the man, in his own right to defend himself but outside of his country and comfort zone. He appears to be a foreigner both in his manner of speech and outwardly in his mannerisms, which appear inwardly eastern while his speech is overtly western. Which is to say English. English being the language he felt most comfortable in, up until this point, in another country, where his loafers lived up to their expectations and repeatedly lounged against this long necked man on the S bus’s wing tips and upper ankles.
“Surely not intentionally” He repeats, now to himself as the young man with the long neck and the waywardness of a boy negligent of his own habits rather than repeating himself, as the man did, in the S. Bus, on the S bus, in Paris, during a midday commute felt the need to do so.
Instead this boy with the long neck, in my vision, on the bus, outside the blistering June midday commute, inside the bustle of this could be commuters view, which is to say my view, which is to say in the view of many, both inside and outside of the bus, saw him, rather than further ensue the argument walk to the nearest vacant seat.
Of which there were a few opening and closing and opening and closing as passengers or commuters or persons in the perpetual present of the moment during the altercation of the moment of the perpetual present moment of the altercation between the boy and the foreign man with the loafers who loafed about casually and accidentally or casually but regardless accosted a young man with a long neck -and a funny hat- in front of me on the S bus during midday in Paris on an afternoon in June, the afternoon and June I speak of being the present one. Well then if not for that alone the boy moved seats and the foreign man continued to look foreign, as was not his want but more than likely simply his nature or modus operandi as it was known in the past and in many respects the present, though not at all known to those outside the periphery of such referential diction.
Should I then tell you of the inconvenience of seeing this long necked boy yet a second time in that same blistering afternoon, though past the bustle of the present tension taken on the S. Bus.
Not an hour later. In the city of Paris, still. Still within a matter of kilometers from the incident on the S. Bus, that must have dropped the boy off the crowded bus during such a time as I did not see the boy outside the bus but surely as other passengers still saw me on the bus I later left or possibly left prior to the boy, for like I said after the incident he was out of my periphery. Though I suppose he was in others, but none of those are telling this story. Are they?
Thought not, so before or after or at the same time we might have gotten off the bus a time elapsed during which both me and the boy with the long neck and funny hat traveled to the same gare as passengers now, at least for a time off the bus, for what is a passenger outside of a bus but not currently on or in one? Passengers awaiting a bus. Not on one currently but possibly to be on one again, this is the makings of a commuter, a metro, a system of connected travel routes convenient or inconvenient for passengers such as myself or such as the boy with the long neck, though it might have been the hat that made his neck so funny, who wound up off the S bus and some time later at the same gare. This should not be of any surprise to me, though at the time, in the midday it should be noted that it might have been but more thank likely, as memory currently recalls and for the sake of the tale was and is in the present sense of the story I am currently telling.
I saw this long necked boy, outside the gare Saint-Lazare, inside the same coat he was wearing. A long coat, inside or outside or beside were a series of buttons, fashionable or otherwise.
“Too close together.” Said his friend outside the gare, inside the city, within the presence of myself and others, though I don’t recall them from the bus. Though they might have been within it while the bustle of the midday took place, as it does in June, as is June’s want. This boy stood out because of his neck, hat, and the altercation with the foreign man, who was not to be seen at this juncture but it can be said, and will be said, in this story and outside of it in my intuitive memory that the foreign man remained foreign inside the city of Paris on this afternoon, now past midday, as he -the foreign man- was a long way from Baltimore or where ever he may have been from.
“You ought to move that button up a notch.”
Instead of doing both of these remixes I kind of went with a mash-up of the two. Below is my Stein influenced Exercise in Style.
Hope you like it.
If not, just look at this instead. It's pretty and Dutch.
In the inside of the S bus it is crowded. In the outside of the S bus there is Paris. In Paris there is a crowded midday scene. The midday scene is filled. Filled with commuters. These commuters –some of them- are on the S bus.
Like me.
Like me, I’m on the S bus at midday.
In Paris.
Outside of the city but inside of the bus. Inside the bus it is crowded just as outside the bus the city is crowded with people pouring into the bus. In the bus there is the feeling of shoulders. Shoulders are against other shoulders. It’s the way of the city, shoulders against shoulders. Shoulders, in mid-day, in Paris, along the metro, in route to lunch, which is to say to be in route to meet people for lunch people. People in and about Paris, crowded onto the bus.
Similar to the bus I’m on, the S bus. The S bus in midday in Paris crowded with shoulders. Beyond shoulders there are other body parts contained in coats and trousers crowding the S bus. Trousers containing men’s knees and ankles and calves ready to and taut to kick and shuffle with the shuffle of the city, the city of Paris, and its midday bustle of commuters on the S bus, the bus I’m on. The bus I’m on watching trousers and suit jackets containing men and women bustling about in the midday, lunchtime, by far the busiest part of the day in Paris. Well at least during the week when the midday keeps the bustle at its trouser bustle point of note. Suppose this is a point of note, as it is being noted, the bustle, the midday bustle that is to be noted, specifically on the S bus. This day in June during the midday bustle on the S bus.
In the bus it is frantic. In the outside of the bus it is frantic, as it is midday. Inside the bus the passengers coil in their fabrics. Inside their fabrics their knees buckle a bit and when the bus lets out, in the midday sun outside the bus there is a similar bustle but that doesn’t matter for now. Though the bustle outside the bus is the bustle of thousands, their small lunch movements, all of them, let light on the pavement amidst frantic pigeons consuming the bustles lunch fragments.
Inside the bus I’m sitting in outside the midday sun inside the city of Paris on the S bus. Inside the S bus but on it I see a long neck inside the bus, the same bus that I am inside or on but inside the city of Paris, though not outside of it are my thoughts, not exclusive to the city, as is summer and my thoughts have drifted to the country. I love the city in the summer and its contained day dreams of the country. Wheat fields and such and the way that inside of them outside of the city I think of life with Paris in the distance. Bits of wheat like drips of grapes feeding a city out of grasp of itself. Out of grasp is the city with a view of itself. Anywhere in Paris you can see the Eifel tower except under it.
Outside the city is a bustle in the midday. Inside there is a bus, that bus I’ve been telling you I’m on. Well, inside this young man, the young man with the long neck is inside of my periphery, which is to say he is outside of those outside of the bus but inside the view of those within a few seats of me, as mentioned the bus is crowded in the midday in the midweek in the midsummer.
Outside there are tourists looking inside a midday S bus in Paris in the midday. They take photos, captured in film, taken out of cameras, developed outside of Paris, more than likely in Ohio or Baltimore. Outside Baltimore, in Maryland is a bit of land designated outside of its state held right. Designated as a Capital of a country. The United States of America is outside of Baltimore, inside of Maryland, Virginia and some other state that is currently outside of my memory.
Inside the S bus this boy I’ve mentioned with the long neck –did I mention his funny hat? It sits outside of fashion for the time– is growing upset inside the bus and outside of his contained wits.
“Hey there buddy, You’re in my personal space.”
“Surely not intentionally.” Say’s the man, in his own right to defend himself but outside of his country and comfort zone. He appears to be a foreigner both in his manner of speech and outwardly in his mannerisms, which appear inwardly eastern while his speech is overtly western. Which is to say English. English being the language he felt most comfortable in, up until this point, in another country, where his loafers lived up to their expectations and repeatedly lounged against this long necked man on the S bus’s wing tips and upper ankles.
“Surely not intentionally” He repeats, now to himself as the young man with the long neck and the waywardness of a boy negligent of his own habits rather than repeating himself, as the man did, in the S. Bus, on the S bus, in Paris, during a midday commute felt the need to do so.
Instead this boy with the long neck, in my vision, on the bus, outside the blistering June midday commute, inside the bustle of this could be commuters view, which is to say my view, which is to say in the view of many, both inside and outside of the bus, saw him, rather than further ensue the argument walk to the nearest vacant seat.
Of which there were a few opening and closing and opening and closing as passengers or commuters or persons in the perpetual present of the moment during the altercation of the moment of the perpetual present moment of the altercation between the boy and the foreign man with the loafers who loafed about casually and accidentally or casually but regardless accosted a young man with a long neck -and a funny hat- in front of me on the S bus during midday in Paris on an afternoon in June, the afternoon and June I speak of being the present one. Well then if not for that alone the boy moved seats and the foreign man continued to look foreign, as was not his want but more than likely simply his nature or modus operandi as it was known in the past and in many respects the present, though not at all known to those outside the periphery of such referential diction.
Should I then tell you of the inconvenience of seeing this long necked boy yet a second time in that same blistering afternoon, though past the bustle of the present tension taken on the S. Bus.
Not an hour later. In the city of Paris, still. Still within a matter of kilometers from the incident on the S. Bus, that must have dropped the boy off the crowded bus during such a time as I did not see the boy outside the bus but surely as other passengers still saw me on the bus I later left or possibly left prior to the boy, for like I said after the incident he was out of my periphery. Though I suppose he was in others, but none of those are telling this story. Are they?
Thought not, so before or after or at the same time we might have gotten off the bus a time elapsed during which both me and the boy with the long neck and funny hat traveled to the same gare as passengers now, at least for a time off the bus, for what is a passenger outside of a bus but not currently on or in one? Passengers awaiting a bus. Not on one currently but possibly to be on one again, this is the makings of a commuter, a metro, a system of connected travel routes convenient or inconvenient for passengers such as myself or such as the boy with the long neck, though it might have been the hat that made his neck so funny, who wound up off the S bus and some time later at the same gare. This should not be of any surprise to me, though at the time, in the midday it should be noted that it might have been but more thank likely, as memory currently recalls and for the sake of the tale was and is in the present sense of the story I am currently telling.
I saw this long necked boy, outside the gare Saint-Lazare, inside the same coat he was wearing. A long coat, inside or outside or beside were a series of buttons, fashionable or otherwise.
“Too close together.” Said his friend outside the gare, inside the city, within the presence of myself and others, though I don’t recall them from the bus. Though they might have been within it while the bustle of the midday took place, as it does in June, as is June’s want. This boy stood out because of his neck, hat, and the altercation with the foreign man, who was not to be seen at this juncture but it can be said, and will be said, in this story and outside of it in my intuitive memory that the foreign man remained foreign inside the city of Paris on this afternoon, now past midday, as he -the foreign man- was a long way from Baltimore or where ever he may have been from.
“You ought to move that button up a notch.”
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