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.

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.

I Don't Recall How to Delete a Post

So this will remain sparse until that day occurs.

Fake Introductions (Stephani Nola)

During her lifetime, poet Stephani Nola was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, an abundance of research, criticism and appreciation has emerged surrounding her first publication, “Lunch Poems.”

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.

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.