Thursday, October 26, 2006


Remix this, remix that.

New media artist as "mashup filter" (you control the experiential opacity, crunchy altertones, asynchronous assemblages, etc.).

Henri Bergson (from the core of his belief system):

The VJ speaks another language altogether. For example,

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Monday, October 23, 2006

VJ Persona as Trickster

Random notes toward a philosophy of the VJ (continued):

1) Laptop improvisations by the Monkey Grammarian are part of an art-research investigation always on the verge of asking the burning question.

2) The VJ practices a nomadic, occultist aesthetic, as in: Hermes is "[s]ly, slippery, and masked, an intriguer and a card. . . he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play" (Derrida, 1991, p. 122). Their criticism would be unpredictable, like the divination methods Apollo gave to Hermes, and ultimately uncharacterizable. A truly unpredictable, divinatory criticism would greatly contrast the deductive tendencies of contemporary cultural theory by opposing them with the "slide rule of intuition" (Ulmer, 1994, p. 206) and deliberate cultivation of contingencies that would prevent an identifiable method from congealing. This very absence of essential identity would align Hermes with the Fool in the tarot deck, "who is always on the road, always in the process of becoming" (Semetsky, 2001, p. 59), and hence allows nothingness to acquire a positive value.

3) Live performance or activist Life Style Practice as unconscious triggering of image-events beyond cinematic language, disrupting narrative, challenging the experiential qualifier generally referred to as "realtime" while immersing oneself in a proprioceptive wandering through "realspace" via acts of improvisational composition that "take place" during and outside of the affective interval.

4) Ulmer: "The strategy of chorography for deconstructing the frontier metaphor of research is to consider the 'place' and its 'genre' in rhetorical terms -- as a topos. The project is then to replace topos itself (not just one particular setting but place as such) with chora wherever the former is found in the trivium. In order to foreground the foundational function of location in thought, choral writing organizes any manner of information by means of the writer's specific position in the time and space of a culture." That is, what "takes place" in the affective interval is an improvisational remix of bodily perception composed by the VJ as an aesthetic experiment in chorography.

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Sunday, October 22, 2006

Healing Dick

This multi-media package from writer-shaman Michael Brownstein includes a drum chant, a Youtube video, a novel, and a bodily move toward total psychic cleansing:
This is my story and every last word of it is true. But it's your story too, sweet earthlings.

Because like it or not, ready or not, after five thousand years of hiking along history's straight line we're about to re-enter the world of myth. The shaman's realm of shapeshifting and trance. A waking dream where before and after, up and down, inside and out no longer limit us. Where travel from one end of the universe to the other takes only an instant.

Time and space can be wide-open for us, they can be our allies. But the realm we're entering also teems with entities looking to redefine what human means. It's filled with demons.

In fact, a great battle is being joined between the forces of dark and light. Whether or not we're aware of it, whether or not we're awake, someone out there wants to control what we see and hear and think. And who could that someone be? Who's taking our measure?

Listen to his voice, sweet earthlings. He's the man with the frozen heart. You've heard him before, declaiming from the bully pulpit in places of power. Singing his siren song of fear and separation. But listen to him when he's at home. With his guard down. With his boots off and his feet up. Who's he speaking for now? Who does he represent? Who is his real constituency?
And then, in "I See Something...":
We need your help as an extra set of eyes and ears.
Unattended bags? Suspicious behavior?
Take notice of people in bulky or inappropriate clothing.
Report anyone tampering with video cameras or entering unauthorized areas.
If you see something, say something.

I see something.
I see a criminally insane person
roaming the halls of the White House.
He believes he's the president of the United States.
And I see a rotund bastard with a heart problem hovering in the background, pulling the strings.
His crooked smile lights the way to perdition[...]

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