Remember split 7"s? Where two bands would each record one side of a vinyl record? Taking inspiration from this form, Rhizome is offering a "Split 1-Inch" edition for those who contribute $250 to our community campaign. This limited edition flash drive contains two folders pairing artwork by artist and co-editor of VVORK Aleksandra Domanovic and curator of Art Since the Summer of 1969 co-director Hanne Mugaas. Rock out to your desktop, and pick up a Split 1-inch today!
Remember split 7"s? Where two bands would each record one side of a vinyl record? Taking inspiration from this form, Rhizome is offering a "Split 1-Inch" edition for those who contribute $250 to our community campaign. This limited edition flash drive contains two folders pairing artwork by artist and co-editor of VVORK Aleksandra Domanovic and curator of Art Since the Summer of 1969 co-director Hanne Mugaas. Rock out to your desktop, and pick up a Split 1-inch today!
The School of Art at CalArts have introduced a new two-year program MFA in Art and Technology. According to the press release, "The new program is designed to encourage students to investigate the critical and creative issues that arise in art practices that employ the use of new technologies and digital media. The students will also be encouraged to pursue work that crosses traditional mediums, enabling the integration of hybrid art forms with online strategies and performance...The Art and Technology Program in the School of Art will involve faculty and visiting artists whose work engages computer programming, web based systems, digital image making, digital sound design, immersive installation, digital video, interactive multimedia and hybrid performance. The curriculum will be integrated with studio based practices and open forums designed to foster dialogue between students and faculty." They are currently accepting applications for the Fall 2010 semester. Visit the link below for more information.
The School of Art at CalArts have introduced a new two-year program MFA in Art and Technology. According to the press release, "The new program is designed to encourage students to investigate the critical and creative issues that arise in art practices that employ the use of new technologies and digital media. The students will also be encouraged to pursue work that crosses traditional mediums, enabling the integration of hybrid art forms with online strategies and performance...The Art and Technology Program in the School of Art will involve faculty and visiting artists whose work engages computer programming, web based systems, digital image making, digital sound design, immersive installation, digital video, interactive multimedia and hybrid performance. The curriculum will be integrated with studio based practices and open forums designed to foster dialogue between students and faculty." They are currently accepting applications for the Fall 2010 semester. Visit the link below for more information.
Eyebeam announced an open call for their Winter/Spring Residencies and 2010 Fellowships. Their residencies provide a 5-month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Their fellowships are an 11-month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time. Deadline for applications is December 14, 2009 and the start date for the next round of Residents and Fellows is March 1, 2010. Check the links below for more information and to apply.
FELLOWSHIP CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBF10
RESIDENCY CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBRWS10
Eyebeam announced an open call for their Winter/Spring Residencies and 2010 Fellowships. Their residencies provide a 5-month opportunity for production and presentation of projects querying art, technology and culture. Their fellowships are an 11-month opportunity to spearhead new research, lead group research inquiries, and develop innovative technology with support over a longer period of time. Deadline for applications is December 14, 2009 and the start date for the next round of Residents and Fellows is March 1, 2010. Check the links below for more information and to apply.
FELLOWSHIP CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBF10
RESIDENCY CALL: http://tinyurl.com/EBRWS10
On November 15, an unseasonably warm fall Sunday, a small crowd of artists and academics armed with pens, notebooks, and cell phone cameras, gathered on the second floor of the Bronx Museum. The afternoon began with a panel discussion on the topic of radio and Futurism followed by a sound installation presented by the artist Kabir Carter as part of Performa 09. As Sergio Bessa, Director of Programs, pointed out-- perhaps facetiously-- Futurism and the Bronx are temporally linked: Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the Grand Concourse are both celebrating their centennial this year.
The panel, featuring literary critics Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and poet Charles Bernstein, served as a precursor to Carter's Trap [originally titled Drifts and Traps], locating the sound piece within the historical context of the Futurist movement. The live presentation also served as a more complex complement to Carter's current installation at the BMA.
The panel centered on the opposition of the Russian futurists, portrayed as optimistic idealists by Perloff, and the Italian futurists, a group of dystopian thinkers enamored of fascism presented by Sieburth. Perloff began by reading Velimir Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future, an essay predicting the potential of radio to act as a vast concert hall and to disseminate news to the masses. Sieburth, on the other hand, explored Ezra Pound's role in Italian Futurism, focusing on Canto LXXII, a poem of discordant strife describing the author's fictitious meeting with Marinetti in radio hell. Transitioning neatly to Carter's installation, Bernstein then performed a dramatic reading of sections of Marinetti's manifesto, as well as poems by Russian Futurists and the speaker himself.
After a short break, Carter positioned himself at a table with an array of devices: radio scanners, analog synthesizer modules and audio mixers. Sounds subtly began to emanate from speakers located around the room, and the din of the audience ebbed as it became aurally engulfed by the powerful installation.
Kabir Carter Performing "Trap" at the Bronx MuseumMuffled voices, sirens in the distance, fuzzy static and high-pitched beeps came together in a tangled whir, as Carter, poised like a DJ, concentrated on turning knobs and switching wires. Picked up by radio scanners, the source material derived from transmissions generated by police, car services, the MTA, and other radio users in the South Bronx. For the first time in his career, the artist chose to work with signal delays in order to "accurately represent the continuous lateral drift of acoustic energy and events along the Grand Concourse," in his own words.
After a few minutes, the composition reached a powerful crescendo, and as the late day sunbeams shone through a window onto the artist, a phrase from Radio of the Future, "a silver shower of sounds," described the moment perfectly. The intensification ended abruptly, and a lull drew attention to the silence in the room.
As time passed, the sounds became more legible and systems became identifiable-- the presentation had a fairly long duration for precisely this reason. While the radio signals may at first have appeared to be a chaotic jumble of noises, over time patterns began to emerge, and Trap became a fluid movement. As Sieburth reminded the audience earlier in the afternoon, Marinetti once declared that a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and for a few hours in the Bronx, the legacy of Futurism lived on in the cacophonous beauty of Trap.
Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.
On November 15, an unseasonably warm fall Sunday, a small crowd of artists and academics armed with pens, notebooks, and cell phone cameras, gathered on the second floor of the Bronx Museum. The afternoon began with a panel discussion on the topic of radio and Futurism followed by a sound installation presented by the artist Kabir Carter as part of Performa 09. As Sergio Bessa, Director of Programs, pointed out-- perhaps facetiously-- Futurism and the Bronx are temporally linked: Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto and the Grand Concourse are both celebrating their centennial this year.
The panel, featuring literary critics Marjorie Perloff and Richard Sieburth, and poet Charles Bernstein, served as a precursor to Carter's Trap [originally titled Drifts and Traps], locating the sound piece within the historical context of the Futurist movement. The live presentation also served as a more complex complement to Carter's current installation at the BMA.
The panel centered on the opposition of the Russian futurists, portrayed as optimistic idealists by Perloff, and the Italian futurists, a group of dystopian thinkers enamored of fascism presented by Sieburth. Perloff began by reading Velimir Khlebnikov's Radio of the Future, an essay predicting the potential of radio to act as a vast concert hall and to disseminate news to the masses. Sieburth, on the other hand, explored Ezra Pound's role in Italian Futurism, focusing on Canto LXXII, a poem of discordant strife describing the author's fictitious meeting with Marinetti in radio hell. Transitioning neatly to Carter's installation, Bernstein then performed a dramatic reading of sections of Marinetti's manifesto, as well as poems by Russian Futurists and the speaker himself.
After a short break, Carter positioned himself at a table with an array of devices: radio scanners, analog synthesizer modules and audio mixers. Sounds subtly began to emanate from speakers located around the room, and the din of the audience ebbed as it became aurally engulfed by the powerful installation.
Kabir Carter Performing "Trap" at the Bronx MuseumMuffled voices, sirens in the distance, fuzzy static and high-pitched beeps came together in a tangled whir, as Carter, poised like a DJ, concentrated on turning knobs and switching wires. Picked up by radio scanners, the source material derived from transmissions generated by police, car services, the MTA, and other radio users in the South Bronx. For the first time in his career, the artist chose to work with signal delays in order to "accurately represent the continuous lateral drift of acoustic energy and events along the Grand Concourse," in his own words.
After a few minutes, the composition reached a powerful crescendo, and as the late day sunbeams shone through a window onto the artist, a phrase from Radio of the Future, "a silver shower of sounds," described the moment perfectly. The intensification ended abruptly, and a lull drew attention to the silence in the room.
As time passed, the sounds became more legible and systems became identifiable-- the presentation had a fairly long duration for precisely this reason. While the radio signals may at first have appeared to be a chaotic jumble of noises, over time patterns began to emerge, and Trap became a fluid movement. As Sieburth reminded the audience earlier in the afternoon, Marinetti once declared that a speeding automobile is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and for a few hours in the Bronx, the legacy of Futurism lived on in the cacophonous beauty of Trap.
Jeanne Gerrity is a Brooklyn-based curator and writer. She currently holds the position of Programs Manager at Smack Mellon.
Rick Silva: The announcement for your retrospective in Greece (your third retrospective right?!) says "The exhibition will also include the European premiere of his most recent work, Immobilité, the first feature-length work released in his 'Foreign Film Series.' I really liked this quote you told me once, I think it was by Atom Egoyan, that "every film is a foreign film"... how does that quote resonate with this new work/series?
Mark Amerika: "UNREALTIME," the exhibition in Athens, is by far the most comprehensive of all of my prior "retrospectives." In 2001-2002, we were having some fun with the notion of "Internet time" and tried to play with the idea of a retro-spective in relation to a lot of the net art I had created in the 90s. Those shows were at the ICA in London and the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo. Two more followed in 2004, one in Bilbao and one in Sao Paulo, but just in terms of size, the way my work is distributed throughout the museum space, and the variety of work covered -- net art, digital video and surround sound installation, the new mobile phone works, and various language art pieces, going through the show in Athens feels like a very intense experience.
This is partly due to the inclusion of Immobilité. The work runs 75 minutes and is being projected as a wide screen cinematic installation in the big Project Room in the museum. As I was making Immobilité, I was intentionally modeling it after what in the past we have called art-house films or, for the purposes of my new body of work, foreign films. For me, all films are foreign because they take me into another world that defamiliarizes my own and, in the process, exiles me from myself so that I too can become foreign and enter that altered world I need to immerse myself in when creating.
Besides, I am especially attracted to some of the more experimental, visionary artworks composed by artists like Chris Marker and Agnes Varda as well as the work of Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, and Kar-Wai. There is something about the way that these other artists oscillate between interior and exterior landscapes that really speaks to me. I have also seen multi-media exhibitions by both Godard and Varda and have navigated through CD-ROMs by Marker, so it's not that odd to go in the other direction, i.e. from novel writing and net art and VJ performance into feature-length filmmaking-as-art. Although it should be said that my idea was not to make a film per se, but to literally remix the form of a feature-length foreign film so that it felt like something you would see in an art-house theater but that was clearly not a major motion picture and would be best experienced as a museum installation. To achieve this, I went very D-I-Y, and shot the work entirely on mobile phone and essentially mashed-up a more amateurish visual aesthetic with my over-the-top auteur-ish methods. For example, there are many of these "painterly" scenes that point back to the abstract expressionist roots of the art scene that has come out of the Cornwall region of the UK where the work was shot. These painterly images were made not in After-Effects, in fact there are no slick, Jeremy Blake-like composites in the work, but rather flickering color fields and character portraits created using experimental hand-held techniques, something that you can really play with once you get a feel for the mobile phone as capturing device. As odd as it may sound, I imagined the mobile phone as part image capturing device, part paintbrush, and part communications gadget during the entire production.
Of course, as with all of my prior work, Immobilité is an expansion of my creative writing practice too and consists of subtitles that also remix both philosophical and literary texts that have informed my own writing style for over 25 years. As with all foreign films, the only way to see Immobilité is to read it.
RS: This idea of 'remixing the form' goes all the way back to your first new media work GRAMMATRON, where you basically wrote a novel as a multimedia hypertext website. Do you think we are in a post remix era, as in post taking-content-directly-from-other-people's-works, and maybe more about remixing aesthetic or structural forms?
MA: My sense is that it's an "all of the above" situation that has been happening for awhile now and that, out of necessity, we find ourselves becoming not so much contemporary artists (i.e. "of" our time) but temporary artists, something much more fluid in the sense that we are continually caught in the post-production process which for me is the same thing as the creative process. Being creative is what it means to be an aesthetic creature, i.e. one who remixes forms and content as part of their ongoing quest for novelty. This is something that we can trace back to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead whose books, particularly Process and Reality, highlight how we quite naturally select useful source material, what he calls datum, and reconfigure it for our own creative needs. So yes, on a practical level, remix culture is about sampling content and manipulating it for temporary effect, but on a philosophical level it goes much deeper than that, where we are intersubjectively jamming with the cultural moment we are part of while at the same time sampling from cultural forms we have inherited. With GRAMMATRON, I am noticeably remixing the formal experiments we find in metafiction, hypertext, and conceptual art+language works while unknowingly helping usher in a new genre that we have since come to call Internet art. The buzz from the discoveries made during the making of GRAMMATRON is then integrated into PHON:E:ME, where I remix the form of the concept album with forms I associate with Conceptual Art while at the same time expanding the concept of peer-to-peer networking, and then with FILMTEXT I try to mash-up a lot of different forms including interactive cinema, games, cyberpunk fiction and what had by then become net art.
Mark Amerika, GRAMMATRON, 1997But at a certain point, around 2001-2002, I realized that it was time to expand out of net art into other forms. What I noticed was that the more visual and interactive the work became, the more it begged for performance, so I began taking source material from FILMTEXT and started remixing it in live performances, what we were then referring to as VJ-ing which plays with the idea of "live cinema" or "live A/V." These are all just ways of advancing creativity as part of an aesthetically-induced, temporal achievement. Although, seeing a solid sample of the work I have created over the last twelve years distributed in the large museum space in Athens, brings home the idea that what my body of work is really investigating over time is the way digital media facilitates the remixing of persona.
RS: How do the audio/visual elements of FILMTEXT play to the different audiences you distribute the work to via say, a live, physical audience as opposed to a more distributed, online network?
MA: The audiences are changing so it's very tricky to try and anticipate what kind of art experience one can deliver to an imaginary other. For example, some of my live performances are also simultaneously distributed over the net and then archived for future research or remix purposes. One is tempted to say that these changes are almost all technologically induced. But then again, I am the one pulling the trigger. Although once I am performing a live set or enable my online presence to get distributed 24/7 over the matrix, then I start feeling like a network distributed "other" more than I feel like anything I might want to call "me" ("me" who?). This might have something to do with the way we now "play ourselves" as we live out the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote "I am another."
Don't forget, in the old days, say 10-12 years ago, a lot of the pioneering net artists were both making net art in total isolation yet connecting with their audience via the web and email while at the same time actively circulating in the international media arts festival scene. Once that happens, the audience becomes this imaginary hybrid i.e. a mesh of flesh and avatar-others, one that is constantly shape-shifting into new configurations. For example, take "Open-X" at Ars Electronic in 1997. Look at who was there and you see the core group of international artists who were beginning to define what we now think of as Internet art. "Open-X" was an interesting if slightly odd experience. The work was on the net, but the Pure Net Art Animal was now on display as a kind of novelty item to be observed for its playful tendencies. We weren't really sectioned off into a ghetto; it was more like we or our work process was on visual display in kind of techno-zoo, which made perfect sense since we were becoming part of art history which treats its artists and artworks like a precious species to be preserved in controlled environments.
Since the start, though, I have tried to tie a performance element to my various art projects. With GRAMMATRON, you would have thought the audience was primarily oriented toward experimental electronic literature. Sure, there was some of that, but it was what we call the "art world" that really embraced it when it first launched. When I went on the GRAMMATRON WORLD TOUR in 1997-1998, I was playing the work like a multi-media literary reading, something I picked up from my book tour days with my underground novels like The Kafka Chronicles, the difference being that these so-called readings now had sound art, animated images, and multi-linear narrative routes to navigate through while performing the work live. These were the days when my work was being reviewed by magazines like MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL who at the time put out books like "Book Your Own Fucking Life." The early net art scene was a very DIY scene and that was what attracted me to the idea of pushing it as far as it would go back then. There were no MFA programs dealing with net art in a serious way, that's for sure.
So it was not a big leap for me to then take FILMTEXT on the road as part of a live A/V or DJ/VJ performance act. The work opened at my solo exhibition at the ICA in London 2001-2002, and was presented as a cluster of projects that could be interacted with or activated over the Internet: the main digital narrative / Flash interface, a downloadable artist e-book, and an mp3 concept album. But then ten months later started the performances. The main difference between the GRAMMATRON readings-cum-performances and the FILMTEXT performances was that the source material became more translocal because we would supplement the source material from the net art version of FILMTEXT with new source material from wherever we were in the world performing our live A/V gigs. Whether we were in Basel or Tokyo we would record local video and sound data and integrate it into the gig later that night, which then led to all kinds of wildstyle philosophical tripping. This all fed into what I know think of the VJ Persona tour. I remember being in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and the Canary Islands all in a five-week period -- I was even teaching two new media art seminars as part of my professorial duties -- and realizing that the "jet-lag consciousness" as I call it, i.e. the time-tripping through international time zones while recording and remixing my memories, imaginary experiences, and translocal source material, created a more immersive net art practice than I had previously imagined. Since I am addicted to writing (Cocteau: "Writing is a sickness." / Bataille: "I write not to be mad."), I have documented these experiences in META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press) in both theoretical and fictional forms. Cf. "The Random Life of VJ Persona (A Mobile Medium in the Form of a Fiction)". In the book, VJ Persona is a nomadic net artist whose digital personae operates in asynchronous realtime, which is a kind of UNREALTIME, thus the connection to the title of the exhibition in Athens right now.
RS: When I look across your various works, some major themes that rise to the surface for me are; the future slipping into the past, the virtual slipping into the real, and the self/artist and the body as it negotiates these slippages. Other themes just below the surface are language, sex, politics, and place. Do you see that as fair reading of the work? Am I missing a big aesthetic or philosophical concern in there?
MA: As I look at my body of work to date, starting with the novels and working through the net art, the multi-media museum installations, the live A/V performances and now the feature-length films, the thing that stands out is how much my methodologies depend on what I call remixological inhabitation -- something that artists of all stripes have been doing in a visible form forever (think of Chaucer referring to himself as "The Compiler"). One can see the residue of "play-giarists," appropriation artists, and cut-up practitioners like Lautréamont, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Raymond Federman all throughout my work. This may be why I enjoyed hanging out with Acker and Federman and was attracted to Burroughs as well, especially the way they fucked up language with their political forms of sexuality and experimented with their bodies.
All of the talk of hactivism, the gift economy, surf-sample-manipulate, etc, was easy for me to connect with because, in fact, when I look at the real early stuff I was doing even in my teens and early twenties, before I was aware of any the historical lineage of those who stole before me, I can see in my notes that I was seriously mashing up discourses from a lot of different sources. So when you say that you see the virtual slipping into the real, for me the virtual is the Source Material Everywhere and it was made "real" via whatever temporary remix I happened to perform with the material in asynchronous realtime. If I happened to have recorded that performative act then that recording too becomes more source material that can be revised, remixed, or otherwise reconfigured into a composed work of art no matter what medium or genre I am working in and, by the way, the mediums and genres begin to blur in my work too because of all of the transcoding that takes place within these ongoing remixological performances. Immobilité can be read as a film, a video art work, a philosophical treatise, or even a kind of visual novel/installation (loaded terms all, I know). For me it basically comes down to maintaining a "cut-and-paste-as-you-go" open source lifestyle practice where the remnants that you leave behind reveal your formal or stylistic tendencies. Some of these remnants are left on the net, some in institutional or commercial spaces, some are left in the club, and some are left on my computer. The important thing for me is that when I am making a work, I am, to use a sports analogy, "leaving everything on the field" because for me making art is an intense experience where the aesthetic, i.e. the artist-medium performing, meets the prosthetic, i.e. the technological crutch, meets the athletic, i.e. the body losing itself in unconscious creative projection. Producing -- or what I really mean is perpetually postproducing -- one's aesthetic trajectory through history is a durational achievement that challenges our sense of time. It's like what Borges says, "Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
The reason I keep going back to language, play, sex and politics is because that's all that really matters in the end. Of course, since I am postproducing the kind of art that grows out of a literary sensibility, let's not forget death too. Language, play, sex, politics and death all resonate with my core aesthetic principles which, I was reminded of again last year, are intimately connected to Whitehead's process theory. In Process and Reality, Whitehead declares that "Creativity is the principle of novelty." The word novelty is, for Whitehead, uncharacteristically placed in italics for emphasis. If you read through Whitehead's process theory, especially as it applies to aesthetics, you will see that he not only literally introduces us to the concept of creativity, but that he anticipates the coming of the postproduction artist as creative medium. Remixing, it ends up, is a biological process that feeds into what I am now calling the renewable tradition. How each individual negotiates the Source Material Everywhere is, as you suggest, a slippery process, and informs the development of their remixological style which then can be applied to the making of customized aesthetic experiences.
RS: So, what in the Source Material Everywhere is filtering itself into your upcoming projects?
MA:
Mark Amerika's comprehensive retrospective ""UNREALTIME" curated by Daphne Dragona runs at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, from October 22, 2009 until January 3, 2010.
Rick Silva is a former student and sometimes collaborator of Mark Amerika. The interview was conducted via email.
Rick Silva: The announcement for your retrospective in Greece (your third retrospective right?!) says "The exhibition will also include the European premiere of his most recent work, Immobilité, the first feature-length work released in his 'Foreign Film Series.' I really liked this quote you told me once, I think it was by Atom Egoyan, that "every film is a foreign film"... how does that quote resonate with this new work/series?
Mark Amerika: "UNREALTIME," the exhibition in Athens, is by far the most comprehensive of all of my prior "retrospectives." In 2001-2002, we were having some fun with the notion of "Internet time" and tried to play with the idea of a retro-spective in relation to a lot of the net art I had created in the 90s. Those shows were at the ICA in London and the Media Arts Plaza in Tokyo. Two more followed in 2004, one in Bilbao and one in Sao Paulo, but just in terms of size, the way my work is distributed throughout the museum space, and the variety of work covered -- net art, digital video and surround sound installation, the new mobile phone works, and various language art pieces, going through the show in Athens feels like a very intense experience.
This is partly due to the inclusion of Immobilité. The work runs 75 minutes and is being projected as a wide screen cinematic installation in the big Project Room in the museum. As I was making Immobilité, I was intentionally modeling it after what in the past we have called art-house films or, for the purposes of my new body of work, foreign films. For me, all films are foreign because they take me into another world that defamiliarizes my own and, in the process, exiles me from myself so that I too can become foreign and enter that altered world I need to immerse myself in when creating.
Besides, I am especially attracted to some of the more experimental, visionary artworks composed by artists like Chris Marker and Agnes Varda as well as the work of Antonioni, Bergman, Cassavetes, Fellini, Godard, and Kar-Wai. There is something about the way that these other artists oscillate between interior and exterior landscapes that really speaks to me. I have also seen multi-media exhibitions by both Godard and Varda and have navigated through CD-ROMs by Marker, so it's not that odd to go in the other direction, i.e. from novel writing and net art and VJ performance into feature-length filmmaking-as-art. Although it should be said that my idea was not to make a film per se, but to literally remix the form of a feature-length foreign film so that it felt like something you would see in an art-house theater but that was clearly not a major motion picture and would be best experienced as a museum installation. To achieve this, I went very D-I-Y, and shot the work entirely on mobile phone and essentially mashed-up a more amateurish visual aesthetic with my over-the-top auteur-ish methods. For example, there are many of these "painterly" scenes that point back to the abstract expressionist roots of the art scene that has come out of the Cornwall region of the UK where the work was shot. These painterly images were made not in After-Effects, in fact there are no slick, Jeremy Blake-like composites in the work, but rather flickering color fields and character portraits created using experimental hand-held techniques, something that you can really play with once you get a feel for the mobile phone as capturing device. As odd as it may sound, I imagined the mobile phone as part image capturing device, part paintbrush, and part communications gadget during the entire production.
Of course, as with all of my prior work, Immobilité is an expansion of my creative writing practice too and consists of subtitles that also remix both philosophical and literary texts that have informed my own writing style for over 25 years. As with all foreign films, the only way to see Immobilité is to read it.
RS: This idea of 'remixing the form' goes all the way back to your first new media work GRAMMATRON, where you basically wrote a novel as a multimedia hypertext website. Do you think we are in a post remix era, as in post taking-content-directly-from-other-people's-works, and maybe more about remixing aesthetic or structural forms?
MA: My sense is that it's an "all of the above" situation that has been happening for awhile now and that, out of necessity, we find ourselves becoming not so much contemporary artists (i.e. "of" our time) but temporary artists, something much more fluid in the sense that we are continually caught in the post-production process which for me is the same thing as the creative process. Being creative is what it means to be an aesthetic creature, i.e. one who remixes forms and content as part of their ongoing quest for novelty. This is something that we can trace back to the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead whose books, particularly Process and Reality, highlight how we quite naturally select useful source material, what he calls datum, and reconfigure it for our own creative needs. So yes, on a practical level, remix culture is about sampling content and manipulating it for temporary effect, but on a philosophical level it goes much deeper than that, where we are intersubjectively jamming with the cultural moment we are part of while at the same time sampling from cultural forms we have inherited. With GRAMMATRON, I am noticeably remixing the formal experiments we find in metafiction, hypertext, and conceptual art+language works while unknowingly helping usher in a new genre that we have since come to call Internet art. The buzz from the discoveries made during the making of GRAMMATRON is then integrated into PHON:E:ME, where I remix the form of the concept album with forms I associate with Conceptual Art while at the same time expanding the concept of peer-to-peer networking, and then with FILMTEXT I try to mash-up a lot of different forms including interactive cinema, games, cyberpunk fiction and what had by then become net art.
Mark Amerika, GRAMMATRON, 1997But at a certain point, around 2001-2002, I realized that it was time to expand out of net art into other forms. What I noticed was that the more visual and interactive the work became, the more it begged for performance, so I began taking source material from FILMTEXT and started remixing it in live performances, what we were then referring to as VJ-ing which plays with the idea of "live cinema" or "live A/V." These are all just ways of advancing creativity as part of an aesthetically-induced, temporal achievement. Although, seeing a solid sample of the work I have created over the last twelve years distributed in the large museum space in Athens, brings home the idea that what my body of work is really investigating over time is the way digital media facilitates the remixing of persona.
RS: How do the audio/visual elements of FILMTEXT play to the different audiences you distribute the work to via say, a live, physical audience as opposed to a more distributed, online network?
MA: The audiences are changing so it's very tricky to try and anticipate what kind of art experience one can deliver to an imaginary other. For example, some of my live performances are also simultaneously distributed over the net and then archived for future research or remix purposes. One is tempted to say that these changes are almost all technologically induced. But then again, I am the one pulling the trigger. Although once I am performing a live set or enable my online presence to get distributed 24/7 over the matrix, then I start feeling like a network distributed "other" more than I feel like anything I might want to call "me" ("me" who?). This might have something to do with the way we now "play ourselves" as we live out the (re)mixed reality narratives that we call our lives. Perhaps this is what Rimbaud meant when he wrote "I am another."
Don't forget, in the old days, say 10-12 years ago, a lot of the pioneering net artists were both making net art in total isolation yet connecting with their audience via the web and email while at the same time actively circulating in the international media arts festival scene. Once that happens, the audience becomes this imaginary hybrid i.e. a mesh of flesh and avatar-others, one that is constantly shape-shifting into new configurations. For example, take "Open-X" at Ars Electronic in 1997. Look at who was there and you see the core group of international artists who were beginning to define what we now think of as Internet art. "Open-X" was an interesting if slightly odd experience. The work was on the net, but the Pure Net Art Animal was now on display as a kind of novelty item to be observed for its playful tendencies. We weren't really sectioned off into a ghetto; it was more like we or our work process was on visual display in kind of techno-zoo, which made perfect sense since we were becoming part of art history which treats its artists and artworks like a precious species to be preserved in controlled environments.
Since the start, though, I have tried to tie a performance element to my various art projects. With GRAMMATRON, you would have thought the audience was primarily oriented toward experimental electronic literature. Sure, there was some of that, but it was what we call the "art world" that really embraced it when it first launched. When I went on the GRAMMATRON WORLD TOUR in 1997-1998, I was playing the work like a multi-media literary reading, something I picked up from my book tour days with my underground novels like The Kafka Chronicles, the difference being that these so-called readings now had sound art, animated images, and multi-linear narrative routes to navigate through while performing the work live. These were the days when my work was being reviewed by magazines like MAXIMUM ROCKNROLL who at the time put out books like "Book Your Own Fucking Life." The early net art scene was a very DIY scene and that was what attracted me to the idea of pushing it as far as it would go back then. There were no MFA programs dealing with net art in a serious way, that's for sure.
So it was not a big leap for me to then take FILMTEXT on the road as part of a live A/V or DJ/VJ performance act. The work opened at my solo exhibition at the ICA in London 2001-2002, and was presented as a cluster of projects that could be interacted with or activated over the Internet: the main digital narrative / Flash interface, a downloadable artist e-book, and an mp3 concept album. But then ten months later started the performances. The main difference between the GRAMMATRON readings-cum-performances and the FILMTEXT performances was that the source material became more translocal because we would supplement the source material from the net art version of FILMTEXT with new source material from wherever we were in the world performing our live A/V gigs. Whether we were in Basel or Tokyo we would record local video and sound data and integrate it into the gig later that night, which then led to all kinds of wildstyle philosophical tripping. This all fed into what I know think of the VJ Persona tour. I remember being in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and the Canary Islands all in a five-week period -- I was even teaching two new media art seminars as part of my professorial duties -- and realizing that the "jet-lag consciousness" as I call it, i.e. the time-tripping through international time zones while recording and remixing my memories, imaginary experiences, and translocal source material, created a more immersive net art practice than I had previously imagined. Since I am addicted to writing (Cocteau: "Writing is a sickness." / Bataille: "I write not to be mad."), I have documented these experiences in META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (MIT Press) in both theoretical and fictional forms. Cf. "The Random Life of VJ Persona (A Mobile Medium in the Form of a Fiction)". In the book, VJ Persona is a nomadic net artist whose digital personae operates in asynchronous realtime, which is a kind of UNREALTIME, thus the connection to the title of the exhibition in Athens right now.
RS: When I look across your various works, some major themes that rise to the surface for me are; the future slipping into the past, the virtual slipping into the real, and the self/artist and the body as it negotiates these slippages. Other themes just below the surface are language, sex, politics, and place. Do you see that as fair reading of the work? Am I missing a big aesthetic or philosophical concern in there?
MA: As I look at my body of work to date, starting with the novels and working through the net art, the multi-media museum installations, the live A/V performances and now the feature-length films, the thing that stands out is how much my methodologies depend on what I call remixological inhabitation -- something that artists of all stripes have been doing in a visible form forever (think of Chaucer referring to himself as "The Compiler"). One can see the residue of "play-giarists," appropriation artists, and cut-up practitioners like Lautréamont, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Raymond Federman all throughout my work. This may be why I enjoyed hanging out with Acker and Federman and was attracted to Burroughs as well, especially the way they fucked up language with their political forms of sexuality and experimented with their bodies.
All of the talk of hactivism, the gift economy, surf-sample-manipulate, etc, was easy for me to connect with because, in fact, when I look at the real early stuff I was doing even in my teens and early twenties, before I was aware of any the historical lineage of those who stole before me, I can see in my notes that I was seriously mashing up discourses from a lot of different sources. So when you say that you see the virtual slipping into the real, for me the virtual is the Source Material Everywhere and it was made "real" via whatever temporary remix I happened to perform with the material in asynchronous realtime. If I happened to have recorded that performative act then that recording too becomes more source material that can be revised, remixed, or otherwise reconfigured into a composed work of art no matter what medium or genre I am working in and, by the way, the mediums and genres begin to blur in my work too because of all of the transcoding that takes place within these ongoing remixological performances. Immobilité can be read as a film, a video art work, a philosophical treatise, or even a kind of visual novel/installation (loaded terms all, I know). For me it basically comes down to maintaining a "cut-and-paste-as-you-go" open source lifestyle practice where the remnants that you leave behind reveal your formal or stylistic tendencies. Some of these remnants are left on the net, some in institutional or commercial spaces, some are left in the club, and some are left on my computer. The important thing for me is that when I am making a work, I am, to use a sports analogy, "leaving everything on the field" because for me making art is an intense experience where the aesthetic, i.e. the artist-medium performing, meets the prosthetic, i.e. the technological crutch, meets the athletic, i.e. the body losing itself in unconscious creative projection. Producing -- or what I really mean is perpetually postproducing -- one's aesthetic trajectory through history is a durational achievement that challenges our sense of time. It's like what Borges says, "Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
The reason I keep going back to language, play, sex and politics is because that's all that really matters in the end. Of course, since I am postproducing the kind of art that grows out of a literary sensibility, let's not forget death too. Language, play, sex, politics and death all resonate with my core aesthetic principles which, I was reminded of again last year, are intimately connected to Whitehead's process theory. In Process and Reality, Whitehead declares that "Creativity is the principle of novelty." The word novelty is, for Whitehead, uncharacteristically placed in italics for emphasis. If you read through Whitehead's process theory, especially as it applies to aesthetics, you will see that he not only literally introduces us to the concept of creativity, but that he anticipates the coming of the postproduction artist as creative medium. Remixing, it ends up, is a biological process that feeds into what I am now calling the renewable tradition. How each individual negotiates the Source Material Everywhere is, as you suggest, a slippery process, and informs the development of their remixological style which then can be applied to the making of customized aesthetic experiences.
RS: So, what in the Source Material Everywhere is filtering itself into your upcoming projects?
MA:
Mark Amerika's comprehensive retrospective ""UNREALTIME" curated by Daphne Dragona runs at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, from October 22, 2009 until January 3, 2010.
Rick Silva is a former student and sometimes collaborator of Mark Amerika. The interview was conducted via email.
The current exhibition at Art in General is “Erratic Anthropologies", which features Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, Rancourt/Yatsuk, and Hong-An Truong, who construct narratives through video and performance that investigate a host of social subcultures (from hippie crafters to failed south Florida housing developers). In collaboration with Performa 09, a special series of performances have been organized to accompany the show. Last Wednesday, November 10, Benfield, Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk performed in temporary environments in the gallery space. They will perform again tonight at 7pm. Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Jenny Jaskey writes about Shana Moulton’s "The Undiscovered Antique."
In a crowded room on Wednesday night, video and performance artist Shana Moulton presented the ninth installment of Whispering Pines, a series in which her alter ego Cynthia relishes the life-changing potential of home décor, beauty routines, and self-help mantras. Cynthia’s obsession in this episode, entitled The Undiscovered Antique, focuses on her journey to confirm the value of personally meaningful domestic artifacts á la The Antiques Roadshow. Moulton’s work is a layering of video, performance, and prop staging that is, in its more effective moments, abstract and dreamlike. In the spirit of Sara Goldfarb minus the amphetamines, Cynthia fantasizes about the transcendental payoff of her kitsch consumer fetishes, which include a head massager and footbath. Moulton achieves this sense of escapism by fully integrating her character into a two-dimensional digital landscape: projected objects move in choreographed syncopation with Cynthia’s body, sometimes appearing to control its movement or color its surface.
Moulton’s work makes us particularly attuned to the social structure surrounding its protagonist through its exaggerated and fragmented representation of Cynthia’s environment. It uses this fiction as a means for creating a kind of framed anthropological analysis (in one interview I read, the artist says she began as an anthropology major and switched to art later in college). What became striking through this latest performance was not only the extent to which mass produced objects take on spiritual or healing significance for Cynthia, but how consumerism itself functions as a kind of religious outlet for her: the collection of “ritual” products, the pilgrimage to Roadshow, the promise of transformation through the practice of domestic consumption. If Moulton the anthropologist is showing us something, it is perhaps how our appetite for worship finds itself both in and outside of religious structures; organized consumption holds as much promise for accessing power and healing in Moulton’s scenario as organized religion might in other contexts.
Moulton’s practice uses the strategy of embodiment shared by artists across a wide swath of practices – Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tamy Ben-Tor, Yasumasa Morimura – to name a few, but the work finds its singular voice and appeal in Moulton’s personal and diaristic attachment to her character. It is the artist’s close affiliation with Cynthia (she views the character as connected to her own psyche) that keeps the work from spiraling into irony.
The current exhibition at Art in General is “Erratic Anthropologies", which features Guy Benfield, Shana Moulton, Rancourt/Yatsuk, and Hong-An Truong, who construct narratives through video and performance that investigate a host of social subcultures (from hippie crafters to failed south Florida housing developers). In collaboration with Performa 09, a special series of performances have been organized to accompany the show. Last Wednesday, November 10, Benfield, Moulton, and Rancourt/Yatsuk performed in temporary environments in the gallery space. They will perform again tonight at 7pm. Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Jenny Jaskey writes about Shana Moulton’s "The Undiscovered Antique."
In a crowded room on Wednesday night, video and performance artist Shana Moulton presented the ninth installment of Whispering Pines, a series in which her alter ego Cynthia relishes the life-changing potential of home décor, beauty routines, and self-help mantras. Cynthia’s obsession in this episode, entitled The Undiscovered Antique, focuses on her journey to confirm the value of personally meaningful domestic artifacts á la The Antiques Roadshow. Moulton’s work is a layering of video, performance, and prop staging that is, in its more effective moments, abstract and dreamlike. In the spirit of Sara Goldfarb minus the amphetamines, Cynthia fantasizes about the transcendental payoff of her kitsch consumer fetishes, which include a head massager and footbath. Moulton achieves this sense of escapism by fully integrating her character into a two-dimensional digital landscape: projected objects move in choreographed syncopation with Cynthia’s body, sometimes appearing to control its movement or color its surface.
Moulton’s work makes us particularly attuned to the social structure surrounding its protagonist through its exaggerated and fragmented representation of Cynthia’s environment. It uses this fiction as a means for creating a kind of framed anthropological analysis (in one interview I read, the artist says she began as an anthropology major and switched to art later in college). What became striking through this latest performance was not only the extent to which mass produced objects take on spiritual or healing significance for Cynthia, but how consumerism itself functions as a kind of religious outlet for her: the collection of “ritual” products, the pilgrimage to Roadshow, the promise of transformation through the practice of domestic consumption. If Moulton the anthropologist is showing us something, it is perhaps how our appetite for worship finds itself both in and outside of religious structures; organized consumption holds as much promise for accessing power and healing in Moulton’s scenario as organized religion might in other contexts.
Moulton’s practice uses the strategy of embodiment shared by artists across a wide swath of practices – Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tamy Ben-Tor, Yasumasa Morimura – to name a few, but the work finds its singular voice and appeal in Moulton’s personal and diaristic attachment to her character. It is the artist’s close affiliation with Cynthia (she views the character as connected to her own psyche) that keeps the work from spiraling into irony.
Scheduled for its New York premiere this Sunday, November 22, Case is an experimental adaptation of the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Considered a classic work of the literary genre cyberpunk, Neuromancer tells the story of Case, a fallen super hacker whose glory days have long since ended, leaving him in a drug-addled, regret-ridden state that lifts when a mysterious entity offers him a second chance. Charged, kaleidoscopic, and prescient, Neuromancer dilates on virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a globalized world through the intricacies of Case’s story. Case (2009), conceived and produced by artist Brody Condon, will be a day-long installation and performance that, in the artist’s words combines “Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with faux ‘virtual reality’ scenes that will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.” I asked Condon a few questions in advance of the New York premiere so readers, near and far, could get a sense of how this ambitious work will unfold on Sunday.
Case is commissioned and presented by Rhizome and Performa 2009: the New York Biennial of performance art, whose theme this year is futurism. It will take place at the New Museum on November 22 from 1-6pm. Viewers may come and go; there is no set time required to stay. Advance tickets are available here: http://www.newmuseum.org/events/384.
Lauren Cornell: Why were you inspired to adopt Case's story in 2009?
Brody Condon: One core theme of Gibson's novel is addiction and transcendence, and is embodied by the hacker Case. The performance will feature Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, an infamous Midwestern hell-raiser and activist, reading as the main character. This work started as a series of interviews with Ray, which I mashed with Neuromancer. Not only did he give me this book in the late 1980's, but many of his anecdotes concerning a life lived on the fringes of society blend seamlessly with those of Case.
I'm actually not so interested in the specifics of Gibson's narrative, for me the book is a reference to a situation that surrounded me in the 1980's when "new age" spiritual culture combined with a technological fetishism that promised a now dated "virtual reality" that would finally release us from the confines of our bodies.
Case cast member Sto practicingLC: Right, when characters interface with the internet in Neuromancer, it is like they are stepping into virtual reality. This is not the first time you've dealt with alternate realities -- a fascination with them runs through your work, as with Twentyfivefold Manifestation (2008) in which 80 players enacted live action fantasy role-playing in a sculpture park over the course of a few months, and KarmaPhysics (2004) which features animated Elvis’ falling through an unbounded, pink-hued space. How will this feeling of virtual reality be conveyed in the performance at the New Museum?
BC: I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I am still interested in this notion of projection of self into other spaces via religious experience, drugs, role-playing, or immersive screen spaces, but I never imagined Case interfacing with the actual internets, he is immersing himself in Gibson's idea of what he thought this future screen space could be - the most lucid take I've heard recently on this issue is Bruce Sterling's talk in Germany, "the idea that the virtual is somehow philosophically seperate from the actual, it's a period notion. It's done."
The piece at the New Museum is a parody of this idea of a space where we would fly through information. When the main character, Case, "jacks in", he will face away from the audience, the Gamelan ensemble will kick in, and the other readers will pick up the geometric props and move around him, like he is flying through the virtual objects as described in the novel. At the same moment, the props are similar to objects used in Oscar Schlemmer Bauhaus performances, a key moment in early twentieth century techno-fetishist art.
Brody Condon, KarmaPhysics, 2004 (Still)LC: The performance combines sensationalism and deadpan readings. The narrative itself is thrilling and wild--reading it today, one can't help think about how its future predictions have borne out. And you've selected a truly diverse cast from much-loved Williamsburg gallery owner Sto of Cinders Gallery to actress and actress/ pornstar Sasha Grey. Can you describe what visitors will see when they come to the event on Sunday? And more practical choices: how did you do the casting? And why did you choose to have the reading be deadpan?
BC: I don't find the performance so sensational, or at least I didn't begin with that intention. Viewers can come and go as the please throughout the day. The event will be fairly random and casual, like a rehearsal, with the Gamelan ensemble interrupting the monotonous reading at various cycles throughout the day during the scenes where Case is in other spaces outside his body like hallucinations or VR. I have made a set of geometric shapes inspired by video documentation of a 80's Oskar Schlemmer remake where two dancers interact with a stack of cubes. Made in collaboration with the printmaker Breanne Trammell, the shapes will be picked up and moved around Case as a low-fi VR simulation.
LC: Via his Twitter account, we found out that William Gibson approves the performance and has no issue with the fact that you didn't seek his permission in advance of the production. This isn't the first work in the public domain you've dealt with, what is your usual approach to ascertaining permission?
BC: Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved... and it's an honor that Gibson is into the project.
LC: Agreed. Last question: Where will Case go next?
BC: From the beginning the idea was to stage the reading at a small outdoor theatre in the rural Midwest where I originally began shooting interviews with the main character Ray a few years ago. That is currently planned for 2010. I am re-staging it primarily to shoot a video piece, as this was logistically a problem at the New Museum. My current performative projects operate this way, me setting up temporary communes based on a world I organize based on a simple set of rules, then I collect footage.
Scheduled for its New York premiere this Sunday, November 22, Case is an experimental adaptation of the 1984 novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Considered a classic work of the literary genre cyberpunk, Neuromancer tells the story of Case, a fallen super hacker whose glory days have long since ended, leaving him in a drug-addled, regret-ridden state that lifts when a mysterious entity offers him a second chance. Charged, kaleidoscopic, and prescient, Neuromancer dilates on virtual reality, artificial intelligence and a globalized world through the intricacies of Case’s story. Case (2009), conceived and produced by artist Brody Condon, will be a day-long installation and performance that, in the artist’s words combines “Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with faux ‘virtual reality’ scenes that will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara.” I asked Condon a few questions in advance of the New York premiere so readers, near and far, could get a sense of how this ambitious work will unfold on Sunday.
Case is commissioned and presented by Rhizome and Performa 2009: the New York Biennial of performance art, whose theme this year is futurism. It will take place at the New Museum on November 22 from 1-6pm. Viewers may come and go; there is no set time required to stay. Advance tickets are available here: http://www.newmuseum.org/events/384.
Lauren Cornell: Why were you inspired to adopt Case's story in 2009?
Brody Condon: One core theme of Gibson's novel is addiction and transcendence, and is embodied by the hacker Case. The performance will feature Ray "Bad Rad" Radtke, an infamous Midwestern hell-raiser and activist, reading as the main character. This work started as a series of interviews with Ray, which I mashed with Neuromancer. Not only did he give me this book in the late 1980's, but many of his anecdotes concerning a life lived on the fringes of society blend seamlessly with those of Case.
I'm actually not so interested in the specifics of Gibson's narrative, for me the book is a reference to a situation that surrounded me in the 1980's when "new age" spiritual culture combined with a technological fetishism that promised a now dated "virtual reality" that would finally release us from the confines of our bodies.
Case cast member Sto practicingLC: Right, when characters interface with the internet in Neuromancer, it is like they are stepping into virtual reality. This is not the first time you've dealt with alternate realities -- a fascination with them runs through your work, as with Twentyfivefold Manifestation (2008) in which 80 players enacted live action fantasy role-playing in a sculpture park over the course of a few months, and KarmaPhysics (2004) which features animated Elvis’ falling through an unbounded, pink-hued space. How will this feeling of virtual reality be conveyed in the performance at the New Museum?
BC: I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I am still interested in this notion of projection of self into other spaces via religious experience, drugs, role-playing, or immersive screen spaces, but I never imagined Case interfacing with the actual internets, he is immersing himself in Gibson's idea of what he thought this future screen space could be - the most lucid take I've heard recently on this issue is Bruce Sterling's talk in Germany, "the idea that the virtual is somehow philosophically seperate from the actual, it's a period notion. It's done."
The piece at the New Museum is a parody of this idea of a space where we would fly through information. When the main character, Case, "jacks in", he will face away from the audience, the Gamelan ensemble will kick in, and the other readers will pick up the geometric props and move around him, like he is flying through the virtual objects as described in the novel. At the same moment, the props are similar to objects used in Oscar Schlemmer Bauhaus performances, a key moment in early twentieth century techno-fetishist art.
Brody Condon, KarmaPhysics, 2004 (Still)LC: The performance combines sensationalism and deadpan readings. The narrative itself is thrilling and wild--reading it today, one can't help think about how its future predictions have borne out. And you've selected a truly diverse cast from much-loved Williamsburg gallery owner Sto of Cinders Gallery to actress and actress/ pornstar Sasha Grey. Can you describe what visitors will see when they come to the event on Sunday? And more practical choices: how did you do the casting? And why did you choose to have the reading be deadpan?
BC: I don't find the performance so sensational, or at least I didn't begin with that intention. Viewers can come and go as the please throughout the day. The event will be fairly random and casual, like a rehearsal, with the Gamelan ensemble interrupting the monotonous reading at various cycles throughout the day during the scenes where Case is in other spaces outside his body like hallucinations or VR. I have made a set of geometric shapes inspired by video documentation of a 80's Oskar Schlemmer remake where two dancers interact with a stack of cubes. Made in collaboration with the printmaker Breanne Trammell, the shapes will be picked up and moved around Case as a low-fi VR simulation.
LC: Via his Twitter account, we found out that William Gibson approves the performance and has no issue with the fact that you didn't seek his permission in advance of the production. This isn't the first work in the public domain you've dealt with, what is your usual approach to ascertaining permission?
BC: Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved... and it's an honor that Gibson is into the project.
LC: Agreed. Last question: Where will Case go next?
BC: From the beginning the idea was to stage the reading at a small outdoor theatre in the rural Midwest where I originally began shooting interviews with the main character Ray a few years ago. That is currently planned for 2010. I am re-staging it primarily to shoot a video piece, as this was logistically a problem at the New Museum. My current performative projects operate this way, me setting up temporary communes based on a world I organize based on a simple set of rules, then I collect footage.
This gallery-installation/internet-art hybrid automatically created sculptures using spam and e-mail to trigger the sculpting process. It consisted of a steel frame surrounding a large block of biodegradable (starch-based) Styrofoam. Attached to the frame is the Eroder: a mobile sprayer that squirted colored water on to the foam. Done in collaboration with Tony Muilenburg and commissioned by Rhizome.org.