Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Looking Back (and Forward, Again, in a loop...)

It's that time of year again when Professor VJ becomes less VJ and more Professor. This loss-of-VJ to the institutional "finishing up" of the semester takes approximately one week, at which point, if all goes well, it's back into art-mode 100% of the time until early next year.

Looking back on 2006, there's much to take account of, including finishing the page and color image proofs for META/DATA (The MIT Press, 2007), finishing my long overdue third novel, 29 Inches (Chiasmus Press, 2007), making excellent headway on a new feature-length video art work entitled My Autoerotic Muse (starring Kat Wolf and featuring the sound art of William Basinski and Twine), a few VJ performances, writing a new artist-essay called "Making Space for the Artist" that will be included in an anthology published by Intellect next year, lots of great research trips to and lectures/workshops in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Washington D.C., Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hawaii, Frankfurt-Mainz, Detroit, San Diego, and many more too, and starting and maintaining this blog with numerous excursions into politics, the ecstasy of video art making, avant-pop lit, and other indecipherable matters not to mention the ever-present and all-too-looming virtual realities I associate with the fluxlike "anyspace whatever"...

Then there were the two blog performances/exhibitions (one at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and the other at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art), a short video work made-for-mobile-phone and on exhibit at Senet in Seoul, multiple exhibitions of Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) (including the current show in the hometown venue), the launch of the ever-popular Mark Amerika Nature Photography, and a couple of really good experiences teaching two Grad seminars, one in Post-Photography and one in Integrated Media Arts.

For the seminars, I have been taking notes and test-driving some ideas for yet another book I am starting to fish my brain for, a print-cum-digital work tentatively entitled Hybrid Art. As far as I can tell, the next book will investigate this emerging "playah" we call the artist-researcher, but who might also be referred to as the artist-medium, the artist-persona, and the artist-remixologist (for example, think of Burroughs-Gysin's concept of the "Third Mind" and their very useful cut-up method as a salient precursor of contemporary remix and mashup culture, then apply the Situationist legacy of détournement to this remixological practice as way to politicize its intent, and finally throw in the narrative sensibility of Kathy Acker and the critical-collage theory of Walter Benjamin circa "Passagen Work", and you're off to the races).

More on all that after the institutionalized Professor fades, and the free-to-create VJ [artist-medium] returns...


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