Monday, December 17, 2007

As the Art World Turns IV

What does it mean to be creative?

Is it a posthuman condition?

Or is it aboriginary with cyborgian implications?

Remixology samples from Whitehead when he says
"Creativity is the principle of novelty"
a conditioned indetermination
that morphs into a real potentiality
spurring on the further advance
of our ongoing creative momentum
via an applied aesthetics that both manipulates
and is unquestionably manipulated by
the environment that each novel situation
presents to us in its state of immediacy

This "advance" garde of Creativity itself
in pursuit of transmuting aesthetic moments
creates a physical momentum
formally felt as an ongoing satisfaction
within an optimum economy of motion
and is triggered by the intensity of experience
which in itself becomes an aesthetic fact
and informs "the production of novel togetherness"

The "production of novel togetherness"
(as Whitehead refers to it)
is the ultimate notion embodied in
the term concrescence (where the many
become one and are increased by one)

An artist role-playing a mathematician
who aligns his avant-garde practice
with the entrepreneurial spirit of an academic
looking to hurdle impenetrable institutions
in a series of single bounds (still binding)
might formulate it as such:

M = Many
One = Fluid Singularity
1 = Remix-in-process

and conclude

M = One + 1 (always becoming)

The casual dropping of the parenthetical
"always becoming" signals a break away
from what others might call "total togetherness"
and instead highlights how Whitehead's
"production of novel togetherness"
advancing into the future of now
is really what it means for artist-mediums
to live in perpetual postproduction
(a non-totalizing experience)

Always becoming a postproduction medium
is what it means to be aesthetically networked
(to tweak synaptic knobs while spinning)
(to customize artist-apparatus filters
as part of an hallucinatory achievement)
(to embody creative synthesis in praxis
while intersubjectively jamming with the autopoietic
environment I call the artificial intelligentsia)

In META/DATA I suggest that we are all born
avant-garde (that it is our natural birthright)
but that one of the cruel ironies of being
a living breathing postproduction medium
in an age of super-late turbocharged capitalism
is that the environment that produces innovation
is now also the environment that kills creativity

This sets up an epic struggle for artist-mediums
whose ongoing satisfaction of formally felt experience
is co-dependent on their being able to intuitively
generate emergent forms of novelty ("Creativity itself")

In his "Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism"
Steve Odin says "creativity is tenable only in
an asymmetrical framework of causal relatedness"
and highlights Whitehead's use of the term vector
as a way to signify a magnitude with direction

In this scenario vectors gather strength
via an accumulation of causal feelings
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
feelings relayed into ongoing throbbing intensities
between occasions of aesthetic experience
forming a pattern of energetic transmissions
between vibratory events

For the contemporary remixologist
this relaying or relayering of experience
translates as an intensive "always becoming"
or always live postproduction performance
that turns the trajectory of the artist-medium
into a simultaneous and continuous
fusion of light motion energy sensation
effect affect emotion ["an aesthetic fact"]
i.e. a picture-perfect model of aesthetic fitness

What's interesting from the perspective of one
who regularly contradicts himself and knows
for a fact that being a picture-perfect model
is not a matter of "do as I say" or
"do as I do" but rather a matter of
remixologically inhabiting the datum
that pings your unconscious neural mechanism
and spurs you on to create your own version
of this ongoing "narrative in the making"

is that regardless of whether
you may or may not be readily inclined
to render into vision [to literally envision]
a nuanced mix of what it means to circulate
within the networked space of flows

the Many that is "always becoming"
+1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1 +1
and that advances toward the ultimate
dream of picture-perfect connectedness
is forever charging and recharging
"language to the utmost possible degree"
and intervening in concrescent processes
other than its own

This process of Collective Envisioning
that feeds the Creative Advance
in superlate turbocharged technocapitalist culture
more than suggests that
The Aesthetic Turn is now upon us

It has become us and we it

The pragmatist in me then wants to ask
"How much will it cost us?"
and as a follow-up
"How can we translate our creativity
into 'digicash' currency that will
enable us to afford being
the postproduction mediums
we long to become?"

(Musing over those questions is
at the heart of creative class struggle)

Perhaps Remixology can help guide us
in that it shows the contemporary artist-medium
where to focus their attention while
performing this always live
postproduction process that renders them
into a simultaneous and continuous fusion of
light motion energy sensation effect affect emotion

For if Remixology is anything at all
it is an ongoing valuation of ones
Life Style Practice as an aesthetic fact
one that integrates selectively manipulated data
into its pattern of intensiveness
a pattern that is aesthetically perceived as
the novel production of togetherness
in its phase of (nonstop) origination

(think of it as an eternally remixable originary
that comes with endless feeds
of open source material)

The question remixologists constantly face
while performing their "live postproduction sets"
as a pattern of intensive aesthetic experiences
is "How then to keep the Big Creative Mo
within an optimum economy of motion?"

Simple things first
for example
creating arbitrary constraints
or collage / cut-up / appropriation methods
or feed-dependent triggering devices
may help launch a thousand and one (+1)
synaptic firings within the unconscious
neural mechanism that spurs the creature on

(The literary precursors for these kinds
of methodologies would be Oulipo i.e.
"Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or
"The Workshop of Potential Literature"
Brion Gysin and William Burroughs
practice/theory of The Third Mind
or even my own recent 29 Inches
where I take my incoming spam messages
and force myself to remixologicallly inhabit them
as my "source material" for that day)

Or take the basic ideas of "thematic context"
and/or "methods for an applied aesthetics"
and develop a hactivist remix strategy
that creates an intimate relationship
with the source material close at hand

For the last two years I have located a word
a single word that was to be the driving force
for all (post)production the ensuing year
(not as a limit but as a triggering device
that I could always turn to when in need)

In 2006 the word was improvisation

In 2007 the word has been intuition

Simple things like this have a way
of keeping one focused and as always
may lead to unexpected outcomes
as you begin to see things
you never knew were there but were
always right in front of you

(not seeing what is right in front of you
has been thought of as a negative hallucination)

The notion of "intuition" has been
very very good to me in 2007
I have seen it everywhere
even though it is not necessarily something
that you can literally see
maybe it would be better to say
I have felt it form inside of me
and have become intimate with the rhythm
of its patterned projections as I act on
whatever ground is available
to me at any given time

I have watched it [intuition] change shape
over the course of 12 months
a kind of embodied yet amorphous
shape-shifting vector
(magnitude with direction)
that has metamediumistically stimulated me
to continually perform my processual relayerings
of throbbing intensities as they shift
between occasions of aesthetic experience
forming a pattern of energetic transmissions
between all of the vibratory events
I have mutated myself through as
a just-in-time postproduction medium
(the creative advance of novelty embodied)
and so it seems only right that as 2007
inevitably draws to a close
and I have ended the year on my Whitehead kick
that I would now turn to Whitehead
who writes
Thus the 'production of novel togetherness' is the ultimate notion embodied in the term concrescence. These ultimate notions of 'production of novelty' and 'concrete togetherness' are inexplicable either in terms of higher universals or in terms of the components participating in the concrescence. The analysis of the components abstracts from the concrescence. The sole appeal is to intuition.

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