Transgressive Shareability

Last year, my essay-dialogue with new media theorist and philosopher David Gunkel covered a wide range of issues including remixology, remixthebook, glitch aesthetics, transgression, and even university art school politics. The dialogue was published as a chapter in Transgression 2.0: Media, Culture, and the Politics of the Digital Age (Routledge). Here is an excerpt:

In my book META/DATA, I see this co-emergence and the co-response-ability that comes with it as a way to affectively become what I call the not-me. The not-me rejects a self-situated ethics of being and instead remixes digital flux personae into a transgressive form of networked performance that experiments with subjectivity in the field of distribution. It's like what Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) writes in Rhythm Science (2004) when he refers to "persona as shareware" and Ettinger refers to as "transgressive shareability" (Ettinger 2006, 168) Daily remix practice is not a self-centered ritual of dissipating the ego. It's much more intense than that. I think of it as a kind of embodied praxis where the artist-medium builds their chops by conducting an open source, cut-and-paste as-you-go, digital lifestyle practice that operates as part of this larger, com-passionate agenda to nurture feelings back into the mix. This is the only we can even approach what Whitehead refers to as the Higher Phases of Experience.

The entire chapter can be downloaded here.


Keywords: remixology, glitch aesthetics, transgression, Mark Amerika, David Gunkel, Bracha Ettinger, DJ Spooky, Routledge