Cyber Psycho Geography - Mark Amerika
Cyber Psycho Geography - Mark Amerika
Cyber Psycho Geography - Mark Amerika
No one thinks academically. People just pretend they do. They force themselves to
think like that. Academic style is a result of effort (or, if you prefer, of mental disci-
pline), so it is therefore a result of a first thought. The academic is a second thought,
because it is a translation of a first thought. It is not spontaneous, but deliberate. The
choice between the academic style and my own is therefore a half-choice: I will speak
spontaneously, or I will choose ‘‘academicism.’’
—Vilém Flusser, ‘‘Essay’’
Cyberpsychogeography (An Aimless Drift in Twenty
Digressions)
standard, especially given my own natural tendency to refute time itself by los-
ing myself in timeless acts of creative composition? When I land in Australia
less than twenty-four hours later, somehow two days will have passed, and I’ll
be having a soy latte and organic blueberry muffin for breakfast at a café in
North Bondi Beach. Sleeping on the plane, my body will write itself out in
some elaborate dreamtime script that continuously improvises other lives for
me to role-play in, and after the morning coffee and muffin at the beautiful
beach Down Under, I will intuitively come to realize that there is, in fact, a
sensible regularity to my self-imposed lifestyle discipline, even though I occa-
sionally feign a kind of occupational difference.
For example, in Boulder, where I supposedly live and work, I go to sleep
around midnight. If everything is the way it should be, I will wake up the
next morning around eight or nine, spend the day and night making art (liv-
ing life), and then, by the time midnight falls again, aimlessly drift back into
the kind of alternative states of mind that, as a romantic poet-dreamer (artist-
researcher), help me pay the bills. Having said that, there can be no question
that these dreamlike, aimless drifts happen periodically throughout my wak-
ing life as well, and I can’t help but wonder if this is not what I, as an artist-
researcher, am particularly talented at—that is, finding ways to teleport my
turned on and plugged-in body into states of altered consciousness no matter
what time it is, locating my creative potential and its complementary poetic
thrust wherever necessary, just so long as everything is defamiliarized and rel-
atively timeless, which then makes it easy for me to invent on-the-fly imagistic
events never before imagined.
Perhaps this is what it means to become an artist-medium nurturing the field
conditions for my creative potential to unconsciously play in. These trance narra-
tives that float through my body as I sleep or write or navigate my various
digital art personas through the cyberpsychogeographical regions of The Net-
work are an essential part of this everyday life I am constantly launching my
asymmetrical phrasings and rephrasings in. This is the experiential space, full
of rapidly reconfigured sense data, that I feel most at home in and will do any-
thing in my power to have access to at all costs. I know I’m in the process of
activating its full readiness potential when my internal superclock makes me
feel pregnant with the synchronicity of everything happening right now, in
realtime, although my intuition tells me this is not realtime at all but some-
thing that resembles realtime even though I know it’s totally fake. It’s what I
would call unrealtime.
Cyberpsychogeography 5
The feeling of living in unrealtime is one that takes the artist-medium be-
yond improvisation or living on the edge of forever. It’s something more akin
to hyperimprovisational Life Style Practice, an intuitively driven creative class
struggle that cannot be captured in any media-specific analysis. What it needs
is social network synthesis that breaks away from the prying need to always un-
derstand itself and, instead, refocuses all component energies on exploring its
own creative/readiness potential. Think of it as writing out the anticipatory
moment of surging creativity as it projects itself from inside my body in a per-
petual state of hyperintuition or what the Situationists might have called
avant-garde presence—one that TAKES PLACE in the revolution of everyday
life.
This avant-garde presence that circulates throughout my day-to-day life
feels both OF its time AND ahead of its time. Just like the phenomenon in
the 1980s that we called cyberpunk explored imaginary worlds simultaneously
happening in the present as well as the immediate future, this avant-garde
presence enables me to operate in the machinations of the working world
and its preset itinerary of bureaucratic functions, even as I imagine myself
proactively engaged in a yet-to-be-invented future-tense practice that resists
the contemporary situation I am always positioning myself to move beyond.
But there are still other worlds or states of mind where I work or, once I’m
there, play, and they tend to lose all of their presets. In these alternative
spaces, I no longer have to worry about what it would be like to become that
other thing that wants to bureaucratize me. Instead of designing my more in-
tuitive, internalized, readiness potential so that it consciously plays to the reg-
imen of always being ON time while answering TO corporate, university, or
otherwise bureaucratic callings, I customize its settings and preferences so that
my state of avant presence is playing IN time and feels more engaged than ever
before.
Think of what we used to call a mad scientist who is now envisioned as a
fully tilted artist-researcher swimming in the intersubjective waters of the fluid
intelligentsia—or the artist-researcher as a pseudo-autobiographical work in
progress. This is extreme role-playing, a gig that was MADE for me, where
after years of nonstop dress rehearsal, I am now situated as the perfect person
to play myself as is, although the pseudo-autobiographical work in progress
cannot help himself and is always turning the role of the as is into the always
premiering as if. Role-playing the as if allows the transmitting nerve centers of
my processual image filters to initialize a performative thrust of narrative
6 Spontaneous Theories
momentum that resists the machinations of Time itself so that I may continue
distributing my many digital flux personas. These digital flux personas are a
multiverse of possibility and are experienced as something else entirely differ-
ent from what I thought I was when I started the day, when I woke up in the
familiar environment that I, for lack of better, call home. Home for me is not
really the place I live in (Colorado) or the temporary autonomous zone I cre-
ate for myself while living in Sydney. Rather, it’s the day that never was and
that I am constantly losing myself in as I construct new digital art personas
to disperse throughout the compositional field I operate in.
Many times these digital flux personas—which I role-play via e-mail, Web
chat, spontaneous Net art creations, VJ performances, mobile blogging, and
the like—often overlap and even converge into the one digital flux persona
that my audience has tagged with the easy-to-remember name Mark Amerika.
To me, this digital flux persona that goes by the name Mark Amerika intui-
tively becomes an indeterminate loci of readiness potential that precedes
consciousness while transponding the fluid metamorphosis of a radical inter-
subjectivity to the point where there is no longer an I or a place to call home.
There is only a networked SPACE of flows for my creative self to wander
nomadically through as I invent my life as an artist at this particular moment
in time—as if there could even be a particular moment in time. Think about
it: it just passed us by. Was it ever really there in the first place? We have al-
ready disproved that. What I mean to say (as I begin to remix all of my lines
of transcontinental flight into a running trajectory of naked words leaving
their digital traces on the forever expanding magic writing pad) is that this
process of metamediumistic self-invention taking place in an always emer-
gent, interconnected space of flows can mean only one thing. I am under the
influence of self-induced jet lag—or what I have come to call jet-lag conscious-
ness. This is a consciousness that no longer depends on flying to different
countries around the world to be experienced and can be achieved anywhere
at anytime.
I take this notion of ‘‘Without the unreal, there is no Real’’ to heart. As a dig-
ital artist committed to expanding the concept of writing while tapping into
the fictional unconscious that precedes my every conscious act, this digging
into the Real and its inevitable relationship with radical states of shape-
shifting intersubjectivity are impossible to ignore. One thing I am sure of as I
continue this ongoing process of experimental identity construction is that
there is an all-too-human tendency to lose sight of who it is I am while tele-
porting my writerly texts through this networked space of flows that the
cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer, referred to as
the ‘‘consensual hallucination of cyberspace.’’ And yet is not losing sight of
who it is I am while simultaneously charging my potential language eruptions
to the utmost possible degree enough to challenge the intimidation tactics of
the ever-leering philosophical void?
Writing these naked words during a transcontinental flight that crosses the
international date line and loses an entire day I will never experience in my
8 Spontaneous Theories
lifetime helps accentuate the fact that the philosophical void is my friend, my
spiritual guide, my one and only intellectual adviser. Without the vanishing
point looming large somewhere over there, shiny bright with its concomitant
reminder that all of my imaginary lines of flight are bound to converge in a
catastrophic disappearance of the real, there would be no anticipated endgame
triggering my immediate need to make art. Meanwhile, the increase in the
total number of years my body aspires to survive through is always on the
rise, and without that knowledge nudging me into further acts of creative
composition, there can be no movement toward constant renewal and strate-
gic resistance.
But why is that so? You would think that these eventual disappearances
would make the artist rebel in the most noncomformist way possible and
that I would stop making art. Is it because this consensual hallucination I
operate in has already cashed in on my innate human tendency to live in per-
petual denial? Perhaps my body is being washed away by the endless flows of
data that permeate the very air I breathe and, a willing victim, I simply have
fallen in love with it all. In fact, I must be totally swimming it, like never be-
fore. Who do I thank for such mammoth historical opportunity?
We consent to this shared hallucination in other contexts besides computer-
mediated cyberspace. This flight I am on started yesterday in Colorado (but
was it really yesterday?) and will eventually end up in Sydney, Australia. Some-
how, somewhere, I will lose an entire day of my life. Somewhere, somehow,
that day will simply not exist—and yet it does exist. People will be born that
day, and many people will die—and yet for me that day will disappear like no
other day. I want to know where it went. Where is that space of time? What is
it?
How does this time shifting relate to my thinking about cyberspace—about
writing cyberspace, navigating cyberspace, imagining or even imaging cyber-
space? How does it affect the way I might think about writing, navigating, or
imaging a new kind of language—cyberpsychogeographical, in nature, archi-
tectonic in its technoetic emergence? How does this potentially fertile field of
poetic composition (which simultaneously exists but does not exist within any
standard time) relate to that nonplace place that the French poet Stéphane
Mallarmé speaks of when he says ‘‘Nothing will have taken place but the
place’’? (Appropriately enough for a spontaneous approach to living out one’s
life as a theory-to-be, this quote comes from his work ‘‘A Throw of the Dice,’’
where he philosophically speculates that ‘‘a throw of the dice will never abol-
Cyberpsychogeography 9
ish chance.’’) I want to know how this nonplace place links to these dreamy,
interactive states of being becoming something else that I find myself continually
investigating while conducting virtual art performances in both cyberspace
and sleep. Or given my background as a creative writer, I want to know how
it relates to scripting cyberspace as a potential dreamworld of coded composi-
tion. This is how we might think about scripting languages that inform behav-
ioral performance or an expanded concept of writing that includes all manner
of resonance between programming codes, semiotic codes, genetic codes, be-
havioral codes, and what The Spy in the House of Love might call secret codes.
Is tapping into our readiness potential in the nonplace place an attempt to
crack open the secret codes of creative composition, or is it more about styliz-
ing our creative practices so that they can poetically encrypt even more secret
code? Both/and? Perhaps the Good Doctor (any Ph.D. will do) can answer. Is
there a Virtual Chora in the House?
The Situationists referred to this aimless drifting as dérive. Debord has the-
orized about the dérive:
If chance plays an important role in dérives, this is because the methodology of psycho-
geographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally con-
servative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation
between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where
chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can
say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the
stroll but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may
tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn
back.
In other words, customizing your aimless drifts within certain loose param-
eters can be addictive, and creating new lifestyle algorithms that challenge
your set ways of thinking gets more difficult with every successive wander.
Think of the dérive as metatourism or an intentional homelessness that is per-
formed out of philosophical necessity but that is part of a research practice
that may not always give itself over to chance occurrence. And yet, as we
have already stated, a throw of the dice never abolishes chance, and once you
turn a corner and, as if by accident, encounter one of those illuminating
eureka moments, you will probably program yourself to create similar param-
eters the next time you set out to power your drift within any given composi-
tional field. For artists, this is especially dangerous because it means that you
may find yourself going down what appears to be the right alley but ends up
being the all-too-easy shortcut where you continually rob yourself of the
chance to reach your full potential. The question is: how do you continually
challenge your intuition to spur on the unconscious player living inside your
body—the one whose creative actions open up the compositional field for you
to improvise and lose yourself in, like never before?
The idea is to avoid getting tackled or brought down by the defensive pos-
turing of the mundane consumer culture. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner
write in their essay ‘‘Debord and the Postmodern Turn,’’
In contrast to the stupor of consumption, Debord and the Situationists champion
active, creative, and imaginative practice, in which individuals create their own ‘‘situa-
tions,’’ their own passionate existential events, fully participating in the production of
everyday life, their own individuality, and, ultimately, a new society. Thus, to the pas-
sivity of the spectator they counterpoise the activity of the radical subject which con-
structs its own everyday life against the demands of the spectacle (to buy, consume,
conform, etc.). The concept of the spectacle therefore involves a distinction between
Cyberpsychogeography 11
passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning passive con-
sumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and
imagination.
And yet for contemporary digital artists whose experimentally constructed
flux personas link to a pseudo-autobiographical work in progress forever on
the cusp of composing new iterations of poetic being becoming something else,
what does it really mean to participate fully in the production of their own
individuality? The radical subjectivity that the Situationists bet the farm on
somehow left out the essential otherness of the utopian playing field they des-
perately wanted to play on. If, as Gibson suggests in his cyberpunk novel, the
hallucination is consensual, then we have to assume that it takes at least two to
tango. The Situationists suggested that three was the perfect number of partic-
ipants for a valuable dérive. And yet as we know, the Society of the Spectacle
gave way to the Me Decade only to be followed by even more supercharged
spectacle. Perhaps we have yet to finally experience our Last Tango in Paris.
Perhaps the situationists were just buttering us up for the ultimate letdown.
Perhaps the only way OUT is by triggering the creative potential of the spec-
tacular Not-Me.
Lately, as both a nomadically wandering Net artist and touring VJ (or visual
jockey), I have been experimenting with the concept of drifting (dérive), both
as a fluid situation in which I traverse various urban environments where I
capture my digital video source material and as a cyberspatial activity where
I partake of a Gibsonian ‘‘consensual hallucination’’ by surfing the associa-
tional web of trails available on the World Wide Web. For the digital flux
persona who is nomadically digging into the Real, the Net itself becomes a
situational terrain in which to study the precise effects of navigating the net-
worked space of flows and participating in a meaningful artificial intelligen-
tsia. The Net also creates an experiential research environment that enables
artists (1) to see how these navigations and engagements can be consciously
managed by acting directly on the mood and behavior of the artist and the
work they produce while drifting and (2) to investigate if what Kellner and
Best call the ‘‘alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagina-
tion’’ can be counterpoised via a hyperimprovisationally constructed Life Style
Practice (LSP) that emerges from the creative potential of the unconscious
12 Spontaneous Theories
and drifts into the many compositional playing fields that await our unique
performances-to-be. Here, the term hyperimprovisational (which I borrow
from the sound artist and theorist Roger Dean and then manipulate for my
own uses) refers to an intuitive, ongoing jam session between nomadic Net
artists and the new media technologies they are forever connected to as part
of their collaborative prosthetic aesthetic.
This Life Style Practice of the nomadic Net artist cum touring VJ, high on
the mobilization of a cyberpsychogeographical drift that always plays with my
mind, allows me to use my digital video camera as both as an image-capturing
device as well as a writing instrument that creates imagistic captions to my
thoughts, many of which I spontaneously write down in the form of diagnos-
tic notes or what I like to call action scripting—an evolving digital poetics that
script into being certain actions and behaviors that characterize the formal
possibilities of the creative spaces I happen to be passing through. I adhere
to these action scripts as poetic ephemera, digital sketching, and projective
choreography, where every move is part of some holistic body-brain-
apparatus dance with the intersubjective playing field I am continuously jam-
ming with. Often, they come across as visible attempts at innovating an artist
theory in the form of writerly texts.
You are reading some of these textual traces right now, and wouldn’t it be
great if they too would take on the flavor of aimlessly wandering through the
networked space of flows as part of an experimental mode of writing/drifting?
What if they were constructed as an alternative artist theory that is meant to
trace the movement of an artist medium that unconsciously mobilizes its
avant presence through a variety of subject-oriented environments while at
once being drawn by the attractions of the intellectual terrain it is navigating
through? How do I do that, I wonder, while still maintaining an engaged
hypertextual consciousness that puts out its worldly tentacles feeling around
for whatever potential links or associations they may find there? Ezra Pound
once suggested that artists were the antennae of society. My sense is that no-
madic Net artists, who are wholly immersed in the digital flux persona of a
drifting Life Style Practice, must always have their antennae out and activated,
picking up signals from the emergent artificial intelligentsia they depend on
for their cultural survival. In this regard, LSP is the new LSD, and considering
that, as Gibson suggested, the hallucination is a consensual experience, Net
artists really have no choice but to activate themselves IN it if they hope to
build on their lucid, digital dreamwork always in process.
Cyberpsychogeography 13
Recently, one of my Net art, VJ personas was touring through parts of Asia
and using a camcorder to capture the neon nighttime scenery of the streets I
was traversing. As I hastily passed through the varied urban and ambient envi-
ronments in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore, my camcorder voraciously
capturing the image écriture that surrounded me, I occasionally turned to my
PDA and improvised spontaneous action scripts. One of these action scripts
was entitled ‘‘R.E.M.ix’’ and began as follows:
The Body Is an Image-Making Machine.
It Filters Information.
It Creates Dreams, Memories, and Spontaneous Situations Made out of Images.
The Images Are Created in the Body as They Respond to Images outside the Body.
The Images Change as the Body Moves.
These Movement-Images Resonate with Dreams, Memories, and Spontaneous Situa-
tions Made out of Images.
This Means That Spontaneous Situations Made out of Images Can Be Dreams or
Active Memories and Vice-Versa.
For the VJ-Hacktivist Who Inmixes the Real with the Unreal, a Live Performance Can
Be Experienced as the Memory of a Dream Composed of Spontaneous Situations Made
out of Images.
Writing Out the Intuitive Phrasing of an Image Écriture that Always Drifts in Its Rev-
olutionary Aimlessness, the Philosophical Scribe Becomes a VJ Artist.
The VJ Artist Is a Metafictionally Charged Philosophical Scribe that Uses Subjective
Plug-Ins to Manipulate Image-Information and in so Doing Begins the Process of
Myth-Making Oftentimes in a Narrative Context Even when the So-Called Narrative
Itself Is an Antinarrative that Works against Conventional Storytelling and Standard
Rhetorical Spin-Control.
After writing these initial notes, I asked myself a series of follow-up ques-
tions that I imagine are at the nexus of my VJ practice as it encounters a
gnawing theoretical fiction that keeps scratching at the inside of my skull,
namely:
What is the relationship between image, memory, dream, event, process, and body?
And why are my VJ performances always telling the story of a digital flux persona who
is constantly processing image-information?
Does this mean what you are reading now is also a kind of VJ performance of pro-
cessed and manipulated imagery but dressed in fictionally constructed poetics clothing?
Where is this VJ artist (digital art persona) located, and will we, in fact, ever SEE the
body of the artist processing these images? (Note to the field of experimental neuro-
science: You can’t scan my radical subjectivity. Only I can release it as a kind of
14 Spontaneous Theories
When I was creating FILMTEXT, the third part of my Net art trilogy, I filtered
my digital poetics through a concept character I call the Digital Thoughtogra-
pher. This alien other (what in the days of novel publishing I might have
called my alter ego), practiced a new form of art called, appropriately, digital
thoughtography. In an e-mail exchange with the contemporary art curator Jane
Marsching, who was arranging to include my Net artwork FILMTEXT 2.0 in
an exhibition called Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technol-
ogy, and the Paranormal, she asked me, ‘‘What is digital thoughtography?’’
to which I responded as follows:
The term thoughtography, it ends up, comes from a paranormal story about a bellhop
named Ted Serios who could imagine images onto film. He would think hard about
the image, and then it would somehow create an imprint on film. The Digital
Thoughtographer in FILMTEXT also plays with this possibility but is narrativized in a
different way, as a kind of alien creature/visitor from another realm who is now ‘‘cap-
turing’’ digital images through his ‘‘thoughtographical apparatus.’’ These images are
then filtered into his imagination, where he sees this near-future world that he exists
in for what it really is: a postapocalyptic media wasteland to which he must respond.
His responses are abstract—image loops, codework texts, creepy sounds, voice mes-
sengers, etc. Think of William Burroughs and his ‘‘language is a virus’’ concept and
his attempt to change the brutal effects of media language by cutting into and altering
consciousness. If the DT sounds like he’s something of an artist, it’s because he is—
something of an artist. A paranormal other evolving spontaneous new ways of seeing
and processing media information. As an artist, he tends to take on human form. Or at
least his shadow does.
Jane was already on to this and was including some of Ted Serios’s work in
the exhibition.
My nomadic Net art and VJ research into digital thoughtography, the arti-
ficial intelligentsia, and the drift through various cyberpsychogeographical
border zones are, of course, intentional and point to another question I have
been asking myself lately: what happens to intention when artists or authors
become part of an intersubjective online collaboration that is being processed in
an idealized gift economy and they allow their work to become freely available
through the networked space of flows? For me, the answer has to be more than
a sci-fi representation of human agency that plays out its fantasies of a pseu-
do-utopian cyberculture that has created the ultimate peer-to-peer network of
artist-engineer-researchers operating in a dreamworld of fluid intersubjec-
Cyberpsychogeography 17
tivity. It has to attach itself to a real-life body (of work) that continually
speculates on new forms of knowledge as part of a poetic process that is con-
tinuously digging into the Real.
Not that we can’t dream or that using our new media technologies and
evolving codes to create alternative worlds is a necessarily futile task. Hardly.
Consider how far we have already come over the last sixty years since Van-
nevar Bush first wrote his important essay ‘‘As We May Think’’ in 1945. Bush,
the straight and narrow MIT scientist who developed a somewhat utopian vi-
sion of peer-to-peer networking culture powered by artificial memory devices
that would creatively link a distributed intelligentsia, was succinct in his ap-
praisal of the situation:
The human mind . . . operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps
instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance
with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other character-
istics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not
fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails,
the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, without knowing who Vannevar
Bush was, I began exploring some of these issues in both of my experimental,
avant-pop novels entitled The Kafka Chronicles (1993) and Sexual Blood
(1995), and soon after beginning graduate school at Brown University in
1995 (during which time I attended the MIT Media Lab’s fiftieth anniversary
celebration of Bush’s famous essay), I began further developing my then
in-process, first-generation Web-based hypertext entitled GRAMMATRON
(which I started writing in 1993, began to build into a multimedia narrative
space for network distribution in late 1995, and officially released on the
WWW in May 1997). A lot has happened in the growing field of experimental
digital narrative since I first released GRAMMATRON in the spring of 1997,
and I now look back at these experimental novels and hypertexts as the perfect
media for initially exporting my various flux personas. By exporting my var-
ious digital flux personas through networked narrative environments, I am
able to conduct hyperimprovisational, technoetic writing performances and
further investigate the kind of fluid, creative thought processes (spontaneous
theories) that can be developed while tapping into their just-in-time readi-
ness potential as it asynchronously jams with the ongoing writerly text their
body of thought keeps distributing. Expanding the concept of writing so that it
becomes an emergent form of social science-fiction playing in a spontaneous
18 Spontaneous Theories
and multilinear time means first of all learning how to excite the uncon-
scious neural mechanisms that trigger your do-it-yourself ‘‘ideogrammic-
experiential’’ hallucinations into screenal space. As Allen Ginsberg once said,
this all takes place ‘‘physiologically in the body’’ as a kind of spasm, one that
does not, at least initially, depend on technology for its delivery.
For me, the technology has become almost invisible even as I cannot help
but acknowledge its presence in my spontaneous acts of creation. If, as Lud-
wig Wittgenstein suggests, the self is grammatical, then the semantic software
that the self is being filtered through is more a stylistic choice than a deter-
ministic behavior. To me, using various transmedial software applications as
a preferred structural device is akin to the way that, say, writing an argumen-
tative, academic paper on Deleuzian brain disorders and how they lend them-
selves to schizophrenic walks in the park is also a kind of structural device that
one chooses to use as they begin to situate their designer content. Having
exported my own creative, writerly self (my digital flux personas) through a
vast array of technological filters informs my every next move in such a way
that I always see my new projects as an exciting, if not difficult, challenge to
reinvent my grammatical self within the context of whatever new narrative
conditions I may be operating in at any given moment (as if there could be a
given moment: did we already acknowledge that?). The key thing is to be aware
that I will be training myself to activate my unconscious readiness potential, even
though, during the actual performance, I myself will be unaware of what is being
created in unrealtime. Perhaps this is what it means to lose one’s self in (writ-
erly) flow. At a certain point, I can expand the concept of writing so that all
of my (writerly) flow is being exported through all manner of technological
filters—dynamic links, Photoshop, Java, Flash animation, VJ performance,
podcasts, streaming audio, high-definition digital film, or the combined lan-
guages of multimedia messaging and mobile blogging, to name a few of the
trendy options at my disposal today.
This reminds me of something another artist-researcher named Vito
Acconci once said in his essay ‘‘Steps into Performance (and Out)’’:
If I specialize in a medium, then I would be fixing a ground for myself, a ground I
would have to be digging myself out of, constantly, as one medium was substituted
for another—so then instead of turning toward ‘‘ground’’ I would shift my attention
and turn to ‘‘instrument,’’ I would focus on myself as the instrument that acted on
whatever ground was available.
Cyberpsychogeography 19
What he is saying is quite simple, and yet it is something that tends to be over-
looked in the rush to keep up with the latest developments in technology—
namely, the artist is the medium or instrument, and the networked space
of flows play this instrument to facilitate the development of creative
compositions.
are constantly sourcing prior writers whose texts and styles they eagerly rip off
to renegotiate their relationship with the void. But now there are more options
available to writers of all kinds when it comes to designing their narrative in-
terface, and it’s no longer a matter of just staring at the blank white page.
Here’s a thought (or maybe it’s more of a rant, like the ones I used to write
for various underground ’zines back in the 1980s): what about writing IN our
moment? My version of ‘‘our moment’’ intentionally explores the artist’s po-
tential to use the new media environment as a research and development plat-
form to expand the concept of writing, enabling us to innovate our practice
yet again, although perhaps this time with more immediate results. This
means that the art of writing is now seeping into online hypertext and blog-
ging, VJ culture, digitally expanded cinema, hactivism, Flash art, Java applet
art, data visualization, and the like. The methodology for relocating the narra-
tive and poetry is up to each artist to develop.
But there are others issues as well. For example, what is the relationship be-
tween generative art, hypertext narrative, and hyperimprovisational VJ perfor-
mance? Again, I do not want to approach this question as an academic with a
theory-heavy ax to grind or as technologist whose social science fiction is
populated by characters written into the story just because they were able to
receive funding from the National Science Foundation. I would prefer to ask
the question in the context of a passing thought that is of interest to me as
an artist who composes on-the-fly digital remixes of his ideogrammic-
experiential metadata. When I perform my live VJ sets in front of audiences
around the world, I realize that the library of images I am creatively interact-
ing with and pulling from is very much influenced by my own selections of
digital source material that I have captured in expansive cyberpsychogeo-
graphical drifts and that I have manipulated into a movie-clip format for my
improvisational remixes. Without my images, without the ceremonial video
love dances I engage in while capturing my digital source material, without
my hyperimprovisationally choreographed writerly processing of all of these
image manipulations in unrealtime, there is no experiential database of poten-
tial to pull from, and without an experiential database of potential to pull
from, there is no story.
Jamming with my laptop and its customized VJ software, I can generate
spontaneous narratives that operate on the associative linking model of hyper-
text, without feeling as though I am constantly arriving and departing. While I
22 Spontaneous Theories
a club space and have projected some wicked eye candy in excellent venues all
around the world, but is this all we are capable of?
VJ artists must work hard to avoid the label of being nothing but deliverers
of visual wallpaper just as the technotheorists of new media studies must
avoid creating art that tries to compensate for an ever elusive theory-to-be. In-
stead, we need to locate an alternative creative strategy that taps into our
readiness potential, the thing that precedes our conscious thought, and that
incites us to become this awakening performance. I won’t pretend that it’s
easy to become an unconscious player in the field of aesthetic composition.
It’s not easy to keep the conscious, theoretical I at bay while the creative artist
is at play. It requires practice (like playing a sport or a musical instrument).
But that’s what must be done if the artist is to emerge.
Unfortunately, for those of us who can see the benefits of creating an
alchemical remix of narrative strategies that enable fictional discourses to
thrive in the emerging forms of art and thought supported by an engaged, ar-
tificial intelligentsia, many contemporary media theorists, technologists, and
artists always risk hiding their narratological shortcomings behind their theo-
retical premises and the trendy technologies those premises are intimately
attached to. That’s one sure way to kill narrative art, which would then prove
all of the conservative cultural critics right. In this regard, we must not let
technology kill creativity or narrativity. The idea is to let the software trickery
of the still undiscovered neural mechanism that triggers all of our uncon-
scious performative gestures jam with whatever new media technologies are
available, placing the emphasis back on the artist as instrument. Besides, as
any experienced avant-pop storyteller will tell you: the best way to do away
with narration is via narration itself.
Or so the story goes.
10
And yet in the expanding field of new media art research, theories rule. The
artificial intelligentsia that has evolved around new media practice is all about
reconfiguring the way we think about art and, in this way, closely resembles
the Conceptual Art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Look around the con-
temporary cultural landscape, and see what’s happening in the digital arts and
what makes it especially different from all of the other disciplinary areas. More
than any other art discipline (painting, sculpture, video, performance), digital
24 Spontaneous Theories
artists are writing out their poetics as part of their practice. They also go to
more conferences and festivals, participate on more panels, and give more
public demonstrations of their work than artists of any other discipline. Why
is this so?
Perhaps it has something to do with the demo-or-die mentality that we
associate with technology corporations, but my own answer to why digital
artists take on the often unpalatable role of what feels like snake-oil salesper-
son is that they are engaged participants in this previously described Internet-
worked intelligence that consists of all of the linked data being distributed in
cyberspace at any given time and that is powered by artistic and intellectual
agents remixing the flow of contemporary thought. That is, they feel com-
pelled to keep the network alive and will not easily drift into conventional
roles—like the ones we associate with the studio artist as individual genius
who cranks out the same masterpieces over and over again. Some Net artists
may be artistic geniuses. But the difference between them and, say, Pablo
Picasso, Bruce Nauman, or Kiki Smith is that they are signatories to an active,
collaboratively generated network of linked data that is intimately integrated
into their simultaneous and continuous online art performance—the one
that happens in what I call asynchronous realtime. Much of this linked data is
text-based and happens via e-mail, either one-to-one e-mail distribution or
one-to-many. Seeing that e-mail is generally thought to be experienced asyn-
chronously but that the artists involved often feel that they are experiencing
the networked space of flows in realtime, it almost goes without saying that
this Internetworked intelligentsia operates (hyperimprovisationally performs)
in asynchronous realtime. (If it feels like I just said this or that you are sure
you have read these passages before, remember what the great Yogi Berra once
said: ‘‘It feels like déjà vu all over again.’’ Apply that thought to a fully func-
tional, totally remixable, Life Style Practice that happens in unrealtime but
that still feels real due to a manipulation of subjective time perception.)
Artists who are immersed in digital processes are contemporary versions of
what in the twentieth century we used to call the avant-garde. Thankfully, they
no longer have to pretend to be ahead of their time since, as experiments in
neuroscience have already suggested, they have no choice in the matter. By
continuously experimenting with their readiness potential as it precedes
consciousness—that is, by activating their creative selves in the unconscious
playing fields that their best work manifests itself in—they are by nature ahead
of their time.
Cyberpsychogeography 25
In fact, even though we are witnessing a major changing of the garde where
easily accessible new media gadgets make the idea of being ahead of your time
the equivalent of making a trendy consumer purchase, artists who work with
digital processes must do more than merely identify themselves as part of an
avant-garde tradition. In many ways, their burden is greater because they are
really avant-pop (A-P) artists: they naturally play with whatever new media
technologies are developing in the pop culture while at the same time aesthet-
ically engaging themselves with the forms of the mass media they are sur-
rounded by. They do this as part of a larger hactivist strategy that intends to
subvert the mass media from within so that it bends to their own art and po-
litical agendas and can be integrated into their evolving Life Style Practice in
asynchronous realtime. The LSP of the A-P artist nurtures an urge to demas-
sify the content industry so that A-P artists can produce, exhibit, and distrib-
ute their just-in-time remixes into the niche communities they are actively
building. In a different context, we would call this a peer-to-peer network but
is really a community of shared interest (and where there’s interest, there’s in-
vestment, and where there’s investment, a market is sure to follow).
Digitally inclined A-P artists are not deconstructionists who, in the old
French style, playfully sample from the history of philosophy so that they
can then innovatively remix the nagging metaphysical TEXT that never goes
away. This kind of poststructuralist critique of culture may be one elemental
by-product of their ongoing online art performance. Fine. But A-P artists are
constructing (writing into existence) coded viruses (social software) that
attack the traditional media environment from within to subvert its one-
size-fits-all mold of reality. Corrupting the traditional media, art, and political
cultures—everything from the business news channels, to presidential cam-
paigns, to corporate-sponsored museum exhibitions—is standard practice in
the nomadic Net art world, and A-P artists make a point of using their spon-
taneous creations to create a nonconformist alternative to all status quo polit-
ical agendas. In this case, the interventionist strategies of many a hactivist Net
artist are aimed at deconstructing both the conservative and liberal sides of
corporate culture’s moneyed mentality so that the online art performance
exudes a politically charged aesthetic aura that operates in its own networked
context.
But didn’t Walter Benjamin tell us that aura was dead and that the authen-
tic was all but history? Perhaps it’s time to authenticate the silence.
26 Spontaneous Theories
11
Where to begin. Once upon a time won’t do, not in this networked space
of flows where the mission creep of an illuminating unrealtime takes hold
and empowers us to question time itself, to rethink its premises. Of course,
these are age-old issues, and an anthropological fictioneer like Jorge Luis
Borges was keen to investigate these questions himself in ‘‘A New Refutation
of Time’’:
And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astro-
nomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not
frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is
the substance I am made of. 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.
And yet, and yet . . . we all know what it’s like to lose ourselves in the moment.
When that moment is somehow artificially constructed as a kind of hyperim-
provisationally designed experience colored by the unexpected and, yes, the
unintended effects of being online, what happens to our notion of what an
artist is and where that artist lives?
To rephrase the question: where does the virtual artist, whose navigational
dreamworld of fluid intersubjectivity circulates deep inside a peer-to-peer net-
work culture, actually conduct art/life research practice?
Or to rephrase the question yet again: where is that missing link of a day-
night-space-time when my flight leaves from Colorado on a Saturday and—
less than twenty-four hours later—arrives Down Under on Monday?
Talk about cyberpsychogeographical drifting. Perhaps for the nomadic Net
artist, this ongoing Life Style Practice of associational thinking that hastily
passes through the labyrinthine, networked space of flows takes place in asyn-
chronous realtime.
By asynchronous realtime I am referring to what at times feels like a per-
petual jet-lag consciousness or timeless time, a blur motion of experiential
metadata that indicates a formal investigation of complex event processing
where the VJ artist, always gyrating at a pivotal location in the narrative,
becomes a multitude of flux identities nomadically circulating within the net-
worked space of flows (both geophysical networks and cyberspace networks).
Living in asynchronous realtime often produces a feeling of being both avant-
garde (ahead of one’s time) and time-delayed or even preempted.
Cyberpsychogeography 27
nist, Maldoror (taken from the fictional character developed by the Comte de
Lautréamont [Isidore Lucien Ducasse] in his dark nineteenth-century collec-
tion The Songs of Maldoror), experiences what he refers to as Melting Plastic
Fantastic Time. He is fully aware that he is standing on a beach in the Algarve
in Portugal, killing time as he waits for the necessary hours to pass so that he
can begin his journey back to the United States. But he is also aware that he is
already becoming part of a complex event that is processing his near-future
experiences in the United States before he even gets there. What’s even
stranger, he is certain that in some ways he is already in the USA—that his
superclock has already reset its parameters and that all that needs to happen
now is to transport his meat package to the airport so he can finally catch up
with himself.
These kinds of art-research investigations are consistent with what Stan
Brakhage called moving visual thinking and that I interpret as a kind of expe-
rientially anticipated special effects brought on by engaging with one’s own
poetic intensity. All of these investigations are conducted via the ‘‘fine
nerve-scales’’ that Antonin Artaud spoke of ‘‘when studying myself micro-
scopically.’’ Henri Bergson tried to materialize them in his own thought
process—that is, using the metadata of everyday life experience to discover
how the body transforms into a kind of turbo-charged packet-switching sta-
tion that continually filters (parallel processes) the various distributed media
fictions that ‘‘I’’ am always in the process of becoming, like a chameleon
reconfigures itself to both embed itself and contribute to whatever shifts are
taking place in the autopoietic world it happens to be living in.
In the world of cyberpsychogeographical drifting and nomadic Net art
practice, we are immersed in the collective-self organizing domain of the arti-
ficial intelligentsia. We feel the sensation of seeing through eyes that Brakhage,
in his ‘‘Metaphors on Vision,’’ asked us to imagine as ‘‘unruled by man-made
laws of perspective’’ and that are ‘‘unprejudiced by compositional logic’’ so
that the artist can ‘‘know each object encountered in life through an adventure
of perception.’’ In a later essay, Brakhage tells us the adventure of perception
takes in ‘‘the full presence of consciousness . . . present tense (Or as US poet
Charles Olson’s ‘there is no history except as it is invoked in The Present’).’’
Once the images are captured as an inevitable representation of the light that
is available when the images are simultaneously recorded, they (as Brakhage
reminds us) ‘‘exist referentially AND in an implied past tense . . . always there-
fore tied to a remembrance, or resemblance of ‘Things Past,’ an ideology of
30 Spontaneous Theories
Memory, the ideas of Memorial.’’ In this way, we might say that VJs, in per-
forming their function as artist-medium, attempt to use their live sets to build
a living, visual monument to the spontaneous eruption of their past-present-
future tenses in the most intense way possible.
Needless to say, the quality of the light in a Stan Brakhage film is totally
different than the light in a VJ performance using laptops, QuickTime movie
files, and VJ software. The former is made by mixing light and sometimes
paint in its constituent colors, while the latter is remixed data emitted through
red, green, and blue (RGB) pixels stimulated by an electron beam or elec-
trical impulse. In VJ performance, light is expressed via binary code and hexa-
decimals transfused with electricity and not via the more sensitive process of
manipulating photons and transparency values. With direct film, as in the
work of Len Lye (where he scratched his visions onto the emulsion while
experimenting with dyes, stencils, air brushes, and other instruments), the
hypnotic effect of seeing the work projected on a screen reveals the alternative
shapes and forms a cinematic phenomenon could take, and viewers are im-
mediately invited to expand their concepts of what a film could be. Lye’s
experiments, along with those run by Brakhage and other artists like Maya
Deren and Bruce Conner, reflect the poetic, trancelike qualities of the filmic
medium.
Members of the London Film Makers’ Cooperative were also interested in
expanding the possibilities of the cinematic apparatus and investigated its phe-
nomenal and sculptural aspects as a relational object in an otherwise experi-
mental screening venue. One of the early moving image artists to emerge out
of the London Film Makers’ Cooperative scene was Mike Leggett. In a recent
unpublished paper, he theorizes that his film works provide ‘‘an encounter
with the ‘film as phenomena’, as film ‘abstracted’ ’’ and that there existed ‘‘an
opening up of the spaces between its component parts, in contradistinction to
the conventions of Cinema, intent on concealing the many joins that hold the
illusion in place.’’
By engaging the viewer in an immediate social network (like the one pro-
vided in club spaces, where VJs perform most of their work), contemporary
performances that focus on hyperimprovised image manipulation might be
assumed to point back to these early ‘‘film as phenomena’’ events that
demanded a new set of expectations from their audiences. But the techniques
employed by VJs are in many cases referring to contemporary video tropes
Cyberpsychogeography 31
that are used in everything from mainstream music videos to big Hollywood
movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). And with the lack of
historical perspective that pervades VJ culture, more and more young artists
find it easy to perform in alternative spaces as they jam with the available VJ
software using their virtual banks of found footage, taken either directly off
the Web or from filmic source material on DVDs. It’s so easy, in fact, that if
you talk to some young VJs, you might think that VJ culture came to us totally
out of the blue. As usual, it’s not black and white. For example, one young VJ
I know has been using the content from recent DVD releases by Brakhage as
his VJ source material. When I asked him why, he simply said, ‘‘Because it’s
great. It was made for VJing.’’
12
the breakout potential of your neuroaesthetic self. If you don’t change direc-
tion, then you just may end up where you are heading. Whatever the risks,
just keep moving. The self-reflexive artist-trickster often succeeds by proceed-
ing without caution. If you fail, maybe you’re doing something right, some-
thing that challenges the status quo and demands a revaluation of all values.
You might get hooked on this kind of philosophically engaged Life Style
Practice, especially if you have figured out a way to maintain it over the dura-
tion of a lifetime while still paying the bills. It is a gamble, and when you’re on
a winning streak, you have to work hard to keep things in balance. After a
while, projecting your digital art personas into various modes of cyberpsycho-
geographical drifting can become addictive—the way that staying connected
or continually evolving strategies to survive in the network culture can be ad-
dictive. Steven Shaviro’s recent book Connected: Or What It Means to Live in
the Networked Society tells us that we are now beyond the Society of the Spec-
tacle and that Debord himself was deluded about the notion of ‘‘a false con-
sciousness of time.’’
‘‘There was never a time when life was directly lived,’’ says Shaviro. He goes
on to say ‘‘there was never a unity of life as opposed to the separation imposed
by the detaching of images from their original contexts.’’ According to Sha-
viro, this ‘‘unity of a life ‘directly lived’ ’’ is something Hollywood invented
and that never occurred to anyone before they started seeing Hollywood
movies. Given this context, what’s a planetary Net artist or internationally
touring VJ to do? Intervene in the assault of distributed media fictions by be-
coming one?
By the term distributed media fiction, I am referring to what the nomadic
digital artist becomes by navigating through the networked space of flows in
asynchronous realtime. In my case, I can be tagged at any given moment as an
experimental novelist, a hypertext composer, a Net artist, a VJ performer, a
DVD-with-surround-sound installation artist, a film director, or a writerly
conduit whose digital poetics occasionally loses itself in the imaginative neth-
erworld of abstract expression. The important thing (as my co-conspirator,
Ronald Sukenick, liked to say, often as a nonsequitur) is to annihilate the im-
portant thing.
To which I might add:
The important thing is a feeling.
The important thing is losing sight of yourself in asynchronous realtime.
34 Spontaneous Theories
13
‘‘The world runs on Internet time,’’ says Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel. Yes,
Andy, you’re probably right, although what Internet time actually is is still an
open question. It’s like the chip inside your head is programmed for destinar-
rativity complete with built-in obsolescence, a fact you are semiconsciously
aware of 24/7—except when your system has completely crashed, the super-
clock between your eyes and inside your head needs a foreign-substance
adjustment, and meanwhile you’re still surfing the Web looking for more
meaning or for meaning potential. That is to say, you Google yourself to death.
This is when the state of problematized Being is erupting. It’s the beautiful
thing about evolving a digital culture out of lived unreality (mutating code-
work). You program yourself to write yourself into Being, to engage in an on-
going ungoing networked social experience with the Other, one that always
borders on becoming. But becoming what? Becoming a cyborg-narrator in
Cyberpsychogeography 35
whose sight we see the world anew? Becoming a planetary Net artist whose
responsibility to world citizenship is to capture consciousness with whatever
digital apparatuses are available during your given time?
Arthur Rimbaud (that nineteenth-century poet entrepreneur who would
have made a killing in the dot.com glory days if only he had been alive to ex-
perience it) once wrote, ‘‘To each being, several other lives were due.’’ Imag-
ine if he had access to e-mail, iChat, SMS, or networked games. He might
have never written his poetry about the seasons of hell he was so desperate to
convey to the wide open other. The excellent poems he wrote would probably
have been lost to a series of virtual killings in first-person shooter game space
or any number of role-playing environments that suited his then-emerging
poetic sensibility. He may have suffered from attention-deficit disorder, and
his parents, not sure how to rein in his hyperactive emotions and over-
powering energy, may have forced him to take Ritalin or Prozac to somehow
simulate a pseudo-jet-lag consciousness that is nowhere near as pleasantly
nasty and stimulating as the real thing and may cripple creative potential.
Every-body has its preferred drugs of choice. For me, all I need is a long trip
on an airplane, an attempt to stay up as long as possible, and then a journey
through a neonated city at midnight or a hot and thirsty walk through a desert
landscape. All of a sudden, I find myself entering another world, another
planet—Planet Oblivion, where the aliens are alienated from alienation itself.
Living along the contours of a borderless Planet Oblivion is where my prac-
tice flourishes. Sometimes I can watch myself as if from above and see my hu-
man body perambulating the surface of this renegade planet. There I am, that
naked body of words mobilizing their hypertextual consciousness through a
maze of experience that steers me through various multilinear routes, hum-
ming an old song that Frank Sinatra once sang: ‘‘To dream the impossible
dream.’’ Yes, the impossible dream—the one I am always in the process of
composing as a nomadic Net artist drifting in cyberpsychogeographical
spaces.
And what you are reading here now, almost as a delayed effect created with
some digital manipulation, is that my impossible dream is the one I am always
in the process of composing as a nomadic Net artist drifting in cyberpsycho-
geographical spaces. This line can keep repeating itself in a low murmur
somewhere in the background of the soundtrack to this essay (the one I am
always in the process of composing as a nomadic Net artist drifting in cyber-
psychogeographical spaces). Some might call this theory looping or layering the
36 Spontaneous Theories
rhetoric, the way a DJ spins discs or adds various tracks to a digital composi-
tion. But there is always the risk of slipping a disc while falling off the edge of
this oblivious curvature of thought that still feels like an extraplanetary trans-
mission. Slip and fall, and watch your world go completely out from under
you. Then what do you do Ms. DJ/VJ nomadic Net artist? I mean, how do
you play if you can’t pivot? The gravity of the situation is enormous. As a pro-
gramming image-body that experiences body-brain-apparatus achievements
in asynchronous realtime, you always have to be able to pivot, to drift along
with your make-or-fake history until it takes its sudden hallucinatory turn. At
which point, you have to be able to plant your poetic foot six feet under and
immediately spin yourself in another direction, or you might end up going
exactly where you are heading.
14
Walking down one of the narrowest streets in Harajuku, with fashion shops
calling for my attention, I remember to press the red record button on my
digital video camera, at which point the people who walk in front of my lens
are said to be captured by my apparatus as it views the scene. But I wonder:
Are these people that I am capturing part of the unreality of my ongoing
philosophical fictions? Or are they real actors performing as themselves in
realtime, and do I just happen to be capturing them in action?
Is their realtime biography synchronizing with my unrealtime autobiog-
raphy, or is it all a kind of pseudo-collective autobiography, a random inter-
active performance transmitted only for the apparatus that captures our
consciousness for us? At a certain point, even a narratively minded VJ artist
has to ask, ‘‘Who needs cameras?’’ when you have the readiness potential of
the unconscious player streaming mashed-up media fictions in ultrarapid
fervor? Who needs cameras, indeed. But I use them anyway.
Maybe I shouldn’t use words like biography and autobiography to contextu-
alize the experience of supplementing (writing out) my own life story, since
I’m already beyond the graph of knowing my own subjectivity. Is this what it
means to be a super avant-garde artist—to be so ahead of time that even the
artist’s many different selves can’t keep up? But no matter how far I may get
ahead of myself (and this ongoing spontaneous artist theory is only about
staying ahead of myself, of not looking back and wondering what happened),
there is still this nagging issue of the body and its more generic functions.
Going with the flow sometimes means letting the flow take over, at which
point you just have to go. Let’s face it: it’s my bodily functions that totally
ground out this impossible dream that has somehow come true to life as I
use these emerging technologies to distribute my cast of digital flux personas.
Besides, at times, autobiography feels more like autobiopsy. Think of it as a
kind of self-inflicted, open-source surgery that attempts to excise whatever
nuggets of meaning may still be residing in my public-domain body as it pro-
cesses the metadata of my experiential Life Style Practice. Sometimes I get
caught in the flow of writing out my life, and it feels like I am metaphorically
taking all available diagnostic instruments to my rich, multilayered databank
of experience and turning it into a Burroughsian cut-up or the virtual version
of a slapdash Merz collage. This aesthetic procedure is often an invasive,
preemptive, proactive strike that enables me to engage spontaneously with
the dreams, memories, and hallucinations I willingly create, collaboratively,
with my colleagues all across the planet—the collective IQ that constantly
38 Spontaneous Theories
Who is the we that wants to be entertained and that is being mocked all the
while? Not me, I can hear everyone say. Then who? You?
Think of artificial intelligentsia as gorgeous (beautiful, lovely, perfect) inter-
subjectivity. Virtual intersubjectivity.
Now connect the dots (follow the money): is that the Collective Uncon-
scious I smell coming around the corner? Is that you?
‘‘Not me,’’ I can hear someone say. That someone is Everyone. Here Comes
Everyone! Here Comes the Collective Not-Me!
Hey, what if we built in some artificial stupidity?
I feel stupid and contagious / Here we are now, entertain us.
Locating artificial stupidity would be like striking gold. Once it’s firewired
into my hard drive, the rhetorical flood of narrative information would fill to
the brim, and then it would all be more virtual dream juice ready for spin
doctoring. Or what I call surf-sample-manipulate. A strategy where the
Net artist, formerly a writer, surfs the digital culture, samples data, and then
changes or manipulates that data to meet the specific needs of the narrative
—of the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress their network story is
unbound to become.
You can use any data for this creative process—from the Internet, CDs,
DVDs, books, magazines, overheard conversations, or found material of all
kinds.
For the Internet, it would work on two fronts. One, the so-called creative
content (that is, the text, images, sounds, and links that are available to us)
would be sampled from other online sources and digitally manipulated so
that it becomes original constructions that are immediately imported into
the storyworld you are creating. Two, the so-called source code itself could
be appropriated from other designs floating around the Net and eventually
integrated into the screen’s behind-the-scenes compositional structure. The
great thing about the Net is that if you see something you like, whether con-
tent or source code, you often can download the entire document and manip-
ulate it to your needs.
Forget inspiration. That was for the Me Generation—(‘‘I was inspired to
write this poem’’). They were worst than the Lost Generation—the literary
others who were bound by their prolific, creative genius.
Net artists seem to be saying that content and source code are one and the
same thing—that it’s all open source ready for remixing so that we can
40 Spontaneous Theories
15
Kino-Eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the
entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact. . . . Kino-Eye is the
possibility of seeing life processes as hypertextual consciousness moving at all
speeds. . . . Kino-Eye uses every possible means in reconfiguring the artist as a socially
provocative apparatus operating in a telepresent environment, comparing and linking
all points of the universe in an open source generated peer-to-peer network, breaking,
when necessary, all the laws and conventions of reality construction.
Then I open a book by Vilém Flusser, called Toward a Philosophy of Photog-
raphy, and rip this from him:
Apparatuses were invented to simulate specific thought processes. Only now (following
the invention of the computer), and as it were with hindsight, is it becoming clear what
kind of thought processes we are dealing with in the case of all apparatuses. . . . All ap-
paratuses (not just computers) are calculating machines and in this sense are ‘‘artificial
intelligences,’’ the camera included, even if their inventors were not able to account for
this.
So now I do a remix of a manipulated Vertov/Flusser sent through the
aforementioned digital thoughtography filter I have invented, and this what I
come up with:
Apparatuses capture space, make links to the other via hypertextual consciousness,
simulate specific thought processes as ways of seeing, and process the social spaces of
the artificial intelligentsia as it operates in a peer-to-peer (P2P) open source environ-
ment breaking all the laws and conventions of identity construction.
This all happens in asynchronous realtime, inside the networked space of
flows where my body comfortably processes all it has read and seen while
drifting into various cyberpsychogeographical border zones. The improvisa-
tional push-pull of the act of composition makes it feel as though I am gener-
ating an intuitive writing practice that designs my story for me as I create it—
as I live it. Think of it as Experiential Meta/Data. Narratological Resonance.
VJ Style. Whatever you call it (and don’t worry, I’ve heard worse), I’m not
looking back. This is an historical documentation of a process that never
took place in realtime anyway, so there’s no originary chronology I have to
be true to.
It feels like writing writing itself. I am letting the language speak itself, but
with various filters turned on and tweaked in a way that we can, if we want,
experience its unconscious Net effect.
Streaming fictions screaming across the network
Cyberpsychogeography 43
16
This isn’t to say that literature has no role in any of this. Just as we know via
Wittgenstein that the self may be grammatical (as well as machinic—that is, it
may be a grammatron), the self may also be a grammatical fiction that is
remixed from the blood lineage of all of the other grammatical fictions that
came before it and that are mixing up their virtual juices in the heavy IV
drip of now.
There’s an entire heritage or rival tradition of literature (including Lautréa-
mont, Burroughs, Raymond Federman, and Kathy Acker, to name a few)
whose authors readily write cyberspace as a kind of playgiaristic practice, and
that tradition feeds into my own Net art practice. Playgiaristic is a term I steal
from Federman, who uses the supplemental y to signify play and performance
in the self-organizing world of the artificial intelligentsia—what I imagine to
be the open source network. I interviewed Federman in hopes he would reveal
to me what he meant by the term playgiarism, and this is what he wrote back:
To answer the question once and for all. I cannot explain how Playgiarism works. You
do it, or you don’t. You’re born a Playgiarizer, or you’re not. It’s as simple as that. The
laws of Playgiarism are unwritten. Like incest, it’s a taboo. It cannot be authenticated.
The great Playgiarizers of all time—Homer, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Diderot, Rimbaud,
Lautréamont, Proust, Beckett, Federman—have never pretended to do anything else.
44 Spontaneous Theories
Inferior writers deny that they playgiarize because they confuse Plagiarism with Play-
giarism. It’s not the same. The difference is enormous, but no one has yet been able to
explain it. Playgiarism cannot be measured in weight or size. It is as elusive as what it
playgiarizes.
Plagiarism is sad. It whines. It cries. It feels sorry for itself. It apologizes. It feels
guilty. It hides behind itself.
Playgiarism, on the contrary, laughs all the time. It exposes itself. It is proud. It
makes fun of what it does while doing it. It denounces itself.
That does not mean that Playgiarism is self-reflexive. How could it be? How can
something reflect itself when that itself has, so to speak, no itself but only a borrowed
self. A displaced self.
If this is getting too complicated, too intellectual, too abstract, then let me put it in
simpler terms—on the Walt Disney mental level: Playgiarism is above all a game whose
only rule is the game itself. The French would call that Plajeu.
17
18
The illogic of sense data is another way of looking at it. With hyperimprovisa-
tional acts of freeform composition, the sensorium in which writers immerse
themselves leads to a bleeding of one sense order into another, a blurred
blending of the way things look, sound, and feel while writing. Think of it as
what Brian Massumi, in his book Parables of the Virtual, calls a ‘‘fringe-flow
sensation.’’
Smell the red, taste the noise, see the stink, touch the moan. Feel the body
enter its altered state of utter proprioceptive whiteness and watch the writer
compose as he fully immerses himself in a post-VR hallucination, that total
creative work environment called The Defamiliarization Lab.
ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN in The Defamiliarization Lab. Inside The
Defamiliarization Lab, we can manipulate our live-action memories as future
perfect dreams that take place in a tense that doesn’t quite exist, or if it does,
only in theory.
Let’s call this tense utopense. It’s that tense you give way to while expending
utopian thought.
Think you can handle it? Mano y mano, Utopia and You, forming a more
perfect union. You-topia. (‘‘Nothing will have taken place but the place.’’)
DON’T LOOK BACK. Or if you do, recognize that what you’re looking at
are the formal traces of an improvised style that you had NO IDEA you were
creating while you were composing THIS THING (your life).
Blurring Life Style Practice and nomadic Net art wandering as the same
thing can lead to disorientation, which may be the best way to orient yourself
to what the status quo tries to pass off as the real.
48 Spontaneous Theories
creative writing would morph into creative, computer-based code and that
this emerging codework would then further morph into a freeform network
of hyperimprovisationally generated performance artworks that would contin-
ually manifest themselves in a variety of cultural environments (everything
from techno clubs to media art festivals to Net art mailing lists to experimen-
tal seminars doubling as multimedia blog jams)—assuming one could bypass
all multimodal logjams.
The one constant that remains no matter what environment this digital art-
work ports itself through is that both the artists and the electrotraces they are
leaving behind are situated to facilitate research investigations into the future
of writing and its eventual inmixing with other influential forms of new media
art. A future that we assume, given our cyberpunk heritage, is happening now,
in eternal utopense.
19
the work of art that desperately wants to emerge. Once this kind of in-body
and out-of-mind experience clicks into a fluid transmission of manifest un-
reality, it often finds the all-too-sexy and flirtatious specter of writing standing
there. It is ready, willing, and able—incubating, on the verge of letting loose
the code of pleasurable corruption. (Like Burroughs says, ‘‘Language is a
virus.’’)
It’s this urge for connectedness, of letting loose the code of pleasurable cor-
ruption, that matters most, and teleporting your new media language through
any medium or apparatus will do. The key is to open up yourself to the instru-
mentality of interdisciplinary action in whatever random environment you
happen to perform in. Now comes the risky part. Do you or don’t you hook
up? Is it time, once again, to become the artist-medium, the enervating plug-
in filter of all of society’s dirty white noise? What experiential dividends will
this personal investment in the creative process potentially pay you, and what
are its opportunity costs? If you are sure this is what you really crave, how bad
do you really want it?
20
For me, it’s simple. I just start playing around with the freely available social
software wherever I happen to be located on Planet Oblivion and watch the
work materialize before my very eyes. What materializes out of this practice
(this embodied discourse network of which I am but one metacommentator)
is a kind of joie de vivre, and as a joyful participant, I emerge as more than just
VJ Persona traversing the cyberpsychogeographical playing fields of Planet
Oblivion. I find that I also become an active amateur (passionate lover) of
the network culture and generate new material no matter what I do.
The word material is useful here, especially when I think of it in terms of
digital source material and the ways that the source becomes matter. For the
artificial intelligentsia, matter matters little unless one can materialize a con-
text for its existence. In the case of the Net artist—whose nomadic wander-
ings are part of a larger image movement taking place in eternal utopense—
the context for its existence is still that nonplace place where the heightened
states of body-brain-apparatus achievements are always a possibility in the
networked space of flows. In this networked space of flows, VJ Persona hallu-
cinates a metafictional drift of personal narrative momentum while parallel
processing the flow of images aggregating into his live performance. It’s the
purposeless play of things present, inmixing with the remembrance of things
past. (And all of this happens while still eyeing the immediate future—so im-
mediate, in fact, that it perpetually blurs the tense field the VJ is performing
in.)
Things past are also things passed on, generationally. I am a VJ who cap-
tures his own source material in front of a live audience. When I hyperimpro-
vise my VJ sets with video images being captured, streamed, and remixed in
the performance space itself, I become a kind of simultaneous and continuous
fusion of all of the spontaneously generated imagery I have thus far captured.
My embodied thoughtographical gestures take on the shape of a living,
breathing, digital apparatus that rhetorically charges the visual language of
the performance environment. I use the transmission of manipulated images
and sounds to further modify the relationship between the performer and the
audience—especially the relationship between their bodies. These bodies pass
through the all-encompassing image-sound mix and can also become part of
the image-sound mix in an electronic mesh of robust synaesthetic happen-
stance. The bodies become screens and sound boards as well as social engines
to remix the performance energy into a poetically tinged playing field of net-
52 Spontaneous Theories
work potential. What I find in my live field research, particularly in small clubs
and loft parties, is that during live performances, these manipulated images
and sounds pass through my body as both an active memory I am remixing
from previous gigs as well as manipulated flashbacks of my prior video loca-
tion shoots. I find myself composing more digital source material out of my
fictional memories (yes, active fictional memory generation, as digital source
material).
The hyperimprovised image-sound mix that I’m creating in live social envi-
ronments is thus composed primarily of my own manipulated memories cap-
tured on digital video and exported through a wide array of fictional filters
and effects. This then becomes something like a customized Life Style Practice
that emerges from the depths of the creative unconscious. Forget phrases like
‘‘Sometimes my life feels like a movie.’’ No movie can even come close to cap-
turing the live VJ performance my fringe-flow sensations pass through as I live
my life on Planet O.
The net effects of these manipulated memory-visions that I hyperimprovi-
sationally compose in live performance are known to linger. Sometimes, the
day after a long VJ performance, I will drift through the maze of streets in the
foreign city I happen to be in, looking around at the light and shadows on
the surfaces I am exposed to, and see that they resonate with what I generated
twelve hours earlier in the performance space I was gigging in the night be-
fore. Am I hallucinating my manipulated memories on to the walls and pave-
ment of the city I performed in the night before? Or are my eyes tricking me
into seeing what’s not really there? And yet I am convinced that without the
unreal there is no Real.
For me, there is no need to get totally hung up on it all. I just do what I do:
I play with the data. And by playing with it—by self-reflexively manipulating it
while making my presence felt (hyperintuitively aware of my role as artist
plug-in turning the knobs of my readiness potential on to autopilot)—I al-
ways go meta on you. Going meta is what a postcontemporary fictional artist
does when randomly composing many digital flux personas in the networked
space of flows. I (whoever that is) make spontaneous visual connections
and link these spur-of-the-moment remixes of past-present-future dream-
memory-performances into my various stories and emerging digital poetics—
the ones that are always embodied in this distributed media fiction I am con-
tinuously in the process of becoming (like here, in this aimless drift that’s
been going on for how long now?).
Cyberpsychogeography 53
An earlier version of this essay was originally published as part of the Ciber@rt Bilbao 2004
conference proceedings.