The Free and Enslaved

To begin with, one must be political:

“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.” Walter Benjamin

Protecting Our Portals

"There ought to be limits to freedom.'' - George W. Bush

"A paranoiac is someone who has all of the facts at their disposal." - William Burroughs

Methodology

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On my Professor VJ blog, I mentioned the connection between Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Work (aka The Arcades Project) and something I am calling blogstyle. I have been looking for an opportunity to put into practice a methodology similar to the one Benjamin employed for his Passagen-Work, and the chance to do that has finally arrived. This work is coinciding with The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Center for Visual Art's "Decades of Influence: Colorado 1986-2005" exhibition - and since I supposedly influenced the emerging digital/net art scene in Colorado, I am making a new work for the show - this one you are now accesing via BLOGGER.

Lately, I have been looking at blogging as theory-performance. Not as an academic space for the theory of performance (though that's OK too - go for it) - but a place to play out my own theoretical performances in personal blogstyle. I now want to filter that impulse through an "imaginary plug-in" I will call Passagen-Work.

Speaking of methodology, here is what Benjmain wrote in his file on methodology for Passagen-Work:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Of course, he contradicted himself in the best of possible ways and actually said a lot - and so one can imagine that I will attempt to do this too, whether I want to or not. Another difference between Benjamin's approach and mine is that "the rags, the refuse" that I want to make use of are easily sampled from the vast library of information waiting to be aestheticized (performed with, manipulated) on the Internet - and I also have a lot of material I myself have contributed to the electrosphere, material I intend on recontextualizing for this 10 week performance.

So here's to the idea of Benjamin's methodology being performed within the context of my own remixological blogstyle - and some kind of theoretical performance art project emerging out of it. The subtitle of the Passagen-Work is Theory As Remixology As Performance As Art?


Identity-As-Passagen-Port