Passagen-Work

A Sense of Measure

2006-08-24T10:36:00.000-06:00

Being-Field

"You can measure distance by time.
'How far away is that place?'
'About 20 minutes.' But it doesn't work the other way.
'When do you get off work?'
''Around 3 miles.'"

- Jerry Seinfeld

Transitory

2006-08-23T11:41:00.000-06:00

Jetson and Flotsam

"Man ... can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way.” - H. G. Wells

MetaTourist

2006-08-21T03:17:00.000-06:00

Flaneur

"“…from a dérive point of view, cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into and exit from certain zones.” - Guy Debord

To Move and Embody

2006-08-18T03:06:00.000-06:00

Floating an Idea

"We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity." - Raoul Vaneigem

Nettime

2006-08-17T05:01:00.000-06:00

Looping

"[T]he image no longer even has time to become an image." - Jean Baudrillard

The Thickening of Time (Using A Granular Apparatus)

2006-08-16T05:14:00.000-06:00

Focused

"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work." - Jean Cocteau

Slayer

2006-08-15T16:32:00.000-06:00

Figment

"Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life." - William Faulkner

Day Tripper

2006-08-14T04:50:00.000-06:00

Hours

"Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire." - Jorge Luis Borges

Cruelty-Free (At the Airport)

2006-08-11T10:03:00.000-06:00

Contraband

"Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." Camille Paglia

Being What's In

2006-08-10T10:15:00.000-06:00

“If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Kidz Play

"This spectacle, the self-construction of the newest in the medium of what has been, makes for the true dialectical theatre of fashion." - W. Benjmain

V is for Vendetta

2006-08-09T11:07:00.000-06:00

Bonehead

"Every word written is a victory against death." - Michel Butor

In Transit

2006-08-08T17:10:00.000-06:00

Detour the Detour

"All over the globe, revolutionary praxis, like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative into positive, lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of rebellion to ink in the map of its triumph." - Raoul Vaneigem

To interrupt the course of the world

2006-08-07T10:56:00.000-06:00

Your quill was illin'...

“Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius crater for an inkstand!” - Herman Melville

Subject Position

2006-08-04T12:35:00.000-06:00

Fill In the Blanks

"I have too many fantasies to be a housewife.... I guess I am a fantasy." - Marilyn Monroe

Prosthetic Otherness

2006-08-03T10:24:00.000-06:00

FIN

"It is better to be unfaithful than to be faithful without wanting to be." - Brigitte Bardot

What Does This Mean?

2006-08-02T12:27:00.000-06:00

Woman on Bicycle

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."
- Susan Sontag

Guerrilla Girl

2006-08-01T10:18:00.000-06:00

Meat Joy

"....and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for 'woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women." - Monique Wittig

Mysterious Resonance

2006-07-31T10:54:00.000-06:00

Submissive

"Her beauty drowned me. As I sat in front of her, I felt that I would do anything mad for her, anything she asked of me." - Anais Nin

Comfort Level

2006-07-28T17:52:00.000-06:00

Bubula Darling

"I wish men had boobs because I like the feel of them. It's so funny - when I record I sing with a hand over each of them, maybe it's a comfort thing." - Baby Spice of the Spice Girls

The Hunger

2006-07-27T09:54:00.000-06:00

Provisions

"A woman's appetite is twice that of a man's; her sexual desire, four times; her intelligence, eight times." - Proverb

Interiority

2006-07-26T10:04:00.000-06:00

Mixillogical Sensibility

"All women do have a different sense of sexuality, or sense of fun, or sense of like what's sexy or cool or tough." - Angelina Jolie

Self-Inflicted

2006-07-25T10:11:00.000-06:00

Don't Be Cruel

“The greater your capacity to love, the greater your capacity to feel the pain.” - Jennifer Aniston

Out of This World

2006-07-24T10:07:00.000-06:00

Hunka Hunka

“This is Earth. Isn't it hot?” - Paris Hilton

Datum

2006-07-21T09:52:00.000-06:00

The Supreme Fiction

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Database

2006-07-20T10:58:00.000-06:00

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Metadata

2006-07-19T10:03:00.000-06:00

Intersubjective Jamming

"That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Sense Data

2006-07-18T10:11:00.000-06:00

A lure...

"The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must allure the senses to it." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Data

2006-07-17T10:10:00.000-06:00

How About I Slip You
Into Something More Comfortable?

"Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Cinécriture

2006-07-14T09:48:00.000-06:00

Lux

"It's like a stream of feelings, intuition, and joy of discovering things. Finding beauty where it's maybe not. Seeing. And, on the other hand, trying to be structural, organized; trying to be clever. And doing what I believe is cinécriture, what I always call cine-writing. Which is not a screenplay. Which is not only the narration words. It's choosing the subject, choosing the place, the season, the crew, choosing the shots, the place, the lens, the light. Choosing your attitude towards people, towards actors. Then choosing the editing, the music. Choosing contemporary musicians. Choosing the tune of the mixing. Choosing the publicity material, the press book, the poster. You know, it's a handmade work of filmmaking -- that I really believe. And I call that cine-writing." - Agnés Varda

Coming into Being

2006-07-12T10:59:00.000-06:00

Sentencing (A Libidinal Economy)

"...the writer uses words that use the writer as an instrument to come into being. The writer lures them onto the page, but they come following their own law." - Rosmarie Waldrop

When Will the Cup Runneth Over?

2006-07-11T09:55:00.000-06:00

Zeitgeist

"What is it that we know but do not yet know that we know?" - Getrude Stein

Cancer

2006-07-10T09:46:00.000-06:00

Still Born

"Every chance, every contingency, every senseless out of every situation, is a little virtuality, a modest death, a rupture, an interval of being. After which life continues, still. Possibility and potential re-engage. Situation clamps back down. Next steps array themselves. Habitual paths stretch before and behind. Rounds. Return. Recapture." - Brian Massumi

Body Language

2006-07-07T09:10:00.000-06:00

Pussy, King of the Pirates

"Pretend that there is a distinct entity named self and a different entity named other or world. Define insanity as the situation when there occurs a nonnegotiable disparity between the self's version of the world and the world. According to this definition, American culture is now insane. Well-measured language, novels which structurally depend on the Aristotelian continuities, on any formal continuities, cannot describe, much less criticize, such culture."
- Kathy Acker

A Sensuous Thought

2006-07-06T10:20:00.000-06:00

Venus On Ecstasy

"Persistent suggestion through fire, the appearance of fire, the play of fire, images of fire are capable in certain cases of provoking 'unconscious' and 'impulsive' conditions - that is, of bringing 'sensuous thought' to the foreground, and forcing 'consciousness' into the background." - Sergei Eisenstein

The World's a Mess and It's in My Kiss

2006-07-05T10:25:00.000-06:00

Museological

"Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with a velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath the diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars [...] Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust -- what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster." - Henry Miller, from "Tropic of Cancer"

Metadata: politics, fiction, sex, literature, philosophy

Art Is What You Say It Is (Isn't It?)

2006-07-03T10:31:00.000-06:00

“Whatever you say it is, it isn't.” - Alfred Korzybsk

Socialist Fashionistas

2006-06-30T10:06:00.000-06:00

Pattern Recognition Plug-in for MetaBody

Pattern Recognition Plug-in for MetaStock

"Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern." - Alfred North Whitehead

"People were more interested in the phenomena than the art itself. This, combined with the growing interest in collecting art as an investment and the resultant boom in the art market, made it a difficult time for a young artist to remain sincere without becoming cynical." - Keith Haring

Feel the Pulse

2006-06-29T10:08:00.000-06:00

La Folie du Jour

"Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character." - Jean Baudrillard

Vital Signs

2006-06-28T19:33:00.000-06:00

Nothing comes between me and my sign...

"A sign... [in the form of a representamen] is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen..." - Charles Sanders Peirce

Subsumed By History, Dismembered

2006-06-27T03:07:00.000-06:00

Everything is now flat. She is easily splayed across the level-playing field of linkable metadata. An Historiographically-Engendered-Object-in-Waiting, a flower asking to be picked and enjoyed as an organically-conceived, beautiful substance, some-thing-in-itself to be contemplated, categorized, and eventually archived with so many other dead things.

Girl, Interrupted

"...for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility." W. Benjamin

"Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists." Willem De Kooning

Waxing Poetic

2006-06-26T01:43:00.000-06:00

“I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.” - Albert Einstein

Father Knows Best (And Will Always Be There to Protect You from Yourself)

2006-06-22T02:03:00.000-06:00

Color Theory For The Brain Dead

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are 'still' possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable."

--Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940) trans. Harry Zohn.

I'll Have My People Call Your People (And Together, We'll Create A Monopolistic Form of Market Censorship)

2006-06-21T01:35:00.000-06:00

Hi, No One Is Home Right Now,
But If You Tell Us What To Do,
We'll Be Sure To Flak For You

"Congress is deciding on the fate of the Internet. The question before it is simple: Should the Internet be handed over to the handful of cable and telephone companies that control online access for 98 percent of the broadband market? Only a Congress besieged by high-priced telecom lobbyists and stuffed with campaign contributions could possibly even consider such an absurd act." - Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney

"The First Amendment of the Internet – the governing principle of net neutrality, which prevents telecommunications corporations from rigging the web so it is easier to visit sites that pay for preferential treatment – took a blow from the House of Representatives Thursday." - Nation Report on June 9, 2006

The Fundamentals of Oilgarchy

2006-06-20T03:04:00.000-06:00

What Does That Have To Do With
The Price of Texas Tea In China? - No. 2

Does the Void Torment the Void?

2006-06-19T02:42:00.000-06:00

What Does That Have To Do With
The Price of Texas Tea In China? - No. 1

"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier...just as long as I'm the dictator..." - G.W. Bush

History's Metric

2006-06-18T20:11:00.000-06:00

You're The Bomb

"The boredom of Sunday afternoon, which drove de Quincey to smoke opium, also gave birth to Surrealism: hours propitious for making bombs." - Cyril Connoly

The Free and Enslaved

2006-06-17T12:33:00.000-06:00

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

2006-06-16T10:00:00.000-06:00

Offline Shopping Network

Easy Travel to Other Planets

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