silly video sound performance that got lost in the fire.
this is all that remains.
Rise of the Transtextuals
In my most recent searches into the void I have come across the concept/theory/ideology of transtextuality. Right off the bat I was hooked. "What the hell is transtextuality?" "What the hell is transtextuality?" "What the hell is transtextuality?" This has become my internal mantra. I have scoured the net and found many theorys and writings at length upon the subject, but every addition to this new current literary trend leaves the hallmark question answered by yet another question. Still undefined and awash of speculation built upon few source materials, I am so drawn towards this emerging classification of communication. The deeper I fall down this rabbit hole the stronger my current realization become...I am a transtextual.Transtextuality was originally coined by Gérard Genette in his book Palimpsests which can be found within the Google Books library. Of course, being ever so busy attempting to fool myself and everyone else into believing that I am the budding erudite, I have not read Genette's book...yet. Despite this minor roadblock in time management, I see no reason as to hold back my insightful take on the whole transtextuality thing. There is a plethora of regurgitation amongst the blogashere on Genette's concepts; here is the gist of it all. According to helmer.ca there are four sub-categories of transtextuality. They include intertexuality, paratextuality, architextuality, and hypotextuality. this is the comman basis for the breakdown of the trantextuality within the multiple net pages dedicated to it's definable understanding, though some sources do interchange intertextuality for metatextuality but their definitions remain identical. Intertextuality and or metatextuality refers to the concept of one text referring to itself as well as a secondary text referring to a primary text where in the understanding of the secondary text helps to define the primary text. Paratextuality is the textual information that surrounds and or supports the main text. this can be defined through the uses of specific fonts, illustrations, embedded videos and audio files, headings, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, and ect. Architextuality comments on related texts connected through genre. this definition I find a bit elusive but it's terms are easier understood as helmer.ca puts it "the division of a play into acts". Finally, hypotextuality refers to a secondary text that supports a primary text by creating interjections into the original text. I understand this concept most clearly in regards to the modern phenomenon of the remix and remix culture. Essentially that is the basis for the transtextual, all originally conceived by Genette and published in France in 1982 but it's prime importance is just now being conceptually understood and practiced through the renaissance of new media.
Currently, rhetoricians are revisiting Genette's proposed transtextuality and correlating it to modern communication modes and means. The ideals of transtextuality are specifically the fundamental elements of new media communication. all four of the predefined transtextual sub-categories are explicitly utilized within current new media trends. As the lines between consumer and creator are becoming ever so blurred transtextuality is becoming the norm. Within my own interpretations of the subject, this new media revolution is slated to make transtextuals out of us all. We are collectively referring to and morphing texts upon texts. Within the bounds of social media we are creating volumes upon volumes of text genre all of which intesects and interprets one another anew. many of the new media artists and designers are basing their work on cross platfomisation as remix of idea, concept, and content lead towards new contextualizations. personally I feel that the crux of transtextuality lies within the unfettered bounds our new media. We are still in the fledgling infancy of our "new printing press". we are all still learning to typeset our new communicative paradigm. This new openness and availability towards active communication lends itself towards the concepts of transtextuality. It is time to open the closet door and embrace our transtextual tendencies.
FLUXUS FUXUS: Shelley Jackson- New Media Author and Artist
Recently I bumped into Shelley Jackson. Of course our encounter was metaphoric and far from literal, but through the onslaught of short bursted information centralized within keyword searches about the incredible creativity that this woman has exude over the last twenty years; I began to feel some sort of kinship towards her. I never realized how in depth and "out of the box" an author/artist could be. Shelley Jackson is doing things that literally blow my mind. Certainly she is not the "be all end all" of text creation, but what she is doing is flipping the script on what modern publishing and literature is and can be. Jackson is on the front lines of the new media renaissance and she is paving inlets into this vast open new media terrain so that future creatives can tread deeper towards the evolutionary precipice of which we seek.Shelly Jackson grew up in Berkley, received her Bachelors of Arts from Stanford, and her Masters in Fine Arts from Brown University. In 1995 she published her first hypertext novel entitled Patchwork Girl. Apparently, a hypertext novel is a literary work that is displayed electronically and framed through the use of hypertext links. These hypertext links within the literary work allows the reader an in depth control of direction to the narrative, kind of like the choose your own adventure stories I read as a child wherein the reader makes choices about the direction of the story by making selections from different prompts at the end of a set of pages. Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a loose non-chronological adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelly later wrote two more hypertext novels with her sister Pamela Jackson. They are entitled The Doll Games and My Body.
One of Shelley Jackson's most recent projects, one in which I have become a supper huge fan, is called Skin. Skin is a short novel of about 2,000 or so words. The short novel is currently being published but not on paper as typical novels are printed and distributed. In this project Jackson has recruited volunteers to tattoo one word form the novel on their skin. This is the only means in which this novel will be published. Jackson has set up an informative web site describing in detail all angles of this project. A short video piece has also been created where in each participant in the Skin project videos their tattoo and says the word. All of these submissions have been edited together to tell a shortened version of the multimedia novel. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times, Jackson discusses the project participants;
I usually call them words, or my words, as in, "I got an angry email from one of my words," or "Two of my words just got married!" I really like the ripple of surreality this induces in listeners who haven't yet become inured to the usage. It comes from my original call for participants: I specify that once they are tattooed, "participants will be known as 'words'. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as their embodiments. As a result, injuries to the tattooed text, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died." I am a word myself: the title, Skin.The importance of Shelley Jackson's work is still yet to be determined. She is creating outside the norm of her generalized medium, but is that not the point. Within the spectrum of the new media renaissance all restrictions, traditions, and economics are tossed into the fire. Creatives working in this new medium must embrace the multidimensional type set. No longer are we bound to the type faced text. No longer must we hold tight to deteriorating economic models that have defined our expression. Shelley Jackson is of the vanguard of this new paradigm. She creates beyond our past and is actively defining the future: a new horizon of expressed communication.
Hype Huffer
Media hype is the thing. One sees it everywhere. In this postmodernist culture driven by consumerism there is nothing more than the inflated bubble. Certainly there is legitimacy in aspects of the media but generally it is taken outside contexts of measurable truth. It is no surprise that the facts as they are presented in popular culture are skewed for ratings. This has become the constant within many of our own lives. Hype has become the new black as we all add to the gestural descriptions of our exaggerated selves via social media. So where have we as a culture learned to ingrain this behavior of hyper exaggeration? Is it the fault of the media creators; or should the blame of hype rest upon the heads of the consuming masses drawn obediently towards the beautiful car crash?Speaking personally, I am enthralled by hype. My intentions are to be curator of hype. I lavish my time on the latest trends in music, art, and design. I am constantly seeking the new for I am one of the many seeking a seemingly new experience. Thus is the crux of the hype situation. Reality is cyclical. Constant creative attention must be focused in order to repackage the same old thing.
Hype is a part of our legacy. It was derived around the fires of our first archaic oral cultures. These first cultures communicated without written records, thus the truths of the presented knowledge changed with each oral recitation. The foundations of hype are rooted in our past traditions in that we gravitate towards creative interpretations. The need to exaggerate has evolved with the ways in which we communicate. Many of the first journalistic endeavors produced after the assimilation of the printing press were tabloid orientated. News conglomerates of the past created sensational headlines that were so far removed from actual truth, yet it was these fictitious narratives that influenced political and sometimes militaristic actions despite relevance to actuality.
Fluxus Fuxus
The following was first published in 1979 in:
Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia
A Child's History of Fluxus
Dick Higgins
Dick Higgins
Long long ago, back when the world was young - that is, sometime around the year 1958 - a lot of artists and composers and other people who wanted to do beautiful things began to look at the world around them in a new way (for them).
They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music."
And when they saw that, it turned their minds on. And they began to ask questions. One question was: "Why does everything I see that's beautiful like cups and kisses and sloshing feet have to be made into just a part of something fancier and bigger? Why can't I just use it for its own sake?"
When they asked questions like that, they were inventing Fluxus; but this they didn't know yet, because Fluxus was like a baby whose mother and father couldn't agree on what to call it - they knew it was there, but it didn't have a name.
Well, these people were scattered all over the world. In America there were George (George Brecht) and Dick (Dick Higgins) and La Monte (La Monte Young) and Jackson (Jackson MacLow) and plenty of others. In Germany there were Wolf (Wolf Vostell) and Ben and Emmett (Ben Patterson and Emmett Williams) who were visiting there from America, and there was another visitor in Germany too from a very little country on the other side of the world, from Korea - his name was Nam June Paik. Oh there were more too, there and in other countries also. They did "concerts" of everyday living; and they gave exhibitions of what they found, where they shared the things that they liked best with whoever would come. Everything was itself, it wasn't part of something bigger and fancier. And the fancy people didn't like this, because it was all cheap and simple, and nobody could make much money out of it.
(READ THE REST OF THE STORY...click link below)
Letters to the Muse - Episode #2
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| BLaCK MiRRoR |
3-20-2011
Dearest Muse-So here I am tripping my ball's off in Possum Kingdom. Eye drove about 309.67584 miles west; then specifically 5.7564 miles north to the lake. Eye had to ask around, it is so hard to type communications to you at this point. I am sitting on top of a hill, fire going and I am lit up on the inside. I came out here to right, to get right, and to write about it all. Things just haven't been right so much lately. The will just releases itself unto the most beautiful experience, it is all some sort of metaphysics, all of it. There are waves upon waves. Wind speaking to the wind. Out hear you never really know what time it is, but you also really know what time it is not. It comes through you, it takes over you. All the greats just automatic right. Right.?? At least that's how this story keeps getting told.
I came all the way out this way to bee with you, only because I knew I would bee without you. I mean; I knew that I would find you in the wind. I knew that I would find you in the camps smoke whipping about mine dayglow eye. I know that I would find you in the sounds, all the notions of the night. All creeping about me; and you make me smile. Mine eye smiles from east rise to west you set together a place for us, just shelter away from the annoyances, just a place for us to lie to one another for just awhile, to lay there awhile- just with you. Just with you we would lie; here under this universal sky. And we would begin our dance listening to the external sounds, dancing to this nights call.
These kids round here totally fucking kool. There are all these kids up here while I am peacefully tripping along. This ruckus bunch of kids came round and they began their dance too, and the skies opened up, the walls all came down on to this. Where it is hard to blur the lines between the here and the now is also where the worst interpretations just splatter all of the over the place. But these are the muddlings of the moment; here you are and you are not- you have become the meta experience. Within these meta experiential fractalizations, even the most random of wanderings can become art. Eventually you just look like you are some really weird dude typing away every experience as it is. Every experience as it is will undo any recognizable narration.
Letters to the Muse - Episode #1
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| BLaCK MiRRoR |
Muse-
So this is the first time I have written to you in this way. It has been awhile since you boiled my blood to write. Then was a different time. We were connected in the old ways, flesh and bone. Now only the passing dream catches young men's eye. Some of us are past the wisdom of the young; only our heart remembers the song...but we still continue the march towards this empty. Sometimes there is nothing else two do. Maybee that is why eye heard your name whispered on the tongues of the in know. Whilst beers and shots cross o=ver the bound swirling into the dance of collective numbing rituals... your tale was spoken. Eye didn't hear much mind you; but always remember eye have scouts strategic about. Inn this dream you are still right here betwixt us all.
Apparently you are all still in flame. Fiery Goddess writhing and sharp. When do you think all this might settle and kool towards more chance encounter. It was you that visited me in my waking thoughts. Eye so believed the curse was benign; that eye had thwarted the serpent's kiss, but still soon your poison engulfs my vision...and eye sea your face and hair tossed unto the wind. The dark scrawl was still upon your brow, but at the time I thought it an invitation. For luck and maybee a bit of foresight, eye did not act upon my first inclination. Deep inside eye still seek your connection, whether it be false or filled with the precision of a moments truth...eye still listen for your whisper. Your chants reached mine ears this morn, but your trap was eye NOT snared. Within the reflection of this mirror becomes the grove of thorn. Eye shall walk around it and converse with you on the other side; if you wish.
Often all eye seek is the simple discourse. To share and understand through common fluidity can surely build ones strength. To sit and reflect in purity might stop my hearts beat. It only makes sense this foreign war we wage. Across land and air we traject our worst cause. Surely our game is understood by only the most depraved aspects of our reflection. Our darkness must be met by uncomfortable invitations to parties where we are the entertainment...and later after we leave; we become their joke. They gawk and lurch amongst the most ungrateful crimes, but we also have our punch. Such noble birth and tax bracket hordes often shit out diamonds and nuggets of gold. Of course they try to conceal their excrement, but we were taught to dance the Gypsies clever hand and to distract, deflect, and then pocket the change. Hold in all the gold pieces till out the door and down the way we count up our spoils. Those nights are how eye chose to embrace your silhouette; amongst the cold night we swept away with the kings crowned jewel.
Stay on fire if you like. Eye will go back in time and recall past symmetries; while waiting for you to kool. I will hear of the stories and piece them together into thread barren blankets. Eye shall travel this week. Away eye am stalking a time to disperse and inebriate into invisible colors. There are large parties happening down south, and eye wish to find a golden experience. Eye wish eye could find you there but eye know you are not even real. You are the elusive siren's song. One day eye wish to crash amongst thine shores and claw out mine eyes to the pitch of your call.
Until Then-
BLaCK MiRRoR
Two Eye Map
This particular mapping diagrams a reoccurring day/night dream. It also acts as a visual reference setting intentions towards curse reverse. Our thoughts emulate the scratched record. A reality delay overtakes ones perceptions and blinds the seer. Such dreamlike mantras are embedded within the psychic structure of the seer through the works of a dream walker. The seer must acknowledge, accept, and reflect back these embedded intentions in order to free themselves from the imposed psychic drain.
The WHyTe WiNDoW Manifesto (the short version)
The WHyTe WiNDoW Manifesto:
Rules of Engagement:
- WHyTe WiNDoW is an army.
- WHyTe WiNDoW does not promote, provoke, or take part in actual violence.
- WHyTe WiNDoW only reflects the violence of personal ego and cultural demise.
- WHyTe WiNDoW does not proliferate or endorse text/media/rhetoric that promotes hate speech or physical/mental/sexual abuse of any kind.
- WHyTe WiNDoW is art.
Soldier Guidelines:
- All WHyTe WiNDoW Soldiers must adhere to the five rules of engagement.
- All WHyTe WiNDoW Soldiers must conform to a top down control structure. BLaCK BuRKa is at the top of this control structure. If any WHyTe WiNDoW Soldier changes access codes to any account registered for the use of the WHyTe WiNDoW Army, Then those new access codes MUST be immediately forwarded/submitted to BLaCK BuRKa.
"Self Reverence Never Works Without Leaving Scars"
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| image by: Robert David Reedy 2011 |
This is my self portrait entitled “Self Reverence Never Works Without Leaving Scars”. I decided to create a collage from various images that I have collected. Typically this is the manner in which I prefer to work, for my aesthetics are firmly rooted in the ideals of remix culture. Giving some insight into the individual images that I have chosen to remix for this collage is difficult, though describing the entire image as a whole offers me greater availability with words. The experience of life is about discovery and deterioration. My body is actively moving towards it’s demise, whilst my spirit is constantly grasping for elevated reason toward mystical understanding. This is all opposed by my selfish ego as it attempts to elicit sympathy both internally and externally. Many mystical practices speak of a union of three – mind/ego, body, and spirit. Here I have visually remixed similar philosophic tendencies.
Defining New Media Art
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| +this is/not art+ |
Mark Tribe's "Defining New Media Art" is a compelling read. Of course many might argue that statement, but I am continually being pulled towards the New Media Arts aesthetic. I personally feel that the old models of art making and propagation have become passé and redundant. The art world as we know it is collapsing under it's own self imposed importance. From my naive perspective, it is the New Media artists that have pulled out the foundations of the stagnant and stale art world- paving inlets to new possibilities of human expression.
Artists have always led the vanguard of change. This current digital upheaval is no different than the cultural revolutions of the past. Of course the elements of change have evolved, but it is still the wide eyed artists at play that spur the tide forward. Tribe's introduction to New Media Arts gives historical reference to this current movement and offers a "Who's Who" list of the dominant players.
Check out the videos and links below to further your understanding of this current cultural movement.
This Started It All...
This STARTED it all. Eye randomly bumped into this media genius by way of a blog entitled all we ever wanted (was everything). The star of this vid goes by x0verb0rgx- on his YouTube profile page he lists himself as Nathaniel. Whatever or whoever this fallen star is-BLaCK MiRRoR LOVES him. We here at the BLaCK MiRRoR studios have become obsessed with this artist's video content. His YouTube channel is blown up with 19,284 channel views and 220,418 total uploaded views. This kid is on it...LITERALLY; and we can't get enough.
subscribe to x0verb0rgx's channel
+more of x0verb0rgx's videos below+
Brainstorming Infestructure, Navagation, and Content Direction;
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| image by: RDR 2010 |
THiS iS HoW We Do iT...working the base elements.
BLaCK MiRRoR is attempting to demonstrate experimentally on the material plane the validity of a philosophical view of the Cosmos.
BLaCK MiRRoR Nuerons
BLaCK MiRRoR nuerons in your skull.
Soft wired to belong. (FIND YOUR REFLECTION)
Soft wired to belong. (FIND YOUR REFLECTION)
via Wikipedia: A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primate and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.
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