remixthemind

...an assemblage of Neo-Conceptual troubadours, opportunistic critifictionists, transgender digital curators, print-only Internet artists, micro-aggressive feminist realists and trendy algorithmic poets are all congregating at the community table inside the Colorado Cannabis Cafe where the high-energy barista on duty whose night job is playing bass guitar for a hot new local band named Blue Movie keeps expertly tamping down seven grams of freshly roasted and perfectly ground Conscious Coffee organic Tafari espresso applying just the right amount of pressure before pulling what everyone at the table considers to be the absolute best shot of liquid brain-o to be found in the entire Rocky Mountain West—

What are you working on?

It’s part narralogue, part conceptual art conversation piece, part electronic literature, part augmented reality app, part artist book, part transmedia or multiplatform storytelling instrument for others to remix their own stories into so that the collaborative writing potlatch becomes exactly one text forever in-the-making.

Oh, you mean you’re still writing that novel?

Not really. I mean, it could be read as a novel, but then again, it could be seen as a feature-length film or what others might refer to as a work of time-based language art that’s really anything but a film and is more like a long-form work of video poetry composed by flash-editing a stream of fictional subtitles intercut with fuzzy mobile phone images that I captured using some innovative handheld techniques that I intentionally deployed to glitch my reality in hopes of reimagining what a contemporary novel could possibly be.

Are you still calling this long-form glitch, reality-cum-novel a foreign film?

Yes, my novel, if that’s what you want to call it, is really a kind of foreign film because, if you think about it, I was mashing up the aesthetic tendencies I associate with auteur-driven Euro art-house cinema with the loose video vernacular we have all come to expect from amateur-driven YouTube performance art and, as far as I’m concerned, every film is a foreign film.

For that matter, so are the best novels. But then again, last week you said that you were giving up on novels, that the writing of the future was really just going to be something you carried around in your head. That it wouldn’t even be writing anymore, it would be—

Presence. Literary presence.

So what does that really mean?

It means the future of writing is going to be more about meta-mediumystically embodying a form of literary presence that morphs into something like an auto-affective transmission of experiential data to whosoever can pick up the vibe.

It sounds like writing will become more like mirroring neurons.

Exactly. Although, so much will depend upon how you manipulate or filter the stylistic tendencies you port your auto-affective transmission through.

I’ll buy that. The real craft of whatever it is that comes after writing will be to psychically transmit your altered state of consciousness so that it triggers a kind of derangement of the senseless...

Experimental writing as auto-defamiliarization of literary presence…

Yeah, and it’s the auto part that most appeals to me, as in on-the-fly remix of whatever data I happen to be prehending at any given moment in time.

You always talk about works happening onthe fly, as if improvisation were the only way to creatively express oneself. Don’t you think that a bit more deliberation and reflection is in order?

Well, for me, improvising or spontaneously sketching language riffs into and out of the big data mix is part of a dialogical process that opens up writing’s creative potential. When you’re caught in an improvisational flow, you create your own order. Which isn’t to say there’s no structure. Choreographing literary presence is a structured improvisation. The idea is to free language from any preconceived sense of what needs to be ordered, thereby inhibiting some of the more rigid forms of methodical thought while turning toward more powerful techniques like intuition.

Another of your New Age lean-tos: intuition. But...