Beautiful Collider

It’s possible we’re Martians…possible that life arose first on Mars because its smaller size allowed it to cool faster and thus play host to early life forms while Earth broiled. Time (with a capital T) passed. The Red Planet chilled to ice. When comets and asteroids collided with it, debris scattered, eventually arriving on a now perfectly hospitable Earth, and ergo sum. I like this particular theory of exogenesis because it demonstrates the potential benefits of collisions. Mashups, after all, are aesthetic head-ons. The resultant “products” may bring new life to a dying world.

The contemporary concept of mashups can be traced to Musique Concrète and the mid-twentieth-century experiments of sound engineer Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer who juxtaposed various music and everyday “noise” in order to create new aural art forms. But that’s a shortsighted, academic history. Interesting yet superficial. Essentially, mashup-as-process lies at the heart of who we are as a species and why we’ve gotten ourselves into this simultaneously superlative and abysmal status among beasts. Enough of us are creatures of unfettered curiosity that we should be seen as born under the sign of the perpetually cocked head: I wonder what will happen if I put this with that? Stone to stick for fire. Stone to spit for paint. Stone to skull for murder. And on and on and on until we’re colliding particle with particle to create a black hole. Or colliding text with image, sound, and objects to create a literary Chimera.

Indeed, we’ve been living in this monstrous multimedia world for over two decades, increasingly influenced by the aesthetics of fast-evolving digital technologies: the badly lit, jerky videos of YouTube; the shallow-range music of iTunes; the brevity of tweets and Facebook status updates; and the increasing vapidity of headlines as the media tries (and fails) to compete with all of the aforementioned. Most of us no longer view narrative through a monocular. Nor should we: shifting technologies allow us to merge literature, visual art, music, and video into a whole that is so much greater than its parts, able to simultaneously comment from multiple perspectives on the way we live now. Multiplicity + diversity + intrepidity must become the modus operandi if we are ever to survive our own ingenuity and evolve literature out of the zombie field of nineteenth-century expectations. (I promised I would not get political, but I lied.)

The hidden agenda behind my founding the publishing mashup, Jaded Ibis Press, is socio-political as much as aesthetic. In other words, when the press collides literary text with visual art, music, and digital technologies, we want to see what shape the “book” takes as art object and as tool for cultural, social, and political change. Literature may have come into existence for a variety of divergent reasons, but I’ll talk about only three here, and how each relates to my concept of publishing mashups.

Mashup-as-process lies at the heart of who we are as a species.

First, literature exists because it must. Because language is who we are, and the manipulation of language—whether lyrical or rhetorical—is seduction. We’re always on the make, always attempting to seduce one person or group into our peculiar “camp” because the more bodies we have, the more power we wield. Wanting to be right all the time, a condition endemic to human nature, is merely a symptom of the will to power. Ultimately, the trajectory of every species, human or not, resides in its DNA. Without a drive toward higher status, which provides more and therefore “better” sexual choices, a species’ perpetuation ceases. (Defining “better” would take another essay, much longer than this one. Let’s agree for the sake of argument that, in this case, “better” directly relates to factors presumed beneficial for continuation and evolution of a species.)

By enlisting visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers in a book project, we grow readership by absorbing their camps into ours. Yet we respect their artistic DNA, never asking them to illustrate the book, but rather inviting them to respond using their own...