Better Worse, Fail better.
WSAmacd and WSAadm students remixing the 'official' poster of the WSAcgf event.
Yesterday we heard from the generous Mark Amerika; he gave an inspiring and fun session, particularly I think, for students who are worried about 'making it' in the great big world when they graduate. What are they going to do with their work? Worries about 'portfolios'. He opened his talk with the famous quote from Samuel Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Ever tried. Ever Failed. No Matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." -
The idea of failure or failed work or failing work is a kind of ethos that informs what Amerika calls "applied remixology". A body of work that borrows heavily from that of the Situationists, montage, Dada, with the added emphasis on experimenting with and manipulating work using the Internet. One example of this he showed us is Immobilite, a 'foreign film' he made in Cornwall with the folks at University College Falmouth. For the 5-7 weeks that he was there, he made a film shot entirely using a mobile phone, - specifically a Nokia N95 one of the earlier models with videoing capabilities. "A feature length foreign film", Amerika tells us, is a very loaded term. Immobilite references and remixes the European art house film aesthetic [think Antonioni, Goddard, Warhol, etc] and "tendencies" and the weirdly jarring landscape imagery in Immobilite is influenced by the painterly abstract art tradition. His remix plays, and does so not within the media, - it is different from the art tradition of collage in that sense - Amerika advocates a kind of "deep research" which allows for remix across genres, aesthetic, histories and visual modes, creating simultaneously divergent and convergent moments. In Immobilite, he asks: "what is the relationship between the moving image and the mobile image?" Deep remix is disruptive of the assumptions within aesthetic traditions or conventions and one way of posing questions about these assumptions or habits is to, trans-remediate them.
Another example of his applied remixology came from the Museum of Glitch Aesthetics in Preston and which runs until 2 Jan - a very good reason to visit Preston I think! Amerika plays with the idea of canonized art inviting artists to remix 25 works of art using the Internet and propagating via thisArtist 2.0,'glitches' or glitch aesthetics. You can download the whole MOGA catalog from the site and you can see them on the website without the need for a museum but Amerika also explores the tension between glitch and aesthetizing glitch - a contentious difference as Jussi Parikka points out - the glitch ethos seems to contradict entirely the idea of museum and discursive enshrinement in the physical exhibition and also the multiple "voices" in the MOGA catalog. Are we finding beauty in glitch or are we making - canonizing - glitch so that it becomes beautiful?
I think the only thing we - students, designers, creatives - can do is to play close to this tension if only in order to make innovative work that isn't simply a standalone pretty thing, but also work that re-generates and morphs and produces other work by other people. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it". And this is relevant to folks who do not consider themselves Internet artists, because remix is an ethos, not a fetishization of technology. Driven by theory. Not to say everyone should embrace 'failure' as a theme - because that would be fulfilling the the canonization of glitch - but to focus on the work and give some of it away, as gifts. As Amerika said to one of our students, "don't try to protect your work from its potentialities". Fail better.
