INT. ALBINA PRESS CAFE — DAY

An assemblage of GLITCH VIDEO ARTISTS, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETERS, TRANSMEDIA PRODUCERS, MFA CREATIVE WRITING STUDENTS, and ABD DIGITAL HUMANITIES SCHOLARS are powwowing as the barista on-duty is throwing down some serious COLUMBIA FIGUEROA espresso beans roasted by the pros over at COAVA while engaging in at least four simultaneous conversations with whoever happens to be standing around him as he extracts the subtlest flavors from the brand new LA MARZOCCO LINEA PB 3 AUTO-VOLUMETRIC ESPRESSO MACHINE that he has now become one with.

What’s this new trip he’s been on lately?

It’s all about branding.

Yeah, he’s pretty sinister about it.

But is he? I wonder if maybe his riffs on building brand name identity in the reputation economy are not a none-too-subtle reference to his own career, especially those early and heady days back in the mid-90s.

You mean his success as a net artist and new media theorist?

Exactly. I mean, at what point did he just wake up one day and think, you know, my real art form, the thing that drove my creativity when I first got started, was the way I used the Internet as my primary artistic medium to brand myself before anyone really knew what the World Wide Web was.

Or before there was a Google let alone a Facebook.

If you look at his early work, though, the stuff that got all the attention, it was really about the way he mocked what he imagined would become the networked condition.

Yeah, he was anticipating the present. I thought it was interesting the way he used his own web presence, what he was then calling his “digital flux persona,” as a model of self-satirical branding.

That’s what all of the net artists did in those days, though some are less inclined to admit it now that they have achieved success as artists and professors.

That whole approach to digital art is what got me into the digital humanities.

I could go on (I can’t go on) (I go on).

Really? How so?

I just saw an opening there, the way the digitally inclined scholar could market themselves in a networked environment and use their social media acumen to position themselves as a new kind of humanities scholar, someone who gets it.

Yeah, but that’s the point I was just trying to make about Walt. He was mocking the whole thing. The problem with the digital humanists is that they take themselves too seriously.

Like they’re going to save the profession from oblivion.

I think what made his own version of becoming a net artist so unique was the way he wrapped it into his ongoing investigations into narrative and how he remixed his persona into — what did he call it?

Narrative mythology.

Something about The Novel as Performance and the architectonic dimensions of a practice-based research methodology modeled after hypermediated forms of fiction writing would be worth revisiting here – but why not let the rhetorical repartee do the work for me?

Exactly. Turning his brand into mythopoeic fiction. You know he started out as a postmodern novelist before getting heavy into the whole net art thing.

Oh yeah, and he still writes novels, though they read more like a cross between long narrative poems and new media theory slash performance. I think he’s now calling them theoretical fictions.

But that historical moment, the 90s, has totally passed him by. I mean who wants to read novel works of hypertext fiction, even with enticing animated GIFS and streaming soundtracks, on the Web?

It’s really asking too much of the viewer.

Yeah, really. Fuck the reader. Long live, the viewer!

But in the early days, back when text was the predominant element being transmitted over the Net, the cultural sophisticates who were making their way online were totally open to the idea of at least trying to navigate through a multilinear storyspace. Nowadays, you’re lucky to get someone to just look at your animated GIF, period.

Unless you live in Bushwick, in which case you can get a gallery show featuring nothing but your animated GIFS.

I’m writing a paper about that.

A paper? How very 20th century of you. About what?

The Return of the GIF. It’s the web art version of vinyl. It’s experiencing its trendy hipster comeback in the retro-futurist Post-Internet scene.

Not that any of this will stop Walt from trying to drag more complex narrative on to the Web, kicking and screaming...

Well, have you heard the latest?

What?

He’s creating a MOOC.

Get out.

The idea of a MOOC that doubles as a work of performance video art, something that would never sell in an official university capacity, but could certainly exist both online and in the contemporary art market is not necessarily out of the question. This is not-fiction.

Seriously, he’s been scripting it as part of a series of courses being taught in a new degree program, something called the Professional Masters degree in Creative Entrepreneurialism.

No way.

Way. And get this: it’s being taught in Arts and Sciences, as part of a new track in the Digital Humanities.

Whoa! Did you really just say a “Professional Masters degree in Creative Entrepreneurialism in the Humanities”?

Yep.

That’s some seriously fucked up shit.

Not really, at least not if you talk to him about how he’s going to do it.

What’s he doing?

He sees it as a performance art project.

Now that doesn’t surprise me.

He’s working in the motion capture lab.

That’s cool.

Yeah, I know, he said he wants this new artwork to embody theory as performance capture, something about the “unquantifiable self,” and that he’ll use the technology, the motion capture sensor suit and HD helmet, to record his every move, his every facial gesture, as an attempt to create what he calls a new body language.

Well, he’s been talking about a new body language for decades now.

I know. He used to hang out with Kathy Acker who wrote about that.

What would an art historical language look like if it came from the body, if it read like a body coming?

Acker lived it. Same with him too, I suppose.

Have you read her piece on ordinary language versus the language of the body?

Sure, he assigned that last year, don’t you remember?

Oh, right. Sorry. But that’s something he’s still into apparently, except now he wants to take her whole idea of inventing a new body language, the kind where meaning only occurs at the edge of its becoming lost, and remix it into a form of video performance art that literally interfaces with the whole MOOC phenomenon.

I love Acker’s idea of locating meaning at the edge of language becoming lost. Once you let the language speak itself and it starts losing track of where it would otherwise be expected to go, that’s when the story can start tapping into its mythopoeic potential.

Totally. I know exactly what she means too. It happens to me all of the time when I’m fully lost in the writing process. It’s that moment when whatever we call the “ordinary” escapes from us while we’re writing, and we’re left with nothing but this adjacent possibility of being becoming something else, that space of mind where language itself becomes something else, something strange, and instead of self-correcting, we run with it, operate on auto-compose, and see where it takes us next.

One can also auto-compose a digital flux persona this way. What better way to ME-morialize identity?

Yeah, I really think this is another way of building a personal narrative trajectory and that this is exactly the process Walt talks about every time he tries to subtly critique what he perceives as stilted academic writing, the kind that depends on scholarly reportage and that suppresses the more spontaneous acts of creativity that inform whatever emergent poetics your imagination may want access to.

He quotes that mainstream writer, Doctorow, who once said -

I think it was on the Charlie Rose show, “you write to see what you’re writing about.” How else to compose a new body language that captures your stylistic tendencies?

Well, that’s something that Walt is really good at and he attributes a lot of his own formation as an artist to Acker who, by the way, has her archives at Duke now. He just went there.

If I remember correctly, in that essay about “ordinary” versus “body” language, she was basically talking about bodybuilding, about breaking things down, like bodybuilders break down muscle, to build new muscle, and she thought it was similar to the kinds of things she was doing with her own body language. She thought that she too was always breaking language down to see if she could make it stronger, build it up into something much more powerful, even hallucinatory in a sexual and politically potent way, but in order to get there, she had to take it, take language, to the edge, constantly take it to the edge where it eventually fractures and disperses.

Yeah, the edge of forever, where some new form of meaning might be found, if at all.

She used to masturbate while writing. One hand on the computer keyboard while the other was fingering her clit.

The coming of writing.

She was like that. Very devoted to her practice in an almost religious way.

Yes, I am a fan-boy of Cixous.

It’s what she lived for.

I read where she said that writing is like meditation and that the best way to operate, as a writer, as a novelist, was to get into the same kind of zone that you achieved through meditation, something she thought that weightlifters got into, and from there you would see what your body language wanted to say. But first you would really have to get into that headspace.

So why not push that as far it will go and literally try to bring herself to orgasm while writing? That was a brilliant parameter she set up for herself, a very Kathy Acker thing to try and pull off, a physiological form of rhetoric, very sculptural, you might even say isometric yet very open to revealing a new form of measure, one that would depend on the unconscious readiness potential of the writer to shape it all into an architectonic performance, where the novel becomes a kind of stimulation object.

Walt says that he imagines this MOOC performance he’s developing as a cross between electronic literature, movement art, and video performance. He’s, like, scripting his words, honing in on the gestural articulations, and planning out the different video effects he plans on using in postproduction. He’s even going to design a unique avatar that looks like a future version of himself, an animated 3-D puppet, so that after he dies the avatar will take on all of his idiosyncratic twitches and facial glitches.

He’s just fucking with you. What’s the MOOC about?

It’s called Introduction to Digital Art but it’s not really about that at all, or at least the way he describes it it’s not going to be what it appears to be.

OK, but then what will it be?

Ask her.

Hey.

How’s it going?

Good. Are you talking about Walt?

Yeah, I guess we are. What are you having?

I’ll have an iced soy chai with a shot of iced coffee.

We call that a dirty chai.

OK, then I’ll have a dirty chai.

So what’s Walt’s new MOOC about?

Well, it’s definitely a performance art piece. In fact, he was saying in class yesterday that the performance capture aspect of the work is just the first layer, a way of outlining what a body does when it wants to spontaneously trigger new source material.

So it’s not scripted.

The movement is not scripted but he has a teleprompter with scrolling text he can read whenever he wants to. I think he’ll just let the text flow on the teleprompter and riff off of it.

And, knowing his theories on remixology, on inhabiting the source material as a stylistic gesture compounded by the postproduction of presence, I could see him riffing on his usual subjects.

Such as?

I’m thinking, given the motion capture environment, he’ll start riffing on muscle memory and writing as a gesture toward the Other.

Oh yeah, he already went there yesterday, saying to the class that whatever source material he happens to be embodying into his muscle memory while performing the piece will be captured in the motion capture lab as pure data that he can then remix into — what does he call it?

His theoretically charged language art.

No, not that, or at least that’s not how he put it in class.

His cut-and-paste “on the go” digital flow in auto-affect mode?

Maybe, but I think he put it differently. I don’t think it has anything to do with that whole “mobile” thing he was on to a few years ago.

He thinks it’s like the most natural thing in the world.

What?

His whole spiel about mashing up narrative and rhetoric, practice and theory —

Art and life.

The Total Work of Art.

The language of the body.

Operating in asynchronous real-time.

Now you sound like a fan boy.

Let’s not forget us fan girls too.

Boy, girl, indifferent — does it matter? I say, “break the binary”...

I’m not a biological essentialist.

Never said you were.

They did and they had every right to do so. They are the new it. They’re the ones oscillating transitional forms of presence all along the gender spectrum and I’m jealous.

So say we all.

But I’m still not sure what the MOOC is about. You said something about an intro course focused on digital art and research but also something about branding?

Right, so it’s for this new Masters, you know these Professional Masters programs that they railroad students through so the institution can scoop up a lot of cash while getting them out the door in record time?

Out the door and into the job market.

Degree mills, they’re a dime a dozen, except now they’re all the top research universities talk about.

Mooches.

A way to pay for everything else since the state governments have reneged on that responsibility.

It’s wicked sick shit.

Yeah, so his MOOC will play off all of that.

Heavily.

Yeah, and he’s going to pitch it as an extension course focused on what a critical making practice in the digital humanities ought to be. He wants to hack into what’s fast becoming a canned pedagogical practice that basically translates into another brand of creative conformity, something he thinks the digital humanities are inclined to embrace.

He always was a reality hacker, you know.

The motion capture lab sounds perfect for him.

Yeah, so he figures he’ll don the motion tracking suits as well as the new HD Headcam they just got in the lab especially for facial expressions.

Sounds cool.

Living in the Post like it’s a preexisting condition.

Yeah, this way he can sample both his body movement — his body language — and his facial gestures at thousands of times per second as a way to investigate how the performance itself, as source material, can be remixed into what he calls performance art pedagogy.

But his rap will be more poetic and political in nature.

As always, and philosophical too. I’m sure he’ll bring in Bergson and the relationship between matter and memory. I mean, if you think about it, how does one capture muscle memory as a form of material speculation? Impossible, right? But he sees this new work as continuous with his other projects that sync his serrated satirical edges with whatever his subject happens to be, in this case what’s happening with higher education.

And I imagine not just higher ed, but really all aspects of social media culture, especially the so-called attention economy that’s become so indebted to the — what do they call it, the wealth of networks?

Yeah, well, he calls it the wealth of rigged networks.

That’s very Bernie Sanders of him.

Ha! Well, that’s just it, his 3-D avatar looks just like Sanders.

You’re kidding me.

No, and his persona, the vocal intonations, everything, is modeled after a standard Sanders stump speech but the content is all biting satire about what’s happening to art, education, the economy, interpersonal relationships, social media culture, and whatever else comes into view.

Remix or postproduction art is about so much more than taking two existing works and mashing them up. We can remix whatever we want: forms, syntax, imaginary muscle memory, you name it.

Such as?

Branding.

So what is his angle on branding and how it relates to art, or education?

He’s been really digressing into this a lot lately in class.

For instance?

He says the goal of the emerging digital artist or humanist should be to develop a new form of rhetoric that’s really an ongoing net art project, one that gets distributed to ones cleverly curated networked milieu and that whatever mythopoeic reality you distribute has to keep your audience of followers totally psyched about your particular brand of innovation.

That’s what he did, albeit in a primitive html form.

“We are to the Internet what Plato and Aristotle were to the Academy and the Lyceum.”

Right, so now he’s coming out, so to say, he’s fessing up to his having made a concerted attempt to develop a fictitious mythology around his artist-self by having cranked out new works of digital or net art as well as his fictional versions of new media theory on a regular basis and doing it with whatever technological genres were hot at the time of release.

It sounds like he’s trying to the turn the MOOC into a playful take on his life story and then turn that performance art capture, so to say, into a model of creative entrepreneurialism for others to sample from and remix into their own campaigns for intellectual and creative relevance.

Yes, it’s probably something like that, but you know Walt, he never reveals his true motivations.

The unquantifiable self.

Can’t say that I blame him. My whole life is TMI and there’s no way out.

He says that revealing too much about himself, or at least his supposed self but that he still views as a digital flux persona, would feel like he’s chipping away at some of the mythical aspects of his practice, and wants others to discover their own path, whatever path it is, for themselves...

He’s a wannabe guru, that’s for sure.

The Aesthetic Fit-Bit in Auto-Compose Mode.

Absolutely. But then out of nowhere he’ll surprise you and ask everyone to look under the hood, the hood of his psychic mechanism, and see what you can find there — take what you need. He reveals too much as if succumbing to a spasm of self-demystification.

Yesterday he said something like, wait — here it is: “If you can sustain this always-online auto-generative positive feedback loop with your followers, this will keep your growing Networked Milieu forever tuned in to you, and it will also give you every opportunity to aggregate them into your own cleverly cultivated community of shared interest. This is crucial because these peeps are your optimally positioned brand advocates, and every neo-aesthetic avant-garde entrepreneurial artist needs brand advocates.”

He said that?

Well, it was in the video.

The video? Wait, I guess I missed something here. You mean he’s already in production on the MOOC thing? You’ve seen it?

Totally. He played an excerpt.

Wait a second! You never said this was in production.

No, I said I saw the 3-D Bernie Sanders version of his avatar puppet. Maybe you need a dirty chai.

Funny. Is any of it online?

Not yet, but I secretly recorded the sound on my Voice Memo app. How do you think I was able to transcribe it all verbatim?

Oh. That makes sense. Can I hear it?

Well...

What?

I’d feel like I’m leaking it without his permission.

He’ll just end up giving it away for free on the Internet like he always does.

That’s true. But actually, he’s serious about it being a MOOC, so he wants to wait until he releases it as a DIY exhibition, on YouTube.

Ah, that’s perfect. He wants it to be a MOOC, or to play with the form of a MOOC, but doesn’t want to locate it in any preformatted institutional context because that would kill it, or kill its potential as art, or at least as part his own trajectory as an artist inventing his own body language as a kind of field composition or performance capture.

Exactly.

Do you remember anything else he said, in the video?

Oh, I have been transcribing it. Here, I’ll read you some, but it may not be 100% accurate. The recording is for shit.

That’s OK.

It’s kind of funny, he’ll say things like, “Now, let me be clear,” that’s the Bernie Sanders impersonation, “we talk a lot, I talk a lot, about how as an artist,” — he pronounces it “ought-ist” — “your greatest challenge is to figure out how to build a brand-name identity in the reputation economy which, by the way, is intimately linked to the attention economy. Because if your brand-name identity is taking the reputation economy by storm, then believe-you-me, you'll have a lock on the attention economy and you'll be well positioned to monetize all of those sticky eyeballs that watch everything you do into some Serious Bit Coin.”

Money in the bank.

He then asks, “And what 21st century artist doesn’t want to cash in on some Serious Bit Coin?”

Seriously.

“Because let’s face it, if you want to conform to the contemporary art scene and roll the dice with the blue chip hedge fund environment, then you have to figure out ways to blockchain your canonized provenance all the way to the bank.”

One in a million, and even if you’re the one, you’re still stuck in that upmarket paradigm that determines your value for you.

“So you're probably asking, how do I build this so-called brand name identity so that I can then create a serious value proposition in the art world’s very quirky reputation economy?”

That’s exactly what I was about to ask.

“The first thing you have to do is strategize a series of unpredictable information behaviors that will attract attention to your mischievous nature, to your willingness to disrupt the institutional context your work will end up circulating in.”

OK.

“This playful antagonism to the institutions that drive the contemporary art world economy will create what we call brand awareness because people will see you for being the clever little manipulator that you are and besides, this is a very good way to measure how well people in your target audience are aware of your brand and what it’s all about. But there's more to this than making a ruckus in your particular art world milieu and consequently building brand name awareness.”

Such as?

“You also need what I call BRAND ESSENCE.” And this is when the words BRAND ESSENCE, in all caps, come on the screen.

I thought you were going to say this is when the words BERNIE SANDERS came on the screen. What’s brand essence again?

Sounds like you need to take the course.

Maybe I do.

“It’s as though a coup had been staged in the heart of art school culture by an insurgent troupe of management theorists.”

“Brand essence is the fundamental nature or character of a brand and reflects the very unique footprint your artistic style brings to the contemporary market and, not only that, it also reflects the way you brand your art work in relation to the culture you find yourself doing business in. Now, let me be

clear — ”

He’s really pushing this Bernie Sanders thing.

Yes, but only as a voice. The whole thing is mock revolutionary in that it folds back in on itself so that it can come out even darker on the other end, a counterrevolutionary counterrevolution.

Like two negatives making a positive?

Something like that, I guess. I was never good at math or political science.

But I think I see what he’s getting at, though not so sure about the “fuck it, I’m going down with neoliberal capitalism aesthetic,” but I get it, it’s an act. Go on —

“This is not something that you can accomplish in your sleep.”

What?

Building brand essence.

Oh, right, I forgot.

“This is going to require all of your time and energy, in fact, so much time and energy you may have to start paying other people to make your artwork for you.”

As well as pay them to help articulate your brand essence for whatever audience you happen to be speaking to.

“Believe me, it’s worth it, every penny, because, if you haven’t figured this out already, who has time to make art anyway and, besides, why make art when you can focus on making money?”

You can say that again. What am I doing in Grad school working part time as a barista when I could be out there making the big bucks as a contemporary digital artist building brand essence?

Well, he goes out of his way to make a difference between a contemporary artist and a digital artist ands what he calls a temporary artist.

Really? But we’re all working with digital processes these days.

Right, as are so-called humanities professors, who are really digital humanities professors, they just don’t know it.

Or media studies professors.

Same thing, different source material.

At least it should be that way.

I guess it all depends on how you brand yourself.

How you build brand essence.

The Reconfigured Artist: Media Landscape with Brand-Name Identity (Ongoing, dimensions vary)

Exactly! So he says, “In essence, brand essence is about the experiential encounter you know your artwork will present when it gets exposed to the right audience, something that will make them all feel like they can get something from you that they can't get from anyone else.”

That’s digital humanities in nutshell.

Hush.

Sorry.

But as he goes on to suggest, how you go about doing this depends on your BRAND STRATEGY — and when he says the words BRAND STRATEGY they also appear on the screen for a few seconds as his wild avatar head suddenly disappears.

Oh right, we’re not even seeing him really, or not what we imagine him to be, but some performance captured 3-D version of himself, a designer avatar who’s, what, uploaded his consciousness?

No. It’s still him. He’s still alive for now. But once he’s gone I guess the avatar will live on.

As will the MOOC.

Yeah, whatever institution contracts the work from him is going to make shitloads of money in the future.

They can collect him.

Yeah, his later video works, so to say.

Wild.

Embodying theory as a kind of “performance making” without having to paper over the difference.

Of course, the popularity of the course as artwork depends on how viral the videos become and he talks about that too, about becoming an avatar-meme.

Weird.

Yeah, right? “Everything,” he says, “everything should flow from the brand strategy and this will require you to focus on what some of us like to refer to as differentiation.”

The differentiation engine.

Something like that. He says, “differentiation is an important part of branding, and the differentiation strategy should consider how the brand is positioned compared to its competitors.”

Now this totally sounds like the academic job market to me.

“What we're really talking about here,” he goes on, “is your VALUE PROPOSITION” and then the words VALUE PROPOSITION appear on the screen for like five seconds.

I’ve heard the phrase before.

What does it mean for a digital flux persona to circulate in a contagious media environment?

“A value proposition,” he tells the viewer, the student, the collector, whatever, “is what someone is going to get for their investment.”

I’ve got your value proposition right here.

Hush. “The term is used to describe some unique value that a brand, a product, or even an artist or scholar brings to the table. One of the things I want to be very clear about here is that once you continuously generate brand name identity in the high-brow culture’s reputation economy while simultaneously maintaining brand awareness over the course of a career, then everything you touch has the potential to turn into gold and your value proposition, or differentiation value, will be automatically generated just by the art historical circumstance you have created for yourself — and by this time you will also be taught in universities all around the world which will then enable the canonization and historicization process to feed on itself indefinitely.”

Sounds about right to me.

“Essentially, your brand essence will transform into one helluva marketing tool and, in so doing, you'll eventually find yourself populating both the art world and the academic markets with a network of influential brand advocates who will be so invested in you, so satisfied with your ongoing product line, that they will literally go out of their way to help you market it and, if you're really clever, this networked branding and marketing will never come to end and, instead, your long trajectory of creative outputs will simply be automatically fed into the engine of canonization that converts your value proposition as an art historical figure into some Serious Bit Coin.” And then the words SERIOUS BIT COIN, all caps, come on to the screen for like five seconds.

This is what he’s teaching now?

Kind of. It’s like performance art so it becomes something a bit different than teaching per se. I think of it as modeling. It’s like when you read a novel or see a foreign film or immerse yourself in an interactive installation and you actually learn something about yourself after having experienced the work as a model of artistic composition, right? I guess you could say it’s all about transmitting affective agency as a semblance of learning. It’s like that, but a seminar. It gets transmitted to you as a kind of experientially enriched event. I think he sees it like that.

I can totally see how it relates to all of his other work.

Me too. It’s like, how can you can transfigure thought processes, which are not academic in nature, into emergent forms of digital rhetoric that appear more fractured, digressive, fractal, discontinuous, interactive and most especially improvisational — and do it in a way that reveals a unique body language?

And that conveys information on a subatomic or neural level.

It’s like when you engage in a dialogue with someone who you can totally relate to, the neurons are clicking, it’s a collaborative process generating this other thing, this third thing, this third mind or externalized yet shared flow-object, as if drifting through a hastily composed environment of auto-affective gestures you didn’t know were possible but now all of a sudden you’re responsible for having co-created.

Exactly, and how do you bring that into a work of art that just reeks of networked forms of social interrelatedness?

Yeah, I want to mirror neurons virtually too, with a like-minded flow-object on the other side of oblivion.

And how can you even teach someone how to develop something like that?

Impossible. I don’t think you can teach someone how to compose in auto-affect mode. The best you can hope for is to model an embodied praxis, but even then who knows what’s being transmitted? The signals can easily be misread.

So why take the chance? Which ends up leading to a more conservative professoriate, one that’s always leaning toward the safe learning environment, something that can have negative effects down the line for the student whose world view is never contested and who wants to live in a bubble of entitlement and emotionally driven self-esteem.

You should have given me a trigger warning before you even thought that thought.

My bad. The problem is that I just can’t teach in that kind of an environment. It feels like I’m being censored and, besides, we live in America, the land of the first amendment and so-called academic freedom, right?

Absolutely. I have this conversation almost every day. You would think the best environment to exhibit ones freedom of speech in would be in the academic classroom and that you could really push thinking into the untapped outer boundaries of the unimaginable even at the risk of making people feel uncomfortable. I mean do you want to sound like you’re just running a simple routine, fitting the mold of an old school lecturer who wants the student to take notes and reproduce safe and censored knowledge so they can indicate their ability, their willingness, to memorize facts and/or role-play sanctimonious social justice warriors however important and useful that may truly be, or would you rather align yourself with the artistic pursuit of freedom and pleasure and do this by openly exhibiting the way you tap into your own experiential momentum as a pedagogical performance artist discovering their on-the-fly praxis-in-the-making?

Exactly, and that’s what you mean by modeling.

What does it mean to be a First Amendment Patriot?

So how am I supposed to do this? I don’t want to be this split personality who on the one hand is a totally unencumbered artist and writer letting the language speak itself and, on the other hand, a guarded academic drone who has to watch what she says.

I think you should bring this up in class. I’m sure he’ll want to talk about it too. It seems to be on his mind.

A long silence, final gulps of coffee, and a quick check of iPhones before the party splits the scene.

Maybe being a digital artist is more about cross-fertilizing avant-garde research methodologies with an expanded concept of the digital humanities, one that comes across as a kind of R&D arm of the culture industry, especially academia itself.

Wait. Is that you or him talking there?

Isn’t it all of us?

I wonder when the online MOOC exhibition opens.

I’m sure he’ll tweet about it.

All photographs and artwork in “remixthebrand” are the author’s own, bar the GIF from Captain America: Civil War (dir. Joe and Anthony Russo, 2016), which was sourced from GIPHY.

More information about Mark Amerika’s artwork can be found at his website.

prelude

Undoing TimeSharon Daniel

Kingdom in the CorneaHeidi Rhodes (poem) | (art) Kenji Liu

The Gesture of PhotographingCarla Nappi | Dominic Pettman

interlude

ResonancesBetsy Wing

In the DetailWilliam N. West

Poetical FugitivesMargaret Simon

interlude

remixthebrand (a theoretical fiction)Mark Amerika

Notes Towards a Glitch PoeticsNathan Jones

ExtraneousCharles Bernstein | Ted Greenwald

Autobiography of a PracticeRachel Blau Duplessis

coda

Poem | FaultLauren Berlant (poem) | (art) Pinar Yoldas