Intermedia, New Media, Poetry, Poetics, Literature, Language, Technology, Art, Architecture

Over the last 4 years, I have done more research toward, ultimately, my dissertation than is reasonable for someone who needs to get on with producing a final “book.” As a result, I have produced hundreds of pages of notes, abandoned paragraphs, arguments, histories and so on.This may be par for the course for research addicts. I know I’m not alone in being distracted and fascinated by my research!

I don’t know what others do with all their scraps. Some may keep them around to provide sustenance for future imagination droughts (not a bad idea). I’ve decided to gradually start putting them up here. Arcane research on primarily art, literature, and technology in the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties to come! In particular, research on Fluxus, Arakawa, Madeline Gins, Arakawa & Gins, collage & assemblage, intelligent environments, ubiquitous computing, Yoko Ono, William Gibson, and virtual reality… some “locative media”…

Now, will writing this preclude me from getting around to putting these scraps up? Possibly. To neglect all this work would be a shame though.

This video is a parody of political speech in the United States and the binary modes of thinking that shape and are shaped by this political speech. I made the short by subtitling a fight scene from the film Matrix II between Neo and Agent Smith with selected quotes from a debate between John Kerry and George W. Bush. Speech from a particular candidate did not correspond to a particular character in the film. The film was inspired in large part by Craig Baldwin’s talk at the Collage as Cultural Practice Conference at The University of Iowa in 2005.

At the (probably automated) request of the MPAA, Google (probably also through an automated response system) took this video down several years ago. There are no fair or reasonable ways of appealing a take down on YouTube. You can appeal, but Google makes it clear that there are repercussions should your appeal fail. As a parody of both sources, this clip should be considered fair use. Yet because of the dominion of large corporations over politicians, lawmakers, judges, etc., fair use is no longer a defense. No use if fair, these corporations have decided, unless it’s paid for.

Long story short: I found a great deal on webhosting ($10 for a year + domain + tons of disk space), thus jikkenkobo was born.

Jikkenkobo (koubou) was a multidisciplinary group of artists founded by Toru Takemitsu and Joji Yuasa. From what I’ve discovered about them (they are seldom mentioned in any art history written in English, probably because they don’t fit the mold of ‘imitate and refine’ Japanese) they were a fairly domesticated lot, very unlike their cousins several years later in fluxus. That shouldn’t be discouraging though!

The name as I use it stems from about 2002. When I attempted to bring together a disparate group of artists in Tokyo, a very close friend suggested naming the group jikkenkobo as homage to the original group and its spirit. The name stuck even though the group fizzled after 2 or 3 meetings.