In this ongoing reflection on the infiltration of video phones into our increasingly futuristic lives, I’d like to note that just a few years after the Jetsons brought the technology to pop culture (1962), Stanley Kubrick, in 2001 Space Odyssey (1969), sent the video phone into space. And yet, despite the fact [...]]]>

In this ongoing reflection on the infiltration of video phones into our increasingly futuristic lives, I’d like to note that just a few years after the Jetsons brought the technology to pop culture (1962), Stanley Kubrick, in 2001 Space Odyssey (1969), sent the video phone into space. And yet, despite the fact that broadband is here, Skype is free, and the iPhone has Facetime, we’re still not typically inclined to make video calls. Perhaps it’s just too much privacy thrown out the window, or I suspect people just prefer to narrow the bandwidth of their electronic relations.

However, if there is any phenomenon that invokes post reality symptoms of blurred distance, it’s the video phone. Distance becomes irrelevant, you can be anywhere, but you’re essentially collapsed into an electronic space that proves nearly as intimate as the so-called, formerly known as, “in person” experience. I realize we’re missing a few of the senses, but there is no doubt that with the global extension of our reach, the video phone is an extraordinary mechanism for maintaining relationships that would otherwise be impossible. The difference between a phone call and a Skype call is profound. Situating the other person visually creates a powerful sense of shared space.

When we begin our celestial travel to distant planets, there no reason why we should ever be out of touch!

Lately I’ve been invoking the magic of Skype as I prep my guests for The Post Reality Show: Talk MEDIA!. Well, one of my guests, whose name I won’t mention, didn’t understand my amused comment that Skyping is “just like the Jetsons.” The Jetsons? [...]]]>

Lately I’ve been invoking the magic of Skype as I prep my guests for The Post Reality Show: Talk MEDIA!. Well, one of my guests, whose name I won’t mention, didn’t understand my amused comment that Skyping is “just like the Jetsons.” The Jetsons? One of those boomer moments, struggling to communicate with a gen-exer.

But why bother leaving the radius of home, when there is Skype?

31 years and counting, that’s how long Don Joyce of Negativland has been been hosting the late night sonic universe that is Over the Edge on KPFA in Berkeley. In these days of rapid technological and cultural transformation, it is reassuring that there are [...]]]>

31 years and counting, that’s how long Don Joyce of Negativland has been been hosting the late night sonic universe that is Over the Edge on KPFA in Berkeley. In these days of rapid technological and cultural transformation, it is reassuring that there are pioneers willing to devote over three decades to navigating the bleeding edge of a rarefied art form, in this case: the radical free-form radio mix collage.

It all started in 1981 when Mark Hasler, founding member of the renown experimental electronic ensemble Negativland (infamous for their illegal appropriation of a U2 album cover), met Joyce, who was doing a more mainstream style radio show, and suggested to the radio producer that the radio booth could be less like a medium for playing records and more like an electronic music studio. Why not exploit all that equipment and push the envelope? So Over the Edge was born.

So Joyce’s radio broadcast became a medium for live performance and real-time collage, in which sounds, guests, and esoteric commentary all coalesced into a wild sonic dance. The rule is, if you call in, don’t say hello, just keep the show moving, fluidly, a non-stop manic layering of audio, appropriated music, spoken word, noises, and anything and everything.

The three hour show is still going strong at 12:00 am PST and you can pick up the broadcast via the Internet anywhere in the world. If you tune in at the witching hour and you hear Vangelis’ Heaven and Hell being pulverized by an effects processor, you know you’re in the right place.

While the political wars rage on here in Washington, for an evening a truce was declared and everyone took a moment off from slinging insults to slinging jokes (which is pretty much the same thing). Everyone was fair game: Romney, Palin, Secret Service, press, etc., and even big fat slobs like Chris [...]]]>

While the political wars rage on here in Washington, for an evening a truce was declared and everyone took a moment off from slinging insults to slinging jokes (which is pretty much the same thing). Everyone was fair game: Romney, Palin, Secret Service, press, etc., and even big fat slobs like Chris Christie and Newt Gingrich gaffawed at the obesity slingers. All in good clean, dirty fun of course. Yes, even gridlocked, post-apocalyptic Washington loves a good laugh, especially with all those surgically stylized movie stars jazzing up the Hilton Hotel (incidentally the site of Reagan’s epic shootout).

So laugh-machine Jimmy Kimmel spread the nasty cheer around the room until nearly everyone, particularly such easy targets as Lindsey Lohan and Kim Kardashian, was strafed with comic fire. Of course Mitt Romney was the centerpiece of the show: his now famous dog-on-the-roof fiasco was transported to the roof of Air Force One in a pseudo attack ad created by the Obama Comedy Super-pac. Ironically, this was probably the most effective political ad of the year. (Note to political strategists: comedy is a much more powerful weapon than fear mongering.)

And so it goes, Jimmy Kimmel received his life-long payback wish to a high school journalism teacher, who had warned the young Kimmel his wackiness would get him nowhere, as the comedian defiantly high-fived the most powerful man on earth.

If Washington is a joke, it’s better off when it gets it.

This is not a commercial, this is not a commercial!! This is unabashed enthusiasm for a new product that is a real game changer for live media on the net. It’s called Livestream Broadcaster and it just won an award at the National Association of [...]]]>

This is not a commercial, this is not a commercial!! This is unabashed enthusiasm for a new product that is a real game changer for live media on the net. It’s called Livestream Broadcaster and it just won an award at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). I don’t usually gush like this over a little red box, but this one could very well alter the way everyday people will live broadcast, much in the way YouTube has altered the way we distribute recorded video. And if this little red box causes us all to go live on the net, then amateur reporters, media artists, and everyone else will reach an audience instantaneously from a portable camera. No more waiting to upload. That’s the revolution.

Why is this little red box so different you are probably asking? Three reasons: (1) it costs $500, which is less than 10% of the cost of a portable, wireless broadcaster; (2) it will transmit the output of a garden variety prosumer camera with hdmi in high definition; (3) it’s all integrated within Livestream’s software and hosting, which remarkably, you can control from your iPhone while you are shooting with your digital camcorder. Your audience views the live broadcast on your very own Livestream event page, which you can use to post texts, images, and recorded media.

This is clearly the future of independent reporting, the future of net theater and performance art, the future of concerts, well, perhaps the future of everything! Even the future of the live net broadcasted talk show. My upcoming The Post Reality Show: TALK MEDIA! will of course take place on Livestream.

So let it be said that Roy Ascott’s concept of the telematic embrace just rose to a new level: I expect these little red broadcasters (or whatever the next device looks like) to become de rigueur for every activist and performance artist who yearns to go live on the Net. And yes we can!!

Power to the artist who takes the microphone by the hand and charges the telematic airwaves with whatever needs to be said.

That is The Post Reality Show: Talk MEDIA!, broadcasting via Livestream from my underground studio bunker safely hidden beneath the militarized zone of [...]]]>

Power to the artist who takes the microphone by the hand and charges the telematic airwaves with whatever needs to be said.

That is The Post Reality Show: Talk MEDIA!, broadcasting via Livestream from my underground studio bunker safely hidden beneath the militarized zone of Washington, DC, (something like Radio Free Washington), I will take to the Internet weeknights at 10:00 pm beginning July 16th as part of the 7th Annual Capital Fringe Festival.

My situational-electro-comedy talk media show will feature a provocative lineup of artists and thinkers from around the globe, who will discuss a range of probing topics concerning the hidden mechanisms of contemporary media culture. This interactive cultural experiment is an open invitation to dissect the heretofore indefinable nature of the post reality, while exposing it to anyone and everyone.

Mad Men descended again last night, its twisted dramatic threads revealing just how far we have come since the dawning of the social transformation of the 1960s. Madison Avenue, circa 1965: martinis for lunch and more to come throughout the afternoon; men who preferred their wives safely at home; when African-Americans were called [...]]]>

Mad Men descended again last night, its twisted dramatic threads revealing just how far we have come since the dawning of the social transformation of the 1960s. Madison Avenue, circa 1965: martinis for lunch and more to come throughout the afternoon; men who preferred their wives safely at home; when African-Americans were called Negroes (not long after Colored People); bad pop-art on executive walls; the rigid hierarchy of office space; and the entertainment of abusing (and marrying) female secretaries. It’s all there in the Mad Men descent into a darkness that seems to have no bottom, an abyss of misfortune.

Just when you think we’ve come a long-way-baby since those days – morally bankrupt scenes of promiscuity and back-stabbing to rise to the top of the corporate ladder – we realize that Mad Men is a tame precursor of late 2000s Wall Street, or better yet, the 2012 Republican primaries.

Mad Men is not a time capsule, it is a study in the roots of illness that eternally afflict the human soul. The steely, emotionally deprived Don Draper is our everyman in free fall, driven yet directionless, caught up in blind ambition. Why is this show so popular? It has touched a nerve, a fascinating shop of horrors portraying the Romney 1%, the remaking of Sherman McCoy from Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. We find ourselves irresistibly plunging, plunging, plunging into an American underworld of greed and distrust: Madison Avenue as the lowest circle of Hell, seductive and sweet as a Cosmo.

Stay tuned.

Last night at the Hirshhorn, Doug Aitken defiantly refused to take questions from the DC artworld glitterati, but he has, nonetheless, produced a stunning public multimedia spectacle that has transformed the people’s National Mall here in Washington, DC.

Based on the iconic song “I Only Have Eyes For You,”

Based on the iconic song “I Only Have Eyes For You,” Song 1 is supported by a battery of projectors and speakers that surround the circular Hirshhorn like anti-aircraft weapons launching sound and light into the night air, infiltrating and upending the stoic majesty of the drab government buildings and shining Capital dome. An assortment of singers, from street musicians to hip hop artists to actress Tilda Swinton, croon this endlessly malleable lullaby that permeates our collective consciousness like no other American song. Images of factories, water, and light seem to lift the circular Hirshhorn Museum from its foundation, a hulking donut of sheer architectural weight.

Yes, Song 1 is a multimedia artwork for the people. It’s corny Americana and mural-like inner-city imagery evoke the public art we might associate with LA or Detroit or Baltimore, but certainly not the National Mall. This is the first imprint of Hirshhorn director Richard Koshalek to use the museum as a platform to alter the surrounding landscape, artistically and socially, a preview of the now infamous Bubble he intends to launch next year.

The Hirshhorn Museum is becoming the realization of The US Department of Art & Technology, the government agency I proposed and modeled when I arrived in the nation’s capital more than a decade ago. What I could only accomplish in the virtual domain, the Hirshhorn has activated in the physical space, launching a powerful message across the bow that art is just as significant and relevant to our culture as the politicians and heroes memorialized on the National Mall.

Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” resonates stronger than ever, a free-form, jazz-infused, cacophony of spoken word and appropriated collage of sonic sampling: a 1960s meditation on the effect of media culture and its power to transform the sensorial, as Arthur Rimbaud described it, the “disorientation of the senses.”

The original [...]]]>

Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” resonates stronger than ever, a free-form, jazz-infused, cacophony of spoken word and appropriated collage of sonic sampling: a 1960s meditation on the effect of media culture and its power to transform the sensorial, as Arthur Rimbaud described it, the “disorientation of the senses.”

The original vinyl LP is simply the mother of all remixes.

The recording has been re-released on CD by Five Day Weekend, but I suspect that anyone truly interested in the work, will use methods of appropriation in order to steal it blind from multiple locations around the web. It is the nature of this obscure audio work to hack your way into it’s gold mine of poetic musings.

The Medium is the Message is nothing less than an “electric information retrieval, a simultaneous happening, the tribalizing process” made visceral.

Here is a small sample for your listening pleasure:

As McLuhan says (spoken in a child’s voice):

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

Proper guidance for every young artist today!

With the plethora of images that infiltrate our everyday lives, there is nothing more beautiful than the purity of raw noise. Raw indeed, it is the basic building block for countless textural constructions that undermine the futile quest for realism. It is also a space to dream and to contemplate, like the desert, [...]]]>

The Man Who Fell to Earth is one of those treasured cult films from the 1970s that taps into a rare and critical view of the role of media. As David Bowie plunged into our earthly, alien world of violence, television, greed and sex, we [...]]]>

If cultural production in the age of interactive media no longer fits the institutional model, than what is the new model? Even such a massive enterprise as a presidential campaign is revolutionizing the broadcast paradigm, in ways that are unprecedented. Perhaps, just perhaps, the old broadcast medium is truly dead, left to its own [...]]]>

If cultural production in the age of interactive media no longer fits the institutional model, than what is the new model? Even such a massive enterprise as a presidential campaign is revolutionizing the broadcast paradigm, in ways that are unprecedented. Perhaps, just perhaps, the old broadcast medium is truly dead, left to its own devices of delivering tired old propaganda to the masses.

It’s time to write our own stories.