WE ARE SCIENCE! collaborated with the Pink Line Project to create an interactive experience for the Phillips Collection’s “This is not That” cafe. We took 12 artists from the collection, sampled their statements about art, and broke them down into cards that participants could use to remix their own statements, filling in the blank in “Art is _____”. I was struck by how engaged people were in the experience, and how the simplicity and playfulness of the concept opened up remarkable creativity.
Description:
Remixing is not just an art form: it is a fundamental method for understanding and interacting with what we know. We’ve realized the potential of remixing in music, literature, and art—we must now remix the entire spectrum of human thought. If we can remix songs, why not the encyclopedia? If we can mash-up Jay-Z and the Beatles, why not Einstein and Darwin, the Bible and Pythagoras, Isaac Newton and Lewis Carroll? Remixing “the stuff of thought” will yield not only compelling art, but, with the right understanding and appreciation, real insight and scientific advancement. The innovators of the future will be “DJs of Thought,” sampling, mixing, and spinning all existing ideas and thought-objects into ever-new structures. They will remix what we know into what we could know. They will show the Academy how to dance.
New remix, improvised knowledge project in which I create 10 true statements by a writer by improvisationally remixing their writing.
First two attempts below: Robert Smithson and John Dewey.
Grand Wizard Theodore was said to have accidentally discovered the scratch when his mother yelled at him to stop playing records so loud. He put his hand directly on the record to stop it, heard the sound that resulted, and started playing around. Here’s a decent reenactment of that crucial moment.
How can we “scratch” our objects of thought? Texts, statements, definitions, theories?
Two more sessions of remixing Seed magazine to discover new potential truths and avenues for exploration.
Session 003- Yet a common division of linkages will sort data into their own tones and juices…
Session 004- Sometimes the only way to understand the light / dark core at the heart of deciphering is to register the descendants of each moment of revelation…
From Seed is a new object-oriented thought project in which I conduct quick, improvised remixes of Seed magazine, in order to discover new meanings and possible directions for future knowledge. Noticing what emerges from seed, we enter strange, uncharted fields and domains for further exploration and refinition.
Session 001 – The big idea is a music that can understand a structure…
Session 002 – These ideas … can take one into a particular means to test the illumination. A small current of options flows through the garden…
Functional Improvised Recombinancein which a recombinance, or remix, is channeled into a structure for further use
An interactive performance lecture in which I taught a group of George Mason University students how to re-mix thought-objects to generate answers to the question “What is Thought?”
This is a condensed “promo” version of the 20-minute lecture.
In this reading, I discover that I am close to pattern. And I see a child seeing some birds.
Source for this reading: Seed magazine
EXCERPTS FROM THE READING
Go deep.
There will be a fire.
A fire deep within a schema.
A schema deep within a fire.
Close to pattern I am in parts.
I hear how it moves, the basis of emergence.
Like a space between two birds.
It says it is just a simulation.
Just a complex instance.
For learners to repeat.
METHOD
Become a medium for meaningful phrases to emerge from; use source texts when possible.
Write the phrases on post-it notes.
Take webcam shots of yourself holding the post-it notes.
Do an improvised oracular reading of the pictures.
Repeat until enlightened.
I am becoming a modern-day oracle to discover what “it” is, by giving voice to its many parts, arranging them in serendipitous configurations.
