So I did a little presentation/lecture today in my friend Kai’s class that revolved around Matthew Fuller’s text “Media Ecologies.” I sometimes find it a bit nerve-racking to go in front of people at school and speak about the things I often feel are trivial or disconnected from conceptual art. I’ve often felt that some of the things I do are particularly low brow when it comes the annals of art and art theory.

This text by Matthew Fuller centered around Pirate Radio and underground UK dance culture while applying a Guattarrian mindset to the entire subculture. Simply put, Fuller found it inspiring and fascinating to analyze deeply something that I’ve excused away for years as ’just another thing I do with my time.’

Reading both Chaosmosis and experiencing the heydey of electronic music puts me in a scary compartment. Its kind of one of those “where do you go from here?” moments. These texts are both mutagenic and poisoning in some ways. Its impossible to go back to the source without quoting them and getting blank stares from people without the reference point. And it becomes ever increasingly difficult to admit that those very things you are now analyzing and deconstructing at the basal level give you any visceral joy at all. So you are left to report your experiences anecdotely to people who are more interested in the alien nature of it than the subculture itself.

And who could blame them. It seems far more interesting when applied to things like ecologies, hypotaxis, and hylomorphism. I’m sure you could apply the same to football hooligan culture if you stretched it hard enough.

I’ve always hated being a musician. We quickly figured out the brutal truth; that I am not actually a musician at all. That in and of itself is quite liberating in perspective. Even dealing head-on with such heavy concepts of copyright violation, expression, and reappropriation sets one free from the boundaries that surround your typical musician. You are not creating music. Arguably you are not creating anything. You are simply reconstructing and reorganizing memes and building blocks to reinterpret the subjective. You are assembling beats, bits, and breaks like syllables in a sentence together to weave a complex and poetic structure that acts as a sort of alchemy. But its not music. Its not truly original.

I would argue and I did quite naturally that it would be hard to find something whether it be art or idea that existed as some sort of immaculately conceived notion. A shining diamond that no one had thought prior. An idea never strung together by neurons firing in the wee hours of the morning. Good ideas are archetypical. They stem from something and often when they reach their bitter end, fold upon themselves back into the substrate and provide different roles and functions.

Thats the nature of post-structuralism. And I applaud my colleague trying to inject this sort of chaos in the minds of Architecture and Designed Objects students.

Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning. This act of deconstruction illuminates how male can become female, how speech can become writing, and how rational can become emotional.

Which brings us to the nature of copyright. Copyright is murder. It is the death stamp of approval by law that something has been locked formally. In terms of hylomorphism, its the acknowledgement by a legal body that this is the ‘genuine article.’ The amen break is the perfect example of this. A four second stationary point in time recording on a reel to reel of a drummer getting funky. It does not get any better than that. Its a headstone in a forgotten backwoods cemetary stating “This guy got down, once… on that one record.”

We all know that the drummer from the Winstons went on to do much more than that, somewhat unbeknowst to him. He became a thing of metallurgy, a base element in a new language. This language begat a whole entire genre and subculture in dubstep, colliding headlong in a fiery crash of techno, dub, jungle and hip hop. It undulated upon itself like a oozy puddle and reformed back to its essence. The experiences learned did not go to die somewhere off the branches of some library of congress catalog. They created the basis for years and years to come of expression… a healthy ecology withering and decomposing to feed a stronger, more youthful one. The cycle continues.

As Matthew Fuller states… you can take an ordered list such as words like dubplate, sound systems, clubs, drugs, mixtapes, records, record stores, etcera… and organize them as units to create a whole new subjective experience. We’ve been reordering these bits for years like a rubik’s cube. Creating subgenres upon subgenre’s and colliding with each other in burning heaps, igniting varying degrees of spark.

We do not simply move on so to speak. We do not grow old and do grown up things, following our march unto the grave in the path of the old masters. We take the bones of the old masters and revive them like perverse Golems, hulking across the earth in all their trembling glory. We revel in the madness that is Frankenstein, bending societal and governmental rules in the name of the impossiblities of the divine Platonic Form. We are the bastards and perverts in the eyes of order.

We are chaosmosis.

No I did not jump on the table and scream this at the top of my lungs, ripping off my shirt. I’m way more reserved than that. But its these discussions of texts that prove to be more enlightening than simply solo readings. Its amazing to be able to bounce your subjectivity off of completely different mindsets. Its the nature of heterogeneity. The feedback that comes spiraling back at you, its within that unpredictable hum that you find the answers… the sweet alien chords that rumble your DNA, severing ties to the tried and true pathways.

Its there I’d argue where you can glimpse a small peak of what god may actually look like, ever expanding… ever knowing… ever sure.

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