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Media Deconstruction Kit - Randall Packer with Wesley Smith

Avant-Pop is Situationism looking at itself in the mirror and liking what it sees. It’s not anti-spectacle. It plays with the spectacle the same way a hard-bop musician might play a Bugs Bunny cover song. In so doing, it partly becomes or buys into the fact that we are all somehow effected by the Disneyfication of our Hollywood-TV-Internet reality, and it accepts it too, up to a point. But then there’s the hacking ­ the hacking aesthetic you might call it, and this is where we as net artists can start lobbing our tactical word bombs into the rhetorical mix. Sometimes this tactical media strategy is stylized as art or literature, other times as performance or pedagogy, and still other times as a kind of adventurous critical theory that breaks away from formulaic jargon that gets all of the ideas and buzzwords right, but that doesn’t amount to jack to the so-called “average” media consumer. One thing about the Experimental Party project is that even though the avant-art practice it reveals is very sophisticated and self-conscious ­ perhaps too self-conscious ­ it somehow still attracts a lot of media consumers who would otherwise have nothing to do with avant-art or critical theory. Even though it’s that too, as a series of streaming media events that take place in a hybridized offline/online compositional space. In this way you might say it has allegiances with some of the fringes of conceptual art, except here it’s more action driven. It reminds of me of that term we use to describe Flash coding ­ action scripting. One of the questions we keep asking ourselves is “Who writes the action scripts?” The point being, if we are not writing them ourselves, then who is, and how can we counter that as artists.

RP: You mention the term “hybridized” and how the work is at once literary, performative, net art based, and even hypertheorized. Does this sometimes confuse or blur what it is your doing, and in so doing stop you from staying on message.

MA: Not as far as I can tell! Staying on message is not a problem. That’s because we not only write in reference to the mainstream media discourse, we are quite literally engaged with the media discourse. Our source material is stuff of legends. Justice Department press releases, State of the Union addresses, Billy Graham prayers for the nation, etc. Our message is clear as a bell: it’s time for regime change in Washington, and we are going to do all we can to steer the dialogue and rhetoric in such a way as to reveal the sinister plots of the far-right wing agenda that currently rules our country. And when I say “we” I am referring to those who ­ for better or worse ­ are comfortable characterizing themselves as artists. Hactivists are keen on intervening in the mainstream media discourse through tactical engagement with the very same language that is being used to steal away our freedoms as citizens of the USA. We try and do this in as innovative a way as possible, with satire, performance and very dark comedy as our chief tactical weapons. But even as I use the word “innovative” I am already acknowledging that therein lies the rub. For these innovative strategies are easily co-opted by commercial interests who would like to turn our hard-to-pin down post-leftist pleasure politics into the next generational lifestyle apparatus ­ and from there, create a new demographic that we can sell more things too ­ more techno-mediated things, undoubtedly.

RP: But you can resist these overt come-ons, can’t you?

MA: Yes and no. Changing consciousness is tricky business. Look at what happened to the Beats. They formalized a radical political and aesthetic agenda that called into question how we lead our lives and soon became role models for an expansive network of creative bohemians. But then it got too cool for its own good and you started seeing these strange branches of hippydom emerge and now where are we? So yes, you can resist, but if you do, that may make you more attractive to the marketers who are clever at neutralizing your radical desire to resist and turn that into the Next Big Thing worth buying into as a lifestyle option. Meanwhile, if you don’t resist, if you actually play with it right from the start, say, start your own political party and begin showing a few possible ways out of the mess we are in, maybe that in and of itself can resist neutralization and have some impact on a distributed network of media consumers who secretly long to learn ways to become producers or what we are calling art-hactivists.

RP: So then you’re not running for Miss America, or Mr. Amerika as the case may be?

MA: Exactly. “If there was one thing you could do to change the world, what would that be?” Well, for one thing, the world seems to always want to change itself. And is always changing itself. The best I can do as an art-hactivist is a) be aware of that condition and do my level best to trace that change by selecting the most useful data I have at my disposal so that I can then manipulate it and, consequently, if all goes as planned (b) intervene in the way some people think about that unsettled and unsettling pace of change that seems to flicker in maxed out strobing effects.

RP: But then again: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

MA: Yes, except that sameness seems to be moving much faster now, and one has to constantly change themselves, their tactical strategies, just to keep up with it.

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