What is Blog?

A blog should not be defined. Defining a blog would be like defining what a novel is or what a film is or what an experimental art installation is.

Perhaps it would be better to de-define a blog. A blog is not a diary, it is not dated, it is not autobiography, it is not a dreambook.

Or: it can be any or all of those things but probably should not be any or all of them.

It is not a web site per se, it is not even writing if you prefer to see it that way, but writing seems well-suited to the Idea of Blog, as does code. Blog is more a kind of progressive codework (as lived reality) than manifested outcome.

It's driven by the logic of links, oftentimes dramatically expressed in a default color that usually suggests a feeling of being blue - yet it also suggests other states of emotion such as being active, dynamic, visited, anchored, floating.

Waiting to be ported somewhere, anywhere, but here. But where is here? That nagging question that all of the choragraphers keep asking as they invent the universe.

Blogs could be pseudo-autobiographical works-in-progress, where the artist who creates one surfs the electrosphere for useful data, samples it, manipulates it, and then exhibits it in an online environment that makes it feel like something more than just a diary website.

This will probably have to be done in the translinguistic act of writing itself. The writing I speak of is more than just a diary entry with links to things found on the net and is more than just text. It is designwriting, video ecriture, mixillogical sound art, a color field of graphic disturbance.

Human portals are fine, they are even dandy -- in fact, they may even end up being a kind of virtual dandyism strutting their stuff in net space -- but they are not true blog.

True blog is not true at all. It is pseudo.

For example, the novels of Henry Miller could be considered bloggish, but then again so would the so-called "diaries" of Anais Nin, not because they are diaries per se, but because they subvert the diary form into what reads like an associative, pseudo-autobiographical novel. It's her socio-linguistic poetics coupled with an energetic linking process that makes it feel so bloggered. Her enigmatic jazz momentum totally eroticized by a very stylized use of language as aphrodisiacal elixir. This, I believe, is the key to blogging less it become nothing but narcissistic foreplay, and mediocre narcissistic foreplay at that.

Of course, if Nin were alive today, she would probably not be so bloggered by it all. As always, she would be looking for the rhetorically-charged juice machine that proactively creates language in rhythm, and any Apparatus would do. Same with Miller and many others of their ilk.

But don't tell that to net artists for whom the aestheticization of the network is part of a formalist dream to turn software into pretty pictures that capture your fancy and who knows what can happen once your fancy has been captured - will it ever be released?

True blog, then, is not blog as we know it, but as we un-know it. It incites creation - more invention - so that you yourself have to get down and dirty into the developmental process activating the network with your own mixillogical discourse. This is blog as inventive remix machine placing value on what it sees, what it links to, how it appropriates the Other and strips it of its isolation.

At the end of scene six in FILMTEXT, the Apparatus says: "In my mind, I point and click on You. How will you respond? What will you do? How will you behave?"

Barthes' "Camera Lucida" or "Pleasure of the Text" are blogs all the way as is Andy Warhol's "A". Cocteau once said that "writing is a sickness" and Bataille said that "I write not to be mad." One could apply this to blogging too. In fact, this is the beauty of the blog, if there is one: it blogs bloggers on, that is, it keeps them generating new material, researching the collective unconscious of the Web for possible destination points to link to so that the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress may have some value-added meaning/connectivity.

This value-added meaning/connectivity, when experienced in real-time telepresence, takes on the condition of the material world it is unquestionably a part of. Whoever said cyberspace is immaterial has never seriously read a book in their entire lives.

Of course, this "ceaseless generation" of new material that we might call the avant-pop condition of D-I-Y web production, is a kind of proactively engaged and engaging therapeutic process that one continues as a way to further investigate this Cocteau-ian "sickness," and can lead to all kinds of outcomes whether that be a scholarly ebook, a novel, a hypertext, a CD-ROM, a feature-length DVD with surround sound, an mp3 concept album, a Flash narrative, a multi-user network performance, or even a deconstructed blog-like writing space that occasionally morphs into a "cite-specific work of environmental art" (where the cites are designated as links and the environment is manifested as a P2P network of associational thinkers - an artificial intelligentsia).

One thing we can say about blogs is that they circulate consciousness in a potentially value-added network of social fulfillment and that, in very crude terms, they proactively link some of the data associated with that circulating consciousness to specific "sites" of writing (editor's note: notice how the author does not use the term "scenes of writing") - but they are certainly not site-specific since they are linking machines that are liable to go off at any second. That is to say: they are part of a network greater than themselves and this network is not a specific thing-in-itself but is rather more thingless-in-itself.

This doesn't mean it's immaterial.

Walking Scene: The Market

Walking around the Victoria Market today, the crowd was large, almost circus-like with all manner of suburban families, tourists, CBD shoppers, and local freaks hawking and stalking the area. The freakish nature of the social activity got me to thinking about last night's dinner at the Chine on Paramount. I was dining alone eating my vegetarian duck (quite good) when a table of four sat down beside me. It was clear that the foursome consisted of a young couple, possibly married, definitely living together, and the guy's parents. His father was a quiet, patient, unassuming chap while the mother was older, cranky, loud and obviously a legend in her own mind. The old biddy would not stop talking and everything she spoke about was centered around herself as if the entire world revolved around her trivial concerns and banal interests (sort of like most bloggers, wouldn't you say?).

At one point she went into this tirade against eating Peking duck and she was so loud and obnoxious that the young woman eventually looked over at me with a warm smile and said "you'll have to pardon us." She meant the old biddy, no doubt, and the father smiled a smile of "this happens every time we go out and it's been happening forever so there you have it."

I was just about to rush through my last bit of vegie duck when the old biddy threw me for a loop. In her still loud and obnoxious tone of voice, she rather matter-of-factly said "well, I think I'll have to see Mulholland Drive again."

The young couple was shocked.

"Mulholland Drive?" asked the young woman. "The movie?"

"Yes," said the biddy, "the movie. Mullholland Drive. Have you seen it?"

"Really?" asked the son. The father pursed his lips and gave a look that once again said it all, as in "you still don't know your mother, do you Kevin?"

I was all ears now as I had just seen the Melbourne sneak-preview on Friday at the Nova on Lygone and had not talked to anyone about it yet.

"Where did you see it?" asked the young woman.

"Oh, I forget -- I think it was the Nova. They had a showing on Friday night."

Damn if she wasn't there in the audience with me.

She then proceeded to try and offer a synopsis of the narrative which was quite good considering the story she was trying to relate. In her version, it's a story about a young starlet who wins an award to come to L.A., "you know, very Doris Day," was how she put it, "and then she tries to get this part in a movie and has a free place to stay, her Auntie's apartment although who her Auntie is you never know, and meanwhile there's this other lass in the Auntie's apartment who is suffering from amnesia and doesn't know how she got there and so, together, they try and find out who she is."

Then, after a pause: "I have to see it again. Which is not that unusual, even the newspaper says you have to see it again and again."

The thing about David Lynch is that he is still stuck in a Luis Bunuel time zone with just enough literary freakishness to provide metacommentary on what he sees as the strange underbelly of the American way of life. I remember being at the Telluride Film Festival (perhaps the best film festival in the States and in a beautiful part of Colorado near the Four Corners region), and word leaking out that the new Lynch movie was going to premiere at the fest. We ended up getting tickets to the special engagement and were perhaps the first random audience to see the first two episodes of what ended up being Twin Peaks. Although we didn't know it at the time, and were left with our own thoughts and curiosities at the end of program two. Imagine going into the theater thinking you would see Lynch's new movie but then experiencing the multi-threaded looseness of Lynch's mysterious hyperTV.

But after you see Mulholland Drive you realize that TV is Lynch's real genre. It too, like Twin Peaks, suggests a nasty underworld of psychic hysteria, something we pick up in Blue Velvet (with its white picket fences) or even Lost Highway, and I wonder why. Why not just go all the way and make an art porn film located in the Houston offices of Enron starring the "real" Laura Palmer. Enron was into high-bandwidth porn distribution too. Or why not drop out of Hollyweird altogether and start investigating the evolution of digital cinema in the new media economy - like Mike Figgis who, in a one on one conversation we had at my net art retrospective in London, said he was through with Hollywood and now preferred to make digital narratives for museums, galleries, universities, and festivals.

The thing is, Lynch, whose imagery is beautiful to look at and whose sense of the erotic is always tinged with enough (gratuitous?) weirdness to make you almost want to never have sex again or, if you do, to do it as a kind of blood sacrifice to the Hollywood Gods, is able to get his actors to perform the subliminal American psyche in ways that make us all feel smart and in-the-know (wink-wink, nod-nod, say no more). This kind of "isn't America weird?" narrative style is as American as, well, apple pie, Colgate smiles, industrious earnestness, and commercial T&A.

Speaking of which, that's what I like best about Mulholland Drive: the somewhat surreal, cinematographic rendering of All-American T&A. It's what was missing from the self-censored TV episodes of Twin Peaks, whose mysterious character, Laura Palmer, was played by Sheryl Lee who, I should mention, went to high school a five minute walk from my home in Boulder.

But then again, whenever I mention the word Boulder, 90% of the people worldwide who have heard of the place immediately think of Jon Benet Ramsey, the child beauty pageant queen whose "twin peaks" were never given a chance to develop.

The Jon Benet murder mystery has it all: child porn, white picket fences, evil Santa Clauses, drug dealing, Enron-styled businesses, even links to the John Birch Society as well as the U.S. Military and CIA. David Lynch couldn't invent this place called Boulder if he tried.

Now, just as that thought passes through my Sunday morning grog, I feel the hips of a beautiful, young Aussie girl rub up against me as she tries to squeeze through a horde of casual shoppers, myself included, slowly migrating through the Victoria market.

She is strikingly thin and is wearing an acrylic white skirt and black cotton turtleneck on this cool summer day. Once there is a clearing, she hustles through the bustle and disappears into another aisle, this one with "magic leather" that if you rub it the right way, might make you lose weight.

But not everyone is into losing weight. In fact, it's quite proper and fashionable for some of the shapelier women here to wear low-cut cotton shirts showing off bare midriff, roll of fat hanging loose over the top of very tight fitting jeans so as to further accentuate the fact that this young lass has meat to spare.

It's a phenomenon one can get used to, especially when compared to the soft porn PsychicTV reality of America, where chunky girls wouldn't get caught dead showing their tummy flesh in public.

In America, we want our children to be anorexic beauty queens, to have it all (just like their Super Moms), to reflect well on our lifestyle parenting methods which say we can, in fact, have it all.

Of course, this Oz phenomenon of exposed, meaty midriff, might just be a warped Britney Spears fixation highlighted by what is supposed to be summery weather. "Being Britney" is all the rage these days, as if she knows something most of her teenage colleagues don't. As a 40-something man constantly being exposed to this commercial beauty porn, I can't help but wonder what virginal secrets the ever-teasing Britney may have stored in her vault of PsychicTV memories.

This is where we need a Dr. David Lynch or Professor Mike Figgis to come in and give us the pseudo-documentary treatment. Imagine David Lynch directing the music video for Britney's "I'm A Slave 4 U" -- or Luis Bunuel for that matter.

I'll have to see it again.

Living As Opposed To Acting

"to film a thought in action..."

That's Jean-Luc Godard, from his book Godard on Godard. In the same interview, he says:

"Writing was already a way of making films, for the difference between writing and directing is quantitative not qualitative."

What does he mean by quantitative? That cinema carries more weight as a medium transmitting narrative ideology? That moving images have more heft? They sure do when it comes to memory hogging and net distribution. Try squeezing Two or Three Things I Know About Her through a 56k modem in any decent-sized window format and you'll know what I mean (whereas Tolstoy's entire Anna Karenina would download fine).

For example, let's take Quicktime. It's viewable, it's listenable, it's scalable (to a point), but it's awfully grungy. Grunge is good if you're the Kurt Cobain of web cinema, but if you have higher aspirations, like role-playing some mutant form of new media director who considers herself the Walter Benjamin of streaming cinescripture transponding hypertextual consciousness in a networked environment, then don't hold your breath (or: be like Jean Seberg in "Breathless" and put on your best [inter]face).

Seberg once said "...the less I know about acting and the more I know about everything else, the better I'll be at both acting and living..."

In many ways, Breathless was Godard's improvisational manifestation of that thought in action...

Immersion

I walk into "Lentil As Anything" and there he is again. I'm not sure what to do, whether to approach him down at the other end of the room, pull up a bar stool next to him and give a cheery "G'day," or avoid him completely and go hide on the corner bar stool up front near the plate glass window.

He was here the first time I checked this place out for lunch last week, reading his paperbook book on quantum theory while drinking soy latte and eating a Moroccan Hot Bowl. I assumed he would have a new assortment of crumbly food bits caught in his long, bushy, grey beard this time as well.

Now it was the dinner crowd, a mix of David Bowie wannabes, Greenpeace activists, barefoot and smoking slackers (what the Aussies call "ferals"), and the odd tourist who happened to hear about this socio-spiritual food cooperative when it was featured on TV during last week's edition of Current Affairs. I found it the way I find most things here and wherever else I travel: word of mouth.

Everytime I walk into this place I feel like the vagabond I once was and always promise myself I will once again be. St. Kilda may be trendy, and the food and cakes on Acland street are gorgeous (beautiful, perfect, lovely), but this tiny place that serves all manner of vegie food and has gorgeous (beautiful, perfect, lovely) twentysomething women dancing to the CD music while cooking and serving, is a place unto itself. It is a state of being, seemingly un-problematized being, shuffling my too time-based media perspective into a variety of theoretical chance-operations, forcing me to simultaneously look at both the past and the future while overdetermining the present in realtime, depending on who I am when.

Right now the CD player is playing the French band Air, with Beck on vocals (at least it sounds like Beck, a voice that's hard to miss), his dry, throaty, marijuana intonations narrating yet another quirky story about someone who comes to us

Like a vagabond in the distance
lookin' for a song to sing
a song that will last all night
and for the rest of our lives

When you first walk into this place, the small chalkboard says "Pay what you feel, based off what you eat," and you know you're in another world. That's why it didn't take long for the national TV and radio to jump on it, to turn it into kitsch political commentary -- but on what? New-age entrepreneurialism? Self-styled religious capitalism? Hippy-Dippy coopetition with The Spud Bar next door and Mr. Natural Vegetarian Pizza across the street?

Byron Bay, where are ya when we need ya?

"G'day," I cheerily said to him, and he smiled, was smiling as soon as I walked in and immediately -- or at least it felt immediate -- walked over to him, grabbed a bar stool at the central counter against the main wall, and began delivering an off-the-cuff sermon on VR acting that I was hoping would get his synapses sparking. I know he wanted them to spark, to ignite a thought that he could think through clearly and, in realtime, interject into the dialogue.

"Lentil As Anything," I said to him, giving him no room to speak as he started moving his fingers trying conjure up a language that was just not there, "take two. In this take, we see the sexy young food workers, in their tight jeans and slacks and loose cotton tops with excellent midriffs, rapidly repositioning themselves as cooks, servers, server-cooks, cook-servers, cashiers, cafe baristas, hostesses, and whatever other role they happen to perform at any given time, including girlfriend, lover, flirt, tour guide, and DJ" (it's no longer Air we are listening to but Thievery Corporation).

He just looks at me as if having to work hard to process everything I am saying, and it truly is hard work, especially after the stress of his recent stroke, the fact that his wife just abandoned him (but not his children, thank God), and nothing but the foggy, slippery, memory of his recent past as a Rabbi here in one of the more moderate Jewish neighborhoods.

The barista-hostess-cook-server with long, thick, almost Shirley Temple-like curly, blond hair, looks at me invitingly and I interrupt my one-way conversation with him and walk over to her and tell her she looks beautiful.

She likes that (I must not be in America anymore - not only is there no lawsuit tied to this comment - there's literal appreciation), and before she can respond I ask her for a Moroccan Hot Bowl.

"Good choice," she says. "Anything to drink?" and there's a sing-songy kind of lilt in her voice when she asks it and I have something particular in mind I want to say, something completely off subject and not as sing-songy, but decide to keep it civilized and safe and just say "water" -- as if that were safe, which it is, Melbourne's water being much better than the chlorinated glacier melt we get in Boulder which, it must be said, is not that bad either. The Melbourne water is almost as good as New York -- nay, better than New York, at least for now, especially since I'm flat out parched and ready to slurp the first wet one that comes my way.

But, just like my first visit to this Lost-in-Space food bar, she absent-mindedly, albeit good-naturedly, walks away and forgets to bring me the water, although she never forgets to look me in the eyes and smile from a distance or to put her hand on my shoulder whenever she walks by, which is often.

"When are you going to take your manly hands and come over and give me a big hug?" she says, in a mock soft-porn voice that suggests intentional bad-acting, although this is not the Blond Shirley Temple talking, rather, it's the gorgeous (beautiful, perfect, lovely) Winona Ryder lookalike who is talking to the recently arrived, dirty barefoot Kevin Bacon lookalike who is watching her meticulously prepare a hefty lentil dahl and red rice with salads plate, price still unknown (or open to interpretation).

"This used to be called reality," I continued my conversation with the Rabbi, whose bookmark, like last time, was still on page eight even though it had been five days since I last saw him. "But now I think of it as interactive cinema. This is not a movie, not a film, and it's really not a restaurant either. It couldn't be a museum installation because museums collect art like zoos collect animals, besides, this is much more open, like a realtime peer-to-peer network of social interoperability. Just look around you and try to navigate through the environment. The elements are alive, they perform in sync with each other, are programmed to make an improvised scene come to life. Look how everybody is acting in here. It's like a house party, with the hosts cooking and serving dinner and everybody has to 'pay what they feel' so as to contribute to the continuance of this VR social space - to the future of what might have never been had it not been for this. It's a totally immersive socio-spiritual virtual reality where you think what you see and hear is authentic, like this hard wood counter, right? You think, this can't be virtual reality because I can touch it, I can feel it, and when I knock on it, I can hear my hand knocking on it."

I knock my fisted hand on the wood and it makes a noise like one you would expect to hear.

He moved his hands in a circular motion and seemed to literally be grasping at words as the ends of his fingertips lightly touched his thumb, almost as if he were counting the words, trying to get it exactly right, but to no avail, no words, no numbers, no verbal form of expression. His light guttural utterances were impossible to hear but if you went in close to him you could hear something, filling in the blanks yourself while making up his side of the dialogue as well, as when he said, seemingly out of nowhere, "but these girls aren't acting, there just being themselves..."

"But that's just more manipulated ur-social reality," I said to him, paying no heed to his futile gestures. "We make sounds. We bang on things," I said, and at that instant someone banged a pot while a half-naked cook-server dropped a drinking glass which crashed to the floor and broke into innumerable fragments.

There was an immediate round of applause followed by elaborate bowing, as if accepting the award for Best Supporting Avatar in a Digital Reality. "But look at my hand more closely," I told him and he leaned in to look closer at my hand as it came near the wood but did not touch it.

"See," I told him, "it's not really touching the wood at all. The pixels have been manipulated for it to look that way, but really, it's just a graphical representation of my hand seemingly banging against the wood. Mutated codework as lived reality. As programmed feeling, dig?"

"I am programmed to feel. To hear the dialectical materialism as it pounds away inside my head. What does it feel like, you may ask. Does it feel good? What I feel is language, the action script encoding my behaviors so that I can role-play a kind of digital artist, a Gary Cooper avatar pioneering the Wild Wild West of new media practice. Or so goes the American Dream..."

I noticed that The Thievery Corporation was still playing on the CD player, a song I knew well enough so that it almost interrupted my train of thought, but it didn't.

"...but then again," I kept on keeping on, "in a more indie-style motion graphic picture, my nomadic narrative would reveal someone who is programmed to attempt endless experiments in what he intuitively refers to as Life Style Practice, only to fail time and time again. Like Robert Mitchum in 'The Sundowners' -- you know, it's the buggy bits that keep me going as I try to assess my performance in a process-based learning environment like the one we associate with socialized cyberspace, the so-called desert of the real (the virtual Outback), where I am the total sum of all my walking thoughts in-formation..."

"Virtual subjectivity, Mate," I said as I banged my fist against the wood again, more a rhetorical afterthought than an actual demonstration of what it was I was supposedly talking about. And who am I talking to anyway? I know he can hear me. I can see him listening and processing, desperately trying to associate with my intangible riff.

"In reality," I kept jaw-boning him, "it's just pixellated movement and the sound is just ones and zeroes, right?, ones and zeroes. We anticipate the sound and sure enough, there it is, perfectly in sync with our supposed banging motion. But it's all synchronized time code. Do you know what it sounds like to pick up a wet brain? Take three or four paper towels and run some water on them and start squooshing it all together -- that's a wet brain!"

"Would you like something to drink? Some water?"

It's Blond Shirley Temple and I just can't help but laugh. She smiles, says -- why she says it I have no idea -- "it's beautiful" -- and then I just open my mouth, old-man-lost-in-the-desert style, and she is full of glee, really shining her angelic spirit on me now, saying "oh right, you wanted water, you already asked..."

And off she goes to fetch it.

By the time she comes back the food has been served by the woman who cooked it and half of the original Lentil crowd has disappeared in a plume of virtual smoke. Another crowded rush of people, even more than just left, enter the fray.

Reb With A Cause has arrived.

DT has arrived.

Snowdome has arrived.

Queen of the Blood Plums has arrived.

Lisa-Lauren has arrived.

Winona Laptop has arrived.

Sugar Daddy has arrived.

"This is not a museum installation," I repeated as we started eating (he had the Moroccan Hot Bowl too, and they served them together, as if we were Mates), "you can't put it in a white cube or black box. And yet it feels like a work of art evolving in realtime."

Pay what you feel, based off what you see...

Life / Fiction / Biography / Cinema

As Celine has said, "Life, also, is a fiction...and biography is something one invents afterwards."

When I hit the red button on my digital video camera, people are said to be "captured" by my apparatus as it "eyeballs" the scene. Are they too part of the fiction? Or are they "real" actors performing as themselves in "realtime" and I just happen to be capturing them in action?

Is it their realtime biography synchronizing with my realtime autobiography or is it all pseudo-autobiography, a random interactive performance transmitted only for the apparatus that captures our consciousness for us?

Once the camera is on, it's all sex, lies and digital videotape anyway.

But what about when the camera is off?

What if I were to see myself as the Apparatus turning on?

Push my red button and activate my artificial intelligence and - well - I just might do anything.

The kino-eye apparatus "capturing" alien shadowforms in streaming realtime.

This would be me becoming-cinema. But there is no "me" - not in the conventional sense of a self that will be what it will be. Now there is something else that drives my production cycles into "process heaven" - and this "something else" is: The Network.

The Not-Me.

WYSIWYG subjectivity: a black market in VR cache-flow.

"Here I am now, entertain me..."

Who said that?

A voice from the grave?

Who is the "me" that wants to be entertained and that is being mocked all the while?

Not me, I can hear everyone say. Then who?

You?

Think of AI [artificial intelligence] as gorgeous (beautiful, lovely, perfect) subjectivity. Virtual subjectivity.

Is that you?

"Not me," I can hear someone say.

What if we build in some "artificial stupidity"?

"Here I am now, entertain me..."

Locating artificial stupidity would be like striking gold. Once it's firewired into my hard drive, the rhetorical flood of narrative information would fill to the brim and the demon leakage would start spilling out of the "not-me" as it nomadically circulates within the autopoietic environment that continuously produces itself.

The fluid "not-me" ebbing and flowing as more virtual dream juice ready for spin doctoring.

DJ PhDing.

Or what I call surf-sample-manipulate.

The Network becomes my library of digital source material which I then cross-fertilize with all of the other kinds of data I have at my disposal.

For me, becoming a proactive net artist utilizing everything the web has to offer is like always striking gold. Forget the gold rush mentality of the "dot.bombs" and their phony business plans. Yes, there IS gold in them thar hills, but what you're seeing is not money - it's digital source material, the fuel that feeds the artificial intelligentsia.

It's the ceaseless generation of narrative/rhetorical information just waiting for immediate cut and paste as if performed by a live, telepresent writer cum net artist operating on auto-pilot.

This is part and parcel of a survival strategy where the net artist, formerly a writer, surfs the web culture, samples data and then changes or manipulates that data to meet the specific needs of the narrative - of the pseudo-autobiographical work-in-progress your Network Story is un-bound to become.

The Electronic Word As Digital Rhetoric Become Animated Image/Text.

Cinema beyond Film.

Special thanks to all of those associated with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's School of Applied Communication for offering me a Visiting Fellowship from January-May 2002.

For more of Mark Amerika's work, go to his website.