Fast Forward >> the ©onvergence of media and of cultural objects through the liquefying @ctions of digital technology accelerate post-productive art forms (scratch video, sampled music, digital image appropriation) into the arena of Crash Technology. In this arena, the drama of the end of art history is playing as a permanent re-run.
Pause II if we stop for a moment and take a look (a freeze frame, a snap shot, a screen dump) what can we focus upon ? Everything appears to be merging with or morphing into everything else. Bodies collide and fuse. Images melt into one another.
Insert: >< an ad in a computer magazine says "The Future is Non Linear". But the past is also non linear and now we can re-edit it as often as we wish. Insert a new sequence, disrupt the narrative flow. Histories of the future are written in media edit suites and the stories of the present are crash-edited, on the fly, on the screen, before the unblinking eyes of a million camcorders and an endless feedback loop of surveillance systems.
Dissolve / or cross fade..... surveillance systems aid the collision of media and architecture. Information in architecture, information as architecture, information bodies interacting with the body of architectural information.
Loop, Sample, Hold ...... a time constructed from the repetition of pre-existing fragments whose combination and recombination elaborates a kind of dramatic tension in a situation where nothing will ever happen. ....... all arenas for the society of the televised spectacle are dead arenas, simulations or illusions, places where nothing really happens. David Byrne/Talking Heads, Fear of Music: "Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens".
©onvergence: a question mark appended to, or a red cross through the heart of ©opyright.
©onvergence: the art of appropriation, the deployment of the radical gesture as merely that: a gesture, a sign.
©onvergence: the theoretical death of the author, the end of the modern and its renewal as the hypermodern, the disappearance of the hero into an image of the heroic and the substitution of the historical narrative with a folklore of technology.
Recently organized "Terra Incognita: Art, Architecture & Cyberspace", international seminar , University of Trondheim, October 1995: Speaker at: "In and Out of Doors" seminar on Architecture and Technology, Oslo: Nordic/Baltic Conference on Art & Information Technology, Helsinki, October 1995. Lecture series "Liquid Histories:-Media Art from Video to Virtuality", Royal College of Art, Stockholm, November/December 1995. Speaker at "Electra Philos" seminar, and organizer/presenter of "Electra CD ROM" seminar, Electra Festival, Oslo, March 1996. Currently, Professor of Intermedia at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art.