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(I wrote the following notes for August Highland, editor of The Muse Apprentice Guild, and founder of the worldwide literati mobilization network. Visit http://www.muse-apprentice-guild.com/ to read his magazine: visit http://www.newliteraryunderground.com/ to read the some of the textual work this essay refers to. August works with avatars, creating a whole literary movement by using shifting writing identities.)
2) Highland's work here may on one level be a parody of the entire concept of the "art movement;" inasmuch as the postmodern has been characterized as "the end of movements" and an art era beyond manifestos; Highland, in a bold conceptual move, has birthed an art movement, complete with varied practitioners, from just himself. 3)It is also primarily an internet art, using the network as a means of distribution. In its practice, it embodies the network; because Highland takes on for each work a different persona (though some workers in the movement are developing full bodies of work), he is populating each node in the network of his movement with an avatar. This is in contrast to Alan Sondheim's work, which operates for the most part with a fixed set of agents (Nikuko, Julu, Alan, Azure). 4) What we experience as readers of August Highland's texts is a layering of pastiche upon pastiche, collage on collage, network on network. The work is dense, disjunctive, appropriating (it seems) lines from technical manuals and dimestore thrillers; its what pulp would look like if someone dropped the genre and it shattered on impact (and if a book on network protocol were also already shattered there on the floor, mingling with the freshly fragmented pulp). This, coupled with the avatar-play and its mode of dissemination lends the work a rich veneer of polyphony. Think Schoenberg re-incarnated as DJ Spooky; serialism as a mode of cut- up. 5) Such play is deadly serious in its politics. As Language Poetry challenged traditional, "transparent" writing, rendering the sign opaque, Highland's movement renders authorship opaque as well. What if we found out that "Ron Silliman" was a piece of software? Would it change the work and our relationship to the work as readers? 6) But why challenge authorship in this way? Why produce texts like this at Go To Page: 1 2 |
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