<nettime> (x)art

["cary peppermint" <mint@progirl.com>]

Technology is the commodification of nature.

There is no going back and of course there is the persistent myth of moving
forward.  For years I considered my life something of a romantic construct
which I could easily and readily transgress at any junction.  I was wrong.
People don't flower under the paradigms administered via technology.  The
heart is not so malleable.  Sometimes people break apart and a new updated
version is never again realized.  The future appears nothing like the
promise* of that future, if it even appears at all.

------------------------
----cut ---in point
------------------------
Early spring of 1990, I awake in a hotel room in New Orleans, Louisiana next
to a woman named Susan whom I have known for only 6-12 hours.  We don't have
a shared history to re-collect so we just roll around in bed all day
watching t.v. in our underwear.  Susan has all the t.v. commercials
memorized.  She lip synchs in a whisper to each and every one.  She is an
impressive performance.  She begins to speak in the tongue of advertising
while looking into my eyes like a lover.  I begin to think she is a
manifestation of a world given over to commerce and exchange.  She is a
medium, a vessel for a world that will never hold us, never nurture us, lest
we "desire" no more.  For hours this seduction continues.  I begin to
realize I will never see her again.  I begin to fall in love.  Susan is
forecasting the future and I believe every word.
------------------------
----cut ---out point
------------------------

The opportunities for the everyday exposure of art are becoming less and
less frequent .  Art has increasing difficulty surfacing in even
intermittent bursts into "pop" culture.  It is becoming more and more
difficult to discover anything outside the hegemony of capital and exchange;
this "spectacle" has a mind of its own now.  We are lost, regulated at best
to sort of hit and run ventures.  As artists we can hope to conjure only
moments of brilliance, briefly exposed and then buried again in the
perpetual real-time light of commerce and thus desert of over-exposure.

-cp

----------------------------------------------------
*the fundamental insincerity of all texts produced in the service of capital

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