Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismOperation RemixTheir methods were monstrous. [1] The more he looked, the more damage he found. Erasure wasn't their only or even their favorite strategy. A more frequent one was simply to scramble sources so thoroughly there was no detangling them: "Beauty is Juan, Juan Beauty." "I wish no living thing to suffer Jane." This was the Master Canon! To rewrite it was to rewrite all ensuing simulacra! It was to rewrite knowledge itself!![2] After all, no one really read this stuff. But it did hardwire the cultural memory of every schoolchild on the globe. These Zappatistas with their contraband software. They would change us all! But into what? Notes1. Only, of course, from the perspective of Babylon. We learned our methods from the Ancient Players, Grandmaster Flash (see the Holy vinyl, Adventures on the Wheel of Steel, MF Doom, Kool Keith, and their theoretical bretheren, Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London: Quartet, 1998), and paul d miller aka DJ Spooky that subliminal kid, rhythm science (Boston: MIT, 2004). 2. Or at least memory, which is the same thing. We wish to do for all of culture what DJ Spooky did for film with Rebirth of a Nation, his brilliant old insurrectionary remix of D. W. Griffith's racist epic Birth of a Nation. The future is recombinant! Navigation |