Gallery director's writings on digital art / Los Angeles scene for rhizome

Rex Bruce
Director
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
323 646 9427
http://www.lacda.com


Hi,

Here is an essay I wrote very recently as a cultural take on the L.A.
scene from the perspective of an artist and curator working with
digital technologies. Many galleries are going in at the core of
Downtown L.A. where we have recently relocated. Please post it if you
like. (or is there another place for this more appropriate for this
writing?). Please forward to others. I would like to begin
participating in our discourse, and have more writing and manifestos I
should like to start circulating.

Thanks!

===rex
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L.A. "Rediscovered"


Rex Bruce
Director
Los Angeles Center for Digital Art
107 West Fifth Street
Los Angeles, CA 90013
323 646 9427
http://www.lacda.com

My mind resides in Los Angeles. In my day to day existence the massive
amount of sensory material I am exposed to renders my mental
constitution abstracted. For myself there is not much distinction in
the value of most ideas generated by the cognitively interferential
world I live in. Each concept becomes equally unemphasized–a balanced
kind of ideological atonality.

L.A. is a cacaphonic shimmering silicon wafer, a vast crust of
technologically generated business, transportation and imagistic
exchange. It rushes at high velocity through an endless grid of
infrastructure that has become a hub for the global. This is a
seemingly infinite source of material that runs by my senses–garish
and uncontrolled. Most of it I rather like, but of course, so much is
toxic and destructive. We need changes. Art that recombines itself in
an oblique complicity with the momentum of mechanically produced
chatter can be like a hammer that breaks the wafer or makes a crack.
Such a breach constitutes a humorous and pleasurable possibility of
"re-routing" for change without dictating to others what that change
should be.

Something is only "original" and propulsive in that it brings together
two or more disparate elements and generates an unexpected meaning from
the combination. So from my perspective I live in a high energy (and
hilarious) landscape because in California and L.A. most everything I
see or experience is a wildly disparate combination. Many
recombinations are propelled by the requirement for newness and growth
in types of products, media programming, fashion, technology,
communications, art and professions compulsory to generate the economic
activity that is the lifeblood of our world. The gargantuan collision
of multiple cultures that flow into our surroundings mix and mingle.
They separate off to "rediscover" themselves and recombine again to
create Kosher Burritos and Thai Pizza, or Picture Phones and Net Art
(as more obvious examples of very deep reverberations echoing to create
the flavorful surface of our existence).

The lack of any purity indicates an inherent propensity for change. I
see little primary source or elemental structure in cultures,
knowledge, eras, communication, technology or meaning but rather a
rootless dynamic of combinations and random mutations. Purity is
problematic (and also was the goal of Nazis). Existence is almost
predicated by the capability to recombine. Sperm, eggs and DNA. Whipped
up things ( L. A. being the ultimate in all things fabricated). The
success of a moment can be measured by its sheer variety, quantity and
"inter-marriage" of cultural material. The simultaneous representation
of differing cultures is concurrent with the crossing or
interconnection of their borders.

So it is natural and vital for many artists to reify artifacts from his
or her surroundings containing a vision peculiar to that persons unique
recombinant constitution from their proximate culture–as well as a
culture at large–that denotes a personal narrative or "self." In my
case Los Angeles electrifies life into me as its own Frankenstein's
Monster constituted by parts of what were perceived as discontiguous
bodies: the faces of its population, the products, and landscape. Its
worldwide broadcast. Its mobile connectivity. My face and my body.

I produce and exhibit objects (of my own and others) that are the
dissonant cross dressers of a city and its relation the international.
'Its/my' mind projects 'its/my' identity. This is not just an
expression of identity (or as it turns out the absence thereof) it is
also about the momentum inherent in cultural activity and the power
that gives an artist or curator to create flux in the energy field that
vivifies the necrotic and partially frozen body parts at the core of a
large society (in my case a dilapidated downtown Los Angeles and the
supercharged art scene there). It is a meltdown, or shock treatment.
"De-petrification." "De-putrification." It is a cultural laxative.
Everyone knows that there is an incredible quantity of
things-that-are-wrong-in-the-world, but most everyone has the feeling
of being stuck, or overpowered by the colossal claim on control made by
obese economic and political interests.

My agency in being a curator and artist revolves around the instinct I
apparently have to lubricate the thought processes of an incredibly
multitudinous culture by adding more "mish" to the "mosh" through the
products of artful recombination. This could be in the form of a
single work of my own, a schedule of exhibits, or a group show. The
interpretation of cultural material is always variable and dubious. The
final upshot of my activities is like lighting an aesthetic backfire by
presenting images, sounds, data, words, and whatever summing up into a
hefty quantity of weightless "possibles" or "uncertainties" and
injecting it to the best of my ability into my surroundings.

In our era our surroundings have spread into the electronic space of
contemporary digital networks, mobile communication, interdisciplinary
computer media and their reproduction and dissemination. The "white
box" of a traditional gallery can be subsumed as a peripheral component
to these technologies.

Art can be a self replicating virus to crash systems of closed
mindedness. My goal is to open minds or keep them open. An open minded
culture is a viable situation. It is a paradox that a lack of focus (or
presence of ideological unclosure) becomes a focal point for cultural
ignition.

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2005