DJ Lautréamont is a proponent of critical media literacy, professorial hacktivism, and practice-based research in the innovative arts. A former Chair in a Department of Fine Arts, he has since taken early retirement and now plays his DJ sets at low-key parties and occasional alternative gallery openings.

Other Lives

Today I am a novelist, blogger, flâneur, and post-Situationist “mark on the dérive.”

Yesterday I was a recording artist playing lead vocals for an impromptu remix ensemble called Electronique Écriture (we have since broken up).

The day before that I was a sentimental art historian pining for the good old days of “net art per se” when nobody knew what they were doing and would never, not in a million years, consider moving to New York to “find a gallery.”

The day before that I was a digital photographer and mobile phone “cinematographer” capturing new streams of data for a forthcoming film project that I am still imagining (someone jokingly asked me a couple of days ago, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I immediately answered: “Agnes Varda” and, after a pause, “at eighty.”). Film, of course, is totally the wrong word for what I am making these days. Film? How about “flim-flam”? Whatever you might want to call it, it definitely feels more like a DIY transmedia “narrative environment” that integrates aspects of expanded cinema, net art, mobile blogging, vernacular video, and electronic literature into its conceptual framework (thank you Mark Amerika: maybe you can remix me next?).

The day before that I was a creative truant, a poster-boy for pure gluttony, eating two breakfasts (a bowl of quinoa-corn flakes with grapes, raspberries, strawberries, mango, banana, plums, blueberries, blackberries, figs, raisins, dates, and soy milk [all organic/bio, naturally] and a huge poppy seed bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese), two lunches (new age ginger and vegetable pasta followed by North African vegetarian couscous with numerous [spicy] side dishes), one mid-day snack (salade nicoise), a small loaf of organic multi-grain walnut bread, a round of fresh goat cheese with chives, two papayas, one and a half avocados, a slab of sesame-almond tofu, two bottles of French red wine, a rare Belgium beer made by organic monks (yes, the Trappist monks themselves are also organic!), five cups of Fair Trade espresso (my stomach insisted it was totally unfair but, alas, I rule over it, not it over me), two thick bars of 76% Venezuelan extra bitter dark chocolate, actually make that two loaves of organic multigrain walnut bread (with hummus and cilantro pesto liberally spread atop their lightly toasted crusty textures), one cup of real hot chocolate (not the usual “pre-mix watered down with milk” variety, but basically melted dark chocolate with a small amount of milk mixed in so that it pours), a double scoop of homemade ice cream (bottom scoop praline made with pine nuts, top scoop made with figs which turns the ice cream a luminous bright red so that you feel as though you are sucking the velvet blood out of a passive [dare I say virginal?] victim), one half of a strange yellow-orange melon whose name escapes me right now, a Zen-Zombie smoothie (peach, mango, banana, soy milk, quaaludes), three servings of ratatouille served over brown rice with a side dish of rocket (arugula) topped with fresh cherry tomatoes and thinly sliced and very aged Parmigiana cheese, a bowl of cured black olives soaking in extra-virgin (dare I say cold-pressed?) olive oil with a hint of rosemary and thyme, five pistachio baklavas, and many other things that I can’t remember (wait! how could I forget? the faux potato latkes made out of okara at this very strange hole-in-the-wall Japanese take out joint and that came with a ginger-soy dipping sauce that I would now give half my salary for), especially after the unexpected hit of Absinthe that one of my colleagues insisted I drink as a way to get over pining about the good old days of ascii net.art and way-too-Modernist hypertext fiction (which is itself a fictitious pining, since the good old days were never as good as some would have you believe, and besides, is ten or fifteen years really that old?).

Tomorrow I will be a producer raising funds for yet another huge project that will be a multi-media documentation of various digital personae whose flux identities enable them to create a collaborative, social media art-making machine remixed out of the scraps of data left behind on the other World Wide Web, the one that has its secret protocols, handshakes, codes, seductions, and missing links (the one you will never hear of because you are too bound by institutions and the cultural logic of late postmodernism).

I suppose that one day the public password for this underground WWW will finally be revealed so that everyone, even the Facebook (m)asses, can experience the ultimate pleasure one derives from becoming the kind of uber-sexy, “live currency” one must embody if they expect to transmit their eve of destruction into the replicant agenda of the all-consuming corporate media mind-controllers and their elitist art world cohorts.

For now, though, I must take leave of my senses and allow them to be overrun by the swarm of lips she has promised to entomb me with.

You, on the other hand, must get back to work.

C’est la vie.