Great blurb! Avant-Pop is that blurb itself: part pop, part Futurism, part cyberpunk, part specto-Situationist theory, part and parcel!
People keep asking me, What is Avant-Pop? Sometimes, instead of trying to define what it is (check out the different versions of my Avant-Pop manifesto for that rap), I prefer to focus on what it is NOT. Avant-Pop, the admixture of alchemical avant-gardism and shamanistic capital-formation (pop culture), is NOT your ordinary art movement. Sure, when we look back at the psychic dysruptions caused by other art movements from the 20th Century like Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism and specto-Situationism, Avant-Pop is directly connected to the lineage that brought us artists like Artaud, Lautreamont, Joyce, Henry Miller, Burroughs, Lester Bowie, Lenny Bruce and even the pyrotechnics of Warhol's merz-Factory. But Avant-Pop, always in the process of reinventing itself, is part of an emerging digital culture that is hypertextually-linked to much more than the art movements of the last hundred and twenty years.
What do we mean when we say hypertextually-linked? In this context, we're talking about perceived or not perceived lineages (Anti-Oedipus calls them lines of flight) that connect recent writing and art with a decidedly materialistic frame of reference (what some Materialists call History-In-The-Making or the Dream World of Mass Culture). This frame of reference grows out of the great artistic and scientific discoveries of the recent past but also finds itself significantly attached to what cyberpunks call the Future of Now.
The World Wide Web of potential interconnectivity is the ongoing result of godzillions of futuristic-oriented neurons transmitting whatever necessary energy and data the moment demands. The moment is always changing its demands and this requires a constant rewriting of what software engineers call source code (for our purposes here I'll refer to it simply as code). Code is what assists us in linking all of our energy and data together. In this world, all is code and all is hypertextually-linked. If you think this is too New Agey in a creative-spiritualism sort of way, I assure you it is not. There are real issues of survival here. All of this talk about information-haves and have-nots and survival of the fittest is for real. For those of us not lucky enough to be born under the sign of the God-almighty dollar, being hypertextually-linked to the World Wide Web of nonstop energy and data interactivity is just as important as sucking in the nutrients we need to fulfill the daily requirements of our bloodstream. Code is food. It can be eaten, can eat you, can eat itself (which reminds me of the ubiquitous slogan "Avant-Pop Will Eat Itself!") without even being conscious of its actions.
Our single most crucial objective as electronic writers, publishers and networkers is to position ourselves NOW so that we can democratize the means of distribution which, up to this point, has put a stranglehold on our ability to survive as artists in a commodity culture. We need to aggressively build a multitude of content-filled sites that store the kind of creative work which continually challenges us to further defamiliarise the pretentious pop culture whose banality wants to turn us from passive consumers to falsely-constructed interactive consumers. We need to create the alternatives that we ourselves desire to choose from and not rely on the big money conglomerations to do our network-bidding for us. Once we have these personally-designed sites strewn all across the globe, we will see a florescence of activity which will generate an emerging audience of like-minded dreamers and creators who can then usher forth and share their tender buttons with us thus creating the largest most interconnected group of artists in World History. What will emerge is a huge network made up of small, out-of-control yet interconnected micro-networks whose idea of order will come together out of necessity rather than brutal enforcement (for a poetic reading of this strange world of chaos and order, check out Wallace Stevens' "The Necessary Angel").
So: back to question one: what is Avant-Pop? WE are Avant-Pop. We 'R' Us. Toyboys and Riot Grrls always at the point of becoming hypereroticized Digital Artists who venture into the sticky realm of the fictional becoming. Once inside this sticky realm, she-boy riot toys start interacting with an alternative-code their parents once got busted for playing around with (their sentence was something like 12 years, eight of Reagan, four of Bush...but what's next?).
Definitions are not worth the effort although acknowledging lineages is. I don't want to hash over the history of the avant-garde and its meeting up with an electronic pop culture in the 60's (I'll soon publish an essay devoted to the subject called "Avant-Pop and The New Electronic Media: Thread Baring Itself In Ten Posts"...check my WWW electronic publishing network, Alternative-X, at marketplace.com, for that). I will say that Avant-Pop is NOT trendy. Other things it is NOT:
Great blurb! Avant-Pop is that blurb itself: part pop, part Futurism, part cyberpunk, part specto-Situationist theory, part and parcel!