methodology from Vx talk

Okay, so here's the intro I used for my VacilLogix work during my Duke talk (as referenced in my long-ass comment to Zach) on methodology. Hopefully, it's useful:

In facing that eternal question of what to make next, I knew that I wanted to begin doing work with more teeth — something that really brought my longstanding theoretical interests in interface, power, and culture to bear more strongly upon my artistic practice. More, specifically, I wanted to focus on what is commonly called "media arts" and its seemingly unseverable umbilical connection to that now-ubiquitous cloud of slippery systems theory known as "the New Economy."

On the one hand, I knew this umbilical connection between media arts and the New Economy provided an open conduit for powerful attack. Yet, at the same time, I'd given up on conventional modes of cultural critique. I was no longer content to traffic in recycled negativity. I wanted to avoid all the convenient artificial binaries that have polarized and paralyzed public discourse. I wanted to move beyond parody, satire, and all the prevailing tendencies of distanced, overly simplistic, and ineffectual criticism to something more productive, positive, and transformative.

But how does one transform a system from within that system? I remembered that no one had grappled with that question more effectively than Deleuze, and, so, once again, I returned to his writings and was reminded that resistance to capitalism isn't resistance at all, rather opposition is necessary to capitalism, an inherent part of its logic. And I was reminded that capitalism isn't the enemy of change, rather capitalism is change, it is revolution, it is radicality. And I began to be more convinced that the real way to make a difference wasn't to vainly attempt to resist or subvert the technolibertarian, systems theory-based, free market extremism of the New Economy, but rather to ride it, couple with it, accelerate it, amplify it, make it monstrous — a methodology Deleuze puckishly called enculage in describing his own early work:

"My book on Kant is different; I like it, I did it as a book about an enemy that tries to show how his system works, its various cogs ... But I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery (enculage) ... I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed." (Negotiations, 6)

And so, I let go of my smug artistic attachments, surrendered to the pull of the current, flowed through that umbilical conduit, and entered into the New Economy, became incorporated, shared myself with it, lost myself in it, came to learn its secrets, loved it intimately from the inside.

And, suddenly, everything came together, self-assembled into a single, cohesive, dynamic, new vision. Everything finally computed. [cue Vx video]