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Decoding the Reality Studio

Decoding the Reality Studio Mallory Catlett, G Lucas Crane, and Alex Wermer-Colan PRELUDE: CUTTING UP THE REALITY STUDIO Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. —William S. Burroughs, Literary Outlaw, 1988 ecoder is an evolving series of multimedia concerts, videos, and sound recordings exploring the visionary language of William S. Burroughs on Dthe merging of body, media, and machine. In the early 1960s and 1970s, Burroughs composed an elaborate set of instructions, encoded in sci-fi novels, essays, films, and tape recordings, explaining how to use technology to escape control—societal, political, and personal. What emerged was a prophecy, in a biological language, about the technological takeover of the human ner vous sys- tem. Devised and performed in the age of Trump, Decoder employs Burroughs’s cut-up methods to test whether it is possible to reverse engineer the technological and ideological systems he warned would come to dominate contemporary life. In The Electronic Revolution, first published in 1970, and updated after Watergate in 1973, Burroughs theorized the development of cybernetic communication technologies that would facilitate the viral spread of reactionary ideas. As he observed in his collection of interviews published in 1969, The Job, “The mass http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art MIT Press

Decoding the Reality Studio

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References (4)

Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
Copyright © MIT Press
ISSN
1520-281X
eISSN
1537-9477
DOI
10.1162/pajj_a_00516
Publisher site
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Abstract

Mallory Catlett, G Lucas Crane, and Alex Wermer-Colan PRELUDE: CUTTING UP THE REALITY STUDIO Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage. —William S. Burroughs, Literary Outlaw, 1988 ecoder is an evolving series of multimedia concerts, videos, and sound recordings exploring the visionary language of William S. Burroughs on Dthe merging of body, media, and machine. In the early 1960s and 1970s, Burroughs composed an elaborate set of instructions, encoded in sci-fi novels, essays, films, and tape recordings, explaining how to use technology to escape control—societal, political, and personal. What emerged was a prophecy, in a biological language, about the technological takeover of the human ner vous sys- tem. Devised and performed in the age of Trump, Decoder employs Burroughs’s cut-up methods to test whether it is possible to reverse engineer the technological and ideological systems he warned would come to dominate contemporary life. In The Electronic Revolution, first published in 1970, and updated after Watergate in 1973, Burroughs theorized the development of cybernetic communication technologies that would facilitate the viral spread of reactionary ideas. As he observed in his collection of interviews published in 1969, The Job, “The mass

Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art – MIT Press

Published: May 1, 2020

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