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Hand-Luggage: For a Generative Theory of ArtifactsAuthor(s): Holger SchulzeSource: Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 13, Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission andMusic (2003), pp. 61-65Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513451 .

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Hand-Luggage: For a Generative

Theory of Artifacts

Holger Schulze

FOREVER SPORTS

Looking up, we see kids in school uniforms, ducking under a ball, the view slides to the right-and a text rotates around its horizontal axis. Hovering at the center of the picture it reads: TAKE THE LOCAL CHAMPIONSHIP. A family is enjoying itself in a small living room, FIFA world cup, a text appears TAKE THE WORLD CUP, picture of a player, blackout.

Cyclists going into a curve TAKE FIRST PLACE. Finish line of a long track TAKE LAST PLACE. Tennis player in a yellow terry-cloth dress, the image trembles-she hits the ball over the net repeatedly with incredible precision TAKE CONTROL OF THE STADIUM. In front of a graffiti wall two skaters TAKE CONTROL OF THE STREETS, two street ballplayers TAKE IT SERIOUSLY, BMX-bike coming out of the halfpipe TAKE VERYSERIOUSLY, swimmers starting too fast, false start, TAKE THE LAST LEG. Crouched into the fan curve TAKE IT EASY, MY FRIEND, cheerleaders threatened by water pump guns TAKE A RUN AROUND IN CIRCLES. A scream is build-

ing as the cuts accelerate. "Right Here-Right Now!" urging the exhausted runner into his last round TAKE CONTROL OF THE STADIUM. A little boy trying scissor kicks in his room TAKE YOUR OWN APPROACH. The music is getting faster, the screen blacks out -and the text is spinning on. Impera- tive: TAKE WHAT YOU WANT!

The rhythm is closing in, taking on a beat, taking over. With the text still spinning a sign appears. FOREVER SPORTS -

period. We're there [1].

AJOURNEY We constantly are moving through a continuum of construc- tions, machines and inventions, navigating breaking news of terror, natural disaster and major international sporting events. The traffic of visual and acoustic signs, fresh foods. We

sample theories and billboards for new flagship stores, digital recording facilities and TV commercials. All this vibrates

through our bodies. We catch it, process it-or let it process-and send it out

again, changed completely. Each day is ajourney through the world. Channels wide open, we stand on subway platforms, by a car, and let our present surroundings in, suffused with artifacts. A world in which everything is produced by humans, more or less on purpose. A world in which we too are producing- with full intent. Right here, right now. In this world everyone is a producer. Well versed in text-, image- and sound-processing, we design our time slots so that others can feel relaxed and at home with us at parties, panels and breakfasts the morning after. Our task is to make our way through all these products, this ocean of artificial objects washing against our shores. Wave after wave, day after day. The choice is drowning or learning from the waves how to move in concert with them-using them and redirecting them into our own work. We decide. Great

Chain of Being. In this world no one is a professional anymore. We are

just amateurs, des dilettants universals, who use home recording and DSP, desktop publishing and digital image-processing. We have no idea how our software really works, al-

though we can produce extraordi-

nary results. What we learn is to find our own

approach for each new situation, our own way through it all. So let us start our journey through the day, in search of our very own ars inve- niendi-our individual heuristic. We

generate new artifacts out of those around us-a Theorie der Werkgenese.

ABSTRACT

This article presents the basic elements and strategies of a generative theory of artifacts, the Theorie der Werkgenese. Starting with a narrative reconstruction of Mike Mills's TV commercial for Adidas, the text briefly outlines a history of aleatoric games and heuristic strategies in the classical avant- garde as well as in postmodern follow-ups and late-20th-century pop music. Finally, the various fictions conveyed by the commercial are narrated in a new way, demonstrating generative analysis.

SIX TOOLS FOR GENESIS

How do new works come into being? I would like to introduce six tools: Necessities for our common journey. By now they have been in use everywhere for a long time. Explored by the classical avant-garde and taken up by the late avant-garde, these are now everyday tools in the age of the remix. So what do we take along in our hand-luggage?

Recipes for Genesis One tool helps generate something new anytime and any- where, with no intention needed. It works something like this:

Now try this take a walk a bus a taxi do a few errands sit down somewhere drink a coffee watch TV look through the papers now return to your place and write what you havejust seen felt thought with particular attention to precise intersection points [2].

Follow this recipe and you can be a cook. It was set down by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in 1978. A not-very-well- known German media artist, Ferdinand Kriwet [3], anticipated these instructions and played with them in the 1960s, with the

following results:

E.g. you want to visit a friend by bus; at the bus stop you are con- fronted with the timetable; a horizontal poem of numbers and icons spreads before your eyes; while riding you observe signs in- side the bus ("Do not speak to the conductor," "Hold on tightly," "Buttons are to be pressed only by the conductor"), outside, the billboards, neon signs, traffic signs are positioned for you on buildings, at construction sites, on poles and posts, and the per-

Holger Schulze (cultural theorist, writer), soundXchange, Berlin University of the Arts, ,ietzenburger Strasse 45, D-10789 Berlin, Germany. E-mail: <[email protected]>.

Web site: <http://mediumflow.editthispage.com>.

This text is based on a talk given by the author before the post-graduate colloquium Praxis and Theory of the Artistic Process, Berlin University of the Arts, 24Jutne 1999. It was translated with the help of Laura Schleussner.

LEONARDO MUSICJOURNAL, Vol. 13, pp. 61-65, 2003 61 ? 2003 ISAST



son in front of you is maybe reading a newspaper so the back page faces you [4].

This recipe is a kind of aleatoric game [5], which avant-garde artists have used to incorporate chance in their work, ei- ther by using automatic production or

improvisation, or by letting programs compute algorithms regardless of input. Perhaps a crucial aim of every avant-

garde artist is the attempt to get a little nearer to the null point where artifacts are generated-each is thus a research

group on the way to the nonintentional

starting point of art. These are the fun- damental investigations of a Theorie der

Werkgenese, i.e. the production of artifacts.

Recipes for genesis show how easy it is to begin the process. We choose sources like the examples previously men- tioned-means of transportation, public spaces and mass media-and feed them into selective filtering systems as in Kriwet's

"Writing in Public Places," Burroughs and Gysin's surprising parallels ("precise intersection points") or personal associ- ations. We then prepare a pattern for the

organization of our findings. For the above recipes, a transcription into lan-

guage signs arranged in a sequence is

preferred. Thus, the limits of chance are defined

by repertoire, selection and organization, material sources, filtering methods and patterns of distribution-what we use in

daily life but generally unconsciously [6]. After all, it is all a simple process of fil-

tering, programmed in multiple, repeating sequences, which can be applied to all levels of work genesis, from pixels and consumer products to the Gesamtwerk, a

product line.

A Map of Werkgenese Thus the limitations of our work are al-

ready established before we set out. These are natural restrictions, from which there is no escape: preferences for certain materials, the organization of workflow and movements, antipathies against certain tools or environments. There is no pure chance.

Also, there is absolutely no "Anything goes!" Even if we work randomly--or by destructing, disorganizing, decompos- ing, deconstructing-we cannot possibly transcend these limits. We can only use sources, which are also artifacts in them- selves and thus products designed very much on purpose. By choosing certain materials or products we automatically choose their underlying intentions.

It is absolutely necessary not to pursue an all-too-precise intention at the beginning of a work. Play around, but without

too distinct an aim. By jumping mind-

lessly from X to C, gathering materials as we go, we at least have some chance of

discovering a new and unexpected intention among all those alien artifacts and purposes.

If we follow only fixed intentions at the start, advance intentions-or pretension so to speak-we cannot achieve anything beyond what lies within our own limitations. Pre-calculated, fixed and deter- mined. In the words ofJimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the KLF: "Creators of music who desperately search for origi- nality usually end up with music that has none, because no room has been left for their spirit to come through" [7].

Aleatoric games are a way to make room for emerging intentions, a means of fool-

ing ourselves and loosening our hold on our willful intent-letting us digress into areas we had not put on our map. This is the way we arrive somewhere on the other side of the boundaries, which we had not even recognized as such.

Cohesion Beyond these limitations, beyond intentional acts, lie phenomena that are diffi- cult to explain in semantic terms. This is because they are not concerned with se- mantics but with the nonlinguistic properties of a material.

We cannot explain these attractive forces and surface features in terms of chance, although they are not constructed intentionally. They are the quantifiable, external properties of a material. Texture, rhythm and the physical quali- ties of the medium-in these we find the moments of crystallization within every work genesis. For example, Gertrude Stein traced phonetic similarities and

rhythmic and repetitive sequences- framed by a very limited repertoire of lin-

guistic patterns-and wrote The Making ofAmericans (1903-1911) [8]. In his Poem-

Paintings [9] of the 1960s Ferdinand Kri- wet enlarged letters and distorted and cut them until they looked like the logos of

strange corporations. Heiner Goebbels, in staging a text by Heiner Miiller (Der Auftrag, 1979), had the following epiphany while working on the text:

As soon as the English translation of this Heiner Muller text lay upside down on my desk, all the big Is (Ichs at the beginning of a sentence) popped out of the mi- nuscule English text in a special way; from this I composed the first-person em- phases at the beginning of each line, which are characteristic of the starting sequence of this Hdrstiick and concert [10].

The Is or Ichs popped out optically- not as semantic symbols, but as visual sep-

arators, plotting and hacking all the

phrases and giving them a rhythm. Struc- tures that were perceived, when the text could not be read as a semantic whole

anymore; its meaning became hidden- and the visual and phonetic layer was ob- served on the surface of the text alone.

The field of textual linguistics has coined a term for such phenomena. It calls these nonsemantic, structural properties the binding forces of a material cohesion: Surface tension. An attractive force and a contrast to the semantic content or the inner coherence of a text. For instance, cohesion includes the page lay- out, the print and the repetition of letters or sounds. The cohesion of a

sculpture would refer to the texture of its materials, its color or perhaps the sounds it produces. In photography there is

grain, color intensity and contrast. Music has the material tensions of sound, dy- namics, spatial range and rhythm.

Now, what happens if we let ourselves be drawn by these attractive forces? Let's start the engines... and see what happens.

Media Records Reality becomes a generator for working materials. We connect and record everything, both three-dimensional objects and fleeting gifts of the media, and thus move into another genre of the avant-

garde, namely the media record. This is a

fully automated generator of artifacts, free from direct human intervention. Its

early forms included the collages of news-

paper headlines by the Surrealists, Dadaists and Futurists. More complex forms were applied in Imaginary Land-

scape IV, a piece by John Cage in which 12 radios were played by 24 musicians- with each performance remixing the

given transmissions into a new momen-

tary sound space. Andy Warhol made use of media records when he put "letters, in- vitations, gifts, and magazines" [11] into cardboard boxes labeled by date (the Time Capsules). We can still view them in exhibitions.

From February 1989 to October 1990, Rainald Goetz wrote down with an inno- cent persistence what media in Germany had to say. The result was 1,600 pages full of announcements, bridging com- mentaries, voice-overs, confused corre-

spondents, speeches, forecasts and retrospectives: the media record 1989 [12]. Through short snippets of language and the sheer speed of channel-surfing, we are beamed back to the German media constellation of this period-when cable TV was rarely available, electronic networks were used exclusively by spe-

62 Shulze, Hand-Luggage



cialists and remixing seemed to be a pass- ing trend.

Media records store much more than

any common archive. They not only hold

simple transmissions or artifacts, but also

convey the historically unique way of re-

lating and mixing current artifacts-a specific media practice. So we have come to the second-to-last tool in our hand-luggage:

The Remix If every object presents us with the offer to keep processing it, then the remix can

help us get started. The late avant-garde and postmodernists call this a work in

progress or opera aperta (after Umberto Eco). But what does remixing really mean? Refer again to the KLF:

Mixing. It's one of those words that you hear all over the place from people who don't know what it really means. In case we haven't already told you, mixing is taking what is on the multi-track tape, deciding which bits will be used in what order, while you enhance all the sounds and make a ton of decisions, and then recording what's left on to a two-track, stereo master tape. The record is cut from this master [13].

Again, a filtering process. Present records and new samples are the sources. We decide "which bits will be used in what order." We choose elements and organize them in new patterns. If we "enhance all the sounds," this means nothing more than assimilating or differentiating the cohesion of our selected elements via filter-

ing, deformation, linking, rhythmatizing. This does not happen randomly but re-

quires "a ton of decisions." Kurt Schwitters had to make these

kinds of decisions when he remixed the billboard poem fmsbw by Raoul Haus- mann and played out variations of it for

years, leading up to the Sonate in Urlauten. The same went forJohn Cage when he remixed 42 jazz records into a ballet score (Imaginary Landscape V, 1952) or 600 magnetic tapes into the Williams Mix (1952). Here, filtering and

rhythmatizing do have a different form of cohesion. However, now and then a

unifying sound and beat also have to hold these mixes, with all their randomized samples, together. As the KLF rec- ommends: "Don't stop the beat. Don't lose the beat. Don't mistreat the beat.... Don't be afraid to have next to nothing in it. Worship at the feet of the primeval goddess of Groove" [14].

Beat or groove, flow or stream, cool, relaxation or funk: these are all but in- sufficient metaphors for the phenome- non of cohesion, for the binding force of the purely external, quantifiable properties of the material.

As a category, cohesion can positively describe the nonverbal and nonsemantic. It indicates not merely a lack or with- drawal of meaning but a clearer presence of the body-a body with properties that are not only technically measurable but

generally perceptible. A new, positive aesthetic comes into sight: a Theorie der Werk-

genese.

But what if all this turns out to be a little too superficial for us? What if we long for some consistent coherence? Then we use the sixth and last accessory in our baggage.

The Heuristic Fiction Brian Eno describes a personal experi- ment he performed at the beginning of the 1990s. While strolling through Hyde Park, he carried a DAT recorder and "recorded whatever sounds there hap- pened to be: cars going by, dogs, people" [15]. He cut a time segment the length of a vinyl single from this chance record-

ing, copied it again and again and lis- tened to this Hyde Park noise while

working on the computer, day after day, again and again.

Suddenly there was coherence. Not a mere randomized series of sound events, but a meaningful, even narrative se-

quence of actions. A car accelerates, fol- lowed by a dog barking, which fades out in a rush of doves.

Something that is as completely arbitrary and disconnected as that, becomes highly connected with sufficient listenings. It suddenly seems so plausible that this sound was somehow constructed [16].

The recording was not an artifact. Still, we simply cannot bear to be surrounded

by anything that is literally meaningless and generated by chance. We forget its aleatoric genesis and find ourselves in- volved in a mental game, a heuristicfiction.

Chance products seem to be the work of a composer-maybe, for example, a live-radio piece performed in Hyde Park that we had not known? We make up ti- tles like Extra Wedding Gown, Futurist Ar- chaism or Bobby Charlton. Or are these sounds only the beginning of a song that is just starting? Created by a culture ten thousand years older than ours? Played by creatures who sense that their bodies and thoughts are generated as artificially as their music? Or is what we hear as music only a sketch, an acoustically recorded drawing that is instructing us how to furnish someone's apartment?

Each of these fictions brings one ele- ment to the foreground and pushes oth-

ers back. It changes our focus each time

by alternating the interpretation of this structure from "meaningless" to "new

meaning." Every fiction shifts the order of possible meanings. Hierarchies are var- ied; what was previously central is now

unimportant, and new content takes center stage. These fictions paraphrase our intent. The choice of the material not

only remains random and driven by cohesion: now it becomes intentional, as de- termined by our particular fiction-a different fiction each time.

THE FICTIONS OF FOREVER SPORTS Our bags are packed, we're on our way, on the plane, in the car. En passant we encounter something that fascinates us: a found object, fallen from the sky, out of space, but still an artifact, made by hu- mankind. Where does our excitement originate? Who knows? We are transfig- ured, happy, uplifted and inspired in our own work. How is it possible that this

thing, this alien life form can manipulate us in such a positive way? So now let us reach for our baggage and take a:

Reality Check Consider once more the commercial made by Mike Mills for Adidas, ajob for

Agency 180 in Amsterdam [17]. There are pictures, writings, sounds. We see, hear and read while we're dashing through 14 spaces and 14 types of sports in 60 seconds.

In the first image, we land on a dark, gray empty lot where kids are playing soc- cer. Cut to a living room in light yellow; the family wears rose, mint, pastel. A player on TV wears a dark blue shirt, the first strong, non-pale color, succeeded in the next picture by the red and yellow shirts worn by cyclists-only the fans and technical crew are pale. Next, red is the color for the support team, runners in blue and white reach the finish line. There follows a yellow tennis dress; skaters in pale blue; a yellow shirt in front of a dim backdrop; a sky with palm trees. Then we see a relay race, the journey of artificially enhanced, artificially muted colors. Tension builds, then lessens for a second. We are transported by the enhanced colors, cohesion and connection through all the cuts-cuts through any lack of coherence. Director Mike Mills said in an interview: "I want the paved freeways. I love things that lie open, flat and clean. I'm not interested in the edges of things anymore" [18]. So we are moved through the movie in a cycling transition: Imperatives spin from left to right in the

Schulze, Hand-Luggage 63



center of the pictures ("TAKE THE WORLD CUP," "TAKE LAST PLACE," "TAKE CONTROL OF THE STREET," "TAKE IT SERIOUSLY," "TAKE A RUN AROUND IN CIRCLES," "TAKE WHAT YOU WANT")-the direction in which we read. We follow along offering no resis- tance. Led calmly through every scene we move with the camera. It movesjust a few

degrees, but the spinning text takes us on our journey, moving ahead, gaining speed, left to right.

The rotating text determines every scene. If it is too long, the scene is cut; picturesjump. If it is too short, the whole scene repeats; a loop occurs. The circling lines set the pace. The propeller text is the engine that powers our progress. The texts are always spinning in the same

place, whether locations change or black- outs precede cuts to other scenes. The same thing happens in the soundtrack.

Right here, right now. Coming around

again in circles, "Right here-Right now!" by Fatboy Slim. Like a mantra

telling us to take whatever there is, whatever you want. TAKE WHAT YOU WANT. What scenes do we see? What are the

songs, the texts? What fiction, what story is told? Is anything said?

In each scene the camera pans across and stops at a new person with new color combinations. We follow with our eyes. The person looks back in the direction of the camera sweep, at us, as if nothing were staged, nothing were an artifact. As if these were the live recordings of a

sports channel devoted exclusively to life's deciding moments. We are viewing a pseudo-documentary and we feel present-we feel the immediacy of watching it live. Intimate situation, direct transmission: a fiction called live.

Mills used a similar fiction for All I Need, a video clip for the French

electronic-pop band Air. A couple, both skateboarders, are depicted going through the emotions of their daily lives.

Speaking over the music, both tell how

they met each other, what they like about each other and what they do not under- stand about each other. Again, the fiction of live holds the clip together.

This fiction is even more palpable in

Mills'sfirst remix of the original ad for Adi- das. For the first 30 seconds we see the

pictures we have already seen in the original, but they are transformed, arranged differently. The tension begins at a much higher level. The hues are mostly pri- mary colors, and the soundtrack comes higher. The beat starts sooner now, and we are thrust into live or the Fiction of Presence. There is no turning back. We're here-and now!

In the first version to be cut and broad- cast-the original-the image and the music start out with an obviously lower

degree of cohesion. It takes a long time before the frequencies get louder and

compress. They persist, repeating, lasting an eternity. Another fiction paves the way for the fictions of present and live-that of duration, the long deep breath, "Eter- nity" [19]. Another factor in Mike Mills's work is "the architecture of California in all its mediocrity-the aesthetic in which I grew up." For example, "shopping malls, parking lots, diners and, of course, skate-parks" [20]. These are environments that require patience. They appear to have been built in ancient times and remain seemingly unchanged. It takes a

grim approach, an undeterred singleness of purpose, in order to achieve a mental

presence, i.e. an active presence. In every scene a snap decision is

framed by text, jolting us out of an ex- tended sequence. TAKE FIRST PLACE around the curve / TAKE CONTROL of a ball in the air / TAKE IT VERY SERI- OUSLYwhen you're in the air yourself / TAKE YOUR OWN APPROACH with a kick. The text sings, demands and com- ments on the present action. Extolling the success of the present moment, the result of working hard at your training, your studies, your workout-working hard on yourself. Mike Mills describes his own training as "skateboarding plus an academic education" [21]. This is the fiction of the whole.

Mills's second remix stresses the fiction of duration and eternity via the accompa- nying track, "Memory Gospel," a song of remembrance by Moby. Two new scenes are inserted, which change everything entirely. While the first remix seemed to take place in a twilight, which could have been early morning or evening, artificial

light, sunlight or an approaching storm, in the second remix there are brightly glowing colors. The dominant cohesion continues in the images and the music, lasting, continuing frequencies-which Fatboy Slim's track then pushes aside with the beat-here the beat lasts a long time, very faint and flowing: A beat heard as if from three streets away.

For the last round, the runners in the high-noon sun, two women run past a taxi. TAKE A RUN AROUND THE BLOCK. Cheerleaders RUN AROUND IN CIRCLES. Two fencers TAKE THE BRONZE, THE SILVER, GOLD-prac- ticing scissor kicks to TAKE YOUR OWN APPROACH-your very own method!

We fly out of the halfpipe and TAKE IT VERY SERIOUSLY, trip each other up and DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY AT ALL.

TAKE WHAT YOU WANT-take anything you want, it's all here. The tension is all gone, the pressure's off-so we can

keep the beat, now, forever, on the Fic- tion of Eternity.

References and Notes

1. Narrative interpretation of "Adidas: Forever Sports," commercial directed by Mike Mills, 1999.

2. William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (London: Routledge, 1978) p. 113.

3. Ferdinand Kriwet, born in 1942, started out as a concrete poet and developed his own so-called "mixed media art" ranging from Hortexte ("listening texts") and Sehtexte ("viewing texts") to Poem-Paintings along with different kinds of media records, e.g. on the NASA-Apollo project. See Holger Schulze, Das aleatorische Spiel. Erkundung und Anwendung der nicht- intentionalen Werkgenese im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000) pp. 263-287.

4. Ferdinand Kriwet, Leserattenfaenge, my translation (Cologne, Germany: DuMont Verlag, 1965) p. 14f. The original reads: "Sie wollen z.B. mit dem Auto- bus einen Bekannten besuchen; an der Haltestelle sehen sie sich dem Fahrplan, einem Poem aus Zahlen und Ikonen in Augenhohe senkrecht gegeniber, wahrend der Busfahrt blicken sie Schilder ('Mit dem Schaffner sprechen verboten!' 'Festen Halt suchen,' 'Betatigung dieser Knopfe nur durch den Schaffner,' etc.) im Businneren an, der- weil Reklametafeln, Neonschriften, Verkehrsschilder drauBen fir sie an Hauserwanden, auf Bauztaunen, an Stangen und Masten posieren und ihr Gegenfiber liest vielleicht gerade die Zeitung, welche ihnen ihre Riickseite zuwendet."

5. See Schulze [3].

6. Alternatively, as defined by acoustics and compo- sitional theory: aleatoric processes are those "deren Verlauf im groben festliegt, im einzelnen aber vom Zufall abhangt." Werner Meyer-Eppler, "Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme," in die reihe 1: elektronische Musik, Information iiber serielle Musik (Vi- enna, Austria, 1955) p. 22.

7. The KLF a.k.a. Bill Drummond andJimmy Cauty, The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way (London: Routledge 1988) p. ii; <http://www. instrumentality.com/themanual.html>.

8. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans: A History of a Family's Progress (1906-1908), complete version (New York; Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Villefranche-sur-Mer, France: Sonmething Else Press, 1966).

9. Examples can be found in Ferdinand Kriwet, Mitmedien. Arbeiten 1960-1975 (Dusseldorf, Germany, 1975) pp. 44-57.

10. Heiner Goebbels, "Text als Landschaft," in Neue Zeitschriftfiir Musik 157 (1996) p. 34, my translation. The original reads: "Erst, als die englische Uberset- zung dieses Heiner-Muller Textes kopfilber vor mir auf dem Schreibtisch lag, auf die vielen groBen Is aufmerksam ('Ich' als Satzanfang), die im englischen kleingeschriebenen Schriftbild aufbesondere Weise herausfallen; woraus ich dann die hervorhebenden Zeilenanfange in der ersten Person komponiert habe, die ffir die anfangliche Sequenz diese Horstucks und szenischen Konzerts charakteristisch sind." The aforementioned English translation of the text by Heiner Mfiller reads: "I am standing among men who are strangers to me.... I am dressed like an office clerk or a worker on Sunday. I have even put on a tie, my collar rubs against my neck. I am sweating.... When I move my head, the collar con- stricts my throat. I have been summoned to the boss...."

64 Schulze, Hand-Luggage



11. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Pat Hack- ett, ed. (New York: Warner Books, 1989) p. xv.

12. Rainald Goetz, 1989. Festung2.1, Vols. 1-3 (Frank- furt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993).

13. The KLF [7] p. 101.

14. The KLF [7] p. 102.

15. Cited in David Toop, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (London: Ser- pent's Tail, 1995) p. 129.

16. Cited in Toop [15].

17. Mike Mills, "Adidas: Forever Sports" (Amsterdam: Agentur 180, 1999).

18. Rebecca Casati, "Wahre Schinheit kommt von Ihnen, Mr. Mills," SZMagazin 24 (1999) p. 49. The (erman printed original reads: "Ich will die as- phaltierten Freeways. Ich liebe Dinge, die offen daliegen, flach sind, sauber. Ich interessiere mich nicht mehr fiir die Kanten der Dinge."

19. This fiction also appears in Fatboy Slim's video for the song "Eternity," which tells the story of the unending progress of human evolution from single- celled creature to amphibian, reptile and simian. A counter in the lower right-hand corner of the screen ticks away hysterically in hundreds, thousands and millions of years throughout the video-evolution happening right here, right now in milliseconds. Any wrong decision is lethal. It all leads up to the fat cliche of a young American in sunglasses, spreading out his corpulent body on a park bench in front of the setting sun with the skyline of New York City in

the background. Bloated into eternity: the aim of evolutionary presence.

20. Casati [18] p. 49. The original quotes read: "die Architektur Kaliforniens in ihrer ganzen monu- mentalen Mittelmafigkeit-die Asthetik, mit der ich aufgewachsen bin"; "Shopping Malls, Parkplatze, Diners und natfirlich Skate-Parks."

21. Casati [18] p. 48. The original reads: "Skate- boardfahren plus akademische Bildung."

Glossary

artifact-a cultural artifact is a material or immate- rial product or effect of an intentional, purposeful action.

cohesion-a category used to analyze textual strata in textual linguistics. Whereas coherence refers to the meaning of a text, i.e. its semantic values, cohesion refers to its sound or writing, i.e. the phono- logical and orthographic strata of a text. As analytical categories, cohesion and coherence do not occur in- dividually. Nevertheless, one or the other can pre- dominate. A reconstruction of their specific mechanisms can illuminate the gestalt of a text. See M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Cohesion in En- glish (London and New York: Longman, 1976) p. 5.

DSP-digital sound processing.

generative analysis-the analysis of a cultural artifact that is based not on the description and analysis of the artifact itself but on the narrative reconstruction of the strategies, procedures and revisions in the process of its emergence.

heuristic-an overarching strategy used to approach problems in general. Not an explicit method itself, but a means of finding an appropriate approach specific to the issue in question.

Horstiick-in German, a sound piece (the term also has untranslatable connotations that are lost in translation).

intentional-purposeful, with an explicit and name- able aim in mind.

Theorie der Werkgenese-a theory of the individual strategies employed by producers, artists or authors to address the processes in which a cultural artifact emerges: a generative theory of artifacts.

Manuscript received 2 January 2003.

Holger Schulze lives and works in Berlin and teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he is the initiator of a new post- graduate course in Sound Studies. He is

currently working on a three-part volume Theorie der Werkgenese; The Aleatoric Game; Heuristic; Intimacy and Mediality. He writes for newspapers, monthly journals and magazines on electronic music, develop- ments in contemporary art and new cultural life forms. Schulze is also the author of sound

pieces and of the weblog mediumflow.

Schulze, Hand-Liuggage 65



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