One last dispatch from the terminal, the I that coheres, disappears, disperses in this language, distributed in this http transmission, this missive, immersive conversive: re avant garde as software, this period which I am so fond of, explosive, immediate, engaged, believing in a new man, a new society, propelled by a new century, and the potential of a new politic, what we think and write fondly of now as a true avant savant garde. Rodchenko, Constructivism, Mayakovsky, Kino-Prada, Agitprop and so forth - and the claim that a language of these media had been defined at this exciting time and was only further amplified throughout the rest of the century but not really augmented, taken further. This avant garde as software. I was thinking about duration, presence, the work of Michael Snow, his penetrating investigation of the zoom, (Wavelength) and time, duration, (and a new kind of narrative) and of course Peter Kubelka (about whose work I discussed with Dirk of Jodi.org, who when I brought up the work of Kubelka lit up and said, yes, a big influence on us) and the work of Warhol in sleep and empire state and Vito Acconcci, and Nauman and so forth. There are many practices in poetic and structural cinema that one might argue advance the language beyond the avant twenties. Here there is a move from the kinetic and montage (of course the poetic of Berlin, Symphony of the city) into duration that is most interesting and takes the language further, certainly, an entirely new inflection of it. Perhaps the stills of Vanessa Beecroft suggest a kind of damning duration, that flattens the event of all affect that we've come to associate with models and navy seals, (stillness as opposed to excitement) just as Warhol and Snow flattened the affect of the camera and took it into new considerations of its grammar.
Perhaps these works, like netart combat the total work, resist it, counter it, and that is the pleasure of these works, as we resist the generative language of dominant softwares, and speak new languages; as they wish to speaks us, for us, we adapt them, and write through them in our own present in our own nomadic ways.
– Marc Lafia