Idiot Lust

Phrases, cut-up in spirit of automatic writing...working from perspective of Neuro-Linguistic Programing techniques, interlaced with/set to revolutionary Russian music tampered with/looped and droned, while a home-made Dream Machine whirs nearby.

For the last decade-and-a-half Idiot Lust has been engaged in what most beat-manglers and noiseniks do best – namely clearing dance floors. The usual trail of brow-furrowingly obscure releases can be found, moth eaten, in hipster closets and twitching impotently on suitably moribund P2P sites. Best described as breaknoise that confronts you with a complete lack of sophistication - the time-sink of a miserable lush - Idiot Lust will astound you with cheap thrills and still cheaper gags. A stranger to himself but a lover of others; he will love you in the morning, love you in the evening, love you in the ear and leave.

One could effortlessly settle on a stream of nonsense drip-feeding the cognoscente, spreading ‘relational aesthetics’, ‘domain dialogs’ and ‘transhumanist politics’ about the place. But, from me, this would be disingenuous at best. And it is not so much from a fear of invigilation, as of obscurantism, that nothing will be said along these lines. Nor on the numinous.
Right, then: One could obviously say that one-zero-zero-one-one knows nothing about coding. In fact sitting outside of a sacred, consecrated circle, where knowledge is hinged on the laptop (mine having satanic black screen/black box issues), gave me pause as to whether a hacker [net]workshop speaks to the perpetual Luddite in me.
What I did discover, without the aid of (or as a result of not having) an intermediary, technological, device, was the level to which we have truly become cyborgs, hybrids, symbiotes; incessantly stroking the’ VURT feather’. And the extents to which my technophobia limits and delimits me are defined by the practices I engage in: my laptop dies, I revert to CDR. I do not know command lines so I plunder hundreds of occult images from the net and blast them at four frames per second. My familiarity with schematics is not circuitry-based so I blend the old-hat tech’ of a vintage turntable with a cardboard cut-out version of Gysin’s Dreamachine. Properly experienced, lucid dreaming/tripping might reasonably be expected to ensue.
My performance – rather than approximating a direct response to the first round (first lounge) artists – was negatively-geared towards the technological boundaries which I encounter on a daily basis and the limitations those boundaries exert on my artistic practice. These limitations are liberating in their own way. The ‘mother of invention…’ and all that.
On the day of NAF:TMFC - Notorious R&D, I was attempting to burn a CDR of Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano concerto (backmasked and otherwise fucked with) to use in my performance later that day. Curator Nancy Mauro-Flude said, ‘God Maus, that’s so old school.’ And she’s right. I mean, you only have to look at what some of the other artists involved were peddling (Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev for example: ‘Routing, core protocols, network analysis… packet capture and dissection’), and I start to look like a dusty biped with a fleshy bone and no mastery of fire. This is the point when Arthur C. Clarke’s 3rd Law applies inarguably, directly, to me.
The artistic practices utilised in this instance have been influenced by a sense of limitation/liberation, then, somewhat akin to the Dogme 95 ethos, wherein novel approaches are hatched out of self-imposed strictures. Through attending the workshops I learned how effortlessly individuals with the requisite occult skills can disrupt information flows and render clueless those under their mesmerism. I cannot re-rout a trusted news outlet. But even the coarsest technology can be conscripted in the service of mind control. That’s all that any (h)ac(k)tivism or art-form does essentially; intentionally, purposefully influence the viewer’s mind.
Phenomenology is political, in that an ostensible participatory democracy of consensus reality is always threatened by the totalitarian grip on information flows. But I can change (if just for one night, or a few lousy minutes) the shape of reality for all those in my range of influence/destruction, simply enough. Even with the props of a technological yesteryear.
I am not here to spread the gospel of steel-toothed impresarios, tearing up the cobblestones in search of the beach. An extension of my craft has obtained, facilitated by a techno-somatic collaboration with the thematic, improvisational dance of Karine Rathle and Anne Goldebberg. In future I seek to gain a deeper understanding of the tools of my choosing, if only to better capture the sublime errors and erstwhile ephemera, I have heretofore milked, more effectively.

Idiot Lust//Maus Person