Last night I was online discussing a Perloff’s collection of essays Post-Modern Genres. I haven’t read this book since the last time I read it, and I think I need to order it again and give it a once over once more. The book has some great essays about Cage and his Mesostic of Joyce, and an extremely interesting essay about Laurie Anderson’s work.

My current collaborative project with Veronica Violet Rainbow Reeves, has a lot to do with a passage from this book that I found in my notes which I recorded as such :

“If the palimtext is a description of the modern era, it is also a memorial to its passing”

I can’t say much more then that, but I can say that it has everything to do with the moment of technology’s birth and at the same moment that birth signaling the death of the same technology. Kind of like the battle between HD video formats, what was it BLU-Ray vs WHATEVER, I can’t even remember now. But the idea is that new technologies often are markers of their death. The 8 track was gone in a blip and the technology that we are dealing with is new fresh and everyone is buzzed about it, but I can see it going the way of the beta-max in just a couple of years.

Will art literature and music disappear because of the digital age ? I wonder, what if all is lost, all of our music, books and art are only available online, and the electrical grid world wide ceases, civilization as we know it today is simply gone, instead we are back to bear skins and bones and the hard drives containing all of our dreams are better used to make spear heads and ritualistic jewelry. What would happen if what is invisible, that exists only in the information dimension was somehow cut off from our minds that have melded so seamlessly with this technology. Our nervous system would no longer be extended globally, but back to our bodies that we inhabit, the fanciful reality that we have created would become a memory of a memory, perhaps becoming a myth a cerebral heaven. We would tell our children of this magical place that we used to inhabit, but they could not conceive its possibilities, and they would tell their children, and their children would tell their children and so on and so forth. It’s how myths are born, down the grape vine.