People, bots and strangers!

Audience and Non-Audience of the 21st century!

I have once again risen from my depression swamp in order to bring you this text!!!!!!

(WOAH!!!!!!)

So, my theatrical media meditation luigi mario luigi mario (2024) was recently added by JohnLee Cooper to a collection of “plundercore”, and thus labeled as such, and of course, as an artist-academic: I don’t like this label and I have something to say about that and maybe it’s interesting for others as well.

What is “plundercore” even supposed to mean???

I searched for an official academic book on “plundercore”, but I didn’t find anything. Instead, I found the Wikipedia article on John Oswald’s plunderphonics (sound collaging stuff together – the real ones have of course read my stage play Sound & Space. About Earth. (And Beyond.) from 2021 and listened to the soundtrack that spans about 3 days in its entirety, and they know that I do work with sound collage!!!), as well as an article discussing one of the luigi games that were curated for this “Year of Luigi” exhibition that I also have been requested for/a part of. To position myself very clearly here, and to distance myself yet again: This article shows traces of a professional “networking art world” that I am so heavily arguing against and that I explicitly DO NOT want to be associated with. I tolerate it, that professional artists follow me or sth, but I do not like it, and I myself have broken completely with everything surrounding the neoliberal infiltration, the discriminatory basis, the exclusionary practices of the art world. The future of art should not be organized in any institution whatsoever, kept together by art school graduates (such as I UNFORTUNATELY am myself) and other lurkers of the establishment – because the violence of the circumstances of art production, including discrimination etc, will never end when art is organized in the same way by the same people. And it is unfortunate that people get tricked into those tame status-quo-mindsets that are hindering progress and the ultimate goal of DESTRUCTION of every possible aspect of artistic organization.

I am against art schools and against the art world and everything that has to do with it, and I always have been suspicious of it all, and I will always be. Professional artists are not my friends until proven friendly, and even then they remain sus lol, and possibly complicit in structural and systemic violence and abuse that I myself also have been victim of as well as complicit in. I don’t think that (we as) art school graduates can get rid of our backgrounds being complicit in abuse that easily, it takes courage and more radical actions.

THE TRUE INNOVATORS OF ART ARE THE SELF-TAUGHT DIY HOBBYISTS WHO NEVER WENT TO ART SCHOOL AND WHO ARE NON-NETWORKED AND NON-PLATFORMED AND ACTUALLY NOT SOMEWHERE AT ALL – AND YET THEY MAKE ART AS IF THEY HAD ALL OF THAT.

- Okay, back to the topic.

Interestingly, another result from my quick web search was Gérard Genette’s famous 1982 theoretical book Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. (Whyever this result popped up lol! Happy little accident, I guess! I highly doubt that Genette mentions "plundercore" anywhere lol.) Since I have a background mostly in literature, and the rest is kinda self-taught (but also the literature is self-taught because I didn’t learn anything at university lol!!!), this is exactly where I am coming from in my art (together with for example Julia Kristeva’s writings on intertextuality of course). The basis of all of my art is always literature and traditional theatre, and also experimental film – I am rarely a gamer at all, so I genuinely lack in references in that field. And that’s fine, that’s great even, because it makes one’s work BETTER in my view!!!! Because my brain is not CLUTTERED with NORMATIVE sets of references from the field!!!! When I was writing literature, I was barely reading, but referencing video games. When I am doing video game stuff, I am barely playing video games, but referencing literature. And so on, and so on, and so on. People always say, that you have to know your field – you can, and I do, but that doesn’t mean engaging in it in that way. Innovation doesn’t come from stagnation and being content with the status quo.

What Cooper (not the Twin Peaks guy lol) basically writes in the description of this “plundercore” collection, are well-known practices of 1) intertextuality; and 2) collage/assemblage (or if you want to, to quote Stephanie Sterling, asset flipping (yet another unnecessary label)). To quote: “Games made up of stolen pieces from recognizable works that recontextualize those pieces into new and beautiful things, often playing off of their pre-existing meanings and contexts. Transcending shitpost games into legitimately meaningful art.” The collection also mentions Arcane Kids, I read their manifesto some years ago and I think it’s a nice text, and that’s it, you can even find a quote of it on my itch.io page. (I am more of a theorist myself here, and this plays into my own theory building/researching, as will be layed out in a couple of years in my big German collection of essays, “Poetikvorlesungen” etc.)

Some more thoughts on that:

1) “Shitpost games” ARE ALSO “legimately meaningful art”. There shouldn’t be a distinction between the two.

2) Intertextuality and collage/assemblage obviously go together hand in hand. Collage IS intertextual, and intertexts (meaning for me here: written texts with a richness in references to other (written or non-written) texts) ARE USING collage (with varying degrees in explicitness). The most explicit collage technique in writing is of course direct quotation, but think of idk like Mark Z. Danielewski or Wolfram Lotz, think of Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Uncreative Writing” – there is a wide range of intertextual writing techniques possible.

3) I AM JUMPING UP THE FUCKING WALL KICKING AND SCREAMING!!!! WHY WOULD YOU NEED A PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL NEW LABEL SUCH AS “PLUNDERCORE” FOR TECHNIQUES THAT HAVE EXISTED FOR CENTURIES???? YES PEOPLE DO COLLAGES!!!! YES THEY SLAP STUFF TOGETHER!!!! YES IN ANY ART FORM, AND NOW IT IS FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, SO FUCKING WHAT???? APPROPRIATION ART, ANYONE???? FOUND FOOTAGE, ANYONE???? DADA, ANYONE???? THE READY-MADE, ANYONE???? BASIC ART HISTORY, ANYONE????? HAS ANYONE WATCHED THE SHORT FILMS FROM THE ORIGINAL SURREALISTS FROM AROUND 1920, 1930??? HAS ANYONE READ LIKE – ANYTHING???? HAS ANYONE EVER BEEN TO CONTEMPORARY THEATRE???? WHAT ARE (here in Germany for example) FRANK CASTORF, SEBASTIAN HARTMANN, FALK RICHTER, RENÉ POLLESCH (RIP) ETC ETC ETC DOING IF NOT COLLAGE??? HECK, WHAT DID TADEUSZ KANTOR DO IN THE 1970S???? ARE THEY DOING “PLUNDERCORE” THEN???? GENUINE QUESTION??? NOTHING EXISTS IN A VACUUM!!!!!! (unfortunately.) NOTHING EVER!!!!!!! I RESIST BEING LABELED AS SUCH!!!!! THE ONLY PERSON ALLOWED TO LABEL ME AT ALL IS MYSELF!!! I AM NOT PART OF “THE MOVEMENT” LIKE AT ALL!!!!! (It’s nice tho, but it seems counter-productive for both my work and my theoretical writings on my work.) I AM INDEPENDENT FROM IT ALL!!!!! NO WONDER THAT ART IS STAGNATING SO MUCH AND REPEATS SO MUCH THESE DAYS WHEN NOBODY KNOWS ART HISTORY ANYMORE!!!! OR IS EUROPEAN ART HISTORY SO FAR REMOVED FROM THE US-AMERICAN ONE THAT PEOPLE DON’T KNOW THIS STUFF, GENUINE QUESTION????

4) In the same way as the label “art game” or “notgame” (there is this truly great reply of Rainer Sigl to Tale of Tales, that I do heavily agree with!!!) is kinda absolute bullsh!t, because games are obviously always art lol (maybe they are really bad art, but they are still art), the label “plundercore” is utterly unnecessary. It doesn’t seem to be useful beyond a marketing buzzword, and maybe a “cool new thing” for people who apparently really don’t know art history. The need for such labels honestly says more about the people inventing these labels than about us arguably more-informed people having to deal with this.

I would now like to comment more specifically on what JohnLee Cooper noted in more detail on my artwork.

1) I have no idea what “plundercore staples” are. I never played a plundercore game as of now. Is there really a mandatory “my heart will go on”-moment lol??? It was just fitting to me in that specific scene.

2) What the hell are “youtube poop vibes”??? I mostly watch video essays on youtube, or very specific art things lol. And been uploading my own stuff of course, but idk if I am an avid “consumer” at all. A quick search brings to my attention that “YouTube Poop” even has a Wikipedia article – and yeah, yet again, it just describes the aforementioned collage techniques, mashups and so on. Nice try, diddy.

3) To quote: “Lastly, the opening scene seems reminiscent of the gamecube boot screen which I think is kind of genius. My nostalgic heart was waiting for the associated audio”. Thanks for the compliment, I lol’ed at that, but as a truly Gen Z gyrl I honestly have never touched a gamecube, and I don’t even know what this boot screen looks like at all. For me, it was just an obvious abstraction to start with.

4) To be precise: Cory ArcAngel’s Super Mario Clouds isn’t a game, it’s a video installation. So no, I don’t make use of another “plundercore game”. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if this didn’t already happen, and we just don’t know about it. I am actually pretty sure that this must have been done by someone somewhere around the world, but we just don’t know. For example, because they didn’t label it as “plundercore” then. Think of modding, for example, and modded games (or games that started as a mod such as The Forgotten City) being modded and so on. What is modding, if not collage? What is modding, if not “plundering”, remixing assets? Come on.

5) “I feel even worse about AI now”, yes me too lol. I don’t like to use it at all, especially since it isn’t even necessary most of the time, but occasionally yes, and when it fits the specific artwork. And yeah, AI basically smashes stuff together as well – but the text of course wasn’t AI-generated, only the voices themselves. And AI-generated audio actually has been around before the current hype of visuals, I even used it in my aforementioned 2018-2021 stage play.

And I think that would be it!!!! My notes against “plundercore”!!!

It is late at night!!! I have so much else to do!!!

I am also quite positive that I will manage to publish something bigger again here this month!!!