Eventually, all things must flow together as one. In the overabundance of the daily media intake, ultimately, we must process and integrate the streams of information that activate our sensory reception. Otherwise, we’re doomed. This is the urgency of our increasingly mediated condition. For if received information goes unchecked – as fragmented, disparate modalities – the brain will eventually seize and misfire and reject the meaning of things. Or perhaps we’re already there: swimming upstream and gasping for breath in the choppy turbulence of sensory overflow.
This is the predicament I face in the production of The Post Reality Show: how to assemble this unbridled, multi-layered phantasmagoria into a (seemingly) controlled synthesis, a gesamtdatenwerk (total data work) that harnesses the chaotic modalities of text, sound, and image into a unified language of awe. I see this as the driving force behind the “art of abundance:” minimalist thinking is OUT and the maximalist is IN. The aberrations of glitch, remix, blending, collage and the like are a response to the urgent need to synthesize the sensory overflow that will either drown us or blind us or transport us to another place in time and space.
This is the call: to marshal whatever techniques of mediation I can unleash on the senses to conduct the overflow: the evolving role of the composer of media in the age of saturation.