Abstract

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/the-revelations-of-drKx4l3ndj3r ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) In March, 2011, I was invited by Austrian artist Ralo Mayer to write an essay for an exhibition catalogue to accompany his first major solo show, Obviously a Major Malfunction/KAGO KAGO KAGO BE . Mayer’s interest in experimental, performative research had led him to my book Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance , especially its eccentric second half, whose trajectory begins with the NASA Challenger disaster. This event had had a profound effect on the artist, as it had on me, and he asked if I could reprise some of my book for the catalogue. I soon discovered that Mayer had already remediated certain disastronautic elements of Perform or Else into his multi-medium conceptual art. As his research borders on speculative fiction, I decided to compose a gay sci-fi text remixing his work back with my own, while also stirring in a reading of certain passages from Nietzsche’s Nachlass. The result was the cosmographic text “The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r,” bilingually published in German and English in Obviously A Major Malfunction by Ralo Mayer (Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Linz, Austria). As I had recently been invited to give a keynote presentation at a Performance Design conference in Santiago, I decided to create a multimedia version based on “Revelations.” I narrated the text into my iPhone, imported it into GarageBand, and began mixing in music and sound effects to create the audio. I also invited Mayer to contribute by recording some of his own texts and emails, which would allow me to slice in his voice as well as his imagery. As I completed each audio section, I began designing with visuals, starting in Keynote and finishing in Final Cut Pro. Since my Santiago audience would be overwhelmingly Spanish-speaking, I also had the text translated and the entire video subtitled. I presented a full, though…