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…

Jon McKenzie , University of Wisconsin-Madison Enculturation : http://enculturation.net/smart-media ( Published: September 27, 2012 ) This special section of Enculturation features four sets of experimental media projects produced at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, three by English students enrolled in different courses I have taught over the past several years and one recent experiment of my own. As indicated in the short descriptions provided by their producers, these projects vary in content, form, medium, and function, but all can be understood as emerging scholarly genres—or what we’re calling at UW-Madison smart media . At a time when bookstores are closing, when the MLA is questioning the monograph as the dominant model for dissertations, a time when academic publishers are grappling with the many challenges posed by the web, it is little wonder that smart media such as TED talks, theory comix, video essays, and interactive installations have emerged. Smart media supplement the traditional scholarly genres of book, article, and conference paper, adding elements closely identified with new media: digital images, video, and sound, as well as interactivity. These emerging scholarly genres mix ideas and affects, logos and graphe . If, as Jacques Derrida, Gregory Ulmer, and others have long argued, logocentric writing marginalizes graphe , smart media turns on the high-res display, cranks up the volume, and plays with the inputs and outputs. Writing in no way disappears: it remains a crucial though reinscribed track in a multimedia composition—or rather, design . For design is to digital media what composition is to writing: a craft that can be learned and taught, one that has a long history yet still produces surprises, amazement, and, admittedly, at times clichés and boredom. At UW-Madison, I direct DesignLab , a new design support center for student media projects that works closely with the Libraries (where it is institutionally situated), our central IT…