an artist starves

In Fall 2004 I was stoned out of my gourd watching my star wars DVD collection for the nth time when it dawned on me.

I could remix the scenes from Star Wars to make it seem that C3P0 was some kind of evil robot from whom our heroes in stormtrooper costumes were fleeing.

I ran and wrote down some ideas and gave it a name: viral criticism. The point was that a viral critic uses elements of the text being commented upon to make one's comments upon that text, i.e., using the textual elements to analyze, rhetorically, the text. It's not afar from using evidence, it's just employing the text's possibility for re-assembly to conduct the rhetorical criticism.

I was a big, fat nerdy college kid at the time trying to find some semblance of a scholarly identity. I went back to that scribble when I was sober and realized that it was mostly gibberish. That ray of light that was my epiphany didn't make it to the page. Nevertheless, the remediation of media artifacts goes strong since the popularization of video sharing sites like youtube.

It's too bad that the majority of the videos on that site are filed by their makers under 'random,' 'lol,' and 'idk i wus bored.'

I became disenchanted with the notion of viral criticism and turned to a different tack: the virus as critic. Same smell basically, except the point would be to do a line by line rhetorical criticism of the code of some virus to explicate its workings and its relationship to the digital milieu in which it operates. That being said I applied to a job at A&M outlining this to James Aune.

I never heard back from him, nor from the countless job calls I sent out in Fall/Spring 2005-2006. Ball State would end up hiring me under a much more modest statement of research and scholarship.

Blah blah blah universities are mediocrity machines, and I continue to live in poverty.

It's 55 degrees in my apartment, I'm too proud to take a job working part time stacking boxes at UPS, and continue to write as if I'm some kind of artist.

I'm no artist, but I am hungry.