I draw on the technical metaphor of multiplexing to explain an aspect of my current practice (and perhaps a broader tendency within contemporary art) because it responds to the notion of interference. Instead of disrupting and corrupting the signal (from a notionally exterior position), multiplexing suggests an interleaving of diverse signals within an overall signal field. Art loses its heroic autonomy – its sense of innocent distance and alien viral force – and reveals a more mundane, complicit and opportunistic aspect. At the same time, in avoiding the bad faith of an illusory critical autonomy, it comes to recognise its genuine powers of attachment, its actual potential for engagement.
But I could have employed other metaphors. I have already, for instance, spoken of grafting and of piggy-backing. Art could also be positioned as a component (in the sense of the colour components in a RGB signal), or, in terms of the language of computer programming, as an interface, mix-in or trait. The latter are all means of enabling polymorphic entities – entities that are not derived from a single class blue-print, but that reveal a dimension of multiple inheritance, and, as such, a capacity to be both this and that, to be recognised equally as one thing and another. A spaceship entity in a game can both descend from a general spaceship class (and as such be positioned within a set of spaceship objects) and also draw from of any number of more generally defined traits – elusiveness, capacity to animate, capacity to die and be reborn, etc. In a similar manner, I associate the art trait with my walking and running and the latter become polymorphic. They obtain an additional aspect. They no longer simply correspond to the set of outdoor leisure activities, but also to the set of art activities. They demonstrate an integral multiplicity. There is no need to decide absolutely between one mode of categorisation and another. The dimensions are not mutually exclusive but multiplexed.