The notion of multiplexing suggests a reserved relation between art and everyday life. Rather than directly correspond, the two maintain a polite distance even within the texture of a single event. At any time life can be separated from art and art from life. However, I am less keen now to insist upon this conjoined but distinct relation. While I have no wish to blur their relation altogether, scrupulous distance is problematic. For a start, it renders both art and life in caricatured form. Art becomes associated with reflection, performance and representation, while life appears as a terrain of unmediated simplicity. Actually I don’t think this was my intention. My aim was more to avoid dialectical sublation on either side, to preserve, as I say, the dynamic tension between art and life. Yet this tension only takes adequate shape if something is genuinely risked – if the insulation is stripped from each of the concurrent signal fields, allowing them to intermingle, short circuit one another and discover new relations.
Of course, properly speaking, multiplexing does not involve physically insulated separation. Rather than distinct wires running in tandem, there is a single wire – a single signal – that is algorithmically composed and decomposed into multiple distinct signals. Insulation then is managed in terms of the sequencing and timing of information. And it is perhaps the certainty of these operations – their neat and systematic patterns of reading and writing – that becomes problematic. It is less a matter of blurring the signals than of deranging them, of enabling diminutions and amplifications of data, points of entropic loss and weird, excessive concentration.
In short, placing art and life side by side – running them together within specific fields of action – has its consequences. The two signals affect one another. Their interaction is disruptive and has consequences for the algorithms that interpret them, that struggle to disaggregate them into component signals. Multiplexing works ultimately to unsettle its own possibility and to undermine the larger categorical system that envisages distinct, determinable signals. Art and life share a common flesh and are both intimately affected – even if only in terms of disturbing their equilibrium, their sense of distinct integral identity. Here it is less a matter of blurring into one another, of becoming indistinguishable, than of risking everything in gestures of intimacy and distance, recognition and withdrawal, temptation and loss, caressing and scarring.