Remediating “The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r”

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 rough-cut, Spanish version of The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r in Santiago, Chile, on April 22, 2012.

I am here presenting two sections of The Revelations of Dr. Kx4l3ndj3r: “Prelude & Introduction” and “Axis 3: X is a Rare Form of Disaster,” which have also been screened at The Nonhuman Turn conference (Center for 21st-Century Studies, Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) and Performance Studies international (University of Leeds). The complete version runs 33 minutes.