THIS IS POP TRONIC: MANIFESTO

Pop Tronics is the research frontier that collapses the science of pop culture with the art of time travel. Here at The Pop Tronic Institute we are dedicated to reconfiguring cultural debris to produce ruptures in the space-time continuum of the dataverse. Found material is charged with multiple vectors of time. Through the operation of collage the Pop Tronicist attempts to scramble these visual time codes, remixing them to generate new experiences of the temporal zones from which they were sourced. PUTTING THE TIME BACK INTO TIME-BASED ART The founding premise of Pop Tronics is that time travel has already happened. The camera is a teleporter device - abducting a frame out of real time and transmitting it into the future. COLLAGE AS SHAPE-SHIFTING Shape-shifting is an alien technic of transformation. Collage is the earth science of shape shifting - the master art of the contemporary tabloid magazine. On the cover of NW this week Jennifer Aniston holds up two fingers in the universal symbol of peace. The image caption explains that Jen hasn’t had sex with Brad for two years. Through this unnatural conjunction of text and image Jen’s peace symbol shape-shifts into a public declaration of a two-year abstinence. This conclusively proves that image matter does not need to change in appearance to change in effect. Collage is the extraterrestrial action that already understands this. The only reliable constant is context (and that’s always shifting). THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OF POP Pop knows where you have been. A picture of a celebrity demands either you know me, or you don’t. One of the ramifications of such a face-off is that you come to know what it is that you know. In other words, remix takes a photo of your tastes. More than that, it actually rewires what you know by familiarising you to a sample that you might come into contact with later. Fragment by fragment the remix hopes to bastardise the world. But in order not to alarm viewers with the conceptual magnitude of this plot, all art objects developed at the Pop Tronic Institute are designed with an unthreatening veneer of stupidity, vulgarity or baseness.  PROUD SUPPORTERS OF THE S.C.C The Pop Tronic Institute is a committed supporter of the S.C.C (Society for the Conservation of the Cut). As digital culture hurtles ever onward towards fluid hi-fi super real effects, we try to retard aesthetics with an equal zeal. The cut between samples is where time codes collide. Where meaning shifts. For these reasons, the Pop Tronicist will always resist the tyranny of seamlessness and champion the aesthetics of the awkward POP WITH TRONICS Pop Art’s ability to mash highbrow and lowbrow culture paved the way for Pop Tronic’s essentially mono-brow outlook. But Pop Art strayed from Pop Tronics by whoring itself to generative creative arts such as painting. This violates the Zero Originality Clause of Pop Tronic which states “Under no circumstances must the Pop Tronicist stray from the sanctioned triad of operations: Copy, Cut and Collage.” It is for this reason that while we graciously acknowledges the conceptual ground work of The Factory, we reserve our fanaticism for the great remix scientists of the early 1980s - Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Wizard Theodore and Afrika Bambaataa. Soda_Jerk  04/06