about unitygain

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"If TV is a zoo then ... unitygain is the real wilderness"
by 99 hooker

If TV is a zoo, then the a/v collective Unity Gain is the real wilderness. Abstract, specific, loud, soft, fast, meditative — the process reveals and creates worlds within worlds within worlds. Art in the age of mechanical reproduction never had such liveliness. Here individual performers are woven into a gestalt of all things media (complete with advertising and branding). While they borrow some of the battling lingo of DJ culture (sound provider versus image maker) which of course goes back into jazz and the dozens, they really don’t square off. UG is most interestingly a group, or more accurately a kind of environment.

Unity Gain is a microcosm of the processing within which we are all subsumed. Fortunately, UG has more in mind than Ted Turner or Pepsi when they generate and manipulate material. Or maybe it is that they don’t have an agenda. Taking a cue from the granddaddy of media philosophy, Marshall McLuhen, the medium is the message. The individual impulse is always mediated by the collective process; welcome to the feedback loop. Like the wired world of late capitalism in which product is merely a vehicle for the process of accelerating capital, the individual becomes a gesture, a trail, a trajectory. Emotions are fleeting. Meaning is questionable. Order is subjective. Its all process … One can see (and occasionally hear) an individual source and compare it to the master mix, but in general one experiences the totality of the processing (The visual presentation is fabulous. Although you can watch it on MNN on Friday nights, you need to see it live at least once) The process of producing audio and visual is thus revealed in precisely the way that TV conceals itself. The "product" which emerges is less an art object or editorial than a document of a particular moment from a particular vantage point. The overwhelming sense is that any instant could be generated in infinitely different ways. Of course that is not true. UG is not going to suddenly congeal into a perfect Britney Spears commercial.

If we must choose between location (product) and velocity (process), UG is the later. While TV doesn’t have much content either, UG doesn’t need to pretend it does. They aren’t selling us anything (except perhaps the status of hipdom). Is UG a radical form of consumerism where product never lasts long enough to form an identity to be sold? Don’t get me wrong. There is content. But it is overwhelmingly abstract. Benton C. Bainbridge appears to be the one artist bringing figures and thus bits of narrative meaning into the mix. His home movies and street scenes of course carry the greatest emotional charges and are the closest to traditional artistic product. Other narration is provided by mixing in a live camera of the performers. While all good Marxists must applaud this presentation of the means of production, the viewer never sees what is on the laptop screens. Associations between actions and results are at best implied. The turntabilists are naturally more transparent. UG needs to make the other elements of production equally clear or drop the documentary conceit.

Regardless of your philosophy, it is clear UG’s process undermines aesthetics’ traditional claims to totality. Neither viewer or performer can absorb the information, let alone locate oneself within the media flow. The rhythm of representation trumps statement. For all my intellectualizing, the UG experience is sensory, not cerebral. If Art has been a mastery of material, Unity Gain marks a middle ground between accident and control. Input is not mastered, nor does it devolve into chaos. The material is distorted but not defeated by the process. At the end of the day something does survive the thresher. For all the conspiracies theory about media, UG shows that simple feedback loops and networking can undermine the system’s drive toward totality. Wilderness will creep into the zoo like rats in the lion cage.

Not unlike life in an increasingly decentralized world, Unity Gain inspires a kind of environmental approach to community a la Sim City: put a process in place, open up as many channels as possible, balance the input and output, share the controls and an identity will emerge and evolve; an identity dependant upon individuals but nevertheless greater than the whole. For those of us who still believe that "group-think" is inherently mediocre, Unity Gain may just change our minds.

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