What is Hyperreel-Audio?
A Madness to the Method
I realized recently that to the outside observer, Hyperreel-Audio looks a haphazard mish-mash of different projects with no real direction. First, it was electronic music. “Okay, that makes sense.” Then Thinnity came along as a vocal-based music project. “Okay, it’s still music though.” Now there’s a comedy page. Now there’s a substack page for writing.
“Has he lost his mind?”
I have a bad habit of making weird connections in my head and proceeding forward without explaining any of those connections. Anyone that has had a conversation with me can attest to how annoying I can be when I do this. I assure you, there’s a direction here and part of the purpose of The Antigraphon is to provide a method to the madness (where madness is the method).
I’m a big proponent of the idea that forcing yourself to write about things adds cohesion to your own thoughts. I think after writing out some of what I’m trying to do, I might understand what I’m trying to do better.
When I first started coming up with the idea of Hyperreel-Audio, the saying/slogan that came to my mind was The Integration of Communication. This saying is everywhere on anything I do with Hyperreel-Audio. But, what does it mean?
When we talk about communication, usually people think of things like speaking and writing. After all, those are the most obviously proliferated forms of communication (as I’m using one of them right now). Written and spoken communication are great, but they are only two forms of communication. Music is communication. Visual Art is communication. Even within written forms of communication, there are subforms, like poetry, that differ vastly from the standard forms of written communication that we typically employ.
Another concept is the idea of emergent properties. Let’s say you have object A that has properties:
Let’s say that you also have object B that has properties:
If I put object A and object B together, I can have an object C such that C has properties:
AND,
In short, sometimes when you put two things together you get a new thing that has new properties that didn’t exist in either of its components. At the heart of this concept is that interactions between the subcomponents drive the generation of new properties in the composite object. This doesn’t always happen, but it does happen a lot.
None of the components of a cake are “fluffy”, but you put them together and throw them in the oven then you have a “fluffy” thing (unless you’re making some kind of non-fluffy cake).
My belief is that if you approach the same idea from multiple different angles artistically, and you put that together into a single “art project”, then you are able to communicate deeper insights than if you just stuck to one medium.
This is The Integration of Communication.
This is why when you get something like a cassette from me, I wrote all of the music, I mixed and mastered all of the songs, and I designed all of the art. The final product is but a fractal process of this bigger fractal process that I am operating within.
My hope is that if I were to give all of my artistic output to some people that knew nothing about me, then they would be able to gleam some significant insight on who I am, how I think the world works, how I think, etc. — and perhaps even understand me and my motivations more than I understand them myself — based on the synthesis of all of these artistic media.
So, what am I trying to communicate?
I’m not quite sure I can even answer this question. I think it is a bit of this process of walking around a room blindfolded and bumping into different things than any kind of deliberate process.
As some would be able to tell by the name Hyperreel-Audio, there is a clear theme of hyperreality as defined by Jean Baudrillard. I think in terms of providing tools to understand the fakeness and uncanny nature of our current world, Baudrillard is hard to top. Almost every dysfunction in the current world stems from some kind of disconnect from reality. The problem we have is that we have let the simulacra get so out of control, we can’t trace ourselves back to reality. We are drowning in a sea of substitutions.
The problem with reality is that in many ways, it can never be better than hyperreality. I believe this is the main mechanism of why people prefer social media over real relationships. When you deal with people in the flesh, you are dealing with real people, and all of the baggage that comes with that. When you are dealing with people over social media, you are dealing with a simulacrum of that person and all of the fakeness that comes with that.
I chose the name The Antigraphon for this publication because apparently antigraphon means, “copy,” in Ancient Greek. Maybe it doesn’t really mean that and I’ve been duped, but at least it sounds cool.
I could probably talk about this topic ad infinitum which is why I’ll stop now before this article just becomes something else I can write about.
In any case, hopefully this gives some context as to what this is all about.