THE GHOST OF DADA FUTURE
3RP’s Peter Carlaftes interviews Andrei Codrescu

On the advent of the City Lights Dada World Fair in San Francisco, we asked NPR icon, Dada scholar, and MAINTENANT 10 contributor Andrei Codrescu a few questions about the future of Dada and the human race:

As Dada passes into its second century, in which ways will the movement remain relevant to the world?

Dada offers the only solutions for escaping the glass house/echo chamber of the Surveillance State.
Escape is written in the Dada genome. Some techniques, out of hundreds, to effectuate escape are collage, assemblage, paradox, humor, sabotage through mimesis, instant denial of service, and repurposing the material world and language to serve the human body and its place in the ecosystem of the planet-body. Obviously, only the anti-art effects of Dada are under observation by the theoretical-critical apparatus, and some can be followed through the art of the twentieth & first decades of the twenty-first, but the spirit of Dada, its huge NO enacted as total theater during the First World War, is urgently political and body-centered in the planet-body that is now waging a completely different war.
All historical and museum-bound considerations of Dada need to shed their molten skin to give Dada air to breathe.

How do you believe Dada can best be served by AI and technology? Or vice versa?

If AI achieves Singularity, humanity is done, and so is Dada. The Singularity of conscious Machine eliminating humans or enslaving them, is a real possibility in our lifetime. I’m not sure if anything within our brief “bio-film,” as Wm. Burroughs called it, is going to effectuate a timely linkage with other bio-happenings in a complex  multi-dimensional theater, so our best Dada hope is that outer space bugs enter the game and distribute particle computing to our dwindling imagination.

What can humanity appropriate from the Dada Movement to help embody peace and eliminate war?

There is no peace: we are at war. Peace can’t be embodied now except as a surrender of all and any ideas of social coexistence within disembodied social networks. The war we are in is new, everyone is a combatant, and escape from it depends on the self-destruction of every object employed by the simulacra of humans trading liberty through faux-logical schizo-projections. Shrinking into the vegetal or animal surround and using camouflage that isn’t a hidden commercial sell-off is the battle of the moment. See what you can come up with today. Your assignment is ten new ways of saying “no” in the next five minutes.

The City Lights Dada World Fair takes place in locations throughout San Francisco from Tuesday, November 1–Sunday, November 13. Here is the link for events:                                http://www.dadaworldfair.net/devil-in-the-details/

And please check out Andrei on Election Night at the SF Art Institute and both Andrei & 3RP on Thursday, November 10 for the Dada Seance & Parade through North Beach starting in City Lights Bookstore at 8 p.m. where Mr. Codrescu will embody the Dada spirit of Tristan Tzara.