Essay Two: MASHUP AT THE VANCOUVER ART GALLERY: REVIEWING AND RIFFIN'

ABSTRACT: [onto]Riffology, a “plug in and play” method of inquiry that riffs across technological platforms and with all manner of material, finds easy resonance in mashup and remix. We turn our riffological sights to the Vancouver Art Gallery, which hosted MashUp from February 20th through June 12th, 2016. Creative and combinatorial, mashup is identifiable in popular discourse as fundamentally humanist and epistemological in nature; however, as an interdisciplinary, ontological practise of repurposing and reconstituting, acts of mashup also exist in geological activity, far outside of humanity, and here we apply ontological focus through riffological measures. We are interested not in seeing merely what is being exhibited, but deterritorializing what is being curated. Our emergent senses of new materialisms inform our riffology here as we ceaselessly (re)encounter the exhibition; experienced as a riff arcade of dream like experience that one mayn’t exit; like the arcades of Benjamin’s mammoth project of 1927 to 1940.