Description
The following thesis investigates our current cultural impasse—the “slow cancellation of the future”—through the unearthing of visuals, sounds, and technologies of televisual artifacts and aesthetics that is authored and performed using strategies in hybridity, pastiche, and repetition of pop culture iconography of the past. In the postmodern climate of resurrecting content of our past, we also unearth hidden contexts that continue to haunt in our collapsed time. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist method of hauntology, as adapted by contemporary media theorist Mark Fisher, speculates new constructions of meaning through notions of history, memory and identity by operating within the gaps and traces of ruptured time. Hauntology is an attempt to identify these paradoxes and to destabilize and undermine the binaries that represent our foundational perspectives and practices. Through this conceptual strategy, the television reveals itself as an uncanny technologized space of both play and disruption, where the past simultaneously defines and interrupts the present.
My central research involves examining the televisual spaces in two music videos by Detroit rap artist Danny Brown. By placing himself into simulated televisual spaces of the past, Brown is able to speculate different meanings in the present by uncovering and exposing the contradictions that the smooth operation of our larger ideological system actively tries to repress. These videos, released under Brown’s 2016 album Atrocity Exhibition, transcend beyond nostalgic desire and into a surreal technologized simulation where the boundaries between time and history, self and Other, and past and present are forgotten, remembered, and reimagined.
Keywords: Danny Brown, Jacques Derrida, Mark Fisher, hip-hop, hauntology, uncanny, Detroit, television
