Hybrid Forms and Syncretic Horizons

I'm kind of a digital renaissance guy—composer, filmmaker, visual artist, designer, web/interactive creator, and writer. While I enjoy creating my work in those roles, I want to dissolve boundaries between these disciplines, reexamine conventions, and watch what happens when all the elements that make up digital culture mix and lyrically collide. How’s that work? ¶ In HYBRID FORMS AND SYNCRETIC HORIZONS, I explain how I take digitized media —music/ sound/ noise/ silence, still/ motion images, written/ spoken text — and fuse it (using interactive software) into new expressive forms, experimental performances, media objects, and events. While these hybrid forms exist outside established, recognized, familiar productions (films, books, games, concert music, etc), they often use ubiquitous technology (iPods, mobile devices; common software like Photoshop or Flash; the Internet) to realize ‘the syncretic moment’: my term for a meaningful unity of often disparate, even contradictory, materials and intensions. ¶ This book includes short essays, case studies of my own work, tutorials, and a visual framework for experimental approaches to digital media. — Joey Bargsten, author