“A Post-Production Turn: New Media, New Practice, New Ontology,” is a video project recently published in Textshop Experiments (Volume 5 | Summer 2018). The project grounds itself in a post-critical orientation and situates to make (and to make available) as necessarily a precedent for any conditional to make sense of. This suggests a need to foreground the productive dimensions of working with digital media, as to have digital existence and/or to participate as digital citizen requires one to produce — i.e., to make things and to share them through digital means (not excluding nondigital distributions as well). Further, as Gregory L. Ulmer suggests in his article “Flash Reason,” today’s digital creatives are increasingly working within the realm of readymades—where everything (including our very own likenesses) are suspect to a readymade conditionality. Which is to say, if avant garde artists like Marcel Duchamp employed readymades to call attention to critical art practices (calling into question the very ideologies of art history/art culture), what is occurring in a post-digital moment is that everything is now susceptible to digitization (and digital mishaps) and so exists with the potential to become (perpetually so) part of the never-ending archive of readymade objects and subjects, artifacts and expressions.

Thus, the critical contribution of any post-digital practitioner may come not from any definitive act of criticism, but rather from an electrate prototyping: i.e., working creatives, who are yet critically attuned, finding ways to leverage a world of readymades and repeating signifiers to create conductive resonances within a multisensory and multi-representational, mediated experience. In so doing, what gets exposed to an interested, viewing public is not only the representational practices of electracy, but the dimensions to which the dreamwork logic of flash reason becomes suspect to rhetorical practice (i.e., where post-production operations allow for remaking and reimagining the mediated artifacts of today’s digital-real mixed reality).