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[MB] One of the first figures we see in your new work for VIRTUALLYREALITY ‘Ally Theatre: Excerpt from SYZYGY I’ is American-Israeli media programmer Haim Saban who you go on to call one of the greatest pop artists. Could you maybe explain what you mean by this?

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[BCS-S] Let's definitely talk about this... I tend generally to take a look back at the impact of both Arata Isozaki and the early Japanese Urban Metabolists having comprised the Tange Lab, most immediately, when considering or examining popular industrial constructions of the postmodern period. I'd define the postmodern period as being concurrent with the emergence of a visual cultural colloquial and a socially operable cybernetic atop that, a marked and increased destabilization of the boundaries between the orient and occident through the institution of neocolonial economic relationships, and the development of post-atomic era materials' manufacturing conditions. Those concurrent conditions generate one of their first expressions through the Metabolists' construction of modern Tokyo during midcentury and triangulate the evolution of a kind of celebrant popular 'iconic' and 'citizenry' equipped to facilitate that. It's in some contrast to what a figure like Gilles Châtelet offers up in his conception of "average man". You end up with, for the first time in the West's history of dominion, a central subject allied totally with the sum of the transphysical cybernetic materials composing them, irreducible to vocation. Their occupations blot out and you arrive at citizenry outfitted to provide this new urbanity with its glamour. Personas readymade that can be slipped in and out of people, resultantly yielding very silver-age cinema kinds of personalities... perhaps in parity of some kind with the silver inflected photochemical degradations of modern period image-making technologies, the drama of those images' ecologically corrosive potential and latent financial power completely in tow. You have these people moving as chimeras in a decidedly deterministic, unsexy manner. 

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To cut to the chase, this kind of chimerism evidences in the fractional indeterminacy of an Ai Ogawa... the machinic bombast of a Madonna, or in Haim Saban's case through the development of the affective aesthetics of a nationalistic, universalist kind of peacekeeping. But with Saban these affective aesthetics are dependent on the authority of free market popular capital. It's industrial. The era's King of Pop, Michael Jackson, accomplished something very similar-- but Michael wasn't a nation-builder in a comparable kind of way. Michael empowered people to throw hypernationalist consciousnesses aside, and to unite, which made him the most beautiful kind of dangerous because he was able to do this without leaning into the fatigue of apolitical facade in a fashion nourishing to the youngest amongst his audiences. Name any conflict within a decade or so of the millennium's turn and I can guarantee that either side was bumping Michael Jackson.. Saban, a music producer, is obviously someone who could observe and recognize this kind of power from its onset during the mid-1980s. He developed this persona enabling him to move through C-suite level drag whilst exaggerating its significations of transnational mobility and a favor for diplomatic order over grassroots resistance... in every connotation you can think of, and probably many you wouldn't immediately consider. The situational specificity of this is interesting-- for at a time where the American popular zeitgeist prepared to begin a natural period of reflection over the events constituting the second world war, Saban successfully recognized the shift in these waters and white-knuckled into existence a product that engages a postmodern technical form identifiable as "transtextual calque-mosaic”, which means plainly that he was able to transpose the semantic specificity of one content-object into a different structural context whilst retaining the product's semantic fidelity using a mosaic style pastiche of different visual and theatrical assets. To the point of literally splicing together existing licensed Super Sentai clippings with original screenwriting and theatrical affect. Like Michael, he did this in a fashion nourishing to the youngest audiences. Unlike Michael, however, he elected to speak primarily to them, and only them... on a daily basis offering up a team of child soldiers using color logic to portray the promise of Yahweh to destroy Earth by fire, to draw connection between physical transport and metaphysical transubstantiation, and to install presuppositions surrounding American racial and class consciousness. Whilst developing this program into an infinitely syndicable product, and to this day he can walk into a room and basically no one will know who he is because pop success doesn't require the repeatability of results. None of this had to be intentional, but it is what happened here. From a 50 episode set of Japanese-language and culturally-specific media materials, this guy managed to produce a generation defining piece of media art in response to the American popular zeitgeist's cutting edge and its governing metaphysic, create a top-to-bottom marketing vertical around it where one didn't previously exist, successfully turn it into an infinitely syndicable product, leverage resulting wealth from the media art into an empire of media properties. Did you realize that the Saban Capital Group happens to, essentially, be the primary US Democratic party megadonor, responsible for roughly the prior decade-and-a-half of US democratic party presidential bids... from those of Former President Obama, Former Secretary Clinton, and Current President Biden? Did you realize that the Saban Capital Group happens to be in vested holding of a venture called Everysight, which is the largest defense technology company in Israel, responsible for outfitting advanced fighter jets with augmented reality mounted display systems? Whilst also still having its hands deep in the entertainment industry?

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