The Hybrid Dialectics Interview between Warren S. Neidich and Erik Morse

Abstract This interview between the writer and critic Erik Morse and the artist and theorist Warren Neidich took place over the course of two months in the fall/winter 2021–2022. The interview focuses on a body of work entitled the Hybrid Dialectics produced between 1997–2002 that served as bridge between his earlier perfomative reenactments and fictitious documents entitled, American History Reinvented,1985–1993, and his more recent neon sculptures most notably the Pizzagate Neon, 2017–2021 and his A Proposition for an alt Parthenon Marbles Recoded: The Phantom as Other (2021–2022). Neidich's project extends his interdisciplinary experiments carried out in the fields of cinema studies, structural film and apparatus theory which foregrounded cinematic devices and tools at the expense of the image. This forms the foundation of Neidich’s engagement with photographic medium as a form of politicized aesthetics embedded in a bidirectional embodied and extended cognition. His hybrid dialectics take off where artists like Michael Snow and Tony Conrad left off. They are the result of grafted neuro-opthalmologic devices, used in the measurement of squint and skewed gaze, upon the photographic lens which results in a destabilized and estranged image; making them other and queered while at the same time challenging the stillness of the photographic object. The neuro-photographic assemblages release the vibrant energy of their human and non-human subjects distributing them across the surface of the photographic paper. These portray a lexicon of control that would later appear again, in his recent neon sculptures in the form of the Google effect, meme magic, and click bait. The Hybrid Dialects represented forms of dissensus against what Guy Debord called the Society of the Spectacle where as Neidich’s recent neon work is a rebuttal of the consciousness industry of social media and Big Data.