John Berndt
John Berndt (born 1967 ) is a musician, activist subculture, former Neoist and Internet entrepreneur from Baltimore, USA.
Life
After he had already composed a child experimental electro-acoustic music, John Berndt came in 1985 into contact with the experimental art scene of his hometown of Baltimore. Formative influence on him had the Neoist, musicians, experimental film -maker, and anarchist subculture veteran tentatively, a convenience, with whom he worked closely until 1989. 1985-1989 Berndt published several editions of multiple Neoist SMILE magazine, wrote numerous manifestos Neoist and experimental texts and appeared as a performance artist. In his texts and performances, he tried to combine experimental art with philosophical thought experiments and paradoxes.
Berndt 1986 studied art in Florence, worked with European Neoists as Reinhardt U. Sevol, Vittore Baroni and Pete Horobin and participated in the 64th Neoist Apartment Festival in Berlin. In 1988 he participated, together with a blindfold, as a blind chronicler at the One Millionth Neoist Apartment Festival in New York.
Berndt it was a radical undermining of conventional categories of truth, reality and cognition through a radically - experimental, at the same time artistic, philosophical and political practice, as he understood the Neoismus. To this end, Berndt closed temporarily also Stewart Home and its cleaved from Neoismus projects of the Festivals of Plagiarism and an art strikes of 1990 to 1993. He criticized from the beginning, what he perceived as their shortcomings and careerist motives. The Festival of Plagiarism he sat 1988 Festival of Censorship contrary, the propagated censorship as means of expression. Homes project an anti-art historiography he wanted to add to a history of anti- scientific and antihumanistischer traditions of thought. His informants for this were, inter alia, Martin Heidegger, Alfred Korzybski, Charles Fort and Henry Flynt. Berndt has since worked closely with Flynt together, including as editor of his theoretical writings as well as the first publisher of his record Electronic Hillbilly Music.
As of 1990, Berndt turned largely on Neoismus. He became an Internet entrepreneur, but also - in addition to Jean Rolland Dubé Joseph, Tristan Renaud and others - a member of the Groupe Absence in Montreal as well as a correspondent for the Italian Luther Blissett Project. In Baltimore, he founded the High Zero Festival and the High Zero Foundation for improvisation music, performance art - place Red Room as well as the record label Recorded for experimental music. In addition to his professional activities, he has today is primarily a saxophonist and improvising musicians, including together with violinist Jon Rose, the experimental instrument builder Neil Feather and saxophonist Jack Wright, and graduated with them international concert tours. With the mail art artists, writers and humorists Al Ackerman also connects him a long-term cooperation.
Writings
- Stewart Home (ed.), Mind Invaders, London, 1997; by John Berndt: Counterrevolutionary Communism ( pp. 16-18 ), Dialectical immaterialism (p. 129-133 ) and Chronicle of the Neoast Observer at the so - called Millionth Apartment Festival (p. 179/186 )
- Luther Blissett, Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0, Turin 2000; by John Berndt: A Luther Blissett Manifesto (p. 79)