a re-edited/remixed version of a blog initially published at http://guydart.blogspot.com/

Cicerone is guide aboard a High Powered Lovecraft, sailing a notion of an ocean soaked in liquefying images. It's a matrix of unstable relations, related in micronarratives emerging briefly from a backdrop of scrambled signals. Messages sink back into the mire of referents as quickly as they are apprehended. Cicerone is a mirrorman, a journeyman, a matchstickman, pictured in a fractured universe, a cosmos of viral images transmitted through time/warped space. He browses dimensions stacked like hyperlinked subtexts and sidebars, anecdoted topologies, random encounters and unlikely turns of event.

Cicerone flips coins and rolls dice to ascertain the order of things, or to enhance the disorder of things, whatever. He's rolling and tumbling through a popular history of signs, his mojo is working on overdrive, superdrive, driving him crazy, driving through a landscape of dreams, of dreams, of dreams and dramatic pauses. All those dreams that money could buy, that money has bought, and sold.

Cicerone's journeys are constructs, relationally aestheticised assemblages of association, steeped in a history of artful manipulation. Every picture tells a story, then another one, then another one. Every picture is a liar. Every picture is the truth, literally, transliterally, an alliterated accumulation of inferred narratives. Cicerone is the guide aboard a tour bus, driving in circles and spirals on a road to nowhere, somewhere on or off a map that is drawn and redrawn in memory and song. Lines of song, lines of text, white lines that mark the road, red lines that are borders, thin lines that are easily crossed or erased, invisible lines that link events across unlikely distances.

Cicerone is a collector, hunting and gathering fleeting impressions that are the folklore of a dissipating culture. He stakes his pitch from here to here, from now to now, a barker harking back to vanished public fora where storytellers and soothsayers built architectures of narrative upon which cultural heritage would rest. There's a thin red line running through his cabinet of curiosities, a thin red line like the laser sight of a guided missile, a semantic bomb that is smart enough to explode on impact with meaning. After the explosion the dust settles and Cicerone sifts through the debris looking for clues, making links, hoping to reconstruct a chain of events. Once he finds out the circumstances, then he can go out and build another reality, draw another map, tell another story, translate another text, illuminate another manuscript.

Cicerone could be a monk, jacked up on info-speed, drip-fed data from a wired world. He's google-eyed and dizzy with wonder at the prospect of embarking on a tour of that mirror world reflected in a pool of shared knowledge. He's a wicker man, a wikiman, a distributed entity, spellbound and cast in the role of interpretor.

Cicerone thinks in frames and edits, loops and intervals, layers and masks. He cuts, splices and mixes the elements that coalesce in compounds of precipitated meaning. He's a mix doctor, which doctors the patient unravelling of narrative threads that were woven in webs and networks by spiders from mars. It's a war of the worlds, a war of the words that tell you what to think and who to buy or sell. If you are branded or stranded on a terminal beach by an ocean of indeterminacy, let Cicerone be your principle buoy, your guide aboard a starcraft that will warpdrive you to the Holy Woods beyond that land of nodding affirmation where opinions cluster around a totemic pole of dissociation; the meaning of the interval; a kind of dissonance.