6^

6^ is part of the Pop Manifestos series, a five video project realized in collaboration with Cokes' former students Seth Price and Damian Kulash, and originally conceived as part of a series for the conceptual band SWIPE.

"6^, based on a music track by Damian Kulash, blends essayistic text and quoted song lyrics to self-reflexively question the desires of both performer and audience in pop music forms. Kulash’s song init: A Song for Cynical Art #4 invokes the desire to write songs, rehearses the possible subject matters, then questions the subjective authenticity of such a gesture. The video literalizes the song’s implicit criticism in theoretical (essay) and practical (quoted song lyrics) registers, underlining "individual" desire as a mere shell for mass marketing. The consumer’s desire for a representation of her own personal "emotion" is sold repeatedly in atomized niches, globally."

--Tony Cokes