BIO
Roger Buster's not my real name, at least not originally. The first Roger Buster I met was in one of my favorite Nintendo 64 games, F-Zero X. Roger Buster's character is unassuming, but his machine has good specs, and he became one of my go-to racers.
I've been taking on new names for a while now. In college, I read a parable about the legendary Daoist figure Laozi that said he changed his name whenever he encountered misfortune. Something about that struck me, and so I went out and bought a pack of 100 nametags and proceeded to take on a new "name" each day for 100 straight days until the pack was empty. When it came to choosing an artist name years later, I found myself going back to my undergrad years and thinking about what I learned about names and what it means to take on a name.
Postmodernist art critics love to remind us that everything we produce in this era of Western culture is a mix of references to styles that already exist. Something about making art in this late-capitalist world made me think it would be funny to rip off a name from a popular and well-known piece of corporate art (the F-Zero franchise is also the origin of the popular Super Smash Bros. character Captain Falcon), but to choose a name that hardly anyone could be expected to recognize.
Although I definitely dropped the ball by not ripping off the name "Bio Rex" from another of my favorite F-Zero X racers, something about the name Roger Buster stuck in my head from the first time I heard it. The name is somewhat unassuming at first glance, but also a little bit too sing-song to sound totally natural the more times you go over it. The name Roger Buster seemed perfect to describe what it feels like to put a public face on my art in an era of digital culture when the lines between originality and replication, feeling and performing, and creating and consuming are so blurred that they don't really exist. Something also seemed right that this openly derivative name would be the label I put onto my most genuine attempts at originality. Although the tension between making and copying may be unavoidable, in my eyes the truest experiences of art live entirely in the present tense, and art creates a world of direct experience that still can manage to transcend almost all of the boundaries that we place on it.