&Now 2015: Blast Radius

Our panel will engage with embodiment and disembodiment through a series of performances, readings, and screenings that make use of bodies both as the form and the content of our projects, and that present these bodies (or lack thereof) as remixed in conjunction with digital video "texts." The panel will follow a narrative arc from full embodiment to complete absence of body via the following presentations:  

Amber Bemak’s performance employs her own body as textual surface to be read in conjunction with a film component in order to consider the ways in which a text can come to occupy a body—physically, literally—to be read by other bodies exploring language that finds its landscape in skin.

Through a combination of fractured photographic self-portraits, personal essay, reading, and disrupted video display of the essay text, Raphael Dagold’s reading/performance asks what a body experiences in alcohol-induced blackout, and what are the consequences for that body’s memory and sense of self? 

Partially inspired by Fluxus chance operations, Matt Kirkpatrick’s project "Buy One, Get One," uses PowerPoint, performance, and audience participation to celebrate and satirize how organizations target bodies for direct marketing.

Ali Rachel Pearl’s screening, a film remix of found and personal footage of the desert absence of humans, accompanied by a disembodied voice over, asks how a body disappears into the desert to become nothing but a combination of text fragments appropriated from the love letters of other bodies, other writers, present only in their remixed absence?