&Now 2015: Blast Radius

Collaboration can occur, as it did for William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, as the creation of a "third mind." It can also be full of productive tensions that spur us to create work that would otherwise have been beyond us: tensions around authorship, equality, friendship, and, in some cases, gender. This panel brings together five collaborators who have worked promiscuously, in different pairings, with one another. Their digitally-mediated work involves computationally-produced poems, touch-interactive texts, audio transcription and redaction, and a bookmarklet for creating erasures from web sites. Their presentations will address the tensions encoded in their works, the ways digitally-mediated work can both create and stabilize imbalances, the ways difference or otherness inflect the experience of collaboration, and the engagement whereby duels become duets, and vice-versa.