&Now 2015: Blast Radius

All festival participants + the general public are invited to improvise in a live space and time together.

Performance instructions:  
1. During Rules of the Cosmos, you are a performer and audience member simultaneously.  Everyone is a celestial body in this universe. 

2. In preparation, bring writing about the cosmos and additional themes. This can be any combination of your own work, work by others, found texts, and imaginary languages.
 
3. You are encouraged to make active decisions to shape the event: decide when to read your writing and how to read together with other performers.
 
4. A curator announces the beginning and end of the 1-hour performance.
 
5. Performers walk around the space reading aloud, sometimes standing still and sometimes being silent.
  
6. At some point, performers exchange writing with each other and then read their new texts aloud.
 
7. At some point, performers form into small clusters like a nebula of stars and share a choral moment through repetition, chant, or movement.

Please rvsp at the Rules of the Cosmos Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/390432157802969/

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Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin in Chicago, IL.  Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers.  Founded in 2005, the over eighty events have featured a diversity of renowned creative minds. 

 As a standard metaphor to describe writing, “voice” often overlooks its 
corporeal dimensions at the same time it over-privileges sincerity and authenticity. Yet the voice—disembodied, ventriloquized, multiple, natural, denatured, captive, reproduced, silenced, uncontrollable, queer, nonsynchronous, post-wounded, vulnerable, racialized, post-racial, radicalized, exploitive, authoritative—is as physical and literal as a face. It is both a construct and invariably exists in excess of its own construction. How do writers make use of other disciplinary concepts of voice? How do writers pressure the voice: affect as manifested between the biological and the social, between the personal and political, between language and nonlanguage? This panel seeks to investigate voice in relation to figuration in the work of Laura Elrick, Miranda Mellis, Christina Milletti, and Claudia Rankine.

It's a book fair!

"Bad boundaries”: they’re symptomatic of immaturity, personality disorder, neediness, and/or lesbianism. While certain kinds of boundary-crossing (i.e., the blurring of gender binaries, the hybridizing of genre categories) are celebrated in queer and innovative art and writing circles, it seems even--maybe especially--those of us most invested in these kinds of boundary refusals are at the same time concerned with maintaining healthy relationship boundaries and solid ethics on issues of privacy and consent. The writers and artists on this panel steal and collage, breach and blur, queer. We also, though, have suspect ethics: we divulge secrets from others’ private lives, forge inappropriate  intimacies, and force audiences to be complicit in our messy feelings. But inherent in our bad boundaries, we hope, is potential for collaboration and connection, for a devaluation of the discrete subject and an embrace of overlap, multiplicity, and exchange. 

Five signs that you might have bad boundaries: 
1. You, like Dodie Bellamy, find yourself adopting the/an unlocatable first person voice. 
2. You, like Stephen van Dyck, swap tales of financial and emotional woe with customer service agents over the phone and secretly air them on the radio. 
3. You, like Sam Cohen, hate the idea of survival of the fittest enough to form a collaborative, interspecies theory of evolution. 
4. You, like Megan Milks, itch for a parasitic aesthetics with political and erotic potential. 
5. You, like Matias Viegener, obsess over the encroaching drone invasion, but secretly long to be one.

How to Traffic in Books (And Trace that Traffic): Small Press Editorial Practices in Both Californias / Cómo traficar los libros (y trazar ese tráfico): Prácticas editoriales independientes en las dos Californias

Antena proposes to spark a dialogue—or, ideally, a multi-logue—around cross-cultural and cross-language small press work, defining "cross" and "cultural" in extremely broad and non-traditional terms. Our panel features representatives from four independent presses—two with ties to Southern California and two with ties to Baja California. Each of these presses works across and beyond the borders of language, culture, genre, and aesthetics to create publications, events and interventions that redefine both what is and what is possible. Our panel includes René Castillo from Centro Cultural Artes del Libro (Tijuana), both members of Antena from Libros Antena Books (Houston and Los Angeles), Gidi Loza from Observatorio Editorial Tijuana (Tijuana), and three members of the collective that forms Writ Large Press (Los Angeles). Our panel will be bilingual (some presenters speaking Spanish and some speaking English) and will be interpreted by Antena Los Ángeles, the local satellite of Antena.

Antena’s practice is based in creating spaces for dialogue and discussion where multiple languages coexist on an equal footing. When multiple languages are used in the same room, our capacities for thinking and for communication expand exponentially. In this case, the coexistence of Spanish and English in the same room is also a clear rebuke to a doggedly monolingual U.S. intellectual and social environment. We are especially excited to explore bilingual/multilingual literary practice in the specific context of the “two Californias” that are bisected by the contested and complicated U.S.-Mexico border.

This presentation focuses on a new approach to narrative and narrative design which deploys graphic elements and design thinking strategies to arrive at ‘hybrid’ image/texts. There is a small, secret history of designed works in fiction, from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Mark Danielwski’s House of Leaves. The visual literacy and communication methods of the design field open up new possibilities in fiction, from structuring narratives in a formally designed way to creating moments of emotional impact with well-timed visual or typographical surprises. The combination of text and image-based narrative has implications for interactive works, graphic novels, games, and designed novels. Zach Dodson and Saku Heinänen are building a new Graphic Design masters curriculum around the techniques and methodologies of hybrid works at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. The program is interdisciplinary as well as widely cross-cultural, creating a tinder box for new ideas. Heinänen has also developed a minor course of studies, Pixstories, which combine animation and storytelling. Here they present these emerging fields, the programs built around them, and a peek at the exciting works that are emerging from a hybridization of storytelling.

Douglas Kearney, The Grunt

Martin Gubbins and Carlos Soto Roman, Alternative Set of Procedures”. The subject matter of this performance is torture. Inspired in the CIA’s Kurback Manual and Bush administration’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, and appropriating and recontextualizing texts from different sources (such as Joan of Arc’s trials, and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola). As performers and sons of the so called “Shock Doctrine”, we are entirely committed to achieving a different level of awareness through a different kind of narrative, which deals with the objectification of sensation, and the cold treatment of hot issues.

Christine Wertheim, Madonnas and Child. A sound-performance about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, examining the intersections between this political situation and the infantilizations produced by colonialism.

Type of event: a (performative) presentation & roundtable conversation with simultaneous anti-‐‐surveillance hair & makeup party demo 

Description: Situated somewhere between hands and screen, image and commerce, agency and narcissism, the body and its representation, six poets take up the tangled questions that surround feminist poetics and interventions online. Their diverse web-‐‐based projects address the politics of touch/gesture as we move to mobile platforms, the freedom and limits of "selfie poetics" as women commandeer the gaze and create social personae, cyborg feminism, the re-‐‐purposing of devalued feminine materials, passive aggressive performance, and ambivalent refusal of recognition. What are the possibilities and limits of FemTechNet, Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants, or the Anti-‐‐Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party? How does speed and ephemerality—or a small sub-‐‐cultural poetry audience—shape these projects? Who are they for? What are the intersections of internet-‐‐based creative practices and identity writing [by women] [of color]? Where does the internet extend into the life of local communities when sexual violence is named there? As a tool for art making, consciousness raising, and social organizing, how are we using the internet now, and what else might be possible? What new forms of identity politics and gender performance are emerging in digital poetics projects? What forms of women's innovative digital writing have we already lost? How are women redefining poiesis for a virtual age?   

Which Witch Writers-In-Residence: Which Witch Books  is partnering with the Saugus Cafe for a very special Writers-in-Residence weekend as part of the &NOW15 Literary Conference. We are inviting writers/artists/thinkers/do-ers to reserve a slot (minimum 30 minute commitment) at the Saugus Cafe, Santa Clarita's infamous old-time establishment, to work on a piece of writing/communicative artwork which will culminate in a publication produced by Which Witch.

The purpose of the Which Witch Writing Residency is to inspire new creative work. While CalArts will serve as the main site of activity during the &NOW conference, WW aims to reconnect its Writers-in-Residence to the unique environment and history of Santa Clarita Valley. 

The sole criterion for acceptance into the WW Writing Residency is willingness. 

The Saugus is open 24/hrs, serving diner food, coffee and beverages from its fully stocked bar.

If you would like to be a Which Witch Writer-in-Residence, please sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/which-witch-writers-in-residence-at-the-saugus-cafe-tickets-15748129078?aff=es2&rank=0 

 

In three writing sessions during the &Now Festival, Guido Ignatti will compose a text about contemporary art. He’ll be alone in a room on the CalArts campus with only a typewriter, some paper, and a pencil. The scene will be streamed on a website announced on a placard to &Now participants. After the third writing session, on the final day of the festival, Ignatti will frame the typescript and hang it next to the placard. 

Ignatti’s performance makes visible the struggle to conceive ideas and put thoughts to paper while isolated from many of the apparatuses and functions that determine writing today. He’ll go without the Internet, his computer, and Control+Z. Since this will be the first time that he’ll use a typewriter, the performance may be as much about his physical interaction with the device as it is about his intellectual work. Writing about the present using a device from another era, Ignatti’s site-specific performance evokes CalArts’ long history of fostering experimental artistic and literary practices. 

The performance can be seen during the listed times on www.guidoignatti.com.ar 

Which Witch Books Presents Eclairage: Which Witch's first publication, "Eclairage" by Jen Hutton, is currently in production and will debut in Spring 2015. The text -- written to be heard rather than read -- focuses on two female musicians (Claire and Clare), simultaneously complicating and reveling in the aural quality of language.  Which Witch will preview the book to the &NOW community through an interpretive "reading" of the text, which will include a musical performance of the scored text, composed by Greg Uhlmann.

A panel on the use of divinatory practices as related to writing and writing experiments. We will investigate traditional and non-traditional “divine” modes of communication and their impact on personal and political writing practices. Emerson Whitney will moderate a panel discussion between Schutzman, Kapil, and Saterstrom.  Mady Schutzman will discuss an array of practices that acknowledge the contract between the known and the unknown world, practices situated in radical doubt and that keep ambivalence (and creativity) healthy.  Bhanu Kapil’s practice is deeply rooted in personalized ritual and unbridled experimentation, for example: “bibliomancy — the art of divination in libraries — [has] always been an instinctive part of my life…” she said in a recent interview with Tinge Magazine. “I let my hand drift, palm down — to sense through the palm, as in palmistry — the way I learned it. An under-art. The sense that it is never the line that holds the news of a life, but what flows beneath and through it.” Saterstrom too engages what she calls “divinatory poetics,” or exercises into writing through tarot, channeling techniques, and hermeneutics. Finally, Whitney is a writer currently working on a project involving divining for strangers, embodying the fortune teller stereotype as a means to explore his ethnic gypsy (Romani) heritage, while also engaging the history of chance operations in art and writing, coincidence, correlation, and faith. 

The mind generates every word we write. The mind is housed in the body. The body aches, and suffers. The art of medicine heals the body. The art of literature heals the mind. How is fiction altered when the various organs of the body, such as the brain, or the body in its corporeality and bareness, become central "characters" and begin to control and navigate the narrative? Can art and medicine coexist with another when one is deemed as "fiction" and the other as "real," the latter stemming from objective observations and physiological data? Is it the confluence of such an interaction that creates eccentric literature and gives it lungs to breathe, a heart to beat, and a brain to think, and allow it to become more than an "art"?

And from the confluence of these arts, the most eccentric literature emerges. This panel, consisting of a psychiatrist, a neurologist, and a family physician, will address these questions and explore how a medical perspective can, and must indeed, question and alter a traditional narrative that does not address a body in its physiological and psychological underpinnings, and allow literature to become "eccentric," or, in other words, "real."

This panel is aimed at discussing perceptions and conceptions of text as a fluid medium. We will examine the ways in which the seemingly fixed medium of the written word alters into complex motions that represent the dynamics of speech, thought, meaning and feeling. As is made clear from the beginning of Matthew Nye’s novel Pike and Bloom, any page is a potential field of interactions that comes to life as soon as a reader sets his or her eyes upon it, allowing the essentially fluid nature of meaning making to be enacted. Dan Beachy-Quick turns his highly perceptive experience of the world into a language experience, shared with the reader, calling the senses back into the intellect, and playing with the materiality of words to let them emerge from the page into the reader, impressing his or her senses with lasting and moving traces. 

The plasticity of these texts will also be considered through the translation process. While some aspects of the source text have to be given up, what is it that makes it across the boundary of a language’s frontier? What is the permanence of a translated text (or of any text in time)? Can we still think of texts as having a fixed status in the age of digital arts and media? How does conceiving of a text as a fluid medium allow for meaning to be carried, while resisting its potentially reified fate? 

Our reflexion will involve performances of the authors’ texts, in English and French.

Although Apostrophe Books has defined itself as a publisher of “innovative poetry,” our authors have transgressed even this label by making all generic categories of writing somewhat suspect. From Tony Trigilio’s conceptual deformation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise to Joe Milazzo’s bizarre and haunting palimpsests to Gina Abelkop’s sinister and surreal mock romances, Apostrophe writers don’t simply perform “interventions on movements, canons, timelines, and other gatekeepers of the status quo,” they eschew whatever’s on the other side of those gates all together. 

The mantra at Apostrophe is not simply innovation, but pataphysical innovation. This means the philosophy of the absurd, the ecology of hypothetical experience, the science of imaginary solutions. Our authors challenge categories and genre distinctions most often associated with literature and poetry via discourse that intersects philosophy, cultural studies, theory, and, especially, pataphysics. By investigating language and consciousness through conceptual operations, parody & pastiche, Oulipo-like methods, surrealist conceits, and cross-genre experiments, these writers expand potential definitions of literature. The intersection of poetic discourse with pataphysics involves an “anti-metaphysical” trajectory that delights in the uncertain and indeterminate nature of human experience; a kind of postmodern negative capability. Our writers subvert the idea of a “well-crafted” poem by disclosing its own operations and undermining presumptions about what constitutes a poem. 

After a short introduction from the editors (Mark Tursi and Richard Greenfield), five APOSTROPHE authors (Tony Trigilio, Joe Milazzo, Catherine Meng, Gina Abelkop and Johannes Göransson) will read their work. A panel discussion with the writers and editors concerning the characteristics of our aesthetic followed by questions from the audience.

A reading and Q & A featuring fiction writing that is in one way or another acutely aware of art; that either takes art and art making as its subject, and/or is deeply, intentionally and formally indebted to another art form. The meeting of fiction and art opens up a generative window onto narrative – how best to tell a story, what story (if any) is to be told. Fiction also performs an important worlding function (often, but not always satirical), with the potential to render the “art world” anew. While as critic Maria Fusco rightly observes, “the bridge between fiction writing and visual art making is a wide one, too broad in fact to traverse with any real surefooted assurance,” this panel will hone in on five different pathways and their intersections.

Emerging technologies are transforming how we collect, process, and transmit data. Traditionally, we take in new data through our senses, augmented or otherwise, as facts of direct observation, and then analyze that data in the hopes of finding patterns therein. Those patterns are information, i.e. representations of data, which provide the foundation for knowledges built across cultures, disciplines, and practices. Now, in the era of “Big Data”, this model of knowledge acquisition is crumbling around us, because the volume, velocity, and variety of new data greatly exceeds our ability to process it using traditional means.  

Critics have increasingly regarded “Big Data” as a crisis of theory, and most have looked to science for solutions. In contrast, this panel of artist‐theorists will look to their own literary practices, as well as the practices of other authors and artists, and examine how artists can represent, interpret, and contextualize data to help generate new theories, knowledges, and literatures. VJ Um Amel will present “Tweet World”, a 3D immersive experience that uses actual tweets from global protests and 2D network visualizations to build worlds. Erik Loyer will show “Stepwise”, an open source web and mobile framework for one‐button performance of procedural text. Adam Sulzdorf‐Liszkiewicz will present “Mark Ditto Mark”, a conceptual novel generated by a browser extension, as well as an overview of several other literary and artistic browser extensions. Jeremy Hight will present “34 north 118 west”, the first GPS‐driven locative narrative, and “Carrizo Parkfield Diaries”, a sound, image, and text narrative edited by data from sensors in the San Andreas fault. These presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion of data‐driven literary pract

A screening of several short works of video art in which language – be it political speech, literary work, or invented narrative -- features prominently. The event is designed to spark a discussion about adaptation, histories/ possibilities of language use on the screen, the relationship between supplied, moving image and conjured, mental image, as well as between the spoken and written word. The program will present diverse, recent work by several contemporary video artists, most of whom are local and available for a Q & A afterwards, including:

Danielle Dean, No Lye, TRT 10 minutes, 2013. Confined to a bathroom, five women communicate with the limit of words taken from political speech and advertising from Ebony magazine and Vogue. The women are engaging in making a bomb.

Harry Dodge, Unkillable, TRT 19 minutes, 2011, and Ipse Dixit, TRT 2 minute, 2011. Ipse Dixit is a two-minute loop that uses the simplest tools of Final Cut Pro to deliver a short transcription on the end of the world. The black comedy Unkillable investigates the potency of images made from language by means of monologic performance: wearing a mask, Dodge performs a “text-story” of a would-be film made up of progressively appalling events.

Mariah Garnett, Garbage, The City, and Death. TRT 8 minutes, 2012. The video consists of three scenes from a Fassbinder play of the same title, which was banned from the stage in Germany in 1985. The adaptation consists of the scenes between Roma, the prostitute and Franz, her boyfriend/pimp, with the filmmaker playing Franz and her half-sister, Joanna Coleman, playing Roma. 

Dylan Mira, Untitled (Agua Viva), TRT 13 minutes, 2013. Features the filmmaker’s ailing father reading aloud from Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva from his home hospital bed; his recitation is punctuated by his announcements of distaste for the book as well as by acerbic, tender commentary from his wife about her husband’s character and life.

Tyler Oyer, Calling All Divas: TASASKASP, TRT 4 minutes, 2014. A performative piece utilizing language by Shakespeare, as filtered through Karen Black and an original drag persona.

Maggie Nelson will moderate.

The use of the image with poetic compositions with images is hardly a new practice – consider Blake’s plates, the concrete poems of Apollinaire, Auden’s ekphrasis. While different in approach, each of these practices intersect with images and representation. Since the technological developments of Photoshop, JavaScript, and other such programs, the limits of how a poet can create, use, and/or manipulate an image have exploded.

This panel will be a hybrid of critical presentations and creative readings which interrogate the panelists’ and others’ use of art and imagery in their writing, ultimately considering the intersection between poetry and “the image.” This will include but not be limited to appropriative digital collage, kinetic digital poems, palimpsests, ekphrasis, and the word-as-image.

This reading by Nightboat Books authors showcases the press’s commitment resist convention and transcends boundaries by publishing books rich with poignancy, intelligence and risk. In this presentation, authors will read poems and hybrid work inspired by and in conversation with different senses, technologies, and art forms. To give a few examples: Christina Davis will talk about and read poems that have emerged from daily exposure to an audio archive and how the human voice has changed over the course of the 20th (and 21st) centuries. Martha Ronk will read poems that are direct responses to individual black and white images, many influenced by Barthes's critical work and focus on photography's relationship to death. Together, these writers will offer a vibrant, diverse snapshot of innovative writing in 2015.

Ben Lerner, at the latest Brooklyn Festival, claimed onstage that his new novel 10:04 was ‘‘science fiction.’’ The book’s settings are entirely realistic, however, and its two major events are two recent hurricanes, first Irene and then Sandy. Those were, of course, climate events—their damage exacerbated by humanity’s abuse of the environment.   

So too, the novels and stories known loosely as ‘‘cli-fi,’’ addressing the current climate crisis, challenge and destabilize conventional notions of ‘‘sci-fi.’’ On the one hand, such work imagines a changed world. On the other, cli-fi also eschews genre elements, such as the apparatus of time- or space-travel. Instead, such novels and stories tends to exist in an alternative ‘‘now,’’ different in some essential way from our own, but otherwise using machinery and social structures we recognize. That’s the case even in so accessible and celebrated a text as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. In that novel, the final chapters are set in an America at once our own and yet significantly otherwise. A similar alternative reality can be seen in lesser-known and more challenging fictions, by writers as diverse as George Saunders and Margaret Atwood. 

Our roundtable will address such literary work as both writers and readers. It will consider outstanding examples, such as those named already, and also grapple with difficulties of composition. In complicating our sense of the moment, cli-fi also transgresses boundaries between the artistic modes, and indeed all the arts.

Laura Ann Samuelson (dance artist) and Bhanu Kapil (writer) create a performance that is also an open laboratory [incubation] for everyone who attends it.  They are interested in the cross-exchange between movement/dance/improvisation and writing: what it means to track sensations and gestures [micro-movements/extensions] during and across both processes. What happens when a dancer and a writer incubate their works simultaneously or with a common interest in following sensory processes, to build performances and texts from the bottom up?  

Join this collaborative experimental session of Writing On It All as we take to the walls to explore the intersections between personal identity and bureaucratic language within the structure of forms. How do we translate ourselves into the narratives of the institution, the university, the state, and the nation? How do forms shape our individual and collective identities, and are they re/shaped in turn? Interpolated as employees, students, medical patients (insured and uninsured), applicants, immigrants, business travelers and tourists, voters and consumers, adopters and adoptees, account holders, jurors and criminals, how do we become readable for the statistical eye and what are those opaque areas in which our status remains illegible? We will play with these highly codified and formulaic discourses which are ubiquitous in everyday life, denaturing their apparently natural existence, undermining the universality of subjection to this genre, and proliferating the languages in which forms can be filled out. Getting angry, lyrical, humorous, or unintelligible - and just plain getting back at all those forms - we are going to question the practice of filling them out by projecting them onto walls, creating a collective space of exposure where we can write back and rewrite, and appropriate and refuse, the strictures of literal forms.

We speak as a mongrel horde, from the eye of a dog of uncertain parentage. Our texts are half-breeds, mutant—cross-breeding languages and media, breaking colonizing vocabularies and signs upon themselves. In our poems and performances, we splice text-genes, graft image-skins under the cipher of the hybrid, the sign of the cur. The results are transmuted bodies that are our double—stuttering, obscenely baroque, blind. Lacunae and aporia, indwell. The text-body without borders, without discernable organs that bleeds into visual media and performance art. The failed body of the migrating text that refuses to stop in its perambulations and involutions. The text that eats itself with cannibal intelligence. Poetry as a language prosthesis indicating not absence but excess. The sublime radiance of that.

A panel addressing the locations we posit for for texts and the locations of political bodies, performative bodies, and gendered bodies within their architecture.

 

Abraham Avnisan, “Collocations” (reading & presentation)

Collocations appropriates two key texts from Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein’s historic debates about the complementary relationship between position and momentum on the one hand, and determinacy and indeterminacy on the other.  In quantum mechanics, that relationship is mediated by an experimental apparatus through which the experimenter observes the phenomenon in question; in Collocations, the tablet computer is that experimental apparatus, and the user’s choice to manipulate either its position or momentum allows certain poetic texts to become determinate at the expense of others.  As the user manipulates the device in space, certain words from within Bohr and Einstein’s original texts begin to vibrate, becoming highlighted and forming poetic subtexts.  Striking a delicate balance between completely predetermined and randomly generated texts, these poems embody the fundamental indeterminacy of matter without sacrificing poetic agency.  At the intersection of science, art, language and code, Collocations posits a new quantum poetics that disrupts classical notions of textuality and offers new possibilities for reading.The experimental findings of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century constituted a profound disruption of prevailing world views whose reverberations continue to be felt today.  Building on the transdisciplinary work of particle physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, Collocations develops a quantum poetics by reading the scientific and philosophical implications of quantum mechanics across the disciplines of experimental literature and interactive media arts.  If quantum mechanics radically undermines the classical picture of the world described by Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian metaphysics, the successful translation of quantum mechanics from a physical theory into a textual system must reconceive classical notions of authorship, textuality and the act of reading itself.

 

Luke Pendrell, “Ignis Fatuus (Ghost Light)” (film screening with possible reading)

“Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one. Détournement is the opposite of quotation...” (Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967)  Ignis Fatuus takes Debord’s imperative at its word by appropriating and reworking the text of his seminal 1967 text ‘The society of The Spectacle’. The reconfigured text is collaged with a staccato monochromatic montage of subliminal images and cinematic fragments; the hyper-detritus of consumer capitalism over scored with an unsettling soundtrack of glitch and rupture. “The flat eclecticism of the New Aesthetic and the Post-Internet generation—an endlessly multifarious universe that comes prequantified into discrete and isomorphic tumblr thumbnails.” (Mackay, Pendrell and Trafford, Speculative Aesthetics, 2014) The uncannily prescient spectre of Debord haunts the footage throughout. A malign revenant, its scabrous critique as caustically damning of contemporary interactive media as it once was of film and television. More than just Derridean word games or mournful ‘Hauntological’ nostalgia for lost radicalism, Ignis Fatuus conjures ghostly echoes and disturbing undercurrents in contemporary life, a dark parallax to the perception of social media as a benign creative space of opportunity and friendship. The ghost, rather than supernatural relic of a primitive age, is an increasingly prevalent aspect of the modern world. Immateriality and spectrality are axiomatic to the digital realms we inhabit. Life has become an immense accumulation of ghosts. Everything that was once directly lived is now haunted by itself.

Edwin Torres, “On the Precipice of Edge and Trigger” (solo presentation)

Out of the layers presented in the form of our bodies, in the guise of our skin — are the valleys between each layer. The peaks at the center of each motion, from step to step, is the movement that calls itself human. The layers we present are the edges that make us human. To be human is not to define but to be. To be poet is to undefine…beginning with the edges we present. The imaginary page — my identity, my story — the one at the margins. The corners I view from safe distances, such as — not here. I'd like to present a 20 minute talk exploring the tools poets use to extend past the seeming edges of language and to articulate the rich “between” spaces – between sound and definition, body and nation – that drive our poetry in hidden, powerful ways. Where does the body leave the poet in the making of the poem? Where does the voice replace the body in the creating of the poet? The sensory imperfections of the world are the transitory episodes that envelop, contain and release you. Your edge is incredibly porous, your existence, unfolding within it. Your skin doesn’t keep the universe away. Instead it is the edge that joins your existence to everything else. And this conference is an exchange of supernatural edges — using language as the trigger to our edge.

Jhave

My talk (adapted from and utilizing some material intended for  the cancelled 'Speculative Academies' panel) will outline and demonstrate (with a speed screen-reading and a skid across an algorithmic map) a tentative methodological path for augmented exploratory writing that attempts to retain and reframe the author in an era of entropic machines.  

The techniques of transferring an image to a surface (or an image from one support to another) are part and parcel of the history of art, yet this international panel wishes to concentrate on the interrelations between the arts and poetry today, and namely on how poetry transfers visuality into page-based language. It will seek to discuss the tendencies of conceptual and post-conceptual writing to transfer the language of the arts to the language of poetry and, specifically, to the language of the page. This panel will also be a way to reassess and critique the problematic relationships between the arts and poetry in the most recent poetry: why and how does current poetry need to borrow the categories, the name, and the techniques of preexisting art movements? Questions of interest for this panel will be: how does poetry accommodate visual, definitional and linguistic transfers? How does poetry play with digital material (visual or otherwise) when it seeks to transfer it to the page? What does the visual space of a page mean to a poet today? And how does a book become a grammatical box? 

Frances Richard will revisit Lucy Lippard's essay "Escape Attempts" (1996), her critical look back at Conceptualism. Olivier Brossard will examine Morten Søndergaard's Wordpharmacy, and talk about the transformation of the space of the book into that of the book-object, transferring the poetic consideration of grammar to the language of the box. Vincent Broquawill examine the work of Robert Fitterman, Caroline Bergvall, Ellie Ga and Jena Osman and their many transfers from art shows, multimedia pieces to the page. Martin Glaz Serup will look into how documentary and pseudo-documentary strategies are applied concerning found material and how it is distributed on the page, in the works of Heimrad Bäcker, Åke Hodell and Esther Dischereit.

In our creative-critical presentation, we ask how the occult, as geography, is a making of energy that creates, represents, contains and contests the narratives lived as and through our bodies. Our presentation will explore occult geographies as both concept and artistic practice in its material, theoretical and textual manifestations and valences.  

We will interweave our pieces as a performative reading that seeks to amplify the presentation’s arguments and inquiries. In the place of a single-authored and delivered paper, we offer a collaborative, contrapuntal engagement that embodies the constitutive practices we discuss in our presentation. We ask how the occult, what often remains hidden or beyond our allowed knowledges and understandings, is a navigating force that invites us to embody alternative epistemological and narrative perspectives.

We ask how tracing occult geographies may catapult us into a different destiny and reform our bodies and ways of being. We explore how such attentions make visible embedded forms of state violence, including the built-environment and its manufactured realities. In accord, we analyze narrative treatments of the body as a polluted site and divining rod in contested social spaces. 

We examine the 19th century Victorian practice of using female clairvoyants to perform psychic explorations. Thus, how do female writers negotiate an audience that expects, condemns, and craves her otherworldliness? Further, we turn to current work on non-human materialisms and its challenge to humanist-centered discourses to map how what we inhale, swallow, rub against and commune with are often less-visible or avowed agents in our lives. 

Transconceptualisms: Emergent Poetics in Spanish 
Transconceptualismos: poéticas emergentes en español 

Reading / Round table 

At the turn of the 21st Century forces in literature engaged in a worldwide conversation upon aesthetic values, particularly un/originality within the craft of writing. In 2012, Vanessa Place referred to conceptualisms as “the first international literary movement.”  Mexican author and artist Ulises Carrion (1941-1989) wrote that “plagiarism is the starting point of creativity in the new art.” These moments in writing point out to the dawning of a conversation in which Spanish speaking writers have a clear voice and strong presence. We will read the works of experimental Spanish speaking writers shedding light upon the context of global conceptualisms.

It's a book fair!

Which Witch Writers-In-Residence: Which Witch Books  is partnering with the Saugus Cafe for a very special Writers-in-Residence weekend as part of the &NOW15 Literary Conference. We are inviting writers/artists/thinkers/do-ers to reserve a slot (minimum 30 minute commitment) at the Saugus Cafe, Santa Clarita's infamous old-time establishment, to work on a piece of writing/communicative artwork which will culminate in a publication produced by Which Witch.

The purpose of the Which Witch Writing Residency is to inspire new creative work. While CalArts will serve as the main site of activity during the &NOW conference, WW aims to reconnect its Writers-in-Residence to the unique environment and history of Santa Clarita Valley. 

The sole criterion for acceptance into the WW Writing Residency is willingness. 

The Saugus is open 24/hrs, serving diner food, coffee and beverages from its fully stocked bar.

If you would like to be a Which Witch Writer-in-Residence, please sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/which-witch-writers-in-residence-at-the-saugus-cafe-tickets-15748129078?aff=es2&rank=0 

 

Mess o' Catfish: Four Working in the Solid South Attempting to Create a Neo-Regionalism of Innovative Writing Below the Bug Line

Finding ourselves in a solid south of traditional Southern Gothic Fiction and Agrarian Poetry, we are seeking to establish, in content and form, new renderings of Southern American voice and accent and in so doing reinvigorate the exhausted category of "Regional Writing." We will present our work and discuss its connections to the dynamic places that generate it and ways in which such work encourages and documents actual change in the cultural and physical landscape of the Old South.

This panel will explore literary practices that revolve around changing sensory capacities and spatial resonances, and consider both the written text and literary practice as a materiality that concretely affects and changes the body and atmosphere. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's canonical texts, the panel brings together five female writers who work within, around, and between different physical and emotional spaces and who question what it means to articulate via language the specific resonances and repetitions of a space, the unique architectures of the body, and the associated memories and narratives of a place. From meditations on distance, memory, devastation, and the body, to looking at how text operates like scent—as porous, pouring from one body into another, confirming our existence as shared bodies, the panel will delve into the relationship between flesh, sense, and landscape in the writing practice.

Many translation discussions and discourses are still concerned with the act of translation: Is it possible? How is it done? Keeping such essential questions in mind, this panel will address a related question: What happens next? What does a translation do? How does it move (across boundaries and bodies)? How does an age of globalization, US imperialism, global wars and ecological crises affect the way we think about the translation and circulation of literary texts? Instead of thinking in the traditional model of replication and imitation, we will look at translation as part of a volatile literary model that challenges normative notions of nationality, authorhsip, monolinguality, textual producition and simplistic notions of cultural difference. Instead of asking if translation is possible, we will look at its excesses, vulnerabilities, intensities, transgressions, disruptions, and homeopathic possibilities. If translation is impossible, we will explore these threatening, seductive and crucial impossibilities.

San Diego is a place marked by liminality, occupying the bottom corner of the United States and the shared border with Mexico. Its genealogy includes some of the heroines & heroes of art pushing genre out of bounds, including Kathy Acker, Eleanor Antin, David Antin, Rae Armantrout, John Cage, Juan Felipe Herrera, Fanny Howe, Hiromi Ito, Eileen Myles, Jerome Rothenberg, Roberto Tejada, Rodrigo Toscano, and Quincy Troupe. The current San Diego literary-‐‐performing-‐‐art community is defined by its defiance of genre categorization, a vibrant collaborative spirit, and an engagement with border-‐‐crossing artistic activity. San Diego’s verbal artists have moved their work in the direction of embodied performance, live translation, magical incantation, theoretical investigation, anthropocene territory, and political action, signaling their place at the contested vanguard of contemporary practice.  This reading-‐‐performance by current San Diego artists will interrogate sole authorship, page-‐‐based writing, geographical borders, and the limitations of language and genre.  

Participants:
Kiik A.K. 
Adam Bishop
Ben Doller
Sandra Doller
Brad Flis
Yelena Gluzman
Kendall Grady
Gabriel Kalmuss-Katz
Kylie King
Kim Koga
Nicolee Kuester
Grant Leuning
Feliz Lucia Molina
Allie Moreno
Pepe Rojo 
Ben Segal
Ethan Sparks
Anna Joy Springer
Jose Antonia Villaran
Steve Willard
Brett Zehner

Textuality is an extension of materiality, which aids in producing textual meaning. While we think of contemporary material as digital, analog technologies—book arts—continue to thrive and expand in academic and independent contexts. 

The history of artists’ books “cannot be separated from…the historical avant-garde,” as Johanna Drucker argues. This history also includes a genealogy of small presses invested in alternative modes of printing and distribution. Recently, book arts have been influenced by the intersection between the avant-garde tradition and concerns about production, dissemination, and readership. 

This panel looks at contemporary book arts from varying vantage points. Author and editor Michael Cross will consider micro-presses and their print output as crucial intervention into the notion of book distribution as a “market.” Independent bookmaker Chris Dunsmore will demonstrate how his own work exemplifies tensions within the field: between precious and accessible, trade or gift economy and a work’s value, audience and community. Letterpress printer and instructor April Sheridan will give academic perspective on such projects as her “high low tech” class, which hybridizes lasers and 3D printers with traditional book arts, and a project-based poetics class, which equips writers with graphic and haptic skills. And literature scholar Anne M. Royston will propose a reading of literary theory through the lens of materiality and production.

Can we think of writing as a plastic art? Does the sentence enact a type of architecture, one that wholly immerses the reader? Can poetry attune to the reader, linking hir nervous system to the author’s, even if long dead?

I am interested in thinking about a (queer) somatic writing practice where language can be thought through clay: where plasticity, texture, contour, and spatial command become three-dimensional features of a written text. By theorizing poetics via ceramics, I hope to discuss how syntax, cadence, and tone act as visceral appendages, ones that have the potential to embrace the reader in a non-cognitive, anti-capitalist, sensuous exchange: an embodiment of the author hirself. This presentation will occur in an art studio—or we will create an art studio together, wherever we are—equipped with a piece of clay at each audience member’s seat: to work and mold as I talk. Each participant’s plastic art will become a point of departure for continuing conversation.

Topics, research, and theories discussed will consist of: Queer Phenomenology (Sara Ahmed); The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Bifo Berardi); The Matter of Capital (Christopher Nealon); Music for Porn (Rob Halpern); the works of Melissa Buzzeo and Bhanu Kapil; Interaction of Color (Josef Albers); Feeling and Form (Suzanne Langer); Habeus Viscus (Alexander Weheliye) theories of biopolitics by Foucault; architectural writings of Arakawa and Gins; anthropological writings of Ellen Dissanayake. And more.

Valuing visceral exchange over cognitive knowledge, this presentation/workshop would take the tone and form of a meditative reading: an immersion in “architextural space.”

In three writing sessions during the &Now Festival, Guido Ignatti will compose a text about contemporary art. He’ll be alone in a room on the CalArts campus with only a typewriter, some paper, and a pencil. The scene will be streamed on a website announced on a placard to &Now participants. After the third writing session, on the final day of the festival, Ignatti will frame the typescript and hang it next to the placard. 

Ignatti’s performance makes visible the struggle to conceive ideas and put thoughts to paper while isolated from many of the apparatuses and functions that determine writing today. He’ll go without the Internet, his computer, and Control+Z. Since this will be the first time that he’ll use a typewriter, the performance may be as much about his physical interaction with the device as it is about his intellectual work. Writing about the present using a device from another era, Ignatti’s site-specific performance evokes CalArts’ long history of fostering experimental artistic and literary practices. 

The performance can be seen during the listed times on www.guidoignatti.com.ar 

THRESHOLDS uses layered voices, vocal processors, a variety of sampled sounds, pre-recorded tracks, live vocal play, and projections of poems to trouble the boundaries between sight and sound, languages, and poems as discrete entities. The poems, which act like scores, are transformed from the architectural spatial environment of the page into the aural architecture of a room’s environment, exploring how listening is textural. By also simultaneously offering a contrasting, competing and sparse video of the poem’s textual score (created by collaborator and multimedia artist Jessie Altura) -- a projection that is to the side of the audience’s field of vision -- the audience will be able to experience being in a space of in-between, immersed in the spatialized words and sounds, yet inhabiting the space along the boundaries of the visual poems. 

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? 

Author/Artists perform LIVE presentations of their recent works of visual literature. 

Visual poet/book artist and cultural critic Johanna Drucker performs her Stochastic Poetics, written using material from Aristotle’s poetics, complex systems theory, and an account of a reading in the cacophony of a Los Angeles art event. The book is a letter-
press performance of emergent phenomena; texts emerge and configure, then dissolve or are reconfigured in overprinted pages. Using the work as a score, Drucker’s sound perfor-mance reinforces the presence of language as material, as immanence and potentiality.

Writer/designer/multimedia artist Warren Lehrer presents a performance/reading of his illuminated novel A LIFE IN BOOKS: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley containing 101 books within it, all “written” by his author protagonist who is in prison looking back on his life and career. In his funny, thought provoking performance, Lehrer presents evidence of Mobley’s Life in Books via his book cover designs, book-like objects, and other biographical materials including animations and video performances of Mobley book excerpts.

Writer/media artist Samantha Gorman and interdisciplinary artist Danny Cannizzaro perform excerpts of Pry, a hybrid novella composed for tablet media. Invoking haptic gesture, expanded cinema, interaction design and literary arts, Pry moves seamlessly among words and images to explore layers of consciousness. Six years ago, James—a demolition consultant—returned from the Gulf War. Six months ago, his vision began to fail. Pinch James’ eyes open and witness his external world. Crunch down the text and dive into his subconscious.

This is a collaborative image-music-text performance/reading that responds to the experience of female aging. Faced with linguistic and literary traditions that lack the rich vocabularies to describe female aging, we juxtapose different mediums and genres within these mediums to express this liminal space. The piece’s hybrid form reflects an attempt to suture a language in order to shape an artistic body corresponding to the processes that constitute a shifting identity. The title refers both to the rose's traditional and mythic associations with feminine beauty and also to the completion of a passage between succumbing and becoming. 

Received notions of beauty are a central theme in this piece, signaled in part through the recurring image of a rose. This traditional and mythic symbol of feminine beauty dates back at least to the Roman de la Rose (1230), in which a rose and a woman merge. This piece also engages standard notions of beauty through its formal construction, which questions the traditional aesthetic values of continuity, coherence, and symmetry. 

We hope to express an aspect of female experience for which our language is incomplete by juxtaposing and interweaving lyric, narrative, sonic, and visual elements; to create an artistically sound and persuasive home for a perspective on female aging that falls outside the currently prevailing social norms.

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Matthew Carey collaborated with Shira Dentz in the expansion of her poem in Rose Secoming, “Sisyphusina,” into a multi-media piece.   He is an artist residing in Troy NY, where he is pursing a Masters in Electronic Arts. While formally trained as a composer and pianist, his interests lie in all forms of self-expression, performance, and art dealing with ecologies. 

A literary event featuring authors and friends of JEF: Journal of Experimental Fiction, publisher of the foremost in fiction.

Can we migrate from our fates? As descendants of liminal communities, we practice diasporic poetics. Can such improvised, junked and scrapped histories be archived? Using these questions as prism and seed, our collaboration will be informed by our creative and scholarly pursuits. It will traverse multiple threads, such as transgenerational trauma, fragmented historical narratives as well as notions of exile, ghosts and monstrosity. We plan to amass, dismantle and disperse scraps of our (un)recorded histories in the cities (neighborhoods, seas, streets) we inhabit, and in the various cities and non-cities invoked as memories, monsters or ghosts. Additionally, we will consider relevant historical texts as well as other re-presentations of historical events, including absent, unwritten, overheard narratives and (ir)retrievable re-collections. Our project will be comprised of a multi-media installation and culminate in a collaborative performance. As a part of the &Now conference, we will choreograph part choral intervention, part carefully calibrated improvisation with a focus on collecting histories with whoever is in the room, (however temporarily) in exile from their lives. It is our intention to engage the audience in a structured improvisational score in order to create a communal text, illuminating refractions and investigating mutuality within the collaborative process.

With  Ching-In Chen, Soham Patel, and Carina Gia Farrero

We are interested in language on the Internet, how it is created, by whom, where it exists, and how it is used. Three examples: Google reads our emails, garners information from our personal messages and uses that profiling strategy to select “relevant” ads. It then displays those ads on the screen next to the very emails from which the information was initially taken. Facebook and other social media platforms use similar methods of securing and storing data — data that is paradoxically private and public, and all personal. Further, crowd-sourced encyclopedias like Wikipedia are shaping the way we read, learn, and think. Language is what links all of these sites together. All of the sites’ underlying organization and structures have been built to follow the logic we ourselves employ in using language. “Robots” read content, algorithms interpret it and databases memorize it. The impact of this process is no longer confined to the Internet, but has reached beyond it into our everyday lives. 

“Narrative Fragments” will start the discussion with an introduction of American Psycho, an artist book we produced in 2011. American Psycho was created by sending the entirety of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho through GMail, one page at a time. We collected the ads that appeared next to each email and used them to annotate the original text, page by page. When printing it as a perfect bound book, we erased the body of Ellis’ text and left only chapter titles and constellations of our added footnotes. What remains is American Psycho, told through its chapter titles and annotated relational GMail ads.

“Narrative” Fragments will continue with a broader discourse on the practices and implications of networks like Google, Facebook and Wikipedia, and the ways they affect our understanding of language. We have assembled a panel of artists, critics, and writers who will address this phenomenon from their own research and interests. The core question of this panel is: What can we learn about the invisible and mutable algorithms and structures that dominate our participation on the internet? The discussion will provide a richer perspective on the way language behaves online, and aims to uncover the systems that are changing the way we speak, think, read and learn.

The works of Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs foretell--in ways that anticipate contemporary cut culture--possibilities for materiality and embodiment in the digital age. This panel-performance explores the legacy of this work, and its continuing relevance within a post-human matrix of identity that shifts both with and against the grain of the word. 

Burroughs and Kathy Acker have never been more relevant to contemporary cut-ups and collage practice. 2014 is the William S. Burroughs centennial. His work is being celebrated at major events around and the world, and his writing and art—along with that of Kathy Acker—is often cited as the origin point for contemporary remix culture. These writers pioneered appropriation techniques that pre-figure Internet culture, and they offer in their work “how-to” blueprints to produce text that might impact the world rather than reflect literary and cultural conventions

Improvisation, one could say, is vital to the act of making. Radical improvisation implies a act of extreme participation and/or intervention. In three acts, participants in this presentation/ workshop will examine acts of radical improvisation in collaboration with the detritus that forms around us in our lives. These are the things we might look or walk away from, the things we might not notice - the torn bedspread, the stuff on the table at the yard sale, the wig in the hallway,  found objects, the bits of glitter left on the windowsill, unnamed unlabeled keys. The abandoned bodies somewhere out of our immediate sight, the shrapnel in the wall of someone’s house, the unexploded bomb, the noise, the newscaster so loud we turn off the television. We will ask why or why not these examples demand our attention. We will ask how do we stay present with them? How do we engage with them, make them necessary and perhaps impossible to walk away from? 

Participants are asked to bring something to the workshop they would walk or look away from. Or something they would otherwise throw away.

 Since 2005, Les Figues Press has cultivated innovative writing and generated a unique global discourse in arts and literary communities. Through its practice of publication and curation, Les Figues aims to extend the definition of what constitutes writing, creating a space that generates opportunities for speculations and experiments that affect real change. www.lesfigues.com

This is a collaborative performance that interrogates what Maurice Blanchot calls the “space of literature.” Through text, video, and sculptural/movement elements, our exploration evolves into dynamic interplay between visual and literary art (and artists). 
Writer Jared Green begins the piece centrally located at a writing desk that appears constructed out of e-waste and scrap metal; on the side walls are large-scale projections of book pages being turned very slowly (these are looped sequences from Abigail Donovan’s videos, Book 1 and Book 2). Working at a computer keyboard, Green attempts to compose an unbroken stream of thought on the subject of literary composition as labyrinth; his efforts to produce a textual structure are projected in real time onto the facing wall and floor. Simultaneously, Donovan incrementally removes pieces of his writing environment in order to construct an apparatus called “the orrery,” a hand-made projection machine that casts diaphanous three-dimensional colored images into the environment by beaming light through multicolored glass constructions. With each interruption caused by the process of assembling the orrery, the writing encounters a blockage, as in a labyrinth, and must adapt, change, begin again, fail, and find a new pathway, vying for space with the sculptural and visual art’s commanding presence. Initially antagonistic and then increasingly cooperative, the piece unfolds according to the logic of stretto—the device in the composition of musical fugues whereby a close succession of overlapping statements serves to fragment, intensify, and eventually sublate the subject—and moves toward an ecstatic fusion of word and image.

Make your way to the Main Gallery between 5:30 and 7:30 for a fleeting encounter. 

We’ve been tossed up on dry land, disoriented. The gate is familiar, but there’s someone new standing in our way. There are many paths through this crumbling structure; paths not on any map. The branches have grown thick and tangled over the years, but something can still be heard. Down every hallway and around every corner the voices are coming together.

Featuring:

Karen Adelman // Mark Gerard // Yelena Gluzman // Emma Zakes Green //Jen Hofer // Sylvan Oswald // Analisa Raya-Flores // Erin Schneider //Tom Trudgeon // Santi Vernetti

Directed by Henry Hoke and Marco Franco Di Domenico
in collaboration with Saehee Cho and Sam Bloch


Enter>text is a living literary journal, an immersive series of events where the audience is activated to seek out their own unique encounters with writers. We strive to explore the textual nature of our surroundings, always searching for new voices, histories and fictions.

This year we are exploring Borders, Boundaries and Fine Lines. We’ll seek to illuminate and dissolve the demarcations not only between performer and audience, but also between public and private space, within identities and institutions. Each happening will be a new crossing.

enter-text.com

 

Collaboration for the Duration aims to explore sites of collaborative making that take place over long periods of time, contrasting such collaborations to the one-time commission or one-off co-creation. We are  specifically interested in the way long term collaborative making offers a cross-directional rewiring of the relationship between labor and everyday life, where durational collaborative making moves beyond a poetics of everyday life (usually a solitary interaction premised or made possible by luxury and class) and opens up a relational space premised on a shared and sustainable commons. We are interested in how on-going collaboration asks those involved to create a community, to show up for each other and create spaces of help and mutual care, and how these spaces make art making in catastrophic times possible and potentially meaningful.  We are especially interested in the ways in which a) collectivity often emerges in response to moments of political struggle and b) collectivity over the long term allows for links of solidarity to exist between past and present sites of rupture or struggle allowing for and maybe arguing for a sustainable art practice that resists social and political givens. All of the panelists are engaged in long-term collaborations, many of which are trans-disciplinary. Hence, we would like the extend the panel conversation out into a performance event, including an Office of Recuperative Strategies play, with poet Carla Harryman performing with musician Jon Raskin, and Keith and Mendi Obadike and Jennifer Scappettone and Judd Morrissey performing from their on-going cross-media sound and installation work. Additionally, we would like to open that performance space up to other collaborators present at &Now.

Here are our collaborative bios:

Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey began their collaboration by creating the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), research-oriented collective dedicated to exploring new tactics to promote the reuse, perversification, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena. OoRS has received commissions and engaged in interventions both national and international, from Brooklyn to Berlin, Amsterdam to Denver, New York to Cambridge. Rachel Levitsky is recently the author of a novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013) as well as two other full-length books of poetry, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and a number of chapbooks including Renoemos (Delete, 2010) and Interval (Japan: Mi-Te Press, 2008). She was the founder of the feminist avant-garde network, Belladonna* which has now become Belladonna* Collaborative, and she participates as a member of that shifting field. She teaches in Pratt Institute’s new MFA in Writing. Christian Hawkey is a poet, writer, educator, translator, editor, and activist. He's written/translated/collaborated on numerous books, including Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and Sonne from Ort (Kookbooks, 2013). He translates contemporary German poetry, and with the German poet Uljana Wolf he translates the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. He designed and directs Pratt Institute's new MFA in Writing.

Jennifer Scappettone and Judd Morrissey.  
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist whose works of electronic literature, interdisciplinary performance, and installation have been widely and internationally presented. He is the creator of digital literary works including The Operature (web version in-progress), The Precession: An 80-Foot-Long Internet Art Performance Poem (2009-2011), The Jew's Daughter (Electronic Literature Collection, 2006), My Name is Captain, Captain (Eastgate, 2002), and The Last Performance [dot org] (2009), a collaborative writing, archiving, and text-visualization project for which he was a recipient of the inaugural Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant in 2007. He is the co-founder of the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) who are in long-term residence at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Chicago. In 2013-14, he was the US Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at University of Bergen, Norway. He's now Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 
Jennifer Scappettone works at the juncture of poetry, translation, pedagogy/research, and the scoring of visual, sonic, and gestural fields. Her books of poetry include From Dame Quickly and Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale. Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-up pastorals, is in progress for Atelos Press, with a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, imminent from Compline. She edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli. Collaborative work includes performances of Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble; digital archaeologies with Judd Morrissey; libretti, scores, and vocal concepts for PARK, directed and choreographed by Kathy Westwater; and sonic documentaries for X Locus, an installation conceived with AGENCY architecture and composer Paul Rudy at the American Academy in Rome. Her critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice was published in Fall 2014. 

Carla Harryman and Jon Raskin
Carla Harryman, multi-genre and multi-disciplinary writer and Jon Raskin, composer and musician, make works that incorporate music and spoken text-based and scored poetry. Their collaborations range from duets with speaking voice and instruments to larger ensemble performances. They have performed in Detroit at the Susanne Hilbury Gallery,  at the Stone and St. Marks Church in New York, at the Wels Music Festival, Austria, and in many venues in San Francisco, including the Out Sound Music Festival, the Center for New Music, Small Press Traffic, the Poetry Center, and New Langton Arts. In 2012, Raskin collaborated with Harryman on a text/music score, “Occupying Theodore W. Adorno’s Music and New Music, a Reperformance,” which was presented as a keynote lecture at dOCUMENTA 13.  In 2013, Tzadik Records released Open Box, a cd of works performed in a recording studio with the Jon Raskin Quartet and others. Jon Raskin is an award-winning international composer and performer who has made many recordings as a member of Rova Saxophone Quartet and the Jon Raskin Quartet.  Recent CD’s include All at Once with Phillip Greenlief and Frank Gratowsk and Rova Saxophone Quartet and John Zorn: Receiving Surface. He is currently recording The Long Table, a large ensemble piece based on the experience ofdining with friends. Carla Harryman is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of cutting edge books and works for performance that challenge genre categories. Recent books include the prose diptych W--/M--, the collection of experimental and conceptual essays, Adorno’s Noise, and The Wide Road, a picaresque of poetry and prose written with Lyn Hejinian.

In titular homage to treasured novelist, editor, media activist and archive Toni Cade Bambara, this gathering of writers, poets and researchers presents overlooked, under-examined and otherwise obscured culture workers of radical Black imaginary.  Through sharing and discussion of discoveries, methodologies and creative practices, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions redraws Modernist timelines, expands communities of artistic and political movement and celebrates the African diasporic ArkHive as still forever future forward.

Melanie Sherazi presents on experimental novelist and translator of avant-garde Italian screenplays, William Demby

Tonya Foster presents on the UMBRA poets, the CUNY Graduate Center's "Lost & Found" project, and the work of poet Tom Dent.

Geoffrey Jacques presents on the history of the hipster in jazz and film

Tisa Bryant moderates


 

This panel interrogates the concept of hybridity through explorations of the processes, forms and genres of leading writers, with presentations from Steve Tomasula, Brian Bouldrey and Francoise Sammarcelli.

Sylvie Bauer presents "Not Percival Everett,": Much has been said about Percival Everett's work as being uncategorizable, not fitting within the limits or the frames of generic categories. Not only do his novels and short stories span a wide variety of literary genres, ranging from detective novels to philosophical inquiries, from slapstick comedy to dark humor verging on tragedy, they also combine artistic forms such as cinema, drawing, music and painting and widely invite philosophy within fiction. Yet, far from including artistic, critical and philosophical mediums as mere thematic devices, as simple illustrations or allusions, Everett's writing combines them into processes that affect language and the very notion of fiction, turning writing into what Deleuze calls the Impersonal. This paper proposes to focus on two of Percival Everett's novels, I Am Not Sidney Poitier and  Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, whose titles already interrogate the very notion of subjectivity, suggesting from the start the collaborative and impersonal fluxes at the heart of artistic practice. 

Steve Tomasula  will perform a public reading from TOC: A New-Media Novel: an electronic, multimedia, interactive novel published this year as an App for iPAD. TOC is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. A collaborative work, TOC brings together the work of some 15 contributors from a range of disciplines: graphic design, music composition and performance, voice acting, computer programing, animation, and other visual arts. TOC tells its story through an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. TOC also re-imagines the book by incorporating the materials of the computer as part of its narrative to create a new kind of narrative experience for the reader: one in which the digital tools used to make and read this book transform the reader into an active participant; one in which the book itself alters the reader’s consciousness, or experience of time even as it re-presents/represents its own subject, time.  

Françoise  Sammarcelli  presents "Hybridity Revisited, or, When Percival and Lance Play with Photography," about Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, 2013, and Lance Olsen’s Theories of Forgetting, 2014. Sammarcelli asks, Do the photos function as illustrations or do they introduce noise in the system, thus disrupting the reading process and emphasizing fragmentation? What is the effect of low/high definition ? What happens to a picture when it is reduplicated ? Therefore how do these novels use hybridity to explore our cognitive processes?  In this paper, she will compare Everett’s and Olsen’s aesthetic and semantic strategies in order to shed light on their intriguing effects. While they are very different, both novels can be read as a meditation on time, loss, presence and absence, involving a high degree of reflexivity, and the insertion of photos may be construed as part of a dynamics of re-dis-orientation. 

Brian Bouldrey presents two short video essays, "The Oldest Trade in the World (Artwise)." When you look to Longinus or Aristotle, or, for that matter, any aesthetician, described the functions of art, they alwyas reminded us tht besides delighting and surprising, art can also be instructive.  Our culture is not, historically, keen on instruction in our art  We prefer the inarticulate, common sense voice, the Huck Finn wonder at the stars of Kundeera's novel of ideas.  The dullness of the Soviet "socialist realism" further soured our interest in the didactic; and eighteenth century sermons, full of enthusiasm and enlightenment, and are hardly read, let alone considered a form—perhaps because so many of modern ministers are out of ideas.  but the sermon, thelecture, the Georgic, these are real cretive forms and have many opportunities for artists.  The viable technology of the video essay, among its many surprises as a newere art form, can accommodate and revitaize these antiquated forms and make them radically new.

This creative/critical panel proposes to converse with fiction’s relationship to current visual culture(s). How does fiction adapt/transform/deform/resist social media, narrative television, cinema, and internet browsing to create new forms?  Does writing fiction necessarily mean wrestling with dominant visual modes? We’re interested in how technology is shifting the borders of the self, which seems to call for a different kind of fiction; whether current narrative modes restrict representations of states of being like happiness or contentment; and how fiction can look to other visual arts for inspiration in creating something dynamic and responsive.

Spuyten Duyvil Press, in Brooklyn, N.Y., has, for many years, published important books of innovative writing. In the last eight years, in particular, that publishing has exploded. The press is now going full steam full force full schedule full on with new & new kinds of books. The reviews of Spuyten Duyvil books have been stunning. In 2010, the New York Times named Spuyten Duyvil one of the important cultural institutions in the City. While Spuyten Duyvil has participated in the &NOW bookfair, this will be the first, per se, Spuyten Duyvil reading panel at &NOW. The readers are all, however, active &NOW participants.  This panel, hosted and moderated by Spuyten Duyvil publisher Tod Thilleman, will present five Spuyten Duyvil writers: Rebecca Goodman, Tom LaFarge, Laynie Brown, Joshua Corey, and Martin Nakell. Each will read from recent fiction. 

It's a book fair!

Which Witch Writers-In-Residence: Which Witch Books  is partnering with the Saugus Cafe for a very special Writers-in-Residence weekend as part of the &NOW15 Literary Conference. We are inviting writers/artists/thinkers/do-ers to reserve a slot (minimum 30 minute commitment) at the Saugus Cafe, Santa Clarita's infamous old-time establishment, to work on a piece of writing/communicative artwork which will culminate in a publication produced by Which Witch.

The purpose of the Which Witch Writing Residency is to inspire new creative work. While CalArts will serve as the main site of activity during the &NOW conference, WW aims to reconnect its Writers-in-Residence to the unique environment and history of Santa Clarita Valley. 

The sole criterion for acceptance into the WW Writing Residency is willingness. 

The Saugus is open 24/hrs, serving diner food, coffee and beverages from its fully stocked bar.

If you would like to be a Which Witch Writer-in-Residence, please sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/which-witch-writers-in-residence-at-the-saugus-cafe-tickets-15748129078?aff=es2&rank=0 

 

Now + Then Infrastructure examines the unheard, invisible and repressed politics of the infrastructural terrain of southern California, making perceivable territorial struggle, energy flows, digital secrecy, and atmospherics. Four multi-media presentations will be followed by discussion between the panelists and a Q & A with the audience.

Ken Ehrlich — a network is a network is a network...

This image and text presentation stages a set of questions related to political agency, invisibility and the built environment by reflecting on the Edward Snowden leaks and the material infrastructure of digital communications networks in Los Angeles county. This performative lecture relies equally on visual research, speculative writing and political analysis to excavate the physical and imaginary infrastructure of the internet, nearby and faraway.

Sarah Kanouse — My Electric Genealogy 

Functioning in a state of perpetual construction, a network of high-voltage transmission lines connects Los Angeles to its distant sources of mostly coal-generated power. For nearly forty years my grandfather was intimately involved with the planning, design, and management of this system. An engineer with an artist’s eye, he photographed innovations in electrical delivery with one foot in the aesthetic and another in a techno-scientific sublime forever altered by climate change. This performative presentation weaves together images, objects, and auto/biography to explore aging electrical infrastructure as inter-generational climate debt.

Marina Peterson — Sky scrapers: writing the aerial city 

A child calls vapor trails 'sky scrapers' - knowing that a skyscraper is a building and equally entranced by 'downtown LA' as embodying 'city.' Here I consider how a child’s poetic notion of ‘sky scraper' recasts the architectural as process, built form as gesture, evoking the play between stasis and movement, ground and atmosphere, and the irreducible entanglement of the two.

Louis-Georges Schwartz — Seeing Infrastructure/Seeing settler colonialism

I want to think about THE EXILES (MacKenzie, 1961), a film that portrays a group of first nations people displaced by immiseration from the South West to Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. I'm interested in the way the location projects itself into a future after the end of the film: "with the right kind of eyes," ones that know the dynamic of proletarianized surplus populations and cities, the infrastructure in the movie's mise-en-scene poses the question of what will become of it in off screen time.

GASP (Girls Assembling Something Perpetual) proposes a creative performance of Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette. Founded by six female poets, GASP creates a poet’s theater of part abstraction, part sublimity, part accident, and part gesture. GASP seeks to find ways within theater, within a “play,” to parallel, not translate, radical elicitations of text, body, and atmosphere. To speak as both mouth and limb simultaneously. 

This is basically a poetry reading. We’d like to proceed in the context of &NOW 2015’s theme of “Writing and the Other Arts.” Our own thought is that writing is related to the other arts in the first sense insofar as it shares with them a relation to the animating antagonisms of its time — that it finds itself in the same blast radius, and that collaboration is always mediated by this. We’ll try to puzzle through some thoughts about a version of contemporary poetry’s period style, and how it got that way. 

This is a reading by four essayists (some of them poets as well) whose prose work is not (and cannot be or will not be) assimilable by the term lyric essay. The blend of autobiography and analysis, of inquiry and observation and intellection, is embedded in the long tradition of essaying; and some of the most innovative and staunchly independent prose writing is happening now without recourse to lyric technique. The reading will be followed by an opportunity for discussion. What is the category of lyric essay doing and performing, in and out of the academy? What kind of essay is lyric? What kind of essay isn’t? 

In three writing sessions during the &Now Festival, Guido Ignatti will compose a text about contemporary art. He’ll be alone in a room on the CalArts campus with only a typewriter, some paper, and a pencil. The scene will be streamed on a website announced on a placard to &Now participants. After the third writing session, on the final day of the festival, Ignatti will frame the typescript and hang it next to the placard. 

Ignatti’s performance makes visible the struggle to conceive ideas and put thoughts to paper while isolated from many of the apparatuses and functions that determine writing today. He’ll go without the Internet, his computer, and Control+Z. Since this will be the first time that he’ll use a typewriter, the performance may be as much about his physical interaction with the device as it is about his intellectual work. Writing about the present using a device from another era, Ignatti’s site-specific performance evokes CalArts’ long history of fostering experimental artistic and literary practices. 

The performance can be seen during the listed times on www.guidoignatti.com.ar

Award-winning writer Thomas Frick and celebrated composer/pianist Vicki Ray propose a performance, a collaborative collision between text adapted from Frick’s “alchemical-Luddite” novel The Iron Boys and Ray’s signature prepared-piano soundscapes. In innovative language The Iron Boys explores, through the course of a book-length monologue by Corbel Penner, the ways in which the mechanistic manifestations of the factory system in the early nineteenth century, propelled by the new steam-powered machinery, subtly infiltrated both society and individual consciousness. Selected passages and fragments from the novel (which includes sermons, songs, fairytales, accounts of attacks on textile factories, meetings of secret societies, public hangings, musical concerts, love stories, and more) will conjoin, collide with, interrupt and be interrupted by, over- and underlie, and harmonize with the startling array of sounds possible on a piano mechanistically transformed through the use of interior preparations and extended techniques. The disruption of the music (and text) of life by the imposition of a new industrial reality (against which the Luddites were rebelling) will be metaphorically embodied in this collaborative performance.

With What Tongue 

Performance and Video Screening

This presentation plays with the permeable boundaries between visual, sonic, and verbal fields to break down and cross-fertilize these categories. Each piece engages a different compositional strategy to encourage an active attentiveness. Language becomes sound,sound becomes image, and image becomes language.

1.  Selections from Sixty-Two Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971)  John Cage  

Performed by Carmina Escobar  -‐15 min.

The score for each mesostic will be projected and then followed by its vocalization. A mesostic is a text with a keyword spelled vertically through the middle of the lines, in this case, the name Merce or Cunningham. Cage constructed these mesostics using the I Ching and printed them in approximately seven hundred and thirty different typefaces and sizes. Published as a musical score, instructions are given to the performer to create a cohesive "cry, shout, or vocal event" in response to each mesostic’s visual elements.

 

2.  The Junicho Video-Renku Book ( 2014)     Eve Luckring
Single channel video projection  ‐‐27 min  

Twelve short “twelve‐tone” video-poems (1:45-‐‐3:00 min each) adapt the 17th century Japanese poetic form of renku to video. Similar to an exquisite corpse, renku uses a complex set of rules based on the structural devices of “link and shift” for the writing of verses that journey through the everyday. In my translation of renku to video, I’ve chosen the shortest and most flexible type, the Junicho, meaning “twelve-tone”. The name Junicho is a nod to the composer Arnold Schoenberg’s method of writing music, which uses a manipulation of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale to create atonal music avoiding any one key. Likewise, renku eschews conventional narrative. I’ve invented video-renku as a framework to explore the “link” between the mundane and the ineffable, and the perpetual “shift” in defining boundaries between the "natural" world and the culturally constructed. 

NOTE: An expanded version of With What Tongue including two other performances premiered at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles on Sep. 11, 2014.

Border Tracing/Imaginary Geographies

Within every border is inscribed both the history of colonialization and the buried history of the colonized.  These histories come to light through fantasies, science fiction fabulations, speculations, sketches, or simply the act of crossing.  There is no future free of the past, but the writers and artists on this panel all investigate alternative formulations that reconfigure questions of history and power.

 ————
Samiya Bashir, “Maps” (multimedia poetry presentation)

“When will children stop wanting,” asks young Askar, the central character in groundbreaking Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah’s Maps, the first novel in his Blood in the Sun trilogy (Maps, Gifts, and Secrets). “[W]hen will they accomplish something not as children but as beings?” I hope to present, in progress, an ongoing poetry of erasure as pulled through Farah's trilogy. The poems resist resolution of Askar’s questions, instead pushing them to what may suggest a next generation of questions not alone, but in the same vein of continuum with which Farah himself has taken on (in dense trilogy after dense trilogy) several decades of East African (&colonial) history through character. At present, I am still completing my work with Maps. So, while I can’t yet say how the pieces will live in completion, I would like to engage them (physically) with light, with the projection of language and sound, with the visual imagery being mapped alongside their creation. I’d like its choreographed interaction with live bodies in an interactive space to inform my continuing process and the compass of its cartography.

Hilary Mushkin, “Selections from the Incendiary Traces Archive” (digital slide presentation)

Incendiary Traces is a collective exploration of the role of landscape imagery in international conflict through public on-site drawing events, artistic, historical and geographic research, and the publication of related materials by diverse contributors.  Artbound, KCET’s arts and culture transmedia journalism program, has been chronicling the project since 2012. Through online reports and essays by various writers, Incendiary Traces is building an archive of drawings, photographs, stories and scholarly research related to the experiences of project participants and the militarized sites we visit, tour, draw, and otherwise “trace”. This blend of art, research and media provides a way for the public to re-imagine contemporary battle space and connect more closely to foreign conflict. For &Now 2015, I will present a selection of images and materials from the archive. For example, these items might include: a map made on tour with the US-Mexico border patrol depicting spatial and linguistic points of interest; survival cards listing “ten commandments of survival in the desert when lost or stranded” published by the 29 Palms Marine Base; a plein-air watercolor made at Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach radar and telemetry facilities; or an annotated 1942 crime scene photograph made by a Santa Barbara sheriff to analyze a Japanese attack on coastal oil fields. I will speak about each image shown, giving a brief story about its connection to the project and read select writings that have been published in relation to visual materials. The presentation will thereby offer insights into the instrumental roles linguistic and visual representations of landscape play in understanding international conflict.

Pepe Rojo, “You can see the future from here: Border experiential futures” (a presentation slash screening (with freebies included))

“Desde aquí se ve el futuro” was a series of science fiction-based interventions made during a two month period on the busiest border crossing on the world: Tijuana-San Ysidro. Two hundred artists, mostly students from UABC (Baja California’s Autonomous University), collaborated with images, artwork, dance, theatre and conceptual performances, installations, short stories, and readings in a collective imagination exercise of the near future of the border. A procession was carried out for a saint from the future, a swap meet was enacted (with its own currency), a short wave radio station transmitted for cars stuck at the border’s waiting line and a newspaper from 2043 was distributed among the border-crossers. This presentation (which includes videos) will give an overview of the interventions.

Stephanie Sauer, “The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force” (performative presentation)

The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force – the first artist book to be published by the University of Texas Press (October 2015) – is a semi-fictional account of the Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF), a historical Chicano/a artist-activist collective renowned for their fleet of "adobe airplanes," subversive performance stance, and their key role as the “graphic arts arm of the United Farm Workers Union” during the Chicano civil rights movement (Pilots of Aztlán 1994). The book engages the tensions between fact and fiction in the construction of historical consciousness and public memory. Its very fiction is a performance and intervention on the notion of historical truth.The book presents “authentic” archives with running historical references to note the blending of Pre-Columbian record-keeping practices with European ones. The performative quality is also evident in the staging of fictional characters like La Stef, lead archeologist of the Con Sapos Collective (played by myself), who attempts to guide readers down the blurred lines between “objective” Western historiography and Indigenous/Chicano cosmologies, but often fails. Nonetheless, the team’s attempts reflect the human predicament of documenting the histories of complicated New Worlds everywhere.This book abandons the didactic instruction of most accounts of subaltern experience aimed at a normatized Western audience, and runs ahead instead with a vivid portrayal of a worldview and a field in which various cultural paradigms already intersect seamlessly on equal ground. At &Now, I will present the archives initially in character to complicate audience perceptions, then directly for greater context.

 

 

It has been commonplace in experimental writing to focus on discourse, text, culture, consciousness, or power as the main constituents of reality. Nevertheless humanity remains at the centre of these works, and reality appears only as the correlate of human thought.  Here we speculate about the nature of reality independent of thought and humanity to ask whether the "object" can speak? Can we write from its place, rather than our own?  What do objects have to tell us?  Who is able to hear them? Indeed, what can be an "object" be?

Vincent Dachy: "Should objects be despised?"
Joon Oluchi Lee: "Like a Statuette" 
Matias Viegener: "Spooky Friends" 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Fiction Collection 2, an author-run publisher of non-traditional fiction. This panel will begin with a reflection on literary non-traditionalism.  How do “non-traditional” writers work with and against and slantwise to tradition? How can a collective publishing model encourage irreconcilable aesthetics, communal singularities, multi-directional lineages (vertical, horizontal), innovation, and affinity?  Panelists will present a collective response (speculative, critical, creative, necessarily non-exhaustive) to questions concerning the future of fiction. The panel will conclude with a reading celebrating FC2’s 40 years of multifarious fiction experiments.  

Tender Buttons, both the press and the poem, work and play to change the way people perceive the world.  Come join in a subversive celebration of Tender Buttons' our 25th birthday and remake the forms of address that such a celebration might take!  All of the Tender Buttons books play with echo, intertextual appropriation and interpenetration from other disciplines: philosophy, science, porn…“Poetry as a theory of everything” said Maria Damon recently in her stitchery. Hannah’s work contains a radical take on the anxiety of influence and the “silent teachers” we all have within us start to speak as we read the map of her mind moving. Dodie’s Cunt-Ups asks us “Is the cut-up a male form?” Who owns the language?

Inhabiting original texts as open channels, fan fiction is a richly citational and performative genre, sharing much with concepual writing; yet despite these similarities, it remains underconsidered within innovative writing communities. This panel stages an encounter between fan fiction and conceptual writing to the-orize a fanfic conceptualism. We ask: What happens when we intentionally con-fuse conceptualism and fandom? How might that confusion alter our creative pro-cess or how we read creative process? Moreover, how might fan fiction aesthetics inform not only how we view influence, lineage, and canonization, but also how we construct the boundaries of any artwork?  

With a particular investment in the paraliterary and kitsch aspects of fan fiction, these six writers and video artists articulate a fanfic conceptualism that is interested in identification, occupation, and embodiment: a mode that is affective, performative, and parasitic—melodramatic, operatic, excessive—a kind of marvel-ous trash. Featuring appearances from Oscar Pistorius, Tegan and Sara, the Golden Girls, the Kardashians, and more TBD.

Ruptures and Sutures of the Everyday

Each of these writers unveils different experiential moments of being or objects that are more than or other to what they appear to be.  A quilt made by slave holders, the modest cookbook, internet addictions, disability and the performance of language, all speak in very different ways to the ways in which the everyday is both sutured and ruptured in both texts and objects. 

 

Cole Cohen, “To Suffer a Sea Change”: Performative Writing on Disability (talk/presentation)

Performative writing, critical writing relying on descriptive utterance to challenge a given social reality, is the native language of writing on disability because it is inherently the language of reframing and rearranging. In order to express a rupture in both physicality and mind set it is essential to draw from academic writing that lives somewhere between inquiry and incantation. In this talk, I will draw from the work of Peggy Phalen and Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton’s responses the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm as examples of writing that enacts a body restructured and thus reclassified. My intention is to examine how these writers use performative language to reshuffle assumptions of the work that writing can do in staking claim to narratives of illness and disability.

 

Robin Myrick, “Prizewinners” (reading & visual art)

The modest cookbook, and the humble recipe, have long been agents of propaganda and hyperbole, transmitting a variety of cultural assumptions and attitudes about those who might put them to use. The rhetoric of consumerism, in the guise of helpful advice and careful direction, so infuses the aspirational element of food preparation that decisions about what we eat and how we prepare it are often the source from which conversations about gender, culture, identity, economy, public policy, and other issues arise. Similarly, cooking demonstrations and simulations -- those frothy, empowerment-tinged segments, programs, and informercials that teach us to "do it ourselves" -- reflect not just the prevailing messages and aesthetics of their makers and their era, but the desire for self-sufficiency and expertise in the viewer, and the promise of tele-osmosis, that we can become better just by watching. Prizewinners is a hybrid poetry/photography/video piece that uses the visual and textual rhetoric of recipes and cooking simulations as a means to read equivalent "everyday" acts encompassing duty, desire, performance, and expertise. In addition to cookbooks, this project writes through and considers a variety of recipe/simulation materials and contexts, from early and mid-20th-century product advertisements, lifestyle guides, government pamphlets, magazine copy, circulars and sitcoms, to modern foodie television, maker movements, YouTube tutorials, films, virtual environments, and "skinemax." The presentation of the work will be a reading accompanied by photo/video projections.

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.