Itch Away blog

Five new Postcards are up on the HOW2 Postcard site, with contributions from:

Cara Benson
Suzanna Fry
Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Anna Reckin
Addie Tsai

These form part of a larger section on Ecopoetics in the forthcoming issue of HOW2.  Estimated launch date: kinda soon.

The next Openned night is Thursday, 6th March at the usual venue of The Foundry. As always, it’s free.

Readers to be announced, but I have every faith that Steve and Alex will have some fine dancers, cowboys and drag queens for your bentertainment. I can’t make it cos I’m in the you es.

“Poetry, essays, fiction, translation, interviews”

“An annual journal dedicated to exploring creative-critical edges between making (with an emphasis on writing) and ecology (the theory and praxis of deliberate earthlings).”

The site contains all sold-out issues as free PDF downloads.

Thanks to the interesting work from the forthcoming HOW2 for bringing this site to my attention. And while I’m on the subject, I’m working my arse off webbing the new issue as we speak. The new issue has a HUGE Ecopoetics section, which is itself 3 section-length sub-sections. Phew.

As a kind of addendum to my post on Providence, here are some tasty links to check out. They can all – of course – be found on the links section of the site.

Firehouse 13 – If you live in Providence, this seemed to me like a cool venue to check out. Hosts Justin Katko’s The Program event. Make sure you attend on a regular basis.

Justin Katko

Justin edits the Plantarchy publication through Critical Documents. Check em all out.

Also check out Justin’s work at Midway Journal (Reading Palm plus transcript)

On current issue of The Little Magazine (006 – 007 ISSUE)

Justin’s youtube page

Aubade

Aubade is one incarnation of a fascinating look into manipulation of a corporation’s coded viral site at notcelebrity.co.uk. Justin has worked out ways of subverting the URL structure used to create a name in lights. His youtube page has more examples, and there’s a video at http://plantarchy.us/katko/projects/names-in-light/names-in-light.mp4

Cris Cheek

See Cris Cheek’s page at the British Electronic Poetry Centre

Things Not Worth Keeping – or TNWK (collaborative identity with Kirsten Lavers) – a large site of archived work here

THE CHURCH – THE SCHOOL – THE BEER (Plantarchy 3 – see right-hand side of page)

Radio Radio interview with Martin Spinelli at UBU

Angela Veomett

Anglea’s website is a well-maintained archive of work. All of the videos mentioned in my Providence poet can be viewed here. http://www.angelaveomett.com/

Aya Karpinska

Aya, who is currently completing an MFA and teaching the Electronic Writing II class at Brown, has a background in web design, putting her in an interesting position as a digital poet. Her website, containing both digital poetry and an extensive portfolio of web work, can be found at http://www.technekai.com/

See also Aya’s performance of “nobody knows but you” at the epoetry 2007 festival videos archive (scroll about half-way down)

John Cayley

There’s really too much to put here, so be aware that this is hardly a comprehensive list. But a few highlights on the web, and interesting points of departure might be as follows:

John’s home page (the top link will take you through to his practice) http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/

IMPOSITION in the Openned Anthology

Overboard: http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/overboard.html with an overview at Dichtung Digital

See also “Writing on Complex Surfaces” also at Dichtung Digital.

Hopefully this is an interesting group of links to check out. But there are many I’ve missed. Please leave some comments expanding on the above if you have any you’d like to contribute.

More content coming soon. I’m aware that my website proper has not adequately represented my work over the past year, and I’m working from scratch to try to have it better designed, easier to update, and easier to browse. Stay tuned.

I have a number of posts I’ve been meaning to make over the past week, but simply haven’t had the time to sit down and write.  Part of the reason for this is a concerted effort to update my main site with work in progress right up to completion, rather than let it go stale as has really been the case over the past year.

Next week should see me back on track.

I’m back from Providence where I enjoyed an action-packed day with some old and new friends (in fact, I’m already in Phoenix, this post being a combination of a couple of days’ sporadic writing in spare pockets of traveling time). I had two ‘commitments’: guest speaking for Aya Karpinska’s Electronic Writing II class at Brown University, and the performance with Cris Cheek and Angela Veomett at the Firehouse 13 venue in Providence.

The Electrronic Writing II course, currently taught by Aya (and apparently to be taught by Justin Katko - a genius of similar magnitude to Aya’s fantaschtick) was a wonderful experience for me, since I don’t get many chances to sample the functioning and discussions happening in other courses centred on experimental writing.

The students in Aya’s class, despite having been on the course for just a few weeks, clearly had the focus, enthusiasm, capacity and open-mindedness to produce fascinating work. As it happened, the assignment for today’s class was to increasingly fragment through anagram a paragraph of text written originally by that student. Clearly all of these students, in one way or another, are already ‘good writers’ in the respect that each original was a well-crafted piece of ‘narrative’. The reason I point this out is to reiterate the capacity of these students to then take interest in pulling these pieces of writing apart using procedure without somehow feeling precious about their work. The spirit of experimentation was rife in the class, and was backed up by incredibly thoughtful and intelligent approach to what was happening to their writing and why this was of relevance and interest to them.

It was really fun to give them a brief overview of my work. Fun but odd, since I’ve never really surveyed my work in a way where I connect pieces like Version 1 (2003) with new works-in-progress like Ideas on Oedipal Bitstreams. As usual, I over-prepared and overstressed myself about it. And, as usual, once I got going I barely used the notes next to me, which turned out to be little more than a reassuring mascot for me going my own improvised way. This is probably a much healthier way to deliver my work (and hopefully more useful and accessible to those listening) and the students seemed interested, again asking pertinent questions. These days, I actually look forward to QAs, which are fantastic opportunities to gain fresh perspectives on my own work which all too easily becomes dulled by my over-familiarity with it.

Cris Cheek was also guest speaking in the class, and showed the class a Flash movie produced in collaboration with Kirsten Lavers (under their collaborative idenitity Things Not Worth Keeping) which was textual / visual / sonic investigation into abstracted virtual locations (for example, Silicon Valley) using the bizarre-but-actually-real-I-shit-you-not-this-is-fact location of “Silicon Fen” as its focal point. The movie fits together incredibly well and stands the test of time well too, without looking too shabby for its years. One thing I’ve always found very difficult is trying to get a Flash video which incorporates photography, sounds, texts, to fit together as a cohesive whole. The video - deliberately non-navigable - perhaps represents the un-navigable psychogeography of Silicon Fen ideally. Conspicuous by its physical absence (or perhaps through its existence solely through abstract name-allocation), Silicon Fen’s repeated textual assertion reduces (elevates?) it to the level of hyper-representation, foregrounding the kind of absurd construction trajectory imposed on this physical space (or so I felt when I was watching).

After class, we met up with John Cayley and others, had some dinner and moved on the the Firehouse 13 to finish setting up. From what Justin told me, this was pretty much the most ‘multimedia’ of these events so far. The space itself was great - wonderfully restored (no fireman’s pole, however - which Cris tells me was removed due to fire hazard issues) and before long we’d created a sort of makeshift projection space which accommodated all three of us nicely and, incredibly, obstructed neither the bar nor the toilets.

Angela and Justin at setup

Angela and an exit

I was on first, which can be tricky in terms of getting the crowd on your side, but that wasn’t a problem given the present company, who were up for it. It seemed to go well. Or, I should say, the crowd at least seemed receptive (the farting and burping boy excepted. He was either voicing his displeasure with my reading or his body was voicing its displeasure at his greeding).

Sudden digreshun: I’m updating this section of my blog post from Philadelphia, where I’m waiting for my two-and-a-half-hour-late flight to Phoenix. On the enjoyment scale, and even by the already plunderous baseline of airports, this place is Sucky McSucklington. And I have to spend at least 2 hours here before the gate opens. At least there’s an “Irish” pub.

Next up was Angela, whose 5 videos fell into 2 distinct styles, the first 3 using a documentary-style presentation (I think these were all from the Chernobyl Generation vignettes). However, these transcended straightforward documentary, inflecting the ‘narrative approach implicit in this genre by subtle use of chopped, filtered and re-tempoed visuals, and fragmented audio reminiscent of something Gregory Whitehead might do. The final 2 films were more abstract. Both of these - My Head is a Basket of Apples, and, in particular for me, Communal, were simply beautiful pieces of work especially enjoyable on such a large projection with audio filling the room.

Cris Cheek’s work was pretty predictable in the sense that it was awesome. He showed several pieces of work, including a wonderful video of some of his collaborative work with Sianed Jones. For anyone who has heard Songs from Navigation, it will come as little surprise that both fit together vocally very well in this video. But there’s more to collaboration than this, and the video confirms, as does Songs from Navigation as a whole, the true collaborative compatibility of the pair. Sometimes it’s words. Sometimes sentences. Then it’s fragments and then it truly is music. Personally I thought that seeing the two face to face in a kind of brutalised Smith & Jones feature added an interesting dimension, mesmerised as I was by the mouth movements of the pair, and the facial expressions and movements in general.

Cris performed some textual palimpsests from paper and projection:

performing the surface of the work, which also illuminated the hand-held material he read. It was great to hear, and visually striking. Along with “Dear Bob Cobbing,” a realtime projection of Cris writing and performing improvise, err, writing. On paper!
Great fun.

My thanks to:

John Cayley for organising my brief detour to Brown and giving me a wonderful opportunity to take part in the class and local scene.

Justin Katko for having me on the Firhouse bill, for putting me up, for putting up with me, for scouting out a place to drink a beer at 12:30am in pouring snow, for introducing me to a rather handsome young ladycat who lives with him, for lending me a brightly coloured towel, various books, and for watching me sleep.

Aya Karpinska and students, for listening, probing, producing.

Cris Cheek for picking up on my throwaway comments on Amy Winehouse and not letting me get away with them, and for generally being very nice

Angela Veomett for the gig share and interesting vids

All those people I met whose names I can’t remember, I’m sorry.

Posting has been difficult over the last week because of restricted time and sporadic access to internets. Plus I’ve been working on a mammoth (by my standards) post which reviews Tuesday’s events in Providence, with pics.  Stand by…

I’m flying out to Boston tomorrow.  I am not sure where and when I’ll be able to get online next.  If you’ve emailed me, please be patient while I try to catch up on the other side of the pond…

Though I’ve not been terrible in the past at keeping up with the blog, etc. while I’m away, this time round I plan to have much more documentation of my travels, and more in the way of thesis thoughts being projected into your eyeballs by way of this site.

Plus, there are the churnings of the Itch Away journal which may begin to blossom while I have the time to devote to designs and manifestos.  I’m excited to get some time away…

See you in May

J

Click to visit “The Program” website