The quite brilliant minds of Becky Cremin and Ryan Ormonde have collided and from the splattery big bang that resulted, a new evening has been born. If you are in the area, you should check it out, it’s bound to be interesting.
Details:
press free press @ curzon soho: NEW evening of performing/writing/thinking
we invite one performer, set one writing experiment and you reply to one question
03/10/11
this month’s performer: NAT RAHA
this month’s question:HOW DOES THE PLACE/SPACE YOU ARE IN INITIATE YOUR FIRST ACTION?
bring along your reply – max 50 words
http://www.pressfreepress.com/
Slightly edited output from a generator I’m working on. Two source texts merged:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/13/newt-gingrich-will-endure-challenges/
and
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/13/charlie-brooker-sexualisation-of-children
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There is a pretty fascinating exchange between Al Filreis and Kenneth Goldsmith on ‘originality’ in a digital context. This exchange stems from an original article (linked in this post) concerning a paper on Wallace Stevens for sale, apparently bearing at least more than a passing resemblence to material written by Filreis himself.
Particularly interesting to me:
The kernel of how we must teach today is embedded in your quandary. By reifying the old lines of “this is mine” and “this is not,” we perpetuate myths of originality. Was your research sprung completely from your own genius? Most likely not. You sourced it from dozens of places. What is original — and genius — is the way you wove those sources together. But isn’t that what good research always has been? It’s just that the digital makes this process transparent and eminently elastic in ways that were hidden before.
The article can be found here.
I’ve been working on a digital response to Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments article. In this piece, I use erasure to remove portions of the tet to create new meanings and contexts, all the time using the same ‘material’ textual units (i.e. not dynamically rewriting the text, but removing text). As such, I’m trying to think about how textual economy and marking of texts can be explored on screen. That said, this was done on paper first…!
Check out my progress so far by clicking on the link (click on the REMOVE link at the bottom of the piece to activate the erasure):
UPDATE 29 April: The complete piece will be appearing in a forthcoming Drunken Boat issue, so for now, I need to take it down. I will post an alert when it’s finally published.
While I’m on a Drunken Boat tip, Drunken Boat currently has a cool idea for submissions — inviting responses to Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments list. Submissions can take any format.
View the call for submissions here.
Bernadette Mayer’s Experiments can be found in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, JUNE 1978 issue (go to issue #3).
The latest issue of Drunken Boat has a video of a performance of generative text “Instabilities 2″ by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean. It’s pretty fascinating to say the least, and merges fixed, versioned and generative states of text production on-screen at once, each competing for attention and all competing / harmonizing with the varying levels of audio speech that surround the performance. (See the authors’ notes for a better explanation) The video, being a documentary of one performance rather than the execution of the programs themselves, nonetheless offers a good showcase of the potentials of this setup the algorithms used to produce the various states of textual transformation.
I’m very interested in how live generative algorithms can be used in live performance. This work seems pretty unique in its merging of 3 different states of stasis / flux in a live context. The linguistic transformation techniques occasionally remind me of John Cayley’s Overboard work, in terms of the text-visual decisions being made by the algorithm. I know nothing about the Python code in question but it seems to apply arbitrary text transformations that are sometimes, if not always, visually similar to the words they replace (although there are often complete breakdowns in the text as shown in the video).
Plus extra kudos for the use of Comic Sans.
Take a gander over at Drunken Boat #12.
New Openned Reading series! At a new venue after some bastard closed the Foundry.
Date Wednesday 27th October
Time 7.30pm
Location Corsica Studios
Tube Elephant & Castle
Admission Free
See the event on Facebook
See the event at Openned.com
Readings from
- Tim Atkins
- Allen Fisher
- Sarah Kelly
- Jonny Liron
- Nat Raha
A simultaneous reading from
- Prudence Chamberlain*
- Jennifer Cooke
- Joanna Humphreys*
- Anna Lawrence*
- Jow Lindsay
- Peter Philpott
- Rachel Porcheret*
- Posie Rider
- Carol Watts
- Tessa Whitehouse
Readers marked with * are RHUL Poetic Practice students
More TBA
Last weekend saw the annual Grand Avenue festival here in Phoenix – an opportunity for the local community to stroll between small art venues and talk first-hand to artists about the work they produce, and perhaps even purchase something. Jaime and I went last year, at which time I became acquainted with the work of Christopher Caufield.
Christopher’s work is a taxonomy all in itself, so it naturally defies easy definition. Put simply, he works with found materials that come from almost complete opposite ends of the natural / scientific spectrum. His works are machines of spectacle, made of materials brutal and gentle, natural and electric, all in strange, wonderful harmony.
Caufield collects the bones of dead animals he finds in locations where he is likely to find them. His ethical stance and working method here are very clear: he does not kill animals. In fact, he salvages their discarded bodies from roadsides and the desert, favouring their immortality in his contraptions.
But bones are only one small part of these weird but beautiful objects. The materials are diverse: bones, wooden boxes, neon tubes, negative films, switches – and all wired together into working contraptions, components that have no business feeding into each other but nonetheless striking Frankensteinian creations. Perhaps what helps here is the high quality to which these objects are made, that demonstrates a care to both craft and material decision-making. They may be patchworks of machine and organism, but they are put together in a deliberate, controlled manner that suggests an inherent use value. In my brief discussions with him, I have a feeling that Caufield would be uncomfortable with me considering fetishism as a grounds for appreciating this work. Maybe it’s the neon. But there is something titillating about the verging-on-functionality of the pieces (they often switch on and off, for example) and the convergence of forms that, though unconventional, make an odd steampunk-like sense.
Battered carcasses come in, and leave immaculate bone ingredients. It’s an oddly respectful approach, and much gentler than it sounds. You probably ought to check it out for yourself.
Give him a ring at 480-338-0034
