P||R||O||J||E||C||T||I||O||N||S Premier, May 16

The premier event of P||R||O||J||E||C||T||I||O||N||S, a series curated by Paolo Javier and myself, was held at The Bowery Poetry Club on Sunday night, May 16.

The introduction to the series:

This performance series is an active intersection between moving text and moving image:

1. text moving sonically through space

2. image moving on the surface of a screen

The fundamental scenario presents one or more present persons utilizing words &/or sounds &/or movement to mediate both spatially and conceptually between images on a screen and a live audience.

Historical practices related to this series:

Benshi (Japan), Pyônsa (Korea), Benzi (Taiwan), Gavrilov Translations (USSR), Lector (Poland)

Contemporary practices related to this series:

Movietelling, Neo-Benshi, Voiceover, Redubbing, Gag Dub, Resubtitling

In the last 5 years, these practices have emerged in clusters throughout the world, owing in part to practitioners’ frustrations with the limitations of certain mediums, and in part to the collective social urge to confront and appropriate the onslaught of information and media that now overwhelms us.

Our hope is that this series might become a hub, an intersection for practitioners already stretching and breaking the bounds within their own mediums and communities. We will showcase poets, film-makers, musicians, performance artists, scholars, critics, editors, and other producers and managers of meaning and form.

For more information on this series, please see the P||R||O||J||E||C||T||I||O||N||S Facebook page.

Also, Nada Gordon has written a wonderful review of the premier.

The next event in the series will be held on June 20.

Featuring the following Practitioners:

Danny Snelson

James Copeland

Kate Eichhorn

Tan Lin's Factory

On Wednesday, Mashinka & I were EDITors of & at Tan Lin’s Day-Long Publishing event, “Handmade book, PDF, lulu.com Appendix, Powerpoint, Kanban Board/Post-its, Blurbs, Dual Language (Chinese/English) Edition, micro lecture, Selectric II interview, wine/cheese reception, Q&A (Xerox) and a film.” Organized and orchestrated as part of Danny Snelson’s “EDIT: Processing Writing Technologies,” this event was quite possibly the first instance of simultaneous, collaborative, on-demand text generation, editing and publishing.

Tan Lin gave me the task of documenting the various tools of editing and mediation, to be organized, edited and contextualized with corresponding essays. Given the time constraint, and the state of active eventfulness which prevailed, I focused myself on gathering data, armed with an Alphasmart Neo wordprocessor, a Sony digital audio recorder, a Panasonic Lumix digital camera, and 2 FlipMino HD Video Reorders.

I began by focusing on locating, inputting and photographing the myriad of technological devices that were littered throughout the Kelly Writers House, UPenn, where the event was located. My initial sweep included:

Kanban Board

Sharpie Permanent Markers, Multicolor

Post-It Notes, Multi color

Anchor Extension Speaker for adjacent room

Kingston USB Thumb Drive 4gig x2

M (?) USB Thumb Drive 512mb

Macbook Pro

Macbook Black

Macbook White

Macbook Pro 15inch

Macbook White

Powerbook 12in

Macbook White

Macbook White

Macbook White

Dell Latitude D520

HP Laser Jet 1320 (printer)

Brother WP-3400 Typewriter

Canon Pixma MP210 (inkjet printer)

Mac G5 Tower w/ Dell LCD screen (for monitoring live event feed)

Canon HDV CMOS 1080i (Digital video camera)

Smith-Corona Electra 120 (Typewriter)

Eee PC 1005HA (netbook)

Macbook Black

HP Deskjet F4480 (inkjet printer)

IBM Selectric II

Sony IC Recorder ICD-UX70 (DIGITAL AUDIO RECORDER)

Flip Mino HD X2 (pocket video recorder)

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8 (digital camera)

Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro Keyboard

Rock Mobile Disk (External Hard Drive)

SONY HDV Cassette Video Recorder

MACKIE 1402-VLZ PRO 14-channel mic/line mixer

Extron (rack mounted video controller)

DENON DN-T620 Precision Audio Component/ CD/Cassette Combi-deck

Middle Atlanctic Products, Inc. PD-915R Power Center (amp) Rack mounted

Audio Technica ATW-T28 mic (x6)

SONY FWD-50PX2 Flat Panel Display

IBM Selectric II

JBL Wall Mounted Speakers

Sandisk 4gig USB Thumb Drive

HP 2gig USB Thumb Drive

Lexar 2gig USB Thumb Drive

Blackberry Curve 8300 T Mobile

Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS Digital Elph (camera)

Panasonic sp 60 min DV Cassettes

Dell Inspiron 8000 Laptop

Macbook Pro

Office Depot Copy Paper Standard White Paper 20 pound, 92 us Brightness

Alphasmart Neo Word Processor

The group of some 15 -20 editors had been organized into 6 groups stationed in various rooms. Their tasks ranged from editing and organizing a bibliography from a large stack of source material to designing alternative covers for Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies.

The set goal for this event was to produce and print a variety of books to be individually bound, collected and packaged in a handmade portfolio as an accompaniment to 7CV.

I went from group to group, first simply video documenting their actions and interactions with the devices they were using to edit, transfer, research, input, and design their texts. I repeated rounds, each time investigating further, asking questions:

What word processor are you using?

How many gigs does that thumb drive hold?

Which translation program are you using?

What fonts are you using?

Which printer will you print this on?

What program are you using to format these images in?

What problems are you having?

What MP3 player are you using?

What are you listening to?

How long will this task take you?

Why are you using Google Docs?

Why are you using text edit?

This process sometimes segued into miniature interviews, wherein the editor would turn momentarily from their task to more fully discuss their challenges. Almost every obstacle, though articulated in relation to content, pertained specifically to technological challenges.

In isolating and controlling the editing and publishing process through the constraints of time and place, this event focused attention on the more phenomenological aspects of handling and organizing data. The necessary physicality of each task made seemingly equivalent the practices of making meaning and executing technical operations.

I will explore this relationship in more detail in an essay entitled, “Technological Index,” which will adopt as its format the brevity and bullet-point style of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Culling from several pages of notes regarding the processes of each editorial group, as well as from information collected from 35 video clips and many more photographs, I’ll index and contextualize each technological item in relationship to both its general and event-specific use.

Learn more about this event:

EDIT Press Release

Thom Donovan's Poetics of Distribution, Metadata as Poesis: Tan Lin’s 7CV @ EDIT: Processing Network Publishing

Katherine Elaine Sander's Tan Lin (BOMB Magazine)

Semiospectacle: A Literary Revue

Mashinka is curating the following show, in which I and several of my favorite performers and poets will be presenting:



TO RESERVE TICKETS, PLEASE VISIT: PS122.ORG.

This verbal varieté strategizes the explicitly semiotic spectacle in a multimedia showcase of live art representing an encounter between the academic lecture hall, the poet’s theater, and the vaudeville house. Its players cut across the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, pedagogy, cabaret, poetics, and performance in an investigation of linguistic mechanisms of spectacular identity formation. Linguistic illusionists expose the parlor trick of transparent speech, conjuring floating signifiers that levitate forty-four feet above the floor. Costumes sewn from three million majuscules burst at the semes. The auditorium oscillates between reading room and performatorium. The linguistic turn transmogrifies into a shimmy. Curated by Mashinka Firunts.

CO-SPONSORED BY: UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE. Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective focusing on new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. The Presse favors emerging, international, and forgotten writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses. Its publications employ a variety of handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

PERFORMANCES BY: Vaginal Davis | Lord Whimsy | Dr. Lucky | Jeremy J F Thompson | Paolo Javier | Daniel Scott Snelson | Shonni Enelow

STENO POOL: AN INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE Featuring:
Leesa Abahuni | Nicole Abahuni | Jen Zak | Matt Jones | Kristen Rhea van Liew | Fyodor Pavlov | Lawrence Gullo | Kyle Hittmeier | Lindsay Comstock

CODEXKAMMER: A FUNCTIONAL LENDING LIBRARY
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT BY: Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators
INTERTITULAR TAP BY: The Minsky Sisters
ONE-MINUTE CURATORIAL MICRO-LECTURES BY Mashinka Foxtrot Firunts

MARCH 22ND, FREE
Performance Space 122
150 First Avenue (at 9th Street)
Doors Open at 7:30, Staged Performance Commences at 8PM
Reception To Follow

SEMIOSPECTACLE WEBSITE
PERFORMANCE SPACE 122 RESERVATIONS PAGE
FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

New Voices, LMFAO, Geof Huth, WORK#4

It seems that recently I have witnessed more events than there have been days in which to do so.

NEW VOICES

The story begins on Wednesday evening, July 23rd at the Center for Book Arts. I curated the inauguration of a new reading series misleadingly titled New Voices (the participating readers are well beyond "new," as they are all recognized and published within their communities). The title was predesignated by the Center for Book Arts, but in its defense, I suspect the desire was to employ "New" as an adjective in the service of Progress, as in New Perspectives... fresh, surprising, etc.

Taking into account my own reaction, that of the readers, and those of the audience, I am sure that the work presented did come off as Fresh & Surprising. Much of it still remands so in my memory. The reading was (audio) recorded, and hopefully will make its way on to Penn Sound, courtesy of Danny Snelson.

I had a conversation or two with each of the readers that night, and some of us went out for a drink after the event. Many of them shared my enthusiasm for continuing to develop a community of printers, booksmiths and poets: actually any artists interested in the tensions and cooperations evident in text-based mediums at every stage: words, and words as they are placed and then found on a surface.

I have already begun to keep in touch with several of them, and I believe that the correspondence between us will be vital in encouraging the presence and longevity of the community I have suggested above. That said, I'd also like to see the Center for Book Arts become a more central hub for readings and other text-inclusive performative events.

My primary interest is in the intersection of stunning writing and the possibility of the book as structure. Cuneiform does not ascribe to any particular school or canon, and remains committed to publishing enduring (and ephemeral) works that negotiate the critical imagination and poetic exploration. We aspire to maintain a zeal for experimentation and fascination with the intersection of meaning and form with each publication.
-Kyle Schlesinger, Cuneiform Press

In essence, I would like to apply these goals toward the continued formation of a community, marked by events such as readings and exhibitions of ephemera.


OMG! releases Paolo Javier's LMFAO

On the evening of Friday, July 25th, at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's projects space, DIY press, OMG!, released Paolo's idiomatic cut'n'paste, graphic no-vella LMFAO. I wish I could describe it in detail, but I am currently in Los Angeles, and the book is in New York. But I will say that his performance at the release reading was the 2nd impressive presentation of his I've witnessed. It was both conceptual and lyrical, managing and narrating text composed for other purposes by other people. When it came to the poems from his new book, he simply slowly passed over each powerpoint page without reading aloud. More on that text once I've my eyes on it again.


Meeting Geof Huth in Astoria, NY

The night before I left for Los Angeles, I sat at my computer, reading this post by Geof Huth, a well-known practitioner and collector of visual poetries. The post discusses some ruminations on what (or how) the visual poet sees, and it also lists the location whereat the thought was had, that being, Astoria, NY: my home. I immediately responded with my own thoughts on the relevance of such ruminations within Astoria, revealing my living there as well. He responded in turn, and within minutes, I was greeting he and his wife out on the corner of 27th st & 30th Ave. It is a rare thing when a blog post leads to a handshake, and it takes the outward warmth of a fellow like Goef Huth to initiate such a handshake.

I only recently finished reading his collected pwoermds, and had been having many discussions about them with my wife as well as other poets. Goef Huth's passion for & habit of photographing graffiti and other found texts has rubbed off on me since first discovering it some months ago. Also, and most importantly, his sandglyphs and fidgetglyphs have refreshed my otherwise tired understanding of experiential poetics. His practice suggests the renewed capacity for an immediate poetics, but one that is still meditative and concerned with its social and political implications. I'm speaking now in these broad strokes, but it's mostly out of excitement. I hope some insight can be gleaned from my explanation. At the very least, I hope I've incited some interest in investigating his work further.

We discussed locations and origins. We discussed his touring and reading. He seemed always excited about his work. He is committed, and has found a way to always be practicing, collecting, arranging. It was a real pleasure to meet him.

He gave me a copy of his "audience handout" (which is actually a well designed chapbook).
He gave me a copy of his hot-off-the-press book, Longfellow Memoranda.

I will discuss them soon.

He has also written a description of this encounter.

WORK #4 is online.
David Horton, diligent as ever, has posted another issue of WORK on the Internet.
I have work in Issue #4 (now online).

Radio Ceptuetics: no nonsense noncepts

Ceptuetics, hosted by Kareem Estefan, has recently become my favorite radio talkshow series to download & listen to at work and in transit.

Avant-garde poetry readings/ interviews every Wednesday night from 7:30-8:00 on WNYU 89.1FM in the NYC tri-state area and www.wnyu.org worldwide, or directly through iTunes (Radio--> eclectic-->WNYU)

As interviewer and host, Kareem is both confident and calm, presenting each guest with simply stated questions, which seem to always result in responses that illuminate fundamental aspects of the poets' processes and mechanisms. The half hour is more well spent than many 3 hour lectures I received in college.

Of those I've listened to so far, I recommend the episodes with Ara Shirinyan, Marie Buck, Rob Fitterman, and Danny Snelson.

Shirinyan reads from his Syria is in the World, an especially jaring poem for me, the son of a transient missionary, spening much of my childhood in foreign countries for only weeks at a time.

Buck is very well spoken, managing not only to compose intricate texts, but to articulate their production process in an equally impressive way.

Fitterman kicks of the inagural episode, which is appropriate, as he spends his time discussing appropriated language, a phenomenon or device that acts as a relatively common thread amongst the poets and poetics of the following episodes.

Snelson, whom I recently met at the Charles Bernstein reading, reads/performs another variation of my Dear coUntess, a sometimes video sometimes audio cut-up drawing from a vast pool of avantist' source material: Goldsmith, Stein, Mac Low, Paik, and many many more.

These and other Ceptuetics episodes are available for download at Penn Sound.