[-empyre-] Welcome to November, 2016 -Overcoming Technique:Multi-Media, Dialectics or Synthesis

Wed Nov 2 01:34:12 AEDT 2016

all-star cast! looking forward.

best, md

On 11/1/16 9:10 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
>
> ____________________________________
>
> Welcome to November, 2016 on –empyre soft-skinned space:
>
> Overcoming Technique: Multi-Media, Dialectics or Synthesis?
>
> Moderated by Murat Nemet-Nejat (TURKEY, US) with invited discussants 
> Peter Valente (US), Mustafa Ziyalan (TURKEY, US), Adeena Karasick 
> (CANADA, US),  Alan Sondheim (US), Michael Boughn (CANADA), Jerome 
> Sala (US), Chris Funkhauser (US).
>
> November 1h           Week 1: Peter Valente (US), Mustafa Ziyalan 
> (TURKEY, US)
>
> November 8th          Week 2: Adeena Karasick (CANADA, US), Alan 
> Sondheim (US)
>
> November 15th        Week 3: Michael Boughn (CANADA), Jerome Sala (US)
>
> November 22nd       Week 4: Chris Funkhauser (US), Sally Silvers (US), 
> Bruce Andrews (US)
>
> The computer is now a fact of our life, and in the last decade or so 
> its dark underside has become visible. In the virtual world a lie is 
> no different than truth—that is mathematically and epistemologically 
> (and politically) equal to each other. In the world of digital art, 
> infinite (i.e. algorithmic) openings are potentially overwhelming and 
> equal to no choice at all. Infinity seductively mutates to paralysis 
> (or into the positive virtual sealed reality of a loopgamespace). That 
> beauty is achieved where there is friction. Friction is the pod of 
> desire, creating what is humanly infinite.
>
> The above statement is only a working hypothesis—based on this 
> moderator's belief that technology is first of all about the posession 
> of power. In the arts (as in society), it may easily become an 
> "easier," seductively efficient weapon suppressing expression. Of 
> course, one may agree or disagree with this point of view. The next 
> question has to do with the idea of truth. In the sense Martin 
> Heidegger uses in his essay "The Question Concerning Technology," to 
> what extent does (or doesn't) digital technology lead to the 
> revelation of "the truth" in the arts? The third question has to do 
> with the concept of multi-media. Is the goal of multi-media 
> progressive to achieve an ideal Wagnerian synthesis or is it more 
> dialectical—each acting on the other reflectively (as is the case in a 
> translation) revealing the other's nature and limits, the gap 
> separating them as powerful and relevant as the desire for union. 
> These are all open questions.
>
> The guests this month all work both within and outside the digital 
> world and are intensely conscious of the questions raised above. Peter 
> Valente creating his filmic and photographic images uses oppositional 
> techniques to bypass the cooked perfection and colors of photoshop 
> images. Mustafa Ziyalan, on the other hand, uses the cellphone, 
> including the manipulation of colors, to depict the chaos he sees 
> around himself. Alan Sondheim, in his multi-media work of recent 
> years, often contrasts in the same work a text subjected to digital 
> procedures with a piece of acoustic music performed on a single 
> musical instrument. Adeena Karasick reverses technology's relationship 
> to power, wresting it back by creating a poetics based on 12th century 
> Kabbalah principles. In performances, the poems culminate in ecstatic, 
> erotic-mystical sequences—what the critic Maria Damon calls "the wall 
> of sound"—where words—often neologisms or word combinations invented 
> by the poet—richochet against each other. The poems may use visual and 
> audio digital effects, but always words and the poet's body performing 
> them is at the center. Along with the controversial poet Kent Johnson, 
> Michael Boughn is the founder of the blog Dispatches whose basic goal 
> is to archive texts and elicit discussions that go against the grain 
> of contemporary artistic, literary or political opinion. Jerome Sala 
> is interested "in the poetics of corporate and digital jargon and the 
> new subjectivities to which these languages give rise." His 
> forthcoming book of poetry is /Corporations Are People, Too!/ Chris 
> Funkhauser explores digital poetry as a new, independant form with 
> unique pssibilities where the verbal, visual and aural achieve a fluid 
> sysnthesis and potentially infinite versions of a work coexist 
> simultaneously, depending on the reader's/player' choices.
>
> This month of November, 2016 I invite the –empyre subscriber list to 
> discuss these issues in our soft-skinned space with our distinguished 
> group of weekly guests.
>
> Murat
>
> TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:
>
> <empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au 
> <mailto:empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>>
>
> TO ACCESS ARCHIVES USE THIS URL:
>
> http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
>
> TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT 
> EMPYRE GO TO:
>
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> Biographies:
>
> Moderator:
>
> Murat Nemet-Nejat (TURKEY, US) is a poet, essayist, translator from 
> Turkish poetry and editor. He is presently working on his poem "Camels 
> and Weasels." His recent publications include his translation from the 
> Turkish poet Ece Ayhan, /A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies/ (1997, new 
> edition 2015), his poems /The Spiritual Life of Replicants/ (2011) and 
> /Animals of Dawn/ (2016), and the essays "Holiness and Jewish 
> Rebellion: 'Questions of Accent' Twenty Years Afterwards," Languages 
> of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Pers[ectives (University of 
> Michigan Press, 2016), "Dear Charles. Letters from a Turk: Mayan 
> Letters, Herman Melvile and Eda," Letters for Olson, gathered and ed. 
> Benjamin Hollander (Spuyden Duyvil, 2016), and "A Dialogue with Olga," 
> Drawing Papers 129, Olga Chernysheva Vague Accent (The Drawing Center, 
> 2016). He is also the editor of /Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary 
> Turkish Poetry/ (Talisman Publishers, 2004).
>
> Weekly Guests:
>
> PETER VALENTE is the author of /A Boy Asleep Under the Sun: Versions 
> of Sandro Penna/  (Punctum Books, 2014), which was nominated for a 
> Lambda award, /The Artaud Variations/ (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), Let the 
> Games Begin: Five Roman Writers (Talisman House, 2015), a book of 
> photography, /Street Level/ (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and the chapbook, 
> /Forge of Words a Forest/ (Jensen Daniels, 1998). He is the 
> co-translator of the chapbook, /Selected Late Letters of Antonin 
> Artaud, 1945-1947 /(Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2014), which 
> includes six of Artaud’s letters, and has translated the work of Luis 
> Cernuda, Gérard de Nerval, Cesare Viviani, Pierre Lepori, and Pier 
> Paolo Pasolini, as well as numerous Ancient Greek and Latin authors. 
> Forthcoming is a second book of photography entitled /Blue/ (Spuyten 
> Duyvil, 2016), and a translation of Nanni Balestrini’s /Blackout/ 
> (Commune Editions, 2017). In 2019. City Lights will publish all 33 of 
> Artaud’s late letters with an introduction by Stephen Barber. Valente 
> has also written two experimental sci-fi novellas and two books of 
> music, one on the improvised music scene and the other on the Northern 
> Soul movement. Presently, he is at work translating Guillaume Dustan’s 
> Nicolas Pages for Semiotext(e). In 2010, he turned to filmmaking and 
> has completed 60 shorts to date, 24 of which were screened at 
> Anthology Film Archives.
>
> MUSTAFA ZIYALAN was born at the Black Sea coast of Turkey. He worked as
> a general practitioner and coroner in a rural Anatolian village. Now he
> lives and practices psychiatry in New York. He has worked with torture
> victims, prison inmates, children abusing volatile substances,
> pathological gamblers, and persons with AIDS. His poetry, short fiction,
> and essays have appeared in many literary periodicals, anthologies and
> in book form in Turkey. He poetry appears in English in /Eda: An 
> Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry/.
>
> Cited as the Kabbalah Kohenet (High Priestess), ADEENA KARASICK is a 
> New York based poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and 
> the author of seven books of poetry and poetics. Writing at the 
> intersection of post-Language Conceptualism and neo-Fluxus 
> performatics, her urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described 
> as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic 
> jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their 
> “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” 
> (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves 
> the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic 
> labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin). Most recently is /This Poem /(Talonbooks, 
> 2012) and /The Medium is the Muse: Channeling Marshall McLuhan 
> /(NeoPoiesis Press, 2014). She teaches Literature and Critical Theory 
> for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, 
> co-founding Director of the KlezKanada Poetry Festival and Retreat, 
> and a 2016 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient. The “Adeena 
> Karasick Archive” has just been established at Special Collections, 
> Simon Fraser University.
>
> ALAN SONDHEIM is a Providence-based new media artist, musician, 
> writer, and performer concerned with issues of virtuality, and the 
> stake that the real world has in the virtual. He has worked with his 
> partner, Azur Carter and the performer/choreographer Foofwa 
> d'Imobilite. Sondheim is interested in examining the grounds of the 
> virtual and how the body is inhabited. He performs in virtual, real, 
> and cross-over worlds; his virtual work is known for its highly 
> complex and mobile architectures. He has used altered motion-capture 
> technology extensively for examining and creating new lexicons of 
> behavior. His current work is centered around notions of gamespace, 
> 'edgespace' (the border areas of gamespace) and 'blankness,' 
> projections around edgespace. His current music is based on the 
> impossibility of time reversal, on fast improvisation, and anti- 
> gestural approaches to playing.
>
> MICHAEL BOUGHN's publications include 12 books of poetry (most 
> recently /City -- a poem from the end of the world/ (Spuyten Duyvil, 
> 2016)), a mystery novel, and multiple essays with a common interest in 
> postmodern developments in writing, film, and architecture. In April, 
> 2016, along with poet Kent Johnson, he launched /Dispatches from the 
> Poetry Wars/, an online pirate poetry website of often satirical 
> resistance to both the official verse culture and its Professional 
> Avant-Garde doppelganger. It dreams of becoming a non-central centre 
> for a shifting gathering of like-minded and not so like-minded people 
> to be in common in a way that unfolds into surprise.
>
> JEROME SALA is a poet, independent scholar and essayist, who, for most 
> of his life, has earned a living writing direct response advertising, 
> both digital and print. His books of poetry include cult classics such 
> as /Spaz Attack/, /I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent/, /The Trip/, /Raw 
> Deal/, /Look Slimmer Instantly/, and /The Cheapskates/. His essays and 
> poems have appeared widely in publications such as /The Nation/, /the 
> Brooklyn Rail/ and /Rolling Stone/. Before moving to New York in the 
> 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings 
> together, helping to create Chicago’s lively performance poetry scene. 
> His blog, on “poetry, pop culture and everyday life,” is espresso 
> bongo: http://www.espressobongo.typepad.com: 
> http://www.espressobongo.typepad.com. His forthcoming book of poems, 
> /Corporations Are People, Too!,/ features a series of “Corporate 
> Sonnets” constructed from “business speak” and the clichés of digital 
> marketing and entrepreneurial self-help, towards their new subjectivity.
>
> Multimedia artist and writer CHRISTOPHER FUNKHAUSER is author of 
> /Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995/, /New 
> Directions in Digital Poetry/, /Whereis Mineral: Selected Adventures 
> in MOO/, the chapbooks /pressAgain/, /Subsoil Lutes/, /Electro 
> Þerdix/, and /LambdaMOO_Sessions/. He was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar 
> at Multimedia University (Malaysia) in 2006. In 2009, the Associated 
> Press commissioned him to prepare digital poems for the occasion of 
> Barack Obama’s inauguration. /Funk’s//SoundBox 2012/, nominated for a 
> 2013 Digital Humanities award, interactively unites more than 400 
> recordings he produced. In 2016, he was a featured presenter at the 
> Whitney Museum of American Art's Open Plan: Cecil Taylor exhibition. 
> Funkhouser is Professor and Director of the Communication and Media 
> program at New Jersey Institute of Technology, a Contributing Editor 
> at PennSound, and hosts POET RAY’D YO on WGXC in Hudson.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20161101/101b8b60/attachment.html>