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

Wed Nov 2 01:39:47 AEDT 2016

Thanks Maria.

On Tue, Nov 1, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Maria Damon <damon001 at umn.edu> wrote:

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> all-star cast! looking forward.
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> best, md
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> On 11/1/16 9:10 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat wrote:
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> ____________________________________
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> 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).
>
>
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> 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
>
>
>
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> 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.
>
>
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> 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.
>
>
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> 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.
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>
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> 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.
>
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>
> 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.
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> _______________________________________________
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