[-empyre-] Starting the Fourth Week: Chris Funkhauser, Sally Silvers and Bruce Andrews

Wed Nov 23 01:46:17 AEDT 2016

Murat: nice intro, thanks. I'm humored by your recollection of the St.
Marks event. We were, however, definitely at a table in the Parish
Hall--though we may as well have been in a tent! Until about 1998 I was
often invited to perform at the Poetry Project, but since then, not once!
This nearly coincides with when I started teaching in Newark, oddly enough.
Being an academic at a middle-class state school has its perks but probably
also its downsides (at least in terms of getting gigs at the PoProj).

We have known each other a long while, had many exchanges & social
adventures. I've recorded & produced your work on CD, CD-ROM, etc., etc. &
yet after all that there's a typo in my name in the subject line
here--which is fine, considering I have no belief in perfection. (& I have
never cared about the spelling of my last name, which is already a
bastardization of the original--in fact your spelling is true to the
original but is not what appears my birth certificate!). From my pov there
are only a few things in life that require perfection, one of which is
computer code. Thankfully the corporations in charge make it so that most
people never have to deal with code, how nice. I had dinner with an
architect the other night, who was explaining even his plans didn't have to
be perfect (which I thought was strange). Building designs can be
imperfect, code can't! So maybe the certainly possible (imo) "exchange" you
ask Bruce about is a dialog between algorithm/perfection) &
human/imperfection. I like that, something like that, think like that.
Towards cyborgian synthesis, yah.

I believe that we are supposed to start off by posting a statement (&
bio?), so OK, here:

Call what I do research. On a couple of occasions I’ve stepped up &
presented books that helped me & hopefully others understand the world of
digital writing from a historical perspective. *Prehistoric Digital Poetry *
(https://monoskop.org/log/?p=179), a dozen years in the making, was done
with the intent that it would outlast me. It will. Most of the time,
though, I’m a momentary doer/maker rather than a sayer...

Beyond life as poet & multimedia artist I play various musical instruments,
mainly bass (& some voice), in an unnamed completely improvisational trio,
which is such a potent form of expression. This is part of what I had to
say with them last friday, in our first post-election jam:

https://soundcloud.com/fnkhsr/edge

My work in audio production, documentarian & artistic, started in the late
80s & continues—I’m a contributing editor at PennSound, & earlier this year
I performed a sound collage at the Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor
exhibit (Fred Moten & I also hosted a listening session at the event).

Since early this summer I’ve been working intensively with Chuck Stein, who
I’ve known since 1992. We recorded more than 18 hours of his poetry (a
retrospective anthology), phase one of a project on its way to PennSound
(part two will be Chuck reading all of Olson’s *MAXIMUS*, apparently from
back to front). In 2015 I did a similar project with Peter Lamborn Wilson,
recording 600 of his poems for PennSound (
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Wilson.php).

About a year ago I was lucky to get a grant from my employer, NJIT, to fund
research in interactive digital audio (under the title “Expressive and
Documentary Interactive Audio in the Humanities”). I’ve been playing and
performing with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) since 2010, &
recently I invented a way for my voice to trigger orchestral
instrumentation, which was a significant breakthrough. Haven’t brought this
material out of the woodshed yet, though recently a piece was supposed to
be played as part of a program at the Dorsky Museum in New Paltz that
didn’t end up happening as planned. Perhaps I should use the occasion of
this discussion to go public with it.

 Another relevant work to this part of my life is *Funk’s SoundBox 2012*,
archiving most of the recordings I made over the course of a year in one
web-app, which was nominated for a 2013 Digital Humanities Award & is
housed at https://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/chercher/home.html.

I guess lastly, for now, I wanted to mention I do a monthly literary arts
radio program on WGXC, community station in Hudson NY (sponsored by a
fantastic organization named Wave Farm). On most occasions local poets come
in, read, & we talk. Gratifying work. Since last October I’ve done programs
centered on Allen Ginsberg, Sam Truitt, Anne Gorrick, Andy Clausen, Pamela
Twining, Bernadette Mayer, Philip Good, Lori Anderson Moseman, Chuck Stein,
Robert Kelly, Joan Rettalack, Cecil Taylor, George Quasha, Rebecca Wolff,
Tim Davis, Amiri Baraka, & Lee Gough. Archives of those programs are
available via https://wavefarm.org/wgxc/schedule/ya0aha

*Chris Funkhouser: author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of
Forms, 1959-1995 (Alabama, 2007), New Directions in Digital Poetry
(Continuum, 2012), Whereis Mineral: Selected Adventures in MOO (Gauss PDF),
the chapbooks pressAgain (Free Dogma), Subsoil Lutes (Beard of Bees), and
Electro Þerdix (Least Weasel). With Sonny Rae Tempest he co-authored and
twice staged a "code opera", Shy nag, whose source was the hexadecimal code
of a single .jpg image (see
https://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2015/Shy-nag/shy-nag-info.html
<https://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/2015/Shy-nag/shy-nag-info.html> for details
and documentation). 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.  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, NY.*
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