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

Wed Nov 23 11:28:51 AEDT 2016

But, Michael, are ordinary and imperfect the same thing?

Murat

On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 5:47 PM, Michael Boughn <mboughn at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Finitude (Agamben) and imperfection are the defining qualities of the
> ordinary, which, Emerson tells us, we have yet to acknowledge as our
> condition. Hence we keep screwing up.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Nov 22, 2016, at 3:35 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
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>
> Chris, I apologize for the typo. I was writing the introduction six
> o'clock in the morning since I had to be at Kennedy Airport very early. And
> I did use "tent" metaphorically, but are you sure it was inside Parish
> Hall? I remember it being somewhere in the boondocks. Like quite a few
> others, I seem to have disappeared from the PoPro list a few years ago
> also. Finally, I attributed my case to bad breath.
>
> Yes, perhaps the final struggle is "between algorithm/perfection) &
> human/imperfection." We should pursue it further on. But in *Blade Runner*,
> even the super human androids are imperfect. They must die. That is the
> pathos of that film, and also perhaps our ultimate salvation. If you have
> followed the discussions the previous weeks this month, I was talking about
> the possibility of a poetics of "failure" or "inefficiency" which may be
> close to what you mean by ?imperfection." We were also discussing about
> "glitches" in the algorithmic structures. You say that can not be. Do you
> mean they are impossible or not permitted?
>
> What that architect was telling you sounded more like "laziness," an over
> trust of machines. That's why so many buildings are, as Jean Renoir says,
> boring.
>
> Good beginning. Welcome to Empyre, Chris.
>
> Ciao,
> Murat
>
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 9:46 AM, Funkhouser, Christopher T. <
> christopher.t.funkhouser at njit.edu> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>>
>> 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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