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

Thu Nov 24 03:39:28 AEDT 2016

Murat, I am thinking of those terms (finitude, imperfection, ordinary) in
the same light as Agamben's *irreparable*. "Irreparable means that these
things are consigned without remedy to their being-thus, that they are
precisely and only their *thus . . . a*nd that in their being-thus they are
absolutely exposed, absolutely abandoned."

On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 7:28 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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:
>>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>
>> 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.*
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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/20161123/4657516c/attachment.html>