[-empyre-] Welcome to OCTOBER on -empyre- and Margaret Rhee (t0ny's feminalist collaborations)

Fri Oct 4 13:02:05 AEST 2019

Such great questions -- and I have a few for you too!
I think that recording definitely goes in the category of "serious
goofing around."

We had a zoom recorder on the kitchen table at all times... and at one
point we had the idea to set up audio recording all through the house
because it would often happen that we would be 10 minutes into a
conversation and one of us would jump up and wish we had pressed
record. The sense was that we were always on the verge of something
that could take shape as a project/collaboration/video. The search for
a form settled pretty easily when I came over to his side of the world
and started playing cello. I only started playing cello about 8 months
earlier. So playing music with others was something he was expert at
-- me not at all. We didn't talk about recording -- he would just come
into my office when i was playing and he would plop down on the couch
-- zoom in hand and in a moment when i stopped  or looked up - he
would press the button. He usually played slide-toy-guitar on our
recordings.

The strange thing about this recording is that i can remember how
self-conscious I was in terms of listening to him.. of really trying
to listen and respond to him. The recording made me cautious because I
had a sense that I couldn't ignore what he was doing and just play
what I wanted to play. When I listen to the recording, I can hear my
sense of not knowing how to play with him.

One of the reasons we actively started recording was that our dog was
a virtuoso singer and squeaky toy percussionist. The first night we
brought her home, I played cello to her to make sure she'd be okay
with having to hear it all the time -- and she responded by singing at
me.... As time when on, she would sing or get her toy almost every
time i played -- so often that we kept "her instrument" on a high
shelf if I didn't want her joining in. It was probably her involvement
that got the recording bug in tony's mind. In terms of those
recordings, we did talk about releasing an album -- Nous Sommes The
Cahiers (Papier (me), Crayon (TC), and Steelo our dog). But there
weren't many because she didn't always cooperate when we wanted to
make a recording. This actually might have been one of the times where
we were consciously courting her to play with us -- but instead of
getting a two voice and one cello recording, we ended up with
TCPSVoiceCello11.15.

I guess the thing I would say most clearly about the recording
experience with TC was that it was an unspoken rule that when we were
recording music we didn't talk. Perhaps I should say when he was
recording, because it was always tony who pressed the button. When he
wasn't recording and we were playing around, I would say something
here or there -- or he would-- but the recorder meant no talking. On
my side that comes from my experiences filming and recording
interviews, where the first thing you learn is how to communicate
visually and make as little sound as possible.

That segues to a question for you, David, which has to do with the
relation between talking and musical collaborations-- performances and
recordings. How much and how differently does conversation and
discussion get factored into, work in and around your playing, say,
with Eli or Tony or others? I'm sure it's different for each person --
but do you have a sense about whether there are particular
ideas/attitudes towards "talking" that you have with respect to
"playing"?

I ask this for a few reasons -- first on account of your ability to
translate and animate so much of the unspoken of performance in your
poem "now that the audience is assembled" -- but not in a way that
would suggest sound or music to be the opposite of language -- quite
the contrary, in a way that suggests their complex inextricability.

the second is because i am fascinated by the way we talk or don't talk
when we've performed the piece that tony and i collaborated on -- and
how different that must be when there isn't a sense of mediating an
absence.

To explain to other readers -- just before tony died, he and i devised
a way for a piece to be performed when he couldn't attend a concert.
There had been two musicians hired to play that gig, so we decided
that they should perform with a recording of tony. Not just any
recording, but one of the recordings that tony played with during solo
concerts. See TC had a mix of himself (quite a few of them, obviously)
but one in particular that was a pretty complicated piece based on the
same model of one of his earliest recordings -- "4 violins". And he
had a version of it that featured two minutes of silence followed by
the 50 minute piece. In his solo shows, he would hit play on the cd
when he started playing live and then at 2 minutes this additional
track would come in and fill out the sound. Tony would be playing with
himself - both in the sense of playing with this older recording but
also with all the loops he would have been layering on 'live' as it
were. I don't know if that's clear.. but the piece that David and I
have played together is called "Tony Conrad's Amplified Drone
Strings". And after tony died, i inverted the logic of tony's strategy
for his solo performances -- so now when we perform,  we let the
recording of tony play for two minutes before string musicians come in
and start playing the chord AD.

I can say more about the logic of that piece later -- but I'll suffice
it to say that talking, playing, and writing about "Tony Conrad's
Amplified Drone Strings" has made me think differently about the
registers and logics of play, and of course, the ultimate but also
structuring limitation that the piece is borne of tony's absence and
bears witness to it each time we play it -- but also when I talk or
try to write about it.

On Thu, Oct 3, 2019 at 9:17 PM David Grubbs <bluesea at dragcity.com> wrote:
>
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Kathleen, glad to meet you.
>
> Paige, I have some thoughts and questions about the hilarious
> recording of you and Tony that you posted.  We've talked previously
> about Tony's modes of play when in front of a video camera,
> microphone, or onstage.  His was a brilliant improvisatory comedy,
> often so nimbly self-reflexive, and I was wondering about your
> thoughts as to how this recording captures Tony at play and how the
> fact of it being recorded inflects that play.  Why did y'all hit the
> record button?  What changed in his or your mode of play once the tiny
> red light was on and you were rolling?  Were you regularly making
> recordings, and did you listen back together?  What purpose, if any,
> was imagined for recordings the two of you were making at home?  (This
> one reminded me of some of those serious goofing around recordings
> that Tony made at home with Jack Smith c. 1964, which against all odds
> -- the odds from the time at which they were made -- were released
> thirty years down the line.)
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> D
>
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 6:20 PM Kathleen McDermott
> <katmariemcdermott at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >
> > Thank you all for inviting me into this conversation! I unfortunately did not have the pleasure of getting to know Tony personally, however, I’ve felt extremely inspired by his commitment to breaking down boundaries and hierarchies within creative practice. As evidenced by, as David said, his commitment to his project Studio of the Streets, a project that intentionally troubles the space between art and life and who gets to participate in both creative practice and public dialogue... Tony seemed to me to have a unique ability to see through systems of value and to avoid becoming trapped within them. I think this allowed him to make space for other people to be creative too.
> >
> >
> > To encounter Tony’s work is a generous experience, like someone inviting you into a creative home, as Margaret implied. It reminds me that one of the first questions Kathy High ever asked me was, “Who are your people?” We need to know our artistic kin, not as people to envy (though I envy the practices of so many!) but as people to feel aligned with, indebted to, in dialogue with, in the legacy of…. Maybe squatting in a corner of their "house"… ?
> >
> >
> > To that end, the question of challenging systems of value definitely comes up for me when considering humor and play as valid pursuits within creative practice. When I arrived at RPI in 2015 I was making work that was very centered on play, but I rarely talked about it that way, I was sort of flailing about looking for a framework that would lend me some legitimacy in a PhD context. When I presented my work at our first critique with Kathy, Pauline, Igor, Shawn, and the other great folks in the Electronic Arts program, I was immediately asked, “And what about humor and play?” It was like someone turned a light on in my brain– I felt so happy to have been given a pass to frame my work in a way that was much more intuitive for me, even in an academic environment. (And I should note Samson Young, who I met in Hong Kong, also gave me a great push toward play!)
> >
> >
> > I’m particularly interested in seeing play discussed in academia because this is a sphere where we are often in the business of policing disciplinary boundaries. Artists working across disciplines are necessarily crossing boundaries, challenging ideas of who can fuck around with electronics and who can form an opinion on biopolitics; and expanding conceptions of what tools (and bodies!) can do. Play, and the humility that comes with it, is a vital part of this boundary crossing process. Play is joyful and it can also be sly. As playful artists we become, as Shumon Basar has put it, “Professional Amateurs,” who “generate knowledge by elision, contingency and exacting luck.” It’s a term that can be related to Lewis Hyde’s definition of a trickster: a boundary-crosser, “creative idiot,” and “wise fool.” Play supports an in-between space, it is often non-binary, and it is often, to Paige’s points, a feminist act.
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 4:17 PM Margaret Rhee <mrheeloy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >> Thank you Paige and David. I’m writing on my IPhone now, before I get to the office with Internet at Buffalo. I thought of Tony often, although we hadn’t met, every time I’m in the halls of Media Study at SUNY, or blessed time with Paige in her beautiful home she shared with Tony. And even visits to Buffalo City Hall. Last year, when I was at Harvard, Tony’s retrospective was a few feet away from my office. The Buffalo—Cambridge connections created a space, a sense of home.
> >>
> >> Perhaps that’s what I’m struck by, the expansive ways artistic home is created through the practices and play, and the feminialism! that Paige brilliantly points out how domestic work  can and should be honored as part of “art” practices and collaboration.
> >>
> >> The laboring practices of art, as David shared in his moving post that Tony made space and “home” for a community musicians or even interests in Chicago as a livable place, the importance of a city as home.
> >>
> >> I’ve been preoccupied with notions of queer domestic life in a separate cover and perhaps that’s why my thoughts are veering or intersecting, but it makes me wonder about practice and play if explicitly to explore it, and artistic spaces/home.
> >>
> >> Where is this found? Can people or is a person an artist that can make a home?
> >>
> >> I’m thinking now of Paige’s extraordinary film The Last Slide Projector, which reminds me of Intimacy, memories, images and home. The film in it’s intimacy and voice over reminds us of the photograph shared communally in homes. And remapped WNY too, with Rochester now as the site of the ceasing of machinists production.
> >>
> >> The ways Tony critiqued capitalist modes of production of art, which made playfulness possible. The gallery not as the only home for art. Nor theatre as the only filmic experience.
> >>
> >> I’ll end this with small quote from David’s luminous poetry book, now that the audience is assembled, a haunting imaginary which breaks the visualization of instruments and performance, the stage, and even home?
> >>
> >> “There’s a shimmering both audible and visible.” (75)
> >>
> >> I’m not sure how much I like the word home, but I’ll play with this now.
> >>
> >> Kathleen, I’d love to hear more about your work with Kathy High and influences from Tony on your expansive art practices. This is such a honor to be in conversation with you, Paige, and David.
> >>
> >> Grateful for structures that make conversations possible.
> >>
> >> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 8:3t3 PM David Grubbs <bluesea at dragcity.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>> Dear all:
> >>>
> >>> Glad to be taking part.
> >>>
> >>> I met Tony Conrad and first started playing music with him in 1994, when he came to Chicago to record the album Slapping Pythagoras for the Table of the Elements label.  I knew the tiniest bit about him as someone who had been a participant in the Theatre of Eternal Music many many years before, and that he had played a role in the prehistory of the Velvet Underground.  I think that I was also aware of The Flicker, but only as a rumor.  Jim O'Rourke, with whom at the time I played in a group called Gastr del Sol, had recently returned from a festival in Frankfurt where he had seen Tony do one of the first Early Minimalism performances, and he was bouncing off of the ceiling with excitement, and he had arranged for Tony to come to Chicago to record with a bunch of our friends.  On Slapping Pythagoras I was one of six in a hapless ad hoc ensemble of people bowing electric guitars.  Tony's coaching session for the recording was more like a lecture on just intonation and tuning systems and blew all of our minds and also had us busting guts with laughter.  We more or less couldn't believe that this guy was real.  On that record, I also play percussion.  Tony needed a low sound and a high sound, so I thudded a pillow with a baseball glove and pinged a pint glass with a rolled up guitar cable.  We hit it off, and so in various configurations I recorded with Tony, toured with him, played with him in an ensemble performing Pauline Oliveros's Primordial/Drift (man, that was fun), hung out a bunch, interviewed him, wrote about him in my book Records Ruin the Landscape, did time on the board of ISSUE Project Room with him, etc., etc.  He keeps popping up -- or his ideas do or shards of his sense of humor -- in two book-length poems that I've written that are also stabs at music writing.
> >>>
> >>> Paige's recollection about Tony's sense of his collaboration with Beverly Grant rings true to me.  I mean, Tony had his work cut out for him showing up in Chicago to play with this gaggle of white, twenty-something dudes (and one white, something gal) whose worldview was considerably narrower than any of us understood; his mission to school us expanded far beyond tuning systems.  He was always in his weird Socratic way making us think about how it might be possible that we were doing all of these rad things we were so proud of doing.  I remember a group interview in Chicago a couple of years later for a Table of the Elements festival where it was one musical ego after the next, myself included, trying to get in a few words about their important upcoming projects and all that Tony wanted to talk about was how Chicago seemed a great place to live cheaply and not have to work a lot, and how you could definitely get by not having a car, and how people were very attached to their cars in an unhealthy way and that Chicago's public transportation seemed pretty good and the city eminently navigable by bike.
> >>>
> >>> I'll toss one other thing out there.  I can't really remember Tony ever blowing his own horn re the breadth of media or disciplines in which he worked, unless it was to thwart expectations.  Around the time of those first meetings in Chicago, Tony screened a number of his films -- they floored a lot of folks, suddenly it was all we wanted to talk about -- but he seemed more jazzed to discuss Studio of the Streets, his public-access TV show in Buffalo, and the homework helpline that he ran.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 4:36 PM Paige Sarlin <p.sarlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>>>
> >>>> Thank you, Margaret and Renate.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> It's hard to know where to begin. Tony Conrad thought and worked at the intersections of play and collaboration across decades and media. Playing with others on stage and off was serious fun for him. We don't always call the sort of "playing the audience" that tony did “collaboration” -- but tony did.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> In the vein of more recognizable forms of collaboration, tony and I played music together almost everyday. I'll say more about our collaborations later in the week -- but I've attached one of our recordings below.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> For today, though, I want to tell a story about TC's collaboration with another one of his wives to get us thinking about the structural conditions that enable play and collaboration.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> The late David Pendleton included Straight and Narrow (Tony and Beverly Conrad, 1970) in his film program at The Flaherty Film Seminar the summer after tony died. The theme that year (2016) was “Play.”  It was an absolutely perfect choice -- the film embodies TC’s radical commitment to play-- and to the joy it produces. It’s my favorite of all his films. The first time I saw the film, I was at a screening in London and tony was seated right beside me. I turned to him and said -- it’s the snoopy happy dance… my snoopy happy dance… experimental minimalist white boy style.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> I’m not sure the peanuts reference meant much to him -- but the film still has the same happy-making effect on me. I played it yesterday for my class of 110 undergraduates and it’s kept me humming "Ides of March" -- the John Cale and Terry Riley tune the film is set to -- since then. I’ve been teaching this Introduction to Media Study class and screening The Flicker every year for the last 6 years. When tony was alive, he’d come to the class -- he’d say absolutely nothing about the film and we’d hit play (sorry cinephiles -- there’s no 16mm print of The Flicker at University at Buffalo). He and I would sit on the edge of the stage and look out at the students and watch them watch The Flicker. Never the same twice, he said, for him or for them.
> >>>>
> >>>> Yesterday, I watched tony and beverly’s  film do what tony was so good at -- it cleaned the slate for me and my students. Wiping assumptions right off the table, tony loved to pick the needle up during a broken-record debate and reset the game. No, the basic of unit of cinema is not the shot or the cut, but -- the frame. And constructing a film out of black and white frames means that light and sound play the room with you and me in it.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> About a week after I saw Straight and Narrow for the first time, I asked tony: so tell me what did beverly do on the film? He paused for only the briefest of seconds and said, “She raised ted (their son).” He talked with beverly about the film while she was keeping their life afloat, tending to the apartment, cooking, cleaning, all the maintenance work of social reproduction. Dumb struck by his answer, I said nothing. Tony broke the silence a few minutes later and said “you know, no one has ever asked me that question…”
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> I was amazed -- in 1970, he had understood authorship and collaboration on a whole other level. Beverly Grant Conrad deserved as much credit for conversation, care, ‘women’s work,’ and social reproduction as he did for conceptualizing and filming each frame. Tony had recognized the social and political situation of his own productivity -- that his partner’s labor was the condition of possibility for his “work” and “play.” The film announces that Beverly is the co-author each time it plays. Perhaps Beverly instigated the inclusion. But tony made it clear that he’d thought of it as “their film” from its inception.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Something different than thanks, acknowledgements, or credit -- there is a structural challenge in tony’s conceptualization of his collaboration with beverly which confronts us with a deeply feminist question (or perhaps a feminalist? minimal-feminist?): what are the material, economic, social, cultural, and affective conditions necessary for collaboration and play? How do structural conditions shape and enable artworks that celebrate or involve play and collaboration?
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> TC PS Voice Cello.11.15
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Paige Sarlin, Ph.D. (she/her)
> >>>> Assistant Professor / Department of Media Study / University at Buffalo/SUNY
> >>>> p.sarlin at gmail.com / paigesarlin.info
> >>>>
> >>>> On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 4:02 PM Margaret Rhee <mrheeloy at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>>>> Dear everyone,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Thank you Renate for your incredible curation and mentorship with --empyre--, it's such an inspiring community of thinkers, artists, and activists. I loved the discussion on Trans last month, and hope to continue these threads. For this month I'm pleased to share a forum "On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres." The forum was inspired in part by Tony Conrad's work and practice which spans across film, music, writing, and theory. For this forum, we're honored to have artists, thinkers, and creators who play across media and disciplinary divides and  to celebrate innovation in cross-disciplinary art practices. For the first week, we begin with a focus on Tony Conrad's work on art/collaboration/and play and we're honored to have artists Paige Sarlin, David Grubbs, and Kathleen McDermott join us for the discussion. Please see below for their biographies and we look forward to hearing more about their work and insights on collaboration/play/art in Tony's collaborations, their own practices. As always we welcome --empyre--members to contribute and join the conversation.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> my best,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Margaret
> >>>>>
> >>>>> ----
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In this month's -empyre- forum, we take up the question of productivity and and the politics of play, and how playing across genres, mediums, forms, disciplines, and departments, etc. makes for new kinds of innovative art, thinking, and community; and in doing so, better intervenes and gestures toward transformative futures. The current conspiracy-us versus them- culture perhaps exemplifies the problem of singular thinking and the need for creative, eclectic, and innovative practices more than ever. We’re interested in artists, thinkers, and activists with practices that cross over boundaries and intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to justice, we explore how multiple forms of art practices prompt us to reimagine different kind of worlds, as strategy and survival. Initially inspired by Tony Conrad's work, as his practice spans across film, music, writing, and sculptures, we playfully ask how play lends itself to more libratory ways of creation and practice.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> We begin with the first week on media and new media art in conversation with Tony Conrad's playful work across mediums, we then move into a second week asking questions on poetry and playing across the visual, cinematic, and theoretical, the third week is dedicated to the theme of ethnography across forms such as photography, film, and poetry, and the forth week focuses on the ways artists advocate for decolonial and racial resistance through playing across genres and forms. While seemingly diverse, we hope the loosely organized topics lends itself to connections between the weeks, and across themes presented. With attention to questions such as capital, creativity, institutional critique, and justice, we’re honored to have the following artists and thinkers join us for this conversation and reflect on the possibilities of practice, gestures, and play.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> We also invite our -empyre- subscribers, whose own work broadly resonates with the themes of practice and play, to join the conversation. What are the ways your practice has played or plays across genres? Have you faced institutional challenges in crossing disciplinary divides, and if so, how did you overcome them? Is play and practice productive and/or political? We welcome our guests and all -empyre- subscribers to actively participate and post this month and share your practices and experiences of playing across genres and any questions that arise. Thank you again to our featured guests, and we're honored for their participation. We look forward to the conversation.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Week One: Art/Collaboration and Play
> >>>>> Honoring the play of Tony Conrad
> >>>>> (October 1)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Paige Sarlin
> >>>>> Paige Sarlin is an artist, scholar, and political activist. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Her first feature-length documentary film, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007. "Illuminating Obsolescence: Eastman Kodak's Carousel Slide Projector and the Work of Ending," her corresponding essay, was recently published in The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence (2019). From 1999 to 2010, she was an active participant in the 16Beaver Group in New York City, a platform for the discussion of the intersection of art and politics. Her writings have been published in October, Re-Thinking Marxism, Discourse, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, and Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture.  She is in the process of finishing her book-length manuscript entitled Interview Work: The Genealogy of a Documentary Form.  She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY.
> >>>>> Married to Tony Conrad at the time of his death, Paige was involved in the conceptualization and realization of the recent exhibition Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective. Her essay "In Person, On Screen, In Context, On Tape," appears in the catalogue. Tony and Paige's collaborative composition "Tony Conrad's Amplified Drone Strings" premiered at the Big Ears festival in 2016. Since then she has performed the piece with David Grubbs, MV Carbon, Jennifer Walshe, and others at the Tate Modern in London, The National Gallery in Washington DC, and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center in New York. Her next book project is a collection of essays about Tony Conrad; entitled You Know Who You Are, the book is structured around an investigation of "the acknowledgement" as an aesthetic form.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> David Grubbs
> >>>>>
> >>>>> David Grubbs is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.  At Brooklyn College he also teaches in the MFA programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Creative Writing.  He is the author of Now that the audience is assembled and Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, the Sixties, and Sound Recording (both Duke University Press) and, with Anthony McCall, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press).  In the spring of 2020, Duke University Press will publish The Voice in the Headphones, Grubbs’s second experiment in music writing in the form of a book-length poem.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums and appeared on more than 190 releases; his most recent solo recording is Creep Mission(Blue Chopsticks, 2017).  In 2000, his The Spectrum Between(Drag City) was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times.  He is known for his ongoing cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet Susan Howe and visual artists Anthony McCall and Angela Bulloch, and his work has been presented at, among other venues, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, the Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou.  Grubbs was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, the Red Krayola, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, and many others.  He is a grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a contributing editor in music for BOMBMagazine, a member of the Blank Forms board of directors, and director of the Blue Chopsticks record label.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Kathleen McDermott
> >>>>>
> >>>>> McDermott’s work utilizes a combination of sculpture, open-source electronics, performance and video, to explore the social ramifications of the relationship between bodies and technology; an artistic research method she refers to as absurdist electronics. Absurdist electronics promotes the use of absurdity as a counter to both the solutionist utopia promised by tech companies, and the atmosphere of doom often prophesied within science fiction. Drawing on the Dada principle that absurdity can be an appropriate response to feelings of alienation, McDermott seeks to solve her own specific struggles with socialization and work, through humor and over-engineering.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In contrast to narratives of the future that are disproportionately focused on virtual bodies and bodies represented by data, McDermott’s inventions emphasize real-time physicality by deliberately intervening in physical space, to a ridiculous degree. She often creates electronics which can respond to sensors and environmental input, but that cannot be controlled by the wearer directly, complicating the agency of the human actors in the scene. Examples include a dress which creates a cloud of fog based on a reading of the wearer’s stress level, and a mechanical brooch that opens to reveal a cinnamon bun when the wearer begins to sweat. The items are worn publicly, either by McDermott or a proxy, and the documentation is edited into narrative videos and GIFs, taking cues from infomercials and advertisements. She then produces tutorials for technically recreating the works in the series, which she distributes online and through workshops.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> http://www.kthartic.com/
> >>>>> https://urbanarmor.org/
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Week Two: Poetics and Play
> >>>>> (October 8)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Truong Tran
> >>>>> Lynne Sachs
> >>>>> Kenji Liu
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Week Three: Queer Ethnography/Methods and Play
> >>>>> (October 15)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Kale B. Fajardo
> >>>>> Erica Rand
> >>>>> Jerry Zee
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Week Four: Racial and Decolonial Practice and Play
> >>>>> (October 22)
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Craig Santos Perez
> >>>>> Maria de Los Angeles
> >>>>> Gabriela Cordoba Vivas
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 10:51 PM Renate Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> >>>>>> Dear -empyre-
> >>>>>> Welcome to October already.  The leaves are falling here in Ithaca and the furnace is on.  I am feeling the impending darkness of autumn creeping into my afternoon activities.  I can only imagine the light where so many of you are.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> We welcome a month of discussion on Practice and Play: Gestures Across Genres organized by Margaret Rhee to celebrate innovation in cross-disciplinary art making.  Many of you will remember Margaret's discussion on Robot Poetics in May of 2017
> >>>>>> http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2017-May/009683.html
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Margaret is an incredible poet, writer and artist.  We are so lucky to have her on our -empyre- Editorial Advisory Board.  She brings warmth to us from Buffalo, New York this month with her diverse set of guests.
> >>>>>> Her biography is below.  Margaret will post the first post of the month tomorrow.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Welcome Margaret and thank you. We look forward.
> >>>>>> Renate
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Margaret Rhee is a poet, scholar, and new media artist. She is the author of Love, Robot, named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association. Her poetry chapbooks include Yellow and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love, and forthcoming collection Poetry Machines: A Letter to a Future Reader, a collection of lyrical essays on poetry, and the intersections of cinema, art, and new media. Currently, she is completing her monograph How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body. She was a College Fellow in Digital Practice in the English Department at Harvard University and a member of MetaLab @ Harvard. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in ethnic studies with a designated emphasis in new media studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at SUNY Buffalo and co-leads Palah 파랗 Light Studios, a creative space for poetry, participation, and pedagogy through technology.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> Renate Ferro
> >>>>>> Visiting Associate Professor
> >>>>>> Director of Undergraduate Studies
> >>>>>> Department of Art
> >>>>>> Tjaden Hall 306
> >>>>>> rferro at cornell.edu
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>>> empyre forum
> >>>>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >>>>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> --
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> College Fellow in Digital Practice (2018 - 2019)
> >>>>> Department of English
> >>>>> Harvard University
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Assistant Professor in Media Theory (2019)
> >>>>> Department of Media Study
> >>>>> SUNY Buffalo
> >>>>> _______________________________________________
> >>>>> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> David Grubbs
> >>> Professor of Music
> >>> Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA)
> >>> Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
> >>> http://pima-brooklyncollege.info
> >>>
> >>> Coming in October:
> >>> Anthony McCall & David Grubbs, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press)
> >>> https://pioneerworks.org/publishing/simultaneous-soloists/
> >>> The Underflow, The Underflow (Corbett vs. Dempsey)
> >>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> empyre forum
> >>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> >>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Margaret Rhee, Ph.D.
> >>
> >> College Fellow in Digital Practice (2018 - 2019)
> >> Department of English
> >> Harvard University
> >>
> >> Assistant Professor in Media Theory (2019)
> >> Department of Media Study
> >> SUNY Buffalo
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> 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
>
>
>
> --
> David Grubbs
> Professor of Music
> Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA)
> Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
> http://pima-brooklyncollege.info
>
> Coming in October:
> Anthony McCall & David Grubbs, Simultaneous Soloists (Pioneer Works Press)
> https://pioneerworks.org/publishing/simultaneous-soloists/
> The Underflow, The Underflow (Corbett vs. Dempsey)
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu