...radio is the medium of creative ambiguity.
"I begin with the idea of radio as an adventure, and part of the idea of an adventure is that you don't always know precisely where you are. To my ears, a good radio program invites the listener to navigate. Sometimes the waters get choppy, or the fog rolls in. I always remind myself that the first community of radio artists was a community of maritime distress and rescue, the community of S-O-S."
"My role is to open up a space of play between fact and fiction, certainly not to fool anybody. Not deception -- but play. For example, take Ice Music, in which a sextet of trumpets are frozen into an ice tray, then dropped into a glass of selzer to create a brass choir. Well, the dream of freezing sound is an old one, and it pops up in Rabelais and elsewhere, but it does not carry much water as science. The humor is in taking the illusion seriously enough to inhabit the conventions of a "real" discovery."
"Radio is at root a PULSE medium, it's the very nature of soundwaves. My own roots are in music and writing, so radio seemed like a lovely place to dance. I use music to set tone, certainly, but also to heighten the humor, create counterpoint or cross-reference. Listeners are trained to hear radio as a combination of Words and Music, so once again, why fight it? In a piece like Brain Mash, it's crucial to communicate the essential ingredient of TIME, if you aim to transform mashed Idaho tubers into living human brains."
"I've always believed deeply in the utopian side of radio, the wonderful power to create these temporary communities, among listeners you can never entirely anticipate or predict, very democratic and even random. The other side of radio flourishes, I call it radio Thanatos -- radio death. Radio was born as call for help (S.O.S), yet swiftly became a tool for destruction, whether in the rants of tyrants or, quite literally, as a weapon. But we should never underestimate or abandon the radio that is close to the beat of life, the rhythm of community, what I call Radio Eros."
Gregory Whitehead in conversation.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Opening lines
(from the poetry of WS Graham):
Imagine a forest
I leave this at your ear for when you wake
Whatever you've come here to get
Shut up, shut up. There's nobody here.
Meanwhile surely there must be something to say
I called today, Peter, and you were away.
This morning I am ready if you are
Gently disintegrate me
Just for the sake of recovering
I have my yellow boots on to walk.
Take Matthew Sweeney's workshop in dramatic poetry (from where these openings are taken) here.
(from the poetry of WS Graham):
Imagine a forest
I leave this at your ear for when you wake
Whatever you've come here to get
Shut up, shut up. There's nobody here.
Meanwhile surely there must be something to say
I called today, Peter, and you were away.
This morning I am ready if you are
Gently disintegrate me
Just for the sake of recovering
I have my yellow boots on to walk.
Take Matthew Sweeney's workshop in dramatic poetry (from where these openings are taken) here.
Friday, March 14, 2008
"The elements of poetry are letters, syllables, words, sentences. Poetry arises from the playing off of these elements against each other. Meaning is only essential if it is to be used as one such factor. I play off sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter. I pity nonsense, because until now it has been so neglected in the making of art, and that's why I love it."
Kurt Schwitters. from Merz
Check out Slim Gaillard here.
Kurt Schwitters. from Merz
Check out Slim Gaillard here.
UBUWEB: ETHNOPOETICS
section curated by Jerome Rothenberg
The breakthroughs of the last 100 years in poetry and elsewhere have been marked by new approaches to language and performance. Largely this has been the work of several generations of experimental writers and performers, many of them now archived and available thru Ubuweb and related web sites. It fell to some of us, starting with forerunners like Tristan Tzara and Antonin Artaud, to track related but traditional approaches over a wide range of once impenetrable cultures throughout the world. In my own work I was able to bring some of these lines together in gatherings of the 1960s and 1970s like Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin, as well as in the magazine Alcheringa that I co-edited for several years with Dennis Tedlock. The name that we gave this enterprise, as it applied to the world’s deep cultures – those surviving in situ as well as those that had vanished except for transcriptions in books or recordings from earlier decades – was ethnopoetics.
In the present Ubuweb collection of ethnopoetic openings, it’s our intention to build a sampler of what we take to be the second great breakthrough of the modernist poetry project. The search here is for a range of poetries outside the domain of customarily accepted literature. In particular we’re interested, in the spirit of other segments of Ubuweb, in soundings and visionings that are the traditional and often culturally acceptable counterparts to what in our own surroundings have been seen and heard as radical, even disturbing departures from conventional practice. In exploring these we will also be mindful of occasions on which the avant-garde experimental line has merged with or deliberately drawn from other culturally specific traditions.
We proceed in the spirit of Gertrude Stein, often quoted by me: The exciting thing about all this is that as it is new it is old and as it is old it is new, but now we have come to be in our way which is an entirely different way.
- Jerome Rothenberg, October 2002
View materials here.
section curated by Jerome Rothenberg
The breakthroughs of the last 100 years in poetry and elsewhere have been marked by new approaches to language and performance. Largely this has been the work of several generations of experimental writers and performers, many of them now archived and available thru Ubuweb and related web sites. It fell to some of us, starting with forerunners like Tristan Tzara and Antonin Artaud, to track related but traditional approaches over a wide range of once impenetrable cultures throughout the world. In my own work I was able to bring some of these lines together in gatherings of the 1960s and 1970s like Technicians of the Sacred and Shaking the Pumpkin, as well as in the magazine Alcheringa that I co-edited for several years with Dennis Tedlock. The name that we gave this enterprise, as it applied to the world’s deep cultures – those surviving in situ as well as those that had vanished except for transcriptions in books or recordings from earlier decades – was ethnopoetics.
In the present Ubuweb collection of ethnopoetic openings, it’s our intention to build a sampler of what we take to be the second great breakthrough of the modernist poetry project. The search here is for a range of poetries outside the domain of customarily accepted literature. In particular we’re interested, in the spirit of other segments of Ubuweb, in soundings and visionings that are the traditional and often culturally acceptable counterparts to what in our own surroundings have been seen and heard as radical, even disturbing departures from conventional practice. In exploring these we will also be mindful of occasions on which the avant-garde experimental line has merged with or deliberately drawn from other culturally specific traditions.
We proceed in the spirit of Gertrude Stein, often quoted by me: The exciting thing about all this is that as it is new it is old and as it is old it is new, but now we have come to be in our way which is an entirely different way.
- Jerome Rothenberg, October 2002
View materials here.
Sound Poetry - An Historical Discography (1978)
Michael Gibb
(from Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978. Originally published in KONTEXTSOUND, Kontext Publications, Amsterdam 1977, revised & updated by bpNichol)
Details here.
Michael Gibb
(from Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, edited by Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, Underwich Editions, Toronto, 1978. Originally published in KONTEXTSOUND, Kontext Publications, Amsterdam 1977, revised & updated by bpNichol)
Details here.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, reviewed
Novelist Stephen Amidon is surprised by his test drive.
From The Sunday Times
March 9, 2008
... It is also possible to envision the Kindle causing a change in the nature of the literary text itself. Instead of the traditional flat accumulation of letters, one can imagine a page that is riven with all manner of links to Google or Wikipedia. The novel will wind up looking like your average blog. For instance, the novelist mentions that his hero is peering down into the Grand Canyon, and the reader need only click on those words to be given the same panoramic view. Or listen to a snippet of a symphony, or watch archival news footage. Or even, perish the thought, text a question or a critical response to the author.
Prospects such as this, rather than in the actual experience of reading the Kindle, are what have caused my reservations to grow. The beauty and genius of the traditional book is that it is a thing unto itself. It is self-contained. Its limitations are its strength. It has covers, and between them is an entire world created by the interplay between the author’s imagination and the reader’s. Once you connect that autonomous world to the shifting, boundless, hyperactive universe of cyberspace, you run the very real risk of severing that magical bond of imagination. Give the reader a photographic vista of the Grand Canyon and he no longer has to imagine it. By opening up the book to the limitless possibilities of the digital age, Amazon just might be risking closing it for good.
Read full review.
Novelist Stephen Amidon is surprised by his test drive.
From The Sunday Times
March 9, 2008
... It is also possible to envision the Kindle causing a change in the nature of the literary text itself. Instead of the traditional flat accumulation of letters, one can imagine a page that is riven with all manner of links to Google or Wikipedia. The novel will wind up looking like your average blog. For instance, the novelist mentions that his hero is peering down into the Grand Canyon, and the reader need only click on those words to be given the same panoramic view. Or listen to a snippet of a symphony, or watch archival news footage. Or even, perish the thought, text a question or a critical response to the author.
Prospects such as this, rather than in the actual experience of reading the Kindle, are what have caused my reservations to grow. The beauty and genius of the traditional book is that it is a thing unto itself. It is self-contained. Its limitations are its strength. It has covers, and between them is an entire world created by the interplay between the author’s imagination and the reader’s. Once you connect that autonomous world to the shifting, boundless, hyperactive universe of cyberspace, you run the very real risk of severing that magical bond of imagination. Give the reader a photographic vista of the Grand Canyon and he no longer has to imagine it. By opening up the book to the limitless possibilities of the digital age, Amazon just might be risking closing it for good.
Read full review.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
reviewed by Guy Rotella
Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.
Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1992. 77 pp. $19.95.
"It goes without saying."
So nothing stays. But husks remain. As in "Deserted Perch." What's fled or flown can be evoked: the solace soothes; it menaces, too.
Nostalgic, enigmatic, even coy, Joseph Cornell's recuperating, scarifying work has urged a pride of poets to comment or verse. Octavio Paz wrote "Objects and Apparitions" for Cornell, calling his cased and uncontained constructions "cages for infinity." Elizabeth Bishop translated Paz's poem and made a "Cornell box" herself. In "Pantoum," John Ashbery enlists Cornell with other "connoisseurs of oblivion" who inhabit our "short, brittle" days. And Stanley Kunitz admires a Cornell work— "The Crystal Cage"—for its "basket of gifts," its "snowbox of wonders."
Read the full review here.
reviewed by Guy Rotella
Charles Simic, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell.
Hopewell, New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1992. 77 pp. $19.95.
"It goes without saying."
So nothing stays. But husks remain. As in "Deserted Perch." What's fled or flown can be evoked: the solace soothes; it menaces, too.
Nostalgic, enigmatic, even coy, Joseph Cornell's recuperating, scarifying work has urged a pride of poets to comment or verse. Octavio Paz wrote "Objects and Apparitions" for Cornell, calling his cased and uncontained constructions "cages for infinity." Elizabeth Bishop translated Paz's poem and made a "Cornell box" herself. In "Pantoum," John Ashbery enlists Cornell with other "connoisseurs of oblivion" who inhabit our "short, brittle" days. And Stanley Kunitz admires a Cornell work— "The Crystal Cage"—for its "basket of gifts," its "snowbox of wonders."
Read the full review here.
Ekphrasis: Image and Text
Vessela Valiavitcharska
It’s not easy to separate the visual from the textual in discussions of communication. While some have argued for “a cognitive divide between oral and visual cultures” represented by the progression from the visual to the textual, it is far more likely that the two modes are connected, and that “cultures freely borrow and adapt” from visual and textual methods of representation “when the need arises.” One conversation about the relationship between the visual and the textual concerns ekphrasis, commonly defined as the poetic description of a work of art. Regretfully, this popular definition of the term disregards the long and rich rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis, which has been understood as the rhetorically charged description of anything that can be perceived visually or evoked mentally.
More.
Vessela Valiavitcharska
It’s not easy to separate the visual from the textual in discussions of communication. While some have argued for “a cognitive divide between oral and visual cultures” represented by the progression from the visual to the textual, it is far more likely that the two modes are connected, and that “cultures freely borrow and adapt” from visual and textual methods of representation “when the need arises.” One conversation about the relationship between the visual and the textual concerns ekphrasis, commonly defined as the poetic description of a work of art. Regretfully, this popular definition of the term disregards the long and rich rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis, which has been understood as the rhetorically charged description of anything that can be perceived visually or evoked mentally.
More.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
Ekphrasis through the Ages
Introduction: Eight Ways of Looking at Ekphrasis
by Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner
Words about an image, itself often embedded in a larger text: ekphrasis today has become such an important element of scholarly approaches to the novel, to epic, to the Romantics, and even to genres beyond the literary, that it may be difficult to remember its relative obscurity of a quarter-century ago. Once skimmed over as superfluous, or derided as rhetorical showmanship, ekphrasis now seems to present countless opportunities for the discovery of meaning: it has been variously treated as a mirror of the text, a mirror in the text, a mode of specular inversion, a further voice that disrupts or extends the message of the narrative, a prefiguration for that narrative (whether false or true) in its suggestions.
More.
Introduction: Eight Ways of Looking at Ekphrasis
by Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner
Words about an image, itself often embedded in a larger text: ekphrasis today has become such an important element of scholarly approaches to the novel, to epic, to the Romantics, and even to genres beyond the literary, that it may be difficult to remember its relative obscurity of a quarter-century ago. Once skimmed over as superfluous, or derided as rhetorical showmanship, ekphrasis now seems to present countless opportunities for the discovery of meaning: it has been variously treated as a mirror of the text, a mirror in the text, a mode of specular inversion, a further voice that disrupts or extends the message of the narrative, a prefiguration for that narrative (whether false or true) in its suggestions.
More.
Dial-A-Poem
In the middle of the Dial-A-Poem experience wqas the giant self-consuming media machine choosing you as some of its food, which also lets you get your hands on the controls because you've made a new system of communicating poetry. The newspaper, magazine, TV and radio coverage had the effect of making everyone want to call the Dial-A-Poem. We got up to the maximum limit of the equipment and stayed there. 60,000 calls a week and it was totally great. The busiest time was 9 AM to 5 PM, so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone, then the second busiest time was 8:30 PM to 11:30 PM was the after-dinner crowd, then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep 2 AM to 6 PM. So using an existing communications system we established a new poet-audience relationship.
Dial-A-Poem began at the Architectural League of New York in January 1969 with 10 telephone lines and ran for 5 months, during which time 1,112,337 calls were received. It continuted at MOMA in July 1970 with 12 telephone lines and ran for 2 and a half months and 200,087 calls were received. It was at The Musuem of Contemporary Art, Chicago for 6 weeks in November 1969 and since then has cropped up everywhere. This was with equipment working at maximum capacity and sometimes jamming the entire exchange. At MOMA, the 12 lines were each connected to an automatic answering set, which holds a pre-recorded message. Someone calling got randomly one of 12 different poems, which were changed daily. There were around 700 selections of 55 poets.
On this LP of Dial-A-Poem Poets are 27 poets. The records are a selection of highlights of poetry that spontaneously grew over 20 years from 1953 to 1972, mostly in America, representing many aspects and different approaches to dealing with words and sound. The poets are from the New York School, Bolinas and West Coast Schools, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry, Black Poetry and Movement Poetry.
John Giorno, August 1972
Read more and hear Dial-A-Poem here.
In the middle of the Dial-A-Poem experience wqas the giant self-consuming media machine choosing you as some of its food, which also lets you get your hands on the controls because you've made a new system of communicating poetry. The newspaper, magazine, TV and radio coverage had the effect of making everyone want to call the Dial-A-Poem. We got up to the maximum limit of the equipment and stayed there. 60,000 calls a week and it was totally great. The busiest time was 9 AM to 5 PM, so one figured that all those people sitting at desks in New York office buildings spend a lot of time on the telephone, then the second busiest time was 8:30 PM to 11:30 PM was the after-dinner crowd, then the California calls and those tripping on acid or couldn't sleep 2 AM to 6 PM. So using an existing communications system we established a new poet-audience relationship.
Dial-A-Poem began at the Architectural League of New York in January 1969 with 10 telephone lines and ran for 5 months, during which time 1,112,337 calls were received. It continuted at MOMA in July 1970 with 12 telephone lines and ran for 2 and a half months and 200,087 calls were received. It was at The Musuem of Contemporary Art, Chicago for 6 weeks in November 1969 and since then has cropped up everywhere. This was with equipment working at maximum capacity and sometimes jamming the entire exchange. At MOMA, the 12 lines were each connected to an automatic answering set, which holds a pre-recorded message. Someone calling got randomly one of 12 different poems, which were changed daily. There were around 700 selections of 55 poets.
On this LP of Dial-A-Poem Poets are 27 poets. The records are a selection of highlights of poetry that spontaneously grew over 20 years from 1953 to 1972, mostly in America, representing many aspects and different approaches to dealing with words and sound. The poets are from the New York School, Bolinas and West Coast Schools, Concrete Poetry, Beat Poetry, Black Poetry and Movement Poetry.
John Giorno, August 1972
Read more and hear Dial-A-Poem here.
Ekphrasis and the Other
by W. J. T. MITCHELL
This article reproduced as part of
the Romantic Circles Electronic Edition of Shelley's "Medusa"
by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press.
"Ekphrasis and the Other" by W. J. T. Mitchell from PICTURE THEORY published by The University of Chicago Press, copyright 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
by W. J. T. MITCHELL
This article reproduced as part of
the Romantic Circles Electronic Edition of Shelley's "Medusa"
by kind permission of the University of Chicago Press.
"Ekphrasis and the Other" by W. J. T. Mitchell from PICTURE THEORY published by The University of Chicago Press, copyright 1994 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. - book reviews
by Brian Wallis
One of the great themes in Western culture is the contest between word and image. From Leonardo's Paragone through Lessing's Laocoon to the writings of Barthes and Derrida, theorists have struggled to define the different properties of verbal and visual descriptive systems. Seeking ways of distinguishing these systems, some have attempted to disentangle texts from pictures while others have admitted that the two are inextricable. But for many recent critics, this dualistic method of creating categories and granting greater or lesser value to one or the other is itself historically specific, linked to the classificatory modes of modernist ideology. In much postmodern theory about representation, the earlier polarized thinking about words and images has been replaced by a more relativistic approach--one that has resulted in radically decentered and antiformalistic reconsiderations of, among other things, the meaning of realism, authorship and identity. Thus, despite the extensive literature on representation in recent critical theory, the issue is rarely stated--as it is in W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory--in terms of the old word-image dualism. But Mitchell makes a strong case for the argument that this dichotomy is worth revisiting.
Read review.
by Brian Wallis
One of the great themes in Western culture is the contest between word and image. From Leonardo's Paragone through Lessing's Laocoon to the writings of Barthes and Derrida, theorists have struggled to define the different properties of verbal and visual descriptive systems. Seeking ways of distinguishing these systems, some have attempted to disentangle texts from pictures while others have admitted that the two are inextricable. But for many recent critics, this dualistic method of creating categories and granting greater or lesser value to one or the other is itself historically specific, linked to the classificatory modes of modernist ideology. In much postmodern theory about representation, the earlier polarized thinking about words and images has been replaced by a more relativistic approach--one that has resulted in radically decentered and antiformalistic reconsiderations of, among other things, the meaning of realism, authorship and identity. Thus, despite the extensive literature on representation in recent critical theory, the issue is rarely stated--as it is in W.J.T. Mitchell's Picture Theory--in terms of the old word-image dualism. But Mitchell makes a strong case for the argument that this dichotomy is worth revisiting.
Read review.
Friday, February 22, 2008
ASPECT is a biannual DVD magazine of new media art. The mission of the publication is to distribute and archive works of time-based art. Each issue highlights artists working in new or experimental media, whose works are best documented in video or sound.
OPEN CALL—VOLUME 12: VITAL SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
ASPECT SEEKS NEW MEDIA ART SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 12: VITAL
Due by March 26, 2008—ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, a biannual dvd publication, is currently accepting submissions of work best documented in a time-based format for Volume 12: Vital. This issue will explore that which is essential, grave, indispensable, and/or critical to existence.
The staff of ASPECT is asking curators, art critics, and members of the contemporary art community to help assemble and comment on works for the next issue by submitting a work of art on which they wish to provide audio commentary. Due to the format of the publication, the criteria for selection will include both the qualifications of the commentator and the quality of the work submitted. Audio recordings of the commentary will be assembled after the submissions have been selected.
Submissions should include:
- Video documentation of a work or small group of works by a single artist (no more than 15 minutes in length)
- A brief (100 word) statement regarding the submitted work
- Resume of the artist
- Contact information for the commentator and artist
- Resume of the commentator
- Brief notes outlining the contents of the proposed commentary
- If you would like us to return your materials, please include a SASE. Otherwise, we will keep your work on file for further consideration.
Submissions must be received by March 26, 2008 and sent to:
ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art
46 Waltham Street, suite 103
Boston, MA 02118
617.695.0500
All artists will be contacted via email regarding their submission no later than April 28, 2008
OPEN CALL—VOLUME 12: VITAL SEPTEMBER 26, 2007
ASPECT SEEKS NEW MEDIA ART SUBMISSIONS FOR VOLUME 12: VITAL
Due by March 26, 2008—ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art, a biannual dvd publication, is currently accepting submissions of work best documented in a time-based format for Volume 12: Vital. This issue will explore that which is essential, grave, indispensable, and/or critical to existence.
The staff of ASPECT is asking curators, art critics, and members of the contemporary art community to help assemble and comment on works for the next issue by submitting a work of art on which they wish to provide audio commentary. Due to the format of the publication, the criteria for selection will include both the qualifications of the commentator and the quality of the work submitted. Audio recordings of the commentary will be assembled after the submissions have been selected.
Submissions should include:
- Video documentation of a work or small group of works by a single artist (no more than 15 minutes in length)
- A brief (100 word) statement regarding the submitted work
- Resume of the artist
- Contact information for the commentator and artist
- Resume of the commentator
- Brief notes outlining the contents of the proposed commentary
- If you would like us to return your materials, please include a SASE. Otherwise, we will keep your work on file for further consideration.
Submissions must be received by March 26, 2008 and sent to:
ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art
46 Waltham Street, suite 103
Boston, MA 02118
617.695.0500
All artists will be contacted via email regarding their submission no later than April 28, 2008
Distribution systems
See online panel discussion at MIT World here:
Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art
MODERATOR:
Bill Arning
Curator, List Visual Arts Center, MIT
PANELISTS:
Michael Mittelman: Artist, and Founder and editor, ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art
Aspect website
Tony Cokes: Artist and Researcher, Brown University
Cokes' Brown website
Andres Laracuente: Artist
Online gallery site with Laracuente's art
View.
See online panel discussion at MIT World here:
Reproduction, Mimicry, Critique and Distribution Systems in Visual Art
MODERATOR:
Bill Arning
Curator, List Visual Arts Center, MIT
PANELISTS:
Michael Mittelman: Artist, and Founder and editor, ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art
Aspect website
Tony Cokes: Artist and Researcher, Brown University
Cokes' Brown website
Andres Laracuente: Artist
Online gallery site with Laracuente's art
View.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Lawrence Weiner, Vienna, 1991, Wiener Festwochen, Flakturm im Esterházypark. Photo by Christian Wachter.
Conceptual art is a visual art that is not retinal, or at least resists appealing to sight at the expense of thought. It often manifests itself in language that assumes the entire burden of compelling the viewer to read the signs on gallery walls. Conceptual art persists and is not amenable to the merchandising that subsequent decades have brought about. Whether they know it or not, formalists of the 1960s presupposed the early modern achievement of Russian and French artists and writers. Conceptual artists as well show the formal and structural bias of manipulating language operationally. Sites formerly intended for live events or “actions” now allow mental operations to substitute for physical behavior. Lawrence Weiner is among the most respected in the loose federation of artists that includes Robert Barry, Douglas Hueber and Joseph Kosuth, and extends to Sol LeWitt, who remains a key figure in artistic formalism. Weiner’s language refers to works both specific and general. In sites that are specific, yet treated categorically, Weiner’s words occupy the book, the gallery, the street, the stage. His words and work act as cultural irritants wherever they appear. Ranging from mildly to aggressively interventionist, Weiner’s verbal art uses formalism to drive a wedge into the cultural status quo.
Read Lawrence Weiner by Marjorie Welish
in Bomb Issue 54 Winter 1996, ART
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Random poetry almost fulfills the dream of Gilles Deleuze, who imagines an ideal game of chance, one whose rules find themselves generated by, and subjected to, chance itself. Such a game results in an aimless outcome so futile that we dismiss the game as a nonsensical dissipation of time—an atelic, if not asemic, activity, not unlike the daydreaming seen in modern, poetic theory: "only thought finds it possible to affirm all chance" for "[i]f one tries to play this game other than in thought, nothing happens, and if one tries to produce a result other than the work of art, nothing is produced"; hence, "[t]his game, which can only exist in thought and which has no other result than the work of art is also that by which thought and art […] disturb […] reality." Only the artisan and the thinker ever dare to play this game because, in it, "there is nothing but victories for those who know how […] to affirm and ramify chance, instead of dividing it in order to dominate it, in order to wager, in order to win."
CHRISTIAN BÖK
Random Poetry 06
CHRISTIAN BÖK
Random Poetry 06
Hugo Ball's "Karawane"
Marie Osmond performing from memory (:32)
http://www.ubu.com/sound/ball.html
And here it is on You Tube (with text).
Marie Osmond performing from memory (:32)
http://www.ubu.com/sound/ball.html
And here it is on You Tube (with text).
CHRISTIAN BÖK
UbuWeb at AWP
... the links to the works on my playlist for the panel entitled "Listen to This"….
UbuWeb at AWP
... the links to the works on my playlist for the panel entitled "Listen to This"….
The Poetry Foundation has a section on Random Poetry. Here is an example :
CHRISTIAN BÖK
Random Poetry 07
"WE"
First utterance of Talking Popcorn
by Nina Katchadourian
-----------------
Nina Katchadourian is a conceptual artist, famous for her eclectic projects, some of which involve her mending a spiderweb or sorting a bookshelf. Often her work consists of either a whimsical intervention into a geographic mapping or an uninvited modification of an ecological terrain. She might, for example, dissect a travel map, extracting all the landmass, while retaining, intact, all the highways—or she might augment a car alarum, installing a new bullhorn, which screeches out a birdcall instead.
Talking Popcorn is a sculpture that consists of a popcorn-machine hooked up to a microphone that transmits these signals to a hidden laptop—one equipped to convert these sounds according to the dictates of Morse Code, after which the computer translates these dits and dahs into a series of English letters for vocalization by its own robot-voice. The artist goes on to transcribe each message from this "oracle," preserving the popcorn in a vacuum-capsule for display alongside these texts.
Katchadourian remarks that "Talking Popcorn blurts out words in many different languages, but ultimately it speaks a 'language' very much its own"—and she has even gone so far as to bronze the first four kernels of popcorn generated by the machine, in order to preserve its inital, spoken utterance—the word "WE" (dit dah dah, dit). Her machine almost seems to literalize the notion of the "soundbite," insofar as each phoneme erupts by chance from the void, only to leave behind its own edible casing.
Katchadourian has, in effect, built an "echo chamber," in which we see letters collide or disband at random, doing so in a way reminiscent of the clinamen described by Lucretius, who draws an analogy between atoms and words in order to suggest that all substances and all utterances result from minute nuclei, erupting and swerving into each other as they fall through the void. Each letter becomes a fugitive particle that might appear, change, or vanish, depending upon such a randomized trajectory….
CHRISTIAN BÖK
Random Poetry 07
"WE"
First utterance of Talking Popcorn
by Nina Katchadourian
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Nina Katchadourian is a conceptual artist, famous for her eclectic projects, some of which involve her mending a spiderweb or sorting a bookshelf. Often her work consists of either a whimsical intervention into a geographic mapping or an uninvited modification of an ecological terrain. She might, for example, dissect a travel map, extracting all the landmass, while retaining, intact, all the highways—or she might augment a car alarum, installing a new bullhorn, which screeches out a birdcall instead.
Talking Popcorn is a sculpture that consists of a popcorn-machine hooked up to a microphone that transmits these signals to a hidden laptop—one equipped to convert these sounds according to the dictates of Morse Code, after which the computer translates these dits and dahs into a series of English letters for vocalization by its own robot-voice. The artist goes on to transcribe each message from this "oracle," preserving the popcorn in a vacuum-capsule for display alongside these texts.
Katchadourian remarks that "Talking Popcorn blurts out words in many different languages, but ultimately it speaks a 'language' very much its own"—and she has even gone so far as to bronze the first four kernels of popcorn generated by the machine, in order to preserve its inital, spoken utterance—the word "WE" (dit dah dah, dit). Her machine almost seems to literalize the notion of the "soundbite," insofar as each phoneme erupts by chance from the void, only to leave behind its own edible casing.
Katchadourian has, in effect, built an "echo chamber," in which we see letters collide or disband at random, doing so in a way reminiscent of the clinamen described by Lucretius, who draws an analogy between atoms and words in order to suggest that all substances and all utterances result from minute nuclei, erupting and swerving into each other as they fall through the void. Each letter becomes a fugitive particle that might appear, change, or vanish, depending upon such a randomized trajectory….
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