Discus Discuss

We had a wonderful discussion this past Saturday in preparation for our upcoming March 9 event (details: Krowswork Gallery; poets Kevin Killian, Jen Burris, Ben Mirov; artists Chrstine Elfman, Adrian Buckmaster, and Nick Almquist; 7:30pm). 

Looking at some different examples of collaboration, we talked about what it is that makes that "third thing" emerge, as Chrstine put it the "puff of blue smoke in a chemistry experiment" that's neither ingredient alone but rather a result of the reaction between two.

Class of '47, a comic by New York schoolers Brainard and Creeley, as an example of a kind of traditional (or, "exquisite corps-ey" as John Sakkis called it) teaming-up of poet and writer.

War the Musical by Rob Fitterman, as reworked through video by Rob and artist Klaus Killisch (so good, a must see, esp "Don't Give up the Ship," with the dog.).

Swamp, by Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt, an essential exemplification of the problematic nature of directing/receiving directions in a collaborative setting. We may have decided, through this, that everything is kind of a sham.

and various iterations of Christian Marclay's work "Manga Scroll," with special attention to the Shelley Hirsch version that we were lucky enough to witness at the SF electronic music festival last year. This brought up questions about what the relationship between a composer and player is; is it collaboration? Can it be a struggle between egos? Is that necessarily bad, good, neutral? It also reminded John and Tom Comitta of the many interpretations of Kurt Schwitter's Ursonate, of which we listened to Christian Bok's super speedy Bone thugs-worthy reading as well as a robotic xtranormalesque rendition.


Conclusions were nowhere to be found, but we did have some pizza and wine and our heads together and for some good ole third-thing-thinking.

we're not blacked out anymore, and the future is bright

Blackout over!

Get this: the day of the anti-SOPA internet blackout, we Lectrices also experienced a neighborhood blackout. For a while we considered that it might have been a fancy prank against PG&E by some occupiers or anonymous. Then we considered that even if it weren't, we should do our best to make it seem as if it were. Then, though, we found a rat in our kitchen. A real rat, not a person who would tell on us. So our plan was foiled and we spent the rest of our lives standing on chairs and searching under furniture.

Anyway: this post is also to say that we're brewing up some exciting March business. Brace yourselves, and check back frequently.

sopa

Okay, so it turns out that we couldn't get the nifty auto-blackout java thing to work on the platform we're using (something about the time-sensitive thing and html don't go together...). Anyway, here's a solidarity post in support of .... being against SOPA. Please don't look at the rest of our site tomorrow, when it will be symbolically down.

Video Post

Oh hello! If you missed our last event (or if you came), enjoy these videos that were screened:


(This composition is composed of clips shot by accident on personal devices. The montage served as an introduction to the event, presenting and questioning these seemingly unmediated media relics in relation to digital recording as objective documentation.)


(This video is composed of clips shot of the Occupy Movement on consumer devices. As the central video of the event, it broached the subject of framing as subjectivity in documentation.)


(The above video consists of clips that incorporate footage of the Occupy Movement from personal media devices. Played at the conclusion of the event, this video gestures at a largely inconclusive line of questioning: is the quality of empowerment that accessible personal-media making devices seem to offer reversed when inserted into a formalized structure? Is that structure ever-present innately in all media? Or, is the power to co-opt similarly deracinated because of the availability of footage and editing tools?)

Following Incidental Footage

Last Friday's event was a surprising, exuberant showcase of mediated poetry and varied video samples that added up to a culminating picture of how to invert the making of an artwork or social message, given a reflexive culture of equipped creators. Following our screening of accidentally made films, we heard excellent readings by Candy Shue, who contextualized her lyric work in the recent philosophy of Ken Wilbur; Monica Mody, whose moving opening statement about how chance-made art relates to composition and social order left a rife impression on her visceral poetic voice; and Alli Warren, who delivered a singular transcription of textual screen shots that were sourced by her own complex series of constraints (look here!). Next came our compiled raw videos of various #OWS happenings and a reading/provocation-fest by Greg McGarry. Paul Ebenkamp delivered the evening's final oral staging with a copious elucidation of the forms, pains, obsessions and ruins at work in a Dickinson poem. We closed with a composed series of videos that re-frame the Occupy movement, either with ambivalence, flippancy or gravitas.

Look below for some text that was in our program/claim-to-ethos for the event! The three video sequences that were screened will be here soon.

If propaganda is an aesthetic that refuses to be critical of itself, raw footage purports to be its opposite, an unmolested documentation of the real. But what is being represented? Consider the issue of framing: documentation ceases to be objective. We’d like to present a progression of footage with increasingly controlled (and controlling) frame structures.

Here we examine the proliferation of personal media-making. Personal recording devices are empowering aids to an increasingly visual reality, made rich and frenzied by its viewers and by its makers equally. This accessibility blurs the definition between producer and recipient, enabling a culture of immediacy and communicability. Due to this proliferation, digital recording has become tantamount to its predecessor in personal, reproducible communication technology: writing. This evening is an ecosystem of leveled realities.