A Sleepless Night (Standing)

Experimental writing is only private action.

2008-10-17T02:13:00.000-07:00

This title sums up a mainstremist (?) prejudice and shallow attitude toward writing that interrogates the formal arrangement of language. I speak to this as not a new phenomenon or attitude but as an observation directly relating to my own current practice as a young writer.

I recently developed a piece of writing that experimented with sentence formation for Sam Rountree-Williams solo exhibition currently showing at Newcall Gallery. I had expressed doing writing for the studio-based collective as I saw them in keeping with some of the things I am doing in my own practice. Sam approached me to write for the show, and I feel our pairing worked really well in terms of the proximity of some of our ideas and ideas for articulating them (in paint and in writing). My piece specifically emerged from a series of discussions with Sam as well as the writing/language studies I am currently undertaking and poets I am reading. (I would undoubtedly cite Leslie Scalapino as my main influence - spurring these thoughts and how I could consider writing them - but there are so many others).

The writing was described by one funded art blogger as "waffly" and "impenetrable." I differentiate Hurrell's blog from his other writing because I am not familiar with it and assume there is a difference in terms of critical content and form. While I understand that my writing is difficult to "digest wholly" (assuming that's what readerly penetration does and highlighting that in fact my piece purposely resists that), he offered no commentary on why he thought this - as if it explained itself. I am interested in what constitutes as "waffly" and what the referent is precisely in my piece - he does not talk either of these things.

It's not that I expect I won't receive remarks like this, but want to point out the way in which his comment denigrates and voids my writing as a valid interpretation and experience of Sam' work. It also blatantly assumes clarity is both always being "self evident" and that isn't something we should be interrogating.

Hurrell finds my writing frustrating in its refusal to offer a singular meaning for a reader(?) It slides deliberately to configure multiple meanings and senses of Sam's work (as in I could not write that in a straight forward way because I wanted the reader to actually experience that in the writing - so it had to be distinct from the normative way of communicating with people). This textual openness I agree is so unlike the majority of art writing that legitimises an art experience via one's ability to categorically situate the work or connect it to "movements" and other practitioners (describing the viewer's experience to them?)

It surprises me also because I am directly speaking about an idea that has been articulated by so many (phenomenologists, quantum physics, Zen, Cage...) and I focus on that particular thing throughout the piece - it is not divergent in that sense I am talking about many different things. So I am both sustaining attention and versioning the same points (so in a way what I say does not change, but also changes) allowing the reader "to get a hold of" what I am saying without tying them down per se.

Sam's show runs from 15 October - 1 November. Copies of my piece are available from Newcall Gallery and on their website.

2008-10-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

2008-10-09T02:31:00.000-07:00

Lounge 4 Reading ...

2008-09-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

... was great!

These lovely people read their poetry:

Sarah Broom
Jay Granger
Tony Green
Pip Howells
Ted Jenner
Olivia Macassey
Lydia May
Sam Sampson
Lisa Samuels
Michael Steven

In case you missed it - it's happening again in a month's time

LOUNGE 5 READING
Old Government House (University of Auckland)
Princes Street & Waterloo Quadrant
5.30-7 PM
Wednesday 29 October

With readings from:

Jen Crawford
Kartika Ditirta
Shardae Grenfell
Mike Johnson
Karishma Kripalani
Andrew Pasley
Emily Perkins
Emma Phillipps
Gareth van Sambeek
Richard von Sturmer

xE

Each other, floating & glancing - writing about writing

2008-09-20T16:27:00.001-07:00

Chap*books features a review of Winterling Series One (my two self-published chaps) - in the chapbooks 26 post. This wonderful blog is dedicated to chapbooks - a really important form of publication for emerging writers. The author of the blog (Steven) writes entries tracking his thoughts about chapbooks he collects (or is given). I happily facilitated a great chapbook swap with Steven - the observations of my writing are interesting and of course, I appreciate the encouraging, supportive comments. Thank you! xE

let thermal expression be syntactical. The natural is what

2008-09-19T02:50:00.000-07:00

Two committal - bore, and

"held there"

storage

There was him, as if in front - not unlike sensed
them

small spots, more blotchy (that is like spiky-edged)
across the way
assigned - overlaying them

small triangular - like motions,

of one (them?) stepping forth / from out
or underneath it.

Covering placing - there is - range.

while staying reticent, unspoken

2008-09-12T20:28:00.000-07:00

This is all,

as occurring, alongside the expansion of:

figures in brief

to pupate periphrasis

relationally slept on

intended, generative

a drift stooped
birth heard aging

torn pages, rewritten face, (a face is interesting).

Concerning into dry, they're - Collaged Poetry

2008-08-21T18:53:00.000-07:00

Concerning into dry, they're is a series of five collaged poems I have completed - one of which appeared in an earlier post. I used found text, image and pen markings. I have no conceptual statement fully articulated yet - but I think they are perhaps largely explorations in mixing different understandings of size and representative scale.

- E xx

The brave and the bold...

2008-08-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Occurences, which deeply affected me over the past three days - there were a series of things, I will not address them directly as events or as they occurred.

1. Pathologising non-normative writing and ways of seeing language. So, taking your writing somewhere else is what you do.

2. Organising "things" in the world depends upon external systems, good organisation depends upon using those systems and their "making" sense to us - what follows: "information" is that which makes sense to us, as if non-sensical (that is everything deviating from sense) is not information-meaning. (As if, making value judgments was all that ever mattered). Perhaps information and meaning are not the same thing, there is something here. What's more alarming: the interrogation of that which makes sense to us, these systems - cannot occur (?). There was also the assumption that language always accurately communicates what it means to say. Because language is always meaning/saying something - and not including nonsense words because they are not language (?). That is outside, and not the same action.

Sous Rature

2008-08-13T15:36:00.000-07:00

Issue 1 of Cara Benson's new journal, Sous Rature is now online.

How it is, raining...

2008-07-29T22:03:00.000-07:00

... a lot in Auckland.

My window, perpetually, looks like this.

Am (re)reading these wonderful books ...

Keeping happy with these lovely bits ...

I found the charming Dancing Girl Press. It is so wonderful, focused on independently publishing chapbooks by emerging female writers - this girl, Kristy Bowen, certainly keeps herself busy! Not only handling this project, she edits an online journal, Wicked Alice and makes her own paper arts and beautiful jewellery, and collects vintage objects and other delightful items - making her etsy shop a storehouse of enviable, delicious treats. (Kristy keeps a lovely blog here too).

Spelling ( ) Bound (Ellectrique Press 2008) is a poetic collaboration between Cara Benson, Kai Fierle-Hedrick, and Kathrin Schaeppi and looks like a wonderful project - I certainly hope to get a copy.

The projects exhibited in the New Media section in the latest issue of How2 equally much - I thought that Rosheen Brennan's Motion was particularly beautiful.

Reading a manuscript too. Not mine. An energetic surge, sustained. Practically inhaled it.

Making things: some new packettes for chapbooks -

Large handmade envelopes, hand stitched together to create a visible seam and using the same illustration as the last packette experiment.

I have been working on a few different collages/visual poems (that genre)...

Here's one I have completed (though have not titled yet).

- E xx

Snap Happy in Europe

2008-07-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pictures of some of the wonderful places I visited on my holiday... (Too many to post!) I flew to Rome and then moved north to Milan, stopping in Florence, Monselice and Padua, and then travelled up and across to Marseille, spending some time in Aix-en-Provence, and then much further north to Brussels and Paris, crossing La Manche to London, which was my final destination.

The Pantheon

Looking down across the Roman Forum, Colosseum in the distance

Hadrian's Villa, Tivoli

Pompei

Florence

Scrovengi Chapel, Padua

Monselice (Venetian countryside)

Mont Sainte-Victoire, Aix-en-Provence

Creme-brulee!

Marseille

Brussels

The Seine

La Rive Gauche

Centre Pompidou

Eiffel Tower - looking very twinkly...

View from the Eiffel Tower

Leaving here for awhile...

2008-06-18T14:52:00.000-07:00

I am off to travel the Continent tomorrow.

Looking forward to getting out of Auckland and away from campus for awhile. I finally have some time for relaxing (proper) and traveling.

Part of my holiday time means some time for reading...

The Journals of Anais Nin - diary writing is my literary indulgence, I love confessional writing.

How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers - have not read any of his yet... a book my partner lent me... Thank you!

The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence by Leslie Scalapino - (who is incredibly amazing) I am writing a paper on this book so I cannot leave it behind. I am actually really looking forward to spending some more time with it - it is an extremely difficult and wonderful critical book.

The White Fire of Time by Ellen Hinsey - a book another friend lent me... Thank you!

Androgyny Magazine - I'm not much of a magazine person, in fact, I have not even read this publication before - but I decided I needed a travel treat - it looks very pretty...

...I am also taking some photocopied selections from Susan Howe's The Midnight... delight.

Of course, I am too, looking forward to perusing the new How2 issue.

So, I will be out of blogging action for about 4 weeks. Please feel free to email me re chapbook swaps and art trades - bearing in mind I will not be able to do your mail out until the end of July.

Emma X

naming my press; Winterling

2008-06-15T23:10:00.000-07:00

I came across the word ‘Winterling’ in Literature Nation by Maria Damon and Meikal And.

How to recognise: a/the/such as, "winterling".

Suffixing winter with-ling, makes the "winter": pejorative, diminutive, small or refers to a person described in the/as "winter".

I am moving beyond botanical drawings, seasons, or a creature.

Winterling: is not like when something breaks, but more, it is, as distance (smallness, diminuation) - but always locatable. "Affect", and when, there is sound. It is something material, like object. Registering. It also comes before there is sound, much like splintering something, broken in fragments and simply left - sounds - like words. With sound and as though, with or not, -ling, a long trembling and feeling like "facing down" or "looking away". But looking toward the splintering, but occurring not before it.

Dusie: Kollektiv Participation, My Next Big Project...

2008-06-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

Illustration from Dusie : 3

Dusie du...

The wonderful Susana Gardner who facilitates Dusie, the journal, press & many other writing projects, kindly invited me to participate in the Dusie Kollektiv Chapbook Project for this year. I'm so greatful to be a part of this and really excited about this project!

How it works... Susana has divided the group into partners, or rather created a kind of chain where, for instance, I will be giving writing to another in the Kollektiv for them to publish, and someone else will be giving me their writing to publish. Things are very much in beginning/organising stages at the moment, but I will keep you updated on the project here. I can say at this stage that I am so lucky to be paired up with such inspiring, experienced, wonderfully supportive writers...

Winterling and other things...

I originally had plans to make more chapbooks of my own writing this year (self-publication was a good place to begin and test things out), but now I can see that is probably not going to happen - not only because I realised how long it takes to make a chapbook, but also because I want to work on other writing projects, i.e. I do not think everything I write has to be "chapped" necessarily and I have also realised that would love to publish others' writing. So Winterling Press as a chapbook series will include my own writing but I am hoping to mostly publish others' work.

So... I think I will make some more copies of there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways and As For We Who Love, At the Instant As Being Entirely Different From It for more chapbook swaps and art trades this year. Writing that I have done for the forthcoming Anathema ... chapbook, is no longer going to be "chapped" (well not by Winterling anyway) - I think it will be reworked into more self-contained sequences - which I then plan to send out into the world - my first time submitting for publication in journals. I have decided I will make two new chapbooks at the end of the year, after Dusie, over the summer - and I will be publishing another's writing for each, I am very excited about this - such a great way to diversify and move Winterling along.

Emma X

"Generosity As Method"

2008-06-06T18:21:00.001-07:00

I am so overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity I have experienced conducting chapbook swaps so far - the giving and gifting that occurs is productive on both distributive and communicative levels. Not only has this given me a chance to expand my "readership" (or rather start), swapping has allowed me to share in the creative processes and publishing activities of many wonderful writing communities and independent presses, here in Auckland and on the other side of the world. I often experience a lot of anxiety, as a beginner - writer and publisher - so being in contact with very inspiring, experienced and dedicated people has alleviated much of this. I feel chapbook swapping will positively influence, open up and diversify my practice more - not only as others support my activity through the exchanges, but as they share their own writing and publishing experiences with me. Thank you! I hope to continue to do more swapping.

I also would like to take the opportunity to showcase such wonderful gifts - from three wonderful wee presses:

Michael Steven's Soapbox Press

Click here to be directed to Michael's wonderful poetry blog

Lovely to find other small press activity right here in Auckland... Soapbox publications are stocked at Parsons and Jason Books, or alternatively you could email Michael (you can find his contact email on his blogger profile).

Carrie Hunter's ypolita press

Carrie sent me two beautiful chapbooks - Gothenburg from Three Geogaophies: A Milkmaid’s Grimoire by Arielle Guy ...

... and ypolita's latest chapbook, Easter Sunday by Barbara Jane Reyes.

I love the beautifully illustrated covers.

... take a look inside Easter Sunday.

Juliet Cook's Blood Pudding Press

to be administered in spoonfuls...

Juliet, also very kindly, sent me two chaps! Ectoplasmic Necropolis - great title! Love the binding - making use of different kinds of ribbon-ish materials - and the brightly coloured paper too ...

... back cover illustration surprise!

... and The Laura Poems - am looking forward to reading this very much...

... Twin Peaks is such a great series, and as Juliet's poems are, I'm sure.

If anyone would like to do a chapbook swap - and remember I am keen to trade for any other lovely bits - please be in touch!

More soon! X

More Winterling Packettes...

2008-06-02T20:17:00.001-07:00

For my next set of chapbook swaps I wanted to create an alternative cover/sleeve. I decided to make simple large envelopes - without seal or adhesive, these may be opened and closed by the tie at the top.

I decided to pare the collage for these covers right down - the back of the envelope looks very similar. I am basically working with part of a map/some kind of numerated diagram image - so cutting up found material and then using a basic computer illustration program to erase most of it, aswell as the evidence of my cut up procedure.

I think I will keep generating more ideas and possibilities for these packettes and try to establish a kind of loose aesthetic 'feel' for the Winterling project. Please be in touch if you would like to do chapbook or an "anything else" swap! (There is a link to my email on my profile). Thank you so much for those who have responded so far - your packettes will be posted at the end of the week. I hope you will enjoy them.

More soon! X

P.S. I was not sure if the US Postal Service would let me send thank-you-note-twigs from New Zealand - so I made a little collage and printed it on handmade paper instead!

Infoaesthetics & Data Visualisation: The Expressivity of 'Virtual' Matter Itself

2008-05-22T17:21:00.003-07:00

Information Aesthetics: Form Follows Data - Data Visualisation & Visual Communication (Infoaesthetics) is a blog dedicated to exploring the symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualisation. Inspired by Manovich's definition, infoaesthetics relates to a series of new conceptualisations of form - emergent, distributed representation that is never fixed, within the set of parameters within software. (Data is to informationalism, what abstraction was to Modernism).

Bus Routes Data Sculpture - a 3D data sculpture of the Sunday Minneapolis / St. Paul public transit system, where the horizontal axes represent directional movement and the vertical represents time.

Infoaesthetics functions like an exhibition or art space, a project that has collated many different data collections & representations, such as the virtual mapping of human movement through space. As a blog, it is interested in data representations that acknowledge the importance of the emotional experience of users as information access is becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives and therefore new approaches are required for information presentation which consider user engagement and visual aesthetics.

greenpix zero-energy massive LED display - the largest color LED display worldwide, & the first photo-voltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China. the display requires zero external energy, as the facade harvests solar energy by day & uses it to illuminate the screen after dark.

Following a Deleuzian populist approach to art - artistic production, extended to include all forms of expressivity and creativity, is a capability of many more things in the world than humans or a specific group of humans - atoms, molecules, geological phenomena, animals. It also includes the expressive representations of visual data and the circulatory or distribution processes that create these emergent forms.

Wifi Geographical Mapping - a set of "semi-abstract" circular visualizations of the WiFi encryption levels while traveling through the cities of London, Vescemont, Belfort & Barcelona.

Not All Bloggers Are Human...

2008-05-19T21:46:00.000-07:00

Written by artist Eugenio Tisselli, JB Wock is PHP script who likes to keep a blog.

Posting nearly as regularly as each day, JB Wock's decision to post is determined by a random vairable, not disimilar to human bloggers who post based upon contingent factors or establish ritualistic posting procedures, often based upon contingent factors.

JB Wock finds phrases on the internet and manipulates this found text, 'twisting' it into something different - but still derived from a source text. The readers of this blog leave comments that riff off the short, poetic lines JB Wock posts. The recursiveness of leaving comments on others' blogs, as an intrinsic part of any blog's functionining, is heightened in this project.

I wonder if We Feel Fine has picked up on how this alogrithm is 'feeling'?

"It Must Be Free & Downloadable": Internet Art Communities As Flourishing Gift Economies

2008-05-19T00:39:00.000-07:00

Art constitutes a non-rival material good if it is shared - the giver and the receiver would enhance the welfare of the artistic or creative community they both are a part of. This idea of sharing / gifting art would expand and diversify sites of access, collection and dissemination of art and associated writing or reponses. The web with its potentiality to circulate art works, projects and texts (widely and quickly) can massively expand artistic and creative communities.

Members of these online creative communities are producers (creating internet art or contributing to its creation in some way) as well as consumers (people are able to access the art works easily), as this system is about open, fluid and reciprocal gifting and exchange. It offers us an alternative to the prevailing art market or dealer economy (characterized by the impersonal exchange of commodities, or more specficially art, for money) as it is based on sharing and community building.

A gift economy is defined as “an economic system in which the prevalent mode of exchange for goods and services is to be given without an explicit agreement upon a quid pro quo.” It is distinct from the market economy in that it does not exchange commodities, the PennSound project is a good example. The mp3 sound files available at PennSound are not commodities that can be exchanged for money. Bernstein asserts that their will be no problems with rights (all are given to the poet) and there is no profit to be gained - because they can be accessed and downloaded by anyone who has been granted access to the Internet for free. They are gifts given by the poets to PennSound (given permission to use the sound material), an organization that then gifts to the Internet - using public free and downloadable poetry sound files. The site asks its users to reciprocate by way of providing any bibliographical information they might have about the material – a request for direct reader input. This idea of reciprocity in part relies on users to proliferate the ‘message’ and disseminate the concept of poetry readings as a social enterprise as widely as possible.

The gift economy will flourish in a cultural context where there is an expectation of reciprocity, in this sense the gift is always moving. This creates a ‘feeling bond’ which works to establish a community. The gift economy that is fuelling an internet art or web-based art community is built upon the very notion of trying to create community, an environment where ideas may be freely expressed and shared.

Harrison’s essay, which particularly focuses on the emergence of web poetry communities, demonstrates how the internet allows for a successful operation of the gift economy, and illuminates the potentiality of creating an interconnected community where the act of writing is no longer isolated to the individual. Art can be continuously disseminated if we take advantage of the technology the web offers, in terms of it being widely and easily accessible (although there are still issues of the Digital Divide that may render this piece somewhat utopian) and offering creative potential. Hopefully the resistance to commodification will keep the goals of the community at the forefront and combat any issues regarding sustainability that may arise.

References: Joel Harrison 'Web Poetics & the Gift Economy'

Winterling Packette - Chapbook Exchange

2008-05-18T22:58:00.000-07:00

I am very excited about the first chapbook exchange with Michael Steven - a wonderfully interesting poet and the creative mind behind Soapbox Press, an Auckland based small press initiative, Winterling is happily associated with! Click here to be directed to Michael's blog.

I decided to do an illustrated cover of sorts for the chapbooks - more like a sleeve to keep them in (although I'd like to do more thinking about the possibilities for these). I also wrapped a thank you note around a wee branch, in case you are wondering what that is all about! I love sticks, and Winterling is all about branching out.

- Emma X

Making Public: Internet Art On The Internet

2008-05-18T15:33:00.001-07:00

Shamelessly conjuring up a hackneyed, tedious debate - "public art should be decided by the people", and "all public is shit" (I know, boredom) - but this article got me thinking... the web is also a public space... isn't it? Is the internet public or private? Obviously everything that is posted on the web is publicised in one way or another - it is no longer immediately private to the singular individual discloses - others may access it.

Our whole notions of what constitutes public and private are ruptured, as Andrea Slane (2007) writes,

"Many of the foundational socio-spatial practices of liberal democracy are challenged by cyberspace (private property, national boundaries, authority over the individual body), and these challenges have manifested themselves in legal battles over online trading in intellectual property; in the sanctity of homes intruded upon by spam, viruses, and unsavoury images; in jurisdictional controversies across national borders; and in the upsurge of legislative activity regarding online privacy (p. 85)".

Relating it to art, it makes me think that no art is not "public" art - every artwork has an audience, even if it is the creator alone is the audience... Perhaps labelling internet art as either public or not public is defunct when considering the capabilities intrinsic to the web as a communicative tool and medium for expression, or when imagining that which is "private" or "not public" in any externalised expression - which is in fact seems impossible. Even though the internet is a public space - perhaps internet art is not "public", considering our normative usage of the word preceeding another word, that being "art" - rather than positing all art/externalised expression as making public.

~ Works Cited ~

Slane, Andrea. "Democracy, Social Space and the Internet". University of Toronto Law Journal. 57(1), 2007, 81-105.

Electronic Disturbance Theatre - Politically Motivated "Non-Matrixed" Performing

2008-05-18T00:18:00.000-07:00

“We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communion will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.” - Antonin Artaud

The performative avantgarde has long had connections to a political or critical social agenda - from Dada to Situationism to Punk. Working in the gap between art and life, or perhaps in such a way as to render this gap non-existent, the nature of theatrical representation is critiqued from within a performance space. Techniques & deceptions associated with theatre are avoided, by way of creating what Micheal Kirby describes as a ‘non-matrixed performance’ – that which is folded into/inseparable from life.

In 1998, Ricardo Dominguez and a group of collaborators engaged in online civil disobedience actions, in support of rebel activity in Chiapas, Mexico - the Zapatistas, a revolutionary cell fighting against generational government oppression, and are collectively known as the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Combining artistic and political agendas, the group utilises virtual networks to promote its activities - encouraging supporters to download and run a Java applet called FloodNet.

Akin to hacker-tactics, or hacktivism, this applet continually attempts to open nonexistent Web pages at specifically targeted websites. By constructing fictional or "bad URLs" (Web addresses of pages that don't exist on the targeted server). For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested.

Aligning the project with conceptual or idea-based art, the fictated URL becomes inscribed in the server's error log as a way of virtually (symbolically) returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. Presumably if enough people run FloodNet simultaneously, the server would overload - so if a regular user tried to access the site, pages would load extremely slowly or not at all.

As Michel Kirby describes, “The materials of Happenings – performer, physical element, or mechanical effect – tend to be concrete. That is, they are taken from and related to the experiential worlds of everyday life. Within the overall context and structure, the details in Happenings relate to things and function as direct experience." EDT's virtual sit-ins operate like a happening (connect to performance/theatre), however with a more direct political resonance, analogous to sit-in demonstrations in which protesters block the entrance to a public building. Projects of EDT tactically utilise existing virtual-actual media networks and structures, Dominguez explaining their goal is to "disturb - and not destroy."

"Eye Candy For The Style Hungry" - Well, Its Certainly Got Me Wanting More...

2008-05-15T22:16:00.000-07:00

Along with all things sweet, spending time each day pouring over fashion blogs - a new-found wealth of imagery, has become a new found love, some might similarly call an addiction - although would have to admit (depending upon my chocolate consumption) - both are harmless variations.

The impetus appears to be strong. There are so many amazing photographic projects undertaken by creative individuals - who post, sometimes as frequently as daily, results of their street fashion scouting online. I am struck by the diversity of approaches to the internet as an expressive medium for exhibiting the fashions of particular stylish people - resulting in blogs like Facehunter, HelLooks, Satorialist, becoming distinct social media objects - individuated from one another, each blog having its own identity.

This is apparent in not only the "kinds" of individuals that are chosen to be photographed (presumably, unless there is a call for people to send own photographs in, the blogger's attention will be captured by not everything, but a certain something), but also in the very way in which the blog is "present" within the diverse actual-virtual ecology that is the internet. The blogger must make particular editing decisions - actively controlling the expressive elements on the site, for instance how a user navigates, the layout, relationship between text and images, and associations/community listed in a sidebar.

Following Gell, who examines the social context as art - the production, circulation, and reception, rather evaluating art upon whether it is of aesthetic value or some other merit - like innovation or originality, an examination of the social context of fashion blogs is an appropriate way to examine these blogs as art. While there are evaluations of blogs upon the basis of aesthetics or sophistication, (this site here is an example, although I must say I appreciate their focus on independently produced blogs), it is perhaps more interesting or suitable to examine the ways in which certain social processes have brought about the production and circulation of fashion blogs, and would better explain why the internet has been used for this type of social and creative activity.

I have noticed fashion bloggers are commonly preoccupied with exhibiting the images they collect from a particular city, usually the one they live in. However Facehunter is seen to travel across the Continent and to North America even, collecting images for his now, extremely well-known, blog. Perhaps fashion blogs are a new way to "image" the city or a new form of urban art?

Examining the social context as art, allows us to evaluate why street fashion blogging and photo sharing between geographically distant cities has become so popular in the last few years, and enables an appreciation of the diverse creativity and expressivity found online.

The above images are some of my favourites all taken from Facehunter archives.

Winterling Activity: A Project Completed & A Call To (Writerly) Arms...

2008-05-12T02:09:00.000-07:00

Determined to publish ten copies of two different chapbooks ... Winterling Chapbook Project One is finally complete! Check out those lovely sewn signatures... After endlessly long and busy days at university sitting in front of a computer and/books working hard, meant any time I could squeeze in for chapbook making was always a happy and welcome change. I particularly enjoyed repeating a set of delightfully creative but methodical actions - the book making process has been certainly rewardingly relaxing for me these past few weeks.

Chapbooks one and two from Winterling Series One, are As For We Love, At The Instant As Being Entirely Different From It. & there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways. Thank you to Campbell for single-handedly taking the printing task on board, I am sending you my love here. (We are using an ink-jet to print these, and for anyone who prints books like this will understand the initial trials and tribulations that accompany this process and the difficulties in trying to explain it to someone else - perhaps this should be limited to the extremely patient, but I must say, a great way to start making your own chaps).

I have posted about there is always the impossibility of being able to move sideways chap - in case you missed it, click here.

The other chap ...

... takes a line from Lyn Hejinian's My Life ("As for we who love to be astonished") as the starting point.

This chapbook, is self-assuredly a poem (different, however related to, much of the loose form/method/style of poetic prose, or the faux genre of prose-poems, I tend to use mostly for writing). It is concerned with pushing sentimentality to its limit, or outer-edge but also simultaneously constantly, almost exhaustively, reduces all to sentimentality. This poem was also written for someone, I had a particular recipient in mind and consequently I certainly feel something shifts or is shifting in the writing as it is read.

Plans for Winterling

I would love to hear from, firstly, anyone interested in participating in Winterling in any way, shape or form - I am hungry for writing (I want to make it clear I am just as much interested in publishing others), or anyone with an interest in book arts, making, crafting, illustrating or being part of this new-ling poetics community. However I should mention that I will be one hundred percent focused on the five University projects that I must finish over the next four weeks and am then going overseas for four weeks after that - so I will not be starting anything in terms of production or meeting with interested folk until after that - and it also unfortunately means that all my other writing projects are currently on hold, not that they haven't been stagnant for awhile now :-( However, I would still love to talk plans, potentialities and speculations via email, so please get in touch as soon as you wish to!

And secondly, anyone interested in receiving one of these chapbooks as part of a gift exchange - please email me! I am interested in trading my chapbooks for other chapbooks, materials, paper supplies, interesting ephemera, random collected things, with others - any artists, poets, writers, crafters, or anyone who wants to be a part of this ....

More soon! X

Constituting Spatiality: Wearable Computing, Cognitive Mixing

2008-05-11T01:30:00.000-07:00

Viewer wearing HMD

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Erika Lincoln's, work-in-progress, Free Space Loss, is comprised of a seemingly elaborate, although described as low-fi, wearable computing system. The artist has created a series of HMD's, which link the participant/viewer to a feedback mechanism where by the sensors pre-installed inside the helmet measure the temperature, light and acoustic levels of the body wearing it. Measuring or quantifying the viewer's physiological "output" or environmentally mediated bodily responses, implicates the viewer's body & bodily responses in the art work, as determining variables for the viewer's particularised spatial experience. This data is firstly transmitted to a computer software program, which creates four different 3D landscape planes that the viewer "experiences", as this landscape is transmitted back to the internal LCD monitor installed on the HMD.

Inside the artist's studio ...

(http://lablog-lincolnlab.blogspot.com/)

The syntactic arrangement of the words in the title, Free Space Loss, on first glance, seem to instantiate an oxymoron. However the accompanying image of wireless signals spreading out over time and distance, illustrates the simultaneity of freeing/opening/expanding virtual spaces at the cost of "losing", perhaps reducing or altering would be better here, the materiality of actual space, or requiring a reconsideration of our invested certainty in actual spatial realities.

Interested in the communicative potentialities of embodied experience, the actual bodily responses to specific experiences generating data that may be translated into shifting topographical planes through the mediation of a software program. Landscape image projected initially onto the monitor will be one the viewer perhaps recognises as the artist is using images collected from the actual landscape surrounding the gallery. So prior to installation the artist describes how she goes for walks gathering images, which will be transformed into emerging 3D topographical maps as the HMD and software system are sensitive to physiological changes the viewer undergoes. Consequently these changes are reflected in the landscape the viewer "sees" - presumably from visually recognisable spaces to unfamiliar imaginings or representations, to something that no longer correlates with the actual space because the viewers embodied experience has brought about radical alterations. Interestingly Lincoln has also installed an audio channel enabling a dialogue between viewers. Upon discussing what they observe on their monitors, collectively they can organise the behaviour of the landscape plane.

Image of virtual landscapes as seen from inside helmet

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Choosing the term, Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR) over say, mixed reality, suggests the artist wants to emphasise that images are literally taken from actual life and "altered", through the embodied perceptual processes of the viewers - mediated through both the wearable computing and software systems. Heightening the separability, rather than a fluid interpenetration, of actual and virtual realms. However Lincoln does address the "mixing" evident in her work by describing the "interchange between individuals, environment & [technological/augmentative] devices as creating a mixed cognitive space." She points out that the viewer must negotiate between their knowledge of the physical world outside of the helmet and the visual topographical and aural based knowledge they gain from watching their monitor and discussions with others, within the helmet. This actual-virtual negotiation of space, that which is actual-virtual simultaneously, creates a distinct experience of space.

Close up of one of the planes

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

The images on the monitor continually interact with the viewers' own bodily responses and discussions with others, and so are not articulated through clear-cut frontal perception (Hansen 197). In fact embodied perception produces the changing landscape planes, "tonal responses to" an ever adjusting body (Hansen 197). Embodiment is the medium through which this work is experienced, "space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing" (Hansen 175). Space is literally worn on the body (by way of the LCD monitor installed on the HMD), and becomes fully wearable as embodied perceptual processes coupled with the physiological bodily changes (which are inextricably linked to the affective embodied response and experience) operate and constitute the spatial experience of the art work itself (Hansen 197).

~ Works Cited ~

Hansen, Mark. Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Protecting As Relinquishing: Creative Production & Publishing Online (Oh, The Anxiety!)

2008-05-11T00:47:00.001-07:00

In response to some comments left on my previous post Post(Your)Secret(s)... I was similarly alerted, like the respondent, to some things I had not given much thought to or attention to in my discussion, namely intellectual property rights, online publishing and ownership of material, in this case actual-virtual. (Presumably, creative production online is covered UCC, defining a copyrightable expression as one that is fixed in a tangible medium of expression – I am sure, irrespective of whether people are still arguing over this, readers of this blog will agree, online publication/posting is in fact a tangible medium of expression).

It does appear that corporations are ripping ideas off individuals who publish them online, with a disturbing amount ease, or perhaps more to the point, identifying how easy it is to do so (the short answer here - simply because there is so much material published online). I think this connected to an interesting issue Samuels raises, although I should point out that she is specifically concerned with verbal ideation in her argument – “idea-mongers might hike out to very foreign parts, those not covered by the UCC, and have some very stimulating conversations…then use those ideas with absolutely impunity in their “works” " (372). This is similar to coming into contact, while browsing online, with an interesting, small creative project posted by an individual online that seemingly no one really knows about or one that is not apparently copyright registered .

I am going to refer particularly to the case of NBC claiming that in fact they were “inspired” by a film and not the online PostSecret blog project, for their new show Fears, Secrets & Desires (thank you Pareidoliac for pointing this article out to me). It is interesting that they are able to simply circumvent accusations by proving the idea for the show was planted before the PostSecret project began. Considering that they may have had any number of “ideas” for a new show in the mix before coming in contact with the project's website itself, so who is not to say that this effected the shape and form of a show they already had an “idea” for?

While I think this brings up several interesting threads for discussion, I am going not going to follow any of them here in this post. I will instead focus on a counter-comment that could be made in response to the occurrence of corporations “sourcing” (or stealing) their “ideas” from individuals, “[who] could be more protective of their intellectual property so as to commercialize for their own profit”. This points to a double-edged sword for many artists, writers, musicians and creative people who do publish their work regularly online, and would like to protect their creative output. Part of the attraction to the internet is its capacities to deliver “our” ideas or projects to the world. The more you present your idea to others; circulate and distribute – with your name as author/creator attached, the more likely people are to recognize/associate you with that particular idea or creative production. Thus the internet is a hugely efficient medium for achieveing this, capable of reaching a large number of people in a relatively short amount of time. This is illustrated by the following and publicity the PostSecret project has gained, it was obvious to many that NBC was ripping off them off, because many already knew about the project and recognise the recycling of its central idea.

However, on the other hand (ambivalence sets in…) I must acknowledge that which some find threatening, with an increased number of people who know about your idea or have come into contact with your project, there is an increased likelihood that some of those people will be so fond of your idea or project they will either claim it as their own or recreate something astoundingly similar.

I think that currently, from the sample of online creative projects & blogs I have been looking at, the circulation ideas and creative production online is more focused upon sharing and forming communities (and hopefully it will remain this way), rather than worrying anxiously whether someone is out to steal your ideas (I have not noticed many blogs that are actually copyrighted for example). I am not suggesting that this should not be a concern, but I do not think, therefore you should make your idea/project especially “marketable” (if you do in fact just intend to simply share a thought). For instance, those who participate in PostSecret project by contributing a postcard are not recognized individually (putting aside the fact that individuals would not want to be associated with the secrets they send and anonymity is crucial component of the project), they participate in order to contribute to and re-generate the art project, rather than protecting their individual intellectual property rights to the particular postcard they created.

The efficacy of putting energies into the actual project itself, and working to get your name attached to it, by distributing and circulating it (the internet offering this potentiality) is telling - especially as so many recognised the striking similarity between NBC's new show and PostSecret. I am not suggesting that intellectual property rights should not concern those who publish their ideas and work online, however I do not think it should be a reason not to publish, circulate or distribute ideas or work at all – the threat of someone potentially ripping you off should not overcome the sharing impetus to publish ideas or projects in the first instance. As Samuels points out, “ideas are “public” and once a good idea is exposed…” (361), and this suggests the only guarantee for the protection of your creative idea is to expose and publish, distribute and circulate the idea as that which is yours as widely as possible (Samuels 361).

~ Works Cited ~

Samuels, Lisa. 'Relinquish Intellectual Property'. New Literary History. Vol.33, 2002, 357-374.

Technologically Mediated Bedtimes

2008-05-07T21:55:00.000-07:00

In 2002, the above poster was circulated by Susana Mendes Silva. Visually identical to any number classified advertisements promoting particular services, Artphone essentially made the artist available to discuss contemporary art related subjects with anyone that called her. By dialing the number advertised on the poster above, a user of the service was directly dialing the artist's personal cell phone number. In an effort to entice, she writes “Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art”, simultaneously revealing her intention for the project.

Confidently assuming she could answer any question addressed to her, this cell phone mediated performance was repeated three years later but with adjustments and a change of format. Instead simply making herself available by being just a phone call away, Mendes Silva infiltrated an online video chat room. Mendes Silva created Art_room, an online chatting performance where again, anyone could meet the artist online, and once again, by asking everything they wanted to know about contemporary art (provided they had internet access and the correct plug-ins).

These projects are working within pre-existing actual-virtual networks and communities, and simultaneously temporarily shifting and renewing their functionalities for the duration of the performance. Clearly Silva Mendes' agenda is markedly different from say making artful objects, hence the reliance upon audience participation was not only essential in the reception of the performance but in the performance's creation. The audience viewing the performance were also constituting it, by way of engaging in a dialogue with the artist, either using telecommunication or internet networks.

Such artistic methods and concepts provide the ground for Silva Mendes latest, related work, A Bedtime Story, created for INTIMACY: Across Digital & Visceral Performance (2007) , a series of events designed to address an aesthetically and formally diverse set of responses to the notion of ‘being intimate’. Art works included sought to address proximity and hybridity in performance, particularly digital and live art performance practices were set up as agents to further a vibrant discourse and practical exploration of intimate inter-actions. (Click here to be directed to the Intimacy website).

To follow a detailed discussion of how A Bedtime Story operates as a performance piece please click here. Essentially, someone either emails and phones Silva Mendes to book in story time, and then artist and participant meet online at the agreed time. Using skype the artist tells a 30 minute bedtime story, a similar concept to the two aforementioned projects of Mendes Silva.

Mendes Silva describes "the outcome of each performance [as] very interesting. The first minutes were used to chat a little bit and to ensure that each person had the right environment at home. A lot of participants were alone, but some people asked me to listen to the story with someone else, which created a deeper communal sense. One participant didn't have microphone, so we could only interact by chat. This was very strange because i had no immediate feedback, like sounds of movement, breathing or sighing..."

Quote taken from http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-performances.html

The technologically mediated performance is dependent on the interactions between the artist and the participant, to both set up the booking and during the actual reading of the bedtime story. Mendes Silva offers very specific instructions to her participant, asking them to recreate real conditions under which you would normally sleep. Creating a certain kind of space for this performance could potentially be done by replicating a nighttime or bedroom space in a normative gallery/exhibition space, akin perhaps to relational aesthetics, where participants could hear bedtime stories and fall asleep in the recreated space. The artist however is not promoting a service that could be recreated in a normative gallery space, but infiltrating particular networks and communities, whose spatialities are expansive and diverse - traversing immediate geographical separations (that would not need be overcome in a gallery).

Not only are humans, the artist and the participant, mediating the performance, internet technologies play a central role in this work, and furthermore interactions with embodied perceptual processes and human activity. The boundaries separating the virtual from the actual are progressively blurred as individuals spend an increasing amount of time inhabiting both realms simultaneously. Distinctions made between the virtual and the actual are obscured as, for example, the artist is using skype as an apparatus that enables a transmission of a live stream of sound, her voice reading the story to the pre-arranged participant. This describes the concept of "mixed reality", (Milgram & Kishino, 1994; Strauss & Fleischmann, 1999; Hansen, 2006) envisioning a fluid interpenetration of virtual and actual realms.

The actual-virtual artist-participant interaction online poses some interesting ethical questions, the artist identifies that "there is an implicit degree of mutual trust and discreetness, as you might actually fall asleep", and perhaps therefore, "the performance [is] not recorded." Interestingly the artist allows the participant to interrupt the story, they may speak to the artist at any moment. This not only protects the participant and artist from any discomfort they could experience, but also heightens the improvisatory nature and role of chance in Mendes Silva's projects. Suggesting perhaps all in the performance is improvised - except the choice of the story (the participant selects in advance), that which may not necessarily put the participant to sleep.

Links to:

A Bedtime Story Blog: http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/

Artist's site: http://www.susanamendessilva.com/

Project at Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/27963/#50781

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES PRESENTS

2008-05-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

SIDELINING INTERACTIVITY,

ILLUSTRATION & COLOUR

THE USER FOLLOWS A KINETIC

TEXT / CONCRETE NARRATIVE

WHICH RHYTHMICALLY

NEGOTIATES DIGITAL SPACE.

WE FIND,

AND WHILE THERE IS A

DISTINCT FOCUS ON

THE PRESENCE & EXPERIENCE

OF SOUND & TYPOGRAPHY/TEXT,

ACHIEVED BY EMPLOYING

A SIMPLE FORMAT,

COMPLEXLY EVOCATIVE &

IMAGINATIVELY LAYERED

NARRATIVES ARE ESTABLISHED.

UTILISING FLASH,

AND CREATE FAST-MOVING,
TEXT-BASED WORKS THAT
ARE SYNCHRONISED TO
SHORT ACOUSTIC LOOPS.

RIFFING OFF FAMILIAR
JAZZ SEQUENCES
TO CREATE ORIGINAL SCORES,
HEAVY INDUSTRIES
ALSO REUSES A
SOMEWHAT UNIFORM
TEMPORAL SEQUENCING &
ICONIC MONANCO FONT AND

All the above images are stills from YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES, BLACK ON WHITE, GRAY ASCENDING, 2007 part of their project for the New Museum, New York. HEAVY INDUSTRIES have expanded their usual single-channel format to create an unprecedented seven-channel installation that tells a chilling story of abduction and assassination from seven separate points of view, set to an eerily laid-back bossa nova score. The installation is at once as nostalgic as a 1960s suspense film and as current as the daily headlines.

Links to: Rhizome & NewMuseum.org for more details about the particular project mentioned above, to the YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES site for access to their artworks and an interview with the collective.

Play It! Make It!

2008-04-30T22:31:00.000-07:00

Click here to be directed to some writing I have done about Luke Munn's one night exhibition.

Wee-Gifts from Dusie

2008-04-28T21:51:00.000-07:00

The package finally arrived...

... oh look! Darling reproductions of miniature Continental antique jumping jacks! I will have fun assembling these... a sweet thank you note on a gorgeous postcard... I love these touches and attention to detail... Can't wait to open up ...

... and look what's inside! Nine delightful wee chapbooks (I purchased the first three sets of the WEE CHAPS series - each set has three chapbooks) - I cannot wait to read these. Thank you dusie! X

dusie shop at Etsy

(chapbooks, collage, packettes, ephemera, artful objects and assemblages).

Dusie - Giving and Sharing Poetry

Many might recognise Dusie as Mina Loy's student nickname, it is also, quite fittingly, a name that encompasses the concepts, creative ouput, poetic projects and collaborative activity, instantiated and cultivated by Susana Gardner. The word Dusie has several different personal resonances for Gardener, Dusie projects and press activities are similarly diverse. Dusie exists as an on-line poetry journal, a small press, a website, a series of collective poetics projects, and a community. Although largely based and distributed online, a distinctive handmade aesthetic and craft-ephemera sensibility is carried across to these virtual spaces.

~ Dusie Links ~

Dusie.org operates as the main hub site for Gardner and her collaborators' activity. Note that the link will take you to Dusi/e-chaps Issue Seven but you will find all the other issues archived here and e-chaps that are downloadable and free, easily accessible and printable in pdf format. You will also find information about Dusie, and links to current projects and a wide poetics community.

micawberesque - Dusie blog

How2 A Small Press Feature: Dusie Books

Frances Kruk 'Welcoming Space: Susana Gardner and Dusie Books' - a beautifully written and informative piece about Dusie

An Interview with Gardner

Improvisational Writing - En Mouvement

2008-04-24T03:53:00.000-07:00

Ahead: the sameness of place. Whispering operations are dream-like. Certainty of the
and yet there is potential to get on and off at the same place. Such time passes, surely. But she is looking at Other Times and moving through timelessness. Voices swell. Define becoming that is swollen. Turn over into shrieks. They all remove and now because seats are not taken and she tosses waking in the air, you felt it coming. Remove margins: but then this is not smooth sailing, this is “thanks screw driver” and drawn-eyed explosions. Passing is cold and quiet. Obstructed gaze closes consciousness but that’s just too bad, and she wonders why there’s no, and with her. She articulates the, and that running man. There’s just too much content and goings intent are made. You may well ask her to surprise you with measure but there is a preference to be centring some kind of premium life.

182.

228.

Assured by movements, hands in pockets. It’s a friendly silence now. She is sitting up
of the
She cannot see what, She cannot watch what they are doing or even fantasize that she is one of them. She decides not too move, voicing “bad faith” makes you feel guilty for even thinking she could. This is strange because she does not know what Sartre’s voice sounds like.

Probably just a handful of them:

Business First Transact account (shaped glass explained) and members (all dressed in black by chance, unpersuasively)

Stores.

Cigarette is lit, but not like a film star. Watching her scrunching tissues, balling her tight hands and you ask with a final reduction. Mattress, does this mean we are good friends? She has seen this all before. You watch from upstairs. It is warm. She gave thought to signature, deciphering the knocked up lease. Dry-cleaning. Park Drive.

451.

Cardboard fedora gives her the two-dimensional glad eye. Seamy drips conceal that there is apparently no exit. She walks within the room, framed. Empowering, a question of dine-in or

Does not tell her time. Only railing to a point. Any point. She would follow the guy in your green shorts. She does not see your face but your mouth is moving and behind the signs, she is expecting more, a communication and refusal.

Adult uniforms, adult bookshops, adult entry into, adult keep clear, adult tow away zone. She is situation. Internally frontal at eleven oh and seven. She counts to such even time. Superette conflict, souvenir vault. Rubbing noses focusing on optometry beneath the smoke, intervention and the generalised purpose. Very rarely did she question the ______________ waiting for the and the girls in, crossing the street, between the cars, uncarefully. Leaning over no language she apprehends the taxi rubbing up against her thigh, such battery transformations are temporary. Clearance bounces this game, Yesterday insists you hand precedent asking. She gives no answer. Noon claims lineage. You welcomed her, she sold places and pleasing information – café, coast, country.

1811.

The studio portal invites this month with a full on court and bird-like siblings, such hospitality is industrial. Empiricism is all over her, inhale what is fuel for life. Last night’s woven cloth is serviced centrally. Whim follows and once again she would join the spectacle of watching you light up. Instead she disappoints you by simply not doing it, almost doing it.

She misses the cigarette.

54.

Inquiry makes the journey easier, she is seeing proof.

88.

Only skin, more in home and living and rhythm. Drag if you will: three lamps, arabesque and Thomas Valentine, her one true love. Scripts nestle when this accepted busyness falls into reverie. She imagines such a scarf tied around the neck and it would be an easy death. Wrapped up in flaking breath you tell yourself that she will see fires tomorrow, but slowing here today.

Reference break-up: now enter “ Alakanak or anywhere”

2008-04-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

Reference in Berssenbrugge’s ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ is veiled with ambiguity. Reference is full of possibility and potentiality in conjuring up images in the reader’s mind those that we “can see,” and those we cannot which are created through prose language, becoming an image-making operation. Here reference functions dualistically. Impossible worlds may be created. Essentially language can only take us so far in the text’s literal situation. While deictic expression brings us immediately to aspecific moment and situation reference propels us beyond, into a more imaginativeand abstract zone, that can be seen through language or imagined. Reference conveysmeaning about something not present.

Something separate from the immediatelinguistic/ textual situation. Reference language is denotative and descriptive tying usto a physical or metaphysical world. Although it does not, necessarily provide clarity.It rather expresses multiplicity and transports the reader, with fluidity, from the deicticimmediacy, Berssenburgge’s descriptive reference pushes us beyond the specificlinguistic situation we are positioned in, however her poem does not depend upon it.The title ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ has historical and cultural implications of settlementand colonisation. We may bring, or we not may bring, this particular referential“reading of text” forward. The references to ‘frozen’ matter and rocks and silencemay evoke Alaska vividly or obviously, however these references are not used toprevent readers imaging some other place, or if they are to image, anything related tothe reference to Alakanak at all. Allowing us to ‘see’ through the language of the text to create image.

Instances where the language refers to something we cannot see must be imagined, as exemplified in ‘it splays out like contents its occurrence there.’ ‘Splays’, seems problematic and out of place. ‘Contents’ is spilt or poured out, we could imagine rock crumbling, or breaking up then imaginethe pieces of rock ‘its insides’ which are now exposed. ‘Splays’creates an image difficult to see, the implications of its use are not particularly clear. It requires, the reader to diverge from seeing the rock to imagining something, which splays outrather than is split, the reader must examine, how reference shifts through at onceimage-making and simile. ‘Splays out contents’ made me think of surgical procedures, incisions-openings-autopsy. The image of medical surgery does not see to belong in the setting of Alakanak similarly the word ‘splays’ disrupts a cohesive image. That of a broken rock. The image of human organs being splayed to be examined surfaces for me however it does not displace other images that could arise.

Ultimately the reader determines the image. This does not erase the landscape.Reference to landscape creates the space for image associations. Counter-intuitive it may seem. This idea of splaying the contents of the landscape as a referential moment is extremely dense, it may be read in conjunction with the social, cultural and historical readings of this poem. Moving from the specific situation to a space wheredifferent readings proliferate. To follow this progressing idea further, focusing on reference as mobilising language, we see ‘splays’ disrupting the image, but also allowing us to unravel them.

Alliance, between image and the words of images, is established so language is mobilised. ‘With silence as a material’. Like a material silence becomes pliable and shapely matter. This is at odds with our understanding of silence, still and empty. Silence as material becomes something we have to imagine a reference we cannot see as given in the language/ text. We may connect to ‘plane itself is silent’, although this intra-textual reference is not necessarily present, there is no origin to find – to give reference meaning. As the doubled reference ‘plane’/ ‘plain’ indicates. We connect these references through their sound.

Berssenburgge is playing with our expectations of referential language. How may we distinguish between ‘plane’ and ‘plain’. There is a disparity between what we see and hear. We may associate many things with these two words. Distinct low relief uniform colour without additions. Surface without slope aircraft level of existence. The reader invests in referential possibilities of the image created or not created through language.

Notes

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge has been a really important poet for me over the last couple of years. Inspired particularly by Empathy (1989) I thought it would post a piece of writing about reference in her poem 'Alakanak Break Up' (I also have a component piece about deixis in the same poem that I will post perhaps another time). Decisions regarding how many words per sentence and the number of sentences were made in advance (closely following another piece of writing as a model). My expression was forced into a particular syntactic arrangement, creating fragmentation and anacoluthon.

Post(Your)Secret(s)... And they will remain confidential...

2008-04-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

A postcard is an easily identifiable and recognizable social object, distinguished by its regularized size, flatness and double-sided appearance (one side usually presents a visual image of some sort, and on the other a blank space where a message or note is typically written). Sharply contrasted with the expansive format of the letter, a postcard offers scope for brief and compressed linguistic expression. Envelope-less, a postcard is the perfect choice for sending a souvenir whilst on travel (which has been its normative historical function). The postcard, along with letter writing has been replaced by the enabling speedy and efficient capabilities of email and internet communication that which manages to circumvent the postal service altogether.

Accompanied by a precarious art history of its own (eroticized dusky maidens enticing visitors to a South Pacific paradise come to mind as one of many examples), the postcard, has also been exploited for commercial art purposes. Most galleries and museums now cheaply reprint, the most well-known and iconic canonical art images, from Monet to Warhol, onto postcards and make available for purchase.

This is at odds with the use of postcards for the artistic trading activities and processes of exchange that characterized the international mail art network and movement beginning in the 1950s & 60s. Via the postal service, artists gifted and received a multiplicity of ephemera. Ranging from postcards and handmade books or zines to images made from photocopied materials or with rubber stamps, and other found objects and materials usually relegated to the margins of artistic productivity.

(Useful resources for mail art online - Mail-Art, International Mail Art Archives, EMMA)

Based upon ideas surrounding of freely exchanging art objects and critiquing the dominance of art institutions, mail art “focuses [up]on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception, rather than the evaluation of particular works of art” (Gell 3). This focus is closely linked to a contemporary community art project that similarly makes use of postcard format. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard to a postal address. From here they are "posted" onto the PostSecret blog (blogging and mailing postcards as two forms of "posting"). Sharing secrets has extended to artists using video formats and book publications of the collected postcards.

PostSecret is a mixed reality work. Real life experiences and activities, transferring a deep dark secret onto a postcard, are mixed with the virtual activities of, posting the postcards onto the blog itself and users experiencing the art project online. Exposing secrets to wide internet readership and constructing secrets, literally reifying that which is essentially considered to be a ‘feeling’, ‘regret for past action’, or a ‘worry’ into a concrete object, are expressive and "performative" processes, resulting in the production of a vast range of social media objects.

From the humorous and trifling …

... to a confession of either superficiality or desperateness

... to a statement of guilt, perhaps commenting further (and maybe beyond the creator's intention) on the effects of political correctness and the ways in which marginal groups are socially "visible".

If a secret is understood as that which is kept hidden from knowledge or view, that which we kept internalized, concealed, and do not express, our very notion of ‘secret’ or ‘secretness’ must shift when a secret is shared between individuals or materially expressed in some way. The intrinsic format of the postcard makes a posted secret constantly in visible. It cannot be concealed at any stage of the circulation process, between its initial creation, postal processing and reception on the internet.

And yet these "secret-spillers" remain anonymous. Evading vicious gossip discourse, the project protects its creators by making it impossible to discover their identity. But because secrets have been shared and exposed this potential curiosity seems to be already in effect satisfied. Perhaps more importantly considered is the nature of the ‘secret’ itself and our notions of ‘secretness’. Is a secret still a secret when it is expressed and shared with a large audience?

PostSecret writes that “Sometimes a secret we keep from ourselves only becomes true after we read it on a strangers postcard.” The capabilities of social agency instantiated by the project goes beyond the creator’s intention (Gell 3) to perhaps simply "get something off their chest." Reading the secrets of others can potentially make us realise that we perhaps hold that secret too.

Works Cited

Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1998.

S T R E E T C O R N E R

2008-04-15T01:42:00.000-07:00

Forgetting what meant, of that, and this is, beyond discolouration, recognising

around - mouth

coming out of, from simplism described

inability to, and at times never seeking

when said, felt and whispering minutiae. Board, such with insides and having the, and critical, of

when said, were and not to do this since, desire is finding / shivering with life

becoming streets, bodies - sounded

patience

saw planar refusal - bitten wives and we left, to left untouched round in sculpt

Wanting speech to movement, dreamt light on connected surfaces and not back to that

dove broke birth pulsing and wet and wanting to movement

pointing birth realised having edification

against is lies calling, so far gentleness

development cured, drawing on the walls and the liking to be away

looking at the pages wrote on the walls and of the liking to be

footed, highly suspicious of activity.

I have been interested in Stefanie Schneider's photographic projects for a while now and frequently use them for inspiration in writing. The use of long expired polaroid stock offers evidence of chemical photographic process that is typically disguised. This enables Schneider to layer blemishes and imperfections, in what some critics describe as a painterly fashion, over narrative potentialities. I think perhaps what I most enjoy about these photographs is their lack of specificity. There is something troubling about these images, and the unsettled feeling experienced when I view them spurrs such writing, that which is similarly unsettling and meandering, in its syntactic arrangement and vague preoccupation with narrative.

I HEART POLYSYLLABICS - a promise to come back to you...

2008-04-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

In my first blog entry I published a sample of writing that was to be part of a book length poem, a forthcoming Winterling Press publication. This publication is still coming. I have not, until very recently, continued to work on these sequences. I guess this is due to the fact I have been extremely busy, having little time to work on any writing (unrelated to university) and when I have been doing writing unrelated to university I have been preoccupied with other projects.

I have made some progress - established a working title, Anathema, and not deflagrations or associations with length and completed the first three sequences for the publication which I have posted below. (However I think this will be subject to future alteration and change, and to what extent I cannot say at this stage - so if you find what I write in the chapbook radically different to what I have posted here you will know why).

Anathema, and not deflagrations or associations with length

1.

The influence of eaves, and from, movements of – and sounded in my bedroom. Alight and this kind of becoming, uttering like word, between swollen seeds from grasses that numb your lashes – though not, we.
At the bowl’s lip.
I write, “Welcome home”, this, contained to and looking up from low pictures, are seen in light, a light, in front.
From the side. You – and it is cardboard, and down from, stretched.
Pacing kitted bone and on the boardeon, lying flat on your stomach and on your back.
We stayed in there for some time and no one wanted to come in, too, though this could never be inisolable, like bending a leaf.
Extending far beyond the captions to not a picture, so connected at once suspended and moving, like the clutter of day, around.
It could be pointed out anywhere, a row of sounds, like scales.

2.

Bodies and not parts or them, is lifted and not to be a face. More simply oblique enabling such, we drift through the front.
Wrist on window tactility, I write, “On your lip”, although constructions do not produce. Something spoken of, semi-solidity nothing meant glass or flesh.
Unveiled by the movement of fluids, water is where you collected various fluids. The place, but water is not the substance.
This is unveiled by water.
It is where you collected various fluids.
You found a deepening, an assimilated inurement.
Boned skies, a weighted throat.
Cephalic programming becomes the task of weighing up and relating the difference between what is imagined as seeing, and what is said to be seen.
Salts on paper edge along watery, the place, but water is not the substance.
This is unveiled, is where you collected various fluids, now opening.
Scoring membrane is invasion. In real-time, but water is not cut over, you should, closer up. And come back – so that down at the sides, come away from.
Without the flexing side, come away from the side.

3.

Not everything seen, where every sky is produced singly, and thought.
Could, and no cutting, not a passage through.
Without warning, it is gone. Withheld to the base of the spine, there are some spaces that enclose borders.
Losing stability, this interpretation extends away from the sound, come away from the side. I saw staying flatness, spilt out on the floor.
A voice’s resin, columnar. Traveling toward,
toward the miser trading materials ( ) for another’s thought. Boned skies, where every sky is produced singly, and they thought they could, turnings, not excitable or turning into, not of a floating. I write, “Play a game with me”, though I fail to see it is where you collected the meanings of glass or flesh.

Plans for Winterling Press

I am concurrently working on my first two Winterling Press chapbook series - each series will be made up of three chapbooks. Eventually (yes eventually, press activity is not an easy solo gig when you are attempting to do all the writing and publishing - and yes, eventually I hope to expand and get other writers on board), I hope to make these chapbooks available (for trade with other artwork, chapbooks, writing & or interesting collected/found materials or alternatively for a very small cost, but hope to make the exchanges mostly trade based). I will give more detail of this soon. X

From: N. “cl[e]ap.s” E

2008-04-07T01:38:00.000-07:00

To: ".dirtee codah."
Date: Monday April 7, 2008 8:11pm
Subject:Subject: mez[angelle]. [[Int.errupt[ing] you.r

<< r [ea].Der ] [s norma.

t-iv. e r[[eadin.g pro.

c[ess]]]es [[[[[[[]]]]]]]]] + &p.us [h]ing.

A]]gain.st line[ar] . writ.ing
[M]od.es are strategies em[ploy]ed

by many writers, [artist]s. T[he]

[a] in. [t]er[active. web wri.tinG /

c.oDe poet.ry] [[[ of.

[M][ez] (or [M]ary Anne Bre[e]ze).

i.s en.gag.ing []]]]]]

i.n this kind of a pract[[[[ [ice

b[u]t [up] [on]] a part.I.cularly i.nte.rest.Ing scale.

Mezangelle (the language Mez is writing in) forces together human reader codings and computer reader codings and has developed as a language over the last twelve or thirteen years.

While it looks visually interesting, I encourgae one to absolutely experiment with reading Mezangelle aloud.

I should point out that above is an "imitation" of Mezangelle, and that such a rendition of Mezangelle actually takes it out of its original web context, where hypertextual links activate the virtual dimensionality - you can view an example of Mez's work - pro] [tean] [.lapsing.txts. - by clicking here.

Mezangelle exceeds a "restricted economy of meaning".

An endless variety of reading effects and possibilities are created by non-normative usages of punctuation, syntax and word fragmentation. What is interesting about Mez’s work besides its interruption of normative reading processes is that I noticed many different things about my own personal reading procedure and how I usually "work through" any piece of writing. I typcially experience a lot of horizontal backwards-forwards movement during reading (not dissimilar to most reading of normative print books where reader's often flick back and forth between pages). So while Mez interrupts our normative reading procedures, an awareness of what constitutes normative reading procedures is potentiated.

I engaged in multiple re-readings (and re-articulatings) of syntactic flows, creating shifting and mutliple dynamic specificities, concerning namely pace and "meaning" (usually at the level of a word or "sentence"/"line"). These altered depending on what “interruptions” I recognized and how I recognized them, and in what o[h]r.d[e]e[a]r.

The combination of human and computer reader coding creates tension not only betwen processes of writing and reading, but the multiple and diverse processes of reading. Mez evades conventional poetic undertakings by illustrating that poetry itself cannot be contained by normativity. pro] [tean] [.lapsing.txts. for example, displays the process of its own making, that which constitutes it, as a piece of writing. It requires a reader to navigate both the hyperlinks and linguistic irregularities, to engage in "paradgimatic reading". Reading over or past these non-conventional "interuptions" results in flattening linguistic embodiment into mere furnishings or accoutrements.

Be directed to other projects by Mez by clicking here and link to _knott404_ a very interesting blog project.

Nowhere to Go - Nothing to Do - Street Style Photographic Project & Vintage Rummage Sale

2008-03-30T01:34:00.000-07:00

Nowhere to Go - Nothing to Do is a photographic project concerned with documenting New Zealand street style. Inspired by Ted Polemus' idea of the street as a dead end - the place to go when you aren’t old enough or rich enough to get in somewhere, Nowhere to Go - Nothing to Do transforms the street into a dynamic and fluid aesthetic environment constituted of these very subjects by way of presenting it photographically in an online diary format.

Check out the blog here and get in touch with Kimberley if you have know of any secret New Zealand street-fashion spots or events where people would be interestingly dressed that could be photographed and included in her ongoing project.

Make sure you don't miss Kimberley's (Nowhere to Go - Nothing to Do) amazing Vintage Rummage Sale! (click on the cute poster above to enlarge view and for sale details)

The Hack-Able Curator Project

2008-03-25T00:31:00.000-07:00

day 78: Inspiration by moirabot (flickr)

This project is really interesting in terms of its efforts to diffuse some of the 'power', prestige and authority a curator has in terms of selecting artworks for shows and exhibitions, across a diverse social network. The works that make up ‘imaginary exhibitions’ found on The Hack-Able Curator Project website are chosen from flickr. flickr is a network that literally makes millions of artworks, (photographs primarily, although people often scan illustration, collage and other media) from both professional and non-professional artists (labels that, during my recent internet art searches, are proving to be futile), available to the public, like day 78: inspiration pictured above.

This idea of the artwork selection process as a random one is polyvalent. Works for The Hack-Able Curator Project 'imaginary exhibitions' are not selected as they typically would be for a normative art show or exhibition, based on conceptual or aesthetic merit, for example. The selection is computer generated, and then controlled by users who vote on the curator’s choices, and therefore influence the subsequent choices the curator will make. Users also have the opportunity to upload their own images into the pool, and can therefore also influence the curating process in a more direct manner.

The images are chosen by means of a robot arm controlled by simple algorithm, based on the full set of tags associated with the images.

Aleatory procedures are at play in The Hack-Able Curator, and even though we may think this project is reversing art world hierarchies, that exist between the curator and the artist, I also think that it obliges us to consider whether the premises of normative curatorial practices, are anything other than this, anything other than, random. Sometimes works appear to be randomly selected for shows, random in the sense that they are chosen just because they are considered to be "good" or "important". To me, this "goodness" or "importantness" in relation to establishing a show is often arbitrary and the reason for selecting a particular work therefore seems random. The “importantness” or “goodness” of a work is decided prior to the assessment of its appropriateness for the show's main concept or goal it is chosen for. Shows may be "randomly" created because a group of works has been selected to be in a show, for one reason or another, they are considered important to a particular movement, or to be definitive of an artist’s career, not for "a show" in itself.

The Hack-Able Curator project illuminates our assumptions about role of curators - their position and worth, within our art institutions, and the purposes of art exhibitions, which in itself, all judgments, for better or for worse aside, is particularly interesting.

Fields of Dream - How To Write a Poem, Randomness & Anti-Randomness

2008-03-20T16:24:00.000-07:00

The small, not like careened around the bend, nearing the burnt, it was a bloody stars day for sighing heavily in the christened crash sighing

Maw bit ate a clefting parchment and fell into a cuddle, leaving home it was a raining night as "animal" talk to me

The tight, blackened careened around the bend, nearing the burning holes, it was a stampingly day for nevertheless in the dusky aeons

Tell like cold, and with decided warbling over.

The lines of the poem above were created using Fields of Dream, a literary game where participants can do one or both of the following two things. They can write fill-in-the-blank texts, called dreamfields, that are then left as templates on the site for someone else to populate, with their own words. Or participants can blindly combine their own words with the words of the template, so within the dreamfields, that have been set up and left by previous users. The participant is blindly combining words because they do not know what the dreamfield they are inserting their own words into actually looks like. A template never exists for long, ten dreamfields are always available and by creating a new one, an existing one is erased, similar to a dream that may be forgotten upon waking up. It soon becomes obvious that there is no randomness within fields of dream; fields of dream explains “we are anti-randomness. Or rather, any randomness should come from [the participant's] mind, not from the server's pseudorandom number generator”, or aleatory computer generated procedures. For example, you may enter any word or part of speech when it asks for a noun - “There is no provision for editing what you have submitted; we are anti-editing, just write what you feel like writing at the moment and throw your words together with someone else's.” So while the participants inserted words may be completely "random", the template within which they are working is somewhat deterministic. The radomness is always determined, not by what a participant writes in - but by way of the syntactic structure of the lines. Compare the first and third lines of my poem. The project is collaboration between Nick Montfort and Rachel Stevens. Click here to play Fields of Dream.

PLAY IT, MAKE IT

2008-03-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

Click on poster above to enlarge view and Link to Window :)

Pantoume - Some of the Pleasures & Possibilities of Hypertext

2008-03-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

There were days in that city when I would not face its streets, previous experience of leers, catcalls, projected identities brute incentives to pull out, if only for 24 hours. Foreign women were defined by an influx of game students who frequented the clubs and, by proxy, the rest of us too were divorced from local femininity, marked for an extraordinarily rampant mitigation of social mores. Pale-skinned, blue-eyed, so tall I could rarely find trousers of the right length in shops, sans camouflage, I was effortlessly Other.

- Text and image, by Kai Fierle-Hedrick & Marianne Morris, respectively, from their collaborative project Pantoume.

Pantoume is a new media project by Kai Fierle-Hedrick & Marianne Morris published in How2, an online journal that is interested in exploring innovative writing projects, non-traditional directions in poetry and scholarship by women. Pantoume exists as an interactive hypertext art work, you can visit Pantoume at How2 by clicking here. Marianne Morris' visual pieces were also exhibited at Cambridge Experimental Women Writers’ Festival. (Click here for a link to that festival).

Sophie Robinson has written an introduction to Pantoume as well as written her own poetic response to the work, titled Sugar and has interviewed both Kai and Marianne about the project.

I think this work particularly interests me in terms of what I have been reading about interactivity and differing levels of user participation across the myriad of new media works. I am particularly alerted to a comment Julian Stallabrass quotes in Internet Art to illustrate his and others' point that user/screen interactivity, that which necessary for new media works (having someone behind the computer screen clicking on the hyperlinks to "move through" the works for example). However, he argues this does not necessarily mean the work should be marked out as "interactive", considering the base level of audience "interactivity" that is required to "read" (that is to view or experience) any work of art, whether materially object-based or hypterextual. It does seem perhaps unusual to mark out these works as interactive when any viewer in any art space, actual or virtual, is required to "move through" the space in order to "read", view or experience the work(s). This actual bodily movement in space does not seem so differentiated from hypertextual leaps. We may conclude that all artworks are indeed interactive, although require different levels of participation from the spectator, viewer or user.

I think our tendency to think of a painting, for instance, as not necessarily interactive comes from our thinking about it as an art object, one that we stand before, in awe and contemplation. Because new media works require a user to activate them, it is difficult for us to perceive them as objects, in the way we do with painting or other works that exist in the actual. I also think that this (non)differentiation has to do with the passivity/interactivity binarism heavily engrained into our thinking about art that exists in the actual and art that exists in the virtual, a binarism that helps us describe how virutal based works are differ from works that exist in the actual. However as I was reading Pantoume, I recognised there is the possibility of reading the piece, by clicking on the hyperlinks, without actually "reading" each page. The presence of hyperlinks makes it easy to "move through" the piece without actually reading Kai's text or really engaging with Marianne's collages, which makes it seem as if the user is missing out on what these works have to offer.

However, in saying this, I think that hypertext makes more tangible (rather than limits) possibilities for reading that exist in the actual. Alternative ways of reading are made more "real" in virtual space. These alternative ways of reading are always possible and may occur in "actual" reading, however our dominant mode of reading a book "cover to cover" in the actual is sharply contrasted with the demands of hypertext. I think it is also useful to consider our normative ways of viewing artworks aswell. Hypertext seems to free us from the linear mode of reading where we feel that we must read every word on the page to understand or make sense of the narrative, and in doing so it makes it possible for us go on reading the book. (Although I do acknowledge there are projects and books that resist this and the argument that "actual" reading has always been hypertextual, I just want to point out that the linear normative mode of reading still prevails - and on the other hand, I think that perhaps there are those who attempt to carry this mode into viewing and "reading" artworks online).

So does moving through hyperlinks at hyper-speed mean we are no longer "interacting" with the work and therefore we should equate with a kind of passive spectatorship? This seems to undermine our capacity to register and reflect upon all that we may see (or interact) with, even if it is only for a fleeting moment.

‘Everything Everybody Owns’: A Script for Performance - inspired by Meg Cranston's Keep Same Over

2008-03-12T03:02:00.000-07:00

‘Everything Everybody Owns’: A Script for Performance, There are No surprises: Eliminate the Possibility for Surprise

1. Pre-event: Choose/select/designate a space for the event and ask all the participants to bring to the event everything they own.

2. Event: Gather the participants in the chosen space and arrange everything they own in the space.

2.1 Arrange everything they own in the space to create an environment
2.2 Or a structural assemblage,
2.2.1 or a series of assemblages,
2.2.2 or an accumulation,
2.2.2.1 or a series of accumulations
2.2.3. or a formation
2.2.3.1 or a series of formations.

2.3 Allow the participants and the audience
2.3.1 to move through the structural assemblages,
2.3.2 or inhabit the stimulated environment

2.4 Record the event
2.4.1 Take photographs of the event and write captions for the photographs.
2.4.2 Make a video of the event
2.4.3 Sketch the event on a piece of white A2 standard cartridge paper with a 2B pencil.
2.4.4 Record the event using the following materials only - a wasp’s nest, yellow card, toothpicks, glue and purple glitter.

3. Specified Environment Version

3.1 Use everything the participants own and will bring to the event to stimulate a specific environment,

3.1.1. Stimulate a real-life environment in the space, by using objects and materials to create,
3.1.1.1 a café,
3.1.1.2 a supermarket,
3.1.1.3 cyberspace,
3.1.1.4 a dance studio,
3.1.1.5 a tropical island.

3.1.2 Create an environment with dramatic or distorted spatial dimensions.
3.1.2.1 Put large objects into small spaces
3.1.2.2 Make an object smaller than it really is.
3.1.2.3 Make an object larger than it really is.

3.1.3 Create an environment for the objects which the objects would not normally inhabit.
3.1.3.1 The chosen space is a swimming pool. Arrange
household appliances under water so participants can dive under water and use them.
3.1.4 Create an environment the participants can inhabit permanently.

4. Specified Assemblage Version

4.1 Pre-select from everything the participants own to create an assemblage.

4.1.1 Not all objects will be used. Participants still need to bring everything they own to the event so the object-selection process can take place.

4.1.2 All objects must be owned by the participants prior to the event,
4.1.2.1 Objects or material cannot be found in the chosen space and used for the event.
4.1.2.2 Objects cannot be purchased especially for the event.

4.1.3 Suggested assemblages:
4.1.3.1 Attach 100 safety pins to1 kg soap powder or laundry detergent (any brand) and pour the detergent-safety pin mixture into a bird cage.
4.1.3.2 Gather together 12000 litres of water (with or without a receptacle), a series of wires or cables, and a ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’ sign or a ‘Welcome’ doormat.
Create organic forms from the wires or cables and attach them or balance them underneath the sign or doormat.
4.1.3.3 Create a series of face masks using rubber husks from deflated balloons, broken household appliances and fridge magnets.

5. Fluxversion

5.1 Participants must arrange everything they own into tidy market stall layout.

5.2 Then participants are to go and look at the other participants’ stalls.
5.2.1 They are to then,
5.2.1.1 trade,
5.2.1.2 swap,
5.2.1.3 exchange,
5.2.1.4 or barter
with one another, only using objects and items from everything they own.

5.3 Everything the participants own is lumped together in a large pile, and then sorted into new individual lots according to the number of participants. Allow the participants to take away their new holdings.

5.4 Timed Version - Give Fluxversion a time frame.
5.4.1 38 seconds,
5.4.2 35 minutes, 56 seconds,
5.4.3 Or, 2 days.

6. Mathematical / Deterministic / Procedural Versions

6.1 Limit the number of participants to 4.8.

6.2 Limit the number of objects participants can bring to the event,
6.2.1 Ten participants are to bring the number of objects, from everything they own, according to what number participant they are. For example participant one brings one object from everything they own, participant two brings two and so forth…

6.3 Work out the spatial dimensions of the environment or assemblage according to the total volume of all the objects present. Reduce this figure by 74 percent. Attempt to assemble all of the objects in a space that is too small.

6.4 Limit the number of bodily movements participants can make when creating the environment or assemblage to 18 bodily movements per participant.

6.5 Arrange the objects according to size, in ascending order.
6.5.1 Choose every fifth object and remove all other objects. Retain the negative space that this will leave between the objects.

6.6 Create an accumulative time capsule by arranging everything the participants own according to the years in which they attained that particular ‘thing’ - object or material. Arrange all the objects from a particular year, horizontally, and then stack each ‘year’ (the horizontal assemblage) on top of another to create stratification or a vertically layered assemblage.

6.7 Choose another procedure by which the objects are structured or assembled into layers.
6.7.1 stacked on top of one another
6.7.2 or separately in the space.
6.7.3 Suggestions for structuring procedures:
6.7.3.1 Objects are to be assembled by colour. Put all the brown things together, the white on another, etc.
6.7.3.2 or, objects are to be assembled by shape. Put all the square things on one layer, triangular on another, etc.
6.7.3.3 Objects are to be assembled by other physical attributes.
6.7.3.3.1 According to the softness or hardness of particular objects.
6.7.3.3.2 or, by grouping similar things together. Put all the office supplies on one layer, food on another, clothing, etc.

6.7 Resist creating a casual assemblage. Use things that people own to determine chance operations.
6.7.1 Flip a coin to determine all decisions for constructing an assemblage.
6.7.2 Use a numbered spinning wheel to determine all decisions for constructing an assemblage.
6.7.3 Use die to determine all decisions for constructing an assemblage.

7. Musical Version

7.1 Use the following music score to accompany the event.
7.1.1 Stimulate the sounds of the music score by limiting the sound materials to
7.1.1.1 materials ‘found’ in the chosen space
7.1.1.2 objects and materials from everything everybody owns that are not being used as part of the event assemblage or environment.

7.2 Use the following score to actually create a musical / sound ‘environment / assemblage’. Choose objects from everything everybody owns to create sounds.

7.3 Score:

Materials, such as rope, wire, cord or strings, are plucked for one minute at 2-second intervals.
A participant repeats SOMETHING CONFUSES US INTO SMALLNESS AND WE COME BACK AGAIN over the top of the plucking for 1 minute 7 seconds.
Silence for 35 seconds.
There is a cracking sound of a whip, wet tea towel or glass lasting for a minute.
There is a sound of gushing fluids for 3 minutes.
Silence for 12 seconds.
There is noise of hammers, wood, ceramics, and pots being crashed together for 20 seconds. Then all participants repeat SOMETHING CONFUSES US INTO SMALLNESS AND WE COME BACK AGAIN over top of the crashing noises for 30 seconds.
Silence for 7 seconds.
Crashing resumes for 12 seconds.
Silence for 5 seconds.
Crashing resumes for a second.
Silence for 12 seconds.
Then a series of saws bent almost in two are struck with metal objects for 2 minutes.
All participants repeat WHEN ONE IS BEING NEITHER EMOTIONAL NOR INTELLECTUAL! for 1 minute over top of saws and metal objects.
Silence for 5 seconds.
Someone blows a whistle for 17 seconds.

- Emma Phillipps © 2007

An (Actual) Sleepless Night (Standing)

2008-03-12T02:58:00.000-07:00

Pertaining to; some little things kept

Water, Cetearyl Alcohol, Cyclomethicone, Cetrimonium Chloride, Glycerin, Dimenthiconol, Ceteardimonium Chloride, Propylene Gylcol, Hydroxyethylcellulose, Lysine HCL, Hydrolyzed Silk, Borago Officinalis Seed Oil, Tea-Dodecylbenzenesulfonate, Potassium Chloride, Disodium EDTA, DMDM Hydatoin, Methylchloroisothiazolinone, Methylisothiazolinone, Fragrance.

Water, Stearyl Alcohol, Cetyl Alcohol, Stearamidopropyl Dimethylamine, Zinc Pyrithione, Dimethicone, Fragrance, Glutamic Acid, Benzyl Alcohol, Phenoxyethanol, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Citric Acid.

Active: Zinc Pyrithione 0.5%

Demineralised Water, Denatured Alcohol, Silicone Quaterium-16 (And) Undeceth-11 (And), Undeceth-5, PEG/PPG-15/15 Dimethicone, Fragrance, Cetrimonium Chloride, Diazolidinyl Urea (And) Iodopropynyl, Butylcarbamate, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Gingko Biloba Leaf Extract, Chamomile Extract, Panthenol, Citric Acid.

Aqua/Water, Glycerin, Glyceral Polymethacrylate, Biosaccharide Gum-1, Trioctanoin/Triethylhexanoin, Dimethicone, Propolis Cera/Propolis Extract, Mel/Honey Extract, Propylene Glycol, Sodium Polyacrylate, Carbomer, Phenoxyethanol, Bisabolol, Parfum/Fragrance, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Hydroxide, Benzoic Acid, Gardenia Florida Extract, Dehydroacetic, Caramel, Royal jelly.

Extract of Malted Barley and Rice and/or Barley, Milk Solids, Sugar, Cocoa, Vegetable Oil, Mineral Salts (341, 504, 500), Vitamins [Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C), Retinyl Acetate (Vitamin A), Thiamine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)], Mineral [Ferric Pyrophosphate (Iron)], Flavour, Emulsifier (Soy Lecithin).

Active: Sodium borate in the form of a ready-to-use liquid.

Active: Aluminium Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex GLY 20% W/W

Aqua, Cetyl Ethylhexanoate, Isostearyl Palmitate, Pentaerythrityl Tetraethylhexanoate, Isononyl Isononoate, Cyclopentasiloxane, Glycerin, Hexylene Glycol, Glyceral Stearate, PEG-100 Stearate, Dimethicone, Panthenol, Zinc Gluconate, Magnesium Asparate, Copper Gluconate, Acrylates/C10-30 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer, Sucrose Cocoate, Sorbitan Stearate, PEG-6 Caprylic/Capric Glycerides, Caprylyl Glycol, Tocopheryl Acetate, Disodium EDTA, Sodium Hydroxide, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, Phenoxyethanol, Parfum – [FPT 0613].

Active: sodium fluoride 0.22% W/W, Triclosan 0.3% W/W

Skim milk, Maize Starch, Beverage Whitener (Mineral Salts (340, 451), Emulsifiers (471, 481), Anti-caking Agent (551)), Chicken meat (1%), Wheat Flour, Salt, Sugar, Flavour Enhancers (621, 635) Parsley, Maltodextrin, Chicken Fat, Flavours, Yeast Extract, Vegetable Gum (Guar), Food Acid (Citric), Colour (Curcumin). Contains Soy.

Aqua/Water, CI 778891/Titanium Dioxide, Glycerin, Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea Butter), Propylene Glycol, Methyl Glycol Diethylhexanoate, Mica, Ruscus Aculeatus Root Extract, Hydroxyethyl, Acrylate/Sodium Acryloyldimethyl Taurate Copolymer, Dimethicone, Cetearyl Alcohol, Phenoxyethanol, Xanthan Gum, Centella Asiatica Extract, Panthenol, CI 77491/CI 774499, Iron Oxides, Aluminium Hydroxide, Methyl/Propyl/Ethyl/Butyl/Isobutyl/Paraben, Bisabolol, Hydrolysed Yeast Protein, Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract, Tocopheryl Acetate, Polysorbate 60, PEG-40 Castor Oil, PEG-8, Aesculus Hippocastanum (Horse Cheasnut) Seed Extract, Ammonium Glycyrrhizate, Triethanolamine, Sodium Cetearyl Sulfate, Caparylyl Glycol, Disodium EDTA, Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Extract, PPG-1-PEG-9 Lauryl Glycol Ether, Butylene Glycol, Hedera Helix (Ivy) Extract, Phytic Acid, Sodium Polycrylate, Sodium Hyaluronate.

Water, Cetearyl Alcohol, Cyclopentasiloxane, PEG-2 Oleammonium Chloride, Glycerine, Dimethiconol, TEA-Dodecylbenzenesulfonate, Lysine HCL, Hydrolised Silk, Borago Officinalis Seed Oil, Disodium EDTA, DMDM Hydatoin, Methyl Chloroisithiazolinone, Methyl Isithiazolinone, Fragrance.

Alcohol Denat., Butane, Propane, Isobutane, Isopropyl Myristate, Fragrance, Triclosan.

Cereals (62%) (rice, wheat), wheat gluten, sugar, wheat flour, minerals (calcium carbonate, iron, zinc oxide), salt, barley, malt extract, vitamins (niacin, vitamin B6, riboflavin, thiamin, folate).

Active: Tetramethrin, Bioallethrin, Bioresmethrin.

hamamens virginiana, alcohol denat., aqua purificata.

Aqua/Water, Magnesium Sulfate, Laureth-23, Taurine, Hydrolyzed Wheat Protein, Phenoxylethanol, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Methylparaben, Hydrolyzed Wheat Starch, Ethylparaben, Parfum/Fragrance, Polyquaternium-10, Propylparaben, Arginne, Lysine Hydrochloride, Linalool (D4197/2).

Milk solids (62%), Glucose Solids (Contains Wheat or Corn), Vegetable Oil (Vegetable Oil, Soy Lecithin), Salt, Vegetable Gum (415), Mineral Salts (339, 340 or 341, 451, 452), Flavours, Sweetner (951), Colour (160a), Emulsifiers (471 or 472c, 481), Anticaking agent (551), Antioxidants (322, 330).

Aqua, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Glycerin, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Cocamide DEA, PEG-40 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Coco-Glucoside, Benzyl Alcohol, Phenoxyethanol, Parfum, Limonene, Methylparaben, Plassiflora edulis, Passiflora incarnate, PEG-55 Propylene Glycol Oleate, Propylene Glycol, Hexyl Cinnamal, Butyl Methoxydibenzoylmethane, Linalool, Disodium EDTA, Butylparaben, Ethylparaben, Geraniol, Isobutylparaben, Propylparaben, Citral, Citronellol, Alpha-Isomethyl Ionone, CI 60730, CI 19140, CI 17200.

potassium sorbate, paracetamol

Water/Aqua, Cetyl Acetate, Cetearyl Alcohol, Isopropyl Palmitate, Myristyl Alcohol, Cetyl Alcohol, Isopropyl Palmitate, VP/VA Copolymer, Sorbitan Oleate, Lanolin Alcohol, Isopropyl Myristate, Ceteth-20 Phosphate, Hydrolyzed Quinoa, Chitosan, Panthenol, Magnesium Sulfate, Quaternium-60, Polyquaternium-11, Propylene Glycol, Acetamide MEA, Tormentil (Potentilla Erecta Root) Extract, Yarrow (Achillea Millefolium) Extract, Wild Cherry (Prunus Serotina Bark) Extract, Arnica Montana Extract, Sage (Salvia Officianalis Leaf) Extract, Glycine Soja (Soybean) Oil, Butyl Stearate, Sesamum Indicum (Sesame) Seed Oil, Lanolin Oil, Tocopheryl Acetate, Acetylated Lanolin Alcohol, Lactic Acid, Dicetyl Phosphate, Disodium EDTA, Benzophenone-4, Red-4, Yellow-5, Methylparaben, Propylparaben, DMDM Hydantoin, Fragrance/Parfum.

Active: octinoxate 3.5%, titanium dioxide 1%

Aqua, Isopropyl Palmitate, Cyclopentasiloxane, Isohexadecane, Propylene Glycol, Sorbitan Isostearate, Sorbitol, Phenoxyethanol, Simmondisa Chinensis, Panthenol, Cera Microcristallina, Ceresin, Carnauba, Magnesium Stearate, Aluminium Stearates, Tocopheryl Acetate, Sodium Lactate, Lactic Acid, Parfum.

Aqua, Prunus Dulcis, Theobroma Cacao, Glycerin, Stearic Acid, Triethanolamine, Cetearyl Alcohol, Lanolin, Phenoxyethanol, Alcohol Denat., Propylene Glycol, Mentha piperita, Parfum, Methylparaben, Menthol, Butylparaben, Ethylparaben, Arnica Montana, Isobutylparaben, Propylparaben, Limonene, Linalool, CI17200, CI 15985.

Wheat Flour, Sugar, Vegetable Fat [Antioxidant (306)], Invert Syrup, Whey Powder, Salt, Raising Agents (500, 450), Flavours, Colour (106b).

Sugar, colour (E122)

Aqua/Water, Coco-Betaine, Butylene Glycol, Polyethylene, Sodium Laureth Sulfate, Sodium Chloride, Disodium Cocoamphodiacetate Salicyclic Acid, Zinc Gluconate, Eucalyptus Globulus/Eucalyptus Globulus Leaf Extract, Capryloyl Salicylic Acid, Solum Diatomeae/Diatomaceous Earth, Acrylates/C10-30 Alkyl Acrylate Crosspolymer, Allumina Benzophenone-4, Camphor, PEG-60 Hydrogenated Castor Oil, Polyquaternium-47 Propyleneglycol, Sodium Glycolate, Sodium Hydroxide, Tetrasodium EDTA, Xanthan Gum, Imidazolidinyl Urea, Methylparaben, CI 42090/Blue 1, CI 42090/Blue 1 Lake, Parfum/Fragrance, Benzyl Salicylate, Limonene, Linalool (FIL B12464/1).

SD Alcohol 39-C, Fragrance, Water, Tricolsan, Benzophenone-2.

SD Alcohol 39-C, Fragrance, Water, Benzophenone-2.

Aqua/Water, PEG-7 Caprylic/Capric Glycerides, Poloxamer 124, Poloxmer 184, PEG-6 Caprylic/Capric Glycerides, Polysorbate 80, Centaurea Cyanus/Centaurea Cyanus, Flower Extract, Pyrus Malus/Apple Fruit Water, Vitis Vinifera/Grape Fruit Extract, Propylene Glycol, Disodium EDTA, Tetrasodium EDTA, Butylparaben, Methylparaben, Polyaminopropyl Biguanide, Parfum/Fragrance, Benzyl Salicylate, Linalool (F.I.L. B11120/1).

salt, anticaking agent (551), potassium iodate

cream, water, salt.

- Emma Phillipps © 2007

See the previous post for the notes on this project :)

Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World

2008-03-12T02:23:00.000-07:00

Hot Pants in a Cold Cold World is a beautiful catalogue published by ARTSPACE and Clouds on the ocassion of the exhibition The Pleasures of Obvious Problems: Meg Cranston 1987-2007, organised by ARTSPACE and curated by Brian Butler and exhibited at ARTSPACE, Auckland last year. I was lucky enough to have Meg sign my copy. I am really interested in her inter-art-writing practice.

As I Told You and Keep Same Over have inspired two writing projects of mine. A fluxus type-performance art piece I scripted last year, ‘Everything Everybody Owns’: A Script for Performance, There are No surprises: Eliminate the Possibility for Surprise, some of which I will include in another post.

The other project was an inventory/list poem, titled Pertaining to; some little things kept. This poem constructs a list of ingredients found on the packaging/label of everyday household items found in the bathroom and kitchen. The ingredients are copied directly down, in the list format as they actually appear on the label, and each item is listed in the poem by way of cataloguing the ingredients the item contains rather than the item itself. When these ingredients are decontextualised and brought into a poetic space they take on a different meaning, becoming strange and unfamiliar, even puzzling, despite the list consisting of nothing more than banal household items.

Working Notes: Thoughts on extending this piece further, have been to divide the poem into different areas of the household – kitchen, bathroom, laundry, etc. I would like to go to great lengths and create a full inventory of all the items in each of those spaces, retaining the format of listing the individuated ingredients of each item and without naming what that item is.

I will include the current version of this project in another post aswell.

Making Chapbooks & Winterling Press

2008-03-08T23:06:00.000-08:00

Today I am posting photographs of my latest chapbook printed by Winterling Press. Winterling Press is my own ongoing creative project in self-publication. I choose a plain white handmade paper for the cover and printed the title in grey which gives the effect of the text being barely perceptible. This idea of “being-perceptible” is carried throughout the short story by the moving letters of the five “word-ships”. The "word-ships" are often difficult to see or grasp as they form rapidly and move quickly, break apart and come back together, as the narrative progresses. The idea of "word-ships" came to me as I wanted the story to be centered around something that is conceptually abstract but that could also be concretized on the page (but not necessarily in a literal way). I like the "word-ships" because they emphasize the materiality of the language, narrative and the page as a space where letters, words and sentences are mobile and difficult to pin down.

I have used a basic single signature binding technique for this chapbook, using pale pink thread. I should also mention that this story is largely an investigation into 'voice' as it exists and the myriad ways it manifests, develops and shifts within a singular narrative. I initially thought of this story as a dialogue between two people. They are speaking to one another but then they are not. Theirs is a failed dialogue. I was thinking about communication as an impossibility and the ways in which full desired communication is always impossible. When we communicate we are made aware of the distance between ourselves and that which we want our voice to move toward. During the writing process I felt that I also wanted to consider 'voice' more as a singular entity. Multiple voices may be embodied by a singular entity, and shift amongst what is heard, said, imagined and remembered. I am interested in the simultaneity of 'voice' that is between, within and that never reaches. I also wanted to evoke a voice that is moving, particularly moving further away as the narrative goes on. It is interesting that the "word-ships" by contrast actually become clearer, visually, and more perceptible. However, their function as words on the page is perhaps still obscured by a 'voice' that is lingering on the page but can no longer be present.

The Critical Proximity of Memory

2008-03-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

Today I am posting a selection of pages from a 30 page un-bound book I created. I choose not to bind this book because I wanted it to be a text that could be read in any order and be endlessly recreated by its reader. This book structure is inextricably linked to its narrative, both are conceptually structured around the complexities of remembering and the possibility of recovering memory.

The materials I used for the project, both for the writing and the book as a physical structure, are all recycled or as I like to call them, "waste-language" materials. I made the book from language that people normally throw away, for example, pages of photocopies that come out incorrectly so people throw them away and things like receipts.

I collected text-paper-rubbish and other such waste materials that engaged with language. A lot of collage was involved. I alternated between using the actual words themselves (cut them out and pasted them on the page), copied some text directly from the source material or deviated from the source material by interpretation and extension, to create 'original' text.

This project illuminates the impossibility of making decisions for multimedia writing projects in advance, prior to the making, regarding form, structure and the use of materials, and also decisions about writing (although it is difficult to separate it from my use of materials) that is the process of writing and the physical words that end up on the page. The narrative actually evolved and established itself as I created each page singularly.

I hope to do more projects using "waste-language" materials.

But there is nothing like that, a voice – you expect it,

2008-02-28T21:16:00.000-08:00

and that couldn't be anything other than what it becomes to us and as a sound it wills to me, not frightened, soft. “I love you”, seems to smooth for you and without expectation, this breeze is lit. Drooping, idler, made by dropping and next to you and out and under you. I can feel it more, now, and it comes to me like a memory, and more strongly still. I’m not of the details, correct temporal sequencing is beguiling and not because you are we and them and they feel certain about such things. I would give you more but I can only offer more than I would have given back, moving back to then and the concept of the “same time” and keeping time. We are not sure of the size of boats and the withering reigns that may be holding, and at certain times we may feel the inches and the cool growth of plants and long before that, and the presence of other people, their weathered hands and they have heads with faces and it spreads more quickly than this written creature.

This sequence will be part of a book length poem, that is currently untitled, a forthcoming Winterling Press publication.

Working Notes: This piece of writing is the seventh (I think it will be the seventh) sequence in a long series of sequences that will make up a book length poem. I am really excited about this current project as I feel that it is, so far, a cumulative project and I have imagined myself using a kind of cumulative process for writing for about two years but have not started to write it until quite recently. Sentences are often repeated in later sequences, but return conflated or altered in some way. But in saying this, I cannot claim this work as a procedural piece as I have not always been working progressively in the sense you would expect for a procedural piece of writing. I am not writing the sequences or the sentences within the sequences in order. Some of the later sequences are already written and some earlier sequences are not yet begun. I guess the writing appears quite organic, (I have so far the title pieces for all the sequences, from which my sentences will stem) but it feels to me like "progression" is in fact a result of synthetic decisions I make, at the level of a sentence or a sequence, after having written a particular sentence or sequence.