September 4 - 28, 2008

Opening: Thursday, September 4, 6 - 8pm

chashama ABC Gallery
169 Avenue C at 10th Street
Train: F to 2nd Ave, L to 1st Ave

Gallery Hours: Wednesday to Sunday, 11a - 7p

New York, NY - The curatorial team of Kelly Kivland, Alisoun Meehan, and Christopher Stackhouse are pleased to present the exhibition, CONTRANYM, in conjunction with the New Voices, New York series at chashama ABC Gallery. Exploring the complexities and dubious nature of visual expression and vocal utterance, CONTRANYM will present how language is dependent on the dualities of silence and absence, presence and matter. The exhibition will include the following works by Robert Delford Brown (performance), John Cage (painting), Victoria Fu (video), Stephanie Loveless (sound/performance), and Brian Kim Stefans (digital poetics):

Robert Delford Brown, Explosion of a Tile Factory
John Cage, 10 Stones
Victoria Fu, The Lake House
Stephanie Loveless, (nothing of nothing)
Brian Kim Stefans, Scriptor

During the opening reception, visitors will be part of an original Robert Delford Brown interaction. A Fluxus artist who began his artistic life in 1950s NYC, Brown will transform the gallery front into a vibrant explosion of recycled materials, as part of a collaborative installation that is testament to joint, spontaneous action. Armed with the duct tape, string, scissors, spray paint, and newspaper, Brown and visitors will collectively create a temporary sculpture splayed out from floor to ceiling.

“The ecstatic power that has marked Brown’s art since the 1960s threw a monkey wrench into the avant garde in those days. He touches a nerve at the core of the social codes that organize not only our behavior but also the limits of our art…Robert Delford Brown’s transcendent vision takes on a great significance.” – Allan Kaprow

In John Cage’s “10 Stones,” painting functions as spiritual notation creating a lexicon beyond letters. The chance stone tracing is based on Cage’s ‘Where R = Ryoanji’ drawings inspired by the Ryoanji rock garden in Kyoto, Japan - a seminal meditative work on material and transformation.

Victoria Fu’s short video, “The Lake House,” is a palindromic riddle illustrating the convergence of affection and opposition, intimacy and estrangement in human interaction.

Brian Kim Stefans, editor of the new media poetry website www.arras.net, will premiere the digital poetics work “Scriptor,” featuring dynamically generated, largely scriptural typeface that anthropomorphize words and text with Flash animation.

The premiere of Stephanie Loveless’ sound installation in continuum, “(nothing of nothing),” developed through live performance throughout the exhibition run, weaves and re-envisions the voices of iconic divas, splitting the ghostly from the presently living, the preternatural from the basic material.

***
chashama is a non-profit arts organization that provides opportunities for performing and visual artists. We support the development of art by awarding grants, producing shows and providing subsidized studio, rehearsal and performance space. Since 1995, we have provided artists with a home and the support resources necessary to present and create art that engages the community of New York. For more information, please visit www.chashama.org

He never thought that he could go there,
the final words and the inner ear—
he got stuck there,
explaining almost nothing to his contemporaries.
The camera movement was nearly imperceptible.

Buzzing, hissing, huzzahs
were all the intimacy that he could afford—
the insects and toads were his symphony,
the wind and the rattle shakes were his intimacy.
Blah blah was two times his vocabulary.
They accused him of having “gimmicks.”

First, there were the photographs of all the right angles
in the room, which, translated to the photograph,
turned out not to be right angles at all, but
three lines converging, forming three variable, obtuse angles.
Was this a lie? Afterwards, over a continental breakfast,
“bottomless” coffee but a continental breakfast,
discussion raged. To be summoned like this
to the far side of the uninhabited peninsula,
planting season from pole to pole,
blankets of mist unfolding over the beige hotel?
The light was insufficient for repairing the diagrams.

Second, the “as if” time—
a modest disease contracted when he was studying German.
It was also ridiculous.
Some child could have drawn that,
slipping between the colors of rosey-fingered dawn
(daubed in metaphysics on the wine-dark sea)
her kindergarten heroics even unfit for her peers.
He chalked up their erasers.
He blemished a nose with a Gesicht.
Called to sing, he pantomimed a melody.
(The others started singing, too, wildly, and the typing stopped.)

Third, there was death—a greaseless forehead.

And so, he was alone,
dressed in beige himself, in sympathy with the hotel,
his tongue purring like an unproduced screenplay,
filling up the room, conforming to its right angles, and
obscuring from the lenses the precise, famous angles.
He choked on their concerns,
hardly inured to their instinctual profligacy,
distracted by light, and brown hair, and speech,
armed with velvets and nails and his changeling pride—seeking
some end to the tale of the unproduced screenplay.
Well—he hoped—these huzzahs signify life.

Here’s an interesting development in the world of Debord and plagiarism… I’ve just downloaded the beta version of the game. The story is from Rhizome — here’s the rest.

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.”

So wrote Guy Debord, prominent member of the Situationist International and major instigator of the infamous Paris uprisings of May ‘68. In his most famous text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord articulates the belief that free trade of thoughts and ideas is not only acceptable, but necessary for the intellectual advancement of culture. He did not simply advocate plagiarism as a means of reference, but as an active way to critically engage and subvert dominant media images — what he and his fellow Situationists referred to as ‘détournement.’ Put simply, détournement is the appropriation of these prevailing images for meanings in opposition to their original intent — a strategy that has influenced generations of activists, academics, and artists. So when the estate of Guy Debord recently sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to a group of American artists for copyright infringement, people familiar with Debord’s oeuvre were rightly shocked. Beyond the obvious irony of the situation, this particular case has raised questions about the complexities of copyright, monetary compensation and the historical legacy of our anti-establishment icons.

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted from June 1 to September 30, 2008. Up to three works per author will be considered; previously published works will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection is a biannual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. Volume 1, presently available both online (http://collection.eliterature.org) and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, has been used in dozens of courses at universities in the United States and internationally, and has been widely reviewed in the United States and Europe. It is also available as a CD-ROM insert with N. Katherine Hayles’ full-length study, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Volume 2, comprising approximately 50 works, will likewise be available online, and as a cross-platform DVD in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection are offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the second volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2009, is Laura Borràs Castanyer, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley and Brian Kim Stefans. This collective will review the submitted work and select pieces for the Collection.

Literary quality will be the chief criterion for selection of works. Other aspects considered will include innovative use of electronic techniques, quality and navigability of interface, and adequate representation of the diverse forms of electronic literature in the collection as a whole. For volume 2, we are considering works of electronic literature in video.

Works submitted should function on both Macintosh OS X (10.5) and Windows Vista. Works should function without requiring users to purchase or install additional software. Submissions may require software that is typically pre-installed on contemporary computers, such as a web browser, and are allowed to use the current versions of the most common plugins.

To have a work considered, all the authors of the work must agree that if their work is published in the Collection, they will license it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License, which will permit others to copy and freely redistribute the work, provided the work is attributed to its authors, that it is redistributed non-commercially, and that it is not used in the creation of derivative works. No other limitation is made regarding the author’s use of any work submitted or accepted.

To submit a work, prepare a plain text file with the following information:
• The title of the work.
• The names and email addresses of all authors and contributors of the work.
• The URL where you are going to make your .zip file available for us to download. The editorial collective will not publish the address of this file.
• A short description of the work — less than 200 words in length.
• Any instructions required to operate the work.
• The date the work was first distributed or published, or “unpublished” if it has not yet been made available to the public.

Prepare a .zip archive including the work in its entirety. Include the text file at the top level of this archive, and name it “submisson.txt”.

Upload the .zip file to a web server so that it is available at the specified location. Place all of the text in the “submisson.txt” file in the body of an email and send it to elc2.elo@gmail.com with the name of the piece being submitted included in the subject line.

The Electronic Literature Collection is supported by institutional partners including: Brown University, Literary Arts Program; Center for Program in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; Duke University, Program in Literature; Hermeneia at the Open University of Catalonia; Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; nt2; Pomona College, Media Studies Program; UCSB, Department of English; University of Bergen, Department of Literary, Linguistic, and Aesthetic Studies, Program in Digital Culture; University of Dundee, School of Humanities.

Institutional sponsorship opportunities are still available. If your organization or academic department is interested in more information, please contact helen DeVinney, Managing Director of the ELO, at hdevinney@gmail.com.

Here’s the little poster I designed for the premiere of Themes Out of School at Stockton College (see below for links to the online version). Click to enlarge.

I’m happy to announce that two Stockton efforts from the Spring 2008 semester are finally online. Check them out, and send to friends!

“Themes Out of School”

Themes Out of School (part 1 of 5) from Brian Stefans on Vimeo.

A 45-minute featurette made by the students of the Indie Films and Filmmakers class of Stockton College, Spring 2008.

Five short interlinked movies that follow the lives of students in the South Jersey area, ranging from “Clerks”-style slacker humor to deeper, quieter meditations on youth identity — and a lot of beyond and in-between!

Directors include Patrick Dawson, Kelly Cochran, Jakob Strunk, Sarah Hinkle and Brian Blazak. There is a cast of millions, notably Clarence Pugh, Maryellen Dierkes, Garrett Stites, Jackie Dunay, Meredith Malloy, Scott Staglias, Michael Clark, Brian Sullivan, Brittany Caserta, Brittany Tenpenny, Derek Forrest, Keri Tinagero, Anthony Mauriello, Pamela Staszczak, Geoff Kuinmir, Donald Blair and Sean Herman. Also starring Nathan Long as the Nutty Professor.

It’s on Youtube, but also on Vimeo, which has MUCH better video quality:

Youtube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ep9yeu7kVrA

Vimeo:
http://www.vimeo.com/1055132

“The I-wing Nomad (A Musical)”

The I-wing Nomad is a collaborative musical that takes place in the G-wing cafeteria at Stockton College. It relates the story of Alex, a student who spent an entire semester living in the rafters of I-wing (based on a true story) and the dogged pursuit of two nosey Argo reporters to find out who he is (not based on a true story). A staged reading of the play occured May 2nd, 2008, in the G-wing cafeteria from 2 to 2:30 while it was still open.

The play is a sort of rondo, with four sets of actors playing four versions of the same characters, a form inspired by the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, Jeffrey Jones and David Ives. And there are songs — inspired by Willy Wonka, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Don Felder, and David Bowie!

Authors include Joshua Baechle, A J Colubiale, Cathleen Dower, Maureen Egan, William English, Rachael Finley, Kristy King, Christopher Kocher, Angela Kramer, Sarah Lyman, Timothy Merle, Molly Minehan, Marilyn Mitchell, Scott Oliver, Preston Porter, Jessica Schlueter, Zack Scott-Sedley, and Stephen Voloshin. Brian Kim Stefans and Rachael Finley did the final edits.

Any visual glitches are due to errors on the cheap video tape we used during filming.

Youtube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bFd7Z1SJm3g

You can read the play here:
http://overdrive.thefhiz.com/play.htm

New—like a baby howling “kill the fucker”
from its iron crib—new
like episodes of your daily blood coursing
transmitted to every computer
day and night—
new—like a toothbrush,
bristles standing straight—
what is it that makes all of these things the same?
They have something to do with “new.”

In one sitting, she could master the controls,
and with that, caromed
off into the simulated NYC skyline on her screen
(HUD off, she was flying with no HUD)
and she was excited.
—It was better than glass blowing!
which she had just failed out of in night school
(partly due to scheduling problems,
but it’s also known that she didn’t get along with the teacher).

So we get this straight, also—
nothing gets “old” in the virtual.
Every word—you turn it over like a cube
in a syntax mesh—like a polygon in Lara Croft’s buttocks—
never failing, and it never fails
to ignite. Thus, your negotiations
revive, cyclical—like T.S. Eliot meant with the term “juvescence”
—not so hotly as to feel religious, only
sacrilegious, as it sabotages our inevitable meat.

This voice—in all the anthologies
takes as its subject the old anthologies;
we are admiring time, here

on a still lake, waiting for the boy
to drop his tonsils into the glassy waters:
ritual. But he puts it all together

so nicely, with a modish, antic turn
at the end; he moves forward
with us, into the unclearness

that is black and always novel.

A crowd might want circumstances
more immediate, some play
of forces like beasts, phallic, unthinking

faces in the bright confusion—
animals can lead us to the sock
that gives some shape to the tick-tock

travesty of story time. But that’s easy.
What’s difficult is the waiting
for the boy to assay one more twist

in his effort at soft control.

But I have a complaint: it’s just show,
even highbrow, clearly inept,
this waiting for modest immersions—

like a gastrotrich clamoring for “sleep”
despite a span of minutes-for-life,
and its lack of a lifetime for dreaming it. I

mean: stone could manage speech,
but one hrumpf! sound a week? This boy
is funny, so I just don’t mind,

but I trust the untenables of instinct.

My latest little project has been creating an all around arts site for Richard Stockton College where I’m teaching. The site is called Richard Stockton Overdrive (a name inspired by Bachmann Turner Overdrive, of course). It’s for “official and unofficial” creativity, meaning that I want students to give me stuff from their classes but also their own private ventures, much of which seems much more interesting to me than class work.

It’s not “launched” yet — the content on the site is either bogus, stuff I ripped from the web, etc. I plugged it all in just for design’s sake. The image in the upper right will change with each issue — perhaps the entire color scheme will change — and the categories that I have are just the first group I could think of. They will also alternate depending on content.

But one rule will remain constant, which is that I just want one of each thing for each issue. This keeps the size down, so people know they can more or less get through an issue in less than an hour. Too many webzines overload their contents, and so what happens (in my mind) is that I peruse a few things and maybe bookmark it, but don’t visit it again until I get the announcement for the next issue.

There’s some trash aesthetic going on here — I wanted it to have some underground feel to it — but has some elegant touches, to make it professional-looking.

Please join Les Figues Press and editors Christine Wertheim & Matias Viegener, to celebrate The noulipian Analects, an alphabetical survey of constrained writing by some of today’s most innovative writers.

Hosted by: Robert Fitterman

With readings by contributors: Christian Bök, Vanessa Place, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, and Christine Wertheim

Thursday, January 31, 2008
7:00 p.m.
The Mercantile Library Center for Fiction
17 East 47th Street
New York, NY 10017

For more info see:
http://www.lesfigues.com
http://www.mercantilelibrary.org/events/readings.php

About the book, in the words of Charles Bernstein
[The noulipian Analects is] An Alpha Bestiary of Exogenously Exotic Essays and Dazzlingly Delectable Design, Complexly Charismatic Constraints and Occasional Oulipian Outrages, Thoughtful Theoretical Threads and Ludicrously Ludic Limits, Gutsy Gender Gaiety and Dantesque destinies Detourned, Quixotic Queneau Quests and Cocky Combinatorial Collisions, Real Rubber Roses & Radiantly Removed R’s…What We Wanton Woeful Whimsical Wanderers Willingly Want.

About the People Performing

Robert Fitterman is the author of 9 books of poetry; 3 of which constitute his ongoing poem Metropolis. Metropolis 1-15 was awarded the Sun & Moon New American Poetry Award (1997), and Metropolis 16-29 (Coach House Books, 2002) received the Small Press Traffic Book of the Year Award in 2003. A new collection of various writings, rob the plagiarist, is forthcoming in Fall 2008 (Roof Books). Fitterman is on the writing faculty at NYU and at Bard College. He lives in New York City with his wife, poet Kim Rosenfield and their daughter Coco.

Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at the University of Calgary.

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and a co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of Dies: A Sentence, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novel, and a chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise. Her nonfiction book The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality is forthcoming from Other Press; her novel La Medusa will be published in Fall 2008 from Fiction Collective 2.

Brian Kim Stefans is the author of Free Space Comix (Roof Books, 1998), Gulf (Object Editions, 1998, downloadable at ubu.com), Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos Books, 2000) and What Does It Matter? (Barque Press, 2003). Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (Atelos Press), a collection of essays, poetry and interviews, appeared in 2003. His newest books are What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), collecting over six years of poetry, and Before Starting Over (Reconstruction S.) (Salt Publishing, 2006). He is the editor of the /ubu (”slash ubu”) series of e-books at www.ubu.com/ubu and the creator of arras.net, devoted to new media poetry and poetics.

Rodrigo Toscano latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater, which was a National Poetry Series 2007 selection. Toscano’s experimental poetics plays, body movement poems, polyvocalic pieces have recently been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (Alexandria, Virginia). Toscano is originally from the Borderlands of California. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Matias Viegener is a professor at the California Institute for the Arts, and a member of the art collective Fallen Fruit. His criticism appears in the collections Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media (Routledge), and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style (U Mass). He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles’ The Trial of Gilles de Rais. He has published in Bomb, Artforum, Artweek, Afterimage, Cargo, Critical Quarterly, Framework, Oversight, American Book Review, Fiction International, Paragraph, Semiotext(e), Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents and X-tra.

Christine Wertheim is a former painter with a PhD in literature and semiotics from Middlesex University, (UK). She teaches at the California Institute for the Arts and co-organizes an annual conference: Séance (2004), Noulipo (2005), Impunities (2006), Feminaissance (2007), ArtText (2008). Her writings on aesthetics include essays in Art History vs Aesthetics, Xtra and Open Letter. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, including La Petite Zine and Five Fingers Review, and her book of poetics +|’me’S-pace is published by Les Figues Press, 2007.