Not I

Julianna Barwick

The Botched Transendant

I just finished a wonderful meeting with Ajay and Meg.

Mission? Brainstorm and lay the ground work for our final remix project.

And, I'd say Mission Accomplished.

The plan is to have three pico projectors projecting on three walls and a live sound mix involving a text I will write from found sources layered and mixed with the music of Juliana Barwick.

Each projection will contemplate a different layer of communicative and biological transcendence. On one, a person speaking. A second will display various clips of the fusion of the human with machine on a physical level. The third contemplates this again but on a molecular and binary level.

We're still waiting to hear from one of our other group members so hopefully this will be more filled in and thought out.

Still, I think this is a good base. Now two weeks to really get cracking on it.

word,
derrick.

Blink!

Last week I had the good fortune to be invited to the opening of Blink, the new exhibit at the Denver Art Museum.

This is a beautiful space that the curators have made optimal -though occasionally distracting- use of in order to display digital and electronic video, instillation pieces, neon art, and sculpture dating from the early 90's to 2009.

Some stand outs:

Dan Flavin's neon displays: The one shown was from all the way back in 1992. It provides an ominously fun glow to the space. His work, to me, seems to mock the notion of minimalist sculpture. In that the minimal form of the piece is juxtaposed with the unapologetically loud pinks and greens, reminiscent of early 902 "street ware." This is meant in the best way possible. I loved it.

Olaf Nicolai: More neon! Nommes de Guerres no. 10 and 13 were on display. Nicolai use of neon was blurry, literally. His two pieces -I think because of the feed he was giving them- made them difficult to focus on. While they could be read it felt as though they at the same time could not be. It hurt my eyes. It fit well with the found text he had taken from post 1945 military campaigns.

Mark Wallinger: This was possibly my favorite piece. His work, Angel (1997) is a video he shot in London's Angel Underground Station. He places himself at the bottom of an escalator walking the wrong direction, films himself as a blind man walking backwards. He then speaks backwards text from Genesis. All of this is reversed in editing and played forward. The technique is right out of Twin Peaks, yes, but I like it nonetheless. It ends with rising classical music and Wallinger's character, Blind Faith, ascending the escalator in a climactic manner. Not sure if he meant it this way but I thought it was hysterical.

In more recent times Wallinger has taken on some more serious material. His 2007 exhibit at the Tate in London displays found protest materials from the Iraq war as well as pro-life protests.

I could go on and on and on about more pieces but, in keeping with the theme of the exhibit, I've chosen to be brief.

It's a great exhibit, see it.

A Fluctual Space of Human Rhythms, Menomes, Cosmosis, and Insomnia

Web Spinner

First Piece

Second Piece (To Be Repeated)

Offensive for how pretty it is

Eric Baus

Third Piece (Austin Texas)

Fourth Piece (Horsing Around)

Fifth Piece (cosmic loop)

Cosmic debri, big bang remnants, Pulsar PSR, Vela Pulsar, and the heart beat of the sun.

I Don't Recall How to Delete a Post

So this will remain sparse until that day occurs.

Fake Introductions (Stephani Nola)

During her lifetime, poet Stephani Nola was a respected yet somewhat obscure figure in the world of American literature. Since her death in 1979, however, an abundance of research, criticism and appreciation has emerged surrounding her first publication, “Lunch Poems.”

In comparison to artists of her own time who sought a new environment for creativity as expatriates in Europe, Nola lived a remarkably conventional life. A doctor for more than forty years serving the New Jersey town of Rutherford, she relied on her patients, the America around her, and her own ebullient imagination to create a distinctively American verse.

Nola was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago when she was young, a janitor who had hoped to become a doctor; her mother was a schoolteacher and classically trained pianist. They were supportive of their daughter's passion for reading and writing. Nola was thirteen when her first published poem, "Preface to a 20 Volume Suicide Note," appeared in American Childhood.

According to critic Stephen Burt, “William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Nola how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards.”

Stefanie Nola is a first year poet in the MFA program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied.

Much of what was just said was/is false.

Fake Introductions (Evie McCarthy)

From the time she moved to France in 1903 until her death in a Ford ammunitions factory in Dearborn Michigan in 1946, American writer Evie McCarthy was a central figure in the Parisian art world. An advocate of the avant garde, bringing a refreshing new casualness and spontaneity to poetry.

Critic and friend Igor Stravinsky writes of McCarthy’s work, “God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.”

McCarthy attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. She has since become most known for her strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that has made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to her works.

Her honors include a Writing Fellowship from the California Arts Council and a Translation Fellowship (for her Russian translations) from the National Endowment of the Arts.

Evie McCarthy currently resides in Boulder Colorado, where she is pursuing an MFA from the University of Narapo. It is under that pretense that she joins us here tonight.