Thanks so much Elizabeth, this is great.
Mairead
On 9/30/05, Elizabeth James <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> As I walked in rather late, Philippe Bootz (France) was saying
> 'Everybody can be a meta-reader, except during reading', and promising
> to show us 'the aesthetics of frustration', if there was time. Bootz's
> theorising is stern stuff. The style of his work we saw later seemed
> different: quite expansive, aesthetic, warm even; some was even comic,
> and part of his own perfomance broke into non-verbal grunting. Gavin
> Stuart (UK) is the new director of trAce, the remarkable online writing
> organization founded by Sue Thomas (www.trace.ntu.ac.uk ), but he was
> talking about the applicability of some of Bakhtin's ideas to digital,
> interactive writing. An idea like 'dialogism' can be completely baggy,
> but if you can keep it sharp I guess it can be used generatively, which
> was Stuart's stated interest, and even to critique and improve the work
> you do. Talan Memmott (US) does theory as clowning, or vice versa.
> Bootz's 'Poetry Without Reading' he raised with a 'Silent Lecture', a
> typically brilliant performance whose apparent shambolic and chaotic
> style contradicted its precise planning (subject to a noisy kitchen
> timer) and the seamless virtuosity of (what I've seen of) Memmott's own
> creative work. Its introduction, typed live, remained projected
> throughout onto a whiteboard, on which Memmott then wrote and drew
> diagrams apparently referring to pages of notes on paper, ('mostly
> crap'), which he tore in pieces and scattered. Boxes of board markers
> were emptied onto the floor, so that he slithered over them, stumbling
> also sometimes across the board's protruding supports. However what
> emerged, albeit quickly occluded again, was sensible: witty and clever,
> and even readable if you followed closely, at least as much so as a
> poem; though I couldn't say whether a logical argument unfolded.
> Towards the end he drew around his own shadow. In the discussion session
> following these presentations, someone expressed surprise at the
> emphasis on the body in performances throughout the conference, which
> occasioned a good deal of response.
>
> Loss Pequen~o Glazier (US) talked about the textual body, its
> architecture, in particular its apertures. The 'smallest details' can
> (should) create meaning in text in whatever medium, but when these
> architectural aspects are not set in stone but programmed to occur ad
> hoc, whether randomly or systematically, the poetics is arguably much
> deepened: you don't see everything at once. What, then constitutes 'the
> work'? etc. ... (There was much more to Loss's paper than this.) Theory
> was implicit in Jean-Pierre Balpe (France)'s presentation, of a dynamic
> work installed in public spaces throughout a French town, on the LED
> billboards used by traffic authorities etc. to communicate with the
> public. A phone line was used to receive commands from the readers, who
> were able to influence the story that was distributed across these
> separate sites. Skirting on public art here would have been a good
> moment to widen the discussion into the political realm -- a paper had
> been proposed by Keston Sutherland which looked likely to suggest that
> interactive aesthetics deludes and diverts the impulse to real activity
> (a doubtless very crude reading of the abstract seems to suggest this);
> unfortunately he wasn't able to attend. Very little (though not nothing)
> has been said about politics so far; underlying issues of importance
> seem rather to be, how digital and networked writing may contribute to
> poetics in general by raising awareness of the mediatedness, unnoticed
> or denied, of all textual production, and what that could lead to; and
> the need for a rhetorical taxonomy of e poetry or new media writing
> generally.
>
> The evening began with a reception in the foyer bar of RADA (the drama
> college), which was very pleasant but I mention it only because
> following hard on our heels there was a Farrago slam poetry event, and
> when it was made clear we should push off, with a MOR 'performance poet'
> having taken to the stage, someone negotiated for justin katko to have a
> spot. He proceeeded to perform a sound reading, which he dedicated to
> Bob Cobbing, of the floor of the room. It was terrific stuff -- for a
> minute I thought there might be a fight, but to give them credit the
> Farrago crew applauded, and then we all trooped back across the road to
> Birkbeck.
>
> Later our evening ended too with sound poetry: first Joerg Piringer
> improvised an accelerated reading with live sampling, of a Flash action
> script manual he'd just bought in nearby Waterstone's, and then Lawrence
> Upton (UK), and justin k again, performed together a new visual text of
> Lawrence's, hissing and growling and twitching around in front of some
> of justin's video. Lovely! At the end, Lawrence was left standing in
> centre stage with NO SIGNAL projected fortuitously across his mouth.
>
> e
> "When I play the pieces that were made ten years ago, they are totally
> different." (Philippe Bootz)
>
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