Please refer to the conference schedule for live performance dates and times.
Most of the live performances will be recorded and made immediately available for view on ELMCIP.
VIDEO-GALLERY
Lissa Holloway-Attaway and Jamie Fawcus
PATTER(n)INGS: Apt. 3B: live transmissions from the plague years
Daria Petrova and Co)
freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom
Katie Schaag
The landscape cracks and I sink into a nameless current – What can I salvage? – I imagine you swimming in a clear blue lake – If only I could move past this
Alan Sondheim
Traipse
Cecilia Suhr
Demystifying the Narrative
FEATURED-LIVE-PERFORMANCES
Utterings
Supra Semiotics
Carrie Sijia Wang
The System 2.0
ATOM-r (Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery) in collaboration with Abraham Avnisan
Nocturne in Black & Gold (The Tenders #6)
LIVE-PERFORMANCES
Christopher Boucher
Book Without End
Renee Carmichael
My Feeling of Quantum Scrolling Is...
Yuzhu Chai
Speak, Pen- A (non)-Instructional Performance
Ofri Cnaani
Leaking Lands
Tina Escaja (aka Alm@ Pérez)
Feminist Manifesto in Times of Coronavirus
David Jhave Johnston
De-Platformed Dis-Embodied: 20 years of Glia.ca
Jason Nelson
Secret Lives of Lockdown Objects
Daria Petrova and Co)
freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom
Deena Larsen
Chronic
Sara Raffel
Video Off: Zoom and Pandemic Productivity
Jessica Rodríguez
INVOCACIONES/SUMMONINGS [Wisława Szymborska]
SALYER + SCHAAG
"Perfect Movement Engineering for Better Everyday Zooming," with Kristin S. Wiley and Alfred S. Fox
freedom is freedom is freedom is freedom
— Vsevolod Nekrasov
Many Russian young people feel less free and more adept at getting around legal obstacles.
If there is even the slightest political gesture in the work, artists have to consider whether they are willing to take responsibility for the risks. After all, now you can get a prison sentence even for a simple repost. Artists measure their intentions against the degree of inner freedom.
This performance is dedicated to reflections on the current state of the artist in Russia and his / her inner feeling of lack of freedom and limitations.
The participants of the performance are students of the Laboratory of Media Poetry 101 for teenagers and the youth. The action itself combines walk as a drift and communication at a Telegram Chat.
Screenwriter and performance moderator (Daria Petrova) writes tasks in the chat and predetermines what media should be used to answer this task. As part of the action, being essentially a follower, the artist seeks creative freedom in those given conditions.
One more goal of this performance is to understand the mechanics of the most real media presence - chat. The authors will research all tools for improvisation: location, text in the found poetry genre, noises, photos, stickers, GIFs and so on. Media files become an equal part of the language, full-fledged and very capacious participants in communication. The laws of their use are being formed rapidly, right here and now, before our eyes, under the pads of our fingers.
The participants in the performance will try to find their own laws of artistic communication in chat, try the telegram platform as a creative studio.
Daria Petrova (Russia, Saint Petersburg) is an independent media poet and a 101.Mediapoetry Festival cofounder and curator. She is also an author of the Creative technologies course at the ITMO University. As an artist Petrova is interested in art walks, digital performances and non-digital media. She took part in the Ars Electronica festival (the Instagram Forest Fairytales, 2020), in the Ypoetry – Experimental Poetry Lab, held lectures and performances at the Geek Picknic festival, the Pushkin Laboratories festival, the children’s bureau “Kulturny Kot” (all of the above in Saint Petersburg), the Frankfurt Book Fair (Russian exhibition stand), the Moscow Book Fair, two-day intensive course “Art in the city: the formation of the contemporary cultural landscape” by the Calvert foundation (Russia, Khanty-Mansyisk).
Ah! Sasha is an artist from Saint Petersburg, Russia born in 1994. Ah Sasha works with painting, installation, digital art, drawing and video. She researches concepts of post-irony and post-internet and develops new visual language reflecting issues and values of modern society. Ah Sasha graduated from the Department of Journalism of Saint Petersburg State University and had a Graduate Diploma Fine Art course in Chelsea College of Arts, London. She participated in many exhibitions such as “Off-site” Safehouse Gallery London, “Memento Vivere!” Navicula Artis, “Nudes” NordWest gallery, “edge” festival. Movie “I Like You” directed by Ah Sasha & Anita Kutlinskaya was shown in the program of International film festival Kino der Kunst 2020.
Anita Kutlinskaya (St.Petersburg, b.1994) is a photographer, filmmaker and digital artist. She studied at St.Petersburg State University of cinema and television as a director of photography. She works with film and digital photography, cinematography, video art and digital art. Anita is interested in developing new forms of visual language, researching and reflecting issues and values of modern society. Anita participated in several photography exhibitions in St.Petersburg and Europe such as “Nature Trip” Hannah Gallery Heidelberg and “Nudes” NordWest Gallery. Movie “I Like You” directed by Ah Sasha & Anita Kutlinskaya was shown in the program of International film festival Kino der Kunst 2020.
Cyril Ely is an artist from Saint Petersburg born in 1993. He graduated from Herzen State University and Paideia the school of modern art interpretation. He established his own artistic vocabulary based at the intersection of photography, literature, digital and conceptual art. Ely has exhibited consistently for the past five years both nationally and internationally. His works are also published in various magazines all around the world. NordArt 2019 participant. In collaboration with artist A. Pavlov he produced “edge” art and poetry festival, which became a platform for over sixty authors from twelve countries to present their works. They also conceived several original methods of photography and drawing.
Anatoly Pavlov was born in Saint Petersburg in 1992 where he still lives and works. He qualified as a photographer in the Institute of Cultural Programs and later graduated from the artistic school of Oleg Kaplan and “Paideia” the school of modern art interpretation. His works can be found in private collections and magazines. Participated at “IV Photo-Biennale'' and “Modern Natur Morte '' exhibition arranged by Russian Museum. NordArt 2019 participant. In collaboration with artist C. Ely he produced “edge” art and poetry festival, which became a platform for over sixty authors from twelve countries to present their works. They also conceived several original methods of photography and drawing.
Nastja Korabljova (b. 1996) is an artist, curator, and researcher based in St. Petersburg, Russia. In her artistic and analytic works, Nastja gives particular attention to the philosophy of language and problems of interpersonal communication. Her primary interests include urban art, art activism, and semiotics in culture. Nastja obtained a BA degree in Museum Studies (St. Petersburg State University of Culture, 2019) and a qualification in Translation Studies (the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, 2019). She also studied arts and linguistics at Radboud University (the Netherlands) and Uppsala University (Sweden), and currently is pursuing a MA degree in Curatorial Studies (St. Petersburg State University and Bard College NY).
Leon Strelkov, born in 2002 in Bratsk, is a young poet and photographer. Now he studies bioengineering at ITMO University as a second-year student. Having participated in loads of storytelling competitions, Leon decided to involve new methods of poetry presenting to help people notice the poetic structure of routine life. The main interest at the moment is the development of melodeclamation, as a result of which the audio-album “Неуёмкость” was released in April, 2021.
Alyona Pechnikova was born in 1989 in Penza, Russia. She graduated with honors from Penza State University with a degree in "Higher and Applied Mathematics" in 2006. Since 2007 she lives and works in St. Petersburg. She got Bachelor's degree in the field of "Arts" after graduating from Imperial Academy of Arts.
Alyona makes traditional and contemporary art. She closely works with pictional art, graphics; art installations; video-art and art performance. Alyona is making dramatic art that is more feeling-oriented rather than deductive, it strives to shock; burn and harm. It includes transgressional experience and the delightful sophistication of sin. A prohibition based on an experience of erotic vitality and anxiety that leads towards religious nature of feelings; desire and intense delight. All this together helps to get through the border of objective conciousness and as a result manifest a free artistic act.
Katerina Muravyova was born in the Trans-Baikal Territory in the military town of Chita-46. Now lives and works in St. Petersburg. Media artist, specialist in communicative design. Creative interests from conceptual painting to objects and interactive video/light installations and social projects. She graduated with honors from SPGHPA named after A.L. Shtiglitsa Department "Communicative Design" with a degree in Graphic Design and the Penza Art School K.A. Savitsky, specialty «Teacher-painter."
Katerina Muravyova works with the theme of portrait sketches, compiled on the basis of our taste pref- erences, a new consumer basket, a portrait of time and modernity. The basis of its concepts is the study of the culture of consumption and dependence; thinking about a person's place in the world, about the choices he makes every day, about discounts, about promotion and eternal values. The second topic that is close to the artist is the search for self-identity, a return to the origins, strengthening ties between generations and the creation of symbolic, intangible images of "new reli- giosity" as the ability to see the sacred within itself. By combining natural artifacts and new media, it recreates a micro-world in which the connection of nature and man is captured.
Anastasia Drozd (b.1995) is a young curator and emerging digital artist from St. Petersburg with a background in Linguistics, graduated from Philological faculty and Smolny College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences (St. Petersburg State University). Her spheres of interest include intermediality and integration of text in arts, video and (post)participatory art.
Lissa Holloway-Attaway and Jamie Fawcus
PATTER(n)INGS: Apt. 3B: live transmissions from the plague years
In our performance, we re-create a live version of an interactive web-based audio experience we previously designed to explore being(s) suspended in the emerging “new normal” spaces, patterns and troubled times of 2020 COVID existence: “PATTER(n)INGS: APT 3B.” In our original web-based piece, users/listeners were encouraged to explore the many rooms of a virtual domestic space, that is Apt. 3B, in order to eavesdrop on personal and global responses to pandemics and lockdown scenarios, new and old. With no identifiable graphics, other than a full-screen black square, the eavesdropper-user was asked to wear headphones and could only move a computer mouse blindly across the flat surface of a desk in front of a blackened computer monitor. Hidden sound files moved and shifted and had to be discovered by the eavesdropper-user to participate in the experience. Our aim in the performance is to consider how to re-create this experience in a new kind of live platform.
In both our designs (web-based and live) we incorporate voice narration, psychoacoustic phenomena such as auditory brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and fragmentation/granulation of sound materials that de-centralize and deconstruct the sounding world. The boundaries between music, field recording, sound art, sound assembly and live-ness are blurred, requiring them to be reinterpreted by listeners and performers alike. We draw creative inspiration from personal historical accounts of plague and disease narratives, combined with original texts, recordings and contemporary (2020) news reporting focused on global destruction, recovery, resistance, and homage.
Our live sound spaces, a reflection of our web-based ones, are re-created through two performers, Holloway-Attaway (voice acting/text production) and Fawcus (live electronics and signal processing) and a COVID-compliant interactor moving through the performance space, replaying the role of the eavesdropper. Narrative voice, psychoacoustic sound, and electroacoustic music will be dispersed and digitally re-ordered through patterns and rules evolving simultaneously through the mutual configurations of the performers and from the interactor, who will be cued to respond independently. In this way we hope to move listeners between listening and making states, while exploring cross-references and viral connections across platforms in the plague years.
Lissa Holloway-Attaway (PhD) is an Associate Professor in Media Arts, Aesthetics, and Narration where she teaches in the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde, Sweden. Her research focuses on transdisciplinary and transhistorical media across many genres and forms. Her current research is focused on emergent media (AR/VR/MR), cultural heritage games, and experimental narrative within interactive digital media and art. Her work has been exhibited, performed and published in many International venues and contexts.
Jamie Fawcus (PhD) is a composer, sound designer and performer. His interests centre on the language of physical space in acousmatic art, location-specific performances and sound assembly, archaeoacoustics, and EAM. Jamie is currently Senior Lecturer in electronic music and sound design/production in the Division of Game Development at the University of Skövde, Sweden.
As part of Wordhack 3/18/21 - Thanks to Todd Anderson (and support Wordhack!)
Please note: Starts about 8' 20" in: the rest is preparation.
Sexualities: bodies against bodies, somatic ghosting, interpenetrations
Repetitions, "ownership" of texts, local/non-local
Refugees and collapse as "goods" are piled on/attached to avatars
Broken speech, I can't speak, I want to speak (wanna-speak)
Control and loss of control
Image-imaginary grinding to a halt
Memory machine grinding to a halt
Organisms as streams, control as streams, as streaming
Speech, body, memory, history, as dysfunctional machines:
In-coherency as dysfunctional machines
Who is saying what? Who is saying nothing? Don't get off-track:
There is no track, there is traipse.
Catalyst text:
It all grinds to a halt it all comes to an end. It
grinds to a halt because it can't keep up. The
organism can't keep up. I can't keep up. I'm going to
die while dictating this. I'm not going to survive
this. I'm not going to survive anything. The image is
grinding to a halt. The imaginary is grinding to a
halt. The organism is a stream. The organism control
streams and is streaming. I am a streaming organism I
have no speech. I have nobody. I have no memory. I
have no history. I am a machine. I am flesh and not a
machine. Who is saying that. Who is saying nothing is
anybody saying nothing what is it mean to say. There's
no track there's no track here at all there's no track
to get off of I'm traipsing through the world I'm just
traipsing. Traipsing is all there is. I go backwards
and forwards. I'm an organism I'm a stream. I'm
incoherent. This is incoherent. Who is saying what.
Are you saying anything? Are you saying anything to
me? Don't get off track! Don't get off track! I am in
control. I am control I am in control. I will work out
these I will work out these controls. I am a memory
machine. I am your memory machine. I am a broken
machine. I have speech I Have body I have memory I
have history. I have speech. I Have body. I have
memory. I have history. I am a body against the body I
love you to loot wine my name is Alan dojoji. I love
you Alan David G my name is Julie twine. I am your
somatic Coast. I enter penetrate you I penetrate you
to Route wine. You penetrate me you owned me you owned
me to loot wine. I am local. Space space space space
space. I am local I am not local. I am nothing but
unlocal. I am nothing but I can't speak I want to
speak. I want to speak. I want to speak. I want to
speak. I want to speak. I want to speak. I have no
control. I have no control. I want to speak and I have
no control
Alan Sondheim
is a city-based new media artist, codeworker, writer,
and performer concerned with the phenomeology of the virtual. He
has collaborated with motion capture studios and virtual
environment labs. He has worked at Eyebeam among other venues. His
work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual;
with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed
reality and codework (he wrote a seminal essay on the last). His
writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that
partially appear within and determine the surface. This problematic
style embeds the interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal
systems. The textual body and body of text are deeply entangled. His
current work in text and video is based on concepts of dispersion,
miasma, and violence, as well as the psychogeography of worlds and
their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting"
- the body behind the symbolic body behind the virtual body - and
models of viral dispersion and texts in a series of videos and
essays.
objects? should players be have not contacted? registers wires
have not contacted primordial inert wavelengths. they have not
contacted at. all you have not contacted me and we tried to
direct connect, but never made it. where are you. are you
awake at the moment. why have you not have not contacted me.
restricted: confirm have not contacted confisticated proper-
ties: conflict later. have not been contacted by all; they are
primordial, inert. you have not contacted a station in south
africa very far away from zs6dn. you have not assigned second
third parts half neither chorus nor choir nor anything else.
this is the third time i've have not contacted chat about you.
user: bad # registers wires have not contacted primordial or
inert contact wires: they may be not have been contacted at
all; they are primordial, inert.
no one should have to die in this world nor be contacted:
one is primordial, inert.
Alan Sondheim
is a city-based new media artist, codeworker, writer,
and performer concerned with the phenomeology of the virtual. He
has collaborated with motion capture studios and virtual
environment labs. He has worked at Eyebeam among other venues. His
work is concerned with the inhabitation of the body in the virtual;
with the textuality of the body; with the problematic of mixed
reality and codework (he wrote a seminal essay on the last). His
writing is known for its "somatic grit" and skeletal codes that
partially appear within and determine the surface. This problematic
style embeds the interferences among syntax, semantics, and formal
systems. The textual body and body of text are deeply entangled. His
current work in text and video is based on concepts of dispersion,
miasma, and violence, as well as the psychogeography of worlds and
their modeling. Most recently he has focused on "semantic ghosting"
- the body behind the symbolic body behind the virtual body - and
models of viral dispersion and texts in a series of videos and
essays.
Demystifying the Narrative is an experimental voice improvisation performed on a handmade e-textile interactive instrument. This work is situated at the intersection between sonic art performance and a mixed-media/textile installation combined with a new electronic musical interface. Reflecting on the turbulent and notable year of 2020, this work critically explores the dominant narratives in the cultural and media landscape through an abstract expression of sounds and visual representation via handmade installation. Upon touching each button (made with a ball of steel wool) with a fingertip, it will trigger a pre-recorded audio sound file. While performing on this audio-visual e-textile instrument, my voice is improvised via a looping station. Overall, this work captures the sounds of repetition, repudiation, contradiction, and omission while representing chaos, instability, despair, and unsightly beauty via a large-scale interactive installation. In doing so, it captures various voices that were silenced, heard, repeated, and contradicted as well as a collective and individual outcry.
Cecilia Suhr is an intermedia artist and researcher, multi-instrumentalist (violin/cello/piano/voice), painter, improviser, and author, who is working at the intersection between video, performance art, music performance, and interactive media. Crossing the boundaries between audience and performer, vision and sound, motion and stasis, digital and analog, seen and unseen reality, she is interested in creating meaningful human-centered interactions and experiences to share socially conscious messages and to create embodied experience. Her creative work has been exhibited and performed across the U.S. and overseas in U.K., Australia, Greece, France, Russia, Portugal, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, etc., through galleries, biennials, museums, conferences, and festivals. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Arts, and an affiliate professor of art at Miami University Regionals, OH. She is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation, Digital Media and Learning Research Grant Award (2012).
The landscape cracks and I sink into a nameless current – What can I salvage? – I imagine you swimming in a clear blue lake – If only I could move past this
A lecture on biology and plasticity is disrupted by the unconstrained murmuring of the field beneath. The field enacts only itself, and the landscape is still cracking, even in the midst of all the rampant flowering.
This multimedia lecture performance slowly dissolves into surrealism, challenging expectations of the framework, context, and platform of the academic lecture and its performance of meaning. Subtext inspired by Lisa Robertson's "Face."
Note: This video is an excerpt (9:33) of a full-length (34:30) performance for the camera, which was published in Requited Journal #6 (Chicago, IL), January 2012. A live performance for an audience was also recorded at Requited Issue #6 Release: Sound & Language Performance, at Enemy in Chicago, in December 2011. View the full-length screen performance here, and live performance here.
Katie Schaag is a multimedia artist and writer making work for the page, stage, gallery, screen, and social context. A Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech with an English PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison, she researches plasticity, performativity, digital poetics, queer femme aesthetics, and minoritarian conceptualisms. Her scholarly writing appears in Modern Drama and Performance Research; her public essays appear in Edge Effects and Yes Femmes; her creative writing appears in Imagined Theatres, Datableed, and elsewhere; and she performs and exhibits her artwork in galleries, museums, libraries, and theaters. She is the author of the feminist erasure poetry chapbook The Infinite Woman (Greying Ghost 2021) and the interactive remix/erasure poetry web app The Infinite Woman (Angular 2019), which was selected for ELO's Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 4.
ATOM-r (Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery) in collaboration with Abraham Avnisan
Nocturne in Black & Gold (The Tenders #6)
Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Tenders iteration #5) is a mixed reality performance that engages with the cover song as a means of exploring the ways in which personal and political histories are written, re-written, and written over. The performance juxtaposes a complete 3D reproduction of the bedazzled home of self-taught artist Loy Bowlin, “the original rhinestone cowboy,” a persona fashioned after a popular 1975 Glen Campbell (cover) song, with 3d scans of the former site of Fort Dearborn, an early American garrison out of which the city of Chicago was incorporated. Placing the flamboyant tradition of the rhinestone cowboy in relation to the history of indigenous genocide and expulsion, The Tenders project seeks to invert and queer colonial narratives lodged deep within the American imaginary.
Blending augmented poetics and virtual environments with movement, costuming, and “original” music, Nocturne transforms three networked living spaces into portals of discovery through which viewers experience a layering and collapsing of sites, bodies, architectures and temporalities. The performance exhaustively explores the affordances of Zoom, defamiliarizing the experience of next-generation video conferencing while gesturing towards a future hybrid platform encapsulating live, networked, and site-specific stagings for simultaneously physical and telepresent audiences.
The Tenders project evokes a dazzling camouflage of embodied spaces with a specific attention to the structures of home and fort, imagining their corresponding liminal openings of window and embrasure as deceptively transparent boundaries between discordant lived experiences and historical lineages. Nocturne in Black and Gold is named for an 1875 painting by James McNeill Whistler, a Gilded age artist who was a direct descendent of John Whistler, the army commander who oversaw the building of the first Fort Dearborn in 1807. Later destroyed in an uprising by the occupied Pottawatomi Nation, the fort was memorialized as a symbol of self-defense, providing a cover story for the expulsion of the Pottawatomi from their ancestral lands. Across the river from this monument, a tower displays, in a gaudy shimmering of oversized letters, the name of the 45th US president.
In appropriating the name of a painting that shares a resemblance with the imagery of The Tenders, Nocturne can perhaps be heard as a self-transgressive cover of Whistler’s musical visuality of falling rockets. In this night-song, accompanied by “original” lyrics and guitar, a hallucinatory conjuring of America’s cyclical patterns of wreckage across a non-linear gulf of time attempts to tap into the storming future behind the back of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, their/our wings tangled in the turbulent uncertain progression of a reality that is not another iteration of the past.
ATOM-r: Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery formerly of Goat Island Performance Group co - founded Chicago based ATOM-r (Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality) in 2012. ATOM-r is a provisional collective exploring forensics, anatomy, and 21st century embodiment through performance, language, and emerging technologies. The work is interdisciplinary and evolves through large-scale projects with long durations of research and practice that generate outputs across a range of platforms including Internet art, augmented reality, site specific installation, choreographed movement, books, films and objects. ATOM-r was conceived in response to the historical architecture of early modern anatomical theaters, spaces designed for viewing human dissections and early surgical procedures. This physical and conceptual arrangement is used as a symbol throughout their work to explore histories and experiences of the body, sexuality, and prosthesis.
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating electronic writing, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. He is the creator of digital literary works including The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem (2011), The Last Performance [dot org] (Electronic Literature Collection Vol.2, 2011), The Jew's Daughter (Electronic Literature Collection Vol.1, 2006), and My Name is Captain, Captain (Eastgate Systems, 2002). He is a recipient of a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture, and a Mellon Foundation Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship. Judd is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art and Technology Studies and Writing.
Mark Jeffery (B. 1973 Doveridge, UK) is a Chicago based Performance / Installation Artist, Curator and teacher. He has been making collaborative and non-collaborative performance / installation / internet / screen works and participation based exhibits in numerous spaces and contexts since 1993 including ASU Art Museum, Arizona, Cathedral Quarter Lincoln, UK, Edinburgh College of Art, Inspace, Edinburgh, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Ontological Theatre NYC, Performance Studies #15 Zagreb, Croatia, Interrupt Digital Arts Festival (Brown University), Kunsthalle Museum (Norway), Site Unseen (Chicago Cultural Centre), Nottdance (Nottingham), Taxi Gallery (Cambridge, UK), National Review of Live Art (Glasgow), ICA (London), Arnolfini (Bristol), Firstsite (Colchester), Green Room (Manchester), and Chapter (Cardiff). He was a member of Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 - 2009. Mark is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Performance Department.
Abraham Avnisan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is situated at the intersection of image, text and code. Using a host of emerging technologies including 3D scanning, augmented reality and virtual reality, he creates applications for mobile devices, interactive installations and technologically mediated performances that seek to subvert dominant narratives through embodied encounters with language.
Abraham has presented his work both nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions, biennials and performances include: Inside Practice at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2020), Refiguring the Future at 205 Hudson Gallery in New York, NY (2019); Between Bodies at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington (2018-19); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017); a four-person exhibition at Post-Screen: International Festival of Art, New Media and Cybercultures in Lisbon, Portugal (2016-17); We Have Always Been Digital at The Kitchen in New York, NY (2016); and Electronic Literature in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in Chicago, IL (2014). Abraham is the recipient of a Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship through the Simpson Center for the Humanities, a Digital Studies Fellowship through Rutgers University—Camden, and the Rosen and Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Fellowship for Emerging Artists. He holds an M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College and an M.F.A in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Abraham is an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media & Technology and Journalism & Mass Communication at Kent State University.
From faculty meetings to course lectures and department happy hours, Zoom has allowed scholars to more safely communicate, collaborate, and teach during the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost immediately, the platform became ubiquitous as a substitute for physical workspaces and classrooms. However, as many parents and teachers have attested, bringing the workspace into the home presents complications of its own. Academics with school-age children now have to manage their own meetings and classes along with virtual school appointments, and academics with even younger infants and toddlers find themselves parenting on camera at the most inopportune times. Scheduling anything, at any particular time, becomes a roll of the dice. When agreeing to a meeting, a parent might ask themselves questions like:
· Will my child need to eat at some point during this meeting? Yes. Always Yes.
· Should I schedule a meeting during my baby’s usual naptime? Roughly two percent of the time you will make it through the meeting without a screaming baby in the background.
Of course, the struggle does not stop when we hang up the Zoom call. Writing, research, grading, and course planning are all done while keeping a small, cooped-up, human alive. Digital culture has allowed us to continue our work, and Zoom has allowed us to “perform” that work remotely. This performance will briefly chronicle that struggle.
Sara Raffel is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Central Florida, where her research focuses on storytelling, technical communication, and interactivity. Her published research and digital projects appear in a wide array of publications and conferences, including: Meaningful Play, Visual Ethnography, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, the ACM Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication, The Electronic Literature Organization, and Foundations of Digital Games.
★ FEATURED PERFORMANCE ★
Carrie Sijia Wang
The System 2.0
Set in a futuristic, fictional world, The System presents the process of The Content Generator Qualification Test. The test loops in between three sections: Content Generation, Integration Reinforcement, and Subject Realignment, with each cycle getting progressively more intense than the previous one.
The System 2.0 is the new and improved version of The System, optimized for live streaming platforms.
Carrie Sijia Wang is a New York-based artist working with interactive experience, video, installation, and performance.
She is interested in how systems, rules, and regulations affect cultures, beliefs, and rituals. In her multimedia performance—The System, she created a fake government department that tests candidates’ ability to generate system-compliant content. She is also the creator behind ALEX, a fictional artificial intelligence HR manager that uses gamification as a subtle tool of control in the workplace. The juxtaposition between the real and the fictional, the rational and the absurd is a recurring theme in her work.
Wang holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and an MPS from New York University (2019). She is a 2021 Pioneer Works resident, 2020 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient and 2019-2020 research fellow at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU. She has shown her work with venues including New York Transit Museum, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, A.I.R. Gallery, New York Live Arts, and CultureHub.
"Utterings" is a networked performance and research group whose members gather online on a teleconferencing platform and engage, while blindfolded, in utterings as communication. They create an on the fly “new” language that forwards attention, trust and feeling, above rationality. Put another way, they seek to develop a shared, experiential, supra-semiotic form of communication based on their ongoing performance history with each other.
In "Utterings" communication is not driven by efficacy, nor ruled by code or conventions. The active interlaced communicative structure, mediated by machines, cables and compression algorithms, seeks connection through affection, attention, glitches, delays and even voids.
Utterings is a networked performance and research group, an online “band” composed of Annie Abrahams (FR), Daniel Pinheiro (PT), Constança Carvalho Homem (PT), Curt Cloninger (US), Nerina Cocchi (BE) and Derek Piotr (US).
Since its inception in January 2020 Utterings presented 8 online performances of different durations (20min – 2 hours) in different venues: APO-33, Nantes, FR; the Network Music Festival, UK; STWST48x6 MORE LESS, Linz, AT and on We're All Bats Listening Arts Channel, UK. In 2021 they are invited by We're All Bats to lead three workshops.
Annie Abrahams, artist and performer based in Montpellier France, investigates the possibilities and limits of communication under networked conditions. She is known worldwide for her netart and collective writing experiments and is an internationally regarded pioneer of networked performance art.
Constança Carvalho Homem studied Modern Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. She completed her Masters in Text and Performance Studies with Distinction at King’s College London and RADA. In recent years, she sought the offshoots of a Grotowski-inspired unified stage practice, having trained with Matej Matejka, Thomas Richards/Mario Biagini and Maud Robart. Translator, dramaturg, performer and director, she's also one half of doublebass and voice duo HomemMadeira.
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville (US). His art has been featured in the New York Times and at museums, galleries, and festivals from Korea to Brazil. His fifth book, “Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art,” is forthcoming from Punctum Books as part of Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s 3Ecologies Immediations series.
Nerina Cocchi is an Italian theatre artist and translator based in Brussels, Belgium. A 2019 recipient of Bourse Claude Etienne, a fellowship for emerging Belgian playwrights, she took part in the Arctic Circle Residency and sailed in the Arctic region in 2019. Co-artistic director of inoutput, an international group of artistic creation, she also works as assistant producer for Belgian dance company Dame de Pic/Cie Karine Ponties and is the author of “THE WArDROBE”, an operatic film released in 2020.
Daniel Pinheiro, performer and visual artist based in Porto, Portugal has been developing work in the field of Telematic Art mostly as a resource to discuss and reflect upon the impact of technology on everyday life.
Derek Piotr (b. 1991) is a Poland-born producer and composer based in New England, whose work focuses primarily on the human voice. His work covers genres as diverse as glitch, leftfield pop, chamber, dance, and drone; and is primarily concerned with tenderness, fragility, beauty and brutality.
"Perfect Movement Engineering for Better Everyday Zooming," with Kristin S. Wiley and Alfred S. Fox
Kristin S. Wiley and Alfred S. Fox, CCOs (Chief Corporeal Officials) of Good Movement, Inc., present their latest invention, “Perfect Movement Engineering for Better Everyday Zooming.” This interactive workshop is designed to help you level up your personal performance in our “new normal.” Everyday Zooming affords the ability to view oneself on-screen -- and adjust one's appearance and behavior accordingly -- in work and social environments alike. To help you optimize the effectiveness of your on-screen performances, Wiley & Fox will demo perfect movements and expressions to convey a range of desired tones (attentive, enthusiastic, thoughtful, concerned, etc.), and guide participants in practicing and assessing the degree of accuracy and success of each other’s performances.
SALYER + SCHAAG makes social practice projects, tableau installations, scripts, videos, and intimate, site-specific performance events exploring communication, theatricality, failure, and subjectivity. From durational one-on-one conversations to absurdist personae-driven theatrical events to collective movement scores, over the last nine years they have created relational performance works that playfully navigate the edges and excesses of life and art. They have exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues including Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Stanford University, University of Paris-Sorbonne, Fonderie Darling, University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, Commonwealth Gallery, Madison Public Library, Herron Galleries, and Chazen Museum of Art. Documentation of their performances has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and their plays have been staged at Hemsley Theatre.
Book Without End is a loosely-structured, ever-morphing experimental narrative that is programmed to update itself on a regular basis, years and even decades into the future, and into the past as well. The project fuses traditionally-written vignettes with automated texts and hybrids in order to challenge oft-made assumptions about narrative – those relating to authorial intention and thematic cohesion, for example.
During his performance, Christopher will speak briefly about the project, and read excerpts – from the past, present, and future – that appear in Book Without End.
Christopher Boucher is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (2011), Golden Delicious (2016) and Big Giant Floating Head (2019), all out from Melville House. He’s also the editor of Jonathan Lethem’s nonfiction collection More Alive and Less Lonely: On Books and Writers (Melville House, 2017) and the managing editor of the literary journal Post Road. Chris lives in western Massachusetts and teaches writing and literature at Boston College. In his free time, he plays the five-string banjo.
This story starts with an error. In six short hours in September 2018 a fatal fire brought to an end two centuries’ worth of treasures in Brazil’s national museum. Only a handful of artifacts of the 20 million items that were housed at the museum survived this tremendous disaster. It feels almost unimaginable that so many valuable objects were simply wiped off the earth without leaving any digital trace. One would hope that of contemporary technology would offer its most treasured artifacts a better survival rate than the Library of Alexandria. Among the digital remains is a sporadic collection that formed from users/visitors contributed content that can be found on WikiCommons and includes photos of the collection as reflected by its visitors on their personal visits to the museum. The digital files are accompanied by a full virtual tour, a product of Google Arts & Culture, where one can easily visit the no-longer exist museum. Without a systematic digitization effort at the museum, the fragmented collection that remains represents a challenge to fixed taxonomies and epistemic frameworks, traditionally designed by the state. The digital remains allow us to observe the ways data systems intermingled and refused the canonic institutional order and its indexing system, industry standards, and the forms of governing these orders represent.
Analyzing the digital remains of the Museu Nacional, through this spectral collection, we can get a sense of a collection as it had been viewed, understood, and mediated neither by museum scholars nor through a large-scale, semi-automated digitization system but rather via the eyes of small interest groups or visitors who captured images from the collection that are now stored on their personal devices or their cloud services and shared via their social media. They are a portal to much other data they have been slowly aggregating: other images they saw, texts they read, locations they checked in at, a personal library organized by geolocation or facial recognition software, social networks, and other data points. The lecture-performance uses the hybrid collection, or a digital recollection, to look at ways data systems intermingled and refused the canonic institutional order and its indexing system, industry standards, and the forms of governing these orders represent. The performance takes this saga, that presents a tension between two colonialists, as an invitation to think on the new species of spaces that emerge in this current techno-political environment: where vertical institutional hierarchies and horizontal network entangle in a new political mesh.
Ofri Cnaani is an artist and educator, currently living in London. She works in time-based media, performances, and installations. She is currently a Ph.D. researcher and an associate lecturer at the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Cnaani’s work has appeared at Tate Britain, UK; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; Israel Museum; Amos Rex Museum, Helsink; Kiasma Museum, Helsinki; PS1/MoMA, NYC; BMW Guggenheim Lab, NYC; The Fisher Museum of Art, L.A.; Twister, Network of Lombardy Contemporary Art Museums, Italy; Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; Moscow Biennial; The Kitchen, NYC; Bronx Museum of the Arts, NYC; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Arnolfini Foundation Museum, Bristol; Tel Aviv Museum; Prague Triennial, among others.
Prior to her recent move to London, Cnaani was based in New York City, where she was a faculty at the School of Visual Arts’s Visual and Critical Studies. At SVA she also ran the 'City as Site: Performance + Social interventions' program. In 2016 she co-founded, with Roxana Fabius, the ‘Unforgettables Reading/Working Group’ at A.I.R Gallery, NYC.
A Flash EOL (End-Of-Life) vigil vignette series that focuses on the disembodied body. We are all disembodied now: remotely accessed apparitions. On the platform of the remote performance (is it zoom/discord/twitch/IGLive/VimeoLive for ELO2021?), identity arrives as static icons in a grid. A head shot. A muted audience. A solo as solitude: a radically diminished sense of user interest or engagement.
‘De-Platformed Dis-Embodiment’ will explore life after being de-platformed: experiencing the 2021 closure and erasure of the Flash platform as a form of disembodiment. Additionally, artificial intelligence now shows symptoms of erasing/blurring the author or circumscribing cognitive literature utility. The wetware neural platform of the human brain is engaged in de-platforming itself from the body (the original platform) so it can be digitally stored. This leads toward transcendence as an act of de-platforming.
I will read through 20 years of projects from glia.ca at a rate of about a minute per project, to arrive at 2019-2020 work that involves the erasure of the author by AI. The performance culminates in looking at current work: meditative attempts to move beneath the realm of phenomena into a meditative relationship with a substrate that might in some sense constitute the universal platform.
In short, I cannot exactly say what I will do, but am interested in seeing what emerges.
David Jhave Johnston is a digital-poet writing in emergent domains: AI, 3D, VR, and code. Author of ReRites (Anteism Books, 2019) and Aesthetic Animism (MIT Press, 2016).
Chronic has been a work of mine in the making since 2008, when Marjorie Luesebrink and Stephanie Strickland browbeat me into saying I’d write up my memoirs of the early days of hypertext—which even then were long past and filled with incorrect mythic origins. But I can’t write straight. And this project morphed into Chronic.
Chronic is comprised of 200 handwritten pages, going in different directions and using Rose, a coded language. In Rose, each of the 26 characters in the Roman alphabet has an assigned meaning, and each meaning has assigned symbols to denote a spectrum. A, for example, is a(l)(t)itude—from below, centered, from above. B is courage, and the three ways to write a B signify fear, confidence, or overconfidence. The language is explicated at www.thinkingrose.com.
In 2013 I went to South Africa to record each bit of Chronic—so you can hear me read each piece in a simple straightforward manner (with a few embellishments) or a complex manner (with even more potential embellishments). I have been trying to get this thing programmed ever since. And yes, we still have some major bugs to work out… like.. um… dare I mention… publishing?
For this performance, I will read one page of Chronic –and reminisce about CyberMountain, the Electronic lit conference we had in Colorado in 1999. Depending on how much programming I still need, I will take 30 seconds to beg for help.
Deena Larsen has been a hypertext addict for over three decades now. People like M.D. Coverly and Stephanie Strickland keep pressuring her to tell her tale and the Truth about the Origins of HT/Elit(e)/New Media so she did--only she can not tell it straight. So she created a complex, convoluted mess of Chronic (a work in progress since 2008). Chronic also covers her love and life with MaJe, their only work together: A Modern Moral Fairy Tale. She started the Rose Language as a hidden text in high school.
Speak, Pen is a web-based art tool programmed in JavaScript. It’s a drawing tool that replaces the traditional paintbrush with custom text inputs. Users are free to use text on the canvas to make visual poetries, interactive drawings, and performances, etc. The work explores the materiality of text, and ways in which users experiment with texts beyond their semantic functions. A (non-)Instructional Performance is a live drawing performance combined with vocal narration. Presented as a series of “tutorials”, the performance explores the possibilities of using Speak, Pen while unfolding the theories and story behind its creation.
Created during a radical tool workshop at SFPC, Speak, Pen takes inspiration from other “radical” tools that encourage DIY spirit and playfulness. It is not just a digital drawing tool, but rather, a community that aims to inspire makers to experiment with texts beyond their daily functions. It is something that can be performed, alone, or alongside others. I intend to blur the lines between users and the creators or mediators of a platform. Our community guidelines are based not on rules for how to use the text brush, but examples of how past audiences have experimented with it. The meaning of the works lies not within the interpretation of the texts in the drawings, but the different engagements with the tool within and outside its community.
Graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yuzhu Chai is an artist, creative technologist, and an active member of the creative coding community. Using code to explore the possibilities of poetics via the materiality of text, her work spans visual art, computation, language and storytelling, and education. Her collaborative research project on Digital Narrative, Documents, and Interactive Public History was published via the ICIDS conference.
My work has always seen the overbearing platform and its ecosemantic tension at the centre of finding spaces of critical expression. The covid situation brings me back to these worlds, first populated through personal circumstance and media exploration. The evolution of forms plays structural and organismal games, some making contextual sense, others a kind of mathematical series of the random. What recurrence, adaption, deviance and chaos - what combinatorial forces make certain embodiments more likely.
My performance will consist of coded objects, sounds, animations and interactive triggers I play like an instrument - exploring C# in its nascent phases to becoming a trend, and 3d social space which still lacks one in the flattened pragmatized mainstream while thriving in collective game spaces. where communal platforms like facebook and twitter concentrate a kind of bureaucratic idealism in their document minimalism, the recreational platform (from wow and counterstrike to second life and the sims) concentrate a kind of immersive maximalism (more recently as in overwatch and pubg). Reification and distraction - the two key flavours of capitalist statehood governed through legalist protocols. One I think is a biopolitical endeavour, the memetics of evolution as normalizing tendency. The other a statistical force, unleashing the flexibility of the random for a more cohesive containment (a quality consistent with the laws of war and business).
This history, this personal memory, recurrence within entrepreneurial empire, avatar cry that is also part of the algorithmic plan. These are experiential triggers I think about - environments where affection and construction might meet.
“Feminist Manifesto In Times Of Coronavirus” is a poetic performance urging a feminist move from the toxic masculinist rapaciousness of the Anthropocene to the Gynocene- which will center all bodies that have been devalued.
Tina Escaja (aka Alm@ Pérez) is a destructivist/a cyber-poet@, digital artist and scholar based in Burlington, Vermont. Her creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. She is a member and co-founder, with Laurie Essig, of the absurdist feminist performance group, Feminist Against BS (FABS).
This piece will mix the original voice of Wisława Szymborska (Poland) reading of the poem "Moralitet leśny" with versions in Polish and English read by Victoria Wojciechowska (Canadá), and a Spanish version read by myself. The goal is to make a re-interpretation of the poem through the authors' voice that is expanded through different sound layers moving through a stereophonic space. The poem will be de-constructed and re-constructed through cacophony, juxtaposition, delay, echo, and over-saturation.
INVOCACIONES is a series of performances mixing live coding practices (or code on-the-fly) with electronic literature. The objective of the series is to open for discussion the relevance of the authors within our current construction of identity as women, and how through digital technologies we can have a dialogue with the past.
Jessica A. Rodríguez is a multimedia artist, designer and researcher. She is currently studying a doctorate program in Communications, New Media, & Cultural Studies at McMaster. Her practice and research projects focus on audiovisual practices such as visual music, electronic literature, video experimentation, sound art, visualization/sonification, live coding, among others, collaborating with composers, writers, designers, and other visual artists. She is co-founder of andamio.in, a collaboration platform that uses digital and analogue technologies to explore with text, visuals, and audio. She is also part of RGGTRN, a collective that engages in algorithmic dance music and audiovisual improvisation informed by Latinx experiences.
The metaphors that we use to describe the platforms that we scroll every day are tired and worn out, left to the last scroll that is pushed along by the last ounce of privacy possible that is encouraged with the same dismal energy of zoomed-out, sponsored-in, gesturing hands. The binary no longer provides the answers, the truth is hard to detect, the division between virtual and physical has long been gone, and the list goes on and on and on. Within this wake left behind by the tumultuous 2020 but that in reality started many moons before that, we may have one possible savior left, one that does not require playing the game of one side or the other but that instead moves in that hard-to-put-into-words place of the quantum energy in the middle of it all.
Using speculative equations and experiments of quantum physics, improvised gestures of a scrolling dance, poetic texts that exist somewhere between the formal and the feeling, and my body entangled with the incomputable execution of algorithms, this performance is a speculative, online dance that intimately proposes a quantum methodology for scrolling. The results of the quantum scrolls and algorithms emerge as neologisms that complete the sentence “My Feeling of Quantum Scrolling Is...", creating a generative process for constant improvisation. Instead of trying to solve problems with app-like solutions as bandaids on top, I propose to use the quantum as a possibility for thinking new felt worlds in the repetitive loop of our everyday scrolls.
Renee Carmichael is a researcher, writer, and artist who dwells in the liminal and is inspired by mathematical thinking. She experiments with movement, body, and code, exploring the calculated and the feeling through intimate performances, texts, podcasts, videos, algorithms, and online artworks. The formats of her artworks emerge from the contents themselves; each work is a process that experiments with the how and the why, often bringing together opposing ideas through softness and poetic equations of the everyday boundaries of being a body entangled with digital technologies. Movement for her is like thinking which is like coding which is like writing: they are all processes of understanding the complex world by being in it. She is founder of the project Flee Immediately!, co-founder of the podcast Liminal Bits, and a member of the telematic improvisation collective The Placeholder Group. She is currently a PhD candidate in Comparative Art Theory at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero in Argentina.
