Archive for the ‘NEWS’ Category
News Arrives Overland (that slow)
I have not posted in quite a long time. Time amassed, stagnated, decamped. Given the lag, I’ll drop my formal tone in this blog here and tell it like it is. Here is what I have been up to.
VIDEO: BLACK DIVINE LIGHT: a 3 minute video to be screened in LA in September
ARTICLE: Breaking and Entering/ Touching and Leaving: Perverse Spectatorship in the Bronx forthcoming publication in “Afterall”.
POEM: The Floridian Conditional in “Monsters and Dust” (September).
READING: 16 Strokes, fast and slow. On the Roosevelt Tram (October)
ANHOEK SCHOOL: “The Education of Men and Women”: a new class taught by Rodio Salgada, will begin in January at Industry City in Brooklyn.
ANHOEK SCHOOL II: completed first test class, “Stealing Horses: The Invention of Possession” in Marfa, Texas in June.
IN PROGRESS: “Sweet Cowardice” (experimental documentary on the Patriot Act), “Hi Ana/Hi Hannah” (a salutation, a postcard), “Redford Verb List 2007-2009″ (print), A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb Version 2 (vehicular orchestra and radio play).
NON_PROFESSIONALLY: I have been canoeing (the gowanus canal, the coast of red hook, and soon to governor’s island).
A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb: an experimental radio-play with vehicular orchestra and live chorus
MAY 23rd PERFORMANCE, BROOKLYN, NYC
Writer and Director: Mary Walling Blackburn
Composer and Conductor: Christopher Marianetti
This modern tragedy/live radio play is performed outdoors at dusk and is accompanied by a live chorus and an octophonic vehicular orchestra (the cars are the instruments and all non-human sound derives from them). Sounds arise from three concentric rings consisting of 12 singers, eight cars with eight boom boxes and one FM radio transmitter. Together, these sonic elements and their conflicting narrators, re-imagine the car as something other than bomb or vehicle.
“The night is a book.” –Duras
“There is no explosion like a book.”- Mallarme
A novel in the form of a car bomb.
MORE ABOUT THE TEXT:
Mary Walling Blackburn received ‘google news alerts’ via email regarding recent car bombs. She immediately parsed through these missives, lifted details and incorporated them into a psycho-philosophical investigation of how we surveil and approach car bombs because of the distances between the explosion and the witness/reader.
Given that the development of the car bomb is contingent on its rapid exploitation of new technologies Walling Blackburn makes the production of the work and its dissemination contingent upon recently developed applications that transfer data between cell phone and web, web and bomb. This triangulation of technologies (bomb/web/cell phone) is intended to echo the car bomb’s appetite for and integration of modern innovations. Consequently, Twitter, a micro-blogging application that delivers texts to a user’s cellphone or their Twitter web account, hosts “A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb”. Text: http://twitter.com/howmuchumean2me
MORE ABOUT COMPOSITION
Christopher Marianetti has orchestrated the work in the following manner: the chorus is divided geographically into four sections. Each section is connected (via headphones and a splitter) to an iPOD. Hence, all altos are connected to an alto iPOD, all tenors to a tenor iPOD. The iPods are controlled by the conductor and give audible cues which create (without the use of anything written) an auditory-score by which each person in each section performs his/her part of the piece.
The conductor helps direct the elements of the inner and outer rings, by cuing the choral iPODS and thus the chorus members, and by queuing the car-actors and car-bombers for various cues in moments of transition or action. The conductor is, at the same time, and in the moment of performance, engaged in the composition of the piece as well.
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MARY WALLING BLACKBURN and CHRISTOPHER MARIANETTI created their first vehicular orchestra, “The First Disappointment”, for eight cars and sixteen dancers in North Adams, Massachusetts while Christopher was participating in a composer’s residency at the 2006 Bang on a Can Summer Institute at MASS MOCA and Mary was an artist-in-residence at the Contemporary Arts Center.
“The First Disappointment” was illegally performed in a scrap yard in the dark and was twenty minutes long. The North Adams collaboration included artist Danyel Ferrari.
The Anhoek School
The Anhoek School (www.anhoekschool.org) is an educational experiment. It investigates alternatives to traditional American education at a moment in time when many experimental schools have closed (Black Mountain School and Antioch College) or ceased to develop inventive and/or radical methodologies.
In short, The Anhoek School is an experimental all-women’s (post-undergraduate) school located in Brooklyn, New York. The curriculum is based on cultural production (political, aesthetic, and theoretical). Classes are small (5 to 7 people). Tuition costs are mediated by a barter system; that is students labor for the school in exchange for classes.
Ides of March (my own iron maiden solo)
Here, an update of sorts…
(Including an unintentional reference to Caesar and this )
“A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb” has concluded in its cell/newsfeed/microblogging iteration. The text is now in the process of being adapted into a radio play with vehicular orchestra. The performance will take place in a parkinglot in NYC in May. Please come.
“Sweet Cowardice“, an experimental documentary regarding the Patriot Act, is truly now in its final sound editing phase, thanks to Julia Shirar. Five narrators lend their voices.
“Neutrality: A Soundtrack“, a review of Freudenberger’s prints (Arber & Sons) has been written and edited. Christopher Marianetti is composing a brief soundtrack for the prints that will play on Arber’s site.
The Anhoek School completed its first workshop, “Teachers Fuck Students: Investigating Experimental Pedagogies”. The second workshop, “The Mutinous Classroom” begins April 1.
A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb
“A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb”, is a new work by artist and writer Mary Walling Blackburn. She receives ‘google news alerts’ via email regarding recent car bombs. She immediately parses through these missives, lifts details and incorporates them into a psycho-philosophical investigation of how we surveil and approach car bombs because of the distances between the explosion and the witness/reader.
Given that the development of the car bomb is contingent on its rapid exploitation of new technologies Walling Blackburn makes the production of the work and its dissemination contingent upon recently developed applications that transfer data between cell phone and web, web and bomb. This triangulation of technologies (bomb/web/cell phone) is intended to echo the car bomb’s appetite for and integration of modern innovations. Consequently, Twitter, a micro-blogging application that delivers texts to a user’s cellphone or their Twitter web account, hosts “A Novel in the Form of a Car Bomb”.
Free subscriptions are available at:
Just Shy of Tet
Snuff Architecture, a small concrete work was cast mid-January. It will be included in a book investigating ‘visionary architecture’ that accompanies an installation by Bua/Berkowitz at MassMOCA.
The Demon Seed of John Brown (A New Translation of Children of the Corn) will begin production next week. Angela Perez narrates. At completion, this stripped down version of revolt will be disseminated by roving radio transmitters.
(Library in) The Land of Fuck, a recording of 3 erotic tales, read by myself at age 10, is complete. I will build the library and a radio transmitter will broadcast the tales into the library, that is ‘The Land of Fuck’.
Sweet Cowardice, a radio play with five narrators, is nearly complete. Julia Shirar is mastering the sound in California. A description follows.
Sweet Cowardice, a radio play with five narrators, not only investigates how the purported ‘War on Terror’ continues to expand its field of vision to include environmentalists within the ranks of suspected terrorists but how the totalitarian opportunities insinuated by the act encourage cowardice in the director and those she comes into contact with. Additionally, dreams, collected during the reign of Germany’s Third Reich, are threaded through the play- as they, too reflect, a population’s internal reckoning with their own fear and collusion.
12/22/08
While working with visually-impaired photographers in 2000, I remember that one photographer bitterly noted blind peoples’ lack of access to the likes of Genet or Cooper, or, say, Allison or Acker. The photographer’s frustration made it clear that I should attempt to read, record and disseminate something marginal and sexual. I called the NYC public library’s sector for audio recordings for the blind and was informed that a “selection committee in the Midwest handled all acquisition.” This was despite the fact that recordings were made in NYC as well. I volunteered to provide my own audio editions of my selection, Delta of Venus by Anais Nin, but providing one’s own copies was also against the regulations. I never even mentioned my title or intent to the library; my proposal was simply struck down because all books must be selected via committee. Before understanding this, I had chosen Delta of Venus and planned to dedicate the reading to my mother. All this was because I had secretly found and read Nin’s book lying under my parents’ bed at age ten. Next, there was an unnamed Victorian pornographic novel, then Little Birds and Bukowski’s Women, Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and finally, 9 1/2 Weeks, the S/M novella. By then, I was thirteen years old.
Time passed.
Today, I completed the first installment of “Reading Delta of Venus: Mary (Age 10, Age 36)”.
A girl child narrates three excerpts from Delta of Venus ( from Mathilde, Artists and Models, Marcel). 1 hour and thirty minutes.
The child voice breaks both the intent and content of the original work. What started as a philanthropic act has deconstructed itself. What once may have titillated, now confuses. I have restored my first read.
It will be broadcast via the same radio transmitters we built and broadcast from in the past.
L o g
The forty two prints of the etching, “Night Visitation”, are all in the possession of others. I have posted the snapshots taken by its possessors in the print section of this site. The remaining 13 will be anchored to the outside of buildings in the New York neighborhoods I lived in from 1975-1980. And so, not unlike the title, the prints themselves perform an uncomfortable visitation, an unlikely return.
Over and Out,
MWB
The Head/ Is/ Is Better/ For Using/Than Losing
“The Head/Is/Is Better/For Using/Than Losing”" is on display at Printed Matter (the world’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of publications made by artists) in NYC. It was shown at the artist book show in Marfa, Texas this month and reviewed by Tobin Levy in the local paper; proceeds of sales in Marfa benefit the Marfa Public Library.
A Politic of Tears- Museum of Useless Efforts
Afterall, a journal based in both LA and London, just published (online) a version of “A Politic of Tears: The Museum of Usless Efforts-Marfa, Texas”.
