TPRI convened two panels at &Now 2019 (A Festival of Innovative Writing): Points of Convergence held September 19-22 at University of Washington, Bothell:
Toward Topological Poetics: Media, Materiality, and the Impossibility of a Desaturated Media Environment. Panelists: Brent Cox, Simon Eales, Travis Sharpe, Amanda Hurtado, and Blair Johnson.
Ask Not What Poetry Can Do For Video But What Video Can Do For Poetry. Panelists: Courtlin Byrd, Zak Byrd, Brent Cox, Corbin Louis, and Madison McCartha.
Abstracts:
Toward Topological Poetics: To say we live in media-saturated times would be an understatement, but it would also be a mistake to think it “more mediated” than others. What would a world desaturated of mediation look like? Impossible. Rather than lament our media-saturation, poetics can interrogate the way communications travel through an always-already media-saturated world of substances. Poets don’t just write language, they build mediated infrastructures of possible communications, or impossible communications, that re-render Language’s conditions of possibility: the substance we live in and are surrounded by and are. This panel suggests media and language as co-constitutive of a topological poetics: a poetics that refuses distance in favor of an immanent critical examination of the language, poetry, and media our bodies, and our poems, are made of.
This panel will include Amanda Hurtado presenting S ACE P, demonstrating that Clark Coolidge’s SPACE is based on a carefully regulated inscriptive network at the intersection of the disciplined body and a specific technology (the IBM composer), revealing otherwise hidden aspects of Coolidge’s compositional process. In an effort to disenchant the magic of twitterbots, Blair Johnson will examine the ramifications of technoanimism and the history of technological enchantment through a reading of two twitterbots: the lively and popular @LostTesla and Nick Montfort’s @one_algorithm. Brent Cox will present the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI), a poetics “think-tank” that is a creative-critical interrogation of the “becoming-institutional” of poetry, poetics, art, and, in an epoch living under the cosmos of management and financial culture, increasingly all things. Simon Eales will present findings from this year’s Ecopoetry Workshop in Val Taleggio, Italy. And Travis Sharp will present a critique of poetics of alternative materialities, including biopoetics and digital poetry, which too often offer a liberatory aesthetics of substrative distension while remaining deeply imbricated in colonial and regressive logics.
Ask Not What Poetry Can Do For Video But What Video Can Do For Poetry: This panel proposes an alternative form: the screening. The moving image on a screen has become dominant in our understanding of reading, writing, and being in the world. Along with creative work, this panel proposes a mode of video-criticism and poetic-making that investigates, articulates, and explores the possible affordances of a thinking of poetry through and with video. The panel will consist of introductory remarks by Courtlin Byrd. Then we will have a screening of 4-5 video works that will play continuously, like a cinema-screening, each exploring the potential of video for both making poetry but also for reading poetry. Following the screening we will have a robust Q&A between the artists and audience teasing out the meaning of this convergence.
Courtlin Byrd and Brent Cox will present a collaborative work suggesting video presents unique opportunities for reading documents of poetry. The video will “read” works by Johanna Drucker and Susan Howe, and The Florentine Codex, a 16th-century colonial-imperial ethnographic study of the Nahuatl people made by Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun. Poet and video artist Madison McCartha will present portions of “FREAKOPHONE WORLD,” a series of occult recordings, hauntings, and invocations performing new black diasporic identities in the imperiled globalized society, along with an examination of Jeron Braxton’s animation and a proto-essay on blackness, virtuality, assemblage, mediation and art-making. Zak Byrd will screen “Neighbor,” a survey of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. From general conversations about the issue, the essay focuses in on Anthony Tolliver, an illustrator who has lived on the streets for 35 years. Corbin Louis will screen “Can of Screams,” a pixel-performance, palpitating artwork cross-bred by warping page poem structures with .mpegs, compositing body, video and sound to activate a blast of agony and healing.