Clark Lunberry, "Surface Tension | Writing on Water and Air"
The surfaces upon which we write are often taken for granted, assumed to be sturdy enough to sustain the words upon which they are written. With ink absorbing onto paper, our typed-out letters “saved” upon the computer, we write with the assurance of endurance, with the confidence that when we return to the page, or awaken our sleeping screens, the words will still be there, as if awaiting our eager eyes, as if still living in their visible inscriptions. Though not as sturdy as carving into stone, printing onto paper nonetheless promises a durability that can still easily be mistaken for the nearly eternal, offering the illusion of permanence.
With writing on water and writing on air, however, no such promises can be made, no such illusions entertained. For the surfaces of substances—unlike paper, stone, or screen—are such that a word either floats or sinks, tenuously placed at the mercy of the setting, that temporary site of the writing.
In my &Now 2018 presentation, I will speak about such surface tensions in the writing of a poem and the vulnerabilities arising from a writing on water and air. Following Blanchot’s conviction that “the word is itself no longer anything but the appearance of what has disappeared,” I will speak about my own poetry installations at sites around the world, my own explorations of surface and substance in the writing of a poem through which, as Blanchot describes, “the words…draw light from their dimming, clarity from the dark.”
Davis Schneiderman and Joshua Corey, "The Whole World is Watching: 1968 Chicago, Today"
2018 falls six decades after the start of the 1968 US Presidential campaign that eventually led to the reelection of Richard Nixon. In the intervening months between fall 1967 and the November 1968 election, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy would be assassinated and America would continue experiencing a series of unprecedented cultural changes; anti-war protests would coalesce around the events of the Chicago 1968 Democratic Convention in August 1968—an (dis)alignment of New Left protestors, Yippies, the National Guard, and an aging Mayor Richard J. Daley (already losing his hold upon the Democratic machine)—covered, for Esquire Magazine, by Terry Southern, William S. Burroughs, and Jean Genet. The events culminated in “The Battle of Michigan Avenue” on August 28, 1968 where National Guard troops beat protestors at the corner of Balbo and Michigan, outside the convention hotel, the Conrad Hilton. These images, seen by millions and accompanied by disarray on the convention floor, effectively torpedoed the candidacy of “compromise” Democratic party nominee Hubert Humphrey. This amazing moment of a supremely Chicago political riot, interlaced by writers and artists whose dislocations contributed to the general magnetic forces powering the extraordinary events, is also a surprisingly “Beat” moment. The nexus is coordinated not only by the involvement of Burroughs (and Allen Ginsberg) and Genet, via Esquire, but by the tactics of the Yippies to destabilize the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic political institutions of the period. The values espoused by Abbie Hoffman and co. are highly conversant with Burroughs’ texts such as “Electronic Revolution,” and the events of 1968 clearly marked texts such as The Wild Boys, etc. Accordingly, the Muttering Sickness—a collective of American authors, actors, musicians, and academics—proposes a site-specific response to Chicago 1968 and its larger connection to the Beat legacy. Following performances at the European Beat Studies Association conference in Paris and the Wounded Galaxies Festival at Indiana University, the Muttering Sickness proposes an iteration of thi live reading/sound/image performance that will explore the thematic of Chicago 1968 through an intertextual exploration of Burroughs’ and Genet’s Esquire contributions, footage of the 1968 events, sound collage, and audience participation.
Danielle Vogel, "Archivist of Air: The Earth Archives"
Elements are often considered in their physical forms, rooted within a particular place and time. In Danielle Vogel’s life-long archival project, The Earth Archives, water, earth, air and fire are invisible and set loose in the air as sound, but are, perhaps, no less tangible. An installation composed entirely of voices, The Earth Archives brings together the recorded memories of hundreds of people creating what the artist calls a living, aural archive. Illuminating Vogel’s interest in the art of archiving and the conductive power of language, this archive animates the elements through the acts of languaging, bringing geographies and times into and out of tactility as the voices travel and accumulate. For this panel, Danielle Vogel will play selections from the archive, present a lyric talk about the project and its future, as well as record the voices of those present to add to the ever-growing collection of memories stored in the archive.
