In a blending of exhibitions and education, 4833 serves as a gathering place, resource archive, and program space at the new Hyde Park Art Center. This 1,600 square foot resource center embodies the Hyde Park Art Center’s vision for itself as a place that not only exhibits and teaches art, but stimulates creativity at all levels. 4833 builds on our history of collaborations with cultural institutions to facilitate creative interactions between students, artists, educators, and people from across the city.
Sometimes when you find yourself roaming through unfamiliar territories, you have to ask yourself, “How did I get here?” As I sat in studio 3 of the Hyde Park Art Center pulling giant staples out of an old wooden silk screen frame with a flat head screw driver and a pair of needle nosed pliers, I asked myself that very question. How did I get here? And the only reply I could offer myself was the Art of Poetic Skin.
I arrived in Hyde Park on a surprisingly warm September day in 2007. Coming from New York City, where I was born and raised, Chicago seemed to have a small-town vibe and Hyde Park seemed to be a sleepy little neighborhood where I would embark on a 4-year-long journey through college. At first, I was concerned that living in a small and cozy neighborhood would come at the cost of urban luxuries, like public transportation, late night dining and most importantly, access to art. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that Hyde Park had all of that and more and about 10 weeks in to my time living in Chicago, I found myself enrolled in a ceramics class at the Hyde Park Art Center.
We returned this weekend from performing a work in progress of The Precession in Providence and went straight back into our studio. We are now working towards two open studio showings scheduled for Friday June 18th and Saturday June 19th from 2 - 4 p.m The two open studio times will be an opportunity to open up our process to the HPAC community and to show what we have been working on these past few months in our space. The two open studio times are also a culmination of the first part of our two part residency we have at HPAC. We will return to the studio again starting September 1st.
This past week we (Judd & Mark) were away from our HPAC studio performing in Providence, RI as part of ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate, a conference and arts program addressing digital literary practice. The 4-day event, hosted by the Brown University Literary Arts program, included scholarly discourse on the state of electronic literature along with performances of screen-based poetry, narrative and other textual forms that make use of new media or computer code.
Part One:The Living Newspapers
From June 1st - 27th we have an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago.
This past Friday, Saturday and Sunday we have trained 33 performers to be part of this exhibition. The exhibition takes place daily Tuesday - Sunday. There are two shifts that take place daily. Each shift last for 2 and a half hours. Each shift has two performers. The performers are listening to a text to speech program via ipods that are connected to a wireless network. We workshoped the performers to speak the texts that are coming from their ipods aloud. The are having dialogues with each other through the ipod touches. Judd built a program that mines twitter texts that people have wrote. The performers then speak these texts aloud. In a database the twitter texts in real-time are structured as such that the performers enact scenes within the museum. The scenes are texts minded from twitters wrote in a mile radius of the museum, what people are ‘concerned’ about, the trends of the day - during rehearsal we learned of the deaths of Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper. Other scenes are also actual archival Living Newspapers - from where we take the name. The Living Newspapers were actual plays that were produced during the last great depression putting writers and actors to work and were generally plays of the current times. Our exhibition is a re-enactment and re-imagining of A Living Newspaper of today. We each now in some respects have our own News Feed through our interactions with social media networks. The other part of the exhibition is the performers embodying the Winged Figures of the Republic. The twin figures that sit at the top of the Hoover Dam - we invited our artist friend Claire Ashley to make us wings that we could travel with, could be light and not take up too much room. Claire wonderfully designed her version of the wings as 15 feet high inflatables, inflated by a fan inserted into a backpack. We taught each performer a small choreography that also includes the inflating and deflating of the wings as part of the choreography. We enjoyed teaching / training the performers for the exhibit this past weekend. One of the favorite activities is seeing people laying down on the wings to deflate them and to let the air out. Part performance, part absurd, part ceremonial, part performing procedure. Please see rehearsal photos.
Part Two: Winged Figures of the Republic
At Hyde Park this week we wanted to begin to work with two other performers and young artists that we have approached to collaborate with us on The Precession. André and Evan Lenox are two twin brothers. They make work in performance and new media. We had been working with them during the fall last year on this project and we approached them again last month to work with us on the exhibition. With our initial research trip to the Hoover Dam on the Nevada/ Arizona border we were taken by the monument of the Winged Figures of the Republic. The Two Winged figures sit on top of a celestial map of the night sky on September 30th 1935 at 8.58 p.m. - the time that FDR dedicated the dam. On that night 209 stars were visible to the naked eye and the two winged figures sit on top of this specific sky.
In the studio we asked André and Evan to come up with 3 still movements in relationship to the mic stand and microphone. At the still moments they will be saying text aloud that we will insert. We also asked them to respond to few lines of text written by the poet Emily Dickinson. Earlier in the week we had been sent an essay by our artist friend in the UK, Kira O’ Reilly. A Dim Capacity for Wings: Angels, Flies and the Material Imagination can be seen here .
The lines of text that we asked André and Evan to respond to are here:
My cocoon tightens - Colors tease,
I’m feeling for the Air -
A dim capacity for Wings
Demeans the Dress I wear.
We are also including two images in this blog post of the material that they produced in the studio. We will be working with André and Evan in the studio every Monday and Wednesday.
We have also been in dialogue with Daniele Wilmouth to ask her interest in recording green screen footage of the work we have been developing post exit out of the studio in the first week of July. We intend of layering the material we have been producing physically in space on top of the textual work that Judd has been programming. mining and generating.
Away in Providence:
From Wednesday June 2nd to Sunday June 6th we will be attending the Electronic Literature Organization Conference at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island. The title of the conference is Archive and Innovate. We will be presenting a Work in Progress of The Precession. Judd will also be speaking on a panel as well as performing a new work he has been developing in response to the writer and his mentor whilst he was studying for his masters at Brown, Robert Coover. Link for the event here: http://www.brown.edu/Conference/Electronic_Literature_Organization/conference.php
We have divided the studio into segments corresponding to the windows of the HPAC facade and are creating a movement sequence that could either be performed live on the catwalk or displayed as video sequences in the screens. We are working from sources that emphasize labor, occupation, physicality. Books scattered on the floor include images by Eadweard Muybridge, Michael Borremans, Iring Penn and posters from the WPA federally-funded art program of the 1930’s. Tonight we are meeting with young artists André and Evan Lenox who will be resume their roles as the twin Winged Figures of the Republic in some of our planned future events.
We are about to begin translating the current digital material for initial viewing on the facade. This is a formidable task as it involves creating a web page on the scale of a building. We decided early on that the facade would not be video but a work of internet art simultaneously accessible online. This involves treating the site as a vast navigable panoramic space something like a Google map where, for example, new terrain dynamically appears as you pull the landscape towards yourself. This will take consideration and time. And the HPAC system has a very unique setup and we must work within the constraints of how it displays imagery across machines and projectors.
We are also planning for two imminent events: a re-mounting of The Living Newspapers at the MCA launching June 1 and a performance at Brown University as part of the Electronic Literature Organization annual conference and digital arts event (June 3-6). In addition to a performance of The Precession, we are also creating a new work in honor of Robert Coover. Coover is a prominent writer of fiction and was Judd’s mentor as an MFA student at Brown. The entire event is in part recognition of Coover’s legacy and his innovative approach to bringing electronic media into the practice and discourse of contemporary literature. The Coover-specific intervention involves a live and screen-based retelling of Coover’s renowned re-invention of the Pinnochio story in his novel Pinnochio in Venice. The performance combines written responses to Coover’s work with material mined and composed algorithmically from Coover’s manuscript. Judd’s father, Thomas J. Morrissey, will also participate in the performance. Tom is, among other things, a scholar of children’s literature who is an expert on Pinnochio having written extensively both critical essays and children’s plays from the Pinnochio cultural corpus. The piece, tentatively called RC_AI approaches themes of father-son/ master-apprentice relationships, and the myth of the inanimate coming to life (puppet, monster, golem, artificial intelligence). This may seem like a tangent but there is a connection with our overall Precession project — Pinocchio was one of the productions funded by the WPA theater program (that also funded many Living Newspapers) and when the Federal Theater Program was discontinued in 1939, Pinnochio’s “corpse” was paraded through the streets in a small box.
On Tuesday we are meeting Fred Sasaki from the Poetry Foundation to consider our involvement in the Printer’s Ball summer festivities with its theme of print <3s digital. On Wednesday, Mark will also be part of Power Tools 5 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he will be on a panel called Artists Take Charge.
E-literature conference:
http://ai.eliterature.org/
Electronic Literature Organization:
http://www.eliterature.org/
Info on The Living Newspapers:
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=240
Here are some notes from the studio:
BREAKING DOWN THE SEQUENCE
In the studio this week we have been breaking down the idea of the Muybridge sequence further. We have given ourselves 10 instructions for constructing a 10 minute sequence that is part choreographic and part performative. We are working with a constraint of 10 screens/10 minutes of time and we have marked this spatially on the floor and also the wall. Currently there are 8 gridded squares marked out by blue tape. In the squares are sheets of paper with an instruction to respond to with movement. Some of these instructions came from a previous residency where we asked people in our community to send us directives / instructions via their twitter accounts. We have so far developed 6 minutes of material from this exercise. Minute one is an announcement of a piece of text from the working diary of John Steinbeck, who wrote many depression-era books including the Grapes of Wrath. Minutes 2 - 5 are then specific generated movements and texts. Here are some examples:
1. Pathways of rubble, rocks: maneuver
2. And the poet thought that the power of language to shape the world was fireproof
3. The Astrologer smoked a cigarette and wore a grey T
4. Coalman, grocery boy, carpenter, shoemaker
A Chicago Fireman’s T shirt is worn, his body is placed against a wall and he makes a prediction. A feather falls from the sky and a man smells smoke on this hands. Someone picks up a child’s telescope and walking along a semicircular motion he punctures the wall at the half way mark, then putting the telescope to his nose, he rotates to face the opposite wall.
We want this week to complete the second half, or a further 6 minutes of material from the directives, so that we will have another 12 minutes of material to look over. We repeat, practice and rehearse the material over and over again as a way of understanding the sources and materials we are examining. Hopefully this allows us then to understand what it is we are making and building and also to get a clearer sense of the elements coming together and also to figure out timing, interruption, and editing.
IMAGES FROM THE STUDIO
