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 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

What is a sequence?
In the studio this past week we have begun to look at constructing a sequence of movement that we imagine will be bodies individually placed and spaced across the 10 individual screens on the external facade of HPAC. I imagine this space as a landscape; panorama but also as a continuum: a loop. Each time you get to the end of the line of the screen you have to return and build upon where you first started. We are exploring how do you begin a sequence and how it develops its own language, response and sources to respond to.

Our first post as artists-in-residence will serve as an introduction to the work we are doing in our upstairs studio. We are developing a project called The Precession, a project combining internet art, digital poetry, performance, and installation. This work is being developed specifically for HPAC’s 10-screen digital facade and will launch in December 2010. There will also be performances, workshops, and open-studio events at various times during our stay and exhibition.

The vocabulary of The Precession is closely tied to architecture, physical labor and the night sky. A primary real-world source for the work is a sculpture permanently installed at the Hoover Dam, Oskar JW Hansen’s Winged Figures of the Republic, which depicts two 32-foot tall winged men seated within a complex celestial map. The celestial map was designed by Hansen so that future civilizations and “visiting extraterrestrials” can accurately date the Dam’s construction (much like ancient monuments are often believed to contain astronomical data corresponding to their origins). It also contains a representation of the shifting position of the polestar as viewed from Earth over 26000 years (this changes due to precession, a gradual cyclic shift in the earth’s axis). We are looking at night skies in relation to monument and memorial. One of the goals of our residency is to work with astronomical data to reconstruct the positions of the visible stars over HPAC and use this as a map for nightly arrangements of digital text and image. While examining the Hoover Dam site poetically, the work will also explore depictions of America’s New Deal and depression- era landscape and consider this material in relation to contemporary social, political, and personal realities.

The Precession makes extensive use of social networking technologies to explore the poetics of the individual and collective voice. The textual content of the online work follows a specific formula according to which original writing is mixed in real-time with live data sampled from social networks. Texts are gathered by a computer program using core words in the original writing as searches to find writings to augment or interrupt the piece. A geographical voice is comprised of Twitter texts gleaned from within a 1 mile radius of places where the work is being or has been performed. Finally, an additional algorithmic voice uses the original and foreign texts as a source for machine-composition, using a basic artificial intelligence- type algorithm known as a Markov chain. All of these texts are mixed visually and sonically to form an architectural-poetic landscape.

The different voices of the piece are also dynamically converted from text to speech. This intermixed synthetic voice is represented as architecturally arranged audio files on www.theprecession.org. In live performances, these texts are often received through earphones and spoken.

Another component of our project, The Living Newspapers, has been developed for Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and responds to the Living Newspaper genre of 1930’s theater through the contemporary phenomenon of social networks.

In our residency so far, we have developed a live performance that takes place in conjunction with our digital environment. We recently performed a version of this at post_moot, a poetry and performance event in Ohio. We have additional off-site performances planned this summer in Providence and NYC and will give notice for events at HPAC and elsewhere in Chicago on this blog.

For more information, please see the following links:

http://www.judisdaid.com/precession.php
http://www.mcachicago.org/exhibitions/exh_detail.php?id=240
http://www.chicagodancemakers.org/programs/detail.php?id=63

Artists Anne Hayden Stevens, Derek Haverland, and James Jankowiak bravely agreed to participate in a public critique of their works and works-in-progress.

Lori writes:

“Forget the stereotype of the lone genius artist who toils away in complete isolation in his drafty garret for years only finally to be discovered, exhibited and celebrated. It didn’t work that way a hundred years ago, it doesn’t work that way today, and it’s never going to work that way.

Or does it? Scrap the drama from this romantic cliche and at least one truth emerges: Most artists work in relative solitude, practicing their craft in spare bedrooms, basements and studios with few opportunities to share their art with others.

Sure, some artists exhibit their work in galleries, and some even get a review, and once in a while that review turns out to contain a nugget of insight. But such are the exceptions. Most artists, said local painter Kate Friedman, “hunger for serious dialogue about art.” So she and dozens of others have started participating in a free experimental program taking place every few months at the Hyde Park Art Center called Open Crits…”

You can read the full article here