&NOW 2015: COLLABORATION/DURATION

Judd Morrissey and I will be presenting an evolving collaborative exploration of geospatial situatedness—Exit 43's conceptual "pop-up pastorals" in the context of mixed-reality poetics & ubiquitous data-poisons—at next weekend's &NOW Festival at CalArts, Friday, March 27 at 8 pm. We're honored to be thinking through the challenges of the collaborative process over time alongside the founders of, for example, the Office of Recuperative Strategies (Rachel Levitsky & Christian Hawkey) and the scored poetics of Carla Harryman and Jon Raskin. Collaboration for the Duration aims to explore sites of collaborative making that take place over long periods of time, contrasting such collaborations to the one-time commission or one-off co-creation. We are  specifically interested in the way long term collaborative making offers a cross-directional rewiring of the relationship between labor and everyday life, where durational collaborative making moves beyond a poetics of everyday life (usually a solitary interaction premised or made possible by luxury and class) and opens up a relational space premised on a shared and sustainable commons. We are interested in how on-going collaboration asks those involved to create a community, to show up for each other and create spaces of help and mutual care, and how these spaces make art making in catastrophic times possible and potentially meaningful.  We are especially interested in the ways in which a) collectivity often emerges in response to moments of political struggle and b) collectivity over the long term allows for links of solidarity to exist between past and present sites of rupture or struggle allowing for and maybe arguing for a sustainable art practice that resists social and political givens. All of the panelists are engaged in long-term collaborations, many of which are trans-disciplinary. Hence, we would like the extend the panel conversation out into a performance event, including an Office of Recuperative Strategies play, with poet Carla Harryman performing with musician Jon Raskin, and Keith and Mendi Obadike and Jennifer Scappettone and Judd Morrissey performing from their on-going cross-media sound and installation work. Additionally, we would like to open that performance space up to other collaborators present at &Now.

Here are our collaborative bios:

Rachel Levitsky and Christian Hawkey began their collaboration by creating the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS.net), research-oriented collective dedicated to exploring new tactics to promote the reuse, perversification, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena. OoRS has received commissions and engaged in interventions both national and international, from Brooklyn to Berlin, Amsterdam to Denver, New York to Cambridge. Rachel Levitsky is recently the author of a novel, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013) as well as two other full-length books of poetry, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003) NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009) and a number of chapbooks including Renoemos (Delete, 2010) and Interval (Japan: Mi-Te Press, 2008). She was the founder of the feminist avant-garde network, Belladonna* which has now become Belladonna* Collaborative, and she participates as a member of that shifting field. She teaches in Pratt Institute’s new MFA in Writing. Christian Hawkey is a poet, writer, educator, translator, editor, and activist. He's written/translated/collaborated on numerous books, including Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and Sonne from Ort (Kookbooks, 2013). He translates contemporary German poetry, and with the German poet Uljana Wolf he translates the Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. He designed and directs Pratt Institute's new MFA in Writing.

Jennifer Scappettone and Judd Morrissey. Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist whose works of electronic literature, interdisciplinary performance, and installation have been widely and internationally presented. He is the creator of digital literary works including The Operature (web version in-progress), The Precession: An 80-Foot-Long Internet Art Performance Poem (2009-2011), The Jew's Daughter (Electronic Literature Collection, 2006), My Name is Captain, Captain (Eastgate, 2002), and The Last Performance [dot org] (2009), a collaborative writing, archiving, and text-visualization project for which he was a recipient of the inaugural Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant in 2007. He is the co-founder of the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r) who are in long-term residence at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Chicago. In 2013-14, he was the US Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at University of Bergen, Norway. He's now Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jennifer Scappettone works at the juncture of poetry, translation, pedagogy/research, and the scoring of visual, sonic, and gestural fields. Her books of poetry include From Dame Quickly and Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale. Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-up pastorals, is in progress for Atelos Press, with a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, imminent from Compline. She edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli. Collaborative work includes performances of Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble; digital archaeologies with Judd Morrissey; libretti, scores, and vocal concepts for PARK, directed and choreographed by Kathy Westwater; and sonic documentaries for X Locus, an installation conceived with AGENCY architecture and composer Paul Rudy at the American Academy in Rome. Her critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice was published in Fall 2014.

Carla Harryman and Jon Raskin Carla Harryman, multi-genre and multi-disciplinary writer and Jon Raskin, composer and musician, make works that incorporate music and spoken text-based and scored poetry. Their collaborations range from duets with speaking voice and instruments to larger ensemble performances. They have performed in Detroit at the Susanne Hilbury Gallery,  at the Stone and St. Marks Church in New York, at the Wels Music Festival, Austria, and in many venues in San Francisco, including the Out Sound Music Festival, the Center for New Music, Small Press Traffic, the Poetry Center, and New Langton Arts. In 2012, Raskin collaborated with Harryman on a text/music score, “Occupying Theodore W. Adorno’s Music and New Music, a Reperformance,” which was presented as a keynote lecture at dOCUMENTA 13.  In 2013, Tzadik Records released Open Box, a cd of works performed in a recording studio with the Jon Raskin Quartet and others. Jon Raskin is an award-winning international composer and performer who has made many recordings as a member of Rova Saxophone Quartet and the Jon Raskin Quartet.  Recent CD’s include All at Once with Phillip Greenlief and Frank Gratowsk and Rova Saxophone Quartet and John Zorn: Receiving Surface. He is currently recording The Long Table, a large ensemble piece based on the experience ofdining with friends. Carla Harryman is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of cutting edge books and works for performance that challenge genre categories. Recent books include the prose diptych W--/M--, the collection of experimental and conceptual essays, Adorno’s Noise, and The Wide Road, a picaresque of poetry and prose written with Lyn Hejinian.