LAMENT COMES TO COPPER COUNTRY

I’m beyond thrilled to be bringing elements of SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED, a telegraphic counter-musical about transnational economies (and tangles of disruptive kinship) of copper extraction, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where a critical mass of the fieldwork and research for the project began. Collaborator Judd Morrissey and I will be visiting Northern Michigan University on Thursday, November 21, for conversations with the community and a performance that will begin at 7:30 pm.

Directions here. Facebook event page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2440031579576964/

Co-sponsored by NMU’s English Department with the Math & Computer Science Department and Extended Learning & Community Engagement Office.

Jen & Judd’s project, based on archival and site-specific research in the Copper Country, LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well, is an interactive augmented and virtual reality installation comprising poetry, documentary video and sound developed in collaboration with artist/technologist Abraham Avnisan and writer/composer Mark Booth.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the juncture of scholarly research, translation, and the literary arts, on the page and off. She is the author of the books Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (2014), From Dame Quickly: Poems (2009), and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (2016). Her most recent publication is SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED: Two Acts (2018), an e-chapbook from The Elephants hailing from a libretto composed for live mixed-reality performance with writer and code artist Judd Morrissey and artist/technologist Abraham Avnisan. Other new work can be found in Asymptote, Boston Review, e-flux, Nuovi argomenti, and in the catalog for the US Pavilion of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Dimensions of Citizenship. She has won fellowships, residencies, and grants from foundations such as the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the Center for Italian Modern Art, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Getty Research Center, and the Huntington Library, and was a 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellow. She is currently Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, and a 2018-19 Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating electronic writing, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. He is the creator of digital literary works including The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem (2011), The Last Performance [dot org] (Electronic Literature Collection Vol.2, 2011), The Jew’s Daughter (Electronic Literature Collection Vol.1, 2006), and My Name is Captain, Captain (Eastgate Systems, 2002). He is a recipient of a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture, and a Mellon Foundation Collaborative Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship. Judd is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art and Technology Studies and Writing. His work has been the subject of numerous critical studies and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, RAINTAXI, and the Iowa Review.