LAMENT AT COUNTERPATH

My collaborative work with Abraham Avnisan and Judd Morrissey in mixed reality, circling the hellish consequences of pennies-from-heaven modernity, will be installed at Counterpath gallery starting this Saturday evening, for the month of April. Please join us for the opening this Saturday evening!

LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well

Please join us at Counterpath (7935 East 14th Avenue in Denver) on April 6, 2019, at 7pm for an installation and performance by Jennifer Scappettone (poet and interdisciplinary artist/scholar/University of Chicago) and Judd Morrissey (writer, code artist, and performer, Art Institute of Chicago). They will present LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well, 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. Hoisting virtual landscapes and augmented-reality textscapes datamined from boom, strike, and bust in the Upper Midwest’s Copper Country and the Copper Belt of the American West, this installation and coextensive performance project explores the extraction, processing, and harnessing of copper as a conductor for sprawling networks of exploitation and control as well as illumination. It excavates sites, histories, and languages of mining in a poetics of generative telegraphy, geophysical extraction, and the multilingual hauntings of forgotten laborers—proposing a critical archaeology of contemporary network culture in response to the extraordinary material, political, and environmental legacies that make cloud computing possible.

Scappettone and Morrissey will talk through several years of research in archives and in the field, present bits of the libretto, and mutually interview one another about the conceptual implications and collaborative ethics of bridging live, augmented and virtual poetics.

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. Her translations of the polyglot poet and refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix (2012), which won the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Prize; and she curates PennSound Italiana, a section of the audiovisual archive devoted to marginalized and experimental voices in Italian contemporary poetry. In 2009 she editedBelladonna Elders Series #5: Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, which included new poetry by Lyn Hejinian and Etel Adnan in dialogue with her own poetry and critical prose.She has developed interactive and site-specific poetry in collaboration with other artists for performance and installation at locations ranging from the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts (2018), 6018|North for the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2017), WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles (2014), Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome (2011) and, with Kathy Westwater, Fresh Kills Landfill (2010-11). 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. From 2006-2009, he worked with the seminal performance group, Goat Island. In 2012, he co-founded the collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r). The group are currently working in-residence at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. They have created two large-scale projects, The Operature (2014), and Kjell Theøry (2017). Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-R) explores 21st century embodiment through performance, poetics, and emerging technologies. The work mixes the live body with ubiquitous computing through, most notably through an implementation of Augmented Reality (AR) in which virtual content is overlaid onto bodies and spaces. ATOM-r was conceived in the image of early modern anatomical theatres, small amphitheaters built for viewing human autopsies and surgical procedures. The collective uses this architecture symbolically to explore the altered and technologically augmented body, to dissect queer histories, and reveal embodied personal narratives.Judd’s solo and collobarative works have been included in a broad range of festivals, conferences and exhibitions at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Chisenhale Dance Space (London), Venuše ve Švehlovce (Prague), Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires), Zero1 Garage (San Jose), Eyebeam (NYC), Le Cube (Paris), Casa das Caldeiras (Coimbra), Anatomy Theater & Museum (London), Performing House (York), Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Landmark Kunsthalle (Bergen), House of World Cultures (Berlin), Teatre & TD (Zagreb), and the Chicago Cultural Center. 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.