Esopus Magazine Launch at BRIC Rotunda Gallery Tonight

ESOPUS no. 19 Launch

APRIL 13 : 7-9PM

BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

The latest issue of Esopus launches at BRIC Rotunda Gallery on Thursday, May 2nd, from 7 to 9pm, and hits newsstands the following week. Sporting a new format (including a custom-designed slipcase), and printed with specially formulated inks on 11 different paper stocks, Esopus 19 features artists’ projects by Sharon Core (with removable insert), Joyce Pensato (with removable poster), and John Sparagana (with removable poster); 100 still frames from the opening sequence of David Lynch’s iconic 1986 film Blue Velvet (introduced by acclaimed photographer Gregory Crewdson; fascinating materials—including 8 facsimile inserts—from MoMA’s archives related to late artist Scott Burton’s early performance pieces; 23 never-before-published photographs from 1949 by Magnum photographer Burt Glinn; insightful commentary on artworks from the New Orleans Museum of Art by two of its guards; an excerpt from an extraordinary journal by artist Matt Freedman related to his harrowing experience undergoing cancer treatment; an exquisite found object recovered from a Paris dumpster by artist David Scher; and gripping new fiction by first-time author Chelli Riddiough.

The issue’s themed CD is an audio compilation of brand-new songs inspired by the customer-service travails of Jens Lekman, Dirty Beaches, Richard Swift, Cakes Da Killa, Basia Bulat, Literature, and six other musical acts.  

The issue’s new format is only the latest in an exciting series of changes the Esopus Foundation has undertaken as it enters its 10th year of operation. Last summer, it closed Esopus Space, the performance and exhibition venue in Greenwich Village, in order to be able to focus more fully on producing the magazine. In September, the Foundation relocated its offices to Brooklyn. Because that trip across the river happened to coincide with what would have been the production period for a new issue, the Foundation asked the contemporary artist Robert Gober to create a limited edition in place of the issue. The result, the remarkable Hope Hill Road, was s
ent as a gift to Esopus subscribers in October. The rest of the fall and winter was spent rebuilding the Esopus website from scratch; the redesigned esopusmag.com launched this January.

The Esopus 19 launch party is free and open to the public; directions to BRIC Rotunda Gallery can be found here.

 

Another Pamphlet Launch at Printed Matter Tonight

Another Pamphlet : Issue Launch & Reception

Thursday May 2 : 6-8PM 

Printed Matter, NYC

Symmetry surrounds us. It’s present in ancient Greek mosaics, medieval churches, the human body, the arrangement of atoms in a crystal, flowers, arguments, and the laws of quantum mechanics. Paradoxically, whereas the 20th century saw the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and philosophy expanding their engagement with symmetry, architecture largely turned away from it. 

After a century of asymmetry, what might symmetry offer us now that we’ve missed along the way? This issue claims symmetry as an urgently relevant topic, precisely because it’s so glaringly not a topic in contemporary discourse.

With contributions by: Leo Henke, Isaiah King, Ajay Manthripragada, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Michael Meredith, Ryan Neiheiser, Sarah Oppenheimer Emmanuel Petit, Galia Solomonoff, Giancarlo Valle and Michael Young 

Above all, another pamphlet is a conversation, a loose exchange of forms and ideas, an excuse to play, a frame through which to look, a shared excitement. It is an open dialogue with our friends, our histories, and our surroundings. 

Meaning both “more of the same” and “something different”, “another” contains the seeds of both continuity and change. Another pamphlet mines this contradiction – this tension between past and future – opportunistically interrogating, critiquing, and celebrating the discipline of architecture.

The game is simple. One pamphlet, multiple voices, infinite directions.

another pamphlet was founded by Giancarlo Valle, Isaiah King, and Ryan Neiheiser

www.anotherpamphlet.com

Brooklyn Zine Fest on Sunday

Brooklyn Zine Fest is this Sunday, April 21, 2013 from 11AM to 6PM at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 44 zinesters will be tabling their wares, including highlights FAQNP, Miniature Garden, and NOWORK.

Check out the recent New York Times write up here.

 

The Kitchen presents An Evening with Electronic Literature Organization

 

An Evening with Electronic Literature Organization

Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) presents an evening of multimedia, interactive performative-readings highlighting a broad range of born-digital literary forms, including collaborative, database, film/video, generative, and kinetic image work. The evening’s presentations showcase four projects by media artist and writers Mark Amerika and Yael Kanarek; poet, programmer, and performance artist Ian Hatcher, and experimental novelists Paul La Farge and Illya Szilak.

Presenters: 

Mark Amerika’s latest projects are Museum of Glitch Aesthetics(glitchmuseum.com), Micro-Cinematic Essays on the Life and Work of Marcel Duchamp dba Conceptual Parts, Ink (markamerika.bandcamp.com), andremixthebook (remixthebook.com). 

Ian Hatcher is a poet, programmer, and performance artist living in New York.Prosthesis, an ongoing project, is an expanding suite of code, text, and vocal works exploring feedback loops between human cognition and digital systems. 

Yael Kanarek is a media artist. In her practice she looks at globalization through interaction of languages and the collective experience of standard time. Selected scenes from Object of Desire, an online story inspired by motifs and themes born in the Middle East and Mediterranean, will be performed (worldofawe.net/objectofdesire). 

Paul La Farge is the author of four novels, most recently Luminous Airplanes, which is also a web-based hypertext. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, Fence and elsewhere. 

Illya Szilak uses circulating media and collaborations forged via the Internet to create multimedia novels. She will perform from her latest Queerskins(www.queerskins.com). 

The Electronic Literature Organization was founded in 1999 to foster and promote the reading, writing, teaching, and understanding of literature as it develops and persists in a changing digital environment. A 501c(3) non-profit organization, the ELO includes writers, artists, teachers, scholars, and developers. For more information, go to http://www.eliterature.org

Triple Canopy: Novel Operations at Artists Space Books & Talks

 

Novel Operations

The launch of Corrected Slogans and Invalid Format, with a performance by Jim Fletcher

Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, NY
March 29, 2013
7:00–9:00 p.m., $5 suggested donation

Triple Canopy is pleased to mark the publication of two new books—the second volume of the annual anthology Invalid Format and Corrected Slogans—with a performance by noted actor Jim Fletcher, followed by a reception with the editors and contributors. 

Corrected Slogans is the culmination of the multi-part project Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), which was conceived as Triple Canopy’s contribution to “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The book, which hinges on annotated transcripts of a series of public conversations, represents a collective effort to establish a new critical discourse around conceptual art and poetics. 

Fletcher’s performance will draw upon various literary formats included in Corrected Slogans—transcripts, footnotes, stanzas, dialogue, indexes, and a lexicon—to interpret and amplify the book’s many textual registers, unraveling dialogues and vocalizing word-play with his fellow actors and the audience. 

Corrected Slogans includes work and words by Nora Abrams, Andrea Andersson, Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno,Corina Copp, Michael Corris, Brian Droitcour, Jim Fletcher, Zachary German, Lucy Ives, Aaron Kunin, Margaret Lee, Paul Legault, K. Silem Mohammad, Ken Okiishi, R. H. Quaytman, Katie Raissian, Ariana Reines, William S. Smith, Mónica de la Torre, Gretchen Wagner, Hannah Whitaker, and Matvei Yankelevich. 

Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, designed in collaboration with Project Projects, is at once an archive of Triple Canopy’s widespread publishing activities and a translation into print of projects that originally appeared in other forms. The design of Invalid Format reflects this problem: How might works produced for the screen be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context, though not slavishly, and while also fully inhabiting the page? How can the form and function of interactive, audiovisual works be degraded elegantly, without disappearing entirely, in print? 

The second volume of Invalid Format includes artist projects and literary work published from early 2009 through mid-2010, documentation of public programs, and a sampling of foundational correspondence. Contributors include Sophia Al-Maria, José León Cerrillo, Joshua Cohen, Teddy Cruz, Ed Halter, Lucy Ives, Victoria Miguel,Joe Milutis, New Humans, Hassan Khan & Clare Davies, Karthik Pandian, Lucy Raven, Luc Sante, Dan Torop, and Zs & Josh Slater. 

*** 

Jim Fletcher has worked with Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players for more than twelve years, most recently in Early Plays, a joint production with the Wooster Group. He is a member of the cast of Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service production based on The Great Gatsby, and has worked with Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, the English group Forced Entertainment (Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First,Quizoola!), and Sarah Michelson (Devotion). In 2012, he received an Obie award for sustained excellence of performance.

Artists Space and Sex Magazine host “Tying Up The Phone Lines”

Jason Scott Sadofsky,Still from BBS: The Documentary, 2005

Tying Up the Phone Lines: Bulletin Board Systems and Networks before the Internet

Jason Scott Sadofsky with Bosko Blagojevic
Screening and Discussion

Friday, March 15, 7PM

Artists Space, New York, NY

Artists Space and Sex Magazine present an evening addressing the legacy of Bulletin Board Systems. A screening of two chapters of BBS: The Documentary will be followed by a conversation between Jason Scott Sadofsky and artist and writer Bosko Blagojevic.

A decade before the consumer Internet broke into the domestic arena of home computing, several generations of Americans built an archipelago of early dial-up networks called Bulletin Board Systems (or BBSes). Thousands of these text-based networks allowed messaging, forums, and file sharing between their users—potentially anyone who had the right number to call. The culture of each BBS meanwhile was unique: a board might attract teen hackers sharing discoveries while exploring phone company switches, far-flung software developers with similar interests, or an otherwise dispersed urban gay community. Using a modem-equipped home computer, all of these divergent groups would together engender a nascent culture of networked communication and sociability.

Today in New York, as the Internet evolves toward an increasingly exotic script-driven era of data persistence and identity tracking, many in the cultural sector are looking to the historical precedents of the roaring consumer Internet of the mid-90s. The bulletin board system scene is a vital component of understanding this pre-Internet history as well as the social infrastructure underlying the rapidly evolving present.

Jason Scott Sadofsky’s 2005 film BBS: The Documentary features over 200 in-depth interviews with some of the central protagonists of the BBS era of the 80s and early 90s. From hobbyist programmers to tech entrepreneurs and teen hackers and phone phreaks, Sadofsky has created a major work of computing and communications history that lets these pioneers tell their own story. BBS is an authoritative and engrossing look into the culture that prepared millions of Americans for the Internet.

Two chapters of the eight-hour film will be presented:
“Make it Pay” covers the BBS industry that rose in the 1980′s and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
“HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking)” hears from some of the users of “underground” BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.

— 

Jason Scott Sadofsky (born September 13, 1970 in Hopewell Junction, New York), more commonly known as Jason Scott, is an American archivist and historian of technology. He is the creator, owner and maintainer of textfiles.com, a web site which archives files from historic bulletin board systems. He is also the creator of a 2005 documentary film about BBSes, BBS: The Documentary, and a 2010 documentary film about interactive fiction, GET LAMP. Scott has been known by the online pseudonyms “Sketch”, “SketchCow” and “The Slipped Disk”. He currently lives in Hopwell Junction, New York.

Bosko Blagojevic’s 2012 essay Notes Unpacking a Library (Cult of the Dead Cow) was published in Sex Magazine this past fall.

—

***see also Joybubbles my documentary film about a blind phone phreak (telephone hacker)

Productive Behaviors at Triple Canopy

Left: Astrom/Zimmer, sketch for content mapping application. Right: Lewis Wickes Hine, photograph of women reading at the Siegel-Cooper Company, 1910.

Productive Behaviors

ANTHON ASTROM AND LUKAS ZIMMER ON NEW DESIGNS FOR DIGITAL PUBLISHING

155 Freeman Street 
February 25, 2013 
7:00 p.m., $5 suggested donation 

Triple Canopy is pleased to present a conversation about new directions in digital publishing with its first designers-in-residence, the Zurich-based duo of Anthon Astrom and Lukas Zimmer. Astrom and Zimmer began working together in 2007, when they initiated the Café Society Project, which investigates frameworks for reading, writing, and organizing information on-screen and in print. In 2011, they founded Astrom/Zimmer studio, which works in research, design, and software development. In the past five years, Astrom and Zimmer have won the Swiss Federal Design Award twice, among other accolades. 

Astrom and Zimmer are spending the month of February in Brooklyn, working with Triple Canopy as we develop a new publishing platform to launch in September. Tonight, they will present their work and discuss issues pertaining to the shift from print to digital publishing with Triple Canopy editors. Specifically, they will preview two applications to be launched in conjunction with the forthcoming redesign of Triple Canopy’s website: one that dynamically maps and reinforces relationships—spatial, temporal, thematic, geographic—between various kinds of online content (and representations of events and objects that exist offline); another that enables readers to collate, classify, share, discuss, and print such materials, using a sophisticated yet straightforward columnar interface. 

Along with Triple Canopy editors, Astrom and Zimmer will ask how publishing platforms and applications might not only illuminate but also amplify the fundamental relationships between people, places, objects, and social processes that constitute Triple Canopy’s expanded field of publication. Rather than shoveling all kinds of information onto the Web, how might we design interfaces, and facilitate reading experiences, that make productive use of the ineluctable differences between digital information and tangible things in the world? Moving beyond the naive fantasy of online knowledge production, how might we envision the circulation of information between those realms so as to be meaningful, even socially beneficial?