Category Archives: Residency

“I am especially taken by the joy I hear in the written voices of my friends in the archives”

Arc, Residency

An Archive Should Not Mean but Be (Or, Thinking and Feeling in the Stacks: On Not Writing an Essay)

  • with interjections
    • and an Archive of the Now soundtrack

It began with an idea about poetry and archives: MOMA poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith’s project of printing out the internet

  • which raises the question: what is the internet? Presumably, Goldsmith plans to print out all the web content, not the source code for each page, nor the data analytics mined from the content, nor the energy consumption logs for each server farm. Presumably not gifs or videos or audio. The textual archive of Archive of the Now would be pretty minimal

while everyone talks past the poem
they argue and kiss it
assembles in the lobby shop
thought that too is new you
blow in to sell iPod pouches all the cool
detritus

Calvin Bedient weighed in with the assertion that lyric poetry = “strong feeling” & conceptualist poetry = intellection

  • and we all know that dominant EuroWestern culture privileges affect as a mode of being and communicating, right? Or, wait, needs lyric poetry as its Greek urn in which to store and exhibit affect: Poetry, Writing Beauty and Truth (to Power) since 18whatever, So You Don’t Have to Deal With Either. (Which is not to say that Conceptualism has traditionally been welcoming to affect, embodiment, identity and other formations associated with feminist, queer and postcolonial poetics. But then there is I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, which wrestles with the rational/objectivist dualism of the conceptual. And it’s brilliant.)

I’m a weeping boy and a centaur caving in…

If I had the money to dip in being a boy,
if I was Anna O., & fallen into autism or
steeped in prelingual glimpses of Lena’s face,
I’d be living system: looped in my own elements.

A system closing talking only to itself.

And lo, the wars were joined with the clashing of blogs and the clamoring to be in the Huffington Post. Susan M. Schultz‘ post, as/at the Tinfish Editor’s Blog, has the smartest rounding-up of the antis, and the best defence: she reads “Conceptualism as affect,” offering “a defense of both at once.” For Schultz, poetry is not a binary system where 0/1 indicate think/feel (as both defenders and detractors of Conceptualism have asserted). Persuasively, she connects Conceptualism’s affect to its frequent delving into (and/or inventing of) the archive. She listens in on “the joy… of [her] friends in the archives”: both friends working on archival material and, implicitly, the friends she meets in archival material.

  • Words for it: the shock of the then, the encounter~frisson~zone of contact with some vanished-but-recorded material and/or psychic reality, future-of-past shock, reality bites
    • Archive joy! In “No Guns, No Durian,” Susan Schultz makes friends with Angelina Jolie via her online diary of her journey through Cambodia: “there are these moments of objectivist precision that are incredibly moving, so I stole her language for this poem.”

In other words – in Yvonne Rainer’s words – “feelings are facts.” Rainer, a founding member of the Judson Dance Theater – Cunningham/Cage-influenced conceptual choreographers – and a feminist film maker, both emplaced herself in the archive of alternative culture, and curated her subjective archive, in the memoir that bears that provocative and useful title (borrowed by Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong for an installation in which the spectator is an integral part of the artwork. Rainer’s memoir is roughly co-eval with two other crucial (and affective) feminist interventions into the archive and experimental/alternative/resistant art practices: Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings and Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire, which are concerned with film and theatre respectively. The archival poetics equivalent awaits…

Report from the Archive

Hive, Residency

Report on the Archive: A conference at Birkbeck, 5th July 2013, convened by Holly Pester, curator of the Text Art Archive (Bury Text Festival).

Amy Cutler‘s presentation on her exhibition Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig, with its descriptions of venturing, finding, ingathering – as well as references to ‘zombie archivism’ (a phrase coined by Julie Bacon to descirbe the reanimative force of archival art practices) and ‘forest trauma’ – let me to think about a report from the archive: a critical pastiche of nineteenth-century explorers’ and missionary reports (travels that were the source of many items in our institutional and national archives), and the relation between archives and adventures: is the archival researcher’s self-image Lara Croft, Tomb Raider?  Debating ‘zombie’ practices, discussion moved into legal, land-based terminology, with Pester insisting: “It’s really important to feel that you have a right to trespass [on work in the archive] – as a practitioner, I feel like it’s a duty to trespass, although this is hard to stand by.”

This metaphor – of movement in the archive, crossing its (perceived or real) barbed wire and DANGER! signs – was followed by Carol Watts‘ assertion that “the archivist has to be more embodied.” ‘Intellectual Tactility,’ the title of the exhibition from the Text Art Archive – which included annotated emails and diagrams, as well as ephemera from performance and promotion – is a wonderful phrase for this embodiment: proffering the intention that archivists and archival researchers seek for hapticity and materiality in whatever assets they are handling or curating, including born-digital assets.

The digital archive (like any digital site) is the tip of a pyramid the vast bulk of whose labour – mining for minerals, building computer components, maintaining server farms, providing electricity, coding software – is invisible. As poets in the Archive of the Now, might we research and write a report from the archive, a digital edition of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor? (in fact, Archive poet John Seed has taken a psychogeographical step in that direction already, with his sequence, Pictures from Mayhew – you can listen in here). How can we make not only our bodies felt within digital recordings, but the bodies of all those whose labour makes our words appear/be heard onscreen? This is the inverse question to what I was exploring in my previous blog – that material posted online as part of poetic labour contributes both to the earnings of the major internet companies by providing data for mining towards ad-targeting, and similarly data towards surveillance mining – but it feels deeply related: a question of use-value of online labour.

Ben Cranfield, the closing speaker, highlighted ‘work’ as one of his key terms (with anecdote, materiality , and thieving), with particular reference to framing what archivists and archival researchers do as work, “to recognise that we are engaged in work; that we’re practising and might fail… It might open up some relation between process and product,” re-investing rigour and energy into the way we frame and enact practices. Lisa Robertson‘s embodied work with archival material, and/as the crucially important anecdote, can be heard in her reading of “My Frieze” at QMUL, where she talks about encountering a frieze of Amazons in the basement of the British Museum, and her visceral reaction to it and its secret texts, erased when the frieze was restored to public display.

Slab from the Amazonomachy frieze from the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos, British Museum

“I used to be a little bit embarrassed about the appropriative nature of some of my work,” she says, “but now I have the great experience of seeing it actually function in a documentary manner.” The poem steps in as an archive, erasing questions of trespass. It  begins, moreover, in Robertson’s “very marrow… coiled into [her] body”: Cranfield and I both used the same word for the processual and visceral way we approach archives, and what we value in archives: promiscuity. Both the desire for the moment of encounter/discovery, and a desiring approach to risk, materiality, diversity and uncertainty. Cranfield cited Sam McBean‘s beautiful essay “Being ‘There’: Digital Archives and Queer Affect” as an example of this productive promiscuity, as both a disruption and a reaffirmation of the archive.

Given the root meaning of archive (from archē [Greek]: government), and its association with power, governance, institutionalisation, and thus stability/rigidity, exclusion and authority (however fantasmatic these claims might be for any given archive – or, indeed, government), perhaps it’s preferable to characterise the Archive of the Now as an Anarchive? As well as asking, as Cranfield suggested, “what are the cultural forms that have been proliferated from this work [meaning: the work archived, and the work of the archivist]?”, we could ask “What does this anarchive do to act as an invitation, to democratise the rigorous practice of archiving and take it out of the state’s hands? How does it make the work available to be proliferated, activated?” Can we be Lara Crofts who (mixed video game metaphor alert) let zombies into the archive?

(Re)Search/Destroy? Or, Mistaking Poetry for Viruses

Arc, Residency

An arc of the arc of the Archive: hive report from Holly Pester’s Report on the Archive at Birkbeck, 5 July 2013, forthcoming.

Until then, here’s Twitter’s report on the #epoetry festival at Kingston University. And now: some e-xperiments with poetrynews.

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Poetry as News/Data (after the style of Ron Silliman), combined with Fluxuggestions (à la Yoko Ono, to mark the publication of Acorn, and its performance by Stacy Makishi, at Meltdown on 22.06.2013).

Yoko Ono, “Quiz III,” Acorn (2013).
  • Use Quiz III to think through a poem you’re writing or reading.
  • Apply it to work by Archive of the Now poets such as Marianne Morris or Richard Price, whose “Channel Link” circles around lines, opening:

Even stations move.

Can I meet you fifteen years ago
by the sprung chainlink?

*

A poem by the NSA (list of keywords used as terrorist ‘flags’), ‘found’ by William Knowles.

  • Run the list of keywords through Poetry Assessor (it receives a positive score, classifying it as a ‘professional’ poem). Run a sample text from Archive of the Now through the Assessor. Compare scores. Search Archive of the Now sample texts for NSA keywords: is the Archive “a market for riots online” (Redell Olsen) demanding surveillance?
  • “The idea here is that if lots of people add suspicious words to their messages, the world’s intel agencies will be too busy with spurious input that they will have to give up reading it all… You might want to sprinkle some of these words into your X-headers for a little fun.” William Knowles. Apply to your own writing practice.
  • Add an Archive of the Now poem (sample text or audio link) to every email you send for a day: imagine whether your NSA/GCHQ alert goes up or down. To make sure the poems are being surveilled, join  ‘CC Your Emails to Theresa May Day.’

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In Ceasefire, Andrew Robinson reflects on Walter Benjamin’s ideas of art’s aura in the age of turbo-capitalism, asking what ‘political art’ might look like today, in an era of rapid technological change. “Perhaps this pattern of radicalisation followed by recuperation has even happened with each emergent technology – newspapers, novels, film, (pirate) radio, the Internet. Each time, the new medium has a progressive force, dehabituating people from expected relations, offering new channels for experimental activity, mediatised subcultures, and the spread of dissenting perspectives.”

  • Contribute to the Archive’s Phono-Poetry Indiegogo campaign, and reflect on the auratic with your very own wax cylinder recording (or mp3 or mini-tape of that wax recording) of 3 Archive poets. What difference does the “crackle” of a material object make to the aura of a recording?
  • How can we preserve and enlarge the Archive’s “dissenting perspective” – its resonant opacity to textual search, its contemporaneity and (therefore) instability), its accessibility? How can we extend the Archive to more listeners and recorders without making it textually transparent and available to surveillance? What kind of encryption/de-encryption keys might we generate?
*

Given NSA/GCNQ surveillance, should the Archive of the Now be developing text-based metadata and search capability? Is/should poetry be a part of the semantic “web of data” or is/should poetry be a form of encryption?

  • Write in CAPTCHAs: Completely Animated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart. The reCAPTCHA versions contribute to Google Books’ digitisation project by sampling paleographic queries in, for example, Shakespeare’s folios, and crowd-sourcing the most likely text via your input when decoding and entering the text. Digital analysis can offer statistical probabilities, but optical character recognition still struggles with both handwriting and printed text. What work can manuscript continue to do in digital poetics?

  • Trrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnscribe: listen to Chris Goode’s “An Introduction to Speed Reading” or Caroline Bergvall’s “The Franker’s Tale.” Now transcribe their performances — words, breaths, spaces; pitch, tone, duration; variants, feedback, room tone. And/or use speech-to-text software such as Dragon Dictate to create a transcription; play the downloaded file through Transcriva at different speeds (from tortoise to hare). Post a link to your transcription here and/or re-record it.

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Voynich Entropics: According to New Scientist, 21.06.2013: “A mysterious and beautiful 15th-century text that some researchers have recently deemed to be gibberish may not be a hoax after all. A new study suggests the text shares quantifiable features with genuine language, and so may contain a coded message.” Scientists looked for “global patterns in the frequency and clustering of words” to determine individual words’ entropy, or the evenness of its distribution. The manuscript, housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale, “contains illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet.” The plants and nymphs remain resistant to entropic analysis.

  • Gather a random sampling of Archive poets: perform an entropic analysis, looking for global patterns. Maybe use the NSA/Prism keywords as a basis for analysis. Are these poems written in “genuine language”? Do they contain a “coded message”?
  • Listen to Vahni Capildeo’s “Person Animal Figure” or Harriet Tarlo’s “Nab“: uncover the mythological figures (clothed or naked), unidentifiable plants and astrological diagrams present in the poems. Draw or collage them while listening. Convert illustrations into slideshow movie and combine with audio track.
Page from the Voynich Manuscript

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“It is best to copy and paste the text into the message body. High fire walls usually wipe out attachments mistaking poetry for viruses.” (Poems in the Waiting Room)

  • Create/encode poetry-positive firewall settings. Write a virus using sample text from poems by Jennifer Cooke, Out to Lunch or Alan Halsey.
  • Leave sample texts by these poets – or QR code links to their recordings – in doctor’s waiting rooms. Assess quantitative change in quality of life produced in patients reading or listening to them.
  •  Wipe out the poetry virus: download “The Frankenstein Franchise” (Halsey) or “Carciniogeneticide” (Cooke). Using Audacity, edit the tracks to remove any firewall triggers, producing medically-safe poetry. Copy and paste a transcription into the comments below.

 

“It has you look at your artefacts as if from a spaceship”: Getting into the Archive

Residency

That was the key advice I took from Jason Camlot‘s graduate workshop on 30th May at Queen Mary. Camlot was talking about the amazing SpokenWeb archive he co-created at Concordia University, digitising, uploading and time-stamping magnetic tape recordings of a reading series that ran at the university from 1966-74 – a fantastic comparison, model and inspiration for the Archive of the Now, and my engagement with it over the next 12 months as the first Poet-in-Residence. Following Camlot’s suggestion, I’ll be spending the year wondering what we might hear if we were to treat the Archive of the Now as a version of Nasa’s Golden Record, an image and sound recording sent into space with Voyager, and ourselves as the extraterrestrials listening to it.

That residence will be – like the Archive itself – a mix of virtual and actual: a series of interventions into the Archive as it exists here online, and four workshops for school students that will take place on the Queen Mary campus (more on those soon). That duality repeats – and, hopefully, will help me to interpret – a transitional point in technologies of reading, writing, listening to, performing, archiving, and researching poetry. As Camlot pointed out, we don’t yet have a language in poetics or literary theory for discussing the sounds of spoken poetry, live or recorded, and this seems like an excellent place to generate one – discursively. I look forward to comments and discussions developing with each post here to build more bridges between the actual and virtual, the audio and textual, the critical and conversational.

After all, we have a century of recordings – of which, more below – to talk about, including recent scholarly online poetry archives such as (most famously) PennSound, which Camlot discussed in relation to its manifesto for digital sound poetry archives. “Making Audio Visible” by Charles Bernstein was published in Textual Practice 23.6 (2009), and remains a key article not so much for its claims about the nature of recorded poetry, but for its demands for the future.

In imagining the future of the Archive of the Now (a temporal paradox), I’ll be thinking about the Arc and the Hive as two aspects of the archive: that it constitutes an arc, a grouping marked by parameters (a set) for analysis, both internal (what does the set tell us about its parameters?) and comparative with other sets, such as PennSound; and that it constitutes a hive, a generative open field. Andrea Brady points out that, in the Renaissance, the bee was an image used of the ideal reader, collecting ‘pollen’ as they read and transforming it to spiritual honey through commonplace books. G.W. Pigman, the scholar who identifies the apiary model of reading, points out that “Bees illustrate not only transformative imitation, but non-transformative following, gathering, or borrowing.”

That seems appropriate to the Archive as an anthology or florilegium (both anthos and flora mean flower), a form of publishing described by Maria Popova of BrainPickings as “one of the earliest recorded examples of remix culture — a Medieval textual Tumblr,” and as a metaphor for networked knowledge and combinatorial creativity. As an inheritor of the florilegium that’s actualising that metaphor, the Archive offers rich research pickings through which – as an ideal reader – I hope to float like a bee.

Rather than bringing a particular angle or methodology, I want to see what the Archive has to say for and about itself. Is it “a market for riots online” (Redell Olsen)? How might its Britishness relate to Jeff Hilson‘s disquisition on the impossibilities of Britishness at the start of his bird bird readings? What can and does poetry do – in relation to aesthetics, language, technology, and social relations — when “liam fox/cuts/fox/defence/defence/armed forces/liam fox/cuts/cuts/cuts/aircraft carriers/strike fleet/jets/cuts/trident” (Holly Pester)? Olsen, Hilson and Pester are part of this summer’s major Archive of the Now project: Dr. Katy Price‘s Phono-poetry experiment for the Modernist Studies Association conference, recording their work on wax cylinders to play on an Edison phonograph. Price, a lecturer in modern and contemporary literature in the Department of English at Queen Mary, kindly answered a few questions about the origin and intentions of the Phono-poetry project, which is combining Edison’s nineteenth-century technology with digital media, including a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo that gives you the opportunity to get your own wax cylinder.

“marks which, whispering Bill,” says Hilson, suggesting a relation between printed “marks” and vocal “whispering” — a relation that has been long debated. The phonograph (re)translates sound into graphic marks as it makes the groove in the wax cylinder, but there is no visible digital equivalent of the relation between marks and whispers (although graphic visualisers often try to give a sense there is). Yet at the same time, the digital is entirely graphic — whether the 0/1s of encoding, or the textual nature of programming — but invisibly. In the seminal “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway comments that, “The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores.”

What kind of interference might the Archive of the Now, as a collection of poetic texts, throw up as it connects the old(est?) technology of spoken language, which extended the reach of human communication in space and time, and new technologies of micro-writing, encoding verbal data via the inscription/encryption tools that extend from Edison’s wax cylinders to MP3s? Bridging the digital and the cylindrical with Phono-poetry seems like a good place to start…

Sophie Mayer: Can you tell us about your research concerning the relationship between modernist poetry and technology?

Katy Price: So far I have mainly been looking at astronomy love poems, by the not-exactly-modernist William Empson. He devoured a lot of popular science, and wrote metaphysical poetry inspired by John Donne but with twentieth-century cosmology. Although the poems are formally very tight, they have any amount of doubt, despair and experimental affect running through them to rival the most dystopian modernist.

How did you get involved in Archive of the Now? How did you formulate the magical idea of Phono-poetry? How are you making it happen?

I’ve long been an admirer and user of the Archive in teaching contemporary poetry. I’ve also previously worked with Aleksander Kolkowski, a phonograph musician and composer who has recorded and performed with several vocal artists as well as electronic musicians. I thought it would be great to bring these two kinds of sound archiving technology together. I’m hoping the poets will enjoy their experience of being immortalised on cylinder, playing with their existing work and perhaps even being inspired to write something specially for the phonograph.

What projects might you be interested to see AoN users panning or undertaking with the material that’s available in the archive (given that not every listener has access to an Edison phonograph)?

Once when I was preparing a lecture using the Archive my iTunes accidentally started up in the background. It shoved some Sigur Ros alongside Jeremy Prynne reading John Weiners’ Cocaine. It was beautiful. I’d love to see an AoN mixing app where people could share their blends.

Which poets were historically recorded on an Edison phonograph? Where can people access those recordings, if any?

Tennyson

Browning

Whitman

In her poem “S.C.R.U.F.F.,” Holly Pester — one of the three Phono-poets — says “scruff is part scratch part fluff.” That sounds like a good description of the phonographic process, which produces a groove (scratch) in which the information is encoded, but also the waste wax (fluff)! Could we say that poetry — particularly experimental poetry — is scruff, taking place across and between the signal and the noise, between the information and the excess? Or at least has a strong interest in fluff — errors, found materials, excess, repetition, etc.?

Fluff yes – the material that is scratched off a cylinder in the recording process is called ‘swarf’ (see image below). I love the idea that weird, difficult text art could have a kind of material life like sweepings or lint in relation to smooth and shiny official or acceptable language. But there is lots of swarf, fluff, lint language, isn’t there? Animal sounds, baby sounds, babble on the bus, people who communicate vocally but not verbally. These can often be the main form of communication, not just offcuts. There are sometimes brilliant moments with experimental text art that makes gold from swarf. I think this can depend on how the audience get engaged.

Pester is particularly engaged with radio: in Scruff she mentions Orson Welles (instigator of the infamous radio hoax with his production of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds), and her serial poem “News Piece” — of which 16-19/10/2010 is included on the Archive — samples Radio 4’s Today Programme. How important is radio as an intermediate sound technology between the phonograph and digital for music and poetry?

I think radio invented our heads for us, or a large part of them. It has shaped how we experience sound, distance and information more than we can fully recognise. Radio has also been a very nationally shaped and shaping medium. And that is there in the back of our minds even as we use the internet and apparently more global communication technologies. An idea I find perpetually useful on technology and text is from Lori Emerson who says that we do the same old things with new media – so we read in ways that we learned with books, even on the internet. Familiar approach in a new context. Things don’t change as much as we might fancy they do. One thing that art can do with technology is tickle the part of us that recognises this blend of the familiar and the new, and draw us into playing with it. I think that a lot of the Archive poets are doing this kind of thing with their uses of sound and recording in the texture of their writing.