Online Suicide Note

Days ago, Mitchell Heisman blew his brains out on the steps of Harvard Memorial Church. Here is what he left as a suicide note: a 1,950 page website.

Suicidenote.info

Joke thief?

A few months ago, Marc Maron did a two-part interview (Part One / Part Two) with Carlos Mencia that raises some complicated questions about intellectual property. If you have time, please listen to this interview (Part One / Part Two). It is a fascinating look at a very successful person in a creative field who doesn't seem to be particularly creative.

Mencia has been accused of taking original material from other comics and performing the jokes on his TV show and HBO specials without compensating the creators or even giving them writing credit. But can a comedian own a premise? Are poets or musicians who riff on the work of other artists stealing that material? Is it okay for a comic to take a premise that's been used by another comedian, put his spin on it and make money from it? Is being derivative an artistic sin? I think these questions are pertinent to any artist. Actually, listening to this interview with Mencia makes me think about writing poems--even a good idea for a poem takes a long time and a lot of work to develop into something of value. And unlike poets, who get feedback in the collegial setting of workshop, comics typically have to workshop their ideas in front of a room full of drunk people.

Comics are generally sympathetic to the difficulty of this development process, so Mencia has become an outcast in his creative community as a result of the allegations of theft. (Spicy language!)


But is Mencia stealing the craft of other artists? Should Mencia get credit for performing the jokes well, even if he didn't write the original bit? Some of the material he's accused of stealing can't be called original. They're jokes that are so obvious, everyone makes them:


But Mencia has also allegedly lifted some bits that are well-known in the comedy community as a result of having been developed and previously performed by influential comics:

A bit from Bill Cosby


A bit from Sam Kinison


A bit from George Carlin (spicy language!)


And a line from a song (spicy language!)


These are just the handful of incidents that have gotten a lot of hits on YouTube. If the allegations are true, who knows how many unknown comics Mencia may have taken material from? Part two of the interview (Part One / Part Two) recounts disturbing allegations that Mencia damaged the career of up-and-coming comedian, Freddie Soto, by appropriating his material.

digital piracy

Here is an interesting story about digital piracy from On the Media that seems relevant to our work/discussions...

Legislation aims to Fight Digital Piracy

Sampling

Since Trilbe's been thinking about DJs and electronic music, I thought I'd contribute some work by one of my favorite musicians ever, DJ Shadow:



DJ Shadow's album, Endtroducing, was (I believe) one of the first albums ever to be composed entirely of samples from other musicians. We've brought up, in class, a LFT creative process which involves a subdivision of ideas. To make a video poem, for example, there seem to be couple of types of subdivision: of medium, where one idea is expressed in multiple formats; and of idea, where one idea is broken into pieces which are displayed simultaneously.

To play devil's advocate, though, doesn't text poetry involve a kind of subdivision of ideas, where ideas which, in prose, would be perhaps 'limited' to semantics, in poetry get expressed simultaneously by prosodic techniques?

Anyhow. I'm drawn to sampling, and to DJ Shadow, who seems to be not just subdividing ideas but uniting others' fragments and creating an atmosphere out of those seams.

ONE WORD book video (featuring "fork" from "sixpack" by Thylias Moss)

The promotional video for One Word book: contemporary writers on the words they love or loathe, edited by Molly McQuade from Sarabande Books features excerpts from fork, a section of the essay sixpack by Thylias Moss, a close associate of forkergirl.

Please enjoy this multimedia short film by Tucker Capps for Sarabande. Note the mix of active and static elements in this little film that delivers forkfuls of visual delight, the quick shift from one visual to another, continuity maintained/sustained by both the spoken text (written by forkergirl's friend) and the music by Jonathan Zalben. Note the range of visual textures. In this case, text preceded the film, inspired the film, provided both rules and obstructions in which/despite which the short film was made. The writing itself did not mandate an unfolding of content as a plot-dependent narrative —indeed; rules embedded in the structure of the writing (structure determined by tenets of Limited Fork Theory) may have made plot-dependent narrative an unlikely vehicle for content intentions or the content transcendence that occurs in this film.


My Two words about the One Word video: Forking good!

One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe from Sarabande Books on Vimeo.

From the One Word book website:
In One Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe, Molly McQuade asks the question all writers love to answer: what one word means the most to you, and why? Writers respond with a wild gallimaufry of their own choosing, from ardor to bitchin’ to themostat to wrong to very. There is corn, not the vegetable but the idea, defining cultural generations; solmizate, meaning to sing an object into place; and delicious slang, such as darb and dassn’t. Composed as expository or lyric essays, zinging one-liners, extended quips, jeremiads, etymological adventures, or fantastic romps, the writings address not only English words but also a select few from French, German, Japanese, Quechua, Basque, Igbo, and others. The result is like the best of meals, filled with color, personality, and pomp. There is something delightful and significant for every reader who picks up this wonderful book.


“This sublime anthology is poetry for people who don’t read poems, collecting 67 essays, short stories, and memoirs in which seasoned writers and novices expound, meditate, or riff on a single word. The words range from the familiar (forget by Mimi Schwartz, crash by Dan Moyer) to the obscure (darb by Erin McGraw [1920s slang for an excellent person or thing], umunnem by Kelechi Okere [an Igbo term for all one's blood relatives], from the short (a by Joel Brouwer takes up eight pages) to the long (floccinaucinihilipification by Siobhan Gordon [it means nothing]. Thylias Moss’s disquisition on fork and related words itself forks in many directions. Jason Iwen detects capitalist ideology in interesting, which first appeared in 1711 in an economic context. Poets are almost half of the contributors, but they also include critics, translators, academics, and novelists. These marvelous little pieces of writing highlight not so much the words themselves as what words do, how they exist as themselves but also as the carriers of meanings, which shift and branch into many paths real and metaphoric, juicy with sound.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)


“One Word is a rich and varied collection of meditations on words from the simplest (a and or) to the rarest (kankedort, with only one known occurrence) and from the most basic (doom and filthy) to the most ornately elaborate (floccinaucinihipilification). Starting with Joel Brouwer’s deeply perceptive and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the article a through Lee Martin’s narrative of childhood memories attached to the tricky word colander, Joan Connor’s vignettes associated with lilac, Eric Ormsby’s profile of or (“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary. … Or stands like a squat bouncer at the revolving door of the disjunction.”), to Mary Swander’s recounting of two billion years of geological history lying beneath topsoil, we encounter all of the many ways that language and human events intersect. In each case, the writer has chosen, to borrow wording from Maureen N. McLane’s essay on kankedort, an “exceptional word”, an “unusual word,” a word that has “lodged itself like a mystery, a word that gathered around it associations [both] personal and ramifying…” Not surprisingly in a collection of writings about language, we encounter not only discussions of words and meanings but also stories of relationships with parents, children, mates, and friends, and of the intimate and powerful forces that shape lives. It is a measure of the power and the wisdom and the charm of these pieces that a reader’s relationship with these words will never be quite the same after reading this collection. Maggie Hivnor’s words about Yeats’ use of the word half-light seem apt for this collection as well: “When poets use a word as well as that, they leave a trace of meaning on it, a fingerprint—or sheen: a new layer of lacquer, a warmth, like the time-worn glow on the newel-post of an old banister, touched by generations.” Readers of this collection too will find that the words profiled here have a new trace of meaning, a warmth, and a time-worn glow.”
—John Morse, President and Publisher of Merriam-Webster, Inc.

“At last! A dictionary for people who are words! From the eight pages that define “A” (the fifth most commonly used word in English) (“A never looks back”) to the concluding two pages of “Wrong” (“Two wrongs only make a wrong wronger.”), what we have here is a smorgasbord of sentience, a collision of serendipity and scholarship. This is a book at play in the fields of meaning, a sixpack (Thylias Moss) of quipus (Arthur Sze), a dehiscence (Forrest Gander) of florere (Vincent Katz), I (Cynthia Gaver) hope (John Rodriguez) as (we like it) (Brenda Hillman). We like it! When More’s Utopia is realized, One Word will be the vocabulary list for the SATs. (Except: there will be no SATs!)”
—Bob Holman

Paul Lansky

Following up on my earlier post about DJs, I sent an email to Paul Lansky. Lansky is a professor at Princeton and is also an acclaimed contemporary classical composer. I asked for his opinion on this question about club DJs. They are not quite part of the commercial pop scene but are definitely not part of the academy. I wanted to know what Lansky, who composes electronically, thinks of the DJs who mix and remix, also creating new music electronically.

Why Paul Lansky?
Because Lansky is an electronic music pioneer. In 1973, he composed a piece called mild und leise, an electronic riff on Richard Wagner's "Tristan Chord". The piece was composed on an IBM 360/91 mainframe computer about which Lansky wrote, "This IBM mainframe was, as far as I know, the only computer on the Princeton University campus at the time. It had about one megabyte of memory, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (in addition to requiring a staff to run it around the clock)."

mild und leise generated a lot of discussion when a British band, Radiohead, used looped samples from the piece as the framework of their song "Idioteque". The song appeared on Radiohead's Grammy Award winning album Kid A.

I discovered Lansky when I heard him speak about Threads, a ten movement cantata. The "threads" are interwoven preludes, arias, recitatives and choruses that occur and reoccur through the different movements. Lansky introduced the piece for the public radio show, New Sounds Live. He told us, members of the audience, that the arias and preludes would rise from struck metal. The recitatives would come from "noise instruments", including bottles and flower pots. And the choruses would come from drums. Despite the instruments on which the piece is performed, Lansky said that he uses computers to compose the music. Even though a piece, like Threads, will only use acoustic instruments in performance. As Lansky told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I look forward to the day when nobody will care whether or not a computer was used in the process of making a piece." (Harrison, Shane. "Along for the 'Ride' with Paul Lansky" The Atlanta Journal/The Atlanta Constitution 2 March 2001: P3).

I don't know if he'll actually get my email, but I had to ask the question.

mild und leise, First Movement


Idioteque

IP as an Artist's Conceit

The issue of an artist's exploitation is at the heart of this piece. There is the artist who doesn't get compensated for his work. And then there is the appropriation of black music glam for the video. There are a lot of issues in here.

Turn On the Music


"Bobby Farell realized many people, if they had been in his position, would probably have regrets."

MERMAID AS METAPHOR (a beginning consideration from forkergirl's temporary fish eye lens advantage)

fish eye lens advantage image from forkergirl's photostream

In this consideration of Mermaid as Metaphor, a point of entry and a point of departure (bifurcation hub) are formed by two elements brought together (in a range of manipulations) forming a third element that is a composite of the two (1 element plus 1 element = a 3rd element [1+1=3], as Rima pointed out in a limited forked multimedia story class). At this hub is a common depiction of mermaids in which two unrelated biological segments of two organisms are brought together in (primarily visual) unification usually depicted as horizontally split halves forming wholeness: a mermaid.

This (visual) wholeness is a form of marriage, an easily imagined evolutionary progression or regression of marriage. Though the one mermaid outcome of wholeness formation is usually offered, there are at least two composites that would emerge from each union in this imagined evolution or regression. Human upper body + fish lower body, and human lower body + fish upper body. This is an answer to where's the other halves? —the human lower body and the fish upper body? An example of this more complete merger outcome scenario supplies the horror factor of The Fly (1958). The human/fly hybrid is created when a teleportation experiment meant to be an exclusively human teleportation experiment becomes a human/insect teleportation experiment when a fly is discovered inside the teleportation chamber with the scientist when the experiment is already underway and no one is there to stop the experiment. Though the human/fly hybrid is an unintended outcome, that the hybrid is an outcome indicates a form of successful, if horrifying, biological union. The film features both composite forms: human body with fly head/hand and fly body with human head/hand. Once the hybrids emerged, the assumption was that capturing the fly body/human head composite and repeating the experiment with both hybrid outcomes in the chamber, would restore the human and the fly to pre-composite forms though other possibilities would have been as likely had the fly body/human head variation not been snared in a web of spider for whom the genetic modifications of the humanized insect changed nothing.

A cautionary tale, to be sure. A scientist accused of playing God to be sure.

Though I hesitate the use the term, this serves, in part, as a, well, deconstruction of the mermaid metaphor. It is a closer look inside what is and isn't occurring in the architecture of the metaphor that a mermaid is, and simultaneously is an invitation to explore what can happen/is happening inside other metaphors, using the outcomes of those explorations to establish other opportunities and forms of expression: the making of other poams (products of acts of making).

In popular depictions of mermaids, biological segments contributed by the human and by the (unspecified species of) fish seem interchangeable, largely because each segment apparently remains intact with crossover of fish into human, human into fish. The fish and human portions of a mermaid hybrid system could be separated easily. It is obvious where to cut. The human and fish segments seem closed systems stitched together (or in some other way held in place) superficially. The forming of human/fish composites seems exceedingly neat with a well-defined boundary separating fish function and appearance from human function and appearance. No transgression of species apparently occurs; nothing, well, fishy in the merger. Mermaids, rather, seem models of respect for species purity despite their being linked. No tinkering with the actual DNA as human DNA and fish genetic code don't mix, but instead exist side-by side. Good neighbors who share much, but not everything. Good spouses who share much but not everything.

If a deeper connection is considered, the external division and separation of fish and human raises questions about function, form, and layout of internal organs. Just how is the mermaid metaphor creature mapped internally? Surely anatomical mingling occurs, or it is difficult to imagine viability of this trans-species as a species distinct from human and fish with its own biological frameworks and systems; the fish, in the more frequent ichthyological bottom half mermaid configuration, would have no heart, no brain, no circulation of human blood in fish areas. If the halves are stitched together superficially and not integrated into a single being, each half would then need separate and contained systems of respiration, systems of ingestion, systems of excretion, etc. A romanticized depiction (and why not such a depiction!) of mermaids does not support contamination of the beautiful, usually, woman, with fishiness. Indeed, the mermaid might even be a purer form of woman for rejecting genitalia in favor of fishtail; with breasts, she may suckle a child and could even seem, depending on who's constructing the idea system, nearly as wholesome and good as Mary, Mother of Christ. In this wonderful anatomical chart (to the right) of a mermaid from gearfuse.com, the internal revelation is still decidedly human in keeping with the biological structure of most mermaids; no doubt a common or typical mermaid is dissected in the well-imagined image of mermaid reality wherever it exists, in imagination, gaming, and/or virtual worlds, for instance. Mermaid Diaries is a blog all about a little mermaid named Natalia Zelmanov and her adventures in second life. Below is a video of a Spore mermaid followed by a video of a Second Life mermaid show:






The common mermaid is uncomplicated, unproblematic in biological terms. She (usually) looks good,
and, in keeping with her fish contribution, is an excellent catch.

Consideration of shared biological functioning is not meant to discredit the mythic or aesthetic function of mermaid systems, and certainly does not undermine an ability of imagination to overcome problems of mermaid existence within shared physical realities. That closed biological and chemical systems can align themselves without sharing structures or circulation, may give a nod to some of the power of imagination as part of the glue maintaining the human/fish alignment. Not that everyone can (or should) use imagination in tis manner; what I refer to as imagination may be referred to differently in other cultural and/or belief systems that configure reality differently, including religions in which what some might consider supernatural is real; prayer connects a human mortal reality with a divine system of existence; prayer and belief function as bridges between these configurations.

It is quite odd, I think, that more mingling apparently does not occur at the juncture of fish and human in a mermaid system of co-dependency to be one being, one creature; why not more raggedness as these halves struggle to come together? In the production of mermaids, if something is occurring biologically, why not more evidence of mutation in the manipulation of humans and fish to produce mermaids? Where are the failures? Where are the monsters of human/fish alliances? Where are the other creature from black lagoons (gill-men) and other evolutionary missing links along the evolutionary road to mermaid? What is it about certain environments that seem to encourage emergence of human/fish hybrids? So much perfection! —similar, it seems (sorry for a lack of statistics) to a rate of perfection in production of angels or other beings embodying some human elements and some divine elements. Something in imagination apparently overcomes potential conflict in human and fish unions —did not George W. Bush say that he hoped the human and the fish could coexist peacefully? In configuring scenarios of this coexistence, some of that peaceful cohabitation would exist within a single body, half human, half fish; the bi-species creature practicing a form of political correctness in blending —indeed, Bush's statement could be construed as a call for transspecies experimentation, phase one focusing on human and fish peacful coexistence scenarios.

Had W seen Shiloh Pepin on a Discovery Channel documentary (Mermaid Girl) when he said that?
Did he realize that there was such a condition as sirenomelia, that humans were sometimes born with their legs fused in a disease commonly called mermaid syndrome, a challenging coexistence that might look peaceful? What hope for the future of humans did he foresee in improving human/fish coexistence? What's in that enhanced coexistence for Americans? for democracy? for capitalism?

In written metaphor also things come together with suspicious ease, perhaps in part because of familiarity with a long history of mythical part human creatures from ancient, classical, and sacred texts ; indeed, even Jesus Christ is a half-human outcome of a human/divine union. Evolutions occur inside metaphor; there is a journey from something to something, and details of the journey are seldom mapped. Mapping of what occurs inside metaphor could be quite revelatory and could lead to other revelatory forms of making, thinking, and/or understanding. To the left, Gort becomes The Stig, and to the right, Sambo becomes Obama in two metaphork evolutions by forkergirl. Much, much (compelling and exciting, among other forms of work) remains to be done.

Poam from DJs

POAM = Product of Acts of Making

I would argue that the great DJs are poets of a different page. You would probably argue back at me, right? But I learned everything I believe about form and rhythm (and love and joy) from DJs. So I'm a true believer. As an apostle of House, I was excited to find this interview with Marshall Jefferson, the DJ who developed Chicago's House music genre in the 1980s.

In this discussion, with the Guardian's Paul Morley and Orlando of Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Jefferson addresses the question of whether the artist who spins in clubs is the oldey timey idea of disc jockey. Musician? Performer? Composer? Artist? The label may not matter to the men and women who are out there innovating. But I think that asking this question opens a window into our perception of the cultural value of artists who create their work outside the academy and without the credentials that come from some kind of accredited institution.

About the interview:

"Marshall Jefferson, who, what with one thing and another, made some records in Chicago in the 80s that, pretty much, helped work out a new form of electronically conceived post-techno anti-disco dance music that ended up being given the name house. He got fed up within a matter of months with the way that electrifying house was being turned into an easily cribbed formula, and helped turn out a zonked, fractured, pretty twisted version of house that got tagged as acid house, which soon flew into cities such as Manchester, where it was accepted and adapted with instant, addicted relish."

Marshall Jefferson, The House Music Anthem


Rachid Baba Ahmed, an Algerian club music innovator, took his art seriously enough to sacrifice himself for its creation. Rachid was killed by religious zealots for making music that they believed was offensive to God (Popular artists allegedly being murdered in Algeria, Sinclair, Abiola. New York Amsterdam News. New York, N.Y.: Oct 26, 1996. Vol. 87, Iss. 43; pg. 5). He was warned. He left Algeria and he kept creating music until he was caught and killed.

Rachid,
thorny beats
draw blood.
Raï, rave and leave.

IP in France

Jean-Luc Godard: "no such thing as intellectual property"

"I am so amazed at times that I am actually alive."

POAM artist Andy Goldsworthy (Thanks @Forkergirl!) ...

"when i make a work i often take it to the very edge of its collapse; and that's a very beautiful balance."

also - this artistic experiment has me thinking about the binary space of "success/failure" and what place (if any) it has in the artistic act of making. (hmmmmm)

SITA SINGS THE BLUES as a Tine of Limited Forked Universe

Nina Paley generously gives her beautiful film Sita Sings the Blues to us, all of us, noting that as part of culture (made of components of culture, which includes dreams), it belongs to us already, is an assemblage, an extension of parts of human experience and human interactions with all things human and all things not human. Idea itself is in part response to that which spawns it; some existing information in some form is at part of idea's heart (as it is in this clever heart umbrella from my design pick.com):




How wonderful it is for the human community to link in inspiration and response; negatively or positively we connect, configure, and reconfigure, making a map of human experience that exposes what is marvelous about us and what is not (at times, according to principles of some temporary configurations, interchangeable).

No matter how brief the configuration in which connections succeed, I am grateful that connection occurs, and I accept that for the possibility of sublime connection, the possibility of brutal connection must be risked. Indeed; perception itself is configurable, winners and losers in the same situation. If there is connection, then all possible forms of connections will manifest on some scale in some location for some duration of time. Forms that are not possible will not manifest. Once a form manifests, that form is possible. Forms not possible in this configuration of now many become possible in the now of other circumstances. And what is not possible in a now of other circumstances will not manifest.

The seeking of interaction, a form of connection, that must occur in Limited Fork Theory, the study of interacting systems on any scale in any location for any duration of time; and the participation in interactions found are the context and focus of my ambition. Perhaps study and participation in some as yet undetermined number (so much falls between the tines of the limited fork, so I cannot be sure of anything, even that there is slippage —an incredible probability of slippage, but I have no proof of exactly what flips between the tines, for to know what slips is to have information that slippage denies; to know what falls through tines would be a form of catching what slips. I assume slippage, but what might disprove slippage I believe has slipped through the tines that themselves sponsor my adherence to slippage probability). Therefore: share, share, share!
This post (and forkergirl's other posts in this blog) joins Nina Paley in being made available for re/continued use with a creative commons share alike license:


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.



As most of us (to whom Sita Sings the Blues belongs) still exist in circumstances that require us to have a source or sources of income, Nina Paley is not prospering from free distribution of her wonderful film, so please consider supporting the ethics of sharing and collaborative building (the collaborative is a prevailing nature of things, it would seem, according to Limited Fork Theory, among other tools of perception/understanding) by making a donation at the Sita Sings the Blues site and/or by purchasing some of the products at Question Copyright.com Perhaps a Copyleft Tee shirt or a Valmiki Violin Shirt or jewelry, stickers, etc.

Nothing but praises for Sita Sings the Blues and Nina Paley!


No better example of Limited Fork Theory in action!

Fire Chakra and Midrift

There is no end to the low art that muddies fury and splays to the floor lighting.

What else would do this. This is a model rage. A fucked demiangel. A ragged melt of paint feigning womanhood. What else is new. A painting in drag. A nipple to claim itself chick.

Oh, but it's old, you bastard. It doesn't count. (Plenty want the granny status - ask them. In their Scheile lips and Goya loins.)

So then hand out pink lipsticks from Kresge in hell, and call it even. Take them dancing with the she demons and play them Gershwin.

Let them fire dance it out of their groinish systems.

Artwork taken from artodyssey

Zizou

Sing, goddess, of Achilles ruinous anger
Which brought ten thousand pains to the Achaeans


Image source: Wikipedia.

Amen. Break.

See what forked out from the amen-break:

Rhizomatic Systems

Time Cube: (((human OR humanity OR humans) w/3 (survival OR extinction)) OR (life on earth) OR (life on the planet) OR (thermonuclear) OR (nuclear war) OR (third world war) OR (world war 3) OR (nuclear holocaust))

RUDE TEXT & accessorized text systems

Often the placement of text on a page in typical text poetry may be understood as domination of the page. The text takes over. The page derives its identity from the content, from the often uppercase and bold title in stark contrast to the peasant blankness whose purpose is for development. Whatever might be inhabiting that page already, whatever might be incubating in that environment already is subjugated by the text.


Such RUDE TEXT!
O the audacity of idea!
(image from stuffaspergerpeoplelike.com)


Not that text should be mannered and well-behaved, afraid of controversy, so respectful of every atom in the paper, so hesitant to displace them that the poem mutes itself, but
The ease with which text asserts itself on the page, with which text claims the page
is shocking —as if the page is speechless, voiceless, undeveloped until text provides
possibilities for meaning. Seldom does it seem that the writer has collaborated
with the paper, has valued what paper is bringing to the piece.

Let the text and the paper host duke it out sometimes!
Let what populates the paper reveal configurations of outcomes of the battle!

A text piece could be more responsive to specifics of the [paper] environment hosting it. [Subtle] Differences in the paper environments, even in mass reproduction of paper environments in a print run, could influence how the text is placed in that environment.

to the left: Ed Ruscha: Lisp and Lisp detail from the National Gallery of Art.
A text poam may be considered forms of idea fashion for paper pages, the idea affected by the traits of the paper model. Usually, there is a complete outfit on the page; the text poam is a system that is accessorized —the outfit cam be worn in a variety of ways via versatility of the accessories. A collection of text poetry may be considered a runway showing of the wearing of accessorized text systems.

Pënz (it was pronounced pants)

December 28, 2008.

Last Night.

Linguist signs off with a song dance.

Remembering an Art Year.

Thank you Penz.

-Scryptkeeper, Linguist, Samiya, Night.

So, last night had me really thinking about one of the most intense art projects in which I've ever participated: Pënz (it's pronounced pants). Pënz (a word made up by us four artists) was a year-long, group art project that we did in 2008. It began with a gift of hundreds of 3x5 pre-gesso'd masonite tiles. "We" were four artists - two writers, and two visual artists. All of us multi-disciplinary, but each of us deciding to push our boundaries of art practice for this project. We divided the year based on a lunar calendar, which we then divided based on the Pënz calendar which we constructed. Each Pënz day was actually four solar days. Each of us represented a Pënz day whereby each Pënz day was divided into the four solar days as: MORNING, NOON, TWILIGHT, NIGHT. I was night. We also had our Pënz names based on our art practice: I was the Linguist, there was the Materialist (Wura Natasha Ogunji / Noon), the Conceptualist (Ana Maurine Lara / Twilight), and the Feeler (Senalka McDonald / Morning).

We each had to post "art" every solar day, and each of our Pënz days we had to create and post an art piece which we've done with our Pënz tile. One of my favorite was turning it into a teabag and letting it steep on the window. It really kind of made Pënz tea. Quite fascinating. The tiles, aside from us four, were also distributed around the world. I travelled a lot that year and so did a couple of others. We were based in Austin, TX, and they were left at random places for people to find, wrapped in instructions (which you can see on the blog). We took them everywhere. They were left in hotel rooms all over the country, on airplanes, in bathrooms, given to strangers on the street, used in performances, or just placed on performance stages.

We received Pënz back from all over the country, from Europe, Australia, South America, Mexico. Folks outside of the four were tagged as "GUEST" and we also had a running Guest (the Good Rev), and there folks who participated more than once. I was constantly amazed at the creativity that would be exhibited when people would find this tile, with its simple instructions, and participate with it. Another of my favorite Guest projects came from a guy who sold me shoes in San Francisco. I gave him a tile. A month or two later he emailed it to me completely recreated as a sort of Adonis of shoes in Gay Heaven. Another regular guest was Edgar Easter, who was a stuffed rabbit who became a kind of Pënz mascot. Him, I miss. :) (you can friend him on Facebook though - but be fair-warned: he's a drunken, chain-smoking mess). It was really an amazing project. The project is also currently the subject of a woman's PhD dissertation at Pitt.

You can find out more about the project, the calendar, and see the entire Pënz year by going to the Pënz blog which we kept for the entire year (the sidebar has all kinds of info explaining the project).

This is my last post as Night -- it wasn't my art day, so I just had to post some art -- my art was a kind of video sum-up (with a tongue-in-cheek reference you'll immediately recognize) of the Pënz year. It was really moving to have it end. Four artists, working together, every day for a year. There were days we HATED each other. Hated these tiles. REALLY didn't want to do it. Wanted to quit. It's a miracle that we kept our bargain and kept to all 368 days of the Pënz year. It was 2008 too ... quite a year. Anyway. You can check out the last Night post below. And check out the blog to see the whole Pënz year. Also - at the end, there was a lot of discussion of what to do with all the tiles. I really had to let them go. We also had a couple of dozen left over that hadn't been distributed. They all went to the woman doing the dissertation project, so I have no physical remains. I sent it down the river ... always working with that "greed" thing we're talking about. Pënz belonged to none of us -- we were just the morning, we were just the noon, we were just the twilight, we were just the night. The art was everywhere.

put my poem in

Possibilities of the Page

More and more, I make and navigate digital pages; more and more I think of how pages behave, what happens on pages that are dynamic. I wonder about the emergence of pages that are life forms, that grow and evolve, triggered by interactions with content.

Customizable message plants offer a somewhat crude beginning for a green story or a poem that grows line by line in a group (or stanza) of these plants.

Are the messages and logos genetically written into the plant? —I think of genetically modified corn in which each kernel grows with a letter on it, perhaps just to spell out I am a genetically modified ear of corn.

It's not hard to imagine a very different type of spelling bee.

The words are carved into the seeds, the messages growing somewhat like scars?

I've read about those scientists that inscribed the Hebrew Bible on a silicon surface smaller than the head of a pin, so an entire story plant might be possible, might be growing somewhere.
Stories are being told without words, however; growth is affected by environmental circumstances in collaboration with genetics. It is possible to read chemical constituents of soil, air, water, fertilizers that are pages and chapters of a plant. It is possible to understand specifics of growth compromises through analysis of a plant on a cellular level.

Could an evolution of leaves that sprout messages in human languages occur without human intervention? I can imagine that, but I think that, for now, imagination is best equipped to support that evolution.

Poems that a 17th century Chinese farmwife reportedly wrote on tea leaves with pollen, circumventing her husband's envy of her literacy did not inspire the tea to grow differently, and the steam from tea as he drank it did not spell out the content that he drank without comprehension, her satisfaction taken entirely by him as a form of, a page of the pleasure that is possible for a wife to feel for accomplishment that strengthens marriage, a fist of her words liquified to flow easily down his throat, swallowed without question.