Open Port Festival
Sara Schnadt
http://www.openportchicago.com/
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OPENPORT: Realtime Performance, Sound, and Language
Links Hall's new Artistic Associates each curate a month-long series of performance, based on expertise in their respective artistic fields. February's program was curated by Nathan Butler (US), Mark Jeffery (UK), Judd Morrissey (US), and Lori Talley (US).
OPENPORT is a convergence of artists from a set of distinct contemporary practices including movement-based live art, experimental sound, performance writing, and electronic poetry. Through the rigorous use of the live body and experimental time-based structures, or through an engagement with realtime composition, virtuality, or machine-processes, the artists arriving for OPENPORT complicate and re-map our notions of language, physicality, space, and time, navigating the hidden terrains and encodings of our networked culture.
Keywords:
the live body
network presence
virtual embodiment and disembodiment
duration
slowness
live writing
programmatic composition
realtime data acquisition and processing
OPENPORT Week One-February 2, 3, & 4
Week One
February 2-4
Each program: $12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed) ( mailto:adminis...@linkshall.org )
Friday, February 2, 7:30pm
Jillian Peña (US) - The Promised Land
Filled with hope, The Promised Land is a dance piece about love, desire, restlessness, and ambition. Expressions escape the body in forms such as ecstatic dancing, meditation, sex, and emotions. The dance responds to the anxiety felt somewhere between expectation and failure. Chicagoan Jillian Peña is a video maker, dancer, improviser, negotiator, and writer, and this performance was made while in residency at The Kitchen, NYC. www.jillianpena.com
Loss Pequeño Glazier (US) - Bromeliasas
Exploring new possibilities for web-based digital art, Bromeliasas is a computer-selected rendering of text and images extracted from poetry databases. Glazier's digital poetry also engages with sound, photography, and video; and includes themes of ecology, Latin American landscapes, and the delicate but tangible thread of language. Buffalo (NY) based Glazier is a poet, and Founder and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center, the world's most extensive Web-based digital poetry resource, housed at the State University of New York. www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier
Brian O' Reilly (US) - Weather Mechanics
Weather Mechanics connects sound to moving image. The work is constructed by analog video, where projected images bleed onto one another, intersecting and blurring their lines like layered, waterlogged paper. Currently working as an Artist in Residence at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, Brian O'Reilly is the creator of various works for sound, moving images, multi media assemblage/installation, and is a double bassist.
Saturday, February 3, 7:30pm
Brian O' Reilly (US) - two performances
octal hatch, a collection of miniature abstract audio and video portraits of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis; and scan processor studies, developed in collaboration with Woody Vasulka, and including improvisations with experimental sound composer Robb Drinkwater.
jUStin!katKO (US) - Carriage Return Terror We
A generation of power in one hand and and an engineering of what's ours in the other. jUStin!katKO is an intermedia writer and publisher in Oxford, OH. www.justin-katko.tk
Michael Graeve (AUS) - Simple Methods
Graeve works with old domestic and schoolroom record players and loudspeakers, reveling in the volatile and unpredictable nature of the equipment. Rich tones, textures, and rhythms fall together and fall apart, evidencing simple interactions between machine process and human gesture, with the limitations of the technology producing complex results. Michael Graeve is an Australian artist living in Chicago, working in painting and sound installation, performance and composition.
Sunday, February 4, 7:30pm
Jillian Peña (US) - The Promised Land
Loss Pequeño Glazier (US) - Io Sono At Swoons
Following his presentation on Friday February 2, Glazier presents a different work, which electronically converts text from a database of linguistic stems and words to generate sound and poetry. Along with English, fragments of multiple languages are interwoven to produce a unique fabric of sounds, sometimes humorous, often surprising in tone, density, and color.
jUStin!katKO (US) - Carriage Return Terror We
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OPENPORT Week Two-February 9, 10, & 11
Week Two
February 9-11
Each program: $12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed)
Friday, February 9, 7:30pm
Galen Curwen-McAdams (US) - Diasporalities
Curwen-McAdams' writings and technological interventions are driven by his theoretical explorations and research into human and computer languages, internet protocols, and network architectures. Diasporalities is a performance of the routes, traces, mappings, and gestures of bodies traversing networks. Curwen-McAdams is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who currently lives in Portland, Oregon. www.diaspor.alities.info
jonCates + jake elliot (US) - 0UR080R05
jonCates + jake elliott embark on a realtime audio video performance, where digital systems coil into themselves, creating a speculative screenplay, virtually typewritten onto the raw 16mm film footage of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Chicago-based artists jonCates + jake elliott collaborate on various initiatives involving artware-radical, conceptual software engineered or hacked/modified by artists. www.systemsapproach.net; www.structuredsound.net/jake
Tyne Dogger artist
Caroline Bergvall (UK) - FIG REDUCTION
Caroline Bergvall presents a series of textual pieces based around her recent book FIG. Incorporating video projections and her virtuoso reading technique, this is poetry of complex language and engaged thought. Bergvall is a poet, performance artist, and critic based in London, noted for her pointed as well as playful tugging at identities and prejudices as they are manifested in language. She is co-Chair of Writing, Milton Avery School of the Arts. www.carolinebergvall.net
eRikm (FR) - eRikm turntables solo
French sound artist eRikm is renowned for his virtuoso turntabling, which he integrates with electronic instruments and other tools. He has collaborated with many international artists, including Voice Crack, Christian Marclay, and Luc Ferrari, and explores relationships between rock music, contemporary composition, and free improvisation. www.erikm.com
Saturday, February 10, 7:30pm
Tyne Dogger artist
Caroline Bergvall (UK) - FIG REDUCTION
Tyne Dogger artist
Marisa Zanotti (UK) - Edges
In her new performance Edges, Brighton/Glasgow-based Marisa Zanotti combines material from her earlier dance piece, Wipe Out, with projected images to blur the definitions of performance and film: considering the film set a performance space, and filmmaking as a performance. In addition to performance, Zanotti works in film drama, and her first short, At the end of the sentence, has been shown at many international film festivals.
A performance space marked out in shifting TV monochrome...half lit snapshots, fragments of fading memory...questions about presence, space, the body and the technology of mediation...trembling fragility...lingering depth. Live Art Magazine
Mark Booth (US) - this is the sound of the milky way (projective version)
Mark Booth's new audio project combines text with live and pre-recorded sound, to investigate the natural environment, the limits of electronics, and physical presence in the world. Booth's recordings include phenomena which can be recorded with a conventional microphone (water, rain, wind, speech), and phenomena which cannot (the milky way, the sun, the moon). Mark Booth works with sound, text and painting, and is based in Chicago; he curated the festival An Incomplete Map of Everything for Links Hall in 2006.
Sunday, February 11, 7:30pm
eRikm (FR) - eRikm turntables solo
Tyne Dogger artist
Marisa Zanotti (UK) - Edges
Simon Lonergan (US) - Bench Only
Lonergan's performances incorporate hand-made electronic instruments that blend processes of feedback, resonance, and recording into electro-acoustic improvisations. Influenced by the writings of Kenneth Maue and the audio work of David Tudor, Alvin Lucier, and Nic Collins, Lonergan performs here with a modified 1950s Lowry Tube Organ Bench-a seat that has been modified to become an instrument. Lonergan studied experimental music and composition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and now lives in Davenport, Iowa.
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OPENPORT Week Three-February 16, 17, & 18
Week Three
February 16-18
Each program: $12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed)
Friday, February 16, 7:30pm
Tyne Dogger artist
Donna Rutherford (UK) - Ochone Ochone
Glasgow-based performance artist Donna Rutherford looks at how people overcome and move on from tragedy, or, in contrast, the effects of avoidance and repression. Ochone refers to "sorrows from before that are still with us," and this emotional work references the Kurdish Iraqi community in Glasgow. www.donnarutherford.org
Ochone Ochone is more than an engagingly delivered series of quirky confidences...dealing with the ongoing grief and the moral dilemmas that are Iraq, I doubt there are many shows that touch on that territory so tenderly and with such humanity. The Herald (Scotland)
Tyne Dogger artist
TNWK (UK) - Nurse Trash
In 1999, TNWK "destroyed" 100 books; they have been working with the "remains" ever since, creating an ongoing series of thought-provoking and visually seductive performances that combine film, text, and spoken word. TNWK (things not worth keeping) is a collaboration between Kirsten Lavers (a multidisciplinary artist based in Cambridge, UK) and cris cheek (a British performance poet based in Ohio). www.tnwk.net
TNWK's process releases value -- variously coded as commodity, memory, connoisseurship, etc -- into the intensity of shared work. Sandy Baldwin
Talan Memmott (US) - Twittering
Twittering is a hypermedia performance developed from a paper-based work of the same name. The phrases of Memmott's written text, represented as images, audio, and animations, are recombined in realtime with a live reading of excerpts from the appendix of Memmott's original text. Memmott is a hypermedia writer/artist from San Francisco, now based in Monterey Bay, CA, and the Creative Director and Editor of the online hypermedia literary journal BeeHive. www.memmott.org
Saturday, February 17, 7:30pm
Dana Vinger & Robyn Okrant (US) - (nervous) system
Separated by geography and time zones, theater and performance artists Vinger (Portland) and Okrant (Chicago) find commonality in the systems that overwhelm their lives. They weave a tapestry of spoken language from original and found texts that address both personal and public concerns, including the corporate ideology that shapes and fuels America's urban public education system, and a patient's struggles in a sea of red tape, chronic pain, and stifling amounts of conflicting medical advice.
Goat Island (US) - Lasting, part one
Goat Island Performance Group, the art students of Northside College Prep, and special musical guest Smokey Hormel, present a multi-media collaborative performance in celebration of lastness. Goat Island began in 1987, and has since toured nationally and internationally. This event inaugurates a new web project, which responds to Goat Island's recent decision to make their last performance together: www.thelastperformance.org; www.goatislandperformance.org
Wilton Azevedo (BR) - Po e-Machine
Azevedo presents a performance of 'sonorous expanded writing' generated in realtime from a mix of live voices and virtual instruments. Po e-Machine, a project more than ten years in the making, is a computer program designed to respond in unpredictable ways to changes in its poetic labyrinth. Azevedo was born in São Paulo, Brazil; an artist, graphic designer, poet and musician, he is also a Doctor of Communication and Semiotics.
Tyne Dogger artist
TNWK (UK) - Nurse Trash
Sunday, February 18, 7:30pm
Tyne Dogger artist
Donna Rutherford (UK) - Ochone Ochone
Talan Memmot (US) - Twittering
Wilton Azevedo (BR) - Po e-Machine
Marina Peterson (US) - Solo cello
Marina Peterson presents improvised sonic explorations on the cello; sometimes acoustic, sometimes amplified. Peterson plays primarily new and improvised music, and is a member of Ensemble Noamnesia and Neme. She is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University in Athens, OH. ( mailto:adminis...@linkshall.org )
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OPENPORT Week Four-February 23, 24, & 25
Week Four
February 23-25
Each program: $12 ($10 students, seniors, unemployed) ( mailto:adminis...@linkshall.org )
Friday, February 23, 7:30pm
James Tierney (US) - an excerpt from The Local Memory
Tierney reads from his book The Local Memory, a work that is best described as a "fictional essay." The reading will be accompanied by images from contemporary art, and found images and screen-captures from the internet. Portland, Oregon-based James Tierney received a MFA from Brown University where he was awarded the John Hawkes Memorial Prize in Fiction. He has published fictions, critical essays, and a play in the Golden Handcuffs Review.
Tyne Dogger artist
John Cayley (UK) - imposition
John Cayley uses computer programming to experiment with time-based language poetics using self-devised processes of 'translation' and 'transliteration' through which texts move between languages and states of legibility. Audience members will be able to use networked laptops to track and interpret the work as part of a live, interactive presentation. Cayley is a London-based poet, translator, publisher, and book dealer. He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, University of London. www.shadoof.net/in
Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci (FR) - Untitled (Prayers) 1996-2004
Based in France, Cool and Balducci have collaborated since 1995 to great international acclaim. These selections from their series of short (often two to three minute-long) performances Untitled (Prayers) 1996-2004, are performed solo by Marie Cool, who uses basic movements, objects, and materials to evoke both the personal and universal. Without character or narration, this work resists categorization as dance, theater or performance.
The lightness and simplicity of their pieces belies the forces that drive them and the high seriousness of their ambitions... they are set to win a status among the most important artists of the first half of the 21st century. Contemporary Magazine
Saturday, February 24, 3pm
$10
Marie Cool & Fabio Balducci (FR) - Untitled (Prayers) 1996-2004
A special matinee performance by Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci. For description, see Friday, February 23.
Saturday, February 24, 7:30pm
Tyne Dogger artist
John Cayley (UK) - imposition
Alan Sondheim (US) - ski/nn & Interior Avatar
NYC-based Sondheim's laptop performances combine live writing with video and sound projections, creating a multilayered work that engages with philosophy, psychology, language, the body, and virtuality. Sondheim's recent books include Orders of the Real (Writers Forum, 2005), and he co-moderates several pioneering email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture, and Wryting. www.asondheim.org
Laetitia Sonami & Sue Costabile (US) - The Appearance of Silence (The Invention of Perspective)
Inspired by the gardens depicted in early Italian Renaissance paintings, Sonami (live electronics) and Costabile (live video) use the context of historical and new technologies to explore the shifting perspectives between representation and abstraction, digital saturation and spatial rendering. Originally from France, Sonami is a composer, performer, and sound installation artist working in Oakland, CA. Costabile is a visual and performing artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, whose work challenges the norms of photography, video, and technology. www.sonami.net; www.sue-c.net
Tyne Dogger artist
Fiona Wright (UK) - On Lying (in a blue dress/early version)
A new solo performance, in which a body is moved to confess or at least commit to making it all up. Wright's performance is something like she imagines writing a blog would be if she could only bear the thought of turning up in so many other people's lives at once. Based in Newcastle, UK, Fiona Wright is known for her stylized and functional choreography, combined with a personalized vein of writing.
Sunday, February 25, 7:30pm
Alan Sondheim (US) - ski/nn & Interior Avatar
Laetitia Sonami & Sue Costabile (US) - The Appearance of Silence (The Invention of Perspective)
Tyne Dogger artist
Fiona Wright (UK) - On Lying (in a blue dress/early version)
Litó Walkey (CAN) and Boris Hauf (AUT) - instanded i turn
Broadcasting through the web from their current home base Berlin, Walkey and Hauf present a "concert of reconstructions," in response to Samuel Beckett's Film, the paintings of Michael Borremans, storytelling, and country music. Litó Walkey is a member of Chicago-based Goat Island and in 2005, as Links Hall Artistic Associate, she curated a drop of water: Dance from Europe. Boris Hauf is the founder of efzeg, and often plays with the Chicago-based bands tvpow and Lozenge. www.lito.klingt.org; www.hauf.klingt.org ( mailto:adminis...@linkshall.org )
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OPENPORT Symposium, Panel Discussion, and Exibition
Tyne Dogger
Panel Discussion
Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington
First Floor Garland Room
Saturday February 17, 2 - 3:30pm
Free
Tyne Dogger artists Donna Rutherford, TNWK (cris cheek and Kirsten Lavers), and Fiona Wright discuss their individual work, their experiences in the field of Live Art, and the current climate of Live Art/Performance in the UK/Europe. Issues of commonality and distinction between Chicago and the UK, and the challenges of creation, presentation and sustainability, will be addressed. The panel will be moderated by OPENPORT curator Mark Jeffery.
The Disappearance of Latitude: Live Presence and Realtime in Contemporary Practices
A two-day Symposium
Thursday February 22 & Friday February 23
Free
This symposium brings together theorists and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds to present lectures and participate in discussions formulated around the themes of "Live" and "Realtime," and topics that arise from this convergence of terms. As with the OPENPORT performance series, the intention of the symposium is to group speakers from fields and backgrounds that, while perhaps not normally exposed to one another, may share a common vocabulary. This symposium is presented in collaboration with The School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Performance Department.
ADVANCE REGISTRATION ESSENTIAL: email mje...@saic.edu or write to SAIC, Performance Department, c/o Mark Jeffery, 280 S. Columbus Drive, Chicago, IL 60603. Please include name, phone number, email address, affiliation (if any), number and names of people you are reserving for. Reservation deadline: Monday, February 19.
Opening Address
Adrian Heathfield (UK) - Impress of Time
Thursday February 22, 6pm
SAIC Auditorium, 280 S. Columbus Drive
Performance and live art are currently undergoing a critical, curatorial, and artistic renaissance. How might we think of the changing cultural force of performance? Evoking the work of performance artist Tehching Hsieh - exemplary models of art pressed to conceptual and physical limits - Heathfield re-considers the critical paradigms through which performance has been interpreted. Moving away from ideas of performance as a momentary shattering, Heathfield explores the ways that performance remains in and through the experience of duration. Adrian Heathfield is President of Performance Studies International. www.adrianheathfield.com
Introduced by Lin Hixson, Professor in Performance at SAIC.
Presentations and Panels
Friday February 23, 9am - 4:30pm
SAIC Performance Space 012 & Base Space, 280 S. Columbus Drive
Friday's symposium events consist of talks from two distinguished visiting scholars, in conjunction with panel presentations from OPENPORT artists and SAIC faculty members.
Visiting Scholars:
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Brown University (US): Realtime Imagined Networks
N. Katherine Hayles, UCLA (US): The Time of Electronic Literature
OPENPORT Artists / Panelists:
jonCates (US) - OPENPORT artist/SAIC Faculty
John Cayley (UK) - OPENPORT artist
Lin Hixson (US) - SAIC Faculty
Kirsten Lavers (UK) - OPENPORT artist
Matthew Goulish (US) - SAIC Faculty
Laetitia Sonami (US) - OPENPORT artist
Alan Sondheim (US) - OPENPORT artist
Fiona Wright (UK) - OPENPORT artist
Exhibition:
Tyne Dogger artists
TNWK (UK) - Sheet of Paper
In progress public viewings-February 19-21, 12noon-1pm & 4-5pm
Final installation and performances-February 22-24, 10am-5pm
SAIC Base Space, 280 S. Columbus Drive
In an orgy of intertextuality, UK transdisciplinary art and text collaboration TNWK (things not worth keeping) will be working from February 19-21 at SAIC, where they will be open to visitors each day from 12noon-1pm and 4-5pm. The result of TNWK's efforts will be presented on February 22-24, a "mesh of occurrences" potentially generated and documented by sound works, digital photography, performances, book-art, and hyper-text. Sheet of Paper is being made specifically for the OPENPORT symposium. www.tnwk.net