Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You

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A Free Symposium on Bob Cobbing. Chelsea College of Arts (Banqueting Suite). 10:00- 18:00, Thursday 21 May.

Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You contextualises Cobbing’s work as a concrete poet as well as looking at his legacy as an organiser. The day is built around concerns that continue to be relevant today, such as the value of artist-led publishing initiatives, archiving artist collections, and the intersections between art, poetry, literature and music. More details can be found at Robert Sheppard’s site.

The Other Room reviewed

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Thanks to all who came to our seventh birthday event on 30th April, which was, in the words, of Judy Gordon, a night of “meltdowns, anthropomorphic puzzles, and other surprises”. Thanks to Judy and Write Out Loud for this review, which you can read in full here.

A World Without Words

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A World Without Words is a project by writer and filmmaker Lotje Sodderland, in collaboration with poet and curator SJ Fowler and artist and material engineer Thomas Duggan.

Bringing together the most dynamic genre pioneers in neuroscience and sensory aesthetics, A World Without Words explores the nature of human language through a collaborative program of exhibitions, interactive events, and screenings in bespoke venues across London.

Language is considered perhaps the most characteristic ability of the human species, yet very little is known about it. When Lotje had an unprovoked brain hemorrhage, she woke to find a familiar stranger inhabiting her body, where her ‘self’ used to be. Unable to read, write, speak, or think coherently, she used this unique opportunity as a lens through which to explore the everyday assumptions of how we wield words to express ourselves, bringing a profoundly personal perspective to the contemporary Copernican revolution of neuroscience.

A World Without Words is the latest in Lotje’s body of work around visual perception and neurolinguistics, notable highlights being her Guardian feature All In My Mind and multiple award-winning documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain.

The first event is on May 6th 7.00pm – 10.00pm, Apiary Studios, 458 Hackney Road, London, E2 9EG. Entry is free. Space is limited so come early to get a spot.

JR Carpenter: A Preview

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I always start with a story. Even if the story is a poem. I almost never know what the final form of the piece will be. Even if the piece has been finished for some time. Some stories just don’t seem finished, even after publication. I wrote the text of Entre Ville by hand on a hammock in Vermont. It was published in an online journal in 2005 Then I shot the video. Then I was commission by the Conseil des Arts de Montreal to create a piece for their 50th anniversary. Then I edited the video at OBORO, which took a month. Only then did I begin the web integration. The main interface was built around a line drawing I had made in a note book in 1992. I used pop-up windows because there were so many images of windows in the piece. There is nothing particularly complicated about the programming of the piece.

Read more of this interview in the Huffington Post HERE or visit JRs website HERE

JR will read at The Other Room 7th birthday, 30th April.

For more details of the night see the poster in the middle column.

Tim Allen – A New Geography of Romanticism

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“There is another England, a country not of Cameron, Farage and the house of Windsor, but of Lear and Carroll, Gasgoyne and Blake, a deeper, darker, stranger place. It is of this nation underground that Tim Allen is the cartographer. A New Geography of Romanticism stakes out this shadowy turf with prismatic, kaleidoscopic brilliance. Reading this book on another rainy afternoon in Albion is a beautifully startling experience, like finding a giant hailstone in the fireplace or a peacock perched on the sideboard. These poems are the potions of the maddest of scientists, a gift of sherbet lemons from the gods.” Tom Jenks.

Out now on The Red Ceilings Press.

Lou Rowan: A Preview

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LR: In my single-digit years I’d sit on the floor by the supermarket magazine rack reading comics. I felt that Superman and Superboy were more “real” and “normal” than the Marvel Comics heroes. The Superman movies I’ve found pretty average, but liked the Lois character, except for the sanctimonious Lois in the latest movie. The novel uses the basic knowledge any American might have of our primary superhero. 

Read the rest of this interview at Lou’s website HERE

Lou will read at The Other Room 7th birthday, 30th April.

For more details of the night see the poster in the middle column.

Live Coding Alternatives Workshop call

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Call for position papers and performances as part of Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference, 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Organizers:
 Alan Blackwell, Reader in Interdisciplinary Design, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (UK); Emma Cocker, Reader in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University (UK); Geoff Cox, Associate Professor, Participatory IT research centre, Aarhus University (DK)

Live Coding Alternatives is an interdisciplinary workshop (‘live laboratory’) for testing and exploring live coding as a creative, aesthetic and potentially political practice for constructing ‘critical alternatives’ within both computing and everyday life. The workshop explores this emergent field and aims to open up deeper critical questions about contemporary cultural production and computational culture. It is structured around live research practices of writing, presentation and performance, collaboratively interrogated through discussion, and the development of critical frameworks that reflect the live coding dynamic. Live Coding Alternatives emphasizes the relation of live coding to the cultivation of ‘alternative’, potentially subversive, ways of operating within contemporary culture. In addition the workshop explores the alternative possibilities offered by live coding practice as able in itself to generate epistemic claims through software development, improvised live performance and ‘artistic research’. The intention is not only to propose how live coding transforms code and coding practice but to investigate the transformational potential inherent within the process of live coding itself. We ask what possibilities for change and action does the practice of live coding suggest? What alternative ways of ‘being operative’ are evoked? We welcome analytical, theoretical and reflective papers from diverse disciplines but especially want to encourage expanded notions of live coding in the form of performances and alternative presentation modes.

Initial areas of interest might include:
* Live coding and performance writing, interplay of text and code, experimental notation practices
* Live coding, its transformative potential and politics
* Live coding, temporality and just-in-time production
* Live coding, alternative epistemologies and artistic research
* Live coding, subjectivity and ‘life’ coding
* Live coding and attribution in reputation economies
* Live coding as the persistent traces of interaction

Position papers will be circulated in advance. Working throughout the day, there will be a critical interlocutor and facilitator, helping excavate and elaborate key ideas connecting live coding to the cultivation of various ‘critical alternatives’. Results of the workshop will be published on the Live Coding Network website<http://www.livecodenetwork.org/&gt;.

Important dates:
Call goes live: 02 April
Proposals due: 20 May (email 300 word proposals to gcox@dac.au.dk)
Results made known: 31 May
Workshop: 17 or 18 August 2015, Aarhus

About Critical Alternatives: 1975-1985-1995-2005 — the decennial Aarhus conferences have traditionally been instrumental for setting new agendas for critically engaged thinking about information technology. The conference series is fundamentally interdisciplinary and emphasizes thinking that is firmly anchored in action, intervention, and scholarly critical practice. In 2015, we see critical alternatives in alignment with utopian principles—that is, the hope that things might not only be different but also radically better. At the same time, radically better alternatives don’t emerge out of nowhere: they emerged from contested analyses of the mundane present and demand both commitment and labor to work towards them. More information here .Critical Alternatives, 5th Decennial Aarhus Conference.

CAESURA #30: Third birthday

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17th April, 19:30.
The Artisan Bar, Edinburgh, EH7 5BQ.
Celebrating three years of exploring the recesses language and sound through poetry, music and art with a return to our auld haunt – upstairs at The Artisan on London Road.

The event will feature an avant radge poet, a Glasgow-based experimental writer, a performance from an actor-provocateur and some words and noise from a lanky jive merchant that is normally (perhaps mercifully) constrained to short bursts.

That is Calum Rodger, Katy Hastie, Jamie Scott Gordon and GS Smith.

w/ more to be announced!
CALUM RODGER

Calum Rodger is a Glasgow-based poet working online, on the page and in performance. His first pamphlet

‘Know Yr Stuff: Poems on Hedonism’ was published in 2014 by Tapsalteerie with limited edition booklet

Glasgow Flourishes (of a poem first performed at TEDxGlasgow) following later that year.

He runs live poetry night VERSE HEARSE with Stewart Sanderson, is currently finishing a PhD on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay at the University of Glasgow, and is a contributor to I ♥ E-Poetry and Glasgow Review of Books. Previous collaborators include artists, musicians, software developers, theatre directors, charities and a chef.

He likes limit-experiences, metaphysics and retro video games, and he blogs at All Real Culture Is Free.
-www.allrealcultureisfree.wordpress.com
KATY HASTIE

Katy Hastie is a new writer learning her stuff at Glasgow Uni.

She’ll do anything to get a laugh, cough, tear or a moment of your time: cut-ups, poems, short stories, flash fiction, radio drama and essays.

Places she’s tried not to waste that attention include: Rally and Broad, Fail Better, SubCity radio and Glasgow to Saturn.
JAMIE SCOTT GORDON

Jamie is a Scottish actor, working in film and theatre.

He enjoyed a busy 2014 making films in the UK and America. He looks forward to the release of five films in 2015.

He is currently co-writing his first feature for Hex Media and is in pre-production with his own short film.
GS SMITH

Edinburgh-native GS Smith is a writer and curator.

He has created word-filled egg filled installations in abandoned vaults, farcical pseudo-lectures on abnormal psychology and various collaborative pieces with poets, actors, artists and musicians. In May some of his poems will be turned into interactive computer games in a performance for European Literature Night.

He has curated two exhibitions of visual poetry – show&tell (2013) and Palimpcyst (2014) – and since 2012 he has run the reading series CAESURA.