Nathan Jones

A Future / No Future Poetry Experiment with Poetry Wales

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7 April at 7 PM. Jacobs Market, West Canal Wharf, Cardiff, CF10 5DB.

Cardiff Poetry Experiment will launch Poetry Wales’s new Future/No Future issue with an evening of live poetry at Jacob’s Antiques in Cardiff.

What happens to language when the future keeps getting cancelled?

Nathan Jones, Peter Finch, Ailbhe Darcy and Julia Rose Lewis will read and perform from the new issue which explores futurism, utopia, dystopia and the ‘lossy present’.

Organised by Poetry Wales and the Cardiff Poetry Experiment, supported by the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.

Nathan Jones at Club Big, Home theatre, Manchester

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Club Big: Feb 10 2017

Part of: Club Big

At the centre of John Hyatt: Rock Art is Club Big, a fully kitted-out pop-up music club. John Hyatt is your magical master of ceremonies, introducing the best breakthrough live music and performance every Friday from 18:00 – 21:00. Hosting bands, soloists, the supernatural and the dramatic and featuring the Club Big House Band (provided by Cacophany Arkestra), our host Anastasia, and fully licensed bar. All events are free to attend.

Our line-up for Friday Feb 10 is:

Danielle Swindells: The Ashleigh Hotel

A short documentary filmed inside of The Ashleigh Hotel, once a seaside guesthouse hosting “bucket and spade” holiday-goers. It closed its doors to the public in 1982 to become a House of Multiple Occupation; now a permanent home to a group of Blackpool residents estranged from their social networks. The site was visited alone by the filmmaker over a period of five weeks and is a response to the exilic position of its residents.

Nathan Jones

Nathan Jones performs from his traumatictime series, based on two statements by Rosi Braidotti: “language is compressing, cracking under the weight of the anthropocene” and “post truth is the white male body cracking under the pressure of its own lies”. What are these cracks and what leaks out from them? poems.

Nathan is a poet and artist based in Liverpool. He teaches art writing at Liverpool John Moores University and is REID funded cross disciplinary scholar at Royal Holloway University of London. His work has recently featured on programmes at Foundation for Art and Creative Technology (FACT) in Liverpool, Transmediale in Berlin and Parasol in London. His essay/poetry pamphlet A Cloud of Birds Also Formlessly Flocking on Top of a Lake is published by Dock Road Press, and his journalism and poetry can be found on new media blog Furtherfield and in Poetry Wales, Datableed and Art Monthly.

Ruby Tingle

Though working predominately in collage, Ruby Tingle’s practice expands into music and performance. She deconstructs and reworks familiar images, objects, and sounds to assemble ambiguous and extraordinary forms. Ruby’s practice is grounded in natural history, and her practice is littered with references to creatures that share the globe. Her unique appearance characterises her work and offers her an opportunity to place herself within her work. Her works deal with a private symbolism and employ self-portraiture as a tool to exist vicariously in between states. These transformations allow Ruby to create an alternate folklore and natural history where boundaries between human and animal are obscured. Performance is used as a platform for the large-scale translation of these ideas, often utilising life drawing as an interactive element and theme. Ruby uses her body as a living portrait, forcing her interaction with the three-dimensional collage installations she creates. Music, often comprised of sonic collage pieces from original recorded instrumentation and sound samples, operate alongside these visual works and can support them audibly. The ‘cutting up’ and manipulation of personal conceptual songs form new responsive sound pieces to score live works, whilst physical releases act as art object editions.

 

https://homemcr.org/event/club-big-feb-10-2017/

Storm and Golden Sky at the Caledonia

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Sarah Crewe and Nathan Jones. Friday 29th April.

Up the stairs (at the back of the barroom) at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £5, 7.30 pm spot-on start!

Nathan Jones is a poet and writer based in Liverpool. His current work mixes technological forms of composition and production with autobiographical subject matter.  He is currently PhD student at Royal Holloway University of London exploring the concept of “Glitch Poetics” and the impact of technology on contemporary poetry. He is also co-editor of mind-language-technology publisher Torque, and director of literature and performance agency Mercy 2003. His book length poem Noah’s Ark was published by Henningham Family Press. He also writes criticism for new media blog Furtherfield and Art Monthly. He is co-host of Storm and Golden Sky!

Sarah Crewe is from the Port of Liverpool. Her work focuses largely on working class feminist psychogeography. Her latest publication is urchin (dancing girl press 2016.) Previous chapbooks includeRWF/RAF,a collaboration with Pascal O’Loughlin,(Stinky Bear Press 2015) sea witch (Leafe Press,2014) andflick invicta (Oystercatcher,2012.) She collaborates frequently with Sophie Mayer and her work can be heard at the Archive of the Now website. She will be starting a Masters in Poetry:Innovative Practice and Research at the University of Kent in September.

Storm is run by Nathan Jones, Eleanor Rees, Michael Egan and Robert Sheppard.

Syndrome 2.3: Caroline Bergvall – Drift

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adv. £5 / £6/7 on door
8pm // TUESDAY 7th OCT
24 Kitchen Street, Liverpool

Drift takes you on a journey through time and space, where languages mix, where the ancient cohabits with the present.

Internationally renowned writer and performer Caroline Bergvall teams up with the Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach, Swiss visual artist and programmer Thomas Köppel and Swiss dramaturge Michel Pralong for this unique and extraordinary performance concert. Using live voice, live percussion and 3D text treatments, they create a dense, moveable and abstract universe of drifting, shifting, sounding language mass. An intensely hypnotic work.

Drift invents a language of connections and of extremes: from Anglo-Saxon and ancient Nordic seafaring literature to rare pop songs to human rights reports of contemporary sea migrants’ disaster. A complex and haunting meditation on sea travel, exile and history. A contemporary elegy.

Inspired by the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer, Drift was originally commissioned for the festival lost.last.gru by Grü/Transtheatre, Geneva. It recently opened Shorelines Festival of the Sea, Southend-on-Sea, to great acclaim.

Thank heaven for Caroline Bergvall, an artist and poet pushing the boundaries of language in a blogged-up and twittering world.
– The Guardian

This is a truly international show and the premiere of DRIFT in the UK – make sure you can say that you were there!
– Rachel Lichtenstein, writer and curator of Shorelines

More here.

Syndrome 2.1: Choros

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Click image for more details.

A room-as-instrument devised by artist Jamie Gledhill with sound artist Stefan Kazassoglou, using an array of computers attached to X-box Kinect devices. This project brings together popularly available motion capture technology with 3D audio set up into a unique experiential and performative artwork.

The work will allow for the dynamics and speed of a users movement within the space form a live illustrative mapping on the walls, and for sound to be literally ‘thrown’ across the 3D space by a performer – and members of the public as active participators in their own performative moment with the work.

The CHOROS installation will be open for playing and viewing from 10 – 4pm on 22nd – 24th August. Entering the space, the movements of your limbs will be traced by light and sound across a 3D axis using projections and an ambisonic speaker array. Entry is free for all, and suitable for all ages.

A launch event will feature a brand new movement work by SJ Fowler in which he explores the ritual and violence of martial arts:

The Book of Five Rings by SJ FOWLER
The Book of Five Rings is an unforgettable exploration of physicality and martial spirituality through cutting edge avant garde theatre and performance. And while each Ring will be decidedly different, each a unique, responsive production to its subject, as a whole, they will form an unforgettable tale of a universal human expression, battle without violence, war without war.

no. 1: Pugilistica UK / US (western boxing)
A conceptual performance exploring the sport of Boxing. SJ Fowler takes the audience through a boxing workout with a different, shadow boxing with a complex, cutting edge technological rig, so that each movement has a responsive light and sound reaction. An exhausting, explosive performance of light and sound
The work will then be available to view from 21st – 24th August.

Torque

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Torque
Fri Jun 06 2014 at 08:00 pm
RichMix, 35 – 47 Bethnal Green Road, London, United Kingdom

The future of speech, language systems and techno-cognition combined as a one-off show for the theatre at Rich Mix.

This multimedia performance night features top practitioners from fields of poetry, live coding, dance, diy robotics, classical music, animation and theatre, entwined into a twisted symphony of voice, light, bodies and sound.

Featuring:
Oliver Coates
NEW COMMISSION comprising cello, electronics and field recordings, alongside ‘Oraison’ by Messiaen, one of the first compositions written for electronic instruments. Accompanied by newly commissioned video works by Sam Skinner.

Holly Pester
HANNAH WEINER’S CODE POEMS: a re-staging of Hannah Weiner’s 1960’s work, a poem/performance score using the coded signalling system for ships at sea.

Alex McLean & Kate Siccio
BODY CODE creates a feedback loop and conversation through code, music, choreography, and dance.

Karl Heinz Jeron
SIM GISHEL is a multi-media robot. He sings and dances for money, and tries hard to take part in casting shows to become a pop-star.

Nathan Jones & Mark Greenwood
THE NODES series of conversations as radical language events, proposing a future for speech beyond communication.

**
Torque [LIVE]is part of the Torque programme, exploring the twisting together of language, brain and technology in the 21st century.
**
TICKETS: http://www.richmix.org.uk/whats-on/event/torque-twisting-language-brain-technology/

TORQUE SYMPOSIUM

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TORQUE SYMPOSIUM
an arts and science platform where international thinkers present new ways language, brain and technology are twisting together.

11 – 6pm / Wednesday, 30th April @ FACT, Liverpool

TICKETS
Featuring a range of talks, short film screenings and Q&A with leading thinkers in the arts, poetry, technology and cognitive sciences, the Torque Symposium seeks to address urgent questions around the changing nature of our relationship to language and thought in a digital age. In particular the day will address the ways technology affects our minds and modes of communication – and vice versa.

The symposium asks:
· As cyber-prosthetics are replaced by imperceptible interfaces, where do we draw the lines between technology, mind and modes of communication?

· What happens when technology becomes sentient?

· How is our behaviour corralled and twisted by online surveillance, targeted advertising and the compulsive spectacle of not-so-social networking?

· And how can we better understand and empower our interaction with technology?

Participants:
Lambros Malafouris // Anna Munster (online) // Cécile B Evans
Benedict Drew (video) // Imogen Stidworthy // Hannah Proctor
Holly Pester // Stephen Fortune // Alex McLean // Mez Breeze (video)

The symposium seeks in-part to foreground today’s technologies, and our use of them from the perspective of early tool making and use, and the feedbacks and blurred lines between mind and matter.”

The title of the symposium, a play on the verb ‘to talk’, and refers to torque’s original latin meaning ’to twist’, and also the twisting forces which distort language, technologies and cognitive processes by braiding them together. The cerebral torque is also a central term used by neuroscientist Tim Crow in his 2009 thesis that ‘Schizophrenia is the price Homosapians pay for language’.

Selected presentation summaries:
Keynote speaker and ‘cognitive archaeologist’ Lambros Malafouris will present his Material Engagement Theory through the lens of clay tablets and knapped flint, exploring implications that follow the human predisposition to reconfigure our bodies and extend our senses by using tools and material culture.
Artist Cécile B Evans presents and speaks about her character AGNES, which inhabits the Serpentine Gallery’s website, interacting with visitors and testing the bounds of affective relationships with technology.

Live coding practitioner Alex McLean explores the connection between silicone computers and human weavers, and how live coding is blurring the distinction between programming and natural language.

More at http://torquetorque.tumblr.com/symposium

Syndrome Sessions 1.0

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Sat 26 April / 8pm till 11pm + Afterparty till 2am 24 Kitchen Street. Tickets £5.

24 Kitchen Street, Baltic Quarter, Liverpool.

Session 1.0 : Celebrate the launch of this year-long programme of arts and technology experimentation and see three new works exploring the sensational potential of our new performance resource, The Drome. Featuring new performance works from Hannah Silva, Nathan Jones & Mark Greenwood, and The Hive Collective. More here.

Storm and Golden Sky

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Born of a Liverpool taste for variety and drama, ‘Storm and Golden Sky’ offers literary high style from across the poetic landscape; experimental, lyric, performance and all that is in-between, and brings them, two at a time, hand by hand, into the city bounds for a reading series which revels in the intensities and complexities of our art.

Programmed by a collective of Liverpool-based poets, Michael Egan, Nathan Jones, Robert Sheppard and Eleanor Rees, we aim for a literary experience felt in your bones as juxtaposition and surprise correspondence. New metaphors will be forged, similarities caught, trajectories flown.

Invited poets will read for substantial half-hour sets introduced by new works from the collective. Entrance includes a copy of the magazine ‘Veil the Pole’ edited by Michael Egan, featuring the invited poets and many others.

Last Friday of the Month (apart from occasional variation), Upstairs at the Caledonia pub, Catharine Street, in the Georgian Quarter, Liverpool, £5, 7 pm spot-on start!

28th Feb, Melissa Lee-Houghton and Crispin Best

21st March, Lee Harwood and tbc

25th April, Zoe Skoulding and Keston Sutherland

Future dates: May 30th, June 27th, July 25th and onwards!

Mercy at Manchester Weekender

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Cornerhouse are hosting a brand new live-language-cascade mixing lecture, performance and archive-feedback with video-smith Sam Meech, and poets Steven Fowler, Nathan Jones and Hannah Silva.

Composite: Feedback is a multimedia showcase and live archiving event curated by Mercy, mixing together spoken-word performance with live sampling, notation, analogue processing, and projection – all in one self generating feedback loop. A beautiful and absurd experiment, where the performers and array of interfaces are thrown into a productive conflict.

The event is split into three sections, beginning with short talks and performances on noise, speech violence and glitch, followed by a feedback work-out, pushing the performers into a state of continual improvisation. Finally the Annexe will be left to perpetuate itself as a throbbing artifact of degenerating feedback material.

Featuring poets Steven Fowler, Hannah Silva and Nathan Jones. With video design by Sam Meech. This event is part of the Manchester Weekender. More here.

EVP Think Tank

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Electronic Voice Phenomena Think Tank
7th October in Liverpool,
featuring a range of artists from UK and Berlin, discussing the question

“what are the implications of electronics on the contemporary voice?”

The day, for invited artists, will feature presentations/performances from Erik Bunger, Ross Sutherland, Steffi Wiesman and Sam Skinner.

And there will also be room/resources for conversation, creative thinking and experimenting on this theme.
The Think Tank comes in the context of Mercy’s EVP weekend with Liverpool Biennial 2012, and the performances in this programme will form a basis for some of the discussion.

There will be formal and informal opportunities to make work and propose future projects,  and items from the day will feed into future Mercy plans, including a UK/Europe tour in 2013.

We are particularly looking for possible collaborative relationships to form.

list of confirmed attendees, including artists, poets and musicians:
(participants from Berlin are enabled to come thanks to British Council and Arts Council England through the Artist Internationational Development Fund.)

Berlin:
Erik Bunger http://www.erikbunger.com/
Alessandra Eramo http://www.ezramo.com/
Karl Heinz Jeron http://portfolio.jeron.org/
Francesco Cavaliere http://www.nathiascatola.com/
Steffi Wiezman http://www.steffiweismann.de/

UK:
Joe Banks  http://thequietus.com/articles/09899-joe-banks-disinformation-rorschach-audio
Iris Garrelfs http://irisgarrelfs.com/
Ross Sutherland http://rosssutherland.co.uk
Anat Ben David http://www.yippieyeah.co.uk/anat/
Joe Banks http://rorschachaudio.wordpress.com/
Hannah Silva http://www.hannahsilva.co.uk/
Steven Fowler http://www.sjfowlerpoetry.com/

Only invited artists can attend.
If you wish to be considered for a place, please send an email to nathan@mercyonline.co.uk with your details and area of interest.

We cannot pay any fees for attendees, but we can arrange accommodation.

The Other Room July update

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We can confirm the performers for our July gig at Leeds Gallery (not Leeds Art Gallery). A very special visit from Hazel Smith, Ryan Ormonde coming from London and The Other Room’s Tom Jenks’ and Chris McCabe’s uproarious shindig collaboration Gnomes; now in its third guise. Before that of course at our new home in Manchester, The Castle, we welcome Peter Jaeger, Ira Lightman and Helmut Lemke on June 12th, details in the column to the right. August 14th in Manchester sees Frank Kuppner, Nathan Jones and David Gaffney whoop it up.

Syntax: Coding for Writers 23rd and 30th June

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OPEN CALL FOR PRACTITIONERS to take part in this workshop opportunity FREE OF CHARGE at FACT in Liverpool.

This is practical and thorough opportunity aimed at strong, established writers who are willing to experiment. No experience of coding is necessary though.

There’s lots of rhetoric around the need for this kind of knowledge for writers in the contemporary environment, and Mercy and FACT are keen to support the long-term establishment of expertise in this area. We are also influenced by the presence of Re:dock’s network and others like it in Liverpool and Manchester, where artists are engaging with coding in a playful and open way.

CONTENT

Processing is a programming environment which allows for all kinds of automated functions – appropriating, generating and animating text, integrating online content into your poems – and also interactivity. The workshops will be run by Tom Schofield, who is an established practitioner, and very aware of the particular requirements of working with text and Processing. Examples of things you can build in Processing are too numerous to mention, suffice to say there are implications for showing work as installation, on-line publication, video and in performance. As well as making your own work with support from Tom, you develop a pretty good idea of the possibilities of collaboration with more experienced coders.

APPLY

To apply please send a short statement of interest, bio and links to your work. Applicants will be chosen on the basis of their ability to contribute to a network of strong writers seeking support each other in experimenting with digital poetics – so good writing, experience and aptitude for contributing to critical conversations, and established practice.

REQUIREMENTS

You must be available to attend the workshops on 10am-5pm Saturdays 23rd and 30th June.

Between these workshops you will be expected and supported by the course leader, to complete homework tasks, developing your own work with Processing.

The workshops are FREE, paid for by FACT’s Open Curate It programme, and represent a continuation of this experimental workshop we did with Re-dock at Madlab last year, which were funded by Ideastap.

There are limited travel bursaries available from Mercy, funded by an Arts Council England GFA award, please indicate if you would like to be considered for one of these.

For info and to apply please email nathan@mercyonline.co.uk

[application deadline 25th May]

LINK to Mercy for more details

Summer 2012 with The Other Room

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Why go to Spain…

Our summer programme is making some progress. Here is what we’ve got so far. Take note that we’re no longer at our 4 year home The Old Abbey Inn but at some cracking new venues.

12th June, @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Ira Lightman, Marcus Slease & TBA

19th July, @ Leeds Gallery, http://www.leedsgallery.com (not Leeds Art Gallery) with Hazel Smith and TBA

14th August, @ The Castle, Oldham Street, Manchester with Frank Kuppner, David Gaffney & Nathan Jones