Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2013 | Performing the Text

Dear All,

We have a couple very short video-readings to attend to this week, to keep us alive within (and outside of) our own poetic-performative writings, to keep adding layers of what is possible to the final writing projects each of us are working on. These are very short because too many of you–your collaborative groups–are behind in the writing.

Folks should have a full draft of collaborated final projects done by the end of this week. For that to happen we’ll need really “roll up our sleeves” this week.

READINGS:

1) Video 3 min. See note below. Electronic Disturbance Theater/B.A.N.G Lab, “Particles of Interest: Tales From The Matter Market” LINK IS HERE

2) Video 1 hr — watch as much as you can, try to watch whole video, but at least first 20 min. Electronic Disturbance/Theater B.A.N.G., “Sounding Out The Matter Market.” LINK IS HERE

3) Video 2 min. Electronic Disturbance Theater/B.A.N.G Lab, “Transporder Immigrant Tool” LINK IS HERE

4) Chris Mann, The Use. Interactive Web Text: Poetry. Play around for 10-15 min (at minimum) by pressing on one tab/button, then the next, and then another, and so forth. Find buttons that also show the prose-poetry as it is written (and scroll, text opens on right side of the web page).  LINK IS HERE.

5) Text from a Reclamations blog interview with Ricardo Dominguez on one of his “virtual sit-ins,” which replaced, via hacking techniques, one web page for another–in this case if you were to call up the UC President’s homepage, you’d be seeing a page supplying you with directions to UC tuition hike sit-ins and other UC-wide protests of UC’s  labor and management policies. Text excerpt from the interview is pasted here:

Zach Blas: On March 4, 2010, during the mass student protests sweeping across many University of California campuses and the US, the b.a.n.g. lab led a virtual sit-in in solidarity with these protests against the University of California Office of the President. Could you describe what this action entailed and its legal ramifications? Why, considering that you have led previous virtual sit-ins against various institutions within the UC system, did this particular one instigate an FBI investigation of yourself, the b.a.n.g. lab, and the threatening your tenure? 

Ricardo Dominguez: Well, the Transborder Immigrant Tool was already under investigation starting on January 11, 2010 by UCSD (the entire group of artists working on it were under investigation); then, I came under investigation for the the Virtual Sit-In performance against the UC Office of the President (UCOP) on March 4th, 2010 (which, as you pointed out, joined the communities state wide against students’ fees in the UC system and the dismantling of educational support for K – 12 across California). That was then followed by an investigation by the FBI office of Cybercrimes. The FBI was seeking to frame the performance as a federal violation, a cybercrime, based on UCOP stating that they lost $5,600 U.S. because of the disturbance–it is important to know that the cost had to be over $5000.00 U.S. for it to be a crime. So UCOP tacked on $600.00.U.S. to push the performance into cybercrime territory. In the end, I think that the event of all the actions on the streets of California, the occupations and protests across all the UC’s by students and faculty, and the on-line actions by students and faculty created a space where they could not fail to notice its impact on multiple scales – and our work was already under investigation for TBT, the Mark Yudof resignation site that we hosted, plus the ECD gesture was just too much for the frail imaginary of UCOP.

Zach Blas: During your investigation, The Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool gained much attention and criticism. Can you discuss the importance of the poetic, conceptual, and affective in this project? More generally, what is at stake for you and the group in bringing and highlighting the poetic in this form of border activism and disturbance? 

Ricardo Dominguez: The Customs and Border Protection Agency’s 2009 fiscal year report documents 416 border-crossing related deaths from January to October 2009. When the Berlin Wall fell, official reports claimed that ninety-eight people in total died trying to cross from East to West Berlin. In contrast, local and international nongovernmental organizations estimate that 10,000 people to date have perished attempting to cross the Mexico-U.S. border. The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT) repurposes inexpensive used mobile phones that have GPS antennae. The project represents a multi-valenced code-switch, a queer technology. Its software aspires to guide “the tired, the poor,” the dehydrated—citizens of the world—to water safety sites. Concomitantly, its platform offers poetic audio “sustenance.” Incapable of resolving the long histories of fear, prejudice, and misunderstanding on both sides of the Mexico-U.S. border, TBT remembers the often overlapping traditions of transcendental and nature writing, earthworks, conceptual art, performance, border art, locative media, and visual and concrete poetries. It learns equally from the efforts of humanitarian aid organizations like the Border Angels and Water Station, Inc. “Poetry in motion,” TBT navigates the borderlands of G.P.S. as a “global positioning system” and what, in another context, Laura Borràs Castanyer and Juan B. Gutiérrez slyly misread as a “global poetic system.”

THE WHOLE INTERVIEW, FOR THOSE INTERESTED, CAN BE FOUND HERE

Electronic Disturbance Theater includes artists, poets, queer and cultural theorists, and engineers, such as Ricardo Dominguez,  Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, Elle Mehrmand, and Brett Stalbaum. 

For more, visit THEIR WEB PAGE.

REMINDER: FINAL PRESS Literary & Politics Series READINGS, SAT WEEK 9 & WEDS WEEK 10, IS YOU!!!

Recall that during the public (open to the campus community) night of our final project readings, Saturday Week 9, poet and translator MAGED ZAHER will be joining us for sharing of final projects that evening. Zaher will read from new and selected poems, and will be on hand to enjoy YOUR new and selected poems! Do come, because it isn’t just a reading. It is your class, specifically one of the two days of sharing final projects, which happen to be made by, and will thus be performed by, YOU! (So, it’d be a good time to show up.)

Dear All,

In this post:

–Note on attendance going forward, on time left to complete plans some of you have made for getting to me any back work still outstanding (go back thru your notes as well as the blog pasts to cross-check your writing against weekly assigned writings)

–What to Bring Saturday

–Reminder about writing prompt, due Sat night

–In-class focused fee-writing from Weds: questions transcribed below.

Troubling the Line: Poetries of Resistance: Thank You & Congrats to Student Readers!

Thank you all for attending/participating in our Troubling The Line release party–I am truly grateful to you for supporting the event, for keeping your minds open and alive during the reading, and for supporting the work of your hard-working poetic peers. This really speaks to what Butler is getting at, and much more, when she writes about making a “livable” life “with and for” others.  So, thank you who could make it.

Attendance & Participation Going Forward: 

I want us to take that same loving, open, and attentive commitment and extend it–as most of you have all quarter–to the various forms of desire we have to be heard, read, and reveled in as we write and learn together, in and as our various and varying lives require of us and each other, from now through past the end of our time together as a coterie, as a class, an organism. To that, now is the time to be present with and for one another.

As usual–but perhaps more so now that your collaborators are relying on you–it is vital to attend and participate in Saturday’s class. To participate in all future classes, to be present. So far so good on that–for the most part. But last week on Saturday a couple groups were missing key folks. Unless we’ve worked out a plan ahead of time, we–myself and your peers–are left hanging in the balance, having planned on your being in class and prepared to get writing and other work done. As mentioned during our mid-quarter check-ins, I’ll (always) be making precisely this ask on behalf of those who might not feel so comfortable being direct: to please make each other a priority. Make sure I’m not contacting you about attendance or participation in the weekly writing and discussions–we’d likely all rather be accountable to one another in a way that bespeaks of our ethical commitments and our writing passions, not of credit worries and “making up” work missed. For that to happen, folks need to keep it up, keep being present and keep taking writing risks, risking going outside whatever feels comfortable or easy. So, let’s keep up the momentum that we have had for the most part, take that into what I understand–and thus my note here–to be an increasingly hectic/busy time for each of us. As things get more hectic, it is easy–I know this in myself–to duck out on those with whom you are closely collaborating, including yourself.

What to Bring to Class Sat:

In class last time I asked each of you to free-write a response to one of the two questions below (your choice as to which speaks as most helpful in organizing your own collaborative thinking). These are at the end of this post, for your reference. PLEASE BRING THESE SHORT WRITINGS and also bring the following:

1) Yourself.

2) Your “campus archeology” performative poems — see prompt below.

3) ALL of your writings for this course to date, PARTICULARLY BUT NOT ONLY any and all materials you are so far counting as towards your final project–notes, early sketches of the first draft, drafts if they exist for you yet, individual pieces you plan to be working with or think you might, collaboratively written pieces that you might not know whether you are keeping or will wind up working out yet, etc.

4) Your printed out readings to date (the printed out assigned readings that you keep in a common folder, binder, etc–in other words, your developing anthology of course readings for the class).

QUESTIONS FROM WEDS (these were jumping off points for your discussions last class):

1) “What ‘organizational politics’ do you desire for your collaborative group?” [IN OTHER WORDS: How do you desire to be collaborating? What do you hope a collaborative process will do to help you with the writing you are doing for that collaboration? With bridging differing approaches/'styles' without individuals giving up entirely those approaches/'styles'? What sort of ways of working together / writing together do you feel could be the most generative for you individually as well as for your group as a whole--as relates to completing AND enjoying the process of the collaborative writing project you are just now getting off the ground during week 7?]

2) What do you desire your collaborative group’s poetics to be/become? [IN OTHER WORDS: What common as well as uncommon but mutually supporting interests, ways of writing, approaches to the poetic and to poetic reading/performance, can you at this point locate, identify, or pinpoint within your collaborative group? Of those things you don't yet know whether you share or support in one another's writing practices--why you write, how you write, what you want to make of the writing--what do you ideally hope to discover as shared, or to make happen as you continue to work together? What do these desires say to you about your own writing practices, or your own reasons for making and approaches to collaborating to make performance writing? What do your writing desires say to you about what your writing does? Or what it desires to do for others? This is to ask about your relation to your performance writing's use/fulness as you reflect on what you've written so far and shared. In what ways, if any, do you want your performance writing to be used, taken up in a social context, and for whom do you desire it to be useful?**]

**Recall from Week 2: USELESSNESS CAN BE USEFUL! What serves no obvious function might, in its very atypicality as apparently useless endeavor (given the central value this culture puts on something/someone needing to be ‘useful’) deeply shift our thinking about “use” itself.

Dear All,

This a reminder that we’ll be going on Weds night at 7pm to the Library Underground. That evening is our Troubling the Line Celebration, “Troubling the Line: Poetries of Resistance,” a reading and discussion celebrating the release of this new trans and genderqueer anthology (the first of its kind in English) as well as  poets from trans and genderqueer communities at Evergreen (contributors to the anthology included). This event is a collaboration between PRESS Reading Series and The Ernestine Kimbro Authors and Artists Series.

PLEASE CLICK ON THIS LINK TO SEE THE EVERGREEN LIBRARY POSTER. PLEASE DISTRIBUTE WIDELY!

Readers Include:

TT Jax, Y. Madrone, Laura Neuman, Molly Bess, Fabian Romero, david wolach.

Many thanks to Jane Fisher, curator of the Ernestine Kimbro Authors and Artists Series, The Evergreen Library, The Evergreen Bookstore, contributing programs and courses (full list TBA in a separate announcement/reminder), the Diversity Committee, and the Deans Matching Fund, for their generous support of this event.

*PRESS’s current coordinating committee–those who have made this event possible–are: Molly Bess, david wolach, Max Codella Fernandez & Elizabeth Williamson.