A repost of the Kluge videos, with additional information. I’m working on exporting them with lower file sizes, but for now… enjoy.

Vex 1. 2005. 2:08 mins. 29.1 mb. With Christian Nagler. Sound by Christof Migone and Gregory Whitehead from their series “Cris-cris.” Short vignette in which our hero is plunged into a dream world of homoerotic doubles and hellish fish.

Vex 4. 2005. 3:14 mins. 73.5 mb. With Christian Nagler, Michael Gizzi. Sound by Christof Migone and Gregory Whitehead from their series “Cris-cris.” More conceptual than “Vex 1,” utilizing found footage from the web. The poet Michael Gizzi free associates while destroying a piece of toast as the revolution marches on.

Vex 5. 2005. 1:09 mins. 25.9 mb. With Christian Nagler. Sound by Christof Migone and Gregory Whitehead from their series “Cris-cris.” This is the crowd favorite.  Air balloons, hellish fish, lobsters.

Postscript. 2005. 1:56 mins. 26.7 mb. A sort of postscript to the “Vex” series but not part of it. A fish has dreams also, in this case of the hell of industrialization (via the synechdoche of tricycles). Well, probably not worth reading into.

Manchurian Rainman. 2005. 6:19 mins. 86.5 mb. With Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey. Two Japanese teenagers, one inflicted with a mild case of autism, discuss their addictions.

Ferrari Dogs. 2005. 45 secs. 29.5 mb. With Angelina Jolie. Music by Morrissey. This one would make a good Skittles commercial. Our heroine makes her escape through a dreamlike mountainscape pursued by the pet dog she just can’t do without. Love everywhere. 

Following are six videos I made in 2004. Trying everything, really just my first efforts. You should right click and download the file before viewing.

Popahna. 2004. 11:25 mins. 20.7 mb. With Tyler Carter, Popahna Brandes, Natalia Stefans. Music by Leos Janacek, Public Image Ltd., L Voag. A short drama shot in Providence in a low-tech “Alphaville” style charting the adventures of a protagonist, “The Flaneur,” as he seeks to take down the Ice Queen, “Popahna,” who weaves her magic from a hideaway known as “The Arcade.” In the meantime, other secrets of their relationship are revealed. In German with subtitles.

Self Portrait as the Shroud of Turin. 2004. 3:42 mins. 2.7 mb. Depending on your mood, this is either four minutes of me noodling around in my room or a profound exploration of what it must be like shooting mini-DV video after death by crucifixion. For the martyr in all of us.

Sirius Returned. 2004. 2:58 mins. 3.7 mb. Starring Durango. Inspired by Stan Brakhage’s short film, Sirius Remembered, which centered around the remains of his dog that he discovered in the woods around his home (shot in extremely short bursts of a few frames as was his technique), this short experimental video is completely unedited, but has been reshot in reverse through the viewfinder of another camera. I think it’s cool.

How Are Them Raviolis? 2004. 5:26 mins. 4.9 mb. With Kelli Auerbach, Brian Kim Stefans. I class this as a “performance piece” but I’m not going to tell you what the rules were, you just have to find out. Partly inspired by some Vito Acconci videos I was looking at, or maybe William Wegman. The sound is not so good, but it’s worth listening to as I recreate the voices of my New Jersey youth.

Mouths. 2004. 3:13 mins. 9.3 mb. With Brian Kim Stefans and brief appearances by Rodrigo Toscano, Kim Rosenfield and others. Soundtrack includes reading by Ed Sanders and a sound piece by Marcel Duchamp. This was actually taped by Tim Davis, poet and photographer, in something like 2000 or so in a small bookstore in Williamsburg, but I reshot it in reverse through another camera. Only very slightly edited toward the end. The soundtrack is really funny if offensive.

There’s Something About Barney. 2004. 3:35 mins. 3.7 mb. With Brian Kim Stefans. Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room,” I recorded the same monologe nine-times and progressively increased certain video and audio filters. The monologue is really a scandalous attack on Barney the Dinosaur that I had discovered on the web and re-edited. I created a Flash telepromter to keep it all synched, but it got pretty sloppy anyway.

Here’s a funny photograph I took about 3 years ago of myself, my two brothers, and my three sisters. I’m the one in the middle. (Click to enlarge.)

Just got a copy of this in the mail… I have an essay about my website Circulars in there, and a few of the other pieces deal with my work. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s a pretty cool collection of writers, and the first substantial book to deal with digital literature from the perspective of poetry and poetics. And it’s got a pretty cover…

 

New Media Poetics
Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories
Edited by Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss

New media poetry–poetry composed, disseminated, and read on computers–exists in various configurations, from electronic documents that can be navigated and/or rearranged by their “users” to kinetic, visual, and sound materials through online journals and archives like UbuWeb, PennSound, and the Electronic Poetry Center. Unlike mainstream print poetry, which assumes a bounded, coherent, and self-conscious speaker, new media poetry assumes a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. The essays and artist statements in this volume explore this synergy’s continuities and breaks with past poetic practices, and its profound implications for the future.

By adding new media poetry to the study of hypertext narrative, interactive fiction, computer games, and other digital art forms, New Media Poetics extends our understanding of the computer as an expressive medium, showcases works that are visually arresting, aurally charged, and dynamic, and traces the lineage of new media poetry through print and sound poetics, procedural writing, gestural abstraction and conceptual art, and activist communities formed by emergent poetics.

Contributors:
Giselle Beiguelman, John Cayley, Alan Filreis, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Alan Golding, Kenneth Goldsmith, N. Katherine Hayles, Cynthia Lawson, Jennifer Ley, Talan Memmott, Adalaide Morris, Carrie Noland, Marjorie Perloff, William Poundstone, Martin Spinelli, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, Barrett Watten, Darren Wershler-Henry

Adalaide Morris is John C. Gerber Professor of English at the University of Iowa, where Thomas Swiss is Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry.

Thomas Swiss is Professor of English and Rhetoric of Inquiry at the University of Iowa.

Table of Contents

1. New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How To Write
Adalaide Morris

I. Contexts
 
2. The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and the Dematerialization of Tony Curtis
Kenneth Goldsmith
 
3. Toward a Poetics for Circulars
Brian Kim Stefans
Exchange on Circulars (2003)
Brian Kim Stefans and Darren Wershler-Henry
 
4. Riding the Meridian
Jennifer Ley
 
5. Electric Line: The Poetics of Digital Audio Editing
Martin Spinelli
 
6. Kinetic Is As Kinetic Does: On the Institutionalization of Digital Poetry
Alan Filreis

II. Technotexts
 
7. Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text
Marjorie Perloff
 
8. Vniverse
Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson
 
9. The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event
N. Katherine Hayles
 
10. 10 Sono at Swoons
Loss Pequeño Glazier
 
11. Digital Gestures
Carrie Noland
 
12. 3 Proposals for Bottle Imps
William Poundstone
 
13. Language Writing, Digital Poetics, and Transitional Materialities
Alan Golding and Giselle Beiguelman
 
14. Nomadic Poetry

III. Theories
 
15. Beyond Taxonomy: Digital Poetics and the Problem of Reading
Talan Menmott
 
16. Time Code Language: New Media Poetics and Programmed Signification
John Cayley
 
17. Poetics in the Expanded Field: Textual, Visual, Digital . . .
Barrett Watten

I’ve just returned from California where I went to attend my sister Lindsay’s wedding at Green Gulch Zen Center. Click on the image below to see the Flickr photo album I made. (I’m keeping their full names and any other details off this blog to avoid Google over-exposure.)

Below that is the poem that I wrote the night before while staying at the center. Perhaps a little too Stevie Smith for your tastes but I wanted to keep it simple. The bit about the shower is a little in-joke — we could only take 2 minute showers at Green Gulch because of the water heaters, but, alas, I do do a lot of good thinking in the shower! I read it at the ceremony, so it has a bit of that Eliotic thing going also.

 

IT’S SOME REAL THING
comes down upon us
thinking us through taking a shower
where thinking is often done, and

plants us
square in the middle of the road, on a coast
which yesterday seemed barbaric
– now, of course, it’s simply scenic.

There is no speech, but silence talks,
of course, of course, it says
of course, of course, it’s frankly obvious
there are tomorrows like todays.

– Plants us
square in the middle of a waiting game
that is life, so love
which is not like waking life

cannot make a sentence that is strictly obvious
except in the half-light of our making sense.

I am just about to slip off the homepage of DVBlog, which is not to say my videos won’t be accessible there, just that time flies. Two sections of “Vex” and “Ferrari Dogs” have been featured there for the past couple of weeks.

There’s a rather curious assessment of my work, too. Something along the lines of “I thought it sucked, but now I think it’s great,” which in some ways I find more reassuring than a straight “I think this is great.” Why?

Anyway, check it out. This is a really great site, I check it everyday (I’m downloading three new videos now.)

http://dvblog.org/

I posted a notice on FSC about these videos below.