Triple Canopy

Annotation: The Internet v. Real Life

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 11:15:42 -0400

In advance of the launch of Triple Canopy's new online publishing platform in September, we're posting some thoughts on the development of the magazine in the past few years and on our efforts to capitalize on the convergences of the Internet and IRL.

Diagram of Triple Canopy's Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts) project, 2012–13.

What is an online magazine? For a long time we defined Triple Canopy with that phrase: We started Triple Canopy five years ago because so many of us were increasingly encountering art and literature first, if not exclusively, online. And yet we could name very few places on the Web where we could have meaningful experiences with art and literature. As Triple Canopy evolved, we started to think of the online magazine as the hub of what we refer to as an “expanded field of publication,” which encompasses, so far, books, artist editions, public conversations, and technological experiments. Essentially, we’re annexing media, places, and activities not conventionally associated with the magazine, reconfiguring them as sites of publication—through a website illustrating and reinforcing the relationships between these forms and their audiences.

For the past year, as we’ve worked on redesigning our online platform and rethinking our approach to publishing, we’ve been asking how and why Triple Canopy is still a magazine. It’s a good descriptor for us in a certain sense: We are a magazine in that we publish content serially, an online magazine in that most of our work is presented online. Additionally, though pieces are by many authors they share a clear editorial sensibility. We don’t charge for access, though we do allow people to subscribe. We’re perhaps more like a journal in that most of our content isn’t time-sensitive: If you don’t read an essay or view an artist project this month, you can probably read it three months from now with little loss.

In other ways what we’re doing isn’t particularly magazine-like—or even online—at all. We organize public programs at our space in Greenpoint regularly; we participate in exhibitions like the current "EXPO 1: New York" via what might be called discursive projects; we put on, and occasionally participate in, shows at galleries; we teach classes and initiate educational workshops in cities like Chicago, New Orleans, Dallas, Berlin, and Sarajevo; we publish books, print as well as electronic.

And so “online magazine” starts to seem like a confusing rubric under which to hang what Triple Canopy does. Better add some awkward slashes: online magazine/editorial collective/exhibition space/curatorial platform. No—what we’d rather do is redefine what a magazine can be, and what publication means.

1.
The next iteration of Triple Canopy, due to launch in September, is, of course, a website, but we’re thinking of it as a publishing platform, since it will significantly impact how Triple Canopy’s activities online and offline are represented and related to one another. And so with what we’re calling Triple Canopy 3.0 we’d like to redefine the project—not as an online magazine, but as a magazine that incorporates publishing activities—that take place on the Web, in print, and in face-to-face conversations—and connects their respective audiences. In part, this is because we see the distinction between the Internet and real life diminishing rapidly, dramatically; the Internet is—or fundamentally conditions—real life, and vice versa. This notion of the Internet absolutely pervading our physical, lived experience is, of course, terrifying—unless you’ve always dreamed of the Singularity. But it's also an opportunity. Where we used to think about intersections between the Web and real life, and so online and offline activities, we can now, rather, just think of the world. While we used to invoke the slogan Slow down the Internet, now we’re moving on to the more apt, if more comical, Slow down the world.

With 3.0, the publishing platform will be Web-specific, while the magazine will be medium-agnostic. The slowness will be less specifically about one’s engagement with the screen, more about one’s engagement with culture. As John Dewey said: “Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to the appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency.” (We used this quote in an essay pushing our campaign to raise the funds for 3.0; you can read—and, until July 1st, contribute!—here.) Thinking about designing a website in this way may seem overly complicated, or even self-important—and yet it pushes us to ask fundamental questions about how and why we might build a platform for the slow, meticulous work we want to do, the relationships we want to have, the thinking we want to do; how and why we might build something that looks more like the world we want to live in. We want to rethink, from the ground up, how we create culture and a coherent body of knowledge in a resistant, efficient, particularized world. And we want to keep enlarging our own sense of what Dewey called “the unity or integrity of experience.”

Let’s think about this in the somewhat mundane terms of our website architecture. Before, you could think of Triple Canopy’s issues as big clumps living in our database; we’re moving to a model where individual articles live in the database while a dynamic front-end system enables editors to connect them together on the fly in new configurations. For TC 3.0, we’re also completely redesigning our back-end database system to allow for a greater variety of content formats and a more flexible mechanism for relating and contextualizing content. Currently magazine pieces can only appear in issues, and so we’re limited by that one mode of visual display, that one mechanism for contextualizing and presenting our work. Our new backend system is being designed on the principle that we should be able to easily create and experiment with alternatives to the “issue.” Rather than hard-code organizational principles into the database, we’re creating a lightweight and flexible system that will facilitate experimentation and collaboration with partners such as the design studio Astrom/Zimmer, with whom we’ve been working for the past several months. To put this in slightly more technical terms, we’re putting an API at the heart of 3.0 in order to ease the development of alternative navigational experiences.

Lastly, our new database architecture will treat the range of Triple Canopy’s production in a more uniform manner. Instead of privileging pieces and issues, the records associated with podcasts, events, print publications, and other work will be treated as equal—materials that can be editorially situated, curated, contextualized, and re-contextualized using our flexible system. What does this mean? In the past, the form of the magazine was dictated by technology. Now it can be shaped—and reshaped, as the need arises—by the editors.

2.
As reading and viewing online have evolved in the past five years, so must Triple Canopy. Our current website represents Triple Canopy as an online magazine first and foremost, and fails to show (much less make an argument for) the relationships between the organization’s various publishing activities. Additionally, the website pushes all kinds of content into one format, the column-based system of Horizonize. We need a platform that forges meaningful, intuitive connections between print publications and live programming, between current goings-on and our ample archive; that shows the publication to be a networked object.

One aspect of Triple Canopy that’s played an increasingly significant role in the past few years is public discussions, talks, performances, and so on, whether at our space in Greenpoint or elsewhere. Some of these are spun from pieces that start in the magazine, others—including our annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans—are not so explicitly connected with an issue or article in the magazine, though the thematic connections are profound. So if people think of—and we treat—the magazine primarily in terms of issues and articles, such activities tend to fall through the cracks. The same goes for podcasts, print publications, annotations (shorter pieces that tend to be ancillary to longer pieces), special projects, exhibitions, and so on.

A major example is the recent project Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts). Corrected Slogans began as part of an exhibition at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art called “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art.” The curators approached Triple Canopy in the fall of 2011, and it wasn’t quite clear if Triple Canopy was to be regarded as a co-publisher, an online annex, or an artist contributing to the show. Initially, we proposed to work with three artists in the show to produce projects for the magazine that might later be folded into a special issue; perhaps we’d produce a broadsheet for the exhibition, or perhaps we’d produce an iterative publication that would change the gallery space over time. Eventually, we organized a series of public conversations and performances in Greenpoint (all of which are available as podcasts). We then turned the conversations into an extensively annotated book (including projects specially commissioned for the printed page) that we envisioned as a critical commentary and enactment of the literary and artistic practices considered by the exhibition. We celebrated the publication with a live, scripted performance of the book at Artists Space.

How does all of this fit together? This project calls to mind Mallarmé’s statement that “everything exists to end in a book.” But there’s a structural downside: You could have come to all the Corrected Slogans events without really knowing about the online content. If you’re following us online, you might have noticed the related new works we published. And if you didn’t attend the Denver show, you might not know about the special issue of the magazine.

There’s an organizational problem: If you go to our site, you can find a lot of content related to Corrected Slogans: articles, events, MP3s, the book. If you go to our Facebook page, you can see documentation of the events; if you scroll back to ancient history in our Twitter timeline, you can get a sense of what the conversations were like. But this material is all over the place, and so there’s no coherent representation of the project. (This testifies to the value of the printed book: as a bounded whole, it can sum up what happened, if not fully represent the experience.) One of the problems we’re addressing in 3.0 is the connections between pieces. We’re looking at smart ways to get not just from an article to another article in the issue but also to events related to that article, to small pieces that might be ancillary to the article, and to other related collections of content. If next year we decide to revisit Corrected Slogans, we want to be able to add to the project and make it understood how new work relates to old.

So with 3.0, a project like Corrected Slogans would be a coherent issue of the magazine, which would include online works, symposia, performances, podcasts, an exhibition, and a print publication. That issue might be published over the course of one year, enabling one contributor to respond to another, and enabling readers to track the progress of a conversation as it progresses from one form to another over time. Simultaneously, we might be publishing another issue that lasts six months, and a third that lasts a year and a half—giving us the time to conduct research, build relationships with contributors, present our work to multiple audiences, and represent this dynamic process as essential to our concept of the magazine. Events will exist alongside articles. In 3.0, a public discussion becomes not only an event, but also an instance of publication that spans sites, times, audiences; a way of productively stitching together the Internet and the real world.

3.
When Triple Canopy started five years ago, it was hard to get people to spend a substantial amount of time reading on a screen. Phones were still dumb, the audience on tablets was infinitesimal. That’s all changed. Initially, we made an argument that serious reading and viewing could be done online. Our design was based on that idea: If a magazine were impeccably designed for the medium it inhabits, people would want to spend time with it. The situation now is more complex: People are reading on many different kinds of screens, for long periods of time, and massive amounts of money have gone into facilitating this. To some degree, rather than directing people how to read, we need to accommodate their existing (and still fluctuating) reading practices.

A second design requirement becomes apparent with time: sustainability. The majority of the pieces that we’ve published in the past five years are still interesting and relevant; as I mentioned earlier, our content becomes dated relatively slowly, if at all. The design challenge now is to construct a system in which our content remains legible, or even becomes more engaging by acquiring a context, over time.

Sometimes the problem happens on a banal level: Videos embedded using Flash don’t work if you’re on an iPad. If you’re using YouTube to embed a video, you can get past Flash, but you might get stuck if the video gets pulled because of copyright claims. Web standards have stabilized, so this problem can be solved now, but it still requires a lot of work. A more complex job is making a content creation tool that allows editors to create works that function—and maintain the integrity of their design—in many different formats. What we’re concentrating on now is creating an editing environment that allows for the simple creation of rich media for multiple platforms, and which degrades intelligently. Rather than dictate the experience of readers, we’ll establish self-adjusting templates for work appearing on a Kindle, a phone, a tablet, or even print.

4.
In sum, Triple Canopy’s attention to emerging artistic practices (and the modes of reading and viewing they engender) has led to innovative formats that accommodate long-form writing, intermedia artwork, and experimental publications—many of which are now common on the Web. TC 3.0 will work toward a particular paradigm for screen-reading, but will pay careful attention to the visual and typographic tropes that have endured in classic general-interest magazines for 150 years. Rather than mimic the standards created by tablet devices that, to our minds, are less about reading than about packaging, monetizing, and circulating content, we’re trying to innovate on our own terms. The code underlying 3.0 will be made available as an open-source application; we hope this will be an important contribution to the progressive design community.

What we’re trying to do with Triple Canopy 3.0 doesn’t quite resemble what people usually think of when they think of magazines, much less online magazines. Rather, it’s a publication space that works to incorporate the rest of the world—just as the Internet can no longer be distinguished from the world we inhabit. A magazine brings writers and readers together, and we’re going to continue to do that, both online and off.

Project: This Is Your Brain on Paper

Isabelle Moffat — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:59:23 -0400

by Isabelle Moffat

Images from the history of an organ: medieval diagrams, Japanese woodcuts, digital scans.

Project: Gray Rainbows

Antonia Hirsch — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:19:55 -0400

by Antonia Hirsch

The color of anger, the color of language, the color of Facebook, the color of freshly cut grass.

Annotation: The Islands of Evasion: Notes on International Art English

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Mon, 27 May 2013 18:42:54 -0400

Mariam Ghani and Erin Ellen Kelly, Smile, You're in Sharjah, 2009, still from video installation.

In April, Triple Canopy organized a forum called Critical Language, during which a group of artists, writers, curators, arts administrators, and other cultural workers discussed the "political implications and uses" of specialized language in the art world. We used the term "International Art English," coined by Alix Rule and David Levine in their eponymous July 2012 Triple Canopy essay on "the rise and the space of the art-world press release," to stand for this specialized language and also, to a certain extent, to stand in for a larger debate around "language, legibility and power in the art world," which had been spurred by the essay. The forum itself was inspired by the specific thread of that debate tweaked by Mostafa Heddaya's March 2013 Hyperallergic article “When Artspeak Masks Oppression,” which analyzed the language deployed by the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project and its representatives, and the subsequent response by Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong, also published by Hyperallergic.

While preparing to participate in the forum, I wrote a series of notes on the idea of International Art English, which represent my several perspectives on the topic. First, as a member of the GulfLabor Working Group, a coalition of artists and others working to ensure that workers’ rights are respected during the construction of new cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi. Second, as an artist who has produced work in countries where state censorship is prevalent. Third, as a former arts administrator who wrote grants and copy-edited press releases, those much-maligned bastions of International Art English (IAE), day in and day out for several years. Fourth, as a writer and archivist with a background in linguistics who has worked with several other specialized languages and enjoys the poetry of accidental ambiguity.

These notes are reproduced below more or less as I wrote them before the forum, with a few additions from notes made during or after the forum itself. I’ve also added notes in response to the essays published by Hito Steyerl and Martha Rosler on the same topic in e-flux journal #45.

The Poor Relation
One thread that runs through many of the responses to “International Art English” is a more or less subtle insistence on the separation of press releases from other forms of art writing. At the Triple Canopy forum, curators and critics disavowed press releases as distinctly different from their own writing for magazines or catalogues. Hito Steyerl simultaneously denounces and celebrates them as “the art world’s equivalent of digital spam.” Martha Rosler characterizes them as “art ad copy” and implicitly compares art copywriting to food copywriting. Logically, it would follow that if press releases are their own, separate, “debased” form of art writing, performed by “underpaid, unspecialized copywriters,” an analysis performed on press releases cannot apply to other forms of art writing.

On reflection, and based on my experience as an arts administrator, this separation seems somewhat suspect. Many small and mid-sized arts organizations in outposts both near and far have no separate PR department, designated copywriter or copy editor, or flack-for-hire to manufacture their press releases. The person writing the copy for the press release is most often the person who organized the exhibition (usually a curator) or the organizer’s assistant (usually a curator in training). In many other cases, especially in places where the copywriters are underpaid, unspecialized (i.e. undereducated), and overworked, large chunks of press releases are lifted verbatim from, or découpaged like the exquisite corpses of, curatorial texts, artist statements, reviews, or even critical theory, if it happens to be near to hand and seems apposite.

This is to say that I believe most forms of art writing are contiguous enough to contaminate each other. If there is a specialized language for art, it circulates among and is refined in the exchanges between these different forms, migrating from the press release to the critical review to the theoretical or historical text to the academic thesis to the artist statement to the grant application to the curatorial text and back to the press release again. The press release may be the poor relation in this family, the country cousin with the awkward haircut and clothes that don’t quite fit. But the family resemblance cannot be denied.

Because Alix and David’s essay touched a nerve, and brought back into the foreground that tricky but important conversation about language, legibility and power, IAE is now both a convenient name for the set of elements that make up art’s specialized language, and an equally efficient signal that we are entering into this larger debate. I will continue to use it throughout these notes, but I could equally well use Rosler’s term “Roman” or Steyerl’s proposed moniker “International Disco Latin” (about which more later) instead.

The Quagmire
Like Mostafa, I feel that the most relevant political question asked by Alix and David with respect to politics is, “Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?”

The art world is an ethically murky place. One might even call it a quagmire. IAE—with its indeterminate spaces, its constantly unresolved processes, its simultaneously grandiose and empty assertions—helps to paper over the gaps between what we might like the art world to be and what it actually is; to elide all the compromises and concessions we make in order to get something made, shown, funded, bought, discussed, and so on.

Without IAE, what would we talk about when we talk about art? Would we actually have to talk about money, labor, the means and conditions and constraints of production?

Would we actually have to admit to our baser, darker, deeper (or more shallow) motives for making, selling, and buying the things we make, sell, and buy?

Devil’s Advocacy
Is artspeak really the only, or even the worst, of specialized languages infected by overcomplication and doublespeak, whose simultaneous complexity and mutability make it “especially ripe for capture by political interests”? Legal language is the first such language that springs to mind, because it is both more mutable and more contested than many think. A new term like “eminent domain” or “battlefield exemption” can be introduced into the legal field through legislation or (less commonly) Department of Justice memos, become almost immediately enforceable in fact, but then spend a decade or more being redefined and refined in court cases unless and until the Supreme Court weighs in. Evgeny Morozov’s “The Meme Hustler,” in the current issue of the Baffler, traces the history of a certain strand of Silicon Valley technobabble and its creep into politics, focusing on the illustrious career and far-reaching influence of entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly. Morozov tells the story of how the concept of “open government” was rendered problematic by a decade-long fight to redefine the “open” in the open-source movement as open to the market—free as in beer, rather than free as in freedom.

Similarly, Democracy Journal recently ran an opinion piece by Jack Meserve analyzing the overcomplication (or deliberate obfuscation) of national security jargon like “disposition matrix” Meserve quotes the same Orwell essay, “Politics and the English Language,” referenced by Mostafa in his Hyperallergic article. (Meserve’s Orwell extract: “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”) Meserve also discussed the misnomered “fiscal cliff,” warning that “problems described incorrectly will be solved incorrectly” because sometimes “the metaphor starts to trump the reality you were originally attempting to describe.” Frank Luntz, the Republican operative who wrote the political manual Words That Work, lists in an appendix to his book the “twenty-one political words and phrases” that should be eliminated and replaced; he recommends that “undocumented worker” be substituted by “illegal immigrant,” noting that the label we apply to such people "determines the attitudes [other] people have toward them.” After a decades-long, concerted activist campaign against the use of “illegal immigrant,” the AP Stylebook finally recognized that the label is not “neutral and accurate” and, in April, decided that no human being can be called illegal, at least in print. Perhaps the critical distinction between artspeak and other specialized languages lies in the intentionality with which certain players in the legal, technocratic, and political scenes work to introduce or deprecate certain terms. Do we in the art world have an equivalent to the lawyers of the Center for Constitutional Rights, political wordsmiths like Frank Luntz, or meme producers like Tim O'Reilly?

The Island of Happiness
In the specific case of the transformation of Saadiyat Island, or the Island of Happiness (the literal translation of its Arabic name), into an international cultural hub, there is a widely acknowledged gap between the rhetoric of the project and its reality. It is difficult, however, to hold the rulers of Abu Dhabi, or their proxies at the Tourism and Culture Authority, or their international partners at the Louvre, the Guggenheim, New York University, and the British Museum, to “their word” on labor rights or freedom of expression, when their words are largely “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” It is also difficult to advocate for people whose rights, possibilities, and freedoms have been all been delimited from the moment they accepted their contracts and were redefined as “migrant workers” or “guest laborers.” This linguistic shift, as Luntz would recognize, has real-world consequences. And one logical response is the activist attempt to ground the unmoored abstractions of political debates over citizenship, subcontracting, and corporate or state responsibility in the specific realities of individual lives and human costs—another shift in the terms of the debate.

Devil’s Advocacy, Part Two
Alix and David's essay ends with what some have read as a joke: a press release “reformatted as meter” and a suggestion that we read IAE texts not for their content, but for their lyricism. (This, in some ways, is like what Chitra Ganesh and I do with Index of the Disappeared, a project partly dedicated to finding moments of accidental poetry in declassified official documents—though we are looking to the accidents as moments of human error within inhuman and inhumane systems.) William Empson argues in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) for the importance within poetry of ambiguous language: “verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language.” The seven types of ambiguity identified by Empson include “multiplication,” where individual details could apply in several different ways (literally and metaphorically) to the context in which they are used; “complication,” where those alternative and often interrelated meanings are used to indicate the author's complicated position or state; “fortunate confusion,” where the idea behind a phrase is still being discovered in the act of writing; and “full contradiction,” which reflects a division in the author’s own mind, either an ability to hold two seemingly opposed ideas at once or an inability to decide between them. IAE as presently written and read appears full of complication, contradiction, and confusion, fortunate or not, all stemming—if we accept Alix and David's analysis—from multiplication, an overflow of ambiguous and apparently extraneous language. Is that ambiguity in fact at the heart of IAE’s utility, not only for use by “interns in the Chinese Ministry of Culture,” advocates for art in Abu Dhabi, and others invested in seemingly contradictory ideas, but also for artists? After all, what would critics do if there were no ambiguities for them to decipher and interpret?

As an artist myself, I can say that sometimes the use of IAE in an artist statement, interview or other text wherein an artist describes her own work—particularly that impenetrable brand of IAE where a number of words add up to very little—signals that the artist is trying, consciously or not, to escape from the demand to explain her work. She is wriggling away, word by ambiguous word, from the frame she is meant to be holding up around herself. As Alix and David point out, the artist is presenting a “practice” that is always unfinished, not a product, and refusing a fixed position. Fittingly, this refusal both distances her from specific politics and is a politicized act in itself. Refusing your designated position or label, or opting to shuffle through labels and positions as you like, is also to some extent a refusal of the rules of the art market.

Which Brings Us to: Kabul in Kassel, Kassel in Kabul
Anyone present in Kassel during the press preview of Documenta 13 in June 2012, when the Documenta Kabul-Bamiyan seminars had their first airing outside of Afghanistan, was treated to a tiny masterpiece of IAE. In this case, IAE was used for its ability to simultaneously display and conceal, to quickly create and just as quickly circumscribe a specific discursive space. It was not used because the Documenta seminars in Kabul and Bamiyan had actually been particularly colonialist or exploitative or even unsuccessful, but because the organizers anticipated that those criticisms would be made and preferred to foreclose any substantive discussion of the project (even among those participants in the seminars who were invited to join the organizers on stage) rather than admit the possibility of the colonialist critique entering into this high-visibility event. This strategy led, predictably enough, to a rather ugly finish; but the preceding hour and a half had been so boring that almost all the press had already left the room by the time the explosion occurred, so you could be forgiven for thinking that the strategy actually worked.

The lack of real reflection on the Documenta-in-Kabul project in Kassel was unfortunate, because the project in itself, while flawed, points to some of the ways in which the opacity and ambiguities of IAE (and the ambiguity employed in certain art practices) can be used to circumvent both explicit and implicit restrictions on freedom of expression in places like Afghanistan. For example: if William Kentridge's Shadow Procession were described to the Afghan Ministry of Culture as a political artwork about South African history with a clear analogue in the Afghan civil war, would the Ministry have permitted it to be shown in a park where 27,000 people could see it? No. But described as it was in the wall text and catalogue of the Kabul exhibition, as “a dreamlike procession of black puppets, made from cardboard paper cutouts, slowly mak[ing] a collective exodus, a ghostly reminder of the violence of a land plagued by oppositions but exorcized by a need for reconciliation and change”? Sure, why not? Nonetheless, the parallel to the grim processions of refugees fleeing Kabul between 1993 and 1996 was clear to everyone who saw the work in the Bagh-e-Babur pavilion.

Some of the art history seminars may have themselves been tripped up by the teachers' over-reliance on Western art-theory jargon. (I was not there; I am going by the accounts of some of the Afghan students, who described some seminars as “mostly irrelevant,” and “halfghan” observers, who mostly expressed admiration for the stamina and invention of the translators.) Some of the seminars took translation, omission, and censorship as their subjects. Students in Ashkan Sepahvand and Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s Seeing Studies workshop used paintings that had been removed from the National Gallery for a range of reasons, including shifts in censorship laws, as the starting point for new works—two of which were confiscated by the Ministry of Culture before the final exhibition, but ultimately returned. They discussed translations of Walter Benjamin into Farsi, and the ways in which terms acquire new meanings and ideas new currency through translation and recontextualization.

One of the explicit rules of art censorship in Afghanistan since 2001 is that no scenes of war may be depicted. The word “depicted” is important here, because it is the foundation of an argument that film, video, sound, and performance—ephemeral, unfixed media—are not subject to this law. So far that argument has proved successful. So one may watch a film about the civil war, but not look at a painting of the nineteenth-century battle of Maiwand, around which so many Afghan legends have been spun. And an artist like myself may get away with any number of things—like talking about people, events, and periods of Afghan history that normally go unremembered—if I describe my work as a “speculative” history that mixes fact and fiction, and use the tone of a dark fairy tale to talk about past horrors. So some value is added in the Afghan context by IAE's capacity for evasive maneuvering. But would I want to use the same tactics in a place where defying censorship doesn't carry with it the threat of prison time? Then again, while art is not habitually censored in the West, other kinds of censorship are increasingly prevalent even here.

According to Jacques Rancière, politics perceives art as powerless, which is why art has the freedom to do politics. This principle does not hold true in places like Afghanistan, where art is actually perceived as dangerous, and therefore has very little freedom to do politics. It is possible that the space for politics within art in Afghanistan may only be carved out, in this earliest stage of the recovery of the country’s destroyed artistic traditions, through the evasions and opacities of IAE or something like it.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, has embarked on a program of deliberate acceleration of its art scene, leap-frogging accepted stages of development with the reckless abandon of the truly rich. It has arrived at a different moment in its negotiation of the relationship between the state and the art world, a moment when direct confrontation becomes appropriate. The situation in Saadiyat is particularly ripe because Abu Dhabi, the richest of the Emirates, is infusing so much of every kind of capital into the project, and yet refuses to ensure basic standards of human rights for the workers constructing this fever-dream in the desert, for fear of setting a precedent.

Conclusions, or Questions
I keep circling back to labels, without necessarily meaning to. Perhaps there is a third point of origin for IAE, somewhere between the emergence of identity-based art in the 1980s and the culture of “political correctness” developed in the 1990s? Perhaps IAE developed, in part, as a circumlocution of the troubling terms that surfaced through the works of Adrian Piper, Kara Walker, Jimmie Durham, Coco Fusco, Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, David Wojnarowicz, et al? Not a whitewashing per se, but a way to cloak the confrontation of these works in a more polite, less direct form of address.

Most of my work as an arts administrator was performed for the alternative space Exit Art, recently disbanded after the death of cofounder Jeanette Ingberman. Almost all the artists I mentioned above showed at Exit in the 1980s or early 1990s, and I first came to know their work through Exit's archives, which preserved everything from early drafts of wall and catalogue text to correspondence with exhibiting artists to receipts for screws to install their work. I can attest that in those early years, when Jeanette and cofounder Papo Colo wrote all the press releases themselves, they were always idiosyncratic, sometimes poetic, frequently bizarre, but rarely possessing those traits identified by Alix and David as the marks of International Art English. At the time, Exit Art was still located in SoHo and known as Exit Art/The First World, and its posters played with notions of center and periphery, running slogans like “the inside is the outside” around their margins or borders. With mischief in their eyes, Jeanette and Colo were staking out a peripheral position, even while occupying the very center of the art world.

We return, then, to that larger debate about “language, legibility, and power” that troubles the original conception of IAE. If someone is unable or unwilling to explain an artwork in IAE, does that make the work illegible to the power structures of the art world (by which I mean, primarily, those people with the power to put an artwork into circulation), and therefore render it invisible to greater or lesser degree? Does the same condition apply if the artwork can be explained through the specialized vocabulary of art in the artist's native tongue, and then translated? Or is the real condition of legibility that the artwork must be explained in English, no matter what kind of English it is?

If fluency in IAE for native English speakers, or in English for non-native speakers, facilitates entry into the flows of people, information and capital that constitute the art world, does a lack of fluency prevent an artist from being assimilated into the center? Is the barrier to entry still higher if an artist is physically located in the “periphery” rather than the “center,” or does physical location now matter only inasmuch as it determines access to infrastructure (education, technology, financial support)? I suspect that location matters less these days than the ability to access, understand and manipulate those flows of people, information, and capital. But then again, depending on your physical location, your information-gathering and exchange may be subject to surveillance, censorship, and sudden suspensions.

I love Steyerl’s call for a joyously deviant, queered “International Disco Latin,” a “digital lingua franca” that revels in and remakes itself from its glitches and hitches, its glissandos and excesses, its “digital dispersion, its composition and artifice.” But it is still impossible for images, texts, videos and other files to travel and be traded equally promiscuously through all the ramifications of online networks. File-sharing sites, YouTube, and other key nodes of exchange are all blocked in a whole slew of countries where artspeak is used both to mask and elude oppression, including Afghanistan and the UAE. If International Disco Latin is premised on digital dispersion, is indeed formed from the glitch aesthetics and gleeful mash-ups of “accelerated data sets” crashing into “fantastic circulation orbits,” it would inevitably be formed elsewhere, in the more networked world, and trickle into those other spheres the same way IAE did – through the migratory patterns of privileged diasporas, those perpetual vectors of infection. (I say this with full consciousness that I migrate with intent every other month.)

In China, one of the ways that Internet users talk about politics without being censored is by exploiting linguistic loopholes: ambiguities in ideograms or pronunciation that allow innocuous terms to stand in for subversive ones, separated by only a hair’s breadth of emphasis. These slippages have their own loopy poetics, producing odd artifacts like that new animated hero, the grass-mud horse. Like the Chinese activists and their coded language, the more deliberate users of IAE may, in fact, be exploiting its ambiguities to conceal something, or to conceal some lack, for good reasons or bad. Or they may simply be flashing their credentials: I know the passwords, I speak your language, now will you please open the door?—MARIAM GHANI

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and member of the GulfLabor Working Group. Her work has recently been shown at dOCUMENTA (13) (Kabul and Kassel), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Sharjah Biennial 10. Ghani is currently a visiting scholar at the Asian Pacific American Institute at NYU. Gulflabor is a coalition of artists, writers, curators, educators and others working to ensure that workers’ rights are protected during the construction and maintenance of new cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.

Podcast: Critical Language: A Forum on International Art English

The Editors — Mon, 27 May 2013 13:37:33 -0400

A recording of Critical Language, Triple Canopy's forum on "International Art English," a widely circulated essay on the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world written by Alix Rule and David Levine and published in issue 16. Participants in the forum, which took place in April, included the authors and Wenzel Bilger, Lauren Cornell, Mariam Ghani, Mostafa Heddaya, Alexander Provan, Yael Reinharz, Lumi Tan, and Hrag Vartanian.

In "International Art English," Rule and Levine, analyze a corpus of press releases circulated by e-flux in order to describe the language of contemporary art. They trace the particularities of this language to English translations of critical texts published in the 1970s in journals like October. The widespread use of the Internet has, they argue, accelerated the development of IAE, turning it into a kind of lingua franca; the proliferation of international variations—French IAE, Scandinavian IAE, Chinese IAE—ends up diluting the authority of critics, "traditionally the elite innovators of IAE." Given these developments, Rule and Levine ask: "Can we imagine an art world without IAE? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?" With this forum, Triple Canopy aimed to provoke a critical response to the article, consider questions and perspectives eschewed by the authors, and solicit the perspectives of those who work with (or resist working with) IAE, whether they are critics, curators, educators, or publicists. Specifically, the discussion focused on the political implications and uses of IAE, within and outside of the art world. How does "critical" language direct attention away from the suppression of political dissent, especially when employed by institutions—and their proxies—operating in environments marred by human-rights violations, such as China and the UAE (or even the US)? How does obfuscation slip into propaganda? And do those who regularly produce IAE experience the language as burdensome or liberating, a welcome tool for the diffusion of power or another step toward a global standard of ambiguity and opacity?

Project: This Can Happen Now

Peter Fend — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:57:54 -0400

by Peter Fend

The island of Socotra becomes a global model for methane-powered economies.

Program: Speculations (“The future is ___________”)

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, NY
Date: May 12, 2013

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce Speculations (“The future is ______”), fifty days of lectures, discussions, and debates about the future, as part of EXPO 1: New York at MoMA PS1. Speculations will take place from May 12 to July 28, in a structure created by artist José León Cerrillo and in an installation designed by artist Adrián Villar Rojas. Participants include Marina Abramović, Jacob Appelbaum, David Auerbach, Gopal Balakrishnan, Klaus Biesenbach, Ray Brassier, Ted Chiang, Jace Clayton, Adam Cohen, John Crowley, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Mary “Missy” Cummings, Samuel Delany, Agnes Denes, Silvia Federici, Peter Frase, Rivka Galchen, Alex Gourevitch, David Graeber, Group Theory, N. Katherine Hayles, Natalie Jeremijenko, Thomas Keenan, Myung Mi Kim, Katie Kitamura, Josh Kline, Benjamin Kunkel, Ajay Kurian, Rachel Kushner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Kelly Link, Marie Lorenz, Niklas Maak, Danny Marcus, Mary Mattingly, Joseph McElroy, Maureen McHugh, Yates McKee, Mileece, John Miller, Naeem Mohaiemen, Evgeny Morozov, Heidi Neilson, Ted Nelson, Hương Ngô, Trevor Paglen, Ashwin Parameswaran, Otto Piene, Laura Poitras, Fatima Al Qadiri, Srikanth Reddy, David Rieff, Ben Rivers, Kim Stanley Robinson, Carne Ross, Norman Rush, Saskia Sassen, Gavin Schmidt, Taryn Simon, Elizabeth Stark, Astra Taylor, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Kathi Weeks, and Ben Wizner. The full schedule is posted below.

We know all the ways the world will end. And yet, we continue. Our action in the present implies an optimism about the future, even if that optimism is skeptical, worried, or dark. For Speculations (“The future is ______”), Triple Canopy is inviting writers, artists, scientists, activists, economists, and technologists to bet on futures they want to see realized and to describe them as clearly as possible, while considering what demands these futures make on the present. The speculations will take the form of daily lectures and debates in Villar Rojas’s installation and discussions within the structure created by Cerrillo, which will also house a library and an offline file-sharing network for collective speculations, designed by artist and programmer Dan Phiffer.

All Speculations participants will be filling out a standard questionnaire about their future and its demands on the present, for eventual publication. The public is also invited to speculate on the future and reconsider the present by answering the questionnaire, which will be available all summer at MoMA PS1. Please email speculations@canopycanopycanopy.com with any questions.

Format
Mondays, Thursdays (except July 4), and Fridays
One speaker will give a two-part presentation, each part an hour long. The first part, a seminar, taking place at 2 p.m., will be a discussion of a historical speculation on the future—a short text or other work that the speaker has found generative. The second part, a talk or lecture, taking place at 4 p.m., will present the speaker’s own speculation on the future, to be followed by a Q&A. Weekday events are unticketed and free with museum admission.

Saturdays (through June 22), Sundays, and Thursday, July 4
Weekend days and July Fourth will have a wider range of formats: debate, conversation, keynote, performance, etc. Generally, sessions will begin at 3 p.m. (times will vary) and last for up to two hours. For capacity reasons, these events are ticketed; tickets include museum admission. Tickets are available here.

Weekday lectures and weekend debates, conversations, keynotes, and so on can be watched live or as archived videos via Livestream.

Upcoming Events
Thursday, June 20, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
N. Katherine Hayles is professor of literature at Duke and author of How We Became Posthuman. At 2 p.m. she will discuss Speculation, an alternate-reality game in which a collapsed euro has plunged the world into economic crisis. At 4 p.m. she will lecture on algorithmic trading and the urgent need for humanists, artists, and game developers to develop counternarratives displacing the dominant discussion around global financial markets.

Friday, June 21, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Carne Ross is a former British diplomat and founder of the nonprofit advisory group Independent Diplomat. He is also the author of The Leaderless Revolution. At 2 p.m. he will discuss Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. At 4 p.m. he will describe a future in which political power is redistributed from governments to individuals.

Saturday, June 22, 3 p.m.
Artists Alisa Baremboym, Ian Cheng, Josh Kline and Ajay Kurian, whose work is included in EXPO 1: New York in the group exhibition "ProBio," will discuss the future of the body, the future of art, the artist as speculative thinker, and posthumanism in contemporary art. Kline, who organized "ProBio" will introduce the conversation and speak briefly about the exhibition. Tickets are available for this session.

Sunday, June 23, 3 p.m.
Alex Gourevitch is a political-science professor at Brown University who writes on the environment, work, and economic freedom. Kathi Weeks is author`of The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. They will debate the role of work in a better future. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, June 24, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Srikanth Reddy is the author of two books of poetry, Facts for Visitors and Voyager, which probes this world’s cosmological relation to the plurality of all possible worlds. At 2 p.m. he will discuss H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and futurity in Victorian fiction. At 4 p.m. he will talk about a future in which the living outnumber the dead.

Thursday, June 27, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Jace Clayton is an artist focused on the intersection of sound, technology use in low-income communities, and public space. As DJ /rupture, Clayton has released a number of acclaimed albums. He will discuss inexpensive time-travel devices and how the future might not exist.

Friday, June 28, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Ben Rivers is an experimental filmmaker and artist based in London. Drawing on his film in development, After London, he will talk about a possible future England, landscape transformation, toxic wastelands and the co-existence of multiple, diverging Utopias.

Sunday, June 30, 1 p.m.
Jacob Appelbaum is a photographer and a developer with the Tor Project. Trevor Paglen is an artist and the author of books on experimental geography and state secrecy. Laura Poitras is a documentary filmmaker working on a trilogy about America post-9/11. They will discuss surveillance and how ordinary citizens can reclaim their anonymity. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, July 1, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
TBD.

Thursday, July 4, 3 p.m.
Gopal Balakrishnan is a political theorist and author of The Enemy (on Carl Schmitt) and “Speculations on the Stationary State.” David Graeber is an anthropologist and activist whose books include The Democracy Project and Debt. They will discuss prospects for utopia and stagnation, in America and worldwide.

Friday, July 5, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Ted Nelson is an American philosopher and pioneer theorist of information technology, best known for coining the terms “hypertext” and “hypermedia.” His Project Xanadu, founded in 1960, anticipated the World Wide Web.

Sunday, July 7, 3 p.m.
Elizabeth Stark is a lecturer at Stanford Law School, where she started the Ideas for a Better Internet program. Astra Taylor is a documentarian, Strike Debt activist, and author (The People’s Platform: And Other Digital Delusions). They will debate technological and anti-institutional approaches to the future of education. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, July 8, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others and, most recently, the novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects. His fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, and Locus Awards. He will describe how technology will change the way we narrativize our lives.

Thursday, July 11, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Fatima Al Qadiri is a New York–based Kuwaiti composer and visual artist, and a contributing editor at DIS. Inspired by the film Akira, she will discuss visual and musical specters of the apocalypse, Japanese literature and religion, and Al Qadiri's experience of the first Gulf War.

Friday, July 12, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Myung Mi Kim engages with the translingual and translocative in her poetry; with translation and mistranslation and mass global migration. She will speculate on the figure of the heteroglot and its relation to future citizenships and practices of civil life.

Sunday, July 14, 3 p.m.
Marina Abramović has been using her own body as subject, object, and medium since the early 1970s. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art presented her retrospective “The Artist Is Present.” She will talk about how to create a productive union between the arts, science, technology, spirituality, and education in the future. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, July 15, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Danny Marcus is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, whose writings on Occupy have appeared in October and the n+1 Occupy! Gazette. He will discuss the future of communization and the communal control of social institutions.

Thursday, July 18, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Silvia Federici, emerita professor of political philosophy and international studies at Hofstra University, is an activist, teacher, and writer whose most recent book is Revolution at Point Zero. She will talk about the future of the family and reproductive labor.

Friday, July 19, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Ray Brassier is a philosopher and a translator of Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and a participant in the original “Speculative Realism” conference, he will discuss what the future is and what it means to orient oneself toward it.

Sunday, July 21, 1 & 3:30 p.m.
At 1 p.m., artist-engineer Natalie Jeremijenko and NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt will discuss art and science's responses to climate change. Tickets are available for this session.

At 3:30 p.m., the pioneer in ecological and land art Agnes Denes will discuss her work. Her monumental earthworks have included forests in Finland and Australia and a wheatfield in a Battery Park City landfill. Tickets are available for this session.

Monday, July 22, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Lynn Hershman Leeson is an artist and filmmaker who uses pioneering technologies to investigate the real and the virtual. She will describe a near future where genetic manipulation and the interfacing of humans and machines render remarkable possibilities for human evolution.

Thursday, July 25, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Mierle Laderman-Ukeles is an artist known for her exploration of feminist, labor, and ecological themes. She’ll ask whether we can design modes of survival—for a thriving planet, not an entropic one—that don’t crush our personal and civic freedom.

Friday, July 26, time TBA
Otto Piene, a founder of Group Zero and the first fellow of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, has examined the connection between art, nature, and technology for more than half a century.

Sunday, July 28, 3 p.m.
David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer. Evgeny Morozov is author of The Net Delusion and To Save Everything, Click Here. Ben Wizner is director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. They will debate technology’s false utopias and progressive possibilities. Tickets are available for this session.

Past Events
Sunday, May 12, 12–6 p.m.
Opening of EXPO 1: New York and Speculations (“The future is ________”). The School will be open all day, with talks by Triple Canopy editors and others.

Monday, May 13, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Rachel Kushner is author of the novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize) and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. She will describe a future in which the American prison system has been dissolved. View the Livestream.

Thursday, May 16, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Dan Phiffer is a programmer and artist interested in hackable, inexpensive computer networks. He will lead a workshop on his projects Occupy.here and the Speculations Library, and sketch a future in which everyone controls their own data. View the Livestream.

Friday, May 17, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Saskia Sassen is a sociologist whose work focuses on globalization, urban studies, and emerging technologies. Her most recent book is Territory, Authority, Rights. At 2:00 p.m., she will discuss “Imminent Domain,” her short article on the global protests of 2011—Occupy Wall Street, los indignados, Tahrir Square—and occupation as a political strategy. At 4:00 p.m., she will speculate about migration and the future of the global city. View the Livestream.

Saturday, May 18, 3 p.m.
Known for his monumental clay sculptures, Adrián Villar Rojas represented Argentina at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Klaus Biesenbach is director of MoMA PS1 and chief curator at large at the Museum of Modern Art. They will discuss “Dark Optimism” and Villar Rojas’s installation La inocencia de los animales, built for the EXPO School. View the Livestream.

Sunday, May 19, 3 p.m.
Samuel Delany is the author of science-fiction novels including Dhalgren and Babel-17. Kelly Link coedits Small Beer Press and has written three collections of fantastic short stories, most recently Pretty Monsters. They will talk about how we use and abuse the future. View the Livestream.

Monday, May 20, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Maureen McHugh’s latest story collection, After the Apocalypse, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Ten Best Books of 2011. She will speculate on the consequences of depopulation and de-extinction, and the possibility of terraforming Earth itself to ensure our survival. View the Livestream.

Thursday, May 23, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
John Miller is an artist and writer based in New York and Berlin, and a professor of professional practice at Barnard. At 2:00 p.m. he will discuss Vilem Flusser’s Toward a Philosophy of Photography and describe the impact of cybernetic information technologies on future social structure. At 4:00 p.m. he will speculate about environmental concerns as they relate to entropy, technology, systems theory, networks, conceptual art, sci-fi, and immortality. View the Livestream.

Friday, May 24, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Adam Cohen is a professor in the Departments of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Physics at Harvard. His research focuses on controlling light-matter interactions in warm, wet, squishy environments. At 2:00 p.m. he will discuss writings by Francis Crick and H. G. Wells on DNA and the mutability of life-forms. At 4:00 p.m. he will speculate about the future of stem cells and the brain. View the Livestream.

Saturday, May 25, 3 p.m.
Journalist David Rieff, author of books on immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism, will detail the proposed solutions to the world food crisis, and the serious difficulties with each. View the Livestream.

Sunday, May 26, 3 p.m.
Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Norman Rush is the author of three novels, including Mating, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1991. They will discuss commonalities between literature, OCD, fortunetelling, lucid dreaming, and weather reports. View the Livestream.

Monday, May 27, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Marie Lorenz is an artist whose project The Tide and Current Taxi ferries passengers through the waterways of New York. At 2 p.m. she will discuss the alien “Zone” in the Russian sci-fi film Stalker and novel Roadside Picnic. At 4 p.m. she will describe how to experience the future in the trash of the present. View the Livestream.

Thursday, May 30, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
In 2009, Mary Mattingly launched the Waterpod project, a sustainable art-and-technology habitat. At 2 p.m. she will discuss “Critical Path: Part Four” from Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path. At 4 p.m. she will talk about a future where people rely on community-based networks for resource sharing, from islands made of boats and barges to flock houses to floating spheres. View the Livestream.

Friday, May 31, 4 p.m. lecture. **Nb. There is no 2 p.m. session for this event. The session with Ellen Ullman is canceled.
Hương Ngô is an educator and artist whose performance-based collaborations have been supported by the New Museum, Rhizome, LMCC, the Kitchen, and Tate Modern. She will present recent research on Mars-colonization simulations as they relate to contemporary performance practices. Heidi Neilson is an artist addressing topics such as weather, fake snow, and debris in the Earth’s orbit. She will present recent research on space debris, the “landscape” of space, and off-Earth parks. View the Livestream.

Saturday, June 1, 3 p.m.
Chris Csikszentmihalyi is an artist working on technologies that rebalance power between citizens, governments, and corporations, and founded and directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT. Mary “Missy” Cummings is one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots and director of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab. Thomas Keenan is director of the Bard Human Rights Project. They will debate the future of drones. View the Livestream.

Sunday, June 2, 3 p.m.
Taryn Simon draws on many disciplines to explore the limits and possibilities of photographic representation. Her first solo exhibition took place at MoMA PS1 in 2003. With Tim Griffin, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, Simon will discuss her recent projects Picture Collection and Image Atlas (with Aaron Swartz), and how they envision the history and future of the image archive. View the Livestream.

Monday, June 3, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Mileece is a sonic artist whose interactive “ecoscapes” are generated from the electromagnetic emissions of plants and by handmade, sensor-based musical instruments. At 2 p.m. she will discuss biocurrents and demonstrate the construction of simple bioelectrodes. At 4 p.m. she will describe the design of utopian environments along with the future of renewable energy and distributed power generation. View the Livestream.

Thursday, June 6, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Naeem Mohaiemen is a writer and visual artist working in Dhaka and New York who explores the history of the international left and utopia. At 2 p.m. he will discuss the 1970s ultra-left and show excerpts from his film United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1). At 4 p.m. he will speculate on the future of leftism as an alternative to piety politics in Muslim-majority countries. View the Livestream.

Friday, June 7, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Katie Kitamura has written for Frieze, Wired, and the New York Times. Her novels include The Longshot and Gone to the Forest. At 2 p.m. she will draw on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film World on a Wire to consider simulacra as a model for thinking about fiction writing and authorship. At 4 p.m. she will describe a future where languages are traded like currency. View the Livestream.

Saturday, June 8, 3 p.m.
Group Theory, a Brooklyn-based theater company, is Ben Vershbow and Dorit Avganim plus collaborators. They will present scenes from their work-in-progress Coast of Mars, a Russian doll of stories, conversations, and fantastic reveals, pondering our near future (and recent past) on the Red Planet. With: Clare Barron, Max Dana, Craig Pattison and Ted Schneider. View the Livestream.

Sunday, June 9, 1:30 p.m. lecture & 4 p.m. conversation
Kim Stanley Robinson is a science-fiction author and the winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. At 1:30 p.m., he will deliver a keynote talk, “What Is the Future For?,” and consider the strange shape that climate change gives the future. View the Livestream. At 4 p.m., he will be in conversation with novelist John Crowley. View the Livestream.

Monday, June 10, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
John Crowley is the author of many novels and volumes of short fiction, including the famed fantasy novel Little, Big. He will discuss the prophetic work of Norman Bel Geddes, designer of the Futurama, and describe his own foolproof method of predicting the far-distant world future. View the Livestream.

Thursday, June 13, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Benjamin Kunkel is an editor of n+1 and author of the novel Indecision. At 2 p.m. he will discuss the final chapter of Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization. At 4 p.m. he will talk about the idea of “commonism,” or some institutions for an ecological and egalitarian society. View the Livestream.

Friday, June 14, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Joseph McElroy is the author of nine novels, including Women and Men and Cannonball, as well as a nonfiction book about water, long in progress and to be completed later this year. At 2 p.m. he will be discussing Stanley Crawford's Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico At 4 p.m. he will outline the elements of a new global ethos of water. View the Livestream.

Saturday, June 15, 3 p.m.
Niklas Maak, German writer, architecture critic, and co-organizer of the EXPO Colony, will give a short lecture, “Reclaiming Public Space: The EXPO Colony and Small-Scale Utopias,” on the contemporary crisis of domestic architecture, offering a counterhistory of communes and collectivity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century architecture. He will be joined by Colony architects a77, arts collective Not an Alternative, and MoMA PS1 associate curator Jenny Schlenzka to discuss new ideas about housing, privacy, and public space. View the Livestream.

Sunday, June 16, 3 p.m.
Peter Frase is an editor of Jacobin and a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Ashwin Parameswaran writes about resilience in economics, ecology, technology, and other complex systems. They will debate the future of work, technological unemployment, and the universal basic income. View the Livestream.

Monday, June 17, 2 p.m seminar & 4 p.m. lecture
Yates McKee is an art critic and organizer with various Occupy projects including Strike Debt. His work has appeared in venues including October, Grey Room, the Nation, and Waging Nonviolence. He is coeditor of the book Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism, as well as the magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. At 2 p.m. he will discuss three short readings: “Communiqué from an Absent Future,” dispatched from the student occupation at the University of California in 2009; Martha Rosler's “The Artistic Mode of Revolution: From Gentrification to Occupation”; and “Questions for John Holloway,” from Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. At 4 p.m. he will give a lecture, “Aliens from the Future,” in which he will speculate about the future of radical education with reference to Occupy Wall Street, Free Cooper Union, the Far Rockaways, and the east side of Detroit. View the Livestream.

About EXPO 1: New York
EXPO 1: New York is a large-scale exploration of ecological challenges in the context of the economic and sociopolitical instability of the early twenty-first century. Acting in the guise of a festival-as-institution, EXPO 1: New York reconsiders the museum from the ground up, presenting a simultaneity of modules, interventions, solo projects, and group exhibitions that encompass all of MoMA PS1 and other locations such as MoMA and Rockaway Beach. EXPO 1: New York is made possible by a partnership with Volkswagen.

Program: Cache Cleaner

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: China Chalet, 47 Broadway, New York, NY
Date: May 11, 2013

Cache Cleaner is an evening of musical and artistic performances in celebration of Triple Canopy's fifth anniversary. Cache Cleaner is presented with RVNG Intl. and will feature performances by Maxmilion Dunbar, Masks, My Barbarian, and BFFA3AE. Jon Santos, Michael Magnan (Fatherhood), and RVNG's Matt Werth will DJ.

Tickets
Free for Triple Canopy members
$10 at the door ~~or pay-as-you-wish online now until May 11~~

***

RVNG Intl. is a Brooklyn-based music institution that operates on few but heavily fortified principals, dealing with forward-reaching artists sometimes categorized as electronic, avant, free, fried, fucked, etc. RVNG Intl. was founded by Matt Werth in 2004 and has released records by Blondes, Holly Herndon, Julia Holter, and Mirror Mirror, among others.

Maxmilion Dunbar is a moniker of musician, producer, and DJ Andrew Field-Pickering. Dunbar's second album, House of Woo, was released in February by RVNG Intl.

Masks is a New York-based duo comprised of Alexis Georgopoulos and Max Ravitz. The group's sound is made almost exclusively with analog synthesizers and drum machines and digests the history of electronic dance music, from Detroit to Chicago, cosmic to Italo. Georgopoulos also performs as ARP, and has released records with Smalltown Supersound and RVNG Intl. Ravitz, who performs as PATRICIA, will release his debut record on Opal Tapes later this year.

My Barbarian is a collective consisting of Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, founded in Los Angeles in 2000. My Barbarian's interdisciplinary performance, video, music and installation projects use fantasy, humor, camp, and clashing aesthetic sensibilities to playfully reenact artistic, political, social, and historical situations.

BFFA3AE is a New York-based artist group consisting of Daniel Chew, Micaela Durand, and Matthew Gaffney. The group was formed in 2007 as a surf-club blog to host a dialogue about the implications of the Internet on culture and life. Acknowledging the reach of the Internet into the physical world, the group has since expanded to include work in a variety of mediums, including film, performance, and installation.

Michael Magnan is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist and DJ. He has held numerous residencies at parties such as Mr. Black, Vandam at Greenhouse, and, most recently, ElevenEleven. Presently he is working on a house music production project in collaboration with the artist Physical Therapy, under the name Fatherhood.

Jon Santos is an artist living and working in New York City. He works in video, sound, performance, and sculpture. Recent performances and projects include Telegraph, at Storefront for Art and Architecture's gala; The Last Weekend, with Peter Coffin; and Social Mirroring, at the New Museum. Jon is an adjunct faculty member at Pratt Institute and the principal of Common Space, a multidisciplinary design and art studio. He has exhibited widely in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum (New York).

BYCO is the first micro-financing site for design. BYCO allows anyone to submit projects and finance their designs, and then handles all the production, sales, and distribution. BYCO is a project of the design studio JF & SON.

With generous support from:

Project: Adaptation after Metalogue (Part 2)

Boru O’Brien O’Connell — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:10:30 -0400

by Boru O’Brien O’Connell

On the greater number of possibilities for disorder than for order.

News: April 29, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:47:35 -0400

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce the recipients of our fourth annual round of commissions, initiated with an open call for proposals on December 11, 2012, with a record number of over 400 submissions: Rosa Aiello, Shane Anderson, Bloopers, David Greenspan, Irene Lusztig, Dan Phiffer, Matt Sheridan Smith, Ada Smailbegovic, and Anna Della Subin.

Triple Canopy aims to forge connections between books, manuscripts, lectures, performances, exhibitions, among other forms, and our online publishing practice—charting an expanded field of publication. Over the next year, recipients will work closely with editors toward the creative and technical realization of their projects, which may be published in a variety of formats, ranging from public performance to print pamphlet and beyond, before ultimately appearing in Web-specific form in Triple Canopy's online magazine.

Proposals are reviewed by Triple Canopy year-round via our online submission form. We thank everyone who applied to the call and congratulate this year’s recipients!

* * *

Rosa Aiello is a writer and video artist. For her Triple Canopy commission, Aiello will create a digital piece, “A Deceitful Stick,” an exploration of the limits of humanness as raised by 3-D animation.

Shane Anderson is a Berlin-based poet, translator, and editor. For his Triple Canopy commission, Anderson will translate poet Ulf Stolterfoht’s Ammegespräche, or “Amme Talks,” a linguistic interchange with artist Peter Dittmer’s chatbot installation, Die Amme.

Bloopers comprises New York–based artists and musicians Michael Bell-Smith, Sara Magenheimer, and Ben Vida. For their Triple Canopy commission, Bloopers will hold their debut performance, “Bloopers #0,” in Triple Canopy’s space at 155 Freeman Street.

David Greenspan is a renowned actor and playwright. For his Triple Canopy commission, Greenspan will present “Composition … Master-Pieces … Identity,” a solo performance of three works by Gertrude Stein.

Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. For her Triple Canopy commission, Lusztig will mine an extensive archive of 20th-century maternal training and childbirth films to create "The Motherhood Archives," a mediated essay on the medicalization and institutionalization of childbirth and motherhood in America.

Dan Phiffer is a computer programmer and artist interested in hackable, inexpensive computer networks. For his Triple Canopy commission, Phiffer will deploy “Occupy.here,” a peer-to-peer network autonomous of the Internet and designed to facilitate open political discussion.

Matt Sheridan Smith is a Los Angeles-based artist. For his Triple Canopy commission, Sheridan Smith will create “You can't see any such thing,” an interactive fiction work and text-only computer game navigated using basic commands such as "examine," "take," "look," or "go."

Ada Smailbegovic is a poet and critic. For her Triple Canopy commission, Smailbegovic will compose “Of the Dense and Rare,” an investigation into the poetics of matter based on experimental procedures drawn from Francis Bacon’s 1623 treatise The History of Dense and Rare.

Anna Della Subin is a writer and Bidoun contributing editor. For her Triple Canopy commission, Della Subin will author an essay, “Not Dead but Sleeping,” on the failed 1935 Cairo production of Tawfiq al-Hakim's The People of the Cave and the possibility of sleeping through revolution.

Project: Danny Boy

Rebecca Bird — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:03:02 -0400

by Rebecca Bird

“There were three exodi of boys to sea.” A ballad in prose and six animations.

Project: This Time We’ll Keep It a Secret

Martin Beck — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 13:51:33 -0400

by Martin Beck

“What is the alternative to established America?” A documentary study of certain living arrangements.

News: April 19, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:21:47 -0400

We're pleased to announce the publication of our eighteenth issue, Active Rot, which will be unfurled in installments over the next few weeks. It includes a wide range of writing and artist projects, including Sara Greenberger Rafferty's meditation on televisual drama; Jibz Cameron and Hedia Maron's epic tale of dreams dashed by the Cartoon Network; B. Wurtz's invigoration of everyday objects; Martin Beck's study of American communes and their language; Peter Fend's plan for a global methane-powered economy; Boru O'Brien O'Connell's cannibalization of Gregory Bateson's metalogues; and a delectable story of offshore finance, murder, and commercial thrillers told by Alexander Provan with John Barlow and Goldin+Senneby.

Active Rot is the final issue to be published under the reign of TC 2.0. We will spend the summer developing our new publishing platform, TC 3.0, and launch issue 19 in September. (According to wiseGEEK.com: "Active rot happens when the program is used and updated but the updates either do not reflect changes needed to properly adapt to the computer environment or the original source code has been changed so much that problems are occurring.")

Project: History Works

B. Wurtz — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:15:30 -0400

by B. Wurtz

As if the world were a ball of rubber bands. Views on uncommon objects.

Project: The Dynasty Handbag Show

Jibz Cameron & Hedia Maron — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:14:52 -0400

by Jibz Cameron & Hedia Maron

From Miss Lez to Hollywood to Adult Swim to … a lesbian Seinfeld? How not to make it in showbiz.

Project: Sons

Sara Greenberger Rafferty — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:13:45 -0400

by Sara Greenberger Rafferty

POV to Clay, cut to Piney, cut to Kyle, Kyle pleading, cut to Jax, POV, Clay, Kyle, Tig.

Podcast: Novel Operations

Jim Fletcher — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:28:08 -0400

A recording of a performance marking the release of Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism, by actor Jim Fletcher with Lakpa Bhutia, Alex Delinois, Sam Frank, Jordan Lord, and Ariana Reines. The performance, which took place at Artists Space Books & Talks on March 29, 2013, draws on various literary formats included in Corrected Slogans—transcripts, footnotes, stanzas, dialogue, indexes, and a lexicon—to interpret and amplify the book’s many textual registers, unraveling dialogues and vocalizing wordplay.

Corrected Slogans is the culmination of the multipart project Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), which was conceived as Triple Canopy’s contribution to “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The book, which hinges on annotated transcripts of a series of public conversations, represents a collective effort to establish a new critical discourse around conceptual art and poetics.

Program: History Works

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: Bureau, 127 Henry Street, New York, NY
Date: April 14, 2013

Exhibition:
April 14–25, 2013, Bureau, 127 Henry Street, New York, NY

Opening reception:
Sunday, April 14, 6–8 p.m., Bureau

Screening of Wurtz’s early video work and
discussion with Josh Tonsfeldt and Hannah Whitaker:
Wednesday, April 17, 7 p.m., 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY

Late hours and reading by Rachel Levitsky:
Sunday, April 21, 6–8 p.m., Bureau

Triple Canopy and Bureau are pleased to announce “History Works,” an exhibition of sculptures and photographs by B. Wurtz in collaboration with the magazine. Since the early 1970s, Wurtz has exploited the sculptural potential of everyday objects. Incorporating such common household items as shoelaces, plastic bags, and socks into his artwork, Wurtz recalls the familiar language of the objet trouvé but with distinctive buoyancy and humor. While his works often read as simply stated facts, this directness belies the sophisticated language of objects, and our complicated relationship to even the most modest among them. Wurtz’s work often invites comparison between things: art to non-art, the mass-produced to the handmade, and, in the case of this exhibition, a photograph to the object it represents.

“History Works” consists of three new sculptures, each paired with a photograph that distorts the scale of the object or confounds perspective, echoing the artist’s seminal Photo/Object series. These works will be accompanied by what Wurtz calls a “family of objects” collected or created by him over the decades: a rubber-band ball, a cat toy, and three objects forged by Wurtz as a child—a crude model of Mission Santa Barbara, a wooden skyscraper, and a miniscule human head. The sculptures that comprise “History Works” are inspired by these objects and their stories.

For the past several months, Wurtz has collaborated with Triple Canopy on the development of “History Works,” including an iteration of the project to be published in Triple Canopy’s online magazine in April. The online publication further advances the logic of the photographs, representing the sculptures and objects—however incompletely, or inaccurately—with digital tools, rendering them unfamiliar, embedding them in alternative visual narratives. The magazine iteration of “History Works” will also include video work made by Wurtz when he was a graduate student at California Institute of the Arts, and rarely shown publicly.

On April 17, Triple Canopy will hold a screening of Wurtz’s early videos, which offer a glimpse into the origins of his artistic practice, at 155 Freeman Street, its space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Wurtz will discuss his work with artist Josh Tonsfeldt, with whom he has collaborated, and Triple Canopy contributing editor Hannah Whitaker.

To inquire about available works, please write to office@bureau-inc.com.

***

B. Wurtz was born in Pasadena, California, in 1948, and now lives in New York City. His work has been exhibited at MoMA P.S.1, MCA Chicago, White Flag Projects (St. Louis), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, White Columns (New York), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), RISD Museum of Art (Providence), Corcoran Gallery (Washington, D.C.), and Castillo/Corrales (Paris). Wurtz’s solo exhibition, “Recent Works,” is on view at Metro Pictures from March 21 until April 27.

Program: Triple Canopy at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell Street, Fort Worth, TX
Date: April 09, 2013

A conversation about communication, art, and the role of publication with the editors of Triple Canopy, Cabinet, and Pastelegram. The panel is organized as part of the museum's spring event series, Tuesday Evenings at the Modern. Editors from each magazine will consider and discuss the vibrant life and perceived challenges of today’s art publications. "Each has thoughtfully considered its unique contribution to a discourse that keeps us all engaged and informed," reads the museum's description of the event, "encouraging our intellectual curiosity to face the challenge of not becoming complacent in a gluttonous world of information that can leave us knowing and caring about less rather than more."

Program: Critical Language

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: April 06, 2013

"International Art English," published in Triple Canopy in July, has circulated widely and generated debates about the relationship between language, legibility, and power in the art world. The authors of the article, Alix Rule and David Levine, analyze a corpus of press releases circulated by e-flux in order to describe the language of contemporary art. They trace the particularities of this language to English translations of critical texts published in the 1970s in journals like October. The widespread use of the Internet has, they argue, accelerated the development of IAE, turning it into a kind of lingua franca; the proliferation of international variations—French IAE, Scandinavian IAE, Chinese IAE—ends up diluting the authority of critics, "traditionally the elite innovators of IAE." Given these developments, Rule and Levine ask: "Can we imagine an art world without IAE? Without its special language, would art need to submit to the scrutiny of broader audiences and local ones? Would it hold up?"

With this forum, Triple Canopy hopes to provoke a critical response to the article, consider questions and perspectives eschewed by the authors, and solicit the perspectives of those who work with (or resist working with) IAE, whether they are critics, curators, educators, or publicists. Specifically, the discussion will focus on the political implications and uses of IAE, within and outside of the art world. "Thanks to International Art English, the artist can still appear vaguely subversive and the host state committed to openness, a mutual saving of face," writes Mostafa Heddaya in a recent essay for Hyperallergic. How does such "critical" language direct attention away from the suppression of political dissent, especially when employed by institutions—and their proxies—operating in environments marred by human-rights violations, such as China and the UAE (or even the US)? How does obfuscation slip into propaganda? And do those who regularly produce IAE experience the language as burdensome or liberating, a welcome tool for the diffusion of power or another step toward a global standard of ambiguity and opacity?

The forum will be facilitated by Nathalie Anglès, Wenzel Bilger, Lauren Cornell, Mariam Ghani, Mostafa Heddaya, David Levine, Alexander Provan, Yael Reinharz, Alix Rule, Lumi Tan, and Hrag Vartanian.

***

Nathalie Anglès is cofounder and executive director of Residency Unlimited, a New York-based nonprofit arts organization that fosters customised residencies for artists and curators through strategic partnerships with collaborating institutions. From 2000 until 2008, she was the director of Location One’s international residency program. In 2008 she received the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government.

Wenzel Bilger is regional program director of the Goethe-Institut New York.

Lauren Cornell is the curator of the 2015 triennial, digital projects, and Museum as Hub at the New Museum in New York. From 2005-2012, she served as adjunct curator at the New Museum and executive director of Rhizome, an organization dedicated to the creation, presentation and preservation of art engaged with technology.

Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker, and member of the Gulflabor Working Group. Her work has recently been shown at dOCUMENTA (13) (Kabul and Kassel), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Sharjah Biennial 10. Ghani is currently a visiting scholar at the Asian Pacific American Institute at NYU. Gulflabor is a coalition of artists, writers, curators, educators and others working to ensure that workers’ rights are protected during the construction and maintenance of new cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi.

Mostafa Heddaya is a writer in New York and the coeditor of American Circus.

David Levine is an artist based in Brooklyn and Berlin. His performances and projects have been presented at MoMA, Mass MoCA, Documenta 12 (with Cabinet), and the Townhouse Gallery (Cairo), as well as Galerie Feinkost (Berlin) and François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles).

Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy.

Yael Reinharz is executive director of Artis, an independent nonprofit organization that broadens international awareness and understanding of contemporary art from Israel, and provides important resources, programs and platforms for artists and art professionals to develop lasting partnerships with the global art community.

Alix Rule is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University.

Lumi Tan is an assistant curator at The Kitchen in New York and associate editor of The Exhibitionist: Journal for Exhibition Making.

Hrag Vartanian isa Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and critic. He is the editor of Hyperallergic and a member of the Triangle Arts Association board.

Podcast: Antisocial Network

The Editors — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:28:26 -0400

Listen in for an evening of readings by poets Donald Dunbar, Jane Gregory, Joe Luna, K. Silem Mohammad, and Jacob Wren, originally hosted by Triple Canopy, publishers Fence and The Song Cave, and digital poetry journal The Claudius App, on March 8th, 2013, at the Cambridge, MA offices of The Harvard Advocate, the oldest continuously published collegiate literary journal in America. Here we celebrate the publication of Triple Canopy's newest work of research into the intersection of contemporary art and writing, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism, as well as Jane Gregory's first full-length book, the intriguingly titled, My Enemies, and a new issue from The Claudius App.

* * *

Donald Dunbar is the author of the chapbooks You Are So Pretty (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and Click Click (Gold Wake Press, 2010), and of Eyelid Lick (Fence Books), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he co-curates the reading series If Not For Kidnap and teaches poetry to future chefs at Oregon Culinary Institute.

Jane Gregory is from Tucson, Arizona. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently working towards a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley, California. Her book My Enemies will be released by The Song Cave in early 2013.

Joe Luna lives in Brighton, UK, where he runs the Hi Zero reading series and edits Hi Zero magazine. Crater Press published the letterpress fold Google Song in November 2011; his poems have appeared in, among others, Poems, Written Between October and December 2010 (Grasp Press), The Claudius App (online), Better than Language: An Anthology of New Modernist Poetries (Ganzfeld Press), FRIENDS (Critical Documents), The Cambridge Literary Review, Sous les Pavés, Damn the Cæsars, Lana Turner, and The Death and Life of American Cities. A booklet, LVRSLVRSLVRSLVRS, was privately distributed in 2010; the .pdf epic FAILCORE is still public. A new book, ASTROTURF, is forthcoming.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo, 2004), Breathalyzer (Edge, 2008), The Front (Roof, 2009), and Monsters (forthcoming, Edge Books). In his current project, The Sonnagrams, Mohammad anagrammatizes Shakespeare’s Sonnets into all-new English sonnets in iambic pentameter. He is also editor of the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and faculty editor of West Wind Review. He is an associate professor in the English & Writing program at Southern Oregon University.

Jacob Wren is a writer and maker of eccentric performances. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Unrehearsed Beauty / Le génie des autres, La famille se crée en copulant and the ongoing HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series. In 2007 he was invited by Sophiensaele (Berlin) to adapt and direct Wolfgang Koeppen's 1954 novel Der Tod in Rom and in 2008 he was commissioned by Campo (Ghent) to collaborate with Pieter De Buysser on An Anthology of Optimism. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.

News: April 03, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:52:33 -0400

“Culture is also something personal; it is cultivation with respect to the appreciation of ideas and art and broad human interests. When efficiency is identified with a narrow range of acts, instead of with the spirit and meaning of activity, culture is opposed to efficiency.”
—John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 1916

For the past year, Triple Canopy's editors and designers have been planning an ambitious new online publishing platform. TC 3.0, as we're calling it, will not only revolutionize Triple Canopy’s work on the Web but forge meaningful connections between print publications and live programming, and so illuminate the entire sphere of Triple Canopy’s activities. Here's a taste of what we've been thinking, taken from a new essay on culture and technology written by the editors:

Triple Canopy 3.0: Internet lingo, surely, but useful enough. Refresh is a nicer name for the profound website redesign we’re working on, and all the money we’ve got to raise to pay for it. Profound, of course, is a suspicious word for a website, though certainly much better than disruptive. But it’s not just a redesign, and it’s not just a website, and it isprofound, deep-seated, hard for us to fathom; it’s a rethinking, from the ground up, of how we create culture and a coherent body of knowledge in a resistant, efficient, particularized world. We’re very excited. This is important to us. But it’s tough work, and not cheap; even describing it is difficult, and we have almost as many questions as answers. Which is why we’re appealing to you.

Learn more at refresh.canopycanopycanopy.com »

Program: Novel Operations

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Location: Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, NY
Date: March 29, 2013

Triple Canopy is pleased to mark the publication of two new books—the second volume of the annual anthology Invalid Format and Corrected Slogans—with a performance by noted actor Jim Fletcher with Lakpa Bhutia, Alex Delinois, Sam Frank, Jordan Lord, and Ariana Reines, followed by a reception with the editors and contributors.

Corrected Slogans is the culmination of the multipart project Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), which was conceived as Triple Canopy’s contribution to “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The book, which hinges on annotated transcripts of a series of public conversations, represents a collective effort to establish a new critical discourse around conceptual art and poetics.

The performance, by Fletcher and other actors and readers, will draw on various literary formats included in Corrected Slogans—transcripts, footnotes, stanzas, dialogue, indexes, and a lexicon—to interpret and amplify the book’s many textual registers, unraveling dialogues and vocalizing wordplay.

Corrected Slogans includes work and words by Nora Abrams, Andrea Andersson, Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno, Corina Copp, Michael Corris, Brian Droitcour, Jim Fletcher, Zachary German, Lucy Ives, Aaron Kunin, Margaret Lee, Paul Legault, K. Silem Mohammad, Ken Okiishi, R. H. Quaytman, Katie Raissian, Ariana Reines, William S. Smith, Mónica de la Torre, Gretchen Wagner, Hannah Whitaker, and Matvei Yankelevich.

Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, designed in collaboration with Project Projects, is at once an archive of Triple Canopy’s widespread publishing activities and a translation into print of projects that originally appeared in other forms. The design of Invalid Format reflects this problem: How might works produced for the screen be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context, though not slavishly, and while also fully inhabiting the page? How can the form and function of interactive, audiovisual works be degraded elegantly, without disappearing entirely, in print?

The second volume of Invalid Format includes artist projects and literary work published from early 2009 through mid-2010, documentation of public programs, and a sampling of foundational correspondence. Contributors include Sophia Al-Maria, José León Cerrillo, Joshua Cohen, Teddy Cruz, Ed Halter, Lucy Ives, Victoria Miguel, Joe Milutis, New Humans, Hassan Khan & Clare Davies, Karthik Pandian, Lucy Raven, Luc Sante, Dan Torop, and Zs & Josh Slater.

***

Jim Fletcher has worked with Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players for more than twelve years, most recently in Early Plays, a joint production with the Wooster Group. He is a member of the cast of Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service production based on The Great Gatsby, and has worked with Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, the English group Forced Entertainment (Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First, Quizoola!), and Sarah Michelson (Devotion). In 2012, he received an Obie award for sustained excellence of performance.

Annotation: Re: Our Iron Cage

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:24:58 -0400

In which Triple Canopy inevitably wraps itself in homemade red tape while marching toward progress. This foundational correspondence regarding whether to sign up for Twitter, the trouble with Soulja Boy-related HTML tags, 501(c)3 paperwork, and the tension between flattened and hierarchical organizational structures was excerpted from Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 2, designed by Project Projects and co-published by Sternberg Press, and available now at our online store.

From: Alexander Provan
Date: Dec. 16, 2008, 11:03 a.m.
Subject: Digital age (tweet tweet)

Hey everyone. I impulsively signed us up for Twitter. Is this a good idea? I could make a note on our Facebook page that we’re on Twitter.

From: Tom Roberge
Date: Dec. 16, 2008, 4:25 p.m.
Subject: Re: digital age (tweet tweet)

My only reservation is that it seems like something reserved for teenagers and for those who don’t mind derisive comments in which you're compared to teenagers.

From: Sam Frank
Date: Feb. 17, 2009, 11:41 p.m.
Subject: Bug on new Internet Explorer for PC

My friend just told me he's not able to read Ben Tausig's piece on the newest version of Internet Explorer for the PC. He said he's “getting the logo and the +/-, but no images.”

From: Adam Florin
Date: Feb. 18, 2009 1:31 p.m.
Subject: Re: Bug on new Internet Explorer for PC

OK! After some hairpulling I have a fix for this. Copying editors as our embed methodology for YouTube videos has changed. Due to an obnoxious bug in IE7 (and our fancypants layout system), we can't just use YouTube embed codes in pieces. The process will now look more like how it does for our audio players. Use this snipped to embed a YouTube video:

<div id="soulja_boy_video_player">< /div><script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">window.addEvent('after_column_wrap', function() {init_youtube_video('soulja_boy_video_player', 'http://www.youtube.com/v/mMycfdNdlKA&hl=en&fs=1', '350', '283');}); </script>

Each time you paste this in, you must do the following: Make sure the div id matches up with the first param to init_youtuve_video (in this case, “soulja_boy_video_player”); extract the full YouTube URL from the YouTube embed code and paste; modify the last two parameters, width and height.

From: Sam Frank
Date: Feb. 18, 2009, 1:36 p.m.
Subject: Re: Bug on new Internet Explorer for PC

Just to clarify, we need to write a new, unique div id (that is, come up for a name for each new div id) for each YouTube video we embed? One we’re sure we've never used before?

From: Adam Florin
Date: Feb. 18, 2009, 1:37 p.m.
Subject: Re: Bug on new Internet Explorer for PC

That’s correct!

From: Caleb Waldorf
Date: May 23, 2009, 1:53 a.m.
Subject: Re: Issue 6 assignments

I'm really interested in thinking more broadly about our editorial approach in relationship to time and attention. I was looking at our analytics and the length of visit information is very interesting. Our main committed audience is on the site for 61–600 seconds. We need to try and get those folks in the 31–60 seconds range to stick around longer. And we need to think carefully about how long it actually takes to read/look at our content and make sure that people are likely to actually do so. This is important for two reasons: If they aren’t going to make it through an entire article, it’s highly likely they aren’t going to make it to other pieces; if this is what is happening—you can see that it is by looking at our top exit pages—there is very little point to spending tons of time carefully sequencing issues and thinking about deployment strategies. So we may benefit from doing more shorter pieces punctuated by longer pieces. The coming redesign will tackle some of this by providing better navigation throughout the site, which will make content more horizontally organized (through keywords and related-content links).

From: Colby Chamberlain
Date: May 12, 2009, 12:33 a.m.
Subject: Re: meeting

We’re interested in generating a boilerplate text about Triple Canopy for potential grants and funders. Thus, we’re looking for “grant-speak,” and not language we would dream of actually posting on the site. The text should answer the questions, Who We are, What We Do, Why It Matters (from the viewpoint of funders). The text should list a sampling of What We’ve Done and Who We Work With, but history shouldn’t be privileged considering we are a one-year-old organization. The text should be flexible enough that we could tailor it two or three different categories of funders: 1) funders interesting in writing/literary endeavors, 2) funders interested in the visual arts, and 3) (maybe) funders interested in various forms of techno-fetishism.

From: Peter J. Russo
Date: June 18, 2009, 9:52 a.m.
Subject: Re: TC Greatest Hits

As I understand it, for the 501c3 incorporation paperwork and subsequent grants we need to describe each activity in terms of seven questions: What is the activity? Who conducts the activity? When is the activity conducted? Where is the activity conducted? How does the activity further TC’s exempt purposes? What percentage of your total time is allocated to the activity? How is the activity funded? (This should agree with the financial data in Part IX.) The IRS will be reviewing this with a checklist mentality.

From: ––––––1@aol.com
Date: April 5, 2009 6:05 p.m.
Subject: SPAM -> (no subject)

Hello: I never heard of you before. i was researching the mercenary army called "Triple Canopy" which was, I believe, formed in 2007, using Special Forces veterans: Presumably, veterans of the VietNam War, which ended in 1971 I believe, with the fall of Saigon. However, before then, Nixon had expanded the Vietnam war into Cambodia and Laos. The term "triple canopy" was first used to describe the foliage--if you could call it that--which prevented our bombers from truly laying waste to the place; not that they didn't do enough damage. Triple canopy was what the jungles of Southeast Asia were made of: first the ground vegetation; tall tall 'tiger' grasses (so named because their tough, tall growth effectively hid the tigers which flourished during Vietnam), then the interim growth which was mango, bamboo, orchid vines and the like, and then taller trees . Like I said, "Triple Canopy" always meant Southeast Asia, to me. That is, before we defoliated the place, killing plants, native Southeast Asians, and of course, Americans serving in Southeast Asia. Our defoliants--official dismissals to the contrary--did harm our soldiers, and the military's still denying it. For Shame. Meanwhile, what are you? Some kind of lit magazine--but what kind? War stories from the Johnson/Nixon era? What? Cause, if war stories, I got something you'd be interested in. If I can get through the online copyright ick--I think they call it "Creative Commons" or something, LOL! If interested, reply to Val at: ––––––1@aol.com

Podcast: The Making of Americans on WKCR

Sam Frank, Lucy Ives & Dan Visel — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 14:31:47 -0400

Columbia University radio station WKCR's Blair McClendon interviewed Triple Canopy editors Sam Frank, Lucy Ives, and Dan Visel about the annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which took place in January, and about Triple Canopy's new book, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism.

During the weekend of January 18–20, an Triple Canopy invited scores of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators to gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel. The reading lasted for 52 hours. The marathon inaugurated Triple Canopy's fifth year. There were coffee and donuts during the dawn walk-in hours; there was borscht at dinnertime; we toasted at the beginning and end. We tweeted (#MakingUSA) the Americans as they progressed.

Podcast: Productive Behaviors

Astrom/Zimmer — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:56:34 -0400

On February 25th, Triple Canopy hosted Productive Behaviors, a conversation about new directions in digital publishing with its first designers-in-residence, the Zurich-based duo of Anthon Astrom and Lukas Zimmer. (Click here for a version of this podcast with slides.) Astrom and Zimmer began working together in 2007, when they initiated the Café Society Project, which investigates frameworks for reading, writing, and organizing information on-screen and in print. In 2011, they founded Astrom/Zimmer studio, which works in research, design, and software development. In the past five years, Astrom and Zimmer have won the Swiss Federal Design Award twice, among other accolades.

Astrom and Zimmer spent the month of February in Brooklyn, working with Triple Canopy as we develop a new publishing platform to launch in September. In the podcast they present their work and discuss issues pertaining to the shift from print to digital publishing with Triple Canopy editors. Together they ask how publishing platforms and applications might not only illuminate but also amplify the fundamental relationships between people, places, objects, and social processes that constitute Triple Canopy's expanded field of publication. Rather than shoveling all kinds of information onto the Web, how might we design interfaces, and facilitate reading experiences, that make productive use of the ineluctable differences between digital information and tangible things in the world? Moving beyond the naive fantasy of online knowledge production, how might we envision the circulation of information between those realms so as to be meaningful, even socially beneficial?

News: March 12, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:10:30 -0400

We're pleased to announce the launch of Post, a participatory digital platform for global research developed for the Museum of Modern Art by TC Labs, the consulting wing of Triple Canopy.

Post operates as an online journal, archive, exhibition space, and forum. The platform facilitates the efforts of C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives in a Global Age Initiative), an interdepartmental research program launched by MoMA in 2009, to expand how we read and write art history. Post enables scholars, curators, educators, students, critics, artists, and the general public to contribute to research projects focusing on the ways in which modernism is being redefined, especially in relation to the work of artists outside of North America and Western Europe.

TC Labs is the consulting wing of the magazine and editorial collective Triple Canopy. TC Labs draws upon and helps sustain Triple Canopy’s expansive network of artists, writers, designers, and developers to develop dynamic online experiences, innovative publications, and generative public programs. Learn more about the work of TC Labs at labs.canopycanopycanopy.com.

Post was conceived in collaboration with Caleb Waldorf, Triple Canopy’s creative director.

PS—Attention graphic designers and Web developers: Triple Canopy is looking to hire a visual designer and editorial technologist.

Annotation: How We See

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:41:00 -0400

Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages, 1914.

A core thread of cognitive neuroscience research is deciphering the physiological make-up of epistemology. What are the root properties of visual knowledge? What are the neural mechanisms for interpreting sensory data? What exactly is the brain looking for when it looks at something? Michael Tarr, Cowan Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of CMU's Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, is trying to parse the brain's visual vocabulary. "There's nothing in the visual world that's self-specifying," he notes. "Vision is inferential." Tarr's father Joel, whose work comes up in this interview, is the Richard S. Caliguiri University Professor of History & Policy, also at Carnegie Mellon. Visual artist and Triple Canopy contributor Benjamin Tiven (“Distant Objects Becoming Near”) speaks with Tarr about how we read images. This interview is part of Common Minds, a series of essays and conversations on the contemporary infatuation with the brain.

Benjamin Tiven: Tell me about the main areas of your research.

Michael Tarr: I work on issues within the visual system: how the brain receives and produces images. One major problem I've worked on is invariance, that is, how do you know that two seemingly different things are in fact the same thing, when they look different in an image. There are some nominal solutions for this in computer vision, but it’s still a fundamental problem. How the brain really does this remains unknown.

BT: And what are you working on right now?

MT: We've tried to elucidate what goes on during the chain of computation as information moves through the visual system. But now we're really focusing on what I think is the core, underlying question: What constitutes a "molar" or essential feature? What is the root building block in the visual system, once you get past early vision? Vision is a complex series of processes going from all the way back here [points to back of head] to all the way up here [points to eyes]. We do have some notion that things get more complicated as they go up the stream, but no one can tell you what the encoding is. What is it exactly that's being represented about an object, or a face? What are the critical features? How do we invariantly recognize it? That's the root question: How is the brain representing information about objects? Don't think of vision as a "camera" that takes images and makes them 3-D. It’s a cognitive process, where you take visual information and break it into building blocks or pieces that allow you to generate new objects or interpret objects in ways you hadn't seen before, or imagine them, or manipulate them.

BT: Is this analogous to a pixel, or to a bit—some kind of consistent, measurable root unit of data?

MT: Well, I'm trying to understand that—what the language of vision is, or the predicate or syntax of vision. I'd like to be able to know how we know that something we know is indeed what we know it to be. But to your question, no—I don't think there's a bit, or a pixel type of data per se, but there's a complex vocabulary.

BT: You mean, of shapes?

MT: Of shape, surface, materials, the whole thing.

BT: And the brain sees them all as one interlinked matrix of details?

MT: No, it creates that matrix. The visual world is just rays of light on the eye. Physically, the root unit of visual data would be a photon or a light ray that's striking the retina. But there's nothing in the visual world that's self-specifying. Vision is inferential. The data that you're given as a sensory being is very continuous—light on the retina, a sound wave striking your ear—and from those you infer structure about the nature of the world. But none of that, while in the data, is labeled as such. You have to infer all of it.

BT: So how does the brain store an image? A blind person can remember an image seen prior to their blindness. Does that mean their brain retains this same encoding platform of visual information?

MT: Gosh, who knows. That's another building-block question that we don't understand yet. We just don't know. My sense is that the way blind individuals represent space neurally and mentally tells us a lot about the potential of the visual system. That spatial representation seems to occur in blind people in similar parts of the brain as in sighted people tells you that the visual system isn't purely driven by visual input, but that auditory or navigational information also shape the process of conceiving and mapping space.

BT: Does your work account for understanding glitches in our visual system? That is, things like doubles, duplicates, forgeries, or discrepancies of resolution? These have all proven powerful triggers in the literary, aesthetic, or behavioral registers. But are they at all meaningful in a cognitive or neurological sense?

MT: As for the kind of similarity or overlaps you're asking about, I can only say that neurologically, coding information is related to the tasks one is doing. Sure, two different things can seem the same under the right conditions—it depends what the brain is looking for. Our monitoring of the world is really much less continuous and accurate than we think it is. Experience is the conversion of energy into data. The project of all life is to correlate the interpretation with the energy source, since the better your ability to interpret reality, the more likely you are to survive and pass on your genes. Now, how close or causal is the relationship between the energy we experience and our interpretation of it—that's a different question. In fact, something like illusion or magic is based on a discrepancy between the information we're taking in and our interpretation. Illusion occurs when there isn't a causal relationship between what we experience and what's actually there. The physical reality is different from what you end up experiencing, probably because your interpretive system has made bad assumptions.

BT: To what degree does your work overlap with the wider question of "consciousness"?

MT: [Shakes head wearily, leans back, deep breath] Everyone's into consciousness now, and they have all these ideas, and I mean, no one really knows.

BT: But at the end of all your research into molar features and procedural patterns, is there an extension of that logic to ...

MT: You mean how does it all get conscious?

BT: Yeah.

MT: Who the hell knows?! People write all these books, but they have no data one way or the other. Maybe it’s just a synchrony of oscillating neurons, all firing at the same pace, and that's what defines consciousness. You are your brain, and maybe what you become aware of is just some synchrony, some frequency. But there's probably not a consciousness "spot" that everything channels into.

BT: Is there a theory you find more plausible, or less laughable, than others?

MT: It seems likely that it’s just some read out of your brain state. Some temporal synchrony of firing neurons. This is what's happening in studies of attention, and perhaps that's the same as consciousness—that the way you deploy attention is by training neurons to synchronize. So maybe what you're aware of are things that are all in a particular cycle, together. So, your conscious awareness is just the baseline level of neural synchrony that's monitoring what the world around you is like. Maybe it’s that simple. It may be just some emergent property of whatever way the brain works.

BT: So do you think all the interest in consciousness is a false poetic, in that way?

MT: It may be. Consciousness is something people love to talk about, but until we have a better understanding of the brain, it’s hard to say, and a number of theories have decent claims to some plausibility. The brain is the most complex device in the known universe. So it’s probably true that most experienceable phenomena are due to complex and overlapping neural mechanisms and their attendant behavioral consequences. Nature? Nurture? Of course it’s a combination. But the brain is not a cleanly engineered device, it’s built on layers and layer of adaptations, and each one is kind of ad-hoc.

BT: That's exactly what your father said about cities—that, infrastructurally-speaking, they were dense, vast agglomerations of solutions to various now-lost problems, which had accrued over a tremendous span of time and which couldn't be disentangled from each other. Our brains retain all the engineering patterns that successfully passed evolution's tests on our ancestors. In some ways, urban construction is parallel, where earlier efforts to shape life or solve a problem—say, the sewage or power grid—are these systems we now have no choice but to work within, even if now they're not ideal. It sounds like cities and brains evolve in the same way.

MT: Well, sure. Different time scales, but sure. The structures that form our brain have been in evolution almost continuously for a billion years. Each advantageous mutation just takes you incrementally further from whatever structure was previously there. The brain we have now is the result of a random walk through a certain evolutionary space, and that random walk would have been a lot different if the mutations had been different early on. But the world is the way it is, and the brain has always been building itself in response to that world. You end up with structures that seem optimal for the problems they're faced with.

BT: This seems like a hard-science version of a more recent claim in some fields of spatial psychology or existential philosophy. In the book Human Space, Otto Friedrich Bollnow writes, "The concrete space of human life is organized by purposeful activity in such a way that everything has its assigned place. This spatial order is created only in the smallest detail by the individual. For the most part, we find it already present as a supra-individual order, into which we are born. But this too has come into being as the result of a purposeful human activity. It is in this purposeful form that the world becomes comprehensible to us, and only because of it can I move meaningfully in space." What do you make of this? Do you think it’s just a different expression of the same neurological basis we just described? Do you think that architecture might somehow map or reflect some neurological coding?

MT: Well, we build it, so it must reflect something about our cognition. But I wouldn't push that too far, and I don't know how strong a statement of it I would make. I am skeptical about how much architecture is really constrained or shaped by our cognitive systems, which obviously allow for a pretty wide range of architectural typologies and modes. I think it’s determined more culturally than neurologically. Also, four walls and a ceiling is a pretty efficient way to create a reasonably usable volume, in simple material terms—which would really point more towards physical or technological limits. Now, I do think that the more subtle aspects of architecture—the ceiling height, or the direction from which natural light enters the building—those might be more cognitively-driven. But I'm just guessing.

Program: Antisocial Network

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Location: The Harvard Advocate, 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA
Date: March 08, 2013

Please join Triple Canopy, publishers Fence and The Song Cave, and digital poetry journal The Claudius App for an evening of readings by poets Donald Dunbar, Jane Gregory, Joe Luna, K. Silem Mohammad, and Jacob Wren. We will be celebrating the publication of Triple Canopy's newest work of research into the intersection of contemporary art and writing, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism, as well as Jane Gregory's first full-length book, the intriguingly titled, My Enemies, and a new issue from The Claudius App.

The Harvard Advocate, founded in 1866, is the oldest continuously published collegiate literary journal in America. Readers' presentations will be following by drinks and a party in the Advocate's sanctum. Please RSVP to rsvp@canopycanopycanopy.com.

And, if you are planning to attend AWP in Boston, March 6-9, please stop by Triple Canopy's table at the bookfair, booth #Z30!

* * *

Donald Dunbar is the author of the chapbooks You Are So Pretty (Scantily Clad Press, 2009) and Click Click (Gold Wake Press, 2010), and of Eyelid Lick (Fence Books), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series. He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he co-curates the reading series If Not For Kidnap and teaches poetry to future chefs at Oregon Culinary Institute.

Jane Gregory is from Tucson, Arizona. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently working towards a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Berkeley, California. Her book My Enemies will be released by The Song Cave in early 2013.

Joe Luna lives in Brighton, UK, where he runs the Hi Zero reading series and edits Hi Zero magazine. Crater Press published the letterpress fold Google Song in November 2011; his poems have appeared in, among others, Poems, Written Between October and December 2010 (Grasp Press), The Claudius App (online), Better than Language: An Anthology of New Modernist Poetries (Ganzfeld Press), FRIENDS (Critical Documents), The Cambridge Literary Review, Sous les Pavés, Damn the Cæsars, Lana Turner, and The Death and Life of American Cities. A booklet, LVRSLVRSLVRSLVRS, was privately distributed in 2010; the .pdf epic FAILCORE is still public. A new book, ASTROTURF, is forthcoming.

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), A Thousand Devils (Combo, 2004), Breathalyzer (Edge, 2008), The Front (Roof, 2009), and Monsters (forthcoming, Edge Books). In his current project, The Sonnagrams, Mohammad anagrammatizes Shakespeare’s Sonnets into all-new English sonnets in iambic pentameter. He is also editor of the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln and faculty editor of West Wind Review. He is an associate professor in the English & Writing program at Southern Oregon University.

Jacob Wren is a writer and maker of eccentric performances. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created: En français comme en anglais, it's easy to criticize, Unrehearsed Beauty / Le génie des autres, La famille se crée en copulant and the ongoing HOSPITALITÉ / HOSPITALITY series. In 2007 he was invited by Sophiensaele (Berlin) to adapt and direct Wolfgang Koeppen's 1954 novel Der Tod in Rom and in 2008 he was commissioned by Campo (Ghent) to collaborate with Pieter De Buysser on An Anthology of Optimism. He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.

Annotation: “Somewhere in that sentence, that week, those people”

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:46:47 -0500

We began the first volume of Invalid Format by describing how Triple Canopy came into being in the summer and fall of 2007, as a flurry, then an avalanche, of emails between friends and strangers. At the time, we had only a vague sense of what we were after: an online magazine, an original framework for serious reading and viewing in a medium that seemed to resist such efforts. Our first four issues, compiled in volume one, are a record of our attempts to make that vagueness concrete. Online, we started to move, however haltingly, beyond text illustrated with JPEGS and placed within horizontally sliding pages. Offline, we worked to turn the ideas and experiments that had constituted Triple Canopy into nonprofit paperwork and grant applications; traded in a flattened power structure for a traditional masthead.

By 2009, where this second volume picks up, we were realizing ambitions once floated in Google Groups. This was something of a surprise, and a challenge: How could we continue to publish distinctive work, and just what did we mean by “publish”? Did we have a politics? Was Triple Canopy a job? What was it, really, that we were after? We had a sense of our relationship to technology—selectively enthusiastic about “innovation,” skeptical of any libertarian endgame—and had all learned some HTML; we understood what our content-management system could and couldn’t do. And so we settled into (tweaked, chafed against, abandoned) the structures we had in place. Our second four issues, compiled here, achieved fuller expression: Typically, there were autodidactic and polymathic hydras, essays and reports too expansive to fit elsewhere, projects by visual artists translating their studio practices to the Web, video that wanted to live somewhere between a gallery and YouTube, literature that did something else on a computer screen besides beg to be printed.

For more than a year, we were consumed by two issues devoted to urbanism, approached from many angles and in many forms: a translation of an interview with a Chinese expert on underground cities, a multimedia presentation on “smart sprawl” by a fabricated eco-friendly development firm, a rumination on John the Baptist and cellular automata. Those issues, set against the backdrop of the foreclosure crisis and a deflationary failure of political will, incorporated academic thought and artistic license, parsed city zoning and experimental geography, rhymed Tijuana’s slums with Dubai’s McMansions. But perhaps more important, they helped define Triple Canopy’s mode of turning outward while looking inward; our desire to have our publication annex public space.

We tested the urbanism issues in the Kitchen’s black-box theater, punctuating the editing process with performances of articles-in-progress amid the band Zs’ brutalist constructions and Nine 11 Thesaurus’s rap about teen life in Brownsville. With the microcinema Light Industry and a circle of artists and academics, we organized a weeklong series of screenings and discussions radiating from Wang Bing’s fourteen-hour documentary Crude Oil, on view five times, from dawn to dusk—an exhaustively deep reading of art-time with work-time. As part of the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, we got dozens of once and future contributors to read, dance, project, and otherwise make present pieces from an issue of Aspen, the half-century-old magazine-in-a-box that’s been our lodestar. Taken together, these experiences of Triple Canopy as a protagonist, moderator, facilitator, writer, venue, designer, historian, technologist, and entity about town pushed us to place ourselves in what we later dubbed “the expanded field of publication.”

Invalid Format serves as a record of these widespread publishing pursuits, and as a translation of these activities, across forms, into print. Its design, by Project Projects, reflects this challenge of transformation. Invalid Format is built around templates meant to accommodate different kinds of material, while constraining the ways in which it might be represented. Last time, we called this “the book as content management system,” but that’s not quite correct. The pages aren’t generated automatically based on a set of parameters. Each layout reflects decisions about how works produced for the screen might be transposed to the paperback, shifting between vertical and horizontal orientation as your iPad (or an eighteenth-century botany treatise) might—yet no e-book’s structure is so precisely responsive to such varied contents. And while the form (and introduction) of this volume may be partly recycled from the first, there’s a greater sense of reaching to do things with print that we couldn’t do with the Web—or that we could do with the Web but must redo on the page, if not revise, abridge, omit. How do you print an interactive exegesis of Latin American modernism? A memoir on Hinduism and electronic prayer that concludes with a Flash-driven puja? An mp3ed excursus on the sound of the rolled r? A YouTube essay on authenticity? A quodlibet on Prussian blue, when Web color isn’t true color and, anyway, this book is in grayscale?

A book is also a preservation strategy. Think of the obsolescence of all new media: cassette tapes, LaserDiscs, Zip drives. This book is one of our preservation strategies, among many, because we want Triple Canopy to last. We want to run on more than charisma and fumes, to be able to pay our editors and contributors, and generally to behave like a new-model arts organization. We want to be collective in a sustainable way, not just as an appealing formal arrangement. It’s one thing to talk about it, as we did in our first year or two; it’s another to get $100,000 for “capacity building” from the Andy Warhol Foundation on the condition of regular meetings with consultants and the generation of an “organizational narrative.” We became a nonprofit. We conferred with lawyers and accountants, built a board of directors, started writing checks. We saved up for a redesign (see volume three). We started a Twitter account and thought we’d leave it to rot.

The correspondence concluding this volume attests to our long march to institutionalization. So many of our models refused to play the game: Aspen famously folded after the US Postal Service revoked its periodical mail rate, and we couldn’t afford that either. So, from email flurry to paperwork. Triple Canopy began in September 2007 with thirty people packed into a living room (and others tuned in via Skype), speaking in and out of turn; staying up until 3 a.m. taking positions and making jokes, achieving and abandoning consensus, impressing and infuriating one another, feeling elated and nervous and always that something was at stake. After a long summer day in 2009, a dozen editors and cohorts—almost all of them having performed Aspen or illustrated an article or played a party—ate soup dumplings after an art opening for another contributor-friend (a category that now seems, inevitably, to include everyone we know). We paused midway for a ceremonial signing of Triple Canopy’s articles of incorporation, a few hundred flimsy pages. And this past week, as Labor Day approached, a dozen more people cycled through our white-walled office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to edit, design, copyedit, and generally fuss over this book, in PDF and as sheafs of proofs, while others stole time from office jobs across town to chip away at this introduction, emailed from an Alpine village to comment on the cover, texted from LA with answers to fact-checking queries, or, in the case of Light Industry, now our roommates, went over layouts in between testing 16-mm prints and CD-ROMS for a marathon Chris Marker screening. Somewhere in that sentence, that week, those people; somewhere in those technologies and procedures and jokes and arguments—somewhere in there is the book you’re holding.

News: February 27, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:09:08 -0500

It’s only a coincidence that our nail polish matches both book covers.

Dear fellow bibliophiles,

We are deeply entrenched in a low-level conflict regarding the future of literature. What gives us the strength to soldier on? The enduring support of our compatriots (i.e. you) and the great spirit of comrades like Fence, the venerable literary journal. And so, despite the frozen mud encasing our boots, we are especially pleased to say: Become a member of Triple Canopy this week and receive a free one-year subscription to Fence.

Fence is edited by Rebecca Wolff and has published work by many Triple Canopy contributors, among them Aaron Kunin, Paul Legault, Jena Osman, Ariana Reines, and Cathy Wagner. And Triple Canopy and Fence agree with Stéphane Mallarmé that "everything in the world exists to end up in a book" (or, at least, an online magazine). In the past year, more than 500 of you have become members of Triple Canopy, enabling us to make good on that quote—and, we think, to seriously invigorate the publishing landscape. (If we were to continue with the martial metaphor, we might say that we’ve carpet-bombed it?)

Your membership—at just $3, $5, or $10 per month—ensures that Triple Canopy remains sustainable as a reader-supported enterprise, and continues to support (intellectually, spiritually, materially) the many writers, artists, researchers, and designers with whom we collaborate. And now, in addition to the subscription to Fence and the satisfaction of greasing our collective engine, when you become a member for $5 per month you'll get the most recent volume of our print anthology, Invalid Format; for $10 per month, you'll also get our handsomely discursive tote bag, A Compact History of Digital Utopianism, from Bucky to Steve.

We have, rather presumptuously, planned a party in Boston next week to celebrate our victory over the forces of wanton content circulation, to coincide with the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference (find us at booth #Z30). On Thursday, March 8, we expect the righteous of academe to join us for Antisocial Network, a reading and book release at the Harvard Advocate, co-hosted by Fence and our friends the Song Cave and the Claudius App. So gather your epaulets and point your station wagon toward the Freedom Trail.

Sincerely,
The Editors

Become a member by March 6 and receive Fence free for one year »

Program: Productive Behaviors

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Location: 155 Freeman Street
Date: February 25, 2013

Triple Canopy is pleased to present a conversation about new directions in digital publishing with its first designers-in-residence, the Zurich-based duo of Anthon Astrom and Lukas Zimmer. Astrom and Zimmer began working together in 2007, when they initiated the Café Society Project, which investigates frameworks for reading, writing, and organizing information on-screen and in print. In 2011, they founded Astrom/Zimmer studio, which works in research, design, and software development. In the past five years, Astrom and Zimmer have won the Swiss Federal Design Award twice, among other accolades.

Astrom and Zimmer are spending the month of February in Brooklyn, working with Triple Canopy as we develop a new publishing platform to launch in September. Tonight, they will present their work and discuss issues pertaining to the shift from print to digital publishing with Triple Canopy editors. Specifically, they will preview two applications to be launched in conjunction with the forthcoming redesign of Triple Canopy's website: one that dynamically maps and reinforces relationships—spatial, temporal, thematic, geographic—between various kinds of online content (and representations of events and objects that exist offline); another that enables readers to collate, classify, share, discuss, and print such materials, using a sophisticated yet straightforward columnar interface.

Along with Triple Canopy editors, Astrom and Zimmer will ask how publishing platforms and applications might not only illuminate but also amplify the fundamental relationships between people, places, objects, and social processes that constitute Triple Canopy's expanded field of publication. Rather than shoveling all kinds of information onto the Web, how might we design interfaces, and facilitate reading experiences, that make productive use of the ineluctable differences between digital information and tangible things in the world? Moving beyond the naive fantasy of online knowledge production, how might we envision the circulation of information between those realms so as to be meaningful, even socially beneficial?

News: February 22, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:42:08 -0500

We're pleased to announce the publication of the second volume of Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, designed by Project Projects and co-published by Sternberg Press. Invalid Format, published annually, is at once an archive of Triple Canopy's widespread publishing activities and a translation into print of projects that originally appeared in other forms. The design of Invalid Format reflects this problem: How might works produced for the screen be transposed to the codex in a way that recalls that former context, though not slavishly, and while also fully inhabiting the page? How can the form and function of interactive, audiovisual works be degraded elegantly, without disappearing entirely, in print? Invalid Format will be published at least annually, and will be available at select bookshops worldwide as well as on Triple Canopy's website.

The second volume of Invalid Format includes artist projects and literary work published from early 2009 through mid-2010, documentation of public programs, and a sampling of foundational correspondence. Contributors include Sophia Al-Maria, Bidisha Banerjee, Gil Blank, José León Cerrillo, Joseph Clarke, Joshua Cohen, Teddy Cruz, Ed Halter, Lucy Ives, Victoria Miguel, Joe Milutis, New Humans, Hassan Khan & Clare Davies, Karthik Pandian, Lucy Raven, Nathan Schneider, Molly Springfield, Ben Street & the International Necronautical Society, Dan Torop, and the Zs & Josh Slater. The book is distributed in North America by RAM Publications and in Europe by Sternberg Press.

News: February 22, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:20:24 -0500

The seventeenth issue of Triple Canopy, Inverted Circle, has reached its conclusion. It includes artist projects by Kate Shepherd and Gareth Long; translations of literary works by Hilda Hist and Kirill Medvedev; and essays by Jan Estep and Jena Osman. (Estep and Osman's essays are part of "Common Minds," a series of conversations on the contemporary infatuation with the brain coedited by Dawn Chan, to be continued in issue 18.)

Triple Canopy’s next issue, to be published in the spring, will feature artist projects, literary works, and essays by John Barlow with Goldin+Senneby, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Martin Beck, B. Wurtz, Jibz Cameron & Hedia Maron, Antonia Hirsch, Rebecca Bird, Peter Fend, Isabelle Moffat, Vilém Flusser, and Adela Jusic.

Program: Continuity Drift

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: February 15, 2013

Triple Canopy is pleased to present an evening of viewing and conversation with artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty and poet Catherine Wagner, focusing on the role of televised images, narrative, and sound as both source material for and counterpoint to the participants’ work. Rafferty and Wagner will watch TV in public, discussing video clips selected for the occasion alongside poems and prints. Triple Canopy editors Lucy Ives and Peter J. Russo will moderate and screen video in response to Rafferty and Wagner’s selections.

Re-contextualized by the economy of video and images online, television today is an uncannily constant stream of characters, catchphrases, assaults, and situations purveyed by “networks” of a different kind—a continuous, if strangely anachronistic, site for the creation and recreation of conventions for acting and image-making. Several steps removed from Time Warner, Rafferty’s images and Wagner’s lines glance at TV’s unsleeping animation. Much as Rafferty’s waterlogged stills represent a vernacular treatment of celebrity, Wagner’s poems channel the absorptive power of the set from the next room, by turns distorting, vernacularizing, and speaking in stranger, stronger affective terms. Join us for a dialogue about contemporary writing and artistic practice and the feeling of TV.

Sara Greenberger Rafferty is a New York based interdisciplinary artist. In 2011, she had solo exhibitions at The Suburban in Chicago and at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York. Rafferty has also had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen and MoMA PS1, both in New York. She is an assistant professor of art at Hampshire College.

Catherine Wagner's latest book is Nervous Device (City Lights Publishers, 2012). She teaches in the MA program in creative writing at Miami University and lives in Oxford, OH with her son Ambrose.

Program: Double Features: Title TK and Marco Fusinato

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: February 13, 2013

Triple Canopy presents Double Features, an evening of audio-visual exchange with Title TK and Marco Fusinato. Double Features is organized by sound artist and composer C. Spencer Yeh; this performance marks the return of the series after a hiatus of nearly two years. As is the Double Features standard, Title TK and Marco Fusinato will each perform alongside one film or video work. Title TK has chosen David Fincher's The Social Network (2010). Fusinato has chosen the YouTube user BermudaRao's Jan Vermeer (1632-1675): Une vidéo sur l'art du peintre hollandais (2012).

***

“Hey, do you like to laugh?” Title TK (Howie Chen, Cory Arcangel & Alan Licht) is a banter-prone band that has been described as “a cross between David Antin and Spinal Tap.”

Marco Fusinato is an artist and musician living in Melbourne, Australia. He has exhibited and performed at the Sao Paulo Biennial, the Glasgow International Arts Festival, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, where his solo survey “The Color of the Sky Has Melted” was recently on view. Fusinato's primary focus is unconventional uses of the guitar and electronics. His record L’ Origine/Tema is forthcoming on Penultimate Press, (London).

Podcast: The Melody Indicator

Erica Baum — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:57:05 -0500

“As it curves near the guide line SING SOFTER.” The player piano roll as poem.

Erica Baum reads from her composition on the curious charm of player piano print, originally published in issue 16 of the magazine.

“The Melody Indicator” was produced in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, as part of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), Triple Canopy’s contribution to the exhibition "Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art," curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson and on view between October 12, 2012, and February 3, 2013.

News: February 07, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 15:32:45 -0500

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce its first design residency, granted to the Zurich-based duo of Anthon Astrom and Lukas Zimmer. Astrom and Zimmer began working together in 2007, when they initiated the Café Society Project, which investigates frameworks for reading, writing, and organizing information on-screen and in print. In 2011, they founded Astrom/Zimmer studio, which works in research, design, and software development. In the past five years, Astrom and Zimmer have won the Swiss Federal Design Award twice, among other accolades.

Astrom and Zimmer will spend the month of February in Brooklyn, working with Triple Canopy on the development of a new publishing platform to launch in September. On February 25th, at 155 Freeman Street in Greenpoint, Astrom and Zimmer will present their work and discuss issues pertaining to the shift from print to digital publishing with Triple Canopy editors. Between now and then, they will occasionally post thoughts on their research and work on this site.

News: February 05, 2013

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:48:29 -0500

Triple Canopy is pleased to announce the release of our newest print publication, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism. The book is the fourth and final installment of the multi-part project Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), which was conceived as Triple Canopy’s contribution to “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The book is the culmination of a collective effort by artists, poets, scholars, editors, curators, and designers to establish a new critical discourse around conceptual art and poetics. In the past year, that effort found expression in a series of public discussions, a special online publication, and QR codes affixed to the walls of the galleries at the MCA. Each “act” of Corrected Slogans—dispersed as they are between Triple Canopy’s home in Brooklyn, the exhibition in Denver, the Web, and print—is integral to the same dynamic process; the project as a whole represents Triple Canopy’s ongoing attempt to define an expanded field of publication.

Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism documents the previous acts but also elaborates, edits, amplifies, and contradicts; the form and content of the public discussions are reinterpreted using tools specific to print. The critical debates represented in this book remain unresolved as they circulate to wider audiences through new channels of distribution. Corrected Slogans features annotated transcripts of previous events along with contributions, new essays, artworks, and poetry from Nora Abrams, Andrea Andersson, Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno, Corina Copp, Michael Corris, Brian Droitcour, Jim Fletcher, Zachary German, Lucy Ives, Aaron Kunin, Margaret Lee, Paul Legault, K. Silem Mohammad, Ken Okiishi, R. H. Quaytman, Katie Raissian, Ariana Reines, William S. Smith, Mónica de la Torre, Gretchen Wagner, Hannah Whitaker, and Matvei Yankelevich.

Neither an anthology or nor a collection of essays, Corrected Slogans is a carefully constructed critical response to the advent of conceptual writing—interrogating the changing roles of readers and authors, as well as the future of literary value, as writing moves off the page and onto gallery walls. At a time when digital culture is sometimes said to have successfully obviated literature altogether, Corrected Slogans challenges easy assumptions about the relationship between literature and visual art and activates the book as a site of creative production, enacting an expanded notion of publishing as a mode of critical inquiry.

* * * * *

Act I of Corrected Slogans, “Poems for America,” is a symposium that took place on September 15, 2012, at 155 Freeman Street in Brooklyn. We invited artists and poets to discuss the history and legacy of conceptualism, and asked how conceptual strategies of writing have transformed conventional notions of expression. The symposium included three sessions:
À Rebours, a conversation between Aaron Kunin and Ken Okiishi, moderated by Katie Raissian
Black and White Debates, Gray Matters, and Red Herrings, a conversation between Michael Corris and Matvei Yankelevich, moderated by Lucy Ives
Commonplaces, a conversation between Margaret Lee and K. Silem Mohammad, moderated by Gretchen Wagner

Act II, “Automatic Reading,” is a roundtable discussion Triple Canopy convened on October 20, 2012, also at 155 Freeman Street. Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno, Corina Copp, Jim Fletcher, R. H. Quaytman, Ariana Reines, and Mónica de la Torre, along with moderators William S. Smith and Lucy Ives, debated how the legacy of conceptualism has challenged traditional notions of reading both as an exchange between an individual and text and as a public activation of the written word.

Act III is a special issue of Triple Canopy’s online magazine, “Corrected_Slogans”, accessible to MCA Denver visitors via QR codes on the gallery walls. The issue includes new Web-based artworks by artists Erica Baum and Gareth Long and poet Caroline Bergvall, whose works were also included in the MCA exhibition, as well as a selection of projects from Triple Canopy’s archive that reframes the exhibition’s questions about conceptual art and writing in terms of digital publishing.

Project: Wouldn’t It Be Milchadik?

Franklin Bruno — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 14:46:30 -0500

by Franklin Bruno

Teaching My Fair Lady how to speak Yinglish; or, how parody talks back.

Annotation: The Resistance of Melancholics

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:04:53 -0500

Three things about Aaron Swartz:

1. He was extraordinarily precocious and intelligent.
2. He was a militant social-justice activist.
3. He was earnest, emotive, and sensitive.

All three factors make Swartz an extreme representative of a type of person who has only recently been empowered by technology, where raw technical skills can now permit one to wield real societal influence. Prior to the computer/Internet boom, such a person was more likely to become an abstract mathematician, a hobbyist, or a crackpot. The Internet gave Swartz a much bigger voice than would have been possible thirty years ago.

The tech community is often caricatured, not without cause, as a group of libertarian Ayn Rand acolytes, but the savvier among them tend more toward anarchist or progressive principles. Swartz was a less compromising member of a community that had already generated MoveOn and ActBlue. His antecedents include Saul Alinsky, Noam Chomsky, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alan Sokal.

Swartz’s actions to free information from PACER and JSTOR irritated the government sufficiently that they decided to make an example out of him. Swartz acted out of faith that venality and stupidity could not possibly triumph over what he believed to be the rational self-interest of collective humanity. His faith was not met.

Even before the prosecution, the constant failure of those in power to do right by humanity frustrated Swartz. The frustration is evident in his progressive-pragmatic book reviews. He writes of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds:

One thing the book does teach (although not clearly) is the wisdom of dissent. You can ensure dissent by collecting a large group and keeping the members from talking to each other (since people are usually smart but afraid of going against the grain), by ensuring some members of the group vocally disagree (since they will force the others to better justify their positions), or by forcing them to try to justify all sides (since that will keep them from prejudging the question).

All of which makes it ironic that Surowiecki’s book fails because of a lack of dissent. Nothing goes against the grain, he doesn’t justify his positions, and he has clearly prejudged the question.… He assumes he is right and only stops to look down upon those who disagree.

This sums up Swartz’s ideology as a self-described “dedicated follower of the left-rationalist-progressive tradition.” Similar anger informs his critiques of higher education, corporations, and government, all of which fall victim to self-satisfied, condescending complacency. For him, computers were the best tool yet invented for raising the volume (in terms of number and amplitude) of voices of dissent against the embedded structures of authority and prejudice. Whatever shortcomings there were in his worldview, it was nonetheless intellectually honest and self-critical.

Yet stupidity’s incessant victories are bound to take a toll on those activists lacking a wholly robust spiritual constitution. As Robert Burton showed at great length four hundred years ago in The Anatomy of Melancholy, an acute combination of intelligence and morality often does foster melancholy—not a clinical mental illness, but a natural intellectual temperament. And Lawrence Lessig points out that Swartz was under far more pressure than most melancholics:

He was depressed because he was increasingly recognizing that the idealism he brought to this fight maybe wasn’t enough. When he saw all of his wealth gone, and he recognized his parents were going to have to mortgage their house so he could afford a lawyer to fight a government that treated him as if he were a 9/11 terrorist, as if what he was doing was threatening the infrastructure of the United States, when he saw that and he recognized how—how incredibly difficult that fight was going to be, of course he was depressed.

Swartz’s antagonists will stigmatize him as mentally ill in order to absolve themselves and dismiss his opinions. It would be more useful to acknowledge that the world does not welcome angry activist melancholics like him, preferring they turn their anger against themselves and go off and become harmless artists, bohemians, or critical theorists. One lesson to take from Swartz’s death is that melancholic maladjustment is a legitimate and even expected response to our society by a painfully intelligent and ethical human being.

This maladjustment, sadly, puts genius melancholics at a great disadvantage against Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, the Koch brothers, Roger Ailes, Michael Bloomberg, Robert Rubin, and their ilk. There are two wholly opposing sides, one based on a utilitarian progressivism, the other based on exploitative disenfranchisement. They are at war; Swartz is a casualty.
—DAVID AUERBACH

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer who blogs at Waggish. He wrote the two-part “Anonymity as Culture,” “Treatise” and “Case Studies,” about 4chan and Internet masquerade, for Triple Canopy’s fifteenth issue. “Anonymity as Culture” and Gabriella Coleman’s “Our Weirdness Is Free,” on Anonymous, are also available as a Kindle single, “Here Comes Nobody.”

Program: The Making of Americans

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: January 18, 2013

Triple Canopy is pleased to present its second annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress. Over one weekend, an invited list of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators will gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s text in a continuous read-in, expected to last 52 hours, more or less. The schedule of readers is below, including time slots for walk-ins. There will be coffee and donuts during the dawn walk-in hours; borscht and booze at dinnertime; and champagne toasts.

Gertrude Stein and The Making of Americans have been central to conversations between literature, art, and publishing for more than a century; and those histories and connections are, in turn, central to Triple Canopy’s publishing and programming in Greenpoint, online, and elsewhere. Stein composed The Making of Americans from 1903 to 1911, though it remained unpublished until 1925, in an edition of 500. The novel wasn’t reprinted in full until 1966, by Fluxus artist and poet Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press (New York), making the book available to a new generation of writers and artists. From 1974 to 2000, Paula Cooper Gallery hosted marathon readings of The Making of Americans around New Year’s Eve, including Higgins, Alison Knowles, and John Cage, among many others. Triple Canopy’s read-in revives and updates that tradition, marking the continuing, branching (if largely subliminal) course of Stein’s book through our culture.

The current edition of the novel, published by Dalkey Archive Press, will be available for borrowing or purchase throughout the read-in. Blonde Art Books will be selling work by readers. We'll be tweeting (#MakingUSA) and livestreaming the Americans as they progress. The marathon inaugurates Triple Canopy's fifth year—we hope to see you there!

Special thanks to McNally Jackson Books and Stumptown Coffee Roasters for their support.

Friday, January 18
7:00pm – 7:45pm TC editors
7:45pm - 8:00pm Thomas Beard
8:00pm - 8:15pm David Greenspan
8:15pm - 8:30pm Rainer Judd
8:30pm - 9:00pm Laurie Weeks, Missy Barrett
9:00pm - 9:30pm Richard Kostelanetz, Igor Satanovsky
9:30pm - 9:45pm Tim Trace Peterson
9:45pm - 10:00pm Claire Wilcox
10:00pm - 10:15pm Sasha Frere-Jones
10:15pm - 10:30pm Sarah Leonard
10:30pm - 10:45pm Adam Helms
10:45pm - 11:00pm Prudence Peiffer
11:00pm - 11:30pm Nicholas Muellner, Chris Mills
11:30pm - 11:45pm Genevieve Smith
11:45pm - 12:15am Christine Smallwood, J. Gabriel Boylan

Saturday, January 19
12:15am - 12:30am Anna Moschovakis
12:30am - 12:45am Brian Droitcour
12:45am - 1:00am Rebecca Wolff
1:00am - 1:15am Jim Fletcher
1:15am - 4:30am Ariana Reines
4:30am - 5:00am Sukhdev Sandhu
5:00am - 6:30am Hannah Whitaker, Sam Frank, William Smith
6:30am - 7:30am WALK-INS
7:30am - 8:30am Dan Visel, Peter J. Russo
8:30am - 9:00am Dan Fox
9:00am - 9:30am Lucy Ives, Kate Shepherd
9:30am - 9:45am Angela Conant
9:45am - 10:00am Franklin Bruno
10:00am - 10:15am Sarah Hromack
10:15am - 10:30am Timothy Hull
10:30am - 10:45am Maia Murphy
10:45am - 11:00am Niina Pollari
11:00am - 11:15am David Packer
11:15am - 11:30am Emily Roysdon
11:30am - 12:30pm WALK-INS
12:30pm - 12:45pm Sue Landers
12:45pm - 1:00pm Kathleen Ross
1:00pm - 1:15pm Michael Wilson
1:15pm - 1:30pm Corina Copp
1:30pm - 1:45pm Pam Butler
1:45pm - 2:00pm Zoe Beloff
2:00pm - 2:15pm Caolan Madden
2:15pm - 2:30pm Jackie Sibblies Drury
2:30pm - 2:45pm Micaela Durand
2:45pm - 3:00pm Dawn Chan
3:00pm - 3:15pm Nicole Rudick
3:15pm - 3:30pm Rachel Wetzler
3:30pm - 3:45pm Michael H. Miller
3:45pm - 4:00pm Adrian Chen
4:00pm - 4:20pm Sara Marcus
4:20pm - 4:45pm Mary Walling Blackburn, Che Chen
4:45pm - 5:15pm James Hoff, Sarah Crowner
5:15pm - 5:30pm Erica Baum
5:30pm - 5:45pm John Munshour
5:45pm - 6:00pm Jamillah James
6:00pm - 6:45pm Jenny Schlenzka, Adam Pendleton, Jessica Mitrani
6:45pm - 7:00pm Shelley Burgon
7:00pm - 7:20pm Parul Sehgal, Mark Doten
7:20pm - 7:45pm Nova Benway, Catherine Kron
7:45pm - 8:00pm Ben Fama
8:00pm - 9:00pm WALK-INS
9:00pm - 9:15pm Anna Altman, Simone Blaser
9:15pm - 9:30pm Lisi Raskin
9:30pm - 9:45pm Tyler Coburn
9:45pm - 10:00pm Joseph McElroy
10:00pm - 10:30pm Taraneh Fazeli, Arlen Austin
10:30pm - 10:45pm Matthew Porter
10:45pm - 11:00pm Justin Martin
11:00pm - 11:15pm Jordan Lord
11:15pm - 11:30pm Miriam Katz
11:30pm - 11:45pm Tova Carlin
11:45pm - 12:00am Boru O’Brien O’Connell

Sunday, January 20
12:00am - 12:30am C. Spencer Yeh, Meg Clixby
12:30am - 1:00am Nathaniel Otting, Mina Pam Dick
1:00am - 1:25am Sara Greenberger Rafferty
1:25am - 1:55am Ed Halter, Zak Kitnick
1:55am - 2:35am Damion Searls
2:35am - 3:15am Sara Jane Stoner
3:15am - 3:45am Karin Fazio Littlefield
3:45am - 4:45am Sarah Resnick, Molly Kleiman
4:45am - 5:30am Douglas A. Martin
5:30am - 6:00am Benjamin Tiven
6:00am - 6:30am Michael Miller
6:30am - 7:30am WALK-INS
7:30am - 8:15am Claire Lehmann, David Levine
8:15am - 8:40am Dan Torop
8:40am - 8:55am Sarah Butler
8:55am - 9:10am Andrew Russeth
9:10am - 9:25am Gretchen Wagner
9:25am - 9:45am Frank Heath, Rob Slifkin
9:45am - 10:00am Rebecca Cleman
10:00am - 10:15am Peter Nowogrodzki
10:15am - 10:30am Holly Stanton
10:30am - 10:45am Claire Barliant
10:45am - 11:00am Julia Weist
11:00am - 11:15am Nicholas Weist
11:15am - 11:30am Jorian Schutz
11:30am - 12:30pm WALK-INS
12:30pm - 1:00pm Alexander Provan
1:00pm - 1:15pm Nadja Milner-Larsen
1:15pm - 1:30pm Audrea Lim
1:30pm - 1:45pm Ada Smailbegovic
1:45pm - 2:00pm Matt Longabucco
2:00pm - 2:15pm Lynne Tillman
2:15pm - 2:30pm Corrine Fitzpatrick
2:30pm - 3:00pm Gwen Deely, Kim Irwin
3:00pm - 3:15pm Charles Bernstein
3:15pm - 3:30pm Mónica de la Torre
3:30pm - 3:45pm Rachel Levitsky
3:45pm - 4:00pm Lumi Tan
4:00pm - 4:15pm Kendra Sullivan, Dylan Gauthier
4:15pm - 4:30pm Taeyoon Choi
4:30pm - 4:45pm Ben Vershbow
4:45pm - 5:00pm Matthew Thurber
5:00pm - 5:15pm Paul Legault
5:15pm - 5:30pm Matvei Yankelevich
5:30pm - 5:45pm B. Wurtz
5:45pm - 6:30pm Zoe Leonard, Malin Arnell, Clara López
6:30pm - 7:00pm Ken Okiishi, Nick Mauss
7:00pm - 7:30pm Ben Gocker, Lucy Ives
7:30pm - end Everyone

Project: Aba Okipasyon

Ryan Ffrench & Emmanuel Broadus — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:49:35 -0500

by Ryan Ffrench & Emmanuel Broadus

The performance of UN peacekeeping in Haiti. Military pageantry and depoliticized suffering, from orphanage to Aristide’s house.

Podcast: Lines of Sight

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:47:23 -0500

On November 16, 2012, Triple Canopy presented Lines of Sight, a public reading of passages from fiction that describe photography explicitly, as a subject, or adopt photographic strategies of framing, staging, or manipulation.

Photography is often characterized by its suspension between sets of oppositional pairs: image and object, expression and documentation, icon and index, art and technology. A fictionalized photography frees the medium from the most contentious of these oppositions—fact and fiction. When encountered in fiction, how does a photograph shift from this state of suspension to instrument of the author? How does photography participate in the act of mythologizing? How are photographic methods interpreted and employed in literature? What kinds of characters are photographers?

Hannah Whitaker introduces the evening (00:00-02:19).
Hannah Whitaker reads from Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Oval Portrait," 1850 (02:20-11:22).
Alejandro Cesarco reads from Felisberto Hernández’s "Just Before Falling Asleep," first published, 1977 (11:23-14:17).
Nancy Davenport reads from Julio Cortázar’s "Blow-up," 1968 (14:18-22:56).
Daniel Gordon reads from Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another, 1966 (22:57-35:54).
Molly Kleiman reads from Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams, 1986 (35:55-41:44).
Michael Famighetti reads from Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction, 1995 (41:45-48:28).
Michele Abeles reads from Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory, 2010 (48:29-54:32).
Moyra Davey reads from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, 1943 (54:33-1:00:29).
Sarah Resnick reads from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, 2004 (1:00:30-1:05:40).
Dan Torop reads from Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier, 1968 (1:05:41).

Project: I Know What You Did Last Summer

Sam Frank, Lucy Ives, Christine Smallwood & Dan Visel — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:56:58 -0500

by Sam Frank, Lucy Ives, Christine Smallwood & Dan Visel

Four fictions.

Project: Popular Science

Jena Osman — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:28:04 -0500

by Jena Osman

Amativeness, ideality, “God spot.” On the seductive promise of phrenology and its progeny.

Project: Semblance of Fact

Jan Estep — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 13:27:56 -0500

by Jan Estep

How brain scans are presented and consumed as photographs.

Podcast: Automatic Reading

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 23:57:36 -0500

On October 20, Triple Canopy hosted Automatic Reading, a seminar addressing the act of reading as a part of contemporary artistic practice. Here we present a recording of the seminar, in which Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno, Corina Copp, Jim Fletcher, Ariana Reines, Mónica de la Torre, and R. H. Quaytman discuss of how the legacy of conceptualism has challenged traditional notions of reading both as an exchange between an individual and a text and as a public activation of the written word.

Reading is frequently understood as a private encounter with characters, narratives, and, perhaps, an author. Reading in the context of conceptual art, in contrast, may underscore the material qualities of the codex (the page, binding, and technologies of printing) or cultural assumptions about readers and authors bound up with the physical format of the book. Rather than producing meaning, tout court, reading in a conceptual sense may become an encounter with an object, an audience, or social context—or with discourse itself. As in the case of unoriginal composition, the act of writing can be nearly indistinguishable from the act of looking over words. Conceptual reading establishes new uses for books and texts, even as it moves reading out of the realm of contemplation and into the space of action.

Automatic Reading is part two of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), Triple Canopy’s ongoing collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, in conjunction with the exhibition "Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art". The first act of Corrected Slogans—Triple Canopy’s September 15th symposium, Poems for America—emphasized strategies of unoriginal writing and art making. Automatic Reading extends this line of inquiry by focusing on how conceptual practices make use of conventions of reading.

Program: Lines of Sight

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: November 16, 2012

Triple Canopy is pleased to present Lines of Sight, a public reading of passages from fiction that describe photography explicitly, as a subject, or adopt photographic strategies of framing, staging, or manipulation. Readers will include Michele Abeles, Alejandro Cesarco, Nancy Davenport, Moyra Davey, Michael Famighetti, Daniel Gordon, and Dan Torop, introduced by Triple Canopy’s Hannah Whitaker.

Photography is often characterized by its suspension between sets of oppositional pairs: image and object, expression and documentation, icon and index, art and technology. A fictionalized photography frees the medium from the most contentious of these oppositions—fact and fiction. When encountered in fiction, a photograph may shift from this state of suspension to instrument of the author. "The Swabian was a grotesque double of Archimboldi, his twin, the negative image of a developed photograph that keeps looming larger" (Roberto Bolaño, 2666). How does photography participate in the act of mythologizing? How are photographic methods interpreted and employed in literature? "Many times, just before falling asleep, I’ve remembered my family, as if putting my eye to a small hole and blinking to light them up in the back yard of my house" (Felisberto Hernández, Just Before Falling Asleep). What kinds of characters are photographers? "When I told my husband I hated him, we hadn’t been married long at all. It was when he was taking my picture with his new camera" (Lorrie Moore, Anagrams).

***

Michele Abeles lives and works in New York. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; White Columns, New York, MoMA PS1 as well as "ReMap3" in Athens. She received an MFA in photography from Yale University (2007) and a Rema Hort Mann Visual Arts grant (2010). In April of 2013 she will present her second solo exhibition at 47 Canal, New York.

Alejandro Cesarco's work is currently on display at the São Paulo Biennial and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna. His solo exhibition “Words Applied to Wounds” opens November 15, 2012, at Murray Guy, New York.

Nancy Davenport is an artist living in New York. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries and museums including Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY, the Liverpool Biennial, São Paulo Biennial. She recently opened a permanent installation at the Military History Museum in Dresden.

Moyra Davey lives in New York City. Her work has been shown at the Whitney Biennial 2012, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Michael Famighetti is an editor and writer. He's currently working on a relaunch and redesign of Aperture magazine. He has edited numerous photography books, including volumes by William Christenberry, Robert Adams, John Divola, Jonas Bendiksen, and a series based on the website Tiny Vices. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Bookforum, Aperture, and OjodePez, among other publications. Famighetti has degrees from Bard College and Columbia University, where he has also taught. He has served as a judge for the American Society of Magazine Editors National Magazine Awards and has been a guest reviewer and speaker at many international photography festivals and institutions, including the Bamako Biennial; Krakow PhotoMonth; GuatePhoto; Rhubarb Rhubarb, Birmingham, U.K.; Festival de la Luz, Buenos Aires; Museet for Fotokunst, Odense; and Fotografiska, Stockholm.

Daniel Gordon received a bachelor of arts from Bard College in 2004 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2006. He has exhibited his photographs in solo exhibitions at Wallspace, Zach Feuer Gallery, and Leo Koenig Inc. in New York City and Claudia Groeflin Gallery in Zurich. He has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the CCS Museum at Bard College, and Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, and in 2010 his work was featured in Greater New York at MoMA PS1. Gordon is the author of Portrait Studio (onestar press, 2009) and Flying Pictures (powerHouse Books, 2009). He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Dan Torop works with lenses, film, paper, words, vehicles, and computer languages. His “Alkali Desert” is on view at The Center For Land Use Interpretation's Wendover Exhibit Hall One.

Project: Noping

Caroline Bergvall — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 08:31:58 -0500

by Caroline Bergvall

An unexpected tripping into English-language history. A poem in which noping is where nothing was. Audio recording by Graham Williams. Animation by Ciarán Ó Meachair.

Podcast: Poems for America, Part 3

K. Silem Mohammad & Margaret Lee — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 16:20:26 -0500

On September 15, Triple Canopy hosted the first half of Poems for America, a pair of symposia on poetics and conceptual art. Here we present a recording of the final session, Commonplaces, a conversation about how vernacular modes of writing and image-making can inspire formal innovation, moderated by Gretchen Wagner. Poems for America is part of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in conjunction with the exhibition “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art.”

Poems for America considers the ways in which acts of unoriginal composition—quotation, appropriation, transcription, and so on—create an aesthetic milieu in which certain modes of cultural production become legible, both historically and with reference to contemporary experience. How do the strategies inherited from conceptual art permit writers and artists to narrate the construction and projection of the self in relation to lived experience (rather than emphasizing abnegation of the self in favor of engagement with abstract concepts)? How do artists and poets engage with systems of language and thought to investigate the construction of historical and political identity, even while rejecting traditional modes of self-expression? How is conceptual writing and art published, and how is it shaped by changing technologies and related approaches to publication?

Podcast: Poems for America, Part 2

Michael Corris & Matvei Yankelevich — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:36:45 -0500

On September 15, Triple Canopy hosted the first half of Poems for America, a pair of symposia on poetics and conceptual art. Here we present a recording of the second session, Conceptual Art History, a conversation between Michael Corris and Matvei Yankelevich, moderated by Lucy Ives. Poems for America is part of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in conjunction with the exhibition “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art.”

Poems for America considers the ways in which acts of unoriginal composition—quotation, appropriation, transcription, and so on—create an aesthetic milieu in which certain modes of cultural production become legible, both historically and with reference to contemporary experience. How do the strategies inherited from conceptual art permit writers and artists to narrate the construction and projection of the self in relation to lived experience (rather than emphasizing abnegation of the self in favor of engagement with abstract concepts)? How do artists and poets engage with systems of language and thought to investigate the construction of historical and political identity, even while rejecting traditional modes of self-expression? How is conceptual writing and art published, and how is it shaped by changing technologies and related approaches to publication?

Program: Cultural Studies*

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Location: Grand Harmony, 98 Mott Street, New York, NY
Date: October 25, 2012

We’re pleased to announce Cultural Studies*, a benefit for Triple Canopy featuring two special performances. Violinist Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire) will play a solo set of original compositions. Musician Damon McMahon (Amen Dunes) and visual artist Tom Thayer will debut a new collaborative performance: a scripted abstraction, a narrated projection, a chance meeting at a banquet hall of harmonic characters and color forms. They will be joined by collaborators John Jines and Xander Duell.

Tickets begin at $120 and include a seated dinner and drinks.

Damon McMahon is a musician based in Brooklyn. He performs under the name Amen Dunes, which in 2011 released Through Donkey Jaw (Sacred Bones Records). || Tom Thayer is a visual artist based in New Jersey. His work was recently included in the 2012 Whitney Biennial. He is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York, where his exhibition “Crossing the Methane River” was on view this past spring. || Sarah Neufeld is a multi-instrumentalist musician and a member of the bands Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, and The Luyas. She lives in Brooklyn and Montreal.

Benefit Committee
Benefactor
Are.na, Artforum, Martina Batan, Robert Bielecki, Eileen Cohen, Lisa Cooley, Donald Ellis, Sharon Gallagher, Gabrielle Giattino, Wendy Goldberg, John Johnson, Wynn Kramarsky, Brett Littman, Fraser Mooney, Jonah Peretti, Selig D. Sacks, Lisa Schiff, Howie Seligman, Jeffrey Weiss

Patron
47 Canal, Philip Aarons & Shelley Fox Aarons, John Auerbach & Andrew Black, May Castleberry, Cathleen Chaffee, Kim Conaty, Derek Eller, Sean Elwood & Yvonne Puffer, Jesse Finkelstein, Michelle Finocchi, Richard Flood, James Fuentes, Alex Gartenfeld, Laurel Gitlen, Greene Naftali Gallery, Michael Hainey, Joy Harris, Nic Harteau, Julia Joern, Miriam Katzeff, Christian K. Keesee, David Kiehl, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Kris Latocha, Katy Lederer, Gideon Lewis-Kraus & Carol Cohen, Barbara London, Andrea Lounibos, Martos Gallery, Sarah McNally, Gregory R. Miller, Barbara & Howard Morse, Kristian Nammack, Cory Nomura, Lindsay Pollock & Andrew Zarnett, Charles Renfro, Elana Rubinfeld, Nicole Russo, Mary Sabbatino, Peter Sacks, Amy Sillman, Simone Subal, Jasmin Tsou, Rachel Uffner & Dan Nadel, Gretchen Wagner, Kate Werble, Dara Wier

Tickets are now sold-out. For more information, write to peter@canopycanopycanopy.com.
Table purchase (10 tickets) $1,200.00
Pair of tickets (2 tickets) $225.00
Individual ticket (1 ticket) $120.00

With generous support from:

Unable to attend? Consider a tax-deductible contribution.

Program: The Interface Effect

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: October 23, 2012

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable.

Recognizing the limits of either path, this lecture will explore an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well or castigating those that work poorly, we will consider the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. He is a founding member of the software collective RSG and creator of the Carnivore and Kriegspiel projects. Currently associate professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author or co-author of three books on media and cultural theory, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (MIT, 2004), Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (Minnesota, 2006), The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, written with Eugene Thacker (Minnesota, 2007). In 2010 he and Jason E. Smith translated Introduction to Civil War by the French group Tiqqun (Semiotext[e]). Recently, the Public School New York published French Theory Today: An Introduction to Possible Futures, a set of five pamphlets documenting Galloway's seminar conducted there in the fall of 2010.

Galloway's latest book, The Interface Effect, has just been published by Polity. In his future work he intends to focus more closely on French philosophy and the continental tradition.

Program: Automatic Reading

contact@canopycanopycanopy.com — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Location: 155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn, NY
Date: October 20, 2012

Triple Canopy is pleased to present Automatic Reading, a seminar addressing the act of reading as a part of contemporary artistic practice. Open to the public, the seminar will bring together Erica Baum, Franklin Bruno, Corina Copp, Jim Fletcher, Ariana Reines, Mónica de la Torre, R. H. Quaytman, and others, whose work in visual art, writing, and performance is informed by the history of conceptual art. Participants will discuss how the legacy of conceptualism has challenged traditional notions of reading both as an exchange between an individual and text and as a public activation of the written word.

Reading is frequently understood as a private encounter with characters, narratives, and, perhaps, an author. Reading in the context of conceptual art, in contrast, may underscore the material qualities of the codex (the page, binding, and technologies of printing) or cultural assumptions about readers and authors bound up with the physical format of the book. Rather than producing meaning, tout court, reading in a conceptual sense may become an encounter with an object, an audience, or social context—or with discourse itself. As in the case of unoriginal composition, the act of writing can be nearly indistinguishable from the act of looking over words. Conceptual reading establishes new uses for books and texts, even as it moves reading out of the realm of contemplation and into the space of action.

Automatic Reading is part 2 of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), Triple Canopy’s ongoing collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, in conjunction with the exhibition “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art.” The first act of Corrected Slogans—Triple Canopy’s September 15th symposium, Poems for America—emphasized strategies of unoriginal writing and art making. Automatic Reading will extend this line of inquiry by focusing on how conceptual practices make use of conventions of reading.

This seminar is open to the public. Seating is extremely limited; please arrive early.

***

Corina Copp is the author of the poetry pamphlet Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and is currently working on the three-part performance The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love—based on the work of Marguerite Duras—the first installment of which was presented in this year’s PRELUDE Festival.

Erica Baum lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Bureau, New York; Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin; and Circuit, Lausanne. Past group exhibitions include “Subject, Index,” at Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden. Her work will be included in the upcoming group exhibition “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the 2012 São Paulo Bienal. Her work was included in the book Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography, edited by T. J. Demos (Phaidon Press, 2006). Her artist’s books include Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), with essays by Kenneth Goldsmith and Beatrice Gross, Sightings (onestar press, 2011), and Bbabaubaumbaudevin (Regency Arts Press, 2012). Baum is also the author of “The Melody Indicator,” included in the sixteenth issue of Triple Canopy.

Franklin Bruno is a writer and musician based in Jackson Heights, Queens, and author of the article “Wouldn’t It Be Milchedich?,” multimedia analysis of My Fair Lady and its localized parodies, to be included in the eighteenth issue of Triple Canopy.

Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow, Coeur de Lion, Mercury, and the play Telephone and the translator of books by TIQQUN, Jean-Luc Hennig, and Charles Baudelaire. Reines is also the author of “Un Coeur Simple”, originally commissioned by Triple Canopy for the public-program series Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material at the Museum of Modern Art.

Jim Fletcher has worked with Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players for more than twelve years, most recently in Early Plays, a joint production with the Wooster Group. He is a member of the cast of Gatz, the Elevator Repair Service production based on The Great Gatsby, and has worked with Bernadette Corporation, Claire Fontaine, the English group Forced Entertainment (Sight is the Sense That Dying People Tend to Lose First, Quizoola!), and Sarah Michelson (Devotion). In 2012, he received an Obie award for sustained excellence of performance.

Mónica de la Torre’s poetry collections include two in English, Talk Shows (Switchback Books, 2006) and Public Domain (Roof Books, 2008), and two in Spanish, Acúfenos (Taller Ditoria, 2006) and Sociedad Anónima (UNAM/ Bonobos, 2010). She is the editor, with Michael Weigers, of the bilingual anthology Reverisible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon, 2002). Her translations from Spanish include Lila Zemborain’s Mauve Sea-Orchids (co-translated with Rosa Alcalá) and Poems by Gerardo Deniz, which she also edited. A recent collaborative book project, Taller de Mecanografía, was published in 2011 in Mexico City by Tumbona Ediciones. Four, a group of four new chapbooks, is just out from Switchback Books. She lives in Brooklyn and is senior editor at BOMB Magazine.

R. H. Quaytman is a painter living in New York City. Over the last decade Quaytman’s practice has encompassed various roles, including artist, writer, and curator. Recent projects include the artist book Spine published in 2011, directorship (from 2005 to 2008) of the New York gallery known as Orchard, a collective of artists, filmmakers, and art historians. In 2009 Quaytman’s first solo museum exhibition was mounted at the ICA Boston, and in November 2010 the artist’s first survey opened at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, New York and traveled in June 2011 to the Basel Kunsthalle. Quaytman has had solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Silberküppe, Berlin; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; Daniel Buchholz, Cologne.

Podcast: Poems for America, Part 1

Aaron Kunin & Ken Okiishi — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 14:44:19 -0400

On September 15, Triple Canopy hosted the first half of Poems for America, a pair of symposia on poetics and conceptual art. Here we present a recording of the initial session, À Rebours, a conversation between poet Aaron Kunin and artist Ken Okiishi, moderated by Katie Raissian. Poems for America is part of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in conjunction with the exhibition “Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art.”

Poems for America considers the ways in which acts of unoriginal composition—quotation, appropriation, transcription, and so on—create an aesthetic milieu in which certain modes of cultural production become legible, both historically and with reference to contemporary experience. How do the strategies inherited from conceptual art permit writers and artists to narrate the construction and projection of the self in relation to lived experience (rather than emphasizing abnegation of the self in favor of engagement with abstract concepts)? How do artists and poets engage with systems of language and thought to investigate the construction of historical and political identity, even while rejecting traditional modes of self-expression? How is conceptual writing and art published, and how is it shaped by changing technologies and related approaches to publication?

Podcast: We Are All Anonymous

Gabriella Coleman, David Auerbach & James Grimmelmann — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 13:01:14 -0400

On May 23, Triple Canopy hosted We Are All Anonymous, a conversation about the culture and politics of anonymity online with anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, writer David Auerbach, and lawyer James Grimmelmann. Participants discussed the hacktivist group Anonymous, the rich (and sordid) world of online message and image boards from which it emerged, and the political and legal implications of its activities. We Are All Anonymous also marked the publication of Triple Canopy‘s first e-book, Here Comes Nobody: Essays on Anonymous, 4chan and the Other Internet Culture, which compiles Auerbach and Coleman’s recent articles from the magazine and is available for the Kindle. Recording courtesy of Joly MacFie and the Internet Society of New York.

Podcast: All A Are Not B

Susanne Leeb with David Joselit, Prudence Peiffer & Amy Sillman — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 19:50:20 -0400

On April 12, Triple Canopy organized All A Are Not B a conversation about diagrams with David Joselit, Susanne Leeb, Prudence Peiffer, and Amy Sillman. This is a recording of that event, held on the occasion of the publication of Materialität der Diagramme: Kunst und Theorie (On the Materiality of Diagrams: Art and Theory), published by PoLYpeN (Berlin) and edited by Susanne Leeb, with contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Benjamin Buchloh, Bureau d’études, Bracha L. Ettinger with Birgit M. Kaiser & Kathrin Thiele, and Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, as well as Joselit, Peiffer, and Sillman.

Participants discussed how the diagram can break down conventional systems of signification and provide us with different ways of thinking about and acting in the world, and of making art. They may consider the role of transitiveness in contemporary painting; the humorous, mimetic diagrams of Ad Reinhardt; how chance operates in the work of Marcel Duchamp; how the circulation and disposition of images affects the way we relate to them; and how diagrams can draw a line between the body and the machine.

Podcast: Reading Flaubert's "Un coeur simple"

Ariana Reines — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:47:17 -0400

On March 7, as part of Triple Canopy's Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material series of programs at the Museum of Modern Art, writer Ariana Reines facilitated a discussion of Gustave Flaubert's novella Un coeur simple and Sherrie Levine's 1990 artist book Gustave Flaubert: "Un coeur simple." Following the discussion, Reines led the other participants to MoMA's courtyard, where she read Un coeur simple in its entirety. In this podcast, recorded by Ben Sharony, Reines reads Un coeur simple again.

Click here to download the PDF of Volume Number 2: Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material, the publication produced by Triple Canopy as part of the programs at MoMA.

Podcast: UN<3SIMPLE

Ariana Reines — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 17:26:23 -0400

On March 7, as part of Triple Canopy's Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material series of programs at the Museum of Modern Art, writer Ariana Reines facilitated a discussion of Gustave Flaubert's novella Un coeur simple and Sherrie Levine's 1990 artist book Gustave Flaubert: "Un coeur simple." Reines and the assembled participants talked about Levine's "feminist camp," Flaubert's miserable perfection of style, the relationship between gender and bronze parrots, and the possibility of making work that is at once hard and soft. This podcast is a recording of that event, which included Reines reading her essay "UN<3SIMPLE," written for the occasion.

Click here to download the PDF of Volume Number 2: Miscellaneous Uncatalogued Material, the publication produced by Triple Canopy as part of the programs at MoMA.