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BARGE Buried Treasure Island documentation image 3Wednesday nite’s Nonsite event (11/12/08) at SF Camerawork with Amy Balkin and David Buuck was particularly gratifying for me because David’s and Amy’s works have been corresponding for a long time, if only in my head, and so this evening was the occasion for making an otherwise imagined conversation actual.

And that conversation seems to have realized many of Nonsite’s hopes to make manifest, as material for sustained discussion and investigation, some of the submerged lines of communication between projects located in disciplines often kept at some remove from one another: say, poetry and drawing, performance and social practice. The rich discussion that emerged during the Q/A made it clear that the investigations Balkin and Buuck are pursuing converge with many of the collective’s concerns and engagements, so there’s no doubt we will be following-up. In the short term, we are hoping to make an audio-file of the evening’s talks available here, soon, and perhaps there will be further discussion on the website as well. Stay tuned, too, for Kristin Palm's generous introduction. [read more at blog post]

Nonsiters!

PLEASE consider submitting to the journal I coedit, ON Contemporary Practice.

And check out the inaugural issue--which features writings by Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Brenda Iijima, Suzanne Stein, Alli Warren, and others.

Here goes the advert:

ON

Contemporary Practice 1

edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan & Kyle Schlesinger

contents:
Taylor Brady, Brandon Brown, CAConrad, Jason Christie, Michael Cross, Thom Donovan, Eli Drabman, Rob Halpern, Jen Hofer, Alan Gilbert, Brenda Iijima, Andrew Levy, Edric Mesmer, Sawako Nakayasu, Tenney Nathanson, Richard Owens, Tim Peterson, Andrew Rippeon, Kyle Schlesinger, Jonathan Skinner, Dale Smith, Suzanne Stein, Ali Warren, Katie Yeats

on

Arakawa/Gins, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Michael Cross, Beverly Dahlen, Michael deBeyer, Mark Dickinson, kari edwards, DJ/Rupture, Thom Donovan, Belle Gironda, Brenda Iijima, CJ Martin, Emily McVarish, Yedda Morrison, Hoa Nguyen, Sawako Nakayasu, Julie Patton, Lauren Shufran, Suzanne Stein, Dana Ward, Ali Warren

purpose:
ON Contemporary Practice gathers writing about the practices or poetics of one’s contemporaries. While these writings may be highly anti-categorical or “hybrid,” they are ultimately for the cultivation and extension of critical discourse. If you would like to submit to ON please write the editors at oncontemporaries@gmail.com, or michaelthomascross at hotmail dot com, thom_donovan at yahoo dot com, and kyleschlesinger at gmail dot com. ON welcomes all unsolicited materials which pursue the below guidelines. For more about ON’s editorial positions, please see the first issue’s editorial, “For a Discourse”.

guidelines: Read more

Flux Factory – Call for Proposals
Flux Factory, an artist collective and artist-run center in NYC, is currently accepting proposals for collaborative art projects for our 2009 programming. Projects must commission new work that is collaborative in nature. We create projects in which artists can interact and experiment in ways that produce new works, either as thematic group shows or as giant collaborative works within themselves. Projects must be structured to accommodate an open call to local and international artists.

Examples of past shows include turning the gallery into a giant music box, a exhibition inspired by a movie, an exquisite-corpse exercise in a derelict building, an interdisciplinary monument to Tatlin, an edible art show, bus tours by artists, and many many more.

Since we’re temporarily losing our headquarters, we’re looking for itinerant projects, or ones that we could find specific venues for. Budgets for each show are around $4000 all inclusive.
Think big!

Submissions should be no longer than a one page description of the project, and should be emailed to info@fluxfactory.org with the subject heading “Proposal.” Deadline for submissions is November 26th, 2008.

A bit about us:
Flux Factory began as a collective living space in 1994, in an old spice factory in Williamsburg, New York City. Its original members were undergraduates at the New School For Social Research (now New School University). About four years later, with a new stage built and twice as many members, the Flux Factory living room evolved into a site for art events and performances of all kinds. Flux became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1999 and moved to Long Island City, Queens in 2002. Read more

Peace Events & The Prosodic Body

present

Taylor Brady & Jennifer Scappettone

Saturday, November 1st 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan & Robert Kocik at:

340 Morgan Avenue ("MEBLE" building)
E. Williamsburg (Graham Ave. L stop), Brooklyn
((PLEASE SEE DIRECTIONS BELOW))

about the readers:

Taylor Brady lives in San Francisco where he is active in the Nonsite Collective (www.nonsitecollective.org). His recent publications include *Yesterday's News*, *Occupational Treatment*, and *Snow Sensitive Skin*, written in collaboration with Rob Halpern.

from Occupational Treatment:

Perhaps I write to you in order to create delicious misunderstandings that will render me edible. I hope to settle your own digestion of my own erring analysis. Many of the campers are clothed in the gnawed remains of just such a meal. At one time they even produced its refreshments, but that was before the brewery started outsourcing beer. In the photos I've enclosed the effect is one of unfortunate fatigue. But you must remember that this nation is so young it has not yet discovered its youth. It only appears wreathed in tatters and strips of the outmoded or attenuated. Passing by way of sartorial falsehood, you must come to imagine the truth of a new collective body still barely veiled within it. Then distance comes and spills into its folds. Read more

Treasure Island is our dream – a fever dream, our guide calls it—our dream of riches, our dream of military might, our dream of a little place to get away from it all, if only for a moment. “Look away from the views,” our guide requests, turn away from the postcard image, the picturesque. Everything is not alright. Named after the dream of pirates, we built this island of silt and loam—dredged it up, quite literally—to display our outsized dreams of what the future might possess for us and what we might possess in it. Later, our guide tell us, the island was to become an airport, a dream upstaged for another theater, another set. And, as the military is wont to do, once they settled in, it was a good long time before they made their exit. And, as is also customary, they left the place in much worse shape than they found it. The island is man made and, like all of our once-shining locales, so is its devastation. This afternoon we are joined by both apparitions and inhabitants, the latter interrogated so thoroughly by one tour member—“We have a native here! –so as to make this visitor uncomfortable. But I’ll admit, I eavesdropped. He pays $1900 for his place. His neighbors pay $300. The ultimate verdict of life on the island? “It’s pretty nice. Except for the toxic waste.”

Questions arise (and our guide’s insistent refrain: “I haven’t been able to get anyone to answer that.”)

Why is one building on this island inhabitable while the one next door is shuttered, fenced off?

A moth eradication project here, really?

What of the black SUVs that pull in and out of the restricted area at night? (“it’s the only site with its own private security. But since it’s a hazardous waste zone, it’s unclear to my why anyone would want to break in.”

As well as facts:

The condition of leases on the island is that there is no planting or eating food from the ground

Dramas staged here: Hulk, Flubber, Rent, Nash Bridges Read more