Wednesday, March 4th, 7pm
@ Get Lost Books, 1825 Market Street
with a follow-up discussion-experiment March 6th ( location tba )
Emily's project "You are Your Own Worst Enemy: the Use of 'Self-Abuse' as a Mask to Institutional Culpability" discusses the penal-system's use of the 'diagnosis' of 'masturbation' to pathologize prisoners, and provide an explanation for death, sickness, and mental illness inside Eastern State Penitentiary and Guantanamo Bay. In addition to exploring the material and human conditions of these sites, her process of inquiry aims to conceptually investigate the vocabularies, taxonomies, and social and state understandings that makes the ongoing legitimation of these environment's existences possible, and how it might futurally be disrupted.
Miranda's MATERIALISMS (a new chapbook from Portable Press at Yo Yo Labs) records and amplifies language derived from the medical records of a community of iron miners and loggers in Northern Michigan, and from a childhood in a Marxist-Leninist collective in the Haight-Ashbury during the 1970s and 80s. These two materialisms--the production of iron ore and lumber on one end of the century and the production of anti-capitalist ideology on the other--constitute a framework in which to sound out the contradictions in instrumentalist production and idiom. Here is a link to excerpts from Materialisms in Harp & Altar:
http://www.harpandaltar.com/interior.php?t=s&i=3&p=25&e=47
Emily Abendroth is a writer and artist, alternately residing in the San Francisco Bay area and Philadelphia, where she co-curates the Moles not Molar Reading Series with poet Justin Audia. Her book-length work in progress Muzzle Blast Dander can be found in Refuge/Refugee (Volume 3 of the Chain Link book series). Recent work of hers can be found or is forthcoming in Digital Artifact, Encyclopedia, How2, Pocket Myths, Horseless Review, Eco-poetics, and Cut and Paint. Her chapbook, Toward Eadward Forward was published by Horse less Press this past november. She is currently and ever-so-slowly piecing her way through some writings and thinking on solitary confinement practices in U.S. prisons.
Miranda Mellis is the author of The Revisionist (Calamari Press), Materialisms (Portable press at Yo Yo labs), and Transformer (forthcoming). She is an editor at The Encyclopedia Project and teaches at California College of the Arts. Her various writings may be found in various publications, most currently Modern Painters, Denver Quarterly, and The Believer.
REAL TIME ETHICS is a series of actions and readings and conversations and scores and moment to moment compositions that investigate the time in which we make meaningful sounds at and with each other. Do particular instances of our speech have particular durational frames. How are those instances embodied or disembodied or semi-embodied? What happens when we experiment with these frames? when we don't experiment? when we cease to experiment? In real time? Do our ethics extend beyond the fabula of the 'content' of our speech? Each investigation will consist of a reading/talk/presentation followed-up by a separately scheduled 'activity' that aims to bring a dynamic of the work into the 'real time' of present relation and discourse.
www.realtimeethics.blogspot.com