Sounds, voices, musics, images, written codes of all sorts – in today’s media-saturated environment, humans lend their ears and eyes to an abundant and seemingly free-floating worlds of social and sensory information. The intensity of this information calls for different models of poetics that figure the artist not as a lone fabricator constructing and reconstructing a singular tradition but rather as an antenna, receiving and rebroadcasting atmospheres of experience. The affects, concepts, and materials that create particular ambiences do not merely condition the work, as in the classic divide of text and context, but literally inform it, giving both materialand shape to the poetic process.
From everyday life to extreme conditions of constraint, from suburbia to the warzone, how does the sensing self record—consciously or unconsciously—the ambience of these zones and spaces? This conference a series of roundtable discussions with writers, composers, performers, and critics that will consider not the influence of a particular tradition or canon but rather the influence of particular material surroundings.
New York City, NY; NYC