Here’s the edited transcript of a small new talk I gave this week at the delightful WordHack, a three-year running event at BabyCastles in New York. The first formal presentation was Taeyoon Choi, co-founder of SFPC (School for Poetic Computation), an inspiring artist and thinker I look up to, and Andrew of HAWRAF, the design firm that designed the gorgeous Poetic Computation: Reader. Empty Models/Flattened Language (Thanks to Todd, BabyCastles, and WordHack for inviting and hosting me). So I was […]

Categories: Writing

Small talk given at New School on March 6, 2017, as part of Acid Architecture: Trans-Thinking in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism led by Ed Keller of the Center for Transformative Media. Speakers Warren Neidech, McKenzie Wark, Keller, and Sanford Kwinter spoke eloquently about neuroplasticity, acid thinking (both literal and metaphoric), the binds of cognitive capitalism. Mr. Wark gave an espeically amazing talk about Barbarella. Fun times and great conversation with thinkers I have admired and respected forever and a day … […]

Categories: Writing

It’s the beginning of the year; pages open up in computers everywhere. Time for constructing a good-enough narrative, or at least one we can live with. Selecting the best events and worst, sliding them along the board into position, mapping out a mostly arbitrary story. The psychic demand to name monuments in the desert behind us, marking evidence of progress, our getting better every day. Progress, a clear narrative of our body inching so surely through the world, with more learning […]

Categories: Writing

  This year has felt particularly overloaded, with both projects piling on to split my attention between the manuscript (and so, this header photo of the California coast, where I’ll be in a week, and was just a month ago, baking in a Los Angeles heat wave, alone at Griffith Observatory to get very tan and toasted before a writing session at House of Pies) and what has been three to four non-fiction projects at any time. I’m happy with all […]

Categories: Writing

This is the text I wrote for a performance by Bill Kouligas, who heads the PAN record label, and the artist Spiros Hadjidjanos, for Hören: DECESSION, a night of performances at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin. The installation was multi-layered. Spiros built the beautiful curtained backdrop of optical fibers – connected to active wireless routers. Bill performed his original composition. Two opera singers – Pan Daijing and Annie Gårlid – spoke and sang sections of the text. Lisa Blanning did a very thorough review […]

Categories: Writing

Back at it again, and so many months later! I made well-intentioned efforts of documenting the last ten months, but draft after draft describing quarterly updates have piled up. In an upcoming post, I’ll tell you about work to be performed (!) or published, and about pieces I had the pleasure of editing or referring. I also want to tied up loose ends on the future-is-in-the-name projects that got underway last fall, Futures and the Futures Market, with reflections on the critical response […]

Categories: Writing

Hello! Some of my favorite writers have been making interesting posts about their years. Because I want nothing more than to fit in, I’m doing the same. I hope you read and enjoy. 2014 was an intense year! Year of the Horse. The umbrella theme was collaboration. In January, I met essayist and critic DeForrest Brown, Jr., on the slushy streets outside of McNally Jackson in New York. We blind-pitched an essay to an editor sitting in the New Museum tea space within an hour […]

Categories: Writing

Long time, no update – but for good reasons, I hope. Later on, I will write a much longer story describing how these pieces came about, but for now, I’ll share this VVVNT essay collaboration** with Lars Holdhus, artist name TCF, and DeForrest, followed by a short Rhizome review of James Hoff that serves as a footnote. I’ve never had so much fun writing before, in large part because I wasn’t alone in this work. More collaboration is needed across artistic genres! **UPDATE, 10.4.2014: […]

Categories: Writing

“And raving is everywhere you’re not And everything you’re not” -From On and On and On, by Ryan Kuo If you were born at a certain time, you missed the rave years. All that is left is misplaced nostalgia for those of us not lucky enough to be in England at the right time, or in Detroit at the right time. James Leyland Kirby’s recent The Death Of Rave tracks, in which he breaks down rave mega-hits into ambient soundscapes, speaks […]

Categories: Writing