Category: Writing
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Empty Models, Flattened Language
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…
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Mapping the Hidden
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.…
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Position
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…
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Westward
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…
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Decession
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…
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Intimate Pressure
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.…
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Year of the Horse
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…
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New Work
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…
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Chimeras
Playing a symphony on board the station above the new world, the man leans hard towards the old sounds, places his cheek against the cold speaker. Even as the vessel flings forward through a stream of detritus – bows of dead satellites, many-ton compacted cubes of trash – and the view out is brilliant, his mind…
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The Party Is Never Over
“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…
Nora N. Khan 