Performance

"Claire Donato's We Discuss Disgust: Patafeminism Rides The Digital Abject: Cixous, Kristeva, Lispector, Jackson, Hayles, Damon, Lorde, and Others" was initially presented at ELO14 as a rhetorical front to conceal Special America Holds the Light. The front was employed prior to Special America's surprise appearance and announcement that it had absorbed the ELO and rebranded the Hold the Light conference as Special America Holds the Light. "We Discuss Disgust" was then folded into Special America's performance. In particular, we incorporated the following description, which had been provided to ELO for the program:

How can we negotiate post-post-gender identity in the slipstream of our digitally mediated selves? How can we commit to a feminist position when we see through our hands on the keys? Can we have a body without organs if there is no body? How do we register disgust in the digital sublime? Does the virtual city have a dump, or is it just a bunch of circuits and towers? Now that our mother was a computer, what is the future of futurity? Jackson’s notions of phlegmatics and humour(s) will be cross-stitched with Damon’s warm code as we gag on Kristeva and Lispector, read the scraps of Cixous’ devoured liver & consider Lorde’s new-media outlook: Maybe the Internet raised us / And maybe people are jerks. Q&A to follow.

Special America's use of "We Discuss Disgust" as a front was inspired by marketing and branding tactics employed by celebrities, corporations and academies including Beyoncé, James Franco, Lululemon, The New School, and The Cooper Union.

A group written mission statement netprov.

Ether is a hypothetical medium – supposed by the ancients to fill the heavens, proposed by scientist to account for the propagation of electromagnetic radiation through space. The notion of ‘ocean’ was once as vague. Aristotle perceived of the world as a small place, bounded by a narrow river. Columbus believed the Atlantic was a much shorter distance across than we now know it to be. Even as early electromagnetic telegraphic and wireless transmissions propagating over, under, and through oceans collapsed distances between ships and shores, they revealed vast new oceans – oceans of static, oceans of noise. Etheric Ocean is an underwater web art audio writing noise site. It is an imprecise survey of sounds both animal and mechanical, and of signs both real and imaginary, of distortions born of the difficulty of communicating through the medium of deep dense dark ocean. Like stations dotting a radio dial, murky diagrams, shifting definitions, appropriated texts, nautical associations, and wonky word plays are strung along a very long, horizontally scrolling browser window. This is a world of inversions. Sounds are deep harbours, or are they depths? Sounds purposefully unfold. Out of its element, uncannily airborne, a flying jellyfish drone wobbles about. Noises are made. Islands are Heard.

Text ‘n FX is a DJ mixer for text. It is a prototype machine developed in the 80’s for the emerging practice of Hip-Hop. Instead of a DJ mixing two records together, the designers of the device proposed the idea of a Text-Jockey (TJ). The TJ acted as a machine-assisted poet mashing up lyrics read from two floppy disks in real-time using statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cut-up techniques from experimental literature. The product never made it to market but it exists today as a media-archaeological curiosity.

(Source: ChercherLeTexte website)

Operatus is a live performance of a generative narrative-poetic system distributed between screens, interactive objects and augmented reality overlays. The work engages a range of historical and contemporary contexts of observation and forensic analysis including early modern surgical theaters, the deductive logic of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Stud File, a methodical archive of personal evidence documenting the sexual exploits of Samuel Steward, a 20th century tattoo artist, pornographer, and friend of Gertrude Stein. (source: http://chercherletexte.org/en/performance/opera-tus/)