Stage

Offstage

Parallel to the utopian architects of the 1960’s, arises a critical architectural question: what remains at “the end” of the discursive practices of the last 50 years? Is a new direction to social architecture necessary? The architects Anna Heringer, known for her social architecture firm, discusses these questions with the theorist Christa Kamleithner, founder of the Vienna architecture center Dietmar Steiner, and Nikolaus Kuhnert, the publisher of ARCH+.

19.00 a mini-symposium featuring a LOVE LETTER FROM BERLIN delivered by AA Bronson, a conversation between Julieta Aranda and Antonia Majaca, a talk by Elvia Wilk titled Ask before you bite: roleplay as love beyond recognition, and an updated reading from the essay Is it Love by Brian Kuan Wood.

“Over the past few decades, it has often been said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Lacan famously defined love as giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. But love is more than a YouTube link or a URL. This beautiful negative flip of what is commonly considered the most positive force in the universe helps us begin to see love’s fullness and endless bounty, as based in emptiness and lack—in mutual loss. Love’s joy is not to be found in fulfillment, but in recognition: even though I can never return what was taken away from you, I may be the only person alive who knows what it is. I don’t have what it is you’re missing, but knowing its shape already makes a world where you can live without it.

Love is the most recently introduced member in the family of inflation and bloat. It is a burst of fresh air fed straight into the bubble. It gives the Ponzi scheme at least another decade before people start to think about cashing out. Remember when you would run out of time and replace that with energy? Push a little harder and move a little faster and you can trick time, because darling you’re a superhero. But when you run out of time and energy alike, you run into a problem. You need help. You need support. You need love and a bit of tenderness. Now, with the help of others, you can feed the machine again.” — Brian Kuan Wood

The eleventh title in the e-flux journal reader series with Sternberg Press features contributions by Paul B. Preciado, Brian Kuan Wood, Martha Rosler, Lee Mackinnon, Hu Fang, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Kim Turcot di Fruscia and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Tavi Meraud, Chus Martínez, Virginia Solomon, Slavoj Žižek, Jan Verwoert, Paul Chan, Antke Engel, Keti Chukhrov, Jalal Toufic, and the Cluster Network.

In the spirit of these authors’ collected words, we will stand in celebration, probing, and/or defense and caring inquiry of love.

What’s love got to do with it indeed? In the current climate of political disarray and 4chan style trolling, it appears that love is in short supply. So we would be led to believe. The “monopoly of hate” (as termed by Florian Cramer) is something factions from both sides of the political spectrum appear willing to claim and re-claim and hurl at one another. Replicating each other’s hatred makes for a feedback loop that can result in many outcomes, but communication is definitively not one of them.

Divisive, polarizing politics may be useful to create clear allegiances, but they can also destroy if taken too far. Affective economies are not only care-based, feel-good exchanges. Aggression, anger, and Trump rallies are also affective economies. And taking a close look at them is enough to make us decide that we are interested instead in the various economies of love.
We know that you are too. We see your commitment to treating love as a subject worthy of critical attention, and we look forward to spending an evening (in love) with you.

Conceptual Poetics Day

The Conceptual Poetics Day 2017 will have a vague focus on silence, nothing, the blank and the void(s).

Pavel Büchler Live (intermitting sound pieces between presentations)

13.00  Paul Stephens and Sebastian Campos Klatsch: Coffee Coffee, Convolution Convolution, Dworkin Dworkin, Grenier Grenier, Saroyan Saroyan, The Text as Artifact & The 23 Fonts, (We Have Photoshop) (Convolution Journal)

In this informal talk, Sebastian Campos and Paul Stephens will introduce Convolution by way of Craig Dworkin’s Klatsch, an essay on Robert Grenier and Aram Saroyan from the journal’s fourth issue. Copies of the essay will be provided, and audience participation encouraged.

Pavel Büchler Live

14.00 Sharon Kivland Nana, according to emptiness. A reading. (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE)

I have been reading Nana by Émile Zola for some time now, over many years. Zola’s novel, his ‘true story’ of the demi-monde, was published in installments, first appearing in October 1879 in the Voltaire. The definitive version in book form was published on 15 February by Charpentier. I read and I re-read the book, in both French and English. I digested the book, condensing it, organizing it into themes, appearances; yes, I assimilated it. Today it is according to emptiness.

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE is the imprint of the artist and writer Sharon Kivland, established in 2013. The publications are modestly yet attractively produced, usually printed in small editions, such as the series The Good Reader, in which Kivland invites others to reflect on reading. New books include: Naomi Toth and Vanessa Place, After Vanessa Place, Sharon Kivland, Reading Nana and A Lover’s Discourse, Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland (eds), The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, Peter Jaeger, The Shadow Line, Sarah Wood, Civilisation and its Malcontents, and by various authors, The Dreamers.

Pavel Büchler Live

14.15 Cia Rinne l’usage du mot / notes for soloists / zaroum (kookbooks)

The texts that are focused on in, l’usage du mot / notes for soloists / zaroum, belong to my project, zaroum, and are short minimalistic texts, written in English, German and French, or shifting between each language with phonetic similarities. The texts address the forming of an idea, a word or a quote, that when spoken develops a tone, rhythm or even a melody. The two sequences, notes for soloists and l’usage du mot similarly serve as scores, visualizing and conceptualizing the ways that this theme of shifting between languages is related to something musical or melodic.

Pavel Büchler Live

14.30 Michalis Pichler UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS NABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE)

All the text of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem of the same name is cut out and played on an automatic piano (Pianola Metrostyle Themodist, The Aeolian Company, NY 1910)

Mallarmé had written the poem in 1897, also saw it published in a magazine called Cosmopolis, but left copious notes as to how it should be typeset, instructions that were finally carried out 16 years after his death, in 1914.

In 1969 this work was appropriated by notorious Marcel Broodthaers, who replaced the words by black stripes. He replaced the classification ‘POEME’ on the cover by the word ‘IMAGE’. In 2008 Pichler published an edition classified ‘SCULPTURE’, with all the words cut out by laser, in a way that corresponds directly to the typographic layout used by Mallarmé to articulate the text.

Pavel Büchler Live

14.45 Sanna Marander and Niklas Tafra You say it best when you say nothing at all (Kunstverein Publishing)

You say it best when you say nothing at all is a performative reading by Sanna Marander and Niklas Tafra with appropriated words by Felix Fénéon, George Seurat, Charles Baudelaire, Yayou Kusama and others. Marander and Tafra’s recent book is a retrial of a Parisian court case from 1894 where art critic Felix Fénéon was accused of an anarchist bombing. The performance revolves around a detail in the book: a conflict between Fénéon and artist George Seurat, where the art critic was accused by the artist of using an over-explanatory language.

Pavel Büchler Live

15.00 Alice Maude-Roxby and Stefanie Seibold Censored Realities (Camera Austria)

This project publishes for the first time the complete texts of photographer Berenice Abbott’s famous modernist documentary project Changing New York. Abbott’s partner, the well known journalist and art critic Elizabeth McCausland, has completed a full set of captions that were to serve as critical-poetic commentaries alongside the famous images, but were eventually edited out by the publisher bit by bit for their progressive, leftist political leanings.

Pavel Büchler Live

16.00 Simon Morris Reading as Art (Information as Material)

Explorations of the possibilities of reading as an artistic act. The works displayed and under discussion find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs.

Pavel Büchler Live

17.00 Pavel Büchler Work for Words: The Message of the Medium

Büchler talks about two overlapping interests in his recent work with language: the limitless semantic potential of language and the material and technological limitations and possibilities of working with letters and words. Taking as a starting point the historical links among cryptography, Morse code and letter frequencies, the presentation will explore the ‘message’ of such language technologies as the letterpress, digital synthetic speech and Google translate.

Pavel Büchler Live

18.00 Derek Beaulieu a a novel (Jean Boîte Éditions)

Building upon my previous novels flatland: a romance of many dimensions (2005) and Local Colour (2008), my a a novel, an erasure-based translative response to Warhol’s controversial masterpiece. On each page of Warhol’s original, I erase all of the text leaving only the punctuation marks and onomatopoeic words. Theodor Adorno, in his essay “Punctuation Marks” argues that punctuation marks are the “traffic signals” of literature and that there is “no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks.”
Published in the autumn of 1968, Andy Warhol’s a a novel consists solely of the transcribed conversations of factory denizen Ondine (Robert Olivo). Ondine’s amphetamine-addled conversations were captured on audiotape as he haunted the factory, hailed cabs to late-night parties and traded gossip with Warhol and his coterie. The tapes were quickly transcribed by a quartet of stenography students (including The Velvet Underground’s Moe Tucker); rife with typographic errors, censored sections—and a chorus of voices—the 451 pages of transcriptions became, unedited, “a new kind of pop artefact.”
Warhol’s a a novel favours faithful transcription over plot, chance over predicted composition, and a novel’s ideas over its actual content.

Pavel Büchler Live, intermitting sound pieces between presentations

Live compiles the sound of audiences excerpted from the artist’s collection of live recordings of concerts (reportedly jazz concerts, though I could swear I hear Stevie Ray Vaughan in there).
That collection consisted of 351 albums, and thus 351 became the number of limited-edition copies of Büchler’s Live committed to vinyl.

Post-Butt analyses the virality of images in our mediated society. More rounded, it is a case study around the image of female butts, bootys, and behinds, and their influence in media, society and art. The butt is the protagonist of mass-mediated cullture, it is the democratic sex organ par excellence. The phenomenon of bootyfication exists in many contexts, as varied as the exploitation of the body in colonialism to 90s hiphop culture. Post-Butt goes through different periods in time and place, to analyse the political meaning of the usage of the image of the female buttocks. Then, it discusses the role of the booty in varied cultural expressions such as film, Internet art, music videos, dance and plastic surgery. Deep inside, Post-butt aims to reflect on how our society is conditioned by viral images, that do not only exist in the digital context, but have deep consequences on our physical world as well.

15.00 Albert Coers

Albert Coers will give an insight in past and actual projects which focus on the use and recombination of books, found images and texts (e.g. Encyclopedialexandrina, 2008-), FINESTRA (Finnish Institute, Berlin, 2014), Posen (NAPRZECIW Gallery Poznan), and, most recently, with projects/publications on sign language, with Länderkennzeichen [Country Signs](2016) and Gartenbilder-Bildergarten [Garden-Images – Images-Garden](2017).

16.00 Cube Art Editions Urban Secret Garden – a trilogy book of photographs, Thessaloniki (2016)

The series «Urban Secret Garden» first appeared in the 2013 shortlist of the Int’l Photobook Dummy Award in Kassel – Germany. In April 2016, the photobook titled «Urban Secret Garden – a trilogy book of photographs» was released with new design and narrative as a Print On Demand Selfpublication. The book was exhibited in Braga, Madrid, Florence, Athens, Thessaloniki, Bremen and now in Berlin.

“Heimo Lattner and Michael Baers from DHL (Drucken Heften Laden) will meet the artists / editors of Fucking Good Art Robert Hamelijnck and ­Nienke Terpsma for a public conversation at Miss Read concerning the contemporary climate around independent artist publications. How can artists set up a network to distribute their work and what role can the numerous art book fairs like Miss Read, I Never Read, Friends With Books, and The London Art Book Fair play? Do power structures like Motto and Sternberg hinder or help the dissemination of independent voices? Have the forces that shape the macro-economy also come to permeate the art world? We will look at these questions in light of FGA’s longstanding work as a travelling magazine for investigating art and its social context, releasing publications that employ oral history, ethnology, and documentary, particularly their recent work on anarchism, counter-cultures and other models of cultural production that exist outside the art market.” — DHL & FGA

14.00 Ana Bilbao
Afterall: a Research-Based Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry

Afterall editor Ana Bilbao will be discussing the journal’s history: how they started as a journal and how Afterall have developed. Today they have different strands of publications and have recently became a Research Centre, in which their commitments to contemporary art and exhibition-making, and their relation to wider artistic, theoretical and social contexts continue to inspire them. Ana will also provide some insights regarding their working processes and about their present and future interests.

15.00 Anette Gilbert and Tania Prill launching Under the Radar. Underground Zines and Self-Publications 1965–1975 (Spector Books), Book Presentation.

The mid-1960s witnessed a boom in underground and self-published works.
Hectographs, mimeographs, and offset printing not only allowed for the production of small, low cost print runs but also promoted a unique aesthetic: using wild mock-ups, ‘messianic amateurs’ combined typescript aesthetics, handwriting, scribbled drawings, assemblages of collaged visuals, porn photos, snapshots, and comic strips. The typography consciously frees itself, in parallel to a liberalization of linguistic and visual forms of expression in the name of a new ‘sensibility’. Under the Radar is the first to present the underground and self-published works that came out of West Germany in such depth, while also showing the international context in which they emerged: not as an anecdotal history but as an attempt to tap into the aesthetic cosmos of a Do-It-Yourself rebellion, one that also challenges us to take a new look at the current boom in ‘independent publishing’, the risograph aesthetic, and so on.

16.00 Rosalie Schweiker, Mirjam Bayerdoerfer and Eva Weinmayr
Teaching for people who prefer not to teach (AND Publishing), performative reading

A new teaching manual full of old ideas
A useful manual for zero-hour-teachers
A simple manual for dealing with complex issues
A critical manual for collective actions
A radical manual for all sorts of shortcuts
A practical manual that fits in your pocket

Join the editors for a talk on why and how the publication was produced — and how it has been used.

17.00 Alessandro Ludovico Temporary Library

Temporary and Distributed libraries, after bookmobiles and against instant knowledge.
Contemporary forms of library are increasingly based on a more active public participation contributing to rethinking both their structural and content-related mission. The central role of the institutional library is facing an identity crisis in the post-digital, even if it’s still undoubtedly a nodal cultural system. The appropriation of its mechanisms to allow a different circulation of knowledge is behind the spontaneous creation of different types of DIY ‘libraries’ interconnecting (sometimes) among themselves, and at some point (or not) to the centralised library system. A shared feeling is that libraries should evolve from their historical and ‘monumental’ role, delivering socially relevant services, into an extended, networked and shared infrastructure of knowledge, rivalling the online type of ‘instant’ knowledge, through facilitating true social and cultural exchange.

Inspired by the historical experiments in ‘mobile libraries’ (or ‘bookmobiles’), there are two models of alternative models of libraries I’m actively experimenting with. The first is the ‘distributed library’, integrating relevant small/private collections of specialised knowledge accumulated elsewhere, possibly at some point joining the traditional library system without structurally intervene in it. This process implies the acknowledgement of these collections, allowing an easier historization of often neglected cultural and art movements. The second is the creation of a few ‘temporary libraries’ to fill specific knowledge needs during cultural events, becoming then permanent resources in referential libraries, when the event ends, but also potentially keeping a ‘mobile’ feature, combining preservation and mobility issues.

18.00 Reto Pulfer Refzus Ortie Ofifusiani performance, on occasion of the book launch of Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions (Sternberg Press), edited by Reto Pulfer and Nikola Dietrich.

The performance Refzus Ortie Ofifusiani is an interpretation of his catalogue, where musical landscapes, novel writings and improvisations are condensed.
In the style of a catalogue raisonné, Reto Pulfer’s comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions, follows the artist’s work over the past fifteen years. Excerpts from the artist’s novels as well as insightful texts by Anselm Franke and Benoît Maire are juxtaposed with 475 documentary photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, one-off exhibitions, large-scale installations, and performances. Categories such as living ceramics, food advice, ghostology, synesthesia, and transformation are woven throughout the book, giving unique insight into the ideas and imagination that are part of the work itself.

RISO — STQA is a series of Show & Tell by 10 riso publishers participating in the fair, followed by a short Q&A of all speakers with the audience.
Organized by We make it.

Participating publishers: Colorama (Berlin), Gloria Glitzer (Berlin), indekeuken – Chez Rosi (Brussels), KudlaWerkstatt (Prague), Riso Paradiso (Ljubljana), SOYBOT (Vienna), Vetro Editions (Berlin)

15.00 Jan Novák Páteř – Book presentation (Page Five)

Graphic designer Jan Novák presents his work Páteř, a hard-boiled story set in a futuristic Prague which is told in part through design and typography. Novák will give a short presentation on the project’s background and concept, showing materials from the process, sketches, and introducing his vision of urban Czech Republic in 2116. Páteř is published by Page Five, small publisher and bookstore based in Prague.

16.00 KG Weltformat Diorama

KG Weltformat came across Emanuel Goldberg’s estate in Tel Aviv in 2013 and has been working ever since on an artistic exploration of his scientific achievements. This engagement with his work draws on contemporary examples of image production at the interface of art and science.

Emanuel Goldberg (1881 Moscow – 1970 Tel Aviv) is considered a pioneer of media technology and an information society visionary. A scientist, professor at the Royal Academy for the Graphic Arts and the Book Industry in Leipzig and later head of Zeiss Ikon AG, Dresden, Goldberg studied the fundaments of photography and developed cameras and equipment for the knowledge management of the future. He also worked intensively on reproduction methods, aerial photography and microfilm technology. After being forcibly displaced from Nazi Germany, he used his knowledge to serve the anti-Hitler coalition and the Zionist underground organisation Haganah and founded one of Israel’s first technology companies.

The installation “Diorama” features two display cabinets focusing on Goldberg’s questions about photomechanical reproduction technology and his investigation into the behaviour of photographic emulsions. Original artefacts and reproductions are arranged in backlit display cases with comparative aesthetic studies. The display cabinets are dioramas offering a cognitive as well as an ontological perspective on Goldberg’s research. Questions surface regarding the essence of a picture, the metaphysical conditions of sight and the indexicality of technical images. The sides of the display cabinets are treated with epoxy resin and interference pigments. A visual reflection on the principles of object and medium.

The exhibition is a collaboration and presents at its centre the estate transferred to the Dresden Technical Collections. In addition to the TSD and KG Weltformat, other partners are: Stage Design / Scenography postgraduate course at the TU Berlin, Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig, Centre for Media History Research / Centre for Film & TV Research Bournemouth University, Academic Heritage of TU Dresden. (Talk in German).

17.00 Delere Press & Punctum Books When Thought Wanders Off – Readings & book presentation

The title of Neil Murphy’s Introduction to An Apple a Day… by Jeremy Fernando and Julian Gough, playfully situates our introduction to Delere Press and punctum books, and, more specifically, their selected readings, which range from in situ short stories to a catalogue of agnotology.

Readings:

Delere Press
Pedestrian Stories (2014), stories and photographs by Jennifer Hope Davy (present)
From a wandering girl, an avatar, a MMOG Gold farmer, a Thai hair length rule inspired student rebellion, theoretical pages from texts to hand, and many spaces in between, Davy, with Anon., and their quasi-Greek chorus in the guise of footnotes, narrate and comment upon a story that emerges from 24 hours in-situ at the Reading Room in Bangkok. Traversing displacement, identity, shadow economies, blind faith and fiction, “In-between Places” is the third story of the series, Pedestrian Stories, produced in/as durational ‘performances’ of twenty-four hours in-situ, in which anything, in-situ, virtually or otherwise, become possible material, characters, and/or participants.

An Apple a Day… (2015) by Jeremy Fernando and Julian Gough, with photographs by Tan Jingling, and an Introduction by Neil Murphy
In their respective stories that comprise this book, Fernando and Gough take “the iPhone (and its variants) – and allow it to mutate into a prickly, resonant metaphor for everything from September 11, ISIS, Anders Behring Breivik, blind gratification, the power of the image, and being itself.”
Punctum Books
MATCHES: A Light Book (2015), by S.D. Chrostowska (present)
Moving from art and aesthetics to philosophies past and present, through natural and technological landscapes, beneath the constellations of politics, history and ethics, along the byways of contemporary literary culture, MATCHES goes back to the drawing board of modern critique. Taking any number of forms, Epigrams. Aphorisms. Fragments. Sayings. Dicta. Sententiae. Facetiae. Fractions of truth… it sets out to rekindle short-form literary-philosophical reflection, with roots in the Antiquity of Heraclitus and Hippocrates, apogee in the French moralistes (La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Chamfort … ), and late splendour in German letters (Nietzsche, Kraus, Jünger … ).

An Unspecific Dog: Artifacts of this Late Stage in History (2017), by Joshua Rothes
In An Unspecific Dog: Artifacts of this Late Stage in History, Rothes collects 150 short texts as fables for our time, a veritable catalog of agnotology, a series of situations and propositions that revel in the dark irony at the root of our early-twenty-first-century existence.