No No Deluxe

This is a word cloud visualization of "No No Deluxe or Change Radio, a poem for O." Last Sunday, July 18 was Spare Room Collective's Portland Polyvocal Poetry. As one of the pieces for the event, Washington-based poet and publisher Crag Hill inscribed the word POETRY on a map of Portland and invited five other poets to walk a letter and write a poem (in an hour and a half) based on the words we saw on our walk. I was the "O." Thank you for visualization to Jonathan Feinberg and IBM.

A larger version.

Hello

I write about art (and design) for a number of publications, and make art about writing (and reading) and language.

The Mine King I/O

THE MINE KING I/O

A practice gets a frame. A framing gets a desk. On the desk there is a catalogue, with a hundred more to follow.

The Mining is the practice, the digging down through rich vein of idea (and, not incidentally, language) captured in text, page to dog-eared page (repeat) through to bibliography to jump into another text in the vein.

The Min(e)ing, making mine of mined, refers to repeated readings of beloved writings (gathering books like family), assimilating ideas into my own constellation of ideas, and my practice of “reading” texts, which is to say making-poem-of-found-text via an intuitive paring for sound.

The Mind King [deprecated] was the intermediate step (suggested by sound) from min(e)ing to The Mine King.

The Mine King is both the project and the Mine King. The Mine King is an archive of books, essays, PDFs, handwritten notes, recordings. The Mine King is a set of publications that address the mining and the mined. The Mine King is text constructed from text.

The Mine King I/O is the first public outing of The Mine King. At Gallery HOMELAND from June 11-July 5, 2010, for the exhibition Doing It To It, I'm going to be in residence more or less during gallery hours and do the work of The Mine King while writing catalogue after catalogue to document the The Mine King I/O. I will make one for you. One aspect of The Mine King is its online incarnation (it approximates a card catalogue for project).

OPEN

OPEN is a collaborative, co-written book, a real-time, writing-in-public experiment that was written by more than two dozen contributors (some anonymous) during the 2010 Open Engagement Conference: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse. in Portland, Oregon, co-sponsored by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland Community College.

We set out to address the concerns, practices, and issues around socially engaged art, but equally important was the idea of a performative, inclusive thinking-in-public that this project represents. We threw the door to participation wide open, taking all comers.

We wrote for four days at all hours of the day and night in a single online document from May 14 through 18, with two drop-in sessions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's (PICA's) Resource Room where we had WiFi and a number of computers available. On PiratePad.net we were able to chat with each other in a sidebar while we wrote and edited and responded to one another's salvos in the main editing window. (This chat is documented in the chapter entitled The Back Channel.) Friends checked in from all over the country (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), and we met new contributors from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Stockholm, Sweden and Limerick, Ireland.

We invited contributions of statements by conference presenters and participants, responses to questions posed in the initial conference prospectus, responses to existing texts, conversations, essays, interviews, statements, project reports, and a bibliography of related documents and books for further reading

The result is OPEN. Some contributions are anonymous. Some contributions stretch the premise to the breaking point and beyond. There are manifestos, queries, interviews, critiques, essays, and even a poem.

2009 PWNW Richard Foreman Mini-Fest

For Performanceworks Northwest's annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival, we're each given a link to a chunk of Richard Foreman's online journals and ten days to shape it into a short performance. Over the years, Tim DuRoche and I have done morse code, used typewriters as percussion instruments, and something having to do with Lawrence of Arabia. In 2009 at Imago Theater, we did an episodic performance about the ten days of trying to make the performance. Lemons for Luck.

verse.chorus.bridge.

verse.chorus.bridge. Scratching the Surface. galleryHOMELAND. July 2006.

For "verse.chorus.bridge." Tim DuRoche and I improvised a bridge across the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon using sound. Morse code, tom toms, and lemons for Luck. I read "New Needs Need New," a remix of a quote by Jackson Pollock as I walked west across the Hawthorne Bridge. When sound failed, we used semaphore, I literally, he figuratively, playing drums with white rags. It was 104 each day we performed.