&Now 2019 Conference

This panel proposes an alternative form: the screening. The moving image on a screen has become dominant in our understanding of reading, writing, and being in the world. Along with creative work, this panel proposes a mode of video-criticism and poetic-making that investigates, articulates, and explores the possible affordances of a thinking of poetry through and with video. The panel will consist of introductory remarks by Courtlin Byrd. Then we will have a screening of 4-5 video works that will play continuously, like a cinema-screening, each exploring the potential of video for both making poetry but also for reading poetry. Following the screening we will have a robust Q&A between the artists and audience teasing out the meaning of this convergence.

Courtlin Byrd and Brent Cox will present a collaborative work suggesting video presents unique opportunities for reading documents of poetry. The video will “read” works by Johanna Drucker and Susan Howe, and The Florentine Codex, a 16th-century colonial-imperial ethnographic study of the Nahuatl people made by Spanish Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun. Poet and video artist Madison McCartha will present portions of “FREAKOPHONE WORLD,” a series of occult recordings, hauntings, and invocations performing new black diasporic identities in the imperiled globalized society, along with an examination of Jeron Braxton’s animation and a proto-essay on blackness, virtuality, assemblage, mediation and art-making. Zak Byrd will screen “Neighbor,” a survey of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. From general conversations about the issue, the essay focuses in on Anthony Tolliver, an illustrator who has lived on the streets for 35 years. Corbin Louis will screen “Can of Screams,” a pixel-performance, palpitating artwork cross-bred by warping page poem structures with .mpegs, compositing body, video and sound to activate a blast of agony and healing.