&Now 2019 Conference

What can the past teach us about place through artful digital archiving? Five panelists discuss ways in which they have creatively documented histories.

“Sites and Toposes” is a performance work created by Kelly Dulaney and Ian Bawn. This piece seeks to speak to the politics of the forgotten and welds sonic, visual, and literary elements within a topographical space. Dulaney and Bawn will present recordings, gifs, and still images as documentation of their performance in order to appropriate and disperse the “echo” by repositioning and disorienting points of location in a shifting topographical space. They will address ways in which technological convergences and divergent practices make such a performance possible and discuss the role of the document in performance practices.

Abraham Avnisan’s “On Specters of Home” is an intergenre talk that grapples with the relationship between art and politics. Bringing together original and archival materials, the work reflects Avnisan’s trip to Israel-Palestine, the place of his birth, after a ten-year absence. As an interactive installation, “Specters of Home” would bring together architecture, virtual and augmented reality, and contemporary dance to explore colonialism, exile and haunting by asking how the physical absence and political exclusion of Palestinians from the State of Israel haunts contemporary Israeli society and Jewish-American culture. Avnisan will explore questions of accountability and responsibility within colonial and post-colonial contexts.

"The Dead Ends of Dead Men: Fabulated Archive as Genre" by Carlito Espudo situates itself at the intersection of creative and critical theory by actualizing Saidiya Hartman's concept of "critical fabulation." Espudo will discuss the practical usage of this new genre and how he has fabulated his own digital archive for his late grandfather, Charles Beal, a popular jazz musician. The process, obstacles, and benefits of his project, "The Straw Hat Jazz Archive" will be discussed along with contextualizing this practice of creatively engaging the archive by reviewing Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis.

Jeff T. Johnson’s “Janky Materiality” develops a matrix of potential connection and disconnection points between writerly and pedagogical communities. With the purpose of bridging gaps between experimental poetry and digital language art communities, and between cultural criticism, poetics, performance, and music writing, Johnson will discuss the development of this project and examine concerns regarding analog-digital interface and materiality, embodiment, language-oriented experimental poetry and digital language art, experimental electronic music and modular synths, the literary technology of the album format.