May 30, 2011

Text Festival: the last event!

Featuring Geraldine Monk (UK), Adeena Karasick (USA), bill bissett (CAN), Iris Garrelf (UK)
@ The Met Arts Centre
Friday 3rd June 2011 / 7.30pm

The last gig of the 2011 Festival, featuring:

Adeena Karasick is a poet, media-artist and the award-winning author of seven books of poetry and poetic theory. Marked with an urban, Jewish, feminist aesthetic that continually challenges normative modes of meaning production, and engaged with the art of combination and turbulence of thought, her work is a testament to the creative and regenerative power of language and its infinite possibilities for pushing meaning to the limits of its semantic boundaries. She is Professor of Global Literature at St. John'sUniversityin New York.

Geraldine Monk is one of the most exciting and provocative writer-performers on the British scene. Her readings a witty, warm and dynamic drawing on a prolific career which has spawned fourteen major works in the last twenty five years.

bill bissett is a famously anti-conventional Canadian poet with more than 60 books to his (uncapitalised) name immediately identifiable by the incorporation of his artwork and his consistently phonetic (funetik) spelling. As an energetic "man-child mystic," bill bissett is living proof of William Blake's adage "the spirit of sweet delight can never be defiled." His idealistic and ecstatic stances frequently obscure his critical-mindedness, humour and craftmanship.
Iris Garrelf is a composer/performer intrigued by change, fascinated with voices and definitely enamoured by technology. She often uses her voice as raw material, which she transmuted into machine noises, choral works or pulverised “into granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magzine put it. A vital part of her work, be it using voice or other sound material, is improvisation and the use of random elements, the ephemeral fragility and risk implied in giving up control to me moment, a sonic singularity.

May 15, 2011

Preparing for the next Text Festival weekend

A week of preparations for another big Text Festival weekend. On 19th, 20th and 21st May, Station stories is a unique, site specific, live, literature performance event using digital technology and improvised electronic sound. Taking place at Piccadilly Station, moving from platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers read specially commissioned stories that guide the audience on a creative journey.The writers include: David Gaffney, Jenn Ashworth, Nicholas Royle, Peter Wild, Tom Jenks and Tom Fletcher. Sound Artist: Daniel Hopkins. For more information and tickets, go to www.stationstories.com

Guest curators Helen Kaplinsky & Maurice Carlin of Reading for Reading’s Sake bring New York based Rainer Ganahl to the Transport Museum. Ganahl, who represented Austria in the 1999 Venice Biennale, arrives on Wednesday though installation of his exhibition at the Bury Transport Museum starts on Monday. Ganahl has ambitious plans to create various works this week including two films. The show is called Engels…Engels…Engels and is an investigation through videos, assemblage, photos and prints of “The Condition of the Working Class in England” (1844).


As part of the project Ganahl will facilitate Engels seminars on the 18th (6:30-8:30pm), 19th (2-4pm) and 20th (6:30-8:30pm) May at Bury Transport Museum. No prior reading required but to book email kaplinskyhelen@yahoo.co.uk. The artist will also present a talk on Thurs 19th May 6pm at Islington Mill.

May 03, 2011

Text Festival opening weekend

An intensely packed and exciting opening weekend in Bury and Manchester for the Text Festival - various reviews, images, recordings, videos and reports will appear in the next few weeks but here is a selection of images to start it off here. Many of my photos look like there was no-one there, mainly because I was able to take shots before everyone arrived and once they did I was often too busy to think about the camera. (above: gallery view - foreground: I TELL YOU THE TRUTH by Kate Pickering)
Ron Silliman, Tony Lopez, Me, Barney and Christian Bök .
Sarah Sanders' beautiful performance from the ring balcony


Liz Collini's great wall drawing in the Bury Transport Museum.
As an encore following the Ursonate performances, an amazing world first - Christian Bök and Jaap Blonk improvise

Immanence and the Library of Babel

I have not read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel”. I am a very slow reader. I only read with a purpose. It is sufficient...