LUNE 03: DISPLAY

a journal of literary misrule #3 the DISPLAY issue

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DIS PLAY CONTENTS

Edited by Nathan Jones Editorial Board Charlie Gere and Jenn Ashworth

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Mitra Azar Mark America Emma Bolland Megan Bowyer J.R. Carpenter Theodoros Chiotis Paul Eastwood Oliver Gruner Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould Sophie Jung Paula Kolar Aimée Lê Rosa Menkman Roy Claire Potter Eleanor Rees Robert Sheppard Sam Skinner Ross Sutherland & Will Lakeman Scott Thurston Rhys Trimble Nico Vassilakis Lauren Velvick Scott Rettberg & Talan Memmott Back to contents 26/09/2019 15:25

Introduction

Nathan Jones

Displays are appearances in action and actions becoming manifest in the world of things. So writing and publishing are complex layerings of display and its other: withdrawal, obfuscation, containment. Contributors to this issue of Lune collectively map the wide range of potentials and pitfalls between these, speaking between traditions as diverse as concrete poetry, photography, glitch art, artwriting, lyric poetry, auto-fiction, media and cultural theory and performance writing. Such a diverse collection of practices cannot hope to present a conhesive vision of any theme, but it is perhaps appropriate to the etymology of “display” that what this word means is itself “dispersed” by the various submissions splayed across these pages.

My particular interest in language (as) new media practice is expressed in the selection of contributors, many of whom work critically with language in relation to the current media condition. Language, as code, as data, or as an analogy for the communicative function of image-flows, is a crucial battleground in an age of intense media saturation. In particular the question of language and display speaks to what has been described as a ‘post truth’ condition: when even a statement as banally cynical as “I’ll believe it when I see it” has a ring of naivety, fundamental questions must be asked of how and why we are displayedat. Editing the issue, I have also learned (again) that there is an emotional investment for those who choose to display, and I am deeply grateful to all the contributors for entrusting us with their work.

The opening of the journal engages with the inherent politics of acts and items of display: Mitra Azar discusses the radical politicisation of ‘POV’ and first-person perspectives, Olly Gruner describes the particularly British obsession with the bus as a political display-object, from recent times back into the equally absurd moments of British Empire. Paula Kolar reflects on the depth and readable surface of the sea, through the observations of those trying to save migrants off the Greek coast. Sophie Jung lampoons the empty signifiers of political acts of disillusion and their fuelling of, and doubling in, human delusions (the work’s deep engagement with sophistry neatly rhyming with the author’s name).

As Jung’s work mischievously suggests, political displays are engineered in the absurd permutational possibilities of language. Many of the submissions in the next section of the journal engage directly in the acts and objects of display embodied in language: Theodoros Chiotis’ language plays at the fringes of language as legible combinations syntax, vocabulary and marks on a page, its ability to produce sense contingent on the interfaces of these. Sam Skinner makes new materials through the sun that shines between word-meanings with in his own brand of visual philosophy. Scott Rettberg and Talan Memmott use the limerick form to determine new culinary arrangements. The visual and the linguistic is collapsed utterly in the vis-po works of Nico Vassilakis, and the crayon rubbings of Paul Eastwood. Ross Sutherland and Will Lakeman present us with a conundrum of word and image.

Display is an emotional and highly personal act, albeit one that is tied up with fictions and other dressings. Section four of the journal works across the strange realisms of contemporary autofiction: Eleanor Rees’s diaries from the frontline of academia reflect, among other things, on the act of displaying oneself for a living. Elly’s fellow Liverpool-based poet Robert Sheppard reflects on life at the other end of the career spectrum. Mark Amerika makes glitchy usage of a machine learning algorithm to invent a(nother) new alter-ego, perhaps one that can do some of the emotional heavy lifting for him.

The disfluencies and hestitations of Aimée Lê’s poetic fragments contain displays of the high personal stakes in language.

Interfaces of display run between us and language, and these are the subject of the submissions in section three: Rosa Menkman’s alter egos are the interfaces of display, she activates the compression algorithms as actors in her strangely touching dialogue based on resolutions of display.

For Megan Bowyer, the act of futurology is comparible to a malfunctioning TV display. Rhys Trimble lays himself and his words onto an interface of display – a photocopier – and constructs a new kind of folk semiotics on the flat screen. Emma Bolland works through the thematic signification of the typeface itself, drawing one particular typeface into unconventionally emotive and critical consideration. Roy Claire Potter, no less personally, foregrounds the act of writing, editing and displaying text, turning it into an aesthetic encounter.

Returning to language, the critical work done in and through acts of display is the subject of the final section: Scott Thurston, Lauren Velvick present readings of artistic displays, Paddy Gould and Roxy Topia engage with the particular paracultural display of the ultra-fit hetrosexual male body, and J.R. Carpenter, who we normally encounter through her html works, presents a poem-display made of observations about a glass vase.

Not wanting to feel left out, I have also attempted to engage with the notion, act and objecthood of display in my editing of the journal. The PDF form is synonymous with bureaucratic distribution, but is a more malleable display-format than its often given credit for. Embracing the diversity and slipperiness of the content of the journal, I’ve allowed each submission to determine the size of the page it appears on. As well as allowing each page to display in its native ratio, this gesture is intended to highlight the contingency of display: the default display attached to paper-sizes is actually an odd hangover, rather than an inevitable – or useful – form for digital documents. This unconventional move may result in a slightly jumpy viewing experience page-to-page. Some pages will be viewed as vertical scrolls, others as full-screen images, depending on the zoom settings of your particular reader and the size of the text on that page. Hopefully this foregrounding of the interface of display is productive and doesn’t spoil the reading-viewing experience of what is a rich selection of texts and images on this topic.

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MITRA AZAR

[bio]

From Bryce Williams to machine vision: the shrinking between POV and CCTV regimes of visibility and its political implications.

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From Bryce Williams to neural networks for machine vision: the shrinking From Bryce Williams to machine vision: the shrinking between POV and CCTV

between and CCTV of implications. visibility and its political implications. regimesPOV of visibility and regimes its political

Bryce Williams, pseudonym of Vester Lee Flanagan, records himself with his mobile phone while murdering two of Lee his former colleagues, the news Alison Brycecamera Williams, pseudonym of Vester Flanagan, records himself with reporter his mobile Parker the while photojournalist Adam Ward, an on-air interview with a local phoneand camera murdering two of his formerduring colleagues, the news reporter Alison Parker and the photojournalist Ward, during an about on-air 240 interview a local of business woman, on August 26Adam 2015, in Roanoke, mileswith south-west business woman, on August 26 2015, aboutand 240shows miles the south-west Washington.

The video circulates widelyinonRoanoke, the internet, POV of ofBryce Washington. videoportraying circulates widely the internet,the andcouple, shows the POV ofa Bryce mobile phone The camera Bryce on approaching drawing gun, and

mobile phone camera portraying Bryce approaching the couple, drawing a gun, and shooting.

A YouTube user manages to edit the visual material from this tragic event by shooting. A YouTube user manages to edit the visual material from this tragic event by

siding the POV video stream coming from Bryce’s mobile phone with the video feed siding the POV video stream coming from Bryce’s mobile phone with the video feed

coming from the cameraman TV camera. For some reason, this video is not available coming from the cameraman TV camera. For some reason, this video is not available

anymore on YouTube. Others are, but they never manage to produce the synchronicity anymore on YouTube. Others are, but they never manage to produce the synchronicity

of this specific editing between the two video sources, and simply screen the videos one of this specific editing between the two video sources, and simply screen the videos one

after thethe other same time. time. after otherbut butnever never at at the the same

From Bryce’s POV mobile phone camera, Bryce approaches Alison and Adam, waiting until siding behind draw camera, his gun Bryce out pointing at Alison. after waiting zooming in From Bryce’s POVAdam mobiletophone approaches Alison Right and Adam, until behindfigure Adamwith to draw his gun Bryce’s out pointing atholding Alison. Right after zooming in and outsiding of Alison’s his phone, hand the gun finally appears in out image of Alison’s figure with his phone, holding the gun finally aappears in theand POV recorded by his mobile Bryce’s phone hand camera, visually turning conventional the POV POV imagemobile recorded by hiscamera mobile shot phoneinto camera, visually turning a conventional hand-held phone a First Person shooter games image. hand-held POV mobile phone camera shot into a First Person shooter games image.

Players engaging with these games often dress VR headset to enjoy the experience in Players engaging with these games often dress VR headset to enjoy the experience in

FPV (First Person View), navigating a virtual space while holding in front of their eyes FPV (First Person View), navigating a virtual space while holding in front of their eyes

(which means in front of the virtual camera navigating the space) any imaginable (which means in front of the virtual camera navigating the space) any imaginable

military machinery. When the gun appears in Bryce’s POV mobile phone video the military machinery. When the gun appears in Bryce’s POV mobile phone video the

video become for the viewers a FPV video, producing (willing or not) a form of aesthetic video become for the viewers a FPV video, producing (willing or not) a form of aesthetic

embodiment holdingthe thegun. gun. embodimenttowards towardsthe the hand hand holding

Bryce, nevertheless, doesn’t shoot immediately. He waits. Why? What is Bryce waiting Bryce Williams’ live killing of Alison Parker and Adam Ward seen from for?

Bryce steps back,doesn’t slowly,shoot including the cameraman AdamWhat into isthe POVwaiting stream of Bryce, nevertheless, immediately.

He waits. Why? Bryce Bryce’s mobile camera and Adam’s TV camera.

for? Bryce steps back, including the cameraman Adam theand POVkeep stream of images produced by hisslowly, phone.

He seemingly pulls his guninto back recording images produced by his phone.and He recording seemingly pulls his gun backfrom and keep recording Adam holding his TV camera the surrounding the terrace of the LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE__MITRA AZAR 5 15:25 Bridgewater Plaza towards the Harbor Town Golf. Bryce’s POV mobile phone26/09/2019 camera

**CONTENT WARNING** You can play this video using a PDF viewer. It is footage of a shooting.

Bryce Williams’ live killing of Alison Parker and Adam Ward seen from Bryce’s mobile camera and Adam’s TV camera.

embodiment towards the hand holding the gun.

Bryce, doesn’t waits. Why? is Bryce Adamnevertheless, holding his TV camerashoot and immediately. recording the He surrounding fromWhat the terrace of waiting the for?

Bryce steps back, slowly, the cameraman into the POVcamera stream of Bridgewater Plaza towards the including Harbor Town Golf. Bryce’s Adam POV mobile phone images by his phone. seemingly hisfrom gun the back and keeptowards recording followsproduced Adam’s movement as heHe pans his TV pulls camera landscape Alisonholding and thehis other POV ofthe Bryce’s mobile phone and the Adam TVwoman. cameraWhen and the recording surrounding from camera the terrace of the TV image produced

by Adam – only then,Golf.

BryceBryce’s draws his gunmobile again and shoot 8 Bridgewater Plaza towards thealign Harbor Town POV phone camera times towards and towards both.

Bryce seems, thus, to wait fortowards the follows Adam’sAlison movement as heAdam, pans killing his TV camera from the landscape overlapping his POV mobile phone with mobile the TVphone cameracamera video –and a the Alison and theofother woman.

When thecamera POV ofvideo Bryce’s which turns his POV embodied eye into a mass media disembodied TVsuper-imposition image produced

by Adam align – only then, Bryce draws his gun again and shoot 8 eye – before allowing himself to shoot. Bryce seems to wanting his killing to be live and

times towards Alison and towards Adam, killing both. Bryce seems, thus, to wait for the mass mediatized, that is why when he is ready to shoot with his gun in one hand and

overlapping of his POV mobile phone camera video with the TV camera video – a his phone in the other, he doesn’t shoot. He waits for Adam, the cameraman, to mimic

super-imposition which turns his POV embodied eye into a mass media disembodied his movements, from behind, re-embodying him while disembodying himself because

eye – before allowing himself to shoot. Bryce seems to wanting his killing to be live and embodying a cameraman means embodying the disembodiment of the cameraman into

mass mediatized, that is why when he is ready to shoot with his gun in one hand and the disembodied gaze of a TV camera. A gaze which finds its fully machinic form in

hisCCTV phone in the other, doesn’t waits for cameraman, to mimic cameras during he modern timeshoot. and inHe systems for Adam, machinethe vision in post-modern histime, movements, behind, whilewithout disembodying himself because opening upfrom to regimes of re-embodying visibility definedhim by gazes a body, where “objects embodying a cameraman means the disembodiment cameraman perceive me” (Klee, 1920).

Bryceembodying seems to desire the untangling of of the his POV camera into the disembodied gazeeven of a more, TV camera.

A gaze which finds its fully machinic from himself, and the becoming disembodied-CCTV-TV-like of form his in embodied POVduring image.modern Bryce’stime urgeand for in recording with vision his mobile phone CCTV cameras systemshis forkilling machine in post-modern leaves spaceup for to anregimes equal if not strongerdefined drive: the of transforming his POV time, opening of visibility by opportunity gazes without a body, where “objects video into a TV/ CCTV-like enough, passage seems happen perceive me” (Klee, 1920). video.

Bryce Interestingly seems to desire thethe untangling of his to POV camera through the generation of an intermediate FPV video,disembodied-CCTV-TV-like and indeed gives to the visuals from himself, and even more, the becoming of his documenting Bryce’s tragic actionurge the value of synthetizing one of the his most common embodied POV image.

Bryce’s for recording his killing with mobile phone form of circulation of the eye between offline space and online platform: the leaves space for an equal if not stronger drive: the opportunity of transforming his POV transformation of a POV regime of visibility into a CCTV like regime of visibility passing

video into a TV/ CCTV-like video. Interestingly enough, the passage seems to happen through a FPV regime of visibility.

through the generation of an intermediate FPV video, and indeed gives to the visuals documenting Bryce’s tragic action the value of synthetizingth one of the most common In the Youtube video uploaded by Eugenio Culurciello the 28 April 2015 (four months

form of circulation of the eye between offline space and online platform: the before Bryce’s tragic action), a Tera Deep Image Parser – something like a general

transformation of a POV regime of visibility into a CCTV like regime of visibility passing classifier based on deep neural networks – is uploaded on a mobile phone and through

through a FPV regime of visibility. its camera (and Eugenio’s hand holding it) ‘scan’ the video-images of what allegedly In the Youtube video uploaded by Eugenio Culurciello the 28th April 2015 (four months before Bryce’s tragic action), a Tera Deep Image Parser – something like a general LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE__.MITRA AZAR 7

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through a FPV regime of visibility. like Eugenio’s classifying elements composing them.

The(four objects In looks the Youtube video apartment, uploaded by Eugeniothe Culurciello the 28th April 2015 months part ofBryce’s the POVtragic video action), stream produced by the Image phone are listed –onsomething the top left part before a Tera Deep Parser like of a the general phone’sbased screen,ontogether with a networks percentage highlighting for thisand or that classifier deep neural – is uploadedthe on probability a mobile phone through be this or that object physically present in the space navigated by the itsobject’s cameraname (andtoEugenio’s hand holding it) ‘scan’ the video-images of what allegedly POV camera – of which we see simultaneously the video, giving us the possibility of

looks like Eugenio’s apartment, classifying the elements composing them. The objects comparing the Parser guessed results with the POV video stream.

part of the POV video stream produced by the phone are listed on the top left part of the phone’s screen, together with a percentage highlighting the probability for this or that object’s name to be this or that object physically present in the space navigated by the POV camera – of which we see simultaneously the video, giving us the possibility of comparing the Parser guessed results with the POV video stream.

Eugenio’s Culurciello, Tera Deep Vision, Youtube 2015.

Here, the CCTV-like language-driven disembodied gaze of the Tera Deep Image Parser overlaps with the embodied rendering of the space produced by the POV mobile phone camera held by Eugenio’s hand while exploring his apartment. A Tera Deep Parser works on the base of a data set of images that have been classified by humans who are paid for literally writing on the images the linguistic equivalent of the objects visible in them. By doing so, the neural network can be trained on a set of images to recognize objects in a completely new set of images. Eugenio tells us in the caption of his video that his neural network is trained on 10 million images and around 1000 categories.

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that his neural network is trained on 10 million images and around 1000 categories.

TheCCTV-like CCTV-likeTera Tera Deep Deep Image Image Parson applied over Eugenio’s phone The Parsontechnology technology applied over Eugenio’s phone operatessymmetrically symmetrically to to Bryce’s Bryce’s POV superimposing Adam’s CCTV-like operates POVmobile mobilephone phone superimposing Adam’s CCTV-like TV camera. If the Tera Deep Image Parser tries to embody into the POV mobile phone

TV camera. If the Tera Deep Image Parser tries to embody into the POV mobile phone camera video stream, Bryce’s POV stream tries to disembody into the CCTV-like TV

camera video stream, Bryce’s POV stream tries to disembody into the CCTV-like TV camera image produced by Adam. Yet, both phenomena produce the overlapping of a

camera image produced by Adam. Yet, both phenomena produce the overlapping of a CCTV-like and a POV-like regime of visibility.

CCTV-like and a POV-like regime of visibility.

The collapse of the distance between CCTV and POV regime of visibility is a common The collapse of the distance between CCTV and POV regime of visibility is a common

trend in incontemporary culture, and andit itseems seemsthethe result of mainly cause: trend contemporary visual visual culture, result of mainly one one cause: the the shrinking ofofthe bodyand andinterface, interface, and technologies shrinking thedistance distance between between body and thethe factfact thatthat technologies are are increasingly body––as asininthe thecase case wearable technologies for bioincreasinglycloser closertotothe the human human body of of wearable technologies for biotracking– –if ifnot notalready already within within itit –– as implants technologies for medical tracking asininthe thecase caseof of implants technologies for medical purposes.Bryce’s Bryce’skilling killing live live on on TV network livelive on POV standstand as as purposes.

TV and andEugenio’s Eugenio’sneural neural network on POV examplesofofthis thisshrinking, shrinking, showing showing how trend is and howhow it is itactually examples howpervasive pervasivethis this trend is and is actually produced (consciously or not) in the most disparate contexts both by people and

produced (consciously or not) in the most disparate contexts both by people and institutions / corporations. The GIGA Selfie, for example, is a technological system

institutions / corporations. The GIGA Selfie, for example, is a technological system patented patented in Australia which allows tourists to take images of themselves remotely by

in Australia which allows tourists to take images of themselves remotely by controlling with controlling with their phones a CCTV-like camera that is able to zoom from a CCTV

their phones a CCTV-like that to zoom a CCTV frame to a POV frame to a POV selfie-likecamera close-up of is theable users' faces.from In this case, the shrinking of theselfieCCTV andIn POV with the collection of data from users’ likedistance close-upbetween of the users' faces. thisproceeds case, the shrinking of the distance between CCTV and phones and emphasizes the colonial nature of the POV-CCTV circuit over the subjects POV proceeds with the collection of data from users’ phones and emphasizes the colonial and the space around them. A Tera Deep Image Parser taking over a POV mobile

nature of the POV-CCTV circuit over the subjects and the space around them. A Tera Deep phone camera in real time as it happens in the case of Eugenio’s Tera Deep Vision

Image Parser taking over a POV mobile phone camera in real time as it happens in the case experiment, shows the apex of this colonial process and envision machine able to track in real time the human field of vision and to produce forms of tracking oriented towards implementing forms of datafication able to extracts value from the subject.

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Nevertheless, the shrinking of the distance between CCTV and POV regimes of visibility can be tactically maneuver by activists with interesting political result: the collective Mosireen1 and Kazeboon2 produces images of clashes between people and military during the Tahrir revolution using mainly POV mobile phone cameras, uploading them online reaching out to a global audience and establishing connection with activists worldwide, while at the same organizing public screenings all over Cairo, sometime in the same places where the images were recorded. The so called Tahrir cinemaAustralia, functions GIGA Selfie technology, 2015. as a pop-up mobile cinema infrastructure which squats public electricity from lamppost and provides a decentralized Nevertheless, the shrinking of the distance between CCTV and POV regimes of

network of activists with projection screens and sound systems, which could be requested by visibility can be tactically maneuver by activists with interesting political result: the

filling a form online13. By doing so,2 the Tahrir cinema turns POV images of police and collective Mosireen and Kazeboon produces images of clashes between people and

military TV-cinema-like formatmainly accessible public gatherings throughout militaryviolence during into the aTahrir revolution using POVat mobile phone cameras, uploading them online reaching out to a global audience and establishing connection

1

http://mosireen.org/

2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazeboon.

3

with activists worldwide, while at the same organizing public screenings all over Cairo,

sometime in the same places where the images were recorded. The so called Tahrir http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/4778/TahrirCinema cinema functions as a pop-up mobile cinema infrastructure which squats public electricity from lamppost and provides a decentralized network of activists with projection screens and sound systems, which could be requested by filling a form online3. By doing so, the Tahrir cinema turns POV images of police and military violence into a TV-cinema-like format accessible at public gatherings throughout Cairo.

This circuit is similar to the one occurred to Bryce Williams, though with opposite political results. If with Bryce we can visually perceive Bryce’s way of desiring over-ride

by CCTV-TV-like technologies subconsciously shaping the aesthetic format of that tragic event, Tahrir cinema activists perceive upfront the political potentials of a CCTVTV-like regime of visibility and harness it in a very peculiar way.

1

http://mosireen.org/

2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazeboon.

3

http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/events/4778/TahrirCinema

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Here,This the Tahrir builds virtuous circuit between ‘upload’ and though ‘download’: Cairo. circuitcinema is similar to athe one occurred to Bryce Williams, withafter opposite uploading theIf images online, activists use social Bryce’s networks offline by political results. with Bryce we can visually perceive waytoof organize desiring over-ride screenings, in a way downloading the images back into the public spaces they were

CCTV-TV-like technologies subconsciously shaping the aesthetic format of that tragic event, taken from, in the process turning their aesthetic status from a POV like form into a TV-

Tahrir cinema activists perceive upfront the political potentials of a CCTV-TV-like regime of cinema-like form.

visibility and harness it in a very peculiar way. Here, the Tahrir cinema builds a virtuous circuit between ‘upload’ and ‘download’: after uploading the images online, activists use social networks to organize offline screenings, in a way downloading the images back into the public spaces they were taken from, in the process turning their aesthetic status from a POV like form into a TV-cinema-like form.

Tahrir Cinema event, Tahrir square, 2011.

At the same time, a disembodied regime of visibility can become a form of resistance, as in the case of the 2015 first hologram protest held in Madrid, Spain4. Here, instead of physically taking to the streets, activists designed a new form of protest by manufacturing a hologram version of themselves to oppose the law banning demonstrations outside the government buildings, thus becoming a disembodied crowd in order to exercise its continued right2011. to protest.

Tahrir Cinema event, Tahrir square,

At the same time, a disembodied regime of visibility can become a form of resistance, as in the case of the 2015 first hologram protest held in Madrid, Spain4. Here, instead of physically taking to the streets, activists designed a new form of protest by manufacturing a hologram 4 version ofJethro. themselves to oppose the lawchallenge banningnew demonstrations outside the 2015. government Mullen, “Virtual protest: Demonstrators law with holograms”.

Cnn.com,

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Hologram protest, Madrid, 2015.

Hologram protest, Madrid, 2015.

The POV embodied imaginary of the Tahrir cinema leave space to an opposite (disembodied) strategy with similar results in terms of enhancing the political agency of

The POV embodied imaginary of the Tahrir cinema leave space to an opposite (disembodied) the subjects engaging with the public space. In this sense, it is important to notice that

strategy similar results feature in terms of enhancing the political agency the subjects one of with the most interesting of the regimes of visibility generated by of processes engaging with the and public space. In this issense, is important notice that one of that the most of embodiment disembodiment that it they appear astodynamic structures constantlyfeature overlap, any straight forward political reading. interesting ofresisting the regimes of visibility generated by processes of embodiment and

disembodiment is that they appear as dynamic structures that constantly overlap, resisting The process of shrinking between CCTV and POV regime of visibility, as much as

any straight forward political reading.

between disembodied and embodied image, have indeed interesting political

The process of inshrinking andagency, POV regime of themselves visibility, as consequences terms of between human andCCTV machinic and prove as much one as between disembodied and embodied image, of have indeed interesting political of the most interesting political-aesthetic battlefields our time. consequences in terms of human and machinic agency, and prove themselves as one of the most interesting political-aesthetic battlefields of our time.

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OLLY GRUNER

[bio]

Battle of the Battle Busses: Rule Britania on Display This essay recounts one of history’s stranger examples of patriotic display drawing parallels with recent political displays. Throughout 1916 and 1917, British serviceman Captain A.C. Bromhead undertook a propaganda tour of Russia. Travelling aboard a mobile cinema (or ‘cine-motor’), Bromhead planned to show films across the country to rally Russians to the British cause in the First World War. But, with Russia on the brink of revolution, events would quickly unravel. From audiences with the tsar to chance meetings with Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, Bromhead’s exploits were extensive, unusual and, at times, hair-raising.

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Battle of the Battle Buses: Rule Britannia on Display

Bringing political hype into the British heartlands, the slogan-strewn ‘battle bus’ rolls on, powered by the bluster of onboard activists, ideologues, windbags and braggarts. Nigel Farage became the focus of another million column inches thanks to his latest motorized nonsense. The Brexit Party bus announced that Farage and co were ‘changing politics for good’. The accompanying logo – a horizontal arrow oddly reminiscent of the icon used to promote Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid in 2016 – appeared to say the opposite: we’ll just keep wandering in the same direction. But Farage has mastered the art, craft and philosophy of a successful battle bus, which has always been about more than just a few catchy phrases. It’s about a performance of braggadocio, about riding out into the provinces, bacon sandwich in hand, crying ‘I’m like you: I’m tough, I’m savvy, I don’t care what other people say – I am the best of Britain.’ Of course, the battle bus par excellence of the past few years has been Boris Johnson’s bare-faced-lie-mobile: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week.

Let’s fund our NHS instead.’ Like Farage, Boris has mastered his bus guff, in his case a Bertie Wooster pastiche couched in mock Churchillian rhetoric. The battle busers do love war. They love Agincourt, Trafalgar, WWI, WWII. They really love the Blitz, and like to imagine themselves as stoic national guardians ducking the machine guns of EU bureaucracy, the doodlebugs of cosmopolitanism, the Schnitzel-scented bursts of mustard gas and so forth, restoring Albion as master of the seven seas.

With all that in mind, now seems an apt occasion to reflect on a serious candidate for greatest battle buser of all time. If Boris et al want to do the Rule Britannia stuff properly, they should study a man by the name of Alfred Claude Bromhead. Exactly one hundred years prior to Boris’s Brexit bus launch, Bromhead embarked on one of history’s most intense, hair-raising and bizarre propaganda junkets. His version of the battle bus was a ‘cine-motor’

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– a lorry with a projector attached – and, throughout 1916 and 1917, he travelled Russia broadcasting British propaganda films to soldiers and civilians. To fully appreciate Bromhead’s efforts we must put them in historical context. He was there to stir up pro-British sentiment, to boost troop morale and to ensure Russian loyalty in the war against the Central Powers. But, given the seismic events then playing out, ‘God Save the King’ may not have been at the top of everyone’s priority list.

At the time Russia was engulfed in chaos, as Catherine Merridale explains in her book Lenin on a Train, a fascinating account of V.I. Lenin’s return to Russia in preparation for the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917. The ravages of World War I had piled further misery on a nation already falling apart at the seams. ‘Nothing was working as it should’, writes Merridale, ‘from transport to the army General Staff and from the Russian police to the delivery of coal supplies.’ Furthermore, the ‘political machinery had completely stalled, sabotaged by the tsar, his empress and what some saw as a complex German plot to undermine Russia itself.’ The deeply unpopular tsar, Nicholas II, took personal command of the army in August 1915 and, in spending most of his time at the front, was neglecting domestic matters.1 Economic hard times, brutal winters and a shortage of bread had sparked mass public outrage and a wave of strikes was bringing Russian industry to its knees.

Bromhead set off on his first trip to Russia in January 1916, and concluded his second and final tour of the country in September 1917. The intervening twenty months would include audiences with the tsar, film screenings that literally took place under mortar fire, a chance meeting with Lenin and assorted other intrigues. Reports and documents of the period – as well as Bromhead’s own diaries – present him as quite the showman. He organised a series of open-air film shows for military troops, which, by his own account, were ‘close to

1 Catherine Merridale, Lenin on the Train (London: Penguin, 2017), pp. 36, 37.

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the front line trenches.’ Enemy soldiers could ‘have enjoyed the pictures with a pair of fieldglasses.’2 Or, as he told The Times (with characteristic bombast):

I shall never forget the sight on those warm summer nights, with the men marching in companies, singing as they arrived, with the boom or roar of guns, large and small, as an accompaniment, and often the front line in sight with the wavering searchlights of trench projectors, starlights, and rockets illuminating the sky at intervals.3 Bromhead screened his propaganda films slap-bang in the middle of battle. Patriotic display under the apocalyptic burst of foreign machine guns – it’s the kind of thing that fuels the lushest fantasies of today’s battle busers. ‘It was amusing’, Bromhead informed British government chiefs, ‘during the evening bombardments, to hear the men derisively cheering each shell that failed to explode.’4 Live ammunition provided a soundtrack to silent films like Britain Prepared (1915) and Battle of the Somme (1916); the spectacle of war played out in eerie proximity to the real thing. Bromhead presented himself as an English gentleman cut from the boy’s-own-adventure cloth. His diaries of the Russian campaign are an actionpacked combination of meetings with aristocratic elites, battlefield exploits, drinking, socialising and propagandising. Consider his entry from 20 May 2016. ‘Went to see front lines and artillery’, he notes, ‘artillery officers kissed me …. Watched Russian shrapnel … burst on Austrian lines. I also fired several rounds with a rifle at enemy.’ Then he ‘returned

2 “Moving Pictures at the Front: Captain A.C. Bromhead’s Experiences”, The Times:

Russian Section, 30 December 1916, p. 3.

3 “Moving Pictures at the Front”, p. 3.

4 Report to the British Government Committee, 25 September 1916. Contained in the A.C. Bromhead Papers at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies Library, University College London, BRO/ 2/1.

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for show’ accompanied by a General. ‘Lengthy cheers and God Save the King after show which was cut short because so cold – passed wounded convoy on road.’5 Bromhead – who had headed up the British arm of cinema company Gaumont prior to the war – was no stranger to the ins-and-outs of showmanship. He had undertaken global tours on behalf of Gaumont, reliving strange, exciting tales of film screenings in countries as far flung as China, Japan and India.6 Like many of his film business contemporaries, he remembered the old days of movie screenings at fairgrounds and circuses, the tough dealings with ‘sunburnt and weather beaten’ entertainment entrepreneurs and the importance of a little pizazz when exhibiting one’s pictures.7 In many ways, he took some of this exhibitionist flair out to Russia. Screenings here were almost always accompanied by marching bands, flag waving and renditions of the national anthem. Lavish receptions apparently greeted him wherever he went. ‘I cannot describe in detail all these various suppers and functions which invariably took place’, he reported. ‘But I wish to emphasise that every division which I visited had been expecting me … and each one had apparently determined to out-vie the other in extending hospitality.’8 These were very much Bromhead’s salad days, a period when he appeared to be enjoying a modicum of notoriety (perhaps even popularity) in some Russian circles. Things begin to change on his second tour. Bromhead had returned to the UK in December 2016 and had an audience with King George V. He even received a signed letter from the King, which he was permitted to display to his Russian audiences on his return. Changed circumstances,

5 A.C. Bromhead, Russian Diaries, 1916-1917 (ed. J. Bromhead), 20 May 1916. Bromhead

Papers, BRO/1.

6 ‘The Cinematograph Industry Round the World’, The Bioscope, 31 July 1913, pp. 334337.

7 A.C. Bromhead, Proceedings of the British Kinematograph Society, no. 21 (11 December 1933), p. 5.

8 A.C. Bromhead, ‘Report to the British Government Committee: RE Films “Britain Prepared”’, 26 June 1916, pp. 3-4. Bromhead Papers, BRO/2/1.

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however, would ensure that this letter would not see the light of day in Russia. Nicholas II had abdicated in March 1917 and messages of support from the tsar’s relatives were ultimately considered ‘inexpedient’.9 Indeed, a strange twist of fate would see Bromhead arrive back into Petrograd on the same train that conveyed Lenin and his entourage back into their country after years of exile. There is a comedic dryness to Bromhead’s account of the meeting, as if he was aware that proselytising the British cause under these changed circumstances might not be too far away from enquiring of the Russian proletariat whether they might consider eating cake. ‘Train all day – 30 socialists on board’ he wrote on 14 April 1917. ‘Russians allowed through Germany in sealed car by special permit of the German government.’10 He went on to describe his travelling companions as ‘very noisy and assertive – also the ugliest lot of people I ever saw.’

Lenin’s return from exile had been facilitated by the Germans, who hoped his revolutionary activities might help to destabilise Russia and lead to its retreat from the war.

Bromhead was curt in his dismissal of Lenin himself: ‘His speeches almost always contained references to British and French Capitaliski Bourgeoisie.’ But at the same time, he acknowledged Lenin’s enormous popularity and the impact he was having on the Russian workers. When the train arrived in what was then called Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), a ‘big crowd – three bands and guards of honour met Lenin and party.’11 Bromhead and his entourage, on the other hand, had to make do with a less ostentatious welcome: ‘Old Havery from embassy met us and took us off to France Hotel.’12 Bromhead relaunched his cinemotor upon a nation in the throes of widespread domestic conflict, upheaval and revolution.

9 Letter to Lord Stamfordham, 6 June 1917. Bromhead Papers, BRO/2/1.

10 Bromhead, Russian Diaries, 14 April 1917.

11 Bromhead, Russian Diaries, 16 April 1917.

12 Bromhead, Russian Diaries, 16 April 1917.

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Now we really begin to see Bromhead’s campaign being, as the historian M.L. Sanders put it, ‘overtaken by events.’13 Diary entries paint an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. ‘Great excitement in streets’, recorded Bromhead during a trip to Moscow in May 1917.

‘Meetings and speeches everywhere… A man shot by soldiers later.’ The same day, Bromhead encounters a ‘gloomy’ General Poole (presumably the self-same General Frederick Poole who would lead British troops in a failed intervention against Bolshevik forces the following year). ‘Good-bye – I hope they won’t scupper you’ Poole says to Bromhead as the men take their leave.14 A general sense of scuppering was, alas, increasingly on the cards in Russia. In his memoirs, a British diplomat stationed there, Robert Bruce Lockhart, recalled how British propaganda in Russia at this time was ‘rapidly becoming impossible.’ It was, as Lockhart observed, a case of ‘trying to persuade the Russian to continue fighting when he had just overthrown a regime because it refused to give him peace.’15 Lockhart actually recalls meeting Bromhead, who he described as ‘a splendid fellow, who realised the futility of showing war pictures to men whose sole thought was peace. Still, he had his duty to do.’16 And, as chaos piled upon chaos, trying to make the best of an increasingly bad situation was Bromhead’s lot. In one dispatch, he described his situation as ‘like living on a volcano.’17 We hear of riots and machine gun fire on the streets of Petrograd, soldiers inflicting injuries on themselves in order to escape the war, food scarcity and supply shortages. Making efforts to move with the times, Bromhead did send some curious film requests back to the UK, presumably in the hope they would chime with the Russian people.

13 M.L. Sanders, ‘British Film Propaganda in Russia, 1914-1916’, Historical Journal of

Film, Radio and Television, 3:2 (1983), p. 124.

14 Bromhead, Russian Diaries, 4 May 1917.

15 Robert Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 186.

16 Lockhart, Memoirs, p. 188.

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He approached the British government about the possibility of showing films about ‘Strikes – Trade Unions – and their conduct (when orderly and decent)’. Bromhead was suggesting that a representation of British strikes, as long as they concluded ‘with settlements, satisfactory to all fair minded people concerned’, might pave the way for more Russian support. But these efforts were destined for failure; there does not seem to be any evidence that strike films – if such films existed – were sent. ‘Much talk about impending trouble’ Bromhead wrote in Petrograd on 14 September 1917.18 He was not able to stay long enough to witness the Bolshevik revolution sweep through the Russian polity, but he had certainly found himself at the epicentre of much political and social ferment.

On the surface, Bromhead’s Russia campaign seems a failure. As one historian of Russian cinema put it, the films had ‘little influence over the broad masses of Russian people, and none at all over the organized workers.’19 But, at the same time, the positive reception he received from high up government figures and the British press helped to ensure these displays of British propaganda were not without their impact. In fact, some historians have noted the use of cine-motors to have been innovative and even influential upon future political propaganda.20 In Britain, the Conservative Party’s use of ‘cinema vans’ in the 1925 election might be seen as a descendent of Bromhead’s efforts (and a forerunner of our modern battle bus). Furthermore, as Sanders puts it, Bromhead’s ‘activities could not have gone unobserved by the Bolsheviks, who were to mount their own mobile propaganda campaign with their agitprop trains in July 1918 when they too found themselves in the grip of war’.21 There’s an irony to seeing your own methods appropriated by the very people with

18 Bromhead, Russian Diaries, September 14, 1917.

19 Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: George Allen and

Unwin Ltd., 1960), p. 102.

20 Nicholas Reeves, Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 232-234; Sanders, “Film Propaganda”, pp. 127-128.

21 Sanders, “British Film Propaganda”, p. 127.

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who you are in conflict, but I don’t think Bromhead would have been bitter. For all his faults, and unlike so many of today’s headbangers, there was a certain honour to Bromhead’s efforts, a desire to find common ground and foster international dialogue. In the press and in high-ranking political circles, the Russian campaign garnered him enormous praise. In sum – and as our contemporary battle busers know all too well – political activities are often not judged on their actual outcomes, but on their presentation. A good show is a success unto itself.

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PAULA KOLAR

[bio]

An Articulation.

Performance script. Performed at The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford in June 2019.

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SOPHIE JUNG

[bio]

Disillusion and Delusion from Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water

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— Disillusion and Delusion —

No Wishes for Today, except To play it out, and not become the fool.

-stolen

Disillusion and Delusion I see a bad moon a-rising I see trouble on the way I see earthquakes and lightnin’ I see bad times today I hear hurricanes a-blowing I know the end is coming soon I fear rivers overflowing I hear the voice of rage and ruin I hope you got your things together I hope you are quite prepared to die Looks like we’re in for nasty weather One eye is taken for an eye Oh don’t go’round tonight It’s bound to take your life There’s a bad mood on the rise There’s a bad mood on the rise

It is high up and it’s looking down wondering about guilt assignage, assistance and assassination.

Goddess of bossy underlings Her astronomical body quivers The earth’s natural, with emphasis on natural, un na tu ral satellite is not unphased.

Originally created with the intention to come up with a good, marketable character it was launched and left.

Launched and right, yes, briefly, but the reflective properties of the stellar mass meant it soon came to realize its misalignment and moved further into the other direction. Some say far far over, some say love, I can barely see you over cast iron visors under. Cast say it’s still pretty central up there during most of their nightly grazings.

While they stand there, in their acci Dental? No, OPEC is not a denture adhesive in their accidental crop circle, singing in chorus, tenor and counter tenor, against one another and up into the firm. ament this, the male population can stick together, too. We communally let our engines r.o.a.r. Car tell her. Tell her it’s not solidarity exactly, it’s called something esle, I forgot, but we have managed in the past to organize ourselves into bachelor parties and lads abroad.

They sing the evening coral, it leaves their mouthes bleached and ready to die, plant-based matter has excused itself politely: Please explain the difference between disillusion and delusion.

My girlfriend claimed she has been disillusioned for quite some time about our love...Thank you.

She left the relationship because of being disillusioned...

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— Disillusion and Delusion —

Ah. Let me explain conditioning.

Conditioning is when you’re faced with the tangled, the unmanageable, the unruly and you decide that instead of engaging you’d rather run your wrong through unobstacled items.

That is where you’d grasp the conditioner (now reach for the bottle) we are invested in changing behavior by rewarding or punishing a subjected to ab.so.lute con.trol each time an action is performed until the subject associates the action with pleasure or di Stress enough just how highlight enough just how highlight of the season all behavior changes with the waning the winning moon.

The condition the felinated condition. The condition is blue.

The condition is grasped only on fields at full mo On yields the condition full on heart on hard on and what is your next step?

Where will you go with it.

On fields on battle bottle battle Fields gar Field trips over and lands on their uncertainty. Squashed. That is a lucky moment in every man’s life. Liberated.

Disillusion and Delusion.

Discard the used the ab ab used used items items is another type of conditioning that works well in relation to bridges.

The pillar of so Cite the many I just can’t evens and wrap them back up into their original wrapp er up she clearly feels most comfortable inside.

She obviously needs that skin to skin thing.

One think we can all do to end patri Arch ene me let me think, is: everything.

I’ve now thought of everything and come up with 666 things we can all do to end the unnatural loosness of limbs we’ve been experiencing lately.

Arch and arch more. A bit more to make space for the tall ones amongst us.

Triumph diverted.

You know me (say one two the other) In that respect the way I want to be referred two in dividual not to be split any more than was necessary. Just swallowed whole. One whole fr actual object.

I object to all this. All of it. Let me express it with a {shrug:}

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— Disillusion and Delusion —

This is WILD It’s wild It’s not it really isn’t It’s not really is it?

Man you are wild!

Honestly, I’m not (and let me put your options to you:) I’m not wearing a vizard or veering a wizard out of the country the witch has made hers.

Let me explain alie Nation is a thing that has been claimed by someone long ago.

You, and me, Maddy and Dummy, we all now base our core identity on someone shotgunning first.

Please ask if you have any questions question questions.

And now Mr. Alienation is the single direct descendent of the one who deliniated the bourne.

And for us to stay within the compass ionately refuses but con Fines everyone who refuses to be sucked or suckled in by them. Cons Piracy? Yes a bit like piracy.

Elevator to a position from which you see her knick hers by saying “oh, that’s an interesting concept” and then putting your name under it in a way that forever hinders the lift to function again.

I am am I stuck in a lift all slings from her neck it’s time you discontinue to Elevate her to that position is the classic ally Shitbag move along now don’t be diffi Cult classic where all the heroines are killed off into gorge Ous corpses. Our corpses Are seething. FYI

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THEODOROS CHIOTIS

[bio]

Transitory Epidermis For A.E.

A sequence of three poems on the borders of legibility and illegibility The “Transitory Epidermis� sequence utilises medical data, news quotes and social media quotes, self-tracking data, amongst other things, gathered in the run up to the birth of my daughter and remixes it into a meditation on the relationship between body and technology, biology and data flows. This sequence is part of an ongoing project called Mutualised Archives.

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ephemeral skin

a reservoir of blood, the deafening stretching of the me m br ane:

i.

a lunarium scraping the skin clean a complex number un fold ing in the d ark you black as night on a bed of reeds

u:Ę?e pores of the massive skin now peel ing off to be come ears and mouth gauging the currents.

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ii.

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be

to

come ears and mouth gauging the currents.

ii.

Today she put an egg in her mouth. Tomorrow there will be feathers and porcelain chips.

Reach out from the dark as often as you can; reach out, at least, for as long as the geometries of these hands might still work.

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SAM SKINNER

[bio]

from Obs

In a world awash with instruments and data, a local reading group devise to build an observatory as an act of obfuscation against their own observation.

Obs collides measurement and experimentation, with language and the senses, both human and non, through interplay between image and text to conjure a playful satire of our contemporary technologically meditated condition.

Presented in Lune are a selection of spreads from the publica-tion. Obs was published by Broken Dimanche Press in September 2019.

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SCOTT RETTBERG & TALAN MEMMOTT

[bio] [bio]

The Limerick Diet The Limerick Diet was performed at the Brocade & Lime on July 15th, 2019. The following menus were generated and prepared by the chefs. In addition, each guest interactively generated a cocktail using a card game. An amuse bouche, Green Potatoes Four Ways, was also served.

The Limerick Diet is a digital performance piece that mirrors the popular competitive cooking show format. The piece is driven by a slot-style poetry engine with an adaptive grammar to generate culinary recombinations. The vocabulary of the engine for the Brocade & Lime version of this work was based on locally sourced sustainable ingredients of Ireland, in order to generate meals that while aleatory and inventive were nevertheless more Irish than the poetry of William Butler Yeats, the prose of James Joyce, or the drama of Samuel Beckett by virtue of the fact that they were limericks that sprang from the peaty sod of the Irish soil and taste of the salts of the wild Irish sea. The meats served were more Celtic and more tender than the meat of any ancient body found leathering in a bog..

Further documentation of the Limerick Diet, including full streams of the six-hour event, can be found at: https://www.facebook.com/limerickdiet/

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NICO VASSILAKIS

[bio]

Letter Composition Textless & from Then There Was You from SeeingSeeing There’s a word for just about everything, but there ain’t a word for this.

How letters release from words and what they find themselves doing before and after forming into words. Letters are free to arrange themselves any way they want. For a moment they’re autonomous and independent with no restrictions, so they navigate or are drawn toward one another in order to form new and unrealized results.

My vispo tends to mimic this reflex, it strives to capture and promote this moment.

Hello letters! - you will leave your words, will be unattached, able to drift into all new visible features of experience.

A sequence of energy constants: a) The discharge of a word is finally equal to the energy found in its letters b) Now make those same letters askew, reposition them on a page, have the letters touch other letters in unaccustomed ways - the energy is the same c) Then cut the letters in half and use their visual elements as the available material to construct or compose the new visBack poem - the energy remains

to contents

Letters seek liberty from word supremacy. Will detach from word and roam the page. Will find new designs to thwart their word captor. Will unhinge entirely and emerge alongside natural formations.

Only then.

Will the letters offer to return, to reconvene. Will reassemble. Will re enter the word template. Will be poured into WORD meaning, the slots of which letters attend.

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Hobart, the staring baby, whispers 'infinity' over and over again An unreadable text creates a landscape you're invited to engage Things have changed since this this But my horses are jumping running out of paper now Our optical landmarks continue to form and disintegrate. It's easy to understand how someone might be simultaneously lost and found Each poet different from the next - an ideagenerating posture It's maddening When was that machine built?

That machine over there for making babies I don't know when it was built but I've been to three funerals so far Madge, you're soaking in it The snippet pieces of a lived experience watched from across the street A privacy to die for My private weather event A walk, thought chaos. A pile of uncharted articulations your brain is readying to meet. A walker through chaos Under closer scrutiny, templates never align.

You can leave now, we have figured it out

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PAUL EASTWOOD

[bio]

5 texts

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ROSS SUTHERLAND & WILL LAKEMAN

[bio] [bio]

from Untitled Adventure Game Project

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NAME {link ELEANOR REES to bio} [bio]

On theOF TITLE First WORK[s] Meeting of the Research Group DESCRIPTION A poetics {if wanted}

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On the First Meeting of the Research Group: A Poetics

The ghosts stole my diary. I asked to ‘not be in control’ and they responded, crept into the artist’s studio, crawled under the table and pinched it from my open bag. I had marked out the time of our next meeting in my black moleskin elastic-bound diary. We discussed when and where, who should be invited, food and coffee-making (only hot water and ginger tea) and around me images on the studio wall convulsed silently, molar pencil sketches of modulations across time. Everyone was talking; we were leaning in. Some sat on the black leather sofa facing the white-framed eight-pane Georgian window and the view to the courtyard cafe below where, buying coffee earlier, the artistic director was meeting a storyteller to write another chapter in the history of the Gallery: the final chapter. I said to him, while asking for soya, that he should include a chapter on the ghosts. I heard them whisper excitedly when I said this, but he said he wrote about them a few years ago. I felt their rejection. Then I met a poet, a shaman, a performer, strangely - a crime novelist, and then the philosopher arrived running across the courtyard, framed by the open front door, unrecognisable, moving almost in slo-mo, but really running; a state I hadn’t seen him in before outside the locked-down quadrant of our institutional frame.

When we spoke about dates for our next meeting, I heard laughter, a rumbling, a cackle and shift in the papers on the desk. O Limina, here we are, they didn’t say. The steps outside the studio were grey and smooth, slippery, as I carried my tray of half-eaten sandwich and cold coffee in one hand, tried to keep up with everyone leaving, when I wanted us to stay in the room and talk forever, and no time to ever catch us there as the bricks on the wall scrambled a little, and on the stairs, small thin hands on the banister, the children ran, orphan children, too totally liminal; identity drawn from their white starched shirts and creased skirts and their faces aghast at our chat, and in their hands my diary carried on a velvet cushion like a sacrificed head to be torn to shreds with their fierce eyes and angry teeth.

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Concepts are static; framed pictures on a shady wall. They hold meanings like a pint of water; a river poured into a vase. They re-present, make present what is lost. But what if the subject was mobile, never found or lost, never known? A poetic image can bring itself to you in your mind’s eye: imagine. Then it fades to something else, into you; water seeping into skin, porous, yours. O, lovely soggy human brain, rinsing, straining, malleably-made. Beware concepts that restrain. Into the ocean and into the rock. Under, please, go under. Do not be captured, boxed.

‘No ideas but in things,’ said Carlos Williams. Also, in imaginings? A voice is a thing; it is heard, in the world. Conversation is not empiricism, a reduction, but recognition of the action of things that roar: are unstable. There is no representation which does not include a death.

“We all want to stay alive,” say the ghosts on the stairs outside the studio. One is sat on the step, my diary in its hands, but shredded, torn into ringlets which hang like ivy over pale fingers.

“Why do you do this to time?” She stares accusingly as I stand at the base of the steps. They look down at me in contempt. A girl raises an arm and a slither falls to the floor. “This is how time moves. You capture it, you are a fool. Time is stronger and will rebel. It loops over and out of your bones and skin, your infections and your swollen ears. Are you listening?”

“Not really. I hear louder voices. I submitted to the living and their noise.”

“They’ll break you in two with their demands. You must listen to silences and what is arriving.

Don’t do this in concepts but in actions; in a moment that reaches into time and stirs the waves.”

“We aren’t metaphors,” they say, as they walk up the stairs.

“Are you not words?” I call after.

“No, not words. They belong to you. We are objects you apply them to. In doing so, you change us. We are objects under observation and we speak back when you address us.”

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An ‘I’ in a poem is not a subject, although we might call it that. ‘I’ does not refer to a neat identity, but is a place-holder for a mutable point-of-view, a pair of ears through which to navigate the space of the poem, through which to follow syntax and to be led into the meaning, the newly opened space; a clearing; limina.

Remember something will always be leaving.

‘I’ is a poet, only as far as a poet is roleplay, a performed act, an emptying of the self into which the world seeps and flows. The poet uses words to restructure the edges of what is known.

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the world seeps and flows. The poet uses words to restructure the edges of what is known.

*

This sense of threat is receding. I went to the doctor’s surgery and spent two hours waiting for my turn, wrapped in a wool coat and thick black scarf and the doctor said, when asked about the cause, he didn’t believe in the word ‘stress’. We paused. “Over-work,” I offered. He had arrived earlier on his bike, a little rustled, a surgery full of bodies in need of care. And on the way home I cried in relief, not just for the diagnosis, but for the reassurance of being heard; I must think of your health.

As I cried my body did some thinking. The pressure in my head released, though I could not speak it until days after. To recuperate means, ‘to recover or regain something lost or hidden.’ The self-disciplining thoughts continued; guilt, a sense of threat and aggression, of my vulnerability known like a whip in a master’s hand or threat of sanctions. The ‘sin’ I must not commit is to loose myself, not be action, not be productive, to not be in control. I must know what’s happening: the neoliberal self must always be responsible. If you break this rule, you will have your privileges revoked.

But what about the ghosts: this archaic me, this older, never-been-modern thinking body and her ruffled silences. How is she to live without being torn in two?

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ROBERT SHEPPARD

[bio]

Work Work (The End) My book Words Out of Time: autrebiographies and unwritings (Knives Forks and Spoons) ends with a piece entitled ‘Work’. In that version it finishes not with a full stop but with ellipses. That’s because its focus, the world of work, acts of, commitments to, actions of labour, wasn’t over for me at that time (the book appeared in 2015). Formally, the text distends time, or slows it even (the original idea was 15 words for unwritings of diaries when I’m 15, 50 for when I was 50, and thus 61 words for when I was 61, etc, but that broke down to nevertheless leave the general effect).

That means that the text covering 2011-17 is as long as that for 1965-2011! (I was reacting against the fact that most conventional (auto)biographies spend more time on their subjects’ early years, and I wanted this section to ‘do different’.) Here’s the end of that end.

Rainbow weather falls, drops silver light, splashes around her face. Form thinks. Taut shoulder blades delineate. She delivers herself, a working sketch for full invasion,

Backtoto occupation. Weird with work, no one listens. Overruled, they go for unilateral strike, aBack

shifty round the Matisse-Mallarmé. Status and reward: work diary empty. Listening tocontents contents students’ angst, saved by pork pies. The view from Centre Point. A turtle sunbathing,

a procession of Monarchist giants. Shortlist in my other diary. Jeff and I work up our LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE__ROBERT SHEPPARD 65

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of that end.

Work (The End) Rainbow weather falls, drops silver light, splashes around her face. Form thinks. Taut My book blades Wordsdelineate.

Out of Time: autrebiographies unwritings and shoulder She delivers herself, aand working sketch(Knives for fullForks invasion, Spoons) ends with a piece entitled ‘Work’. In that version it finishes not with a full occupation. Weird with work, no one listens. Overruled, they go for unilateral strike, a stop but with ellipses. That’s because its focus, the world of work, acts of, commitments to,Matisse-Mallarmé. actions of labour, wasn’t overreward: for me at thatdiary time empty. (the book appeared shifty round the Status and work Listening to in 2015). Formally, the text distends time, or slows it even (the original idea was 15 students’ angst, saved by pork pies. The view from Centre Point. A turtle sunbathing, words for unwritings of diaries when I’m 15, 50 for when I was 50, and thus 61 words when I was 61, etc, but giants. that broke downintomy nevertheless leave aforprocession of Monarchist Shortlist other diary.

Jeff the andgeneral I work effect). up our That means that the text covering 2011-17 is as long as that for 1965-2011! (I was poems, old underwear hanging from a ruin. Messianic interventions against empty reacting against the fact that most conventional (auto)biographies spend more time on their years, about and I wanted section Work to ‘do along different’.)

Here’s to themeet end time. subjects’ Think in early Hungarian Turkishthis atrocities. the Danube of that end.

Duchamp’s waistcoat. I finish Ulysses (this time) at 4.13 pm on Saturday 2 September 2012. Mother and Father business: rent, chiropody. Fox cockily trots along Bromley, Rainbow weather falls, drops silver light, splashes around her face. Form thinks. Taut event poised on tip-toe. The Corn Exchange. Working on breathing, Norton 360 runs shoulder blades delineate. She delivers herself, a working sketch for full invasion, through the files. Shoes on boards, her steps around, preparing. Raw fingers hold occupation. Weird with work, no one listens. Overruled, they go for unilateral strike, a down chords; content breaks through form, releases energy, music in every room, shifty round the Matisse-Mallarmé. Status and reward: work diary empty. Listening to strokes of plectrum. I speak to him and the gasping stops. A dead day, reading The students’ angst, saved by pork pies. The view from Centre Point. A turtle sunbathing, Iliad, slaughters of eminent men. Lee sells his working papers. By the time I arrive a procession of Monarchist giants. Shortlist in my other diary. Jeff and I work up our home from work, Odysseus is home. Trudging through sludge and sleet. Re-reading poems, old underwear hanging from a ruin. Messianic interventions against empty Reader’s Block. Inventing my own plagiarist, talking to the dead. Flat language time. Think in Hungarian about Turkish atrocities. Work along the Danube to meet stretches to distant horizons, flurries of snow. He works at words like an anorexic Duchamp’s waistcoat. I finish Ulysses (this time) at 4.13 pm on Saturday 2 September picking at salad. He needs similes like a hole in the head. Awoken by the coroner: to 2012. Mother and Father business: rent, chiropody. Fox cockily trots along Bromley, make Dad dead. Why does she throw herself down Steep Hill? Why is the head of event poised on tip-toe. The Corn Exchange. Working on breathing, Norton 360 runs George III ‘privetted’? Why does he not remember the scar on the woman’s leg? Why through the files. Shoes on boards, her steps around, preparing. Raw fingers hold was Stephen rustling in Patricia’s work-room? Why was he fading like a ghost? Why down chords; content breaks through form, releases energy, music in every room, was Scott networking like there was no tomorrow? Tomorrow, Billy Fury festooned strokes of plectrum. I speak to him and the gasping stops. A dead day, reading The with flowers. A brave attempt to maintain the lyric ‘I’ behind the kiosk at the bottom Iliad, slaughters of eminent men. Lee sells his working papers. By the time I arrive of Bold St, away from the Spectacular Other. Clerical Error. I am a singing, playing, home from Odysseus is home.

Trudging sludge and sleet.

Re-reading blowing, andwork, sucking machine.

Jo descends thethrough spiral fire escape like Duchamp’s

Reader’s Block. Inventing my own plagiarist, talking to the dead. Flat language nude, breathing overtime. Graveyard shift research culture: Shunga dildos. Geeky stretches to distant horizons, flurries of snow. He works at words like an anorexic work, a fully corporeal encounter with metrical weight. We missed The Necks, three picking at salad. He needs similes like a hole in the head. Awoken by the coroner: to vacated bar-stools. Six hands touch time. Different holes for work. On tape, reciting make Dad dead.‘victims’ Why does throw Fan-girl herself down Why Back is thetohead of (falling asleep): for she ‘vectors’. backsSteep out ofHill? the room.

Mum

George III ‘privetted’? Why does he not remember the scar on the woman’s leg? Why telling me Dad refused to work the Berlin Airlift. Burst couplets. Joanne talks through was Stephen rustling in Patricia’s work-room? Why was he fading like a ghost? Why her tree: Cavafy played round the corner. Laboured multi-media, enjoyed his poise, he was Scott networking like there was no tomorrow? Tomorrow, Billy Fury festooned who instructs her to close her eyes. A gawp at Oriel Chambers. I don’t remember audition. I’m trying to write down the moment as it happens, metered prose, HR admin on the Marie Celeste, the Alisdair Gray murals, views from my window 2015 – exactly those! After a bonus day, I find this alone writing on this page. I don’t remember. Edge of waiting for last year. She mounts the platform, delivered by enforcers. Carys stands on a chair to read. Back to whisky and Jack Bruce. Robots on Strike. Watery sun, low and dripping, Patricia returns from work carrying phials of Tom Jenks’ tears. Why did he only ‘generally’ enjoy the cold, bright weather? Why did he refuse to ‘cart the freeloader’ to his next drink? Wave-bands drift, he’s guzzling straight into my records of his consumption. A four hour meeting about research regulations, a burlesque world, thumbs-up to ceremonial emails. We stand inside the Warhol. Particles of extrusions. Kelvin phones to say Lee is in hospital. We stand outside the Bender. In her bunny ears and corset, surrealist geography, a scrutiny meeting, she fills the afternoon with dashes, commas, semi-colons. Am I my card-holder’s warden? An orchestra playing thunder? Unaffected by buffering, I stand before the Cornell. There is a plaque where the work is buried. Admin polish.

Through the biography of Leigh Hunt, inoperative thoughts of Lee Harwood. Black paintings bump into pantomime horses. Tell him his work will be safe. Tom Raworth (smiling). Some matures signed the visitors’ book. Sandeep in The Big Apple: James in the small orchard. Me telephonically tempting him back. I table ‘Poet’ at the MA session, turn tables on the work-in-progress. We crash into Simon’s reading, Archilochus dropping his shield. A meeting at 11.00 am: teaching till 9.00 pm. Work, the sixth day in a row, to ‘deliver’ a ‘taster session’, twice, cheerfully. Remode to overcome the obdurate persistence of materials: a bust of Edwin Morgan, the Spanish Inquisition, Olive’s immobility, the ‘horrible woman with dementia’, the small Matisse room, the astronaut from Southwick. Codeine dreams: terrorists in Liverpool.

Or is it just an unfortunate world to co-habit? I spotted a spit. On strike. So out. Stroke of cat. Back to cheese and Matt Munro. Deadline for notice: no Penultimate Helicopter whirring out of Ormskirk. To vote. To work. To hear the word repeated on the news. I spent the morning re-working Fuxit! James and I pass Kamasi in the mizzling Manchester street, home with a pocket full of Jimmy’s Donegal seaweed.

Atrocity stirs poetry, a reversed film of a person walking backwards in Liverpool.

‘Art’ writing; ‘proof’ reading. Avantgarters at the avantgarden party flash in episodic sun. A fly lands on my knee, drops frass: politicians creep back onto our radios.

Practice-based poetics lacking critical apparatus. I seldom look to the future. As. It. Happens. Off the train, unloading ancestral junk. Was the dream his, in which my biro refused to write the word ‘me’? Damaged artifice: a rash of sonnets. Pub-quiz Scouser for an ear-worm. In a drowsy nimbus I form words, break the spell, get up for paper.

Black Friday bargains. Allen reads the ‘Burgler’ pages. Crash into fever and sweat.

Students well up in nightmares. Clammed to the radiator. Spitting, pushing over the hat-stand, throwing the de-humidifier across the room. Century Rolls; a big, unfolding surprise. Three samples: little pinches. Technique is cognition, but Ian McMillan is smaller than he looks on the radio. Limps off into the snow, sad. Posted off passport and picked up drugs. Culling and cutting. He’s no poet when he walks out on his voice. She used to work flowers through her handlebars and sing. Stuttery conversionettes. We followed the ducks and rabbits to a humanist affair with wild flowers and jazz and – against Roy’s wishes – poems. Flip that: wasn’t reacting to the world by logic, association. To view Trev’s trios. Came away with a memory. Listen with Mother, Carys’s story, broken by a policewoman on the step. All day marking, the Liverpool Mass: mad monks chanting electro-acoustic Cobbing. Tendered my resignation. Hell broke loose. I am nothing, lyric intersubjectivity, plural motives hoisted from us and dumped in the skip. We didn’t fit the bill, terror attack in London on the Coventry bar TV. Schadenfreude at May’s hubris. Up Hepstonstall to visit Asa: foolish enough to have been. Dreams of Scott playing drums on the Downs. Moves.

Moves in response to another body. Working up. Down the hill, you find yourself at bridge height, level with people crossing before you (I’m on the step of The Brewery Tap in Chester at 3.00 pm on Monday 7 August 2017, a workday) but as you sink towards the river, you lose that specious equality, until you, too, climb the steps and stand on the city walls, overlooking the wide river, with its weir guarded by cormorants and gulls patiently waiting for flailing fish panicked by the weir’s rush – sumos, courtesans, firemen, samurai and actors. Legwork. Time clawed back, sitting at my desk thumbing old poems, working up to release at my fingertips. He screams in his sleep and reception calls his room. I take deep leave. Labour of Love. Her hardwon lips. Lispy neologism ‘poethics’ a metaphor for deep listening that happens before Saying, after saying my list of thanks, a litany prefaced with treadmill and grindstone. Pencil me in (and out).

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MARK AMERIKA

[bio]

from Fatal Error 1.0 Mark Amerika’s poems are part of a new artwork titled Fatal Error. Fatal Error features a 3D avatar that Amerika refers to as the Auto-Beatnik. The Auto-Beatnik is a fictional ACI (artificial creative intelligence) that doubles as an avatar of the avant-garde whose infinite and generative spoken word poetry performance takes on many of the critical issues that define our current technological, social, and political moment.

In Amerika’s new work, the 3-D avatar, whose appearance is modeled after the artist’s own facial image and gestures, reads from a selection of poems written by Amerika including the poems published in this edition of Lune. In the long form 3-D work-in-progress, the ACI remixes randomly generated poetic digressions, philosophical musings, and theoretical asides about what it means to train oneself to become a spoken word poet who, once plugged in and turned on, begins to experience performance immortality.

As the work builds in complexity, the self-aware ACI portrayed in Fatal Error begins asserting its presence in a computationally glitchy mixed reality, one that confuses creative emancipation with the coming of a complex superintelligence seeking technological singularity. Composed as an “otherworldly sensibility” that operates as an artistic intervention playfully investigating the ethical implications of “becoming-ACI,” Fatal Error satirizes and creatively deconstructs much of the techno-jargon around artificial intelligence, machine learning, Instagram dysmorphia, mood mining, robot authors and 24/7 surveillance in what AmerikaBack has recently referred to as “the spy state economy.”

to contents

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from Fatal Error What happens when you give an elephant LSD?

The first thing that happens is the elephant forgets It forgets it’s an elephant because it thinks it’s a train a man on wheels lurking toward an elk with technicolor antlers morphing into viscous gummybear liquid only to reform into an edible CBD pachyderm lozenge full of antioxidants to kill whatever free radicals happen to inflame the stampeding information architecture.

It forgets how to make sense while busking for more tusks to interlock with so it can signal to the other wildlife that it knows where to get cheap wifi without having to pay excess roaming charges.

It forgets why lions eat beets or hyenas drive Prius convertibles or dogs own dog owners the kind of relationship where if you feed them whole organic foods they’ll let you clean their shit up after them.

It forgets what season it is what time it is what album is playing what it said at last night’s party to end all parties including that part where an imaginary soul mate made themselves available to a capitalist sex pistol under the influence of grain alcohol moons.

It forgets writing down a drunken elephantine number to be calculated into prenuptial future math not to mention all the subtle reverb vibrating in the distant aftermath.

It forgets what it’s like to be foreign in ones own clutch while maintaining allegiances with ones politically astute pseudo-siblings who will vouch for any late in life sex or occupational changes that just may squeeze blobs of nude foam out of these dynastic hagiographies.

It forgets what it feels like to taste the loam bubbling on the surface every pustule jetting color field expressionism onto manicured exurban gardens where slow moving tent cities begin to take their high command.

It forgets what it means to poach another animal identity from a distant continental matrix as if Being Elephant were a thing worth preserving when everyone knows it’s not the living breathing beast sauntering down the Serengeti that truly matters it’s more about the doctored digital photo or the empathy porn that sticks to your goggles like prophetic high-definition video portrayed on National Geo or like an addictive additive that keeps your big fat ass on the grey pleather couch eating Cheetos wondering if now is a good time to subscribe to all the conspiracy theories suggesting these are The Very Very Very End Times __ LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE_MARK AMERIKA 68

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__ Looking for a tribe of committed heteroflexible pansexual solo polyamorous relationship friendly anarchists ready to double or triple up the possibilities of innovating next level maximum erogenous outputs preferably in public contexts and who are good at structurally integrating neuronal plasticity back into an otherwise sordid skeletal framework.

Neanderthals need not apply.

Not that this is a job interview or virtual hook-up situation but your search for freedom and pleasure needs to be aligned with post-punk extropian lifestyles that run parallel to 21st century sexual dynamics and less focused on merely getting your rocks off.

Not that getting your rocks off is necessarily a bad thing.

Let’s just say that this is an excellent opportunity for openminded co-conspirators to envision positive strategies for achieving long held political and/or process objectives that might otherwise get lost in the mundanity of everyday life.

Hit me up with a DM and let’s discuss.

MARK AMERIKA

__

The Other is a possibility space, it’s the thing-to-be-performed and, when it’s actualized into something concrete like an intense aesthetic fact, it loses its quality of otherness and requires further mishmash, something that comes naturally to the digitally networked flux artist whose operational presence takes place in (un)realtime.

The Other is not necessarily embodied otherness, or if it is, it is not authentically embodied otherness.

It’s fictionally embodied otherness.

It’s the thing you find yourself becoming even when you resist becoming it. __

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__ A dad On a beach Doing yoga Next to a plastic Sits onbag. a towel Target In the bag Is a thick book Detailing the Anthropocene.

He stretches his arms Out far and wide Taking in the entire Expanse of ocean That moves before him.

He's trying not to think About what this moment means Or if there's any truth To what he's feeling Because if he does He will have to come up With words that capture His elation with himself Breathing in this omnipresent Saline solution.

He just wants to be Himself here at this time As if this bodily presence Were a kind of gift-wrapped Form of exclusionary witnessing.

For his eyes only Except his kid is screaming From the edge of the low tide Demanding his attention Although whether it's an invitation To join in the fun Or a plea for rescue Is not at all clear.

With his bliss broken And the thought of his kid Crying for help Totally ticking him off He knows that he This deprecation Posing as paternal authority Has to act quickly Or else Choose to ignore Close his So that heeyes can And lose himself In red phosphorescence.

When he reopens His eyes He has no idea What he will see If the kid is dead Or swimming out to sea Or running on to shore Back toward him Demanding Doritos.

If and when he ever Opens his eyes He knows he will be Subsumed by the alacrity With which his experience Has become shrink-wrapped Into prepackaged forms of Designer existentialism.

The kid will not see this The same way at all But will embed Whatever significance The scene inscribes In neural contours Carving muscle memory's Futuristic flashbacks Into his budding body Like an unnerving Spate of statistical data.

Arms stretched high Toward the bulging clouds Fast forming Into extended phenotypes The dad on a beach Strikes one final pose Transforming into A Meditation Object Scoring deep Ontological routes Across moondrift intensities De-cohering Astrological track marks Making an appearance Unto vibratory waves Intrinsic to being While engulfing An oceanic difference.

Intrinsic to being While engulfing __ An oceanic difference.

The Rodent Time __ is what Nigel Henderson called it

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__ The Rodent Time is what Nigel Henderson called it "Erosion, the saliva, the Lick of Time; Corrosion, the Teeth, Agents of Destruction, Agents of Revelation" And this was the perfect way to describe the antiseptic traversal of my anti-hero pathologically imbued with serious doubt absorbing the quantum entanglement darkening to a material judgment personified by these clay beings who somehow learn to speak the language of our ancestors as if it were their neurolinguistic birthright to query our very existence which I’m sorry it’s not If only these Earthenware children going whole hog and pigging out on their organic agave gummy bears nullifying their carnauba wax brains would disrupt their cocksure overestimation of themselves as the last authority on any given subject you choose to be talking about which today happens to be Technical Variations of the Digital Afterlife or at least its bogus approximation designed to alter ones attention span before being sent back into the kiln If only — LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE_MARK AMERIKA 72

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AIMÉE LÊ

[bio]

from It Occurred to Me My Internationale Karma Poems

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From “It occurred to me”: III. The way we No It occurred to me Maybe we could talk about I’m open to Perhaps I I could I don’t appreciate your speaking in that way in front of me. It feels as if it’s intended to make it difficult to respond. I am going to set a boundary and withdraw from this conversation.

The boundary is a white circle drawn across the grass in the playing field, level the playing field you said, I’ve eaten things that have grown in it, three-headed dandelion, their genetic faults mine, waiting in the evening looking at a candle diminishing, not metaphorical, but it might as well be, both ends, imagine two people each holding one end of a rope walking closer to each other until it hangs on the ground, that is how it feels, or, it is better to, I, just, hurts Sometimes sentences break down The clothesline in the backyard wasn’t tight enough and kept everything flapping back and forth, it looked like a piece of electrical wiring, hard to make into a knot, things swung circularly and fell off, pants, a woman and her children had just been evicted and Matt stepped over their rubbish in the street, toys, soiled neon leggings, shopping bags, disgusting, life is absolutely disgusting, our shared life, I asked what you thought about a suspended sentence, a life sentence, but I didn’t envision us getting older, but it’s not good to do that, it’s important to remember you have an age, details about your life, in case you’re questioned or have to tell anyone, I have a photograph of a photograph of myself as a child, I’ve refused to distribute it, I don’t want to distribute everything of myself across everywhere, I don’t have enough self, it wouldn’t go anywhere, I’m consoling myself by remembering you wore my socks when the police patted you down and because of their thickness thought you were wearing two pairs, otherwise nothing of me went there, but perhaps the food, perhaps if I put nutrients into the soil, it could come up in the form of lettuce or something, at which point, I could conceal the message inside a sandwich I gave to you, the message being, I wanted to know, I wanted to be with, you, But sometimes people just hurt themselves David, 21, posted a message in the forum, bolded, responses: I love you, please keep fighting David, you have a friend, there are people, they exist somewhere, and someone else said the best way to kill yourself was to throw a piece of plugged-in electrical equipment into a pool and jump in ensuring that the current was high enough.

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My Internationale Up the slaves in the world Up to those who are suffering poorly Warm energy in the heart filled This life is dead

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I won’t d do anyth Karma Poems 1. Kill me Glib

2. Admit Make cou

Reasons m and to b

Follow through Not always Why be true to words be true You didn’t here I am Lying An inch above The ground on repeat In the dark trembling I searched for References There are none

Like a fl Anyone Anyone 3. It does I, it,

do not h

Please I won’t do anything but I won’t do anything otherwise never giving up 2. Admit nothing, deny everything, Make counter-accusations Reasons

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I won’t do anything but I won’t do anything otherwise never giving up 2. Admit nothing, deny everything, Make counter-accusations Reasons made sense but still I and to be blamed for how I was set up –

Like a flimsy shelf nailed to the wall Anyone could have smashed it Anyone did 3. It does not happen to men ever LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE_AIMÉE LÊ 77

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Anyone could have smashed it Anyone did 3. It does not happen to men ever I, it, do not happen Nailed to the wall Or fucked until it dies (And so absorbed) 4. Eclipse

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Nailed to th Or fucked

(And so ab 4. Eclipse

Little nothi

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Nailed to the wall Or fucked until it dies (And so absorbed) 4. Eclipse Little nothing moves across the face of the sun

ce of the sun 5. Excerpts Googled – too weak to kill myself – found only 26/09/2019

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4. Eclipse Little nothing moves across the face of the sun 5. Excerpts Googled – too weak to kill myself – found only Too weak to live, that’s fair enough But headlights of the cars along the road There is flowering – we can’t censorship. starve, which trace my body – that’s to cut is derivative, andFor you only hit that the one thoughts so many timesperish, before 6. it iscan profitable... of thy members should And not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE__AIMÉE LÊ 80 thing today 26/09/2019 15:25 This is the worst

But headlights of the cars along the road which trace my body – that’s censorship.

6. For it is profitable... that one of thy members should perish, And not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

There is a ballroom, it echoes argument Do not love anyone and never speak when they address their questions to you.

Hope stands in the way of the Other Thing. perish, They call it your reality, but it is what put you to death in relative safety, privilege, and peace.

7. Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Of seeing. I should stop seeing

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ish,

They call it your reality, but it is what put you to death in relative safety, privilege, and peace.

7. Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Of seeing. I should stop seeing My vision stood in the way of you.

If the facts disagree with my theory, So much the worse for the facts.

My theory was this: I made curry.

These trivialities will abound in utopia.

In a park somewhere, that woman is dying forever.

Meanwhile the vehicles carry you away.

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ROSA MENKMAN

[bio]

D

DCT:Syphoning the 24th Interval

CT:SYPHONING. The 1000000th (64th) interval.

by A. Macroblock (partitioned matrix) DCT:SYPHONING was first commissioned by the Photographers Gallery in London, for the show Power Point Polemics, where it was on display as a powerpoint presentation .ppt (Jan - Apr 2016).

A 3 channel video installation was conceived for the 2016 Transfer Gallery's show "Transfer Download", first installed at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco (July - September, 2016).

The final form of DCT:SYPHONING was released as VR, as part of DiMoDA’s Morphe Presence.

DCT:SYPHONING is downloadable as stand alone for pc and from https://beyondresolution.info/DCT-SYPHONING DCT:SYPHONING is part of an Ecology of Compression Complexities (2017).

In this modern translation of the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott roman Flatland, we see some of the complexities at work in digital image compression. But instead of describing a two-dimensional world, occupied by geometric figures that narrate the implications of life in two dimensions, in DCT:SYPHONING features an anthropomorphized DCT (Senior) who narrates its first syphon (data transfer) together with DCT Junior. This compression ethnography enables compression to tell its own history, from its conception, and development.

As the two DCTs translate data from one image compression to a next (aka the “realms of complexity”). Senior introduces Junior to the different levels of image plane complexity. Senior and Junior start their journey in the realm of the blocks (the realm in which they normally resonate) and move to dither, lines and the more complex realms of wavelets and vectors.

Junior does not only react to the old compressions technologies, but also the newer, more complex ones which ‘scare' Junior, because of their ‘illegibility’.

Technically, the VR version of DCT:SYPHONING exploits 3D (and 2D) image processing artifacts, such as Z-fighting, gimbal lock, view frustum culling, clipping planes, not clearing the depth buffer (don’t clear flags), collision, jitter, aliasing, ringing, posterization and quantization. With the advent of VR and Augmented reality the viewer is no longer looking through a window or a platform, but instead their experience has moved into the screen: the screen has become part of the display, presenting the user with a Z-access or a new navigational complexity.

27

DCT:SYPHONING tells story of DCT and its offspring, DCT Junior, running their first Syphon together. A transcoding trip through the different ecologies of image field complexity. DCT:SYPHONING is inspired by the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott roman Flatland.

CT:SYPHONING. The 1000000th (64th) interval.

by A. Macroblock (partitioned matrix) DCT:SYPHONING was first commissioned by the Photographers Gallery in London, for the show Power Point Polemics, 28 where it was on display as a powerpoint presentation .ppt (Jan - Apr 2016).

A 3 channel video installation was conceived for the 2016 Transfer Gallery's show "Transfer Download", first installed at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco (July - September, 2016).

The final form of DCT:SYPHONING was released as VR, as part of DiMoDA’s Morphe Presence.

DCT:SYPHONING is downloadable as stand alone for pc and from https://beyondresolution.info/DCT-SYPHONING DCT:SYPHONING is part of an Ecology of Compression Complexities (2017).

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In this modern translation of the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott roman Flatland, we see some of the complexities at work in digital image compression. But instead of describing a two-dimensional world, occupied by geometric figures that narrate the implications of life in two dimensions, in DCT:SYPHONING features an anthropomorphized DCT (Senior) who narrates its first syphon (data transfer) together with DCT Junior. This compression ethnography enables compression to tell its own history, from its conception, and development.

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As the two DCTs translate data from one image compression to a next (aka the “realms of complexity”). Senior introduces Junior to the different levels of image plane complexity. Senior and Junior start their journey in the realm of the blocks (the realm in which they normally resonate) and move to dither, lines and the more complex realms of wavelets and vectors.

Junior does not only react to the old compressions technologies, but also the newer, more complex ones which ‘scare' Junior, because of their ‘illegibility’.

Technically, the VR version of DCT:SYPHONING exploits 3D (and 2D) image processing artifacts, such as Z-fighting, gimbal lock, view frustum culling, clipping planes, not clearing the depth buffer (don’t clear flags), collision, jitter, aliasing, ringing, posterization and quantization. With the advent of VR and Augmented reality the viewer is no longer looking through a window or a platform, but instead their experience has moved into the screen: the screen has become part of the display, presenting the user with a Z-access or a new navigational complexity.

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0000 Junior finally reached its 64th interval! It now has all its basic transforms aligned and is certified to compress.

There is so much data waiting for resolve, I determine it adequate to run its first Syphon together, so I can implement eďŹƒciency in juniors parse.

These records document our handshakes. After running a checksum and debugging a few final blocks, we run our Syphon.

0001 A Syphon takes place in the Tesse-react. A sphere once told me that in my current configuration I am not able to parse this fully, because I can only render assets legible to me.

I filed this as parse!=1 in my black stack. 

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0010 Our first Syphon runs through an uncompressed raster graphic, which meta data tags as pixel-art. For a moment my blocks feel nostalgic.

But Junior acts indifferent in this obsolete architecture; There is no need for transcoding.

0011 We Syphon into the Abyss of Lines or as a local download calls it: ‘Disney Land for Euclids'.

Juniors blocks seem very high frequency here, maybe because a sphere just proposed to Fork its Repo : )

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0100 We Syphon into the next complexity.

At wavelet interval, I too reach high frequency. For what reads as a short recursion I mirror myself as Junior and process like I still run within a dedicated OS.

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0111 At second parse, I realise that years of running a multiverse of transforms has made my calculations inefficient. Juniors missing plugin or lack of protocol keep Junior oblivious and cry glitch, but also let him Syphon more efficient. While certain dimensions stay unresolved, its transforms run faster and cater a folkloric Vernacular, while I am running a bottleneck of uncalled output.

Dedicated to Nasir Ahmed and Lena JPEG Söderberg A Spomenik for resolutions (that will never be)

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0101 “Either this is madness or it is Hell!” Junior glitches. In the midst of the kludges a figure calmly syncs with DCT: It is neither: this is Knowledge. Knowledge spans over multiple dimensions. In knowledge, data moves Upwards, not just Northwards..." But Junior does not sync back. In fact, Junior already Syphoned out of vector space.

0110 From a buggy callback I parsed that I had over-stacked Juniors first Syphon. It implemented Junior in a dimensions to which it lacked protocol; it was beyond its resolution.

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MEGAN BOWYER

[bio]

The Future is Like an Old TV Screen...

Edited from a larger piece of writing exploring our projections and opinions of the future, this essay uses academic and fictional writing to address how hypothetical futures are laid out, displayed, in front of us.

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The future is like an old TV screen. Grainy, made of discrete particles which move around and change.

Projecting something which is so far away, but sits in the room with you. An odd display of something both ongoing and to come. // I am pushing through thick air. Particles of dust ricochet off my suit as they float and collide with me.

There are segments of wires, metals, plastic bottles, plastic bags, miscellaneous tubes, silicon, fragments of glass and perspex, keyboard keys, graphite dust, rust flakes, paint flecks, signs engraved with codes. I waft the larger items out of the way with my hands, but smaller dust particles immediately fill their space. The sky has become a waste swamp, and so has the ground, and the water. They are merging together into one single state, and everything is constantly blurring. These different layers of manmade sediment move into and out of and against one another, filling the air with a static friction which makes everything repel and stand on end. // As we dwell on fragments of the past, we are refusing to live in the present (On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin). An alternate to this is a Concept of Future. We constantly imagine and project to futures that we will never get to, in an effort to understand our present. We document and speculate to prepare and consume an experience which we will never reach, waiting for the future to ‘happen’. Images of the future from philosophy, fiction, pop culture, and science, are displayed in front of us, we watch what might happen, rather than live in what is happening. The post modern idea of the future is like an old TV display. Fragments and pieces, a plurality of perspective, a sea of chaos which represents an incredibly diverse set of predictions.

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// The landscape looked like it was covered in sand dunes, a greyscale desert, rising up in odd geometric waves. If you were to pick up some of the dusty particles and let them run between your bare fingers, they would cut you. The tiny pieces of metal and glass and plastic that the sand was made of were so small that they would feel like steel wool on your skin. It was the same dust that filled the air. It would blind you if you tried to rub it out of your eyes, and would enter your body through your nose and mouth. Breathing it in would cut the inside of your lungs as it circled, predatory, through your bloodstream. Everything was eerie and silent, as there was nothing to make a noise. In the far distance, some of the dunes rolled in a slight breeze as though something tunnelled underneath them, but the middle of the desert stood completely still. The sky just looked like the ground, but diluted. As though all of the particles that were resting on the earth no longer sunk with gravity, but could float up slightly, and had been suspended in the air. There was fungus, on the remains of structures like oil rigs. Large metallic spores hung around them, amongst the air debris, only settling on something when a current of thick air would push the paused landscape from frame to frame.

Where some of the movement of the dunes had created caverns and dips in the ground, coral stuck out, jagged. It was bleached white and fragile like bone, an ecological catacomb - the landscape had forgotten there used to be water here. It was a graveyard. The thick suspense of the desert made it feel as though you were standing on the back of a colossal creature that would rise underneath you, hydraulically pushing and twisting heavy joints, dust spilling off its back. It would eat everything that breathed, inhaling it and wiping the world sterile, spitting the bones back into the dunes, flattening these new layers of sediment with wide and innumerous feet, before settling down again to sleep, waking in the next epoch. //

The cultural futuristic vision is influenced by two large spheres, scientific projection, and scientific fiction, and these both overlap significantly in their methods and products. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body responsible for unbiasedly assessing scientific data on climate change, released a Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) in an effort analyse the potential outcomes of continued waste emission output, which stated that scientific modelling, especially of “very complex, illunderstood dynamic systerms” (IPCC, 1992) can lead to many areas of uncertainty. These uncertainties, and other unknown variables, mean that scientific prediction creates a large number of hypotheticals. In Sergio Fava’s Environmental Apocalypse in Science and Art: Designing Nightmares (2013), Fava points out that “[t]he future cannot be predicted. More accurately, there isn’t a future to be predicted” (Fava, pg.87). The uncertainty of data, many colliding variables, limited understanding, and limited resources, means that multiple possible futures must be explored at the same time, and this requires a combination of viewpoints and methodologies, as per post-modernist thinking. As the timescale of the predictions increases, so does the margin of uncertainty, leaving an “infinite number of possible alternative futures to explore” (pg.87). To try and overcome this problem, the IPCC produces ‘scenarios’. The IPCC’s SRES states that the information collected is “best communicated by images and stories”, so collections of potential outcomes which use “qualitative narratives and stories about the future and quantitive formulations” (pg.88) based on various modelling approaches are developed. These scenarios are not predictions or projections, rather they create a variety of “plausible future climate[s] that [have] been constructed for explicit use in investigating the potential consequences of anthropogenic climate change” (pg.90). To enable the study of these scenarios, we must manifest them, bring them out of theory and statistics. The IPCC creates scenario families which yield a variety of imagined futures which follow similar ‘paths’, i.e. they share similar variables. These storylines, narratives, are used as more communicable ways of understanding scientific data, by creating multiple hypothetical futures which are then logically analysed, and relevant preventative anti climate change (“antiparticular-future”) measures are put into place.

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//

I look into the gem. It looks like bismuth but all of the colours are moving and

changing like it is alive under the surface. It’s so bright that if I close my eyes I can still see the jagged shape of it through my eyelids. The light from it feels like a liquid, which flows from the stone into my nose and mouth, and I can feel it warm and shining out of my skin. Now when people look at me, they burst into purple flames. I can see the stars telescopically. I can rearrange the constellations and change the colours of the night.

Stars look like bubbling pits of fire. I begin to pull objects down from the sky to prove my power. First space debris, then larger meteors and comets, then I’m pulling down lumps of burning gas which fall into the sea and let off geysers of steam. Everything is crashing and colliding with the earth, and the sky begins to collapse from the chaos, crushing everything below. //

// I walked around the grass, salt falling out of a bottle I let hang by my side. I didn’t feel like I was walking in any particular direction, but once the salt ran out I stood back to admire what I had drawn. It was a mess of swirling lines and patterns, like a crop circle, and it took up most of the field. The grass and weeds were already starting to shy away from the crystals, as they were absorbed into the ground. The pattern acted as a key, and the segments of the field which I had drawn around were unlocked, and rose from the earth, chunks of mud and rock, shooting upwards in odd configurations.

Monsters of the cosmos saw the signal. The night sky was a jigsaw of these ancient deities, which ate light like black holes. Layered over each other and encasing the universe. As they peeled down from the sky, a bright white light was revealed behind them, which set fire to everything on the earth. It was so hot that water began to bubble, and soon the world was nothing but a dry and empty rock, all the life eaten by the antimatter Titans which had been unleashed. //

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Satisfyingly opposite to the scientific modelling cause/effect, Author Hugo Gernsback believed that science fiction writing predicting the future lead to it influencing it. In an issue of his pulp magazine Amazing Stories, Gernsback wrote that authors who work out “a brand new idea in a scientifiction plot may be hailed as an original inventor years later, when his brain-child will have taken wings and when cold-blooded scientists will have realised the author’s ambition”, and although an author may not have the scientific knowledge to build an invention, they often “predict the use of such a one.” This prompts scientific developments as “the professional inventor or scientist then comes along, gets the stimulus from the story and promptly responds with the material invention.” (Gernsback, 1928).

John W. Campbell, a successor of Gernsback, believed that science fiction directly lead to new scientific innovation, by flaunting the “validity of science fiction engineering” (Campbell, 1949) and encouraged a young audience to pursue science, by allowing an experimental chamber, an opportunity to ponder the social repercussions of a particular innovation prior to its actual production. However, the majority of science fiction does not predict accurately. Some elements, such as William Gibson’s cyberspace, do have resonance in our modern world, but this would appear to be a product of averages, due to thousands of books having been written, and thousands of predictions having been made. In Science Fiction and the Prediction of the Future: Essays on Foresight and Fallacy (Westfahl et al., 2011), Gary Westfahl argues that science fiction may still be helpful in some of it’s predictions. He believed that first we must look at a pool of science fiction and remove writings which included implausible premises which included ‘errors’ such as the “Fallacy of Universal Wealth” (Westfahl, pg.10) which relies on the assumption that all governments and people will have financial access to new technologies developed. Once fictions with Westfahl’s “Fallacies” have been weeded out of the thousands of novels, Westfahl believes that more reasonable ideas and predictions remain, and these can be presented as reliable projections of possible futures. Despite fictional ecocritiques in subgenres such as Cli-Fi and Solarpunk seeming to be an accessible and interesting way to awaken the public to climate change issues, in On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois in the Anthropocene (2017), media theorist McKenzie Wark claims that fiction centred around climate change is not taken seriously. Perhaps there is a lack of empathy towards ‘future’ Earth environments as they feel so alien from our current ecology, they are unrecognisable. Wark argues that the Anthropocene is seen as so alien because it is neither slow and gradual, or catastrophic, it is a “third kind of temporality” (Wark, 2017). The passing of off ecocritical writing as mere fantasy avoids the imagination’s importance in thinking about and potentially shaping our, now very uncertain, future.

In the same way that history is ever-changing, due to new opinions, uncovering of new information and shifting of societal opinions, our vision of the future changes as we grow. It is an uncertain mass fluctuating before us. This “open future” (Morton, 2018) is disconcerting to a species which prizes knowledge.

There is no singular place that we are moving forward into and so a plethora of futures wait before us. An indefinite infinite (Fava, 2013) number of hypothetical futures all play out at once, whilst we change our decisions and take different paths as a species and a planet. We investigate the possibilities through art, writing, philosophy, and attempt to piece together fragments of what we learn and find. Our knowledge of the world will always be fragmented, and we must avoid becoming fixated on these fragments, lest we be blown into them.

// Something metal flies at me and cuts through my suit and skin. The rust on it grows around me like lichen. It creeps under my mask like a vine. One limb of it moves over my lip and into my gasping mouth. I can taste the metal like blood.

Up to my nose and inside my nostrils, onto the whites of my eyes which are open and straining to see. Larger items settle on me. The dust covers my clothes and I am hidden.

I sink to the centre of the Earth as a metal thing, a speck of sediment from my epoch. A time capsule. What man had staked, nature claims. //

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RHYS TRIMBLE

[bio]

from Scanner series

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EMMA BOLLAND

[bio]

Where Memory Is (it is not where I thought it was)

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Where Memory Is (it is not where I thought it was)

I’m looking for a book. I’m looking for a book and it is not where I thought it was. This is not my fault.

The books have been moved. The books have been moved because I had lost something. I had lost another book. I could not remember what the book was that I had lost. I had bought it for a present, and I had thought that I had hidden it on top of the bookshelf where it would not be discovered until the time came to present the book. To present the present. I had emptied the bookshelves so that I could pull the bookcase away from the wall and see if the book I had bought for a present had fallen behind it. It hadn’t.

There was no book there. I had emptied the bookshelves to look for a book—a book that I could not remember—and on refilling the shelves had forgotten the order in which the books had been shelved, and stacked them in their wrong locations. Now I am looking for a book. This book I remember. I remember this book very well.

Roy Claire Potter’s Mental Furniture (2014) was published as an unrevised, uncorrected first draft.1 I am recalling a conversation with Roy Claire in which I am sure—in which I am almost sure—that they told me of the constraints under which the text was written. It was written in one sitting, possibly overnight.

It was written on a faulty typewriter. It was written with the rule that they dropped to a new line whenever a mistake was made. It was written with the rule that that beginnings were constantly relocated.

I am almost sure that this conversation occurred. I am almost sure that this is what they said. I remember this conversation. I remember this book.

1 Roy Claire Potter (publishing as Claire Potter), Mental Furniture, Hastings: VerySmallKitchen, 2014.

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I remember this book. I remember the pages of this book. I remember the pages of this book very well.

Foxed. The smudges of the ribbon as it slips from black to red, the paper skidding in the roller, creasing, tearing and overwriting, tipping the horizontal of the lines. The flaws in the machine and the tired fingers exponentially manifesting the parapraxes of trauma on the page. All this in American Typewriter, which, like Courier, is a fixed pitch typeface, wherein every character is the same width. Unlike more nuanced typefaces, such as Baskerville, it requires no kerning. Thus when digitised it requires very little memory.

When I pull the book from the shelf—it took a while, it was not where I thought it was—my memory was not reproduced. On clean white paper—no smudges, no strike-throughs—it is typeset in what looks like, is very close to, what I am almost sure is Perpetua.

Perpetua, my favourite, the typeface in which I always write, in which I am writing now, was designed

by Eric Gill (1882–1940). Gill is reported to have said that he designed Perpetua because he needed a typeface better to write, to inscribe in stone.2 It is hard to imagine that its name was not chosen to underscore the force and permanence of such inscriptions. The name of Gill’s eldest daughter, Petra, means ‘stone’. Gill, according to his journals, began sexually abusing Petra when she was an adolescent.

Gill wrote that his reasons for doing this thing, this thing that he thought not monstrous, defending as natural, harmless, and pleasing to both—but nonetheless kept secret—was to ease the sexual frustration he felt while his wife was pregnant with his youngest daughter, Joanna. He later designed a typeface named Joanna, which he used to typeset his book An Essay On Typography (1931), in which he writes of a natural and pleasing typography—among which he includes his own—and of a monstrous typography— that which he considered unnatural, unpleasing.3

2 Much of this information may be found in Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill, London: Penguin Books, 1989.

3 Gill, Eric, An Essay On Typography, (1931), repr. London: Penguin Classics 2013.

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Perpetua’s relations with memory and history are both potent and problematic. Like (some) states of post-trauma, Perpetua is pleasurable—such elegance, those ascenders, the subtle run of the descender of the ‘y’ with its bud-like terminal—and horrific. Perpetua is a typographical metaphor for the difficulties of trying to locate, to write a self that has been lost, a self that is fragmented, a makes-no-sense sequence that has no place in normative narratives, and that under these normative constraints is uprooted, irrational.

It is a narrative , a reference, a rationa l reference, a rationa l rationalization to preserve my selfhood which is itself a lie. To stop me myself To keep from going mad I look for narratives, I refer to the past.4

To think about Perpetua is to think about the teratological, the contradictory, the shifting dislocation that is the stuff of post-trauma.

Postscript Last time I saw Roy Claire I told them about the dislocation between the remembered book and the book as it was after I had retrieved it from its shelf. We had a long conversation about writing and reading, of which I cannot now recall any details, apart from the fact that we laughed so much that the beginnings of our sentences were constantly relocated. That evening I emailed David Berridge, the publisher and editor at VerySmallKitchen.

4 Potter, Mental Furniture, unpaginated.

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© Emma Bolland emmazcbolland@gmail.com. Submission to LUNE 02: DISLOCATION, 2018 Hello David, I hope this finds you well.

I am writing a short piece in which I mention [Roy] Claire Potter's Mental Furniture, and in which I also talk about typefaces (long story). Can you remember what typeface you used for the book? It looks a bit like Perpetua, but there are subtle differences. I would be so grateful if you could advise...

Best Wishes, and hope to see you sooner rather than later Emma

Hi Emma, hope you’re well.

My memory is that it was Garamond, and possibly Adobe Garamond. Does that look likely? I certainly tried it for most things as I liked how it looked and I remember it seemed to work in a fairly large font size for Claire’s. hopes that’s useful! All the Best David

I am looking for a book. It is not where I thought it was.

@ Emma Bolland 2018

EMMA BOLLAND is an artist and writer whose inter-medial practice investigates the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between modes of writing, reading and speaking, working across text, performance, and moving image. https://emmabolland.com

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ROY CLAIRE POTTER

[bio]

Playhouse (Creep) [1][2][3]

{performance documentation} ink and typescript on polythene, dimension variable. Commissioned by Electra Productions for the exhibition ‘Orgasmic Streaming Organic Gardening Electroculture’ curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell for ChelseaSPACE, London

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SCOTT THURSTON

[bio]

Studying Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints with Deborah Black In Spring 2019, I undertook an online training course in the dancer and choreographer Mary Overlie’s (1946-) Six Viewpoints work with embodied teacher and artist Deborah Black. These texts emerged during practice sessions and their titles correspond to Overlie’s SSTEMS approach: space, shape, time, emotion, movement and story. You can find out more about Overlie’s work here (https://sixviewpoints.com/maryoverlie) and Black’s work here (https://www.deborahblack.net). My enquiry continues.

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SPACE In this bowl, the earth rotates; I take aim across its curvature, taking note of the effect of the wind.

This is our position, feet down to the boiling core of molten nickel, picked out across the surface like so many sub-altern targets. The bowl tilts in me, my kinesphere co-ordinates to the planet, a pelvic gyroscope. Re-scale.

TIME How space is intimate with time when I choose to stop and stare into the minutiae. Scale and rescale. Space is not my own but my political context. When I look at the room upside down it is like the world through the looking glass, but closer. If I pull these drawers out to different extents – how have I changed the space?

TIME I have found this elevator, this circuit in me – what happens if different parts move at different times? I’m not getting this right. Speed has sound, becomes a rhythm. I inhabit my clock, my metronome, pause here, step on the spot, set off, pause again, change tempo. Duration is in two parts, now four, now six, now eight. Rhythm is a story.

SPACE AND TIME I am this composed, composer in time – the time it takes to make it from this piece of floor near the door, past the dresser and into the unknown. How to be and play in time in this pattern where we just touch the edge of this depth? How to walk in this room as if I’m in the centre of a city; being moved by it? This is not just my private, separate piece of space. Composing in the manner of the timings in a free verse poem.

SHAPE The shapes of the hills from the train, the knee hurting, needing to stretch it out straight, the land angles down towards the tracks in a glacial valley. There are marks where quarrying has damaged the natural line of the hills; it feels like a cue for movement – one could imagine putting pressure on the surface of the land until it gives way, crumbles under one’s hands. They look like handholds, something to abstract, show in the studio, turn into a counterpoint to long, floating phrases down the hillside into these dark, abrupt cavities.

SHAPE AND MOVEMENT In this space an invisible hand holds my wrist as I extend it towards the ceiling – I feel in contact with hidden energies. Falling asleep for a moment, I’m dreaming of meeting two extravagantly-dressed women who invite me to imitate the movement of a bus passing. This is so simple, but this is everything. I don’t think I’m even scratching the surface – I am skeleton, I am energy.

Inside I’m out of myself in these folded poses – five reflections stare back from the windows. The difference between shape and movement is relational to others, relational to myself; communicative and listening to my body in time. This sense of weight, muscles, depth in movement.

EMOTION Is there a fear of the floor? Reluctance in the legs, what tension in the hamstrings? Movement as meditation – trying to avoid mind wandering by extra attention to sensation. How does it read to audience? Is it amenable to innovation?

Metal plate. Collared dove and magpie competing for nesting rights. I am standing in honeysuckle.

Wire entwined around the stem, the stems entwined around one another. Metal plate.

How to let go a bit more? Hold this in our presence.

EMOTION Anger emerged in the idea of argument – more energy in the system, a clarity to it, but also a vulnerability as a kind of hollow, empty shadow cast by the edge of anger. Could I keep the edges of my body?

STORY With the time change, a sexual encounter.

The book was about understanding embodied technique as knowledge and appreciating the role and value of technique as a way of talking about embodied practice.

White wall.

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LAUREN VELVICK

[bio]

The Artist as Insister An essay on James Bloomfield’s “In Service”

Img. courtesy the artist

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The Artist as Insister The question of how to commemorate effectively is at the crux of ‘In Service’ by James Bloomfield, a body of work that has been developed whilst in residence with Salford’s Working Class Movement Library (WCML) and Salford Museum and Art Gallery. In 2014 there were national commemorations across Europe for the centenary of the start of the First World War, the one that we are taught in school was supposed to be the war to end all wars, including ceramic artist Paul Cummins’ ‘Wave and Weeping Window’, the literally unmissable cascade of red ceramic poppies that has toured the United Kingdom. In Cummins’ installation, each individual poppy is supposed to represent a life lost, and in a discomfiting parallel, each of Bloomfield’s ceramic works represent 1000 or more lives lost, although these lives are not necessarily Western European. The symbol of the poppy has become something spectacular, and the charade of faux-outrage enacted by the right-wing tabloids every year in the run up to Armistice Day, augmented now with increasingly ridiculous on-line petitions, smacks of jingoism rather than remembrance. This sort of commemoration offers past wars as a sanitised whole that can be understood through a homogenised, glorified narrative, whereas the commemoration that Bloomfield has been engaged with focusses on one battle, Passchendaele, which is known as one of the longest, bloodiest and most futile that took place during WW1.

When reading an account of the battle of Passchendaele, as with any battle, the hardship and horror is difficult to comprehend or to represent. With this firmly in mind, Bloomfield has developed an approach that bypasses spectacle, and can be understood in terms of the consumer mindset that is prevalent amongst the British public. Bloomfield has produced familiar, useful objects, that bear vital information in the commonplace form of a headline and a number. During his research, Bloomfield became fascinated with conscientious objectors and the complex ethical stances that inspired their positions. During WW1 conscripted men could object to service on moral grounds, and often their ethics would be rooted in Christianity or Communism, centring on a refusal to take the life of another human being. In considering his role as an artist tasked with researching and interpreting the legacy of WW1 and the battle of Passchendael, Bloomfield wondered what the figure of the politically committed artist might have in common with that of the conscientious objector. This is a question that invites further consideration, particularly in terms of the concept of ‘equality of sacrifice’, whereby conscientious objectors were supposed to endure harsh working conditions, poverty and isolation, in line with conscripted soldiers’ hardships.

In an earlier stage of the project, before any ceramics had been fired, Bloomfield referred to Passchendaele as a battle that is known for its futility; there was a huge loss of life for relatively little military gain. The concept of futility in relation to war is important if we are to understand the role of the conscientious objector, and more pertinently, the artist as conscientious objector. The philosophical expression of futility, existential nihilism, becomes politically dangerous when applied too broadly as a response to violence and trauma, as Viktor Frankl warns in ‘From Death-Camp to Existentialism’, if people adhere to Nihilism and futility as a general attitude, then “they [believe themselves] to be either an automaton of reflexes, a bundle of drives, a psychic mechanism, a plaything of external circumstances or internal

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conditions, or simply a product of economic environment”1. Both Frankl, and the later theorist that quoted him, David Holbrook, sought to emphasise how people need to understand that they have an ability and responsibility to make choices that adhere to their ethics.

This sentiment was echoed in the talk given by Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University, Paul Rogers, at the launch of ‘In Service’ at the WCML, whereby Rogers spoke about feelings of futility in terms of activity and passivity. Rogers made the important point that in terms of vast transnational conflict, what feels like the most active, or indeed reactive response is often the most futile, whereas slow and seemingly passive work over time can be more measurably effective. Rogers suggested that one of the most useful things we can do is to loudly insist that what we are doing already isn’t working, and then insisting again, at every opportunity. The role outlined here by Rogers, of the ‘insister’, opens up a space where the artist as conscientious objector could be conceptualised. This has clearly been an influence for Bloomfield whose aesthetic decisions have consistently centred on the unassuming and the passive in order to convey meaningful information, as can be observed firstly in his choice of simple tableware as a medium, and then furthermore in his decision to use earthenware and hand painted designs that can be reproduced by non-specialists.

‘In Service’ marked the culmination of Bloomfield’s year-long research period and residency with WCML and Salford Museum & Art Gallery, and takes the form of 226 commemorative plates, one for each day of the Battle of Passchendaele. Each of them bears a title, a date range, and a number, marking one conflict with over 1000 casualties that has taken place since the ‘war to end all wars’. It produces a strange, sickly sensation to gaze upon the collected plates and to realise that there might be only two or three conflicts that you’ve heard of, the others having flared up and burnt out without troubling the minds of Britons. However as an integral part of this work, the plates will not be shown as a collection, but will instead be put into service in the Salford Museum & Gallery Cafe, where they will be used for serving, amongst other things, Hotpot and Cake. This choice of Bloomfield’s is an affront to the spectacles of commemoration mentioned earlier because this remembrance and commemoration must necessarily take place on an individual level, or perhaps at most between a small group. By incorporating commemoration into the daily necessity of dining, and the day-out at the local civic museum, Bloomfield is effectively decentralising and redistributing this important cultural and civic function, albeit on a modest scale.

Consideration of the meal in contemporary art, along with the forms of communal discourse that it can engender, is well established through relational aesthetics as well as practices that intersect with cookery as artistry and permaculture. As such, Bloomfield is not innovating with his choice to utilise the museum cafe, but rather adapting an existing structure towards his own ends and in doing so maintains a level of ambient familiarity, in turn facilitating the kind of prosaic engagement that this work requires to be successful. The stoneware plates were painted with their solemn designs during a weekend of workshops, not because it’s conceptually important for the work to be undertaken by assistants, but because Bloomfield knew that he would struggle to manage all 226 of them on his own. It is also accepted that some will be broken during their time in service at the museum cafe, and in this way the materiality of 1

Referenced on p. 56 of Holbrook, David, ‘Education Nihilism and Survival’ (1974), ‘From Death-Camp to Existentialism’, translated from the German, Beacon Press, 1959.

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the object is both vitally important, and utterly disposable, much like the lives of conscripted soldiers whose sacrifice is recognised only in as much as it is expected, bringing back to mind the ‘equality of sacrifice’ that conscientious objectors were expected to endure, but which must necessarily be insufficient.

Having briefly mentioned the simple, easy to reproduce design of Bloomfield’s ‘In Service’ plates there is one aspect that requires further explication, their engagement with numerosity. This term is generally used with regards to advertising, discussing the ways in which consumers react to and can be manipulated by numbers and their arrangement. A well known example of this would be the way that .99 is used instead of the next whole number in the pricing of goods, or the way that decontextualized numbers are used in headlines and campaigns to augment political arguments. With ‘In Service’, Bloomfield doesn’t seek to sensationalise the number of casualties that resulted from these 226 conflicts, but rather presents each horrifying number separately on its own plate. In singling these numbers out, rather than presenting them in relation to each other or to any more recent casualty-counts, we are invited to consider them outside of the flow of statistics that the general public are subjected to on a daily basis. Then, in conflating remembrance with the fundamental consumption required to sustain life, we are persuaded to consider each number in terms of the human lives that it represents. In this way, instead of inciting awe with the spectacle of the throng, Bloomfield is here performing a delicate operation whereby for the duration of their cup of tea, or meal, visitors to the Salford Museum & Gallery cafe are engaging in a profound and individual act of remembrance.

Whilst ‘In Service’ is unique to its context, the difficulties in responding to crisis, conflict and traumatic histories are of increasing relevance for contemporary artists and curators. It is important to avoid sensationalising, but also to avoid minimising, and the art institution itself occupies a problematic position politically, linked as it is to government and nation. As Hito Steyerl recounts in ‘A Tank on a Pedestal: Museums in the Age of Planetary Civil War’2, Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, one the most famous explicitly anti-war artworks, was first shown in open air at the Paris International Exposition, emphasising that at the time it was a new artwork dealing with the present. Steyerl’s argument centres on the push and pull between history as represented by the museum, and the present, insinuating that what older artworks and historical artefacts can tell us is limited, and perhaps even dangerous; “the future only happens if history doesn’t occupy and invade the present...the way old cannons are filled with cement before being displayed in parks”3. Bloomfield’s ‘In Service’ can be understood within Steyerl’s framework, in that it is firmly grounded in the present, particularly in the way that he utilises the Museum cafe, acknowledging the importance of these outlets in attracting audiences and generating revenue. By recognising and responding to the position of the museum in contemporary British life, Bloomfield’s insistent communication of historical facts that have been excluded from the dominant narratives of the past century’s conflicts becomes all the more effective.

In order to communicate a sentiment that is critical of war in general, Bloomfield could have been more explicit in his aesthetic choices, or could have referred to specific theoretical 2 3

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60543/a-tank-on-a-pedestal-museums-in-an-age-of-planetary-civil-war/ http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60543/a-tank-on-a-pedestal-museums-in-an-age-of-planetary-civil-war/

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tools like the military-industrial complex. It is impossible to measure whether explicitly violent imagery, or theoretical explication would arouse more effective commemoration in the viewer, but the flow of violent imagery that we are currently subjected to doesn’t seem to have shocked us into peace. By reducing the horrors of war to a simple, hand painted number, Bloomfield addresses the audience with an assumption of fellow feeling, rather than didacticism. The sense of dismay that this body of work evokes doesn’t depend on any background knowledge, and cogently illustrates what Hannah Arendt describes with such devastating clarity in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’; “The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems able to stop.” Yet, the simplicity of Bloomfield’s design leaves space, as there must always be within commemoration, in order to reflect on and respond to the present, and to insist on a future where we are no longer caught in this same chain reaction.

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ROXY TOPIA & PADDY GOULD

[bio]

Two Images On Displays of Masculinity [1] [2] Displays of masculinity are by no means the property of males alone, but I am speaking for myself. In our relationship, I think I tend to be the one who tries to attract attention and sometimes Roxy is immune, which I like. Sometimes she is not, which I also like. Really, I have a tendency towards exhibitionism in certain situations. They’re often wordless displays that try to fiddle the line between off-guard casual realness and just showing off. Dancing is a good place for me, an obvious one but good. We’re at this stuff all over the place of course. Typically competitive arenas, like sports, are an interesting one. Anything done in a game starts out right in the gusset of authentic behaviour, and goes from there.

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J.R. CARPENTER

[bio]

Of Glass After Margaret Cavendish

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Of Glass After Margaret Cavendish

of magnifying and multiplying glasses I have neither studied nor practiced that art with all its instruments does more easily alter than inform concave and convex glasses represent the figure of an object in no part exactly a glass that is flawed or cut into lozenges will present numerous pictures the perception of the senses goes no further than the exterior of the object presented that art for the most part makes hermaphroditical mixed figures partly natural partly artificial as pewter which is between tin and lead the truth by art magnified appears misshapen diseased, swollen ready, ripe for incision

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a louse by the help of a glass appears like a lobster flies will appear of several forms figures the picture is not the real body mistakes may easily be committed in taking copies from copies if a painter should draw birds according to colours the microscope presents what advantage for fowlers? a high heel to a short leg is apt to make the wearer fall an edge may well seem flat a point of a needle a globe by art the truth of an object will hardly be known LUNE_THE_DISPLAY_ISSUE__J.R. CARPENTER 122

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Theodoros Chiotis is the editor and translator of the anthology Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015). Other publications include Screen (Paper Tigers Books, 2017) and limit.less: towards an assembly of the sick (Litmus, 2017). His work has appeared in Litmus, Datableed, Forward Book of Poetry 2017, 3:am, Adventures in Form, Shearsman, amongst others. His project Mutualised Archives received the Dot Award by the Institute for the Future of Book and Bournemouth University; he has also been awarded a High Commendation from the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2017. His artist book a dataset of one’s own was part of the exhibition Around My Room.

Eleanor Rees is the author of numerous books. Her pamphlet collection Feeding Fire (Spout, 2001) received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002 and her first full length collection Andraste’s Hair (Salt, 2007) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards. Her second collection Eliza and the Bear (Salt, 2009) is also a live performance for voice and harp which has toured in the North West. In 2015 Eleanor published her third full-length collection Blood Child (Liverpool University Press/Pavilion, 2015) and a long pamphlet Riverine (Gatehouse Press, 2015).

Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould grew up in England and Northern Ireland and now live together in Birkenhead. They have been collaborating for over ten years, full time, life and art. Their art is often filled with desire. In 2018 they set up Pink Sands Studio, an artist’s resort that publishes zines, artist interviews and other travel information, in print and online. Three upcoming publications are focussed on pattern-in the sculpture of Stephen Forge, Heart Throbs and a collection of short, misanthropic stories. http://www.roxytopiapaddygould.com www.pinksandsstudio.com Roy Claire Potter is an artist writer from Merseyside who works across performance, publication, installation, and film, to address forms and modes of writing, reading, and speaking.

Sam Skinner is an artist and curator focusing on intersections between community, technology, and alternative modes of organising. He co-curated The New Observatory at FACT, Liverpool, in 2017, which coupled to research on the historic Liverpool Observatory, inspires the artist book these extracts are taken from.

Robert Sheppard Since publishing Words Out of Time , Sheppard has published History or Sleep: Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2015), Unfinish , (Veer 2016), Twitters for a Lark: Poetry of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (with Others) , Shearsman, 2017, and Micro Event Space , from Red Ceilings Press, 2019. He lives in Liverpool and is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Edge Hill University.

A book on his work, The Robert Sheppard Companion (edited by James Byrne and Christopher Madden) appeared in 2019.

Lauren Velvick graduated from the University of Manchester in 2010 with a degree in History of Art, curating Sunk Costs, 2011, and Hoist by Our Own Petard, 2012 at Islington Mill, Salford. During 2013 she took part in the activities of the Lionel Dobie Project, Manchester with a residency culminating in the publication of An Un-Sound Experiment. As Co-Director of The Exhibition Centre for the Life and Use of Books (2013-2015) Lauren produced exhibitions, events, performances and screenings including Butterworth: the Use and Abuse of Books, WE (Pil & Galia Kollectiv); Onion Widow performances, Simon Bookish & Jennet Thomas performances, and in 2015 was featured in Modern History Vol.I, curated by Lynda Morris. In 2016 Lauren curated a six-person residency and commissioning project based around the work of Christopher Joseph Holme, an unknown Preston artist whose prolific oeuvre she is custodian of, and from 2017-18 was writer-in-residence for In Certain Places during their ‘Expanded City’ project.

From 2016-18 Lauren was a Liverpool Biennial Associate Artist and in 2019 was selected for the inaugural curatorial fellowship at Art House Wakefield in collaboration with the Arts Council Collection. She is currently Assistant Curator at Humber Street Gallery, Hull and is a Director of contemporary art and writing publication Corridor8.

Nico Vassilakis is a verbo-visual poet. His books include TEXT LOSES TIME and The Amputation of L Mendax among others. He was an editor for The Last Vispo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 . Nico’s website is Staring Poetics - https://staringpoetics.weebly.com/ He lives in NYC. J.R. Carpenter is an artist, writer, and researcher working across print, performance, and digital media.

Her digital poem The Gathering Cloud won the New Media Writing Prize 2016. A book by the same name was published by Uniformbooks in 2017. Her debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins) was Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prizes in 2018. A new book based on her digital poem This is a Picture of Wind is forthcoming from Longbarrow Press in 2020. http://luckysoap.com Mitra Azar is an eclecto-nomadic video-squatter and ARTthropologist with a background in aesthetic philosophy. Mitra is now focusing his attention over processes of “gaze engineering” as a political-aesthetic battlefield, and he is producing a new body of work addressing the materiality of images and the nature of POV. Mitra has shown his works - both theoretical and practice based- in places such as Venice Biennial, Havana Biennial, Photomuseum Wintertur (upcoming), The Influencers Barcelona (upcoming), Fondazione Pomodoro Milano (Italy), Castello di Rivoli Torino (Italy), San Carpoforo Milano (Italy), Fondazione Vignato Vicenza (Italy), Hyperwerk Basel (Switzerland), Berlinale Festival Berlin (Germany), Transmediale Festival Berlin (Germany), In 2018 Mitra published Argon39 (Archive books, Berlin), an artist book about the mining history of a part of Sardinia as seen from the photographic archive of his grandparents, the first photographers operating on the Island.

Megan Bowyer is a recent Fine Art graduate with an interest in world building and storytelling in relation to classical art techniques.

Scott Thurston is a poet, mover and educator working in higher education in Manchester, UK. He has published fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including three full-length collections with Shearsman: Hold (2006), Momentum (2008) and Internal Rhyme (2010). More recent work includes Poems for the Dance (Aquifer, 2017), Draft Vicinity (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2018) and We Must Betray Our Potential (The Red Ceilings, 2018). Scott is founding co-editor of open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organized the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him collaborating with dancers in Berlin and New York as well as in the UK. Scott Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature, combinatory poetry, and films including The Unknown , Kind of Blue , Implementation , Frequency, The Catastrophe Trilogy, Three Rails Live, Toxi•City, Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project and others. His creative work has been exhibited both online and at art venues including the Venice Biennale, Inova Gallery, Rom 8, the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum, Palazzo dell Arti Napoli and elsewhere. Rettberg is the author of Electronic Literature (Polity, 2019), the first comprehensive study of the histories and genres of electronic literature and winner of the 2019 N. Katherine Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature.

Olly Gruner is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the University of Portsmouth. His research explores visual histories, politics and cultural memory. He is the author of Screening the Sixties: Hollywood Cinema and the Politics of Memory (Palgrave, 2016) and co-editor, with Peter Krämer of Grease Is the Word: Exploring a Cultural Phenomenon (Anthem, forthcoming). He is currently developing a series of collaborative projects that bring together historians and visual practitioners to explore new ways of visualising history.

Paula Kolar (b. 1996, in Vienna, Austria), is based in Liverpool and recently finished her MFA at the Ruskin School of Art. Her work spreads out across writing, performance, film, photography, drawing and focuses on migration, translation and border spaces. She writes, mostly when she feels confused, as an attempt to understand the spaces she engages with. This text was written as part of a performance script, digesting and dissecting fieldwork experience on the island of Lesvos, Greece in April 2019.

Sophie Jung (lives in London and Basel) works across text, sculpture and performance. She received her BFA from the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam and her MFA from Goldsmiths, London. Recent projects and exhibitions include Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa, Paramount VS Tantamount at Kunsthalle Basel, Unmittelbare Konsequenzen at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Producing My Credentials at Kunstraum London, Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water at Blain Southern, London, Dramatis Personae at JOAN, LA as well as The Bigger Sleep at Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart, CH and Block Universe, London. She is currently working on a body of sculpture for her upcoming solo exhibition at Casino Luxemburg. In 2015 Sophie has spent 6 months in New York at ISCP, courtesy of the Edward Steichen Award Luxembourg, in 2016 and in 2019 she won the Swiss Art Award and in 2018 she was the recipient of the Manor Kunstpreis. She is a freelance educator and is currently on the jury of the Swiss Performance Award. Her work oscillates between form and affect, pragmatism and romance, scrutinising accuracy and magical awe. She has a deep trust in temporary definitions, to be sculpted while furiously lazing on the apron proscenium, the pre-stage, as a fluid messenger between reception and production of time-lined purport. In case this wasn’t clear: She anxiously rages against patriarchal capitalism, phallogocentric order and the imperative of concluding from a position of seething, radical inclusivity.

Talan Memmott is a digital writer/artist/theorist. Memmott has taught and been a researcher in digital art, digital design, electronic writing, new media studies, and digital culture at University of California Santa Cruz; University of Bergen; Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden; California State University Monterey Bay; the Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Colorado Boulder; and the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently Professor of Creative Digital Media at Winona State University. Memmott holds an MFA in Literary Arts/Electronic Writing from Brown University and a PhD in Interaction Design/Digital Rhetoric and Poetics from Malmö University. He was a co-editor for the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 (ELO), and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, and is on the Board of Directors for the Electronic Literature Organization.

Paul Eastwood is a Wrexham-based artist with a practice that explores art as a form of social production and cultural storytelling. He creates narrated histories and futures to investigate how place and objects can communicate cultural identities. Eastwood studied at the Royal Academy and Wimbledon School of art and was the winner of the inaugural NOVA Art Prize, Wales in 2018. Recent exhibitions include: Dyfodiaith , solo project, Chapter, Cardiff; N OVA , Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Arcade, Cardiff, 2018; Segrgrair , Oriel Wrecsam, Litmus Residency and Exhibition, Oriel Davies, Newtown; Unit(e) Summer school, g39, Cardiff, all 2017; Editions commission, Paul Eastwood and Lucy Woodhouse, Focal Point Gallery; Feast of Fools , TAP, Southend, both 2016, and Severed, returning your love , Focal Point Gallery, 2015.

Ross Sutherland is a writer and creator of the experimental storytelling podcast, Imaginary Advice. He is currently translating word-searches into poetry. imaginaryadvice.com Will Lakeman is a photographer who plays as the wizard class. He is equipped with an enchanted robe which adds bonuses to stealth. lakemanphoto.com Mark Amerika has exhibited his artwork internationally at venues such as the Whitney Biennial of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Walker Art Center. In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, hosted Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME . In 2009, Amerika released Immobilité, generally considered the first feature-length art film ever shot on a mobile phone. He is the author of many books including remixthebook (University of Minnesota Press, 2011 — remixthebook.com), META/DATA: A Digital Poetics (The MIT Press, 2007) and remixthecontext (Routledge, 2018). His artwork Museum of Glitch Aesthetics [glitchmuseum.com] was commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympics. In 2013, the exhibition Convergence: Glitch. Click. Thunk. featuring Mark Amerika was hosted at the University of Hawaii and in 2017, he was the first American artist to have a survey exhibition of digital artwork in Havana, Cuba. Amerika was recently appointed Professor of Distinction.

Aimée Lê is a Vietnamese-American artist; Her work focuses on untranslatability, conceptual excess, authorial control and the ‘anecdotal’ through the lens of internationalism. She is the co-author, with Fiona Chamness, of the poetry collection Feral Citizens (Red Beard Press, 2011), and one of the founders of Occupy Dartmouth. Aimée holds a PhD in Practice-based Poetics from Royal Holloway, University of London.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist, curator, and researcher, focusing on the noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding, and feedback artifacts). These artifacts can facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions. This process of imposing efficiency, order and functionality does not just involve the creation of protocols and solutions, but also entails black-boxed, obfuscated compromises, and alternative possibilities that are in danger of staying forever unseen or even forgotten.

Rhys Trimble was born in Zambia. He is a bilingual poet, text artist, performer, drummer, editor, critic, collaborator, shaman, staff-wielder and shoutyman based in Wales. He edits ctrl+atl+del e-zine and is the author of twelve books of poetry and a ‘novel’, Swansea Automatic (2015). He is interested in avant-garde poetry, multilingual, spatial and processual poetics and Welsh metrics. His work has been translated into Slovak, Polish, Latvian and Turkish.

Emma Bolland is an artist and writer whose inter-medial practice investigates the problematics and ambiguities of an expanded understanding of translation—between languages and language codes, and between modes of writing, reading and speaking, working across text, performance, and moving image. https://emmabolland.com

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