Art, Language & Virtual Objects - speakers - Mark Leahy, Linzi Stauvers, Penny Florence, and John Cayley
[Presentation notes (in rough form) by Mark Leahy, followed by bios for Mark Leahy, Linzi Stauvers, Penny Florence and John Cayley have now been posted. There has been a change to the programme for this evening. John Cayley has already made a spoken contribution, standing in for Malcolm Bowie on Oct. 23. Cayley will still be available for questions and may show some work if there is time. Linzi Stauvers has been added as a speaker, particularly in view of her work on Carl Andre’s poetry.]
art language and virtual objects: instructions and modularity
mark leahy
In these 10 to 15 minutes I would like to focus on two areas as a response to works shown in the idea and object galleries; relating these to poetry or other works using written and textual elements, and addressing ways of reading these works that engage with a heuristics of performing them; how does the reader or viewer operate the work?
The first area I want to look at is:
1. the virtual object as the (potential / possible) outcome of a set of instructions (script / score)
and the second is:
2. the virtual object as the (potential / possible) outcome of a distribution / assemblage / deployment of discrete elements.
Part 1
As a visitor to these galleries do I ask /what are my instructions?/ do I wonder arriving at the top of the escalator /how do I proceed from this point?/ The rooms are ranged in a numbered sequence, there are pathways through them which are allowed, or which are encouraged, and others which are impossible to perform physically. The possible and impossible pathways may be followed in any order on the map on the Tate website or on printed materials:
1 2 4 5 6 … 1
1 2 3 10 11 … 1
1 2 3 2 4 … 1
1 2 3 10 9 8 … 2 1
These possible sequences are presented to the visitor, as directions, as instructions on the map, and she may choose how to implement them, how to perform the score on her visit.
Aside:
All visitors begin in room 1? and all leave by room 1? The two works in this space may then be thought to offer instruction for operating the works in the rooms beyond. As a point of entry, they may raise questions the other works will suggest answers to. Room 1 where the neon statement by Martin Creed, as a straightforward equation makes things initially appear simple, direct, unambiguous – implying that these galleries will be an area of clear definition, of things that can be encapsulated in unequivocal declarations; the Idea and Object range of rooms will offer the visitor a direct engagement with the idea (pure and simple) and the object (clearly other and defined); there is a simple declarative character to Carl Andre's floor piece -- it is what it is -- two metals, in flat square plates, arranged as flat square plates, there is no ambiguity, no confusion; …
‘The whole world + the work = the whole world’
The installed work by Martin Creed is made of bent neon tubes, these tubes of glass are gas filled and the gas is charged causing it glow; these shaped tubes are linked by electrical wiring and fittings, and are shaped to form letters when viewed from a particular angle; this textual aspect is incidental to the physical functioning of the work, we can see the piece, we can understand it as a material object, and then (also) we can read the piece;
Aside:
This is not the metaphoric reading of reading a landscape or reading a face or reading the future, but the reading of letters composed as words and organised into a statement. Is it possible to separate these experiences of seeing the neon as an object and reading it as letters and words? is such a proposition equivalent to a peeling apart of the denotative and connotative aspects of the piece? or a splitting of the signifier from the signified? Is the legible equation the content / referent level of the work? what is this content? the words and their meaning(s), the recognition of the origin of this statement in a philosophical tradition, the deliberate echo of the use of such statements by earlier artists, the usual contexts of neon signage as part of an advertising display or part of a modern urban environment; these connotative elements contribute to our reading. To read the phrase as text is to recognise it as being part of a textual or verbal tradition, relating to aphorisms, relating to argument by syllogism that seeks to prove things true or false, logically true or false (or unprovable); the phrase as text leads the reader back to Aristotelian dispute and questions of identity, and in the more recent past to an art historical context of 1960s conceptual art, a period of 'dematerialised' art documented by Lucy Lippard in Six Years ... , a book which also documents work by a number of other artists represented in this wing – LeWitt, Judd, Morris, Acconci, Andre, ...
Creed’s equation as a simple statement of identity can be related to certain forms of programming language, the generation of a negative or positive result, a true or false outcome to a statement or query may result in an on/off, zero/one output in the binary environment that forms the base of digital operations. Yet this equation raises ambiguities as the material, the content, on either side of the equals sign should balance. In mathematical terms, if we move 'the work' to the right, it becomes 'minus the work' and in this translation 'the whole world' survives unaltered, with or without 'the work'.
the whole world = the whole world - the work
The work, in the context of these galleries refers most immediately to the art work, this solipsistic art work that refers to these neon words, or the other works around it, or in its first installation on the portico of Tate Britain, to all the work in the museum ...
Fig 1: Piero Manzoni. Base of the World, Magic Base No. 3 (Homage to Galileo). 1961
Piero Manzoni in 'The Base of the World' conflates the elements of Creed's equation, turning 'the whole world' into 'the work' as he claims it (authors it) using a plinth and title; his dedication of the work to Galileo suggests a turning of accepted notions of relative position, of the place of the viewer in relation to the world, on its head …
Another reading of the neon equation is to take Creed's statement as rejecting the division between the world and the work, it becomes a statement that the work (of art) (of literature) is of the world, not distinct from or opposed to it. The work is part of the whole world not a representation of it, or a version of it, or a position from which the world may be viewed (as an object) -- the work is enmeshed in and implicated in the world (the whole world) and cannot offer an objective point of view instead of, or in opposition to, or as an alternative to that mess of intersecting subjectivities. A number of the works in these galleries, in their use of the everyday or found or machine made materials or components would seem to fit with this conception of the impersonal ordinariness of things, of stuff that does not show the trace of the individual intervention, that does not propose to represent a particular interpretation of the world. Yet there is within this distribution or application of a machine aesthetic or removal of the trace of the artist room for variation, for the particular, for difference.
One mode of removing the artist's hand from the work, of shifting the focus of attention to the process or to the idea of the work is by using instructions for its realisation. Ken Friedman in his essay 'Working from Scores' identifies this use of instructions with the operation of the score in the composition and performance of music.
From its basis in music in the strict sense, the idea of score in its extended form gave rise to the issue of musicality in an extended sense. This extension has important implications.
The first of these implications is that the work may exist as work in several forms:
-- as idea
-- as score
-- as process
-- as object.
Each of these forms has its own value and meaning.
( from Working from Scores by Ken Friedman) http://www.thecentreofattention.org/exhibitions/workingscores.doc
The use of instructions as and for the art work was developed by the artists associated with Fluxus, and by those labelled as conceptual artists –a label used to designate a number of those represented in these galleries.
Aside:
This short score by Ken Friedman on initial reading seems very open to interpretation, the idea, score and process leave room for the person who chooses to realise it. In Friedman's notes to the published score these possibilities seem greatly reduced, in particular in choosing to limit the meaning of elements.
Ken Friedman
Alchemical Theater
Assemble four elements.
Place the elements.
Act upon the elements.
1992, Oslo, Norway
Notes: This piece requires a collection of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. These elements may be organized in containers, in some raw form, or in a combination. The elements may be rearranged in different ways during the exhibition. http://www.thecentreofattention.org/exhibitions/fluxus.html
A Sol LeWitt wall drawing such as the piece in room % of these galleries, is realised by a team following LeWitt's written instructions, it is a work of translation, of interpretation, a code sequence being executed ... the same work is produced each time, and yet a distinct outcome results at each location, on each interpretation. LeWitt published a short text on the idea and implementation or realisation of his wall drawings in 1971.
The artist must allow various interpretations of his plan.
[…]
Each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently.
Neither lines nor words are ideas. They are the means by which ideas are conveyed.
[…]
The draftsman may make errors in following the plan without compromising the plan. All wall drawings contain errors. They are part of the work.
The plan exists as an idea but needs to be put into its optimum form. Ideas of wall drawings alone are contradictions of the idea of wall drawings.
The explicit plans should accompany the finished wall drawing. They are of importance.
(from Art Now, vol. 3, no. 2, 1971.)
LeWitt in this articulation of his wall drawings allows for the incidence or accumulation of errors, of variation, of difference; this is in part because they are realised by human drafters. (a machine implementation of the process might be expected to produce the same work repeatedly without variation. c.f. Software Structures by Casey Reas where she writes code to implement LeWitt's instructions in a digital form. {Software} Structures by Casey Reas
LeWitt does not propose that the idea alone is the work, it needs to be realised -- if LeWitt's wall drawings relate to code poetry or the writing of software – by extension then the code alone is not the work – it needs to run, to generate an output. This might be challenged by the work of Mez, or others who use Perl as a medium or present work written in computer languages.
Aside:
In engaging with digital literature the reader operates work that is the outcome or object of instructions, (underlying code is a script and a set of instructions that are performed by the programme). The reader may be given explicit directions, [click] [enter], or implicit ones – the action of moving the cursor until it becomes active. These works may be designed to generate a different outcome or experience on each visit, but the variation may at all times be dependent on access to a limited database of material (even as vast a database as the internet).
A number of recent exhibitions, publications and online projects use instructions explicitly: the 'walls' , project at the Poetry Café curated by Dell Olsen and Susan Johanknecht, and published as here are my instructions, Susan Johanknecht and Redell Olsen eds. (Gefn Press, London, 2004); the project 100 Instructions for Action for Kunsthalle Vienna curated by Gerald Matt, http://www.publicartvienna.at/files_e/8.html ; the Do It project curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist which has toured internationally, exists in book form, and continues to develop online; http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/0_manual.html ; and Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher's Learning To Love You More Learning To Love You More which invites both instructions and interpretations or realisations of these to be posted on the site. The slogans reported for assignment 63, 'make an encouraging banner', echo some of Martin Creed's statements in particular his neon piece installed near Clapton in Hackney – Work No. 203 'everything is going to be alright'. http://www.peeruk.org/html/projects/creed.html Another example is the International Database of Corporate Commands (IDCC), a research initiative of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. The International Database of Corporate Commands This collective gather, archive, and perform the slogans and captions of global advertising and branding. They take the texts literally as commands or instructions and act them out in appropriate locations … (just do it; think different, say it with flowers …). This project, along with that of Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Miranda July, suggest an intersection of instruction art, or art using instructions as part of its structure or form, and work that engages with the archive or database.
Part 2
instructions to modularity
In accepting that instructions or commands or assignments will be carried out in more or less different ways, with various outcomes, or various locations, the possibilities of the unrealised or alternative outcomes may also be considered. The local realisation of the given directions, becomes a site where this one of many possible outcomes has been performed; operating in a digital environment allows for a number of variant responses or outcomes to be held in menu or randomly accessed form. Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media identifies modularity and variability as two of the core principles of digital media – these are manifested in the manipulation of discrete units of data, and in the structure of the database. He discusses the development of postmodern or new media in relation to earlier forms:
[T]he discrete units of modern media are usually not units of meaning the way morphemes are. Neither film frames nor halftone dots have any relation to how a film or photograph affects the viewer (except in modern art and avant-garde film – think of paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and films of Paul Sharits – which often make the “material” units of media into units of meaning). (Manovich 29)
Lev Manovich. The Language of New Media. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2001).
Ed Ruscha’s drawing ‘The End’ (Room 11) may represent two partial frames of celluloid film (16 or 32 mm), two frames from the end titles of a (b&w?) movie. The cutting of the words by the frame along with the vertical white streaks gives a sense of movement, of the movement of the film when projected, a movement that has been frozen in the drawing. Freezing the film at the between-frames junction reveals the material behind the illusion of cinema. When running at 24 frames per second the film gives the illusion of movement, or perhaps in the end title, the cessation of movement. The end of the illusion when the film jams may parallel the stripping off of illusion when the choice is taken to ‘reveal code’ on an html web page. The code that presents the background colour, places the images, formats the text; when it is revealed the mechanics of the illusion are uncovered; the fact that the 'page' is an assemblage of discrete elements – jpg files, text, frames, video clips, gif icons … becomes evident. These elements are in this configuration here, but might be deployed differently if the audience or reader were different, or may be being accessed in a different context by another reader elsewhere.
Ruscha in his series of word images has worked with aphoristic statements, with slogans, with brand and character names; and some of his paintings or drawings might be read as instructions or commands: 'Turn Around' or 'Shock the World' or 'Play Ball' … his caption at the end of the book that collects these works reads:
Sometimes found words are the most pure because they have nothing to do with you. I take things as I find them. A lot of things come from the noise of everyday life. (Ruscha np)
Ed Ruscha. They Called Her Styrene (London: Phaidon 2000)
There is not a larger narrative or an organising principle underlying the various examples, what they have in common is their having been gathered and drawn or painted by Ruscha, and their origin in some ordinary language environment. Bruce McLean's piece 'King for a Day' is also a compendium works, in this instance of 1000 works, presented as a list, installed originally as a grid of sheets of paper on the floor of the Hayward Gallery. McLean presents the list as the work, and it is also an inventory, a database of possible realisations.
[…]
190. Instruction piece for Ballrooms (RF forward and across in PP).
191. Participation piece.
192. Latest offering piece. art work.
193. McLean in the boy's Gym.
194. Touch piece, grip grope grab art work.
195. An evergreen memory piece. Art work.
196. 'There Grassy Places' art work.
197. Erotic porno piece, artwork.
198. Hopscotch (Anthony Caro) executed (art work).
199. Etching (a day in the life of an etcher) Piece.
200. Acquisition piece. thing.
201. Song/dance joke laugh cough. Art piece/work etc. 7th version.
202. Fresh look at the last 200 pieces (piece).
203. Think piece.
204. Installation for super duper markets. (work).
205. Retrospective art piece.
206. Art as object (work).
207. Climb every mountain (piece).
208. Walk every highway (piece).
209. Climb every rainbow (piece).
210. Mickey Mouse cult piece.
211. Jimmy Young (edible piece).
212. My love sculpture grows where my Rosemary goes (piece).
213. Heavy rock/jazz (sound installation work).
214. Moving around the Tate (art work).
215. Everybody's talking about it (oral piece).
216. Dig your garden (work).
217. Mow your lawn. (work).
218. Cut your grass (work).
219. Edge your lawn. (work).
220. Dig that crazy rhythm, piece.
221. The artist as a baker. (work).
222. The artist as a bricklayer, (work).
223. The artist as an artist. (piece).
191. Participation piece.
192. Latest offering piece. art work.
193. McLean in the boy's Gym.
194. Touch piece, grip grope grab art work.
195. An evergreen memory piece. Art work.
196. 'There Grassy Places' art work.
197. Erotic porno piece, artwork.
198. Hopscotch (Anthony Caro) executed (art work).
199. Etching (a day in the life of an etcher) Piece.
200. Acquisition piece. thing.
201. Song/dance joke laugh cough. Art piece/work etc. 7th version.
202. Fresh look at the last 200 pieces (piece).
203. Think piece.
204. Installation for super duper markets. (work).
205. Retrospective art piece.
206. Art as object (work).
207. Climb every mountain (piece).
208. Walk every highway (piece).
209. Climb every rainbow (piece).
210. Mickey Mouse cult piece.
211. Jimmy Young (edible piece).
212. My love sculpture grows where my Rosemary goes (piece).
213. Heavy rock/jazz (sound installation work).
214. Moving around the Tate (art work).
215. Everybody's talking about it (oral piece).
216. Dig your garden (work).
217. Mow your lawn. (work).
218. Cut your grass (work).
219. Edge your lawn. (work).
220. Dig that crazy rhythm, piece.
221. The artist as a baker. (work).
222. The artist as a bricklayer, (work).
223. The artist as an artist. (piece).
[…]
from Bruce McLean 'King for a Day and 999 other pieces/ works/ things/ etc.' 1970.
In this work by McLean, it is interesting to note that (and how) he distinguishes between works, things, pieces, actions etc. Within the database of artworks, McLean uses the meaning of work as labour to allow for an articulation of the place of art in the world. The elements of the list are discrete, and they are also subject to a taxonomy. The discrete units of the celluloid film are referred to in Ruscha’s drawing, where in the expansion of the frame into an enlarged unit, a pair of fractional frames, a gap and a link on a stream of fleeting impressions is isolated and frozen into a meaning unit. The assemblage of many of the works in this Idea and Object wing from discrete units, readymade equivalent elements that are arranged, or organised in rows or grids, owes something to the fragmentation of Modern models of production. The artist avoids the handmade, the wholly fashioned, in favour of the assembling of existing units. If for Ruscha these are ‘found words’, taken from the ‘noise of everyday life’, for Carl Andre they may be sections of sheet steel or brass or copper, taken from the factory, the machine works.
The Ruscha drawing takes the two fractional frames of ‘The End’ and reorganises them to a higher level, not as narrative, as the film might have done, but the frame of the page gives them qualities of a window and a complex surface that is looked at and through. Carl Andre’s organisation of the plates of metal creates a surface, in three strips of two wider flanking steel ones, and a narrower central copper one. These three strips are further organised into a pathway or walkway by their being placed running through the opening between two rooms. Jeff Koons' basketballs are set apart as a trio in their glass case, yet they are generic and substitutable – reading them as an ellipsis sign /dot dot dot/ they are not final, but exemplary of any unit that might fill their slot … extending the series indefinitely.
The listed or inventoried or categorised or assembled units become paradigms, operating as sets of data or material from which choices are made, existing virtually or implicitly. The explicit instance realised in one arrangement or actualisation operates syntagmatically in the present as an evident chain of linked choices.
Elements in the syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while elements in the paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia. ... Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit. (Manovich 230)
The database functions as a system of equivalent units that may be used to fill a particular slot, the action of choosing is repeated, the slot on the chain is equivalent, the content chosen to fill this slot is categorically or structurally the same or similar, it fulfils the requirements set by the command or instruction, but each discrete unit may in other ways be very different.
books metonymically instead of alphabetically andor make the alphabet do the chicken dance andor walk a lobster on a leash along the banks of the seine andor go slowly crazy in santa ana california andor think of eddie murphy singing Roxanne when you do the police in different voices andor convince universities to replace phd candidacy exams with quake deathmatch tournaments andor insert pages of your manuscript in the fissures of a limestone cliff so that over the ages they might become part of the fossil strata andor pull the wool over your own eyes andor claim that there is a great deal to be silent about andor choreograph a version of lord of the flies by william golding to be performed as an irish folkdance by michael flately andor urge yourself back by the absence of imposed escapes andor launch the bleeding head of arnold palmer andor carve into the face of a mountain some text chosen at random from your kitchen notepad like will be back at five love Darren andor arrange for kazoo orchestras to perform the symphonies of beethoven andor pretend that you are leonard cohen so long as you start with the part of his career where he gives up writing and goes to live in a buddhist monastery thereby avoiding the crappy folksinging part altogether andor develop a few thoughts in view of the immediately preceding phrase andor express your lack of confidence in concrete
from THE TAPEWORM FOUNDRY andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination.
DARREN WERSHLER-HENRY /ubu editions 2002. 54
In Darren Wershler-Henry's Tapeworm Foundry both the form of instructions and of the database or inventory are represented in an infinite /looped/ sequence of potential or possible realisations. Addressing the reader in the second person, the loop is a linked chain connected by a repeated andor command allowing for all or some or none of these examples to be attempted. Darren Wershler-Henry refers to Modernism in a number of the works the text alludes to, incuding Finnegans Wake, whose last first line and overall structure are quoted. The book length text unites instruction and database in a compendious text that might embrace the whole world, the world of popular culture, of literature, of art, of the mundane and the incidental. In its infinite series, the book offers a range of equivalent commands to do actions or make works that are not distinguished from each other in by any hierarchy. The text extends across the pages in a patterned field articulated by the repeated 'andor' operator. This work might relate to the grid based works of Carl Andre or Agnes Martin, extending across an available area without a value or function distinction between the constituent elements.
In looking at a heuristics of reading works, we can consider how the reader learns from the work how she may read it. Certain works propose their reading time or method or approach.
In relation to works that are developed in response to a set of instructions the reader may reverse engineer them (as was discussed in one of the other sessions), in this case part of the work or pleasure of reading the work is working it out, decoding it, unpacking the process that has brought about this arrangement or result of materials and marks. andor she may consider the unrealised versions or the possible other versions.
In engaging with works that use modular elements, repeated units, discrete parts, the modes of assemblage are part of the reading, the rhythms and structures set up by the relations between the elements. If these elements are found, not fashioned, if they already have associations or meanings before their combination in the work then these external factors are legible within the text of the piece. The assemblage of discrete units may be analysed by the reader, parsed as a sentence might be, or listened to as a beat, or they may begin to be considered as elements in a database, or an inventory; again offering alternate arrangements, other orderings.
Idea and Object Wing, Tate Modern, September 2006.
Mark Leahy
I began to think about kinds of reading, ways of reading that this work brought out in me, brought me out in (like spots) maybe because I was here with that hat on, the reading hat, or even the poetry hat, there was a particular context to my wandering through these rooms, I was thinking about e and eye, eye and e, maybe even doing my homework.
I’d brought a friend along, for company, and she’s a member so we could go up on the roof later and have tea in the sunshine ... this was one of those late autumn days that blazed out a bit unexpectedly ... and it was lovely on the roof, on the south side, where hardly anyone was as there’s less to see from there.
Making my way through the rooms of Idea and Object we were reading at different paces, so she kept getting ahead of me, not quite in that way of reading a newspaper over someone’s shoulder and you’ve read faster than them and you’re tapping your fingers in your head waiting for the page to turn and why can’t they hurry up ... no, it was a bit more like the person who has to read the name and date and detail on every headstone in the cemetery and the pub down the road will stop serving lunch very soon, so she was often heading on into the next room, while I was still in the midst of some piece. Not that either of us was in a hurry, we were reading the stuff in different ways, and the different stuff provoked different reading.
Reading the various material texts, works on paper, drawn words, painted or cut or made words, feels physically different from reading on a screen or monitor or on a page. We are oriented towards the work bodily, in relation to its scale, to its weight, the matter it is composed of. The texts in these works operate differently, situating the works in other discourses, drawing on other uses of phrases, of typefaces, of language. The works without words in or on them are labelled, are captioned, and are already within a written, spoken, printed discourse of art history.
For November 13th, I want to consider some of the ways these works may be read, how they may be read as poetry, as part of a system of signs, as having qualities of digital literature, how they can be read in relation to other texts, read at different paces.
Mark Leahy is a writer and curator, who works with text, objects and performance. Recent critical essays include ‘Plantation and Thicket: A Double (Sight) Reading of Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘Garden of Cyrus’, in Performance Research 10.2; ‘Tina Darragh: Performing the Familiar Sentence' published online at How2, vol. 2 no 2; ‘“I might have been a painter”: John James and the Relation between Visual and Verbal Arts’ in The Salt Companion to John James, edited by Simon Perrill (due Winter 2006) and ‘Private public reading: Readers in digital literature installation’ in The Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies (due Spring 2007). He is curator of the exhibition ‘Public Pages’ as part of conference Poetry and Public Language 2007 at University of Plymouth (April 2007). Since September 2005 he has been Director of Writing at Dartington College of Arts, England.
Linzi Stauvers obtained both her BA and MA in History of Art at University College London, where she is currently undertaking the third year of her PhD, supervised by Briony Fer. Her thesis is entitled, Stein through the sixties: Minimal and Conceptual artists practice Gertrude Stein’s poetics. For this, she is using the work of Carl Andre, John Cage, Hanne Darboven, Roni Horn and Yvonne Rainer to produce a reading of Stein’s writing, in terms of phenomenology and syntactical order, across several media.
Penny Florence is currently Head of Research Programmes at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She has published a number of books and articles in areas related to e-poetry, but this series (e and eye) is her first foray directly into the field. The direct precedent in her work to e and eye is an interactive CD of a visual poem: Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé on CD-Rom, edited, translated and introduced by Penny Florence. Concept and Design by PF, programming and design by Jason Whittaker. With accompanying essays by Florence, one with Whittaker. Legenda - European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Interactive CD and 75 pp. essays.
This CD is in turn a development, after some years, out of her first book, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon. Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning, Cambridge Studies in French, Cambridge University Press, 1986, 167pp. and 78 illustrations.
In between, she has published on film, literature and the visual arts, and has made a few films, most of which have deservedly disappeared. They are, in a sense, an expression of the desire to discover e-poetry and poetics.
John Cayley is a London-based poet, translator, publisher and bookdealer. Links to his writing in networked and programmable media are at www.shadoof.net/in. His last printed book of poems, adaptations and translations was Ink Bamboo (London: Agenda & Belew, 1996). Cayley was the winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's Award for Poetry 2001 (www.eliterature.org). He is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of English, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and has taught and directed research at the University of California San Diego and Brown University, amongst other institutions. His most recent work explores ambient poetics in programmable media, with parallel theoretical interventions concerning the role of code in writing and the temporal properties of textuality (bibliographic links are available from the shadoof site).
e and eye
Monday 13 November 2006, 18:30-20:00, Tate Modern, Idea and Object Gallery
the speakers invited to lead gallery talks & performances are practitioners & theorists in a variety of media ...
