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Visit People's Park Plinth

being being read being reading being read and reading beings

Part of Furtherfield Open Spots programme.

being being read being reading being read and reading beings

Two weekends of reading related happenings and art.

A twisted archive of the mind, language and technology project: Torque – presented via the lens of its current research: *reading*

Visitors will be invited to…

Try:
Animated speed-reading software.
‘Code Karaoke’ with live-coding artist Yaxu (11th April).
The new ‘Outlier’ app that sonifies reading using algorithmic sentiment analysis, by Wesley Goatley.
Record a super-slo-mo reading and broadcast it across the park.

Pick-up for free and read:
A newspaper on privacy, surveillance and ‘being read’ in the age of big data and online lives.
Receipt artworks by James Wilkes (Wellcome Collection resident artist).

Or just soak up the rampant textuality of:
Live readings from performance artist Tim Etchells and remote performance by Yaxu (11th April) and artist writer Claire Potter, with virtual appearance by Mez Breeze (18th April).
Sound work entitled ‘Mind Twist’ by Dennis Oppenheim on the exterior of the gallery.
Experimental text works from Anna Barham, Tim Etchells and Imogen Stidworthy.
A new text-based cgi video artwork by Chris Boyd.
Sound work of Karl Heinz Jeron’s opera singing robot Sim Gishel.
Video and text works by Torque producers Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner, including commissioned score by musician Oliver Coates.

And…

The launch of a new book entitled ‘The Act of Reading’, comprising new essays and artworks on the subject, including a new text by reader/author extraordinaire Katherine Hayles, entitled, ‘Nonconscious Cognition and Jess Stoner’s I have Blinded Myself Writing This’ and further contributions from: Garrett Stewart, Soenke Zehle, Erica Scourti, Stephen Fortune, Esther Leslie, Nina Power, Charles Bernstein, Claire Potter, James Wilkes, Eleanor Rees, Anna Barham and others.

What does it all mean?… well come on down, bury your head in the book, pdf, audio, sentiment analysed and sonified, or speed reading versions… and find out!

It may all sound a bit strange, but that’s the world we live in now and how we read today! 😉

Live Reading #1 – Tim Etchells and Yaxu, 3pm, Saturday 11th April. (Free)
Live Reading #2 – Claire Potter and Mez Breeze, 3pm Saturday 18th April. (Free)
(Yaxu and Mez Breeze remote/online performance)

Location

Furtherfield Gallery
McKenzie Pavilion, Finsbury Park
London N4 2NQ
T: +44 (0)20 8802 2827
E: info@furtherfield.org

Visiting information

Furtherfield Gallery is supported by Haringey Council and Arts Council England

Further details

Torque is a transdisciplinary project by artists Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner, that explores the twisting of mind, language and technology, through publications, symposia, performance, workshops and installation.

At Furtherfield, each of the three gallery spaces will be transformed into a three-dimensional manifestation and archive of the three publications and public research Torque have produced to date. The gallery will become a hypermedia reading room and examination of both reading and the Torque project itself, giving members of the public a deep and varying view of the pressures impacting our relationship to language, and in particular – reading – as it occurs today.

Room 1 will be dedicated to the Torque #1 publication.

Room 2 will present The Opticon newspaper – produced over two days at Tate Liverpool, focusing on themes of privacy and surveillance, in particular machinic reading, big data and the phenomenology of ‘being read’. Comprising contributions from over 100 gallery visitors, poets, artist Erica Scourti and professor of social media Christian Fuchs.

Room 3 will launch a new transdisciplinary digital and print publication exploring reading today, and the impact of technology upon it, following The Act of Reading symposium at FACT, Liverpool and a performance event at Static Gallery. This room will also feature new video works by Jones and Skinner synthesizing and investigating reading-related pathologies and pedagogical systems. 

Jones and Skinner will be in the gallery throughout the exhibition presenting and speaking about their work, and developing new works informed by their experiences and conversations.  

Torque project tumblr here
Free download of Torque #1 book and printed edition available here.
Digital version of The Opticon newspaper here 

Torque is supported by an Arts Council England Grants for the Arts, Tate Liverpool and FACT.

ReadingClub – A Hacker Manifesto v4.0 & The ARPANET dialogues

LIVE LINK HERE

In collaboration with Annie Abrahams and Emmanuel Guez, Furtherfield presents two new ReadingClub sessions based on excerpts from McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0] and the ARPANET dialogues

ReadingClub  proposes a text and an interpretive arena to 4 readers. These readers write together their reading of a text inside the text itself. The audience sees an evolving, cinematographic picture of thoughts and collaborative writing in the making.

Join the performance online at readingclub.fr and use the chat window to exchange, discuss and comment on the performance.

Event Schedule


Monday 21 October 2013, 8pm London Time A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]
Online performance session based on an excerpt from A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0] by McKenzie Wark with Aileen Derieg, Cornelia Sollfrank, Dmytri Kleiner and Marc Garrett.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Tuesday 22 October 2013, 8pm London Time The ARPANET dialogues
Online performance session based on an excerpt of the ARPANET dialogues from 1975-1976 with Alessandro Ludovico, Jennifer Chan, Lanfranco Aceti and Ruth Catlow.

The ARPANET dialogues is an archive of rare conversations within the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu convened between 1975 and 1979 that were conducted via an instant messaging application networked by computers plugged into ARPANET, the United States Department of Defense’s experimental computer network. All participants in the conversation were given special access to terminals connected to ARPANET, many of them located in US military installations or DOD-sponsored research institutions around the world.

What was originally thought to be a historic moment, when figures from within and without the established art canon first encountered the disruptive effects of digital network communications, turned out to be an ongoing research project by Bassam El Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq.

Further reading:

“This pre-Internet chatroom conversation between Jim Henson, Ayn Rand, Yoko Ono and Sidney Nolan is fake. But it’s amazing” – Robert Gonzalez in io9, December 2012.

“Ronald Reagan has joined the chatroom”Interview by Richard Fischer, CultureLab with Jeremy Beaudry, one of the artists behind the project, April 2011.

About the Project


The ReadingClub is a project by Annie Abrahams and Emmanuel Guez, inspired by Brad Troemel’s Reading Group and the Department of Reading by Sönke Hallman.

The project is supported by Dicréam.

+ More information about ReadingClub