ALISON KNOWLES PERFORMANCE AND BOOK RELEASE

PRINTED MATTER, INC. 195 Tenth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd), NYC
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2009, 5-7PM

Please join Sara Ranchouse Publishing at Printed Matter, Inc., 195 Tenth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd), NYC, on Friday, November 6 from 5-7pm, for the publication release of "Plah Plah Pli Plah" by artist Alison Knowles. Knowles will be present to sign copies of her book.
"Plah Plah Pli Plah" documents the sounds, performance and material of Knowles’ handmade paper and dried bean instrument “Bean Turners.” It includes transcriptions of the instruments’ sounds, images of Knowles performing, scores, and a “bean page instrument,” fabricated especially for this project at the Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, Chicago.

Knowles and others of her Bean Turner Ensemble will perform her instruments throughout the evening. Don’t miss this opportunity to see and hear Alison’s amazing instruments live and to support the publication of "Plah Plah Pli Plah."

If you won’t be in New York, you can purchase "Plah Plah Pli Plah" and other of Knowles’ books online at: www.sararanchouse.com. Shipping is free within the US (mention this email) if you place your order before November 30, 2009.

ALISON KNOWLES is a visual artist known for her soundworks, installations, performances, publications and association with Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group formally founded in 1962. Since the early 1960s, she has traveled and performed throughout Europe, Asia and United States. Some of her seminal book projects include "Notations," a book of experimental composition that she designed and co-edited with John Cage (1968, Something Else Press), and "The Big Book" (1967), a walk-in book comprised of 8 ft. pages around a center spine, permitting the spectator/reader to physically go inside of the book. "Bean Rolls," a canned book, appeared in the Whitney Museum exhibition The American Century (2000), and in 1968, "The House of Dust," programmed with the help of composer Jim Tenney, was recognized as the first computer poem on record, winning her a Guggenheim Fellowship. For more information about Alison Knowles, please visit: www.aknowles.com.

SARA RANCHOUSE PUBLISHING was founded in 1993 to promote printed matter, especially the book, as a space in which to make and read visual art and unconventional texts. We are interested in found, rearranged and recontextualized texts, images and materials; in the significance of the physical make-up and production requirements of a publication in relation both to its content and to its subsequent functional and economic life; and in the pursuit of collaborative projects, especially those that resuscitate material that has been under acknowledged. Alison Knowles’ early score and publication, "The Identical Lunch" (1969), is one of our favorite books of all time and we are so pleased to be able to offer a Knowles title ourselves, forty years later! For more information about Sara Ranchouse Publishing, visit: www.sararanchouse.com or write info@sararanchouse.com.

PRINTED MATTER INC. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists’ books and other artists’ publications. Printed Matter maintains a public reading room where over 15,000 titles by 5,000 international artists are available for viewing and purchase. For more information about Printed Matter, Inc., please visit: http://printedmatter.org.

Call for Papers: *Before and after 9/11: American Literature and Visual Culture*

A one-day conference at the University of Leicester

Friday 18 June 2010

The twenty-year span from the end of the Cold War to 2009, a period that has 9/11 almost at its mid-point, has been a fertile one for American literature. Especially in the wake of 9/11 and the “war on terror” writers have re-engaged with politics: recent writing has commented on Guantanamo, the political responses to 9/11, the war of image and rhetoric waged by the government against the American people and America’s role in Iraq. Environmental and cultural policies have also seen increased attention. Political decisions after 9/11 have had an undeniable impact on contemporary literature and visual representation, but can these art-forms exert any influence in return?

The relationship between word and image has also come under examination in this period of reassessment. A generation of creative and critical thinkers have begun to chart the difficult moral and ethical territory of the responsibilities inherent in any act of representation after 9/11. Critics argue that political responses to 9/11 have created a ‘Culture of Fear’ that “limits our intellectual and moral capacities, it turns us against others, it changes our behavior and perspective”[ <#_ftn1>1] This culture has encouraged acts of resistance in both literary and visual expression.

We invite papers that investigate any aspect of American literature’s engagement with the politics surrounding 9/11, from Canada and Latin America as well as the United States. We are especially interested in papers that explore formal and ideological developments in American writing across this period, either through the investigation of changing priorities and themes or through developments in the work of specific authors, and in those that look at the impact of visual culture on American writing.

Papers could address:

• American writing and/or visual culture after 9/11
• The use of word and image to manipulate public opinion
• Responses to the images of 9/11 and the Iraq war
• Writing about the environment or the construction of cultural memory
• Resistance through formal innovation
• The theory and ethics of representation after 9/11
  

Please submit 200 word proposals for 20 minute papers to Emma Kimberley (ek36@le.ac.uk) by 30th January 2010.

Placing Poetry: A reading and colloquium 6th-7th November 2009 at Bangor University, Wales

Placing Poetry: A reading and colloquium 6th-7th November 2009 at Bangor University, Wales.

Friday 6th November 5.30pm

Lecture Room 1, Main Arts Building, Bangor University

Please email z.skoulding@bangor.ac.uk for further details

Readings by:

Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Harriet Tarlo
Nerys Williams
Elzbieta Wojcik-Leese



Saturday 7th November 10 am-6pm

WISCA Seminar Room, Main Arts Building, Bangor University

9.30 Coffee

10.00 Ian Davidson and Zoe Skoulding - Introduction and overview of
Placing Poetry

10.15-11.15 Textual Spaces 1

Alice Entwistle - Taking place: politics, positionality and poetic form

Nerys Williams - Transforming information as a site for poetic knowledge

11.15 Coffee

11.30-12.30 Textual Spaces 2

Elz.bieta Wójcik-Leese - Placing the Poem in Translation

Peter Barry - Just Looking

12.30 -1.30 Lunch

1.30-3.15 Ethical and political spaces: counter-space and protest

Jules Boykoff - Poets as Experimental Geographers: Mark Nowak, Kaia Sand
and the Reconstitution of Historical-Political Space

Kaia Sand - Poem/NonPoem: The Work of Laura Elrick, Kristin Prevallet &
David Buuck

John Wrighton - Ethnopoetics and the Performativity of Place

3.15 Tea/Coffee

3.30-5.30 Environment

Carol Watts - Zeta Landscapes: Thoughts on Poetry, Place and Number


Harriet Tarlo - Fieldwork: open form poetry and poetics in and around the
field

Matthew Jarvis - In/human Place: The Poetry of John Barnie

5.30 DVD paper John Kinsella- Territories of Birds: further de-mapping
and reconnoitring notations of boundaries

Poetry Wales issue 45.2

Poetry Wales issue 45.2 features Nerys Williams on Juliana Spahr and the American long poem, Robert Minhinnick on the Llynfi Valley, Matthew Jarvis in dialogue with John Kinsella on Welsh environments, and John Goodby on the Hay Poetry Jamboree.

There are translations from Danish, Welsh and Chinese by John Barnie, Fflur Dafydd and Pascale Petit respectively, and poems by Frances Presley, Peter Larkin, Mark Goodwin, Peter Hughes and Carol Watts, Katherine Stansfield, Anna Lewis, Linda Black, Vuyelwa Carlin and John Kinsella.

Reviews include Tim Liardet on Damian Walford Davies and Richard Marggraf Turley, Alison Brackenbury on Ian Gregson, Fiona Owen on Ruth Bidgood and John Powell Ward, Tony Frazer on translations of Victor Rodríguez Núñez and Petr Borkovec, Elzbieta Wójcik-Leese on European poetry, and Peter Hughes on Harry Guest and Sirol Troup.

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This issue is available for £5.50 inc. UK postage, annual subscriptions at £20 (£18 for students), cheques to Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, CF31 3AE Wales, or online http://www.seren-books.com/poetry-wales/
For other subscription enquiries or overseas subscription rates please email robingrossmann@seren-books.com

TARPAULIN SKY PRESS IS HIRING

No pay--aside from fame and free books. Start immediately.

Over the next couple weeks, Tarpaulin Sky Press will be filling a variety of editorial and production positions. If you are interested in working for us, please email Christian Peet & Editors at newstaff[AT]tarpaulinsky[DOT]com, and let us know your experiences with (or your desire to be part of) Tarpaulin Sky Press and the small press community as a whole.

Please understand that we would be delighted for you to read submissions, but also that we consider reading submissions to be "the fun part" of editing, and that editors at TSky have many other responsibilities. Also, while ambition will serve as a fine substitute for experience in several positions at TSky Press, we are also looking specifically for people with experience in one or more of the following areas: web design, book design, event coordination, marketing and promotion.

It is not necessary to send a resume/CV--a letter will do fine--
but we will happily peruse anything you send.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Christian Peet & Co.
Tarpaulin Sky Press

ELO_AI: Archive & Innovate

The Electronic Literature Organization's
Fourth International Conference
& Program of Digitally Mediated Literary Art

June 3-6, 2010
Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Organized by the ELO and Writing Digital Media
at the Brown University Literary Arts Program
dedicated to Robert Coover

The Electronic Literature Organization and Brown University's Literary Arts Program invite submissions to the Electronic Literature Organization 2010 Conference to be held from June 3-6 in Providence, Rhode Island, USA.


electronic literature . writing digital media .
language-driven digital poesis . literal art . literary hypermedia .


We welcome papers and presentations on a broad range of topics. The conference will focus on the theory, criticism, close-reading, practice and archiving of language-driven digital art and poetics. Our gathering will also embrace all the related cultural practices that continue to be addressed by scholars and artists in our growing field:

expressive processing, computational art, artificial cognition and intelligence, aesthetic gaming, information art, codework, digitally mediated performance, network & media art & activism.


In addition we will give a special welcome to papers that engage with the contribution that Robert Coover has made to our field. A festschrift comprised of papers from the conference is proposed and Professor Coover will be our chief featured (e)Writer. (Other featured speakers to be announced shortly.)

In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Program of Language-Driven Digital Art, concentrating on but not confined to installation works. We plan to show the selected work in gallery spaces close to the conference venue in downtown Providence over a two week period. Subject to funding restrictions, selected artists will be awarded bursaries to assist with attending the conference.

If you want to give a paper, or form a panel, at this point, please submit a maximum 500-word abstract, with title and brief bio (indicating affiliation, if any).
If you are proposing an installation, or an artistic presentation, or an alternative (innovative) proposal please also describe this in 500 words or less, with title, and bio(s). If you send illustrative, digitized AV materials, either keep these (byte-wise) small and short, or send us links.

Deadline for Submissions: December 15, 2009

- Send to: elo.ai@eliterature.org.
Notification of Acceptance: January 25, 2010
PLEASE NOTE: Deadline for full papers will be May 1, 2010
to allow for reflection and exchange on the papers prior to the conference and to get a head-start in the publication process.

The basic cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100.
Conference registration covers access to all events, the reception, some meals, and shuttle transportation.
All conference attendees are also expected to join the ELO before the conference and this can be done at registration.

We are planning to implement online submission and registration. Before submitting, please consult the conference website at ...

http://ai.eliterature.org

... where these facilities will be available and where you will find much more information about both the content and the form of the conference and arts program.

After consulting the website, for further queries and all email correspondence contact:
elo.ai@eliterature.org

The above address should be used for all conference business. It will checked by myself and also those colleagues and students who will be assisting me with the conference organization. But I appreciate that you may sometimes also want to get in touch with the conference organizer: John Cayley Literary Arts Program - Box 1923, Brown University, 68 1/2 Brown Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA. office: +1 401 863 3966, John_Cayley@brown.edu


FURTHER SUPPORT AND SPONSORSHIP SOLICITED
The Conference is currently sponsored and supported by
The Electronic Literature Organization, Brown University Literary Arts Program,
Brown University Creative Arts Council, Brown University Library, and the RISD D+M Program.
Any organization or individual in receipt of this call who would like to sponsor and
support this major international conference, please get in touch.
External sponsors are being sought and will be appropriately acknowledged.