Meet the artists behind this exhibit on Sunday, July 11 at 10 a.m. EDT (session 4.2.4).
Viewers are also invited to reach out to the artists individually with questions and comments.
Artists retain copyright to their respective works.
Breath Act as a Speech Act: A Poetic Paraphrase
by Carolin Aronis
In this poetic account on breathing in the Coronavirus time, Carolin Aronis illustrates the matter and practice of breathing as an elemental speech act, depended on and conditioned by technologies — from the mask to building openings. Using media ecology framework she describes the vulnerable human condition during the pandemic era and its future, weaving respiratory expressions and bodies to buildings, masks to doors, and mouths to balconies and laughter.
TO BE INVISIBLE GLASS, TRANS-FORM-HER-TIVE, and WE ARE ALL SURFACES IN THE ENVIRONMENT
by Bernadette “bird” Bowen
Streamlined: Cyber-minimalism - A visual decluttering of the void
by Sara Falco
VISPOETIX
5 videopoems by Adeena Karasick
UNTIE ME
Written and performed by Karasick, “Untie Me” explores the continuous binding and unbinding of time, information and being. Steeped in transgressive passion, it also speaks to forbidden love and the ways we are woven through continuous intergenerational cycles. The text was adapted from a poem entitled “Lorem Ipsum” featured in her recent book, Checking In (Talonbooks, Vancouver 2018). Derived from sections 1.10.32-3 of Cicero’s, De finibus bonorum et malorum, “Lorem Ipsum”, which means “pain itself”, has been homophonically translated from the Latin into a passionate love poem, and explores how the notion of “place holding” gets reworked through an impossible relationship both in love and in language. Music composed and performed by Italian dark wave post punk band, Mattatoio5, and is featured on their recently released CD, Escapes, 2021. Art direction by Italian based, filmmaker and media artist, Igor Imhoff.
THE BOOK OF LUMENATIONS (4 videos)
Particularly speaking to this “Covid moment,” these videopoems take as its jumping off point, the Biblical Eicha, The Book of Lamentations, which laments the destruction of Jerusalem and through reflection, deflection, refraction and the fracturing of language, homophonically re-situates the original text to the horrors and hope of the present moment. Tracking through “the city” as a desolate weeping widow overcome with misery, and moves through desolation ruin, prayer and recovery, it explores ways that in rupture, there is rapture.
As a text of defractions and transpositions, “contrascription,” substitutions, it becomes an annextual discourse of contemplative hunger. A ventriloquized latticework where each phrase a kind of contaminative “lexicell,” exaltically and ecstatically dis-easing the way a virus might enter another’s DNA erupting as a consanguinity of interconstellated contingencies. And as transpoesis it acts not only (in General Semanticist terms) as a “time binder” but through a luminous, voluminous threading of light, it highlights how darkness is a form of light, how text itself is, in essence, black light on white light, and thus opens up new ways of seeing and the cyclic nature of meaning and being.
And like McLuhan’s, Laws of Media whereby an artifact enhances, reverses, retrieves and obsolesces, these “translations” of The Book of Lumenations do not obsolesce the original but in Zoharic terms, (13th C. mystical discourse), these Book of Lumenations videos employ the concept of atikin haditin, a pseudo-Aramaic neologism that means “ancient new”; journeys deep within the original and makes it new.
Text written and performed by Karasick, the digital music, is composed and performed by Grammy Award winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London. Visuals created by Karasick, with Italian filmmaker, Igor Imhoff and digital media artist, Jim Andrews.
About the Artists
Dr. Carolin Aronis is a Research Fellow of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. She was a Postdoctoral Scholar of Communication at the University of Colorado-Boulder between 2019–2021, and served on the Media Ecology Association Executive Board between 2017–2020. In the Fall she will become an Assistant Professor in Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University. Two of her recent publications are: ‘Architectural liminality: The Communicative Ethics of Balconies and Other Urban Passages’ (in the journal Cultural Studies), and ‘The “Tweeting” Discourse of Balconies and Porches in the City: Identity Politics, Public Speaking, and Social Change’ (in the volume Urban Communication Reader IV). She can be reached at carolin.aronis@colostate.edu.
Bernadette or "bird" Bowen is a 31-year-old published poet who has posted on her WordPress blog OiseauxWords since 2017. She has a bachelors in sociology, a master’s in communication, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Bowling Green State University School of Media & Communication. Bernadette has been a communication instructor since 2015, and her research interests intersect the broad fields of critical and feminist theories, with an eye towards the ideological struggle between institutions, gender, sexuality, and media ecology. She was recently invited to the National Communication Association Doctoral Honors Seminar for her dissertation project entitled From the Boardroom to the Bedroom: Understanding Sexual Ecologies in an Algorithmic Age, a critical feminist rhetorical and media ecological analysis of biomimetic sextech advertisements in the violent U.S. sociosexual landscape. In 2019, she was awarded the BGSU SMC Harold & Elaine Fisher Award, awarded first and second place in the Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Graduate Essay Contest two years in a row, and the 2019 Media Ecology Association Top Convention Paper. Her academic publications include "#WhatNext: Political Implications of the #MeToo Campaign Aftermath" in Dr. Maria B. Marron’s second volume entitled Misogyny Across Global Media in the Rowman & Littlefield Communication Gender series, "The Role of Sassy Socialist Memes in Leftbook" in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology (EME), and "'Put it in the Box and No One Gets Hurt?': Unpacking the Lovebox" in the International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society. Since COVID, she published a (thus far) seven-part series of poetry chapbooks, which can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Bernadette-bird-Bowen/e/B096W12W27/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1. | Sara Falco, otherwise known as The W?ldcard, is a poet and artist, specializing in the digital mediums of graphic design and photography. She is a student at Temple University majoring in Media Studies & Production and minoring in Gender & Sexuality. Her work is inspired from a diversity of illusions including expressionism, animation, intersectional feminism, street art, the cosmos, and other projections of stardust.
Adeena Karasick, Ph.D., is a New York based Canadian poet, performer, cultural theorist and media artist and the author of ten books of poetry and poetics. Her Kabbalistically inflected, urban, Jewish feminist mashups have been described as “electricity in language” (Nicole Brossard), “proto-ecstatic jet-propulsive word torsion” (George Quasha), noted for their “cross-fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory” (Charles Bernstein) "a twined virtuosity of mind and ear which leaves the reader deliciously lost in Karasick's signature ‘syllabic labyrinth’” (Craig Dworkin); “demonstrating how desire flows through language, an unstoppable flood of allusion (both literary and pop-cultural), word-play, and extravagant and outrageous sound-work.” (Mark Scroggins). Most recently is Checking In (Talonbooks, 2018) and Salomé: Woman of Valor in dual edition of English and Italian (University of Padova Press, Italy, 2017), the libretto for her Spoken Word opera co-created with Grammy award winning composer, Sir Frank London and Salomé: Woman of Valor CD, NuJu Records, 2020, and Salomé Birangona, translation into Bengali, (Boibhashik Prokashoni Press, Kolkata, 2020). Karasick teaches Literature and Critical Theory for the Humanities and Media Studies Dept. at Pratt Institute, is Poetry Editor for Explorations in Media Ecology, Associate International Editor of New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, 2019 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award recipient and winner of the 2016 Voce Donna Italia award for her contributions to feminist thinking. The “Adeena Karasick Archive” is established at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. Forthcoming is Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations. |
© 2021 Media Ecology Association