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We in the City, We on the Web

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Former First Person Plural participants and multi-media art duo LoVid are currently producing/facilitating URQR, a project that we think speaks to the First Person Plural theme and the kinds of questions we’ve been posing through the FPP readings and website.  LoVid became interested in QR codes as part of the flow of near ubiquitous and invisible data around us; as they say, “Our networked, online activities dominate and shape our daily lives.  Do U begin where the flow of data ends?”.  The main feature of URQR was an interactive public project in which participants had a small segment of a large QR code painted across their faces.  A compilation of photographs of the participants’ painted faces will produce a QR code that will take the user to a website featuring, among other conversations, the original participants’ answers to questions such as the following:

What do you bring with you?

Where do you hold information?

How do you remember?

Face to Face with another, Where do your eyes wonder?

What do you notice first in a place?

What can you see through a lens that you don’t see otherwise?

In URQR, faces become part of a larger code for information, but they also submit to the very intimate act of having their face delicately worked on by a painter, a painter who asks questions and who can’t, in the end, eliminate contours, facial features– all the ways people resist becoming 2-dimensional.  LoVid says of the final compilation, of the QR code made up of many: “The machine will recognize the pattern.  The viewers will look for traces of personhood.  The lens will attempt to smooth the skeletal contour.  Viewers will identify the residue of expressions.”

Through our daily transactions, machines and virtual space become our minds, they hold our memory, they collectivize and abstract our identities.  But we are also eccentric cul de sacs, each of us.  To join the conversation about technology and selfhood, you can go, without irony, to U R QR on Facebook and @URQR_URQR on Twitter.

Check Out “Writing on It All” on Governor’s Island

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It’s taboo to write on the walls of a house. But in this series of seven sessions, invited artists and writers, along with interested members of the public, collaborate in writing on the interior of an out-of-use house on Governors Island as part of “Writing On It All,” a series of interventions conceived of and executed by Alexandra Chasin and Jen Bleier.  Writing On It All takes place in an early 20th-Century house that used to serve as senior officer housing when Governors Island was a military base.

“Out of Regiment: A Project in Personal Mapping,” a project by FPP co-founder Wendy S. Walters, took place on June 22, 2013. Participants were asked to explore topics associated with the history of the island.  Among their own personal touchstones, they engaged with the concepts of fortress, harbor, isolation, and the sea.  All work produced during the session was subject to modification or erasure by subsequent participants, and the space was whitewashed following the event’s conclusion.

On June 29 a closed session is taking place with the Bellevue and NYU programs for survivors of torture.  The last session of the series that is open to the public, takes place on Sunday, June 30.  It will be hosted from 12 to 3 by Ébauche, a multi-genre collaborative arts project: Rebecca Bates, Contributing Editor, Guernica Magazine; Amanda Calderon, Poet, NYU; Haniya Rae, Co-Art Editor, Guernica Magazine.  We encourage everyone to check it out and experience the unique kind of community created by being in the space where everyone is allowed to break the same rule.  It’s the kind of event that is truly worth the trip.

To register for the open session on June 30, click here:
For more information about Writing on It All, click here:

The FPP Interview: eteam

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Multi-media artists eteam talk to us about being both removed and immersed in the creation of new work, about the non-existent singular and committing to an expansive sense of “we.”

Collaboration goes deep for eteam.  Not only do you generate projects through your partnership and work with other artists, but you enlist lay people– farmers, barbers, small town residents– to either execute or substantiate the project.  When you collaborate, how do you relate to the idea of control?  Is it difficult to cede control? How do you satisfy your need for an imaginatively and intellectually rigorous project while leaving it open enough to be determined by unvetted participants?  When we work together with other people, especially people whom we have never met before, we control the situation by paying attention or not, shape things rather non-verbally by pointing a recording device towards a situation or not. That’s all. The recording device approves and it energizes. Where nothing has been happening before something is happening as soon as we press the ON button. ON means attention and it implies control, because the situation is automatically framed. Either something fits into the frame or not. Everything outside the frame is irrelevant.  To read the rest of the interview, go here.

 

Spellbound at AWP 2013

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AWP is a massive writers’ conference that is held annually in an urban convention center.  Official readings and panels take place in sterile, look-alike rooms, with florescent lights above rows of stackable seats.  As we anticipated our reading at AWP 2013 in Boston, the desire was blare our music, spraypaint the walls, do something, anything, to strangify our rectangle of space.

However, there is something to the sameness of each conference room: the environments are equalized.  It is up to each reader to do the transporting, the transforming–each reader must bring her own magic, and it must come from her pages, from her voice.

And at our AWP reading, we were spellbound.

We had a kickass lineup, and that’s the truth. First, bam, Margo Jefferson–who made her way from NYC in a snowstorm to be with us–she took us into the “we” of her youth when she read Twain and Baldwin as not just a young scholar, but as a young girl of the Negro elite.  She shared the resultant epiphanies, kept us rapt by her mind’s journeying.

Keya Mitra followed, beguiling us with the story of Anita and her two wombs, each the home of a baby created by another man: one, who is her Indian-American husband; the other, her great Anglo Austin lover.  We laughed, we grimaced, we laughed some more.  She finished and we knew why she had been declared a best new American voice.

And then our last reader was Justin Torres. For those of us who have read We the Animals, there was no reason to expect, or wish, that his reading of the work would add anything more to his stunning novel.  Wrong.  His voice was hypnotic, full of desire, elegy, and light. If Torres would have dropped to a bare whisper we would have fallen out of our chairs trying to listen.  Before starting, he said he had stopped reading that opening chapter, that he felt it all read-out, but decided that on this occasion to share. We hate to break it to him, but his declaration may be like the Stones declaring they were dropping “Satisfaction” from the set list…  nice try, but no one is going to let him get with that. Classic work resists retirement. away

All we know is that by reading’s end, we were all very satisfied.

January 28, 2013: What a Great Night!

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The sleet deterred neither our artists nor our big, warm FPP audience!  We had a fabulous time listening to work by Stacey D’Erasmo, Monica Ong, and Michael Thomas, and to DJ Lady DM‘s groovy opening and closing sets.

Stacey D’Erasmo‘s forthcoming novel tells the comically bittersweet story of a singer trying to make a comeback years after her youthful success.  The excerpt D’Erasmo read led us into fascinating first person plural territory, as the main character recalls the making of her second album, a spectacular failure: seven musicians and producers hole up in a chateau and become a “we,” bonding over drugs and isolation and the mating calls of deer in the woods around them. But the artistic transcendence they feel never manifests in the music.  Monica Ong combined projected images and poems to stunning effect.  Her first image was a childhood photograph of her mother gathered with her mother and six siblings.  The accompanying poem revealed that her mother was one of the three “boys,” dressed and staged so that the family would not lose face from a surfeit of girls.  Her next images and poems brought us into human physiology, giving voice to the silent mechanisms of the body– to the body’s frightening failures and the way we fail our bodies through cultural mores and silence.  She closed with a moving poem written for the FPP reading in response to the Sandy Hook shootings.  Michael Thomas read an electrifying essay from his forthcoming collection.  He recounts a roadtrip he took with his brother who was recently arrested and floundering; as he departs, he fears the trip is ill-advised, that two black men on the highway at night are an easy target for police, and that his unrestrained, undiscriminating brother might threaten Thomas’s hard-won equilibrium and the privacy of mind he fiercely protects.  The essay was a challenge to the comfort and validity of the “we.”  Thank you to our readers for a compelling array of work and for their responses to the FPP theme.  Special thanks, again, to DJ Lady DM who closed out the night with more great music (that very nearly got us dancing– okay, maybe we danced a little)!

The FPP Interview: Michael Thomas

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FPP asked acclaimed novelist Michael Thomas about the risk of memoir, who is mad about his forthcoming book, and what urgent advice he’s given young writers.

Photo by Angel Franco.

Please tell us about your forthcoming memoir The Broken King. It’s a 6-part memoir about Thomas men. Each section contains a central event, commentary, and meditation.

Are their risks in telling these stories?  Yes: you could hurt those you love, or, simply, tell the stories poorly and injure your readers.

How would you describe the memoir-writing experience? Awful. It nearly ruined me.

To read more of this interview, go here.

The FPP Interview: Mackenzie Largie aka Lady DM

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January 28 marks the first night we will open and close our reading with music, and spinning for us will be Mackenzie Largie, aka Lady DM.  We spoke to her about being a DJ’ane, Europe v America for black girls, and the Norwegian night she made headline news.

Zurich, Switzerland 1999

Would you share the origins of Lady DM? Lady DM stands for devotee of the Divine Mother. My guru is Amma. My vision is to heal people through music, as I’ve been healed as a kid growing up under very unfortunate circumstances. Music and dancing saved my life.  To read more of this interview, go here.

Congratulations to FPP Alum Marie Myung-Ok Lee

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FPP congratulates Marie Myung-OK Lee on the sale to Simon & Schuster of her novel Firstborn Son, the story of a Korean-American OB-GYN/screenwriter on an epic quest.  According to Publishers Lunch, it’s “pitched in the tradition of Middlemarch.”  We were lucky enough to hear an excerpt at the November reading, and we are looking forward to more. Good work, Marie.

This Monday Night: Raising $ for Occupy Sandy

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At Monday night’s reading, we will solicit donations for Occupy Sandy.  As many of you know, Occupy Sandy volunteers were on the ground early, walking door to door checking on residents including those in high-rise housing projects without power or hot water.  They continue to help survivors get food and medicine and supplies. (Here is a recent story on their efforts in the NYT, and here is a Tumblr blog on Rockaway post-Sandy). We want to support our neighbors as they recover and rebuild.  If you come out on Monday, please consider giving a cash donation—any amount will help.  If you can’t make it, consider going to Occupy Sandy’s Amazon registry page to place an order for supplies (ex. batteries, diapers) that will go directly to the volunteers for distribution.  Or, you may send a check to:

Occupy Sandy/AfGJ
Alliance for Global Justice
1247 E. St, SE
Washington, DC 20003

Thank you.  See you Monday.