The Data That We Breathe
London-based aritst, writer and performer Caroline Bergvall, writer and code artist Judd Morrissey, and cross-disciplinary writer and scholar Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago, Department of English) launch a series of experiments into the physical and poetic dimensions of breath: its channeling in the evolution and performance of human languages, and its molecular migrations through instruments, terrains, and times.
Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall, writer and artist based in London. Works across art forms, media and languages. A strong exponent of writing methods adapted to contemporary audiovisual and multilingual and other contextual concerns. Starting-points and source materials readily emerge from both ancient cultural detail and contemporary cultural artifacts or political events. Projects alternate between textual pieces, audio works, drawings, installations, and live performances, often in collaboration. Most recent output Drift (Nightboat, 2014) awarded a Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry and Drama, University of Cambridge. The performance version of Drift for live voice, percussion (Ingar Zach) and electronic text (Thomas Köppel) toured the UK in 2014 and was presented at Olavsfestdagene, Norway, July 2015. Other publications: Meddle English (2011) and Fig (2005) as well as a DVD of earlier installations Ghost Pieces (2010). Solo exhibitions: John Hansard Gallery (Southampton 2010), Vita Kuben (Umeå, 2014), Callicoon (NY, 2015). Has presented works at: Tate Modern (London), Khoj Centre (New Delhi), Fondation Vuitton (Paris), Mamco Museum (Geneva), NorrlandsOperan (Umeå, Sweden), Powerplant (Toronto), Samtidsmuseet (Oslo), Fundacio Tapies (Barcelona), MCA Denver a.o. Writer-in-Residence, Whitechapel gallery, London, 2014. Current project in development: Raga Dawn, an outdoors sunrise performance. Prologue for 2 voices (w/Anouk Molendijk) premiered in Geneva (June15) and SALT festival, Northern Norway (August15). Full piece for vocal text and electronic bass-harp being prepared and composed for touring Summer 2016.
More about Caroline Bergvall.
Judd Morrissey
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating computational text, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. He is the creator of digital literary works including The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem (2011), The Last Performance [dot org] (2009), The Jew's Daughter (Electronic Literature Collection, 2006), and My Name is Captain, Captain (Eastgate Systems, 2002). He is a recipient of acknowledgements including a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture.
His projects have been included in a broad range of festivals, conferences and exhibitions with recent venues including Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (Buenos Aires), Zero1 Garage (San Jose), Eyebeam (NYC), Le Cube (Paris), Casa das Caldeiras (Coimbra), Anatomy Theater & Museum (London), Performing House (York), Center of Contemporary Culture Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Landmark Kunsthalle (Bergen), House of World Cultures (Berlin), Teatre & TD (Zagreb), and the Chicago Cultural Center. His work has been the subject of numerous critical studies and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, RAINTAXI, and the Iowa Review.
Judd is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art and Technology Studies and Writing. In 2012, he co-founded the performance and technology collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r). The group are in a long-term residency at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Chicago. Their first work, The Operature, premiered in 2014, and they are currently working on new large-scale project, Kjell Theøry, scheduled for completion in 2017.
More about Judd Morrissey at judisdaid and atom-r.
Jennifer Scappettone
Jennifer Scappettone’s work with languages spans scholarly and creative modes of inquiry, and a variety of disciplines—in line with an abiding interest in the material repercussions of built, neglected, and mythologized environments on those who imagine and inhabit them, and the way the literary arts contribute to their shape. Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, her study of the outmoded city of lagoons as a crucible for experiments across literature, politics, the visual arts, and urbanism, was published by Columbia University Press in 2014 and is shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association’s annual book award. Poetry collections include From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-ups, forthcoming from Atelos Press; a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, is forthcoming from Compline. Her work with contemporary writing in Italy is reflected in a book-length dossier on “poetry of research” in Aufgabe 7 (2008), which she edited; in her translations of the polyglot postwar modernist Amelia Rosselli (for Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2012, and winner of the Academy of American Poets’s Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize); in developing projects on Futurist F.T. Marinetti and feminist Carla Lonzi; and in PennSound Italiana, an audiovisual sector of the PennSound archive she recently curated and launched, devoted to contemporary experimentalism.
Scappettone’s visual and sound poems have been installed in Berkeley, Brussels, Chicago, Ghent, Nagoya, New York City, Providence, Rome, Turin, and most recently, at WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, where she wove Leave Loom: A Memory, a room-sized stanza, out of ten months of post-consumer waste. She has collaborated with musicians, dancers, and designers on site-specific projects, including most recently Marco Ariano, Walter Paradiso, and the Difforme Ensemble (on Exit 43 operettas for video and performance), Kathy Westwater and Seung Jae Lee (on the performance work PARK, with showings at Fresh Kills Landfill, Pratt Institute, New York Live Arts, and elsewhere), composer Paul Rudy and AGENCY architecture (on X Locus, documentary sound collages of the underground for the courtyard and tract of Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome).
Scappettone is Associate Professor of English, the Committee on Creative Writing, and Romance Languages and Literatures, and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago.
More about Jennifer Scappettone University of Chicago and oikost.