COLD OPEN VERSE
A POET TRANSMIT & BLONDE ART BOOKS PRODUCTION
Part of Cold Open Verse – a collaborative project Blonde Art Books and Poet Transmit (Victoria Keddie and Cat Tyc) for Knockdown Center, Queens, and Printed Matter’s 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS1 .
Below is the link to the full preview reel of newly commissioned and open call theatrical trailers for art and poetry publications which was screened in a movie theater setting at Knockdown Center in the basement theater of MoMA I PS1 for the opening night Printed Matter’s 2016 New York Art Book Fair at MOMA/PS1.
Cold Open Verse, on view at Knockdown Center September 8-18, 2016, examined the construct of the ‘trailer’, reconfigured by artists, poets, and publishers interested in an expanded form of communicating their work.
#blondeartbooks #poettransmit #coldopenverse #artbooktrailers #nyabf2016
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(1) Any Way You Like ‘Em / Publisher: Which Witch / 2015
Any Way You Like ‘Em is an anthology of works from 18 writers-in-residence at the historic Saugus Cafe as part of the &NOW 2015 literary festival hosted by California Institute of the Arts. The trailer was created to announce the title’s publication in October 2015.
(2) The After Eden Fall 2016 Catalogue / Publisher: Y2K / 2016 / y2klovesu.com
The After Eden Agency hosts an extreme home shopping network sale of its Fall 2016 Catalogue, featuring assemblages for each of the seven deadly sins. The After Eden Catalogue is available in print and online from Y2K at y2klovesu.com, launching September, 2016.
(3) This is the trailer for 3 Dot Zine Issue 3 featuring audio from Devin N. Morris reading his story “Ritual” from the third issue. 3 Dot Zine Issue 3 is titled “The Issue of Fashions” and will release in November 2016.
(4) Upland By Scott Kiernan and Ethan Miller / Publisher: Syntax Workers / 2016
Upland is constructed solely of image-headline pairs as they originally appeared in The Upland News in 1969–72, a newspaper circular from the small Southern California town of Upland, CA. Think of a cheaply-printed local circular with a hefty coupon section in the back, small town stories, and the reporting to match. The images have been further disfigured and destroyed by Google’s Newspaper Project, through compression algorithms and the physical speed of bulk-scanning fragile newsprint material and the The selections were arranged by considering only the text of the image-headline pairs, creating a poem describing an interior tale of Upland.
(5) Let it Bleed by Rona Yefman / Publisher: Little Big Man, 2016. With contributions by: Gary Indiana, Moyra Davey, Lia Gangitano and Gil Yefman
‘Let it Bleed’, 1995-2010, chronicling two siblings’ symbiotic existence as collaborative artists, and their mutual desire to live exterior to the norm. The most complex part of this project occurred during Gil’s intimate process of transformation from male to a female, and her subsequent transformation back to become, in Gil’s words, “beyond any gender”. The book combines images of formal role-play and performative acts with snapshots and mixed videotapes that expose very real emotional situations, chronicling an experience of growing up and intense relationships through a curve of fantasies, hopes, and desires; disappointments, confusion, conflicts, and flirtation with familial taboos.
(6) Burger is a trailer for William Lessard’s Rembrandt with Cellphone / Publisher: Reality Beach / 2016.
(7) The Mothership by Stephen Lam / Self-published / 2016
Taking the form of a scientific expedition, The Mothership explores the slippery nature of memory and imagination through the careful juxtaposition of images from various sources and context. Old family photo of the artist’s mother, images taken during the umbrella movement in Hong Kong, and abstract rendition of everyday objects are put side by side to narrate a tale of a spiritual journey. Two articles on the theme of ‘Mother’ and ‘Ship’ by the artist are sandwiched between images. www.lamscape.com
(8) Nochita by Dia Felix / Publisher: City Lights & Sister Spit / 2014
Performers: Elena Polson, Stephen Boyer, Clara Lipfert. Music: South Pole / Summer by Octagrape. A Dia Felix Media & Nuhr Studio Production.
(9) LIFE+70[Redacted] by David Moscovich / Publisher: Lit Fest
Press / 2016 / Video Editor: Alexandru Moscu
The print version of the single most expensive literary e-book to ever be hacked. Trailer Soundtrack: David Moscovich at Platforme Intermedia, Audioblast Festival, March 1, 2015 (Nantes, France) Book launch: Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 7pm at bookculture (536 W. 112th Street, Manhattan)
(10) Kuntalini by Tamara Faith Berger / Publisher: Badlands Unlimited / 2016
Eat ass, pray, love. Twenty-five-year-old Yoo-hoo experiences a sexual awakening in her yoga class. She breaks up with her boyfriend and travels to Niagara Falls where she meets a cold fish teen prostitute and an ex-Army troglodyte deep in the falls. Yoo-hoo’s unforgettable yogic journey sweeps across the realms of asana, hysteria, enlightenment.
(11) PARASOMNIA / Publisher: F Magazine / 2016-17
Structured as a choose-your-own-adventure, this collection of surrealist vignettes pays homage to psychedelic horror. Written by Kye Christensen-Knowles, Sean Mullins, Phoebe Nesgos, Sarah Vite, and Krum Wright.
(12) Cheena Marie Lo, Mediapoem for It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland / Publisher: Timeless, Infinite Light / 2014
What gathers here is a snapshot of a poetic moment. This anthology -not-anthology is a candid flash of the ever-evolving politics, relationships and forms that make up the particular experience of poetry, right [now], in Oakland. The anthology is 60 contemporary East Bay poets in a post Occupy house reading that never ends.
(13) Hovering Unpinned: An Eyeful by Patricia Silva / Self-published / 2016
A picture book about body language culled from Hayes Code cinema with original text as a critique of visual taxonomy and modules for seeing/looking/watching.
(14) A Potential Space by Juliana Cerqueira Leite / 2016
Bound by Small Editions and funded in part by a project grant from Isabelle Kowal.
A Potential Space is an artist’s book by Brazilian sculptor Juliana Cerqueira Leite that proposes a re-reading of the frameworks that surround representations of the female sex. The book contains 83 laser-cut outlines derived from a 3D scanned vagina that was originally cast inside of a body.
(15) Wolfe-Arama, Jokes from Ira / Publisher: Ratstar / 2014
Jokes written by Ira Wolfe. Over 3 years Ira emailed Ryan Foerster many times each day. The book is a collection of over 3000 of those jokes. Edition of 500.
(16) ABYSSSSYBA: INVISIBILITY OF THE EYES by Rick Myers / Publisher: Nieves / 2016
[Either side of the eye, dispersed and suspended, via videotape, overhead projector, video projector, sound, silver coin, metal file, and a membrane.]
(17) AMERICANA GIRL by Bon Jane / 2016
The video is a 45 second preview of two of the characters featured in the book. The characters represent sentimental classical portraiture of girls and women as they are being cast for an imaginary film in which they will play a starring role as a 50’s Hollywood diner waitress.
(18) Whore Foods Market by LA Warman / 2016
The video is based on a monthly erotica newsletter Warman sends to subscribers. Organic grocery stores are a private space where individuals across classes (often employees of lower classes and customers of higher classes) and identities meet under the neoliberal notion of Health. When these individuals run into each other things explode and a notion of a forever emerging queered desire becomes central.
(19) Lexicon by Celeste Fichter / Self-published / 2014
A video and artists book-cum-pictionary that is an alphabetical arrangement of words and their meanings… however in this case the definitions are found images culled from the internet that take liberties with the meaning of meaning.
(20) Black Lavender Milk by Angel Dominguez / Publisher: Timeless, Infinite Light / 2015
An experimental lyric that dreamt of becoming a novel only to wake up as notebook. Employing and smudging elements of poetry, prose and memoir, Black Lavender Milk offers the space of a “novel” as a site of mourning, inquiry and recuperation. Through a complex, hypnotic blur of language, the lyric-as-novel functions as an extended meditation on writing in relation to the Body; Time, Loss, Ancestry and Dreaming.
(21) “From the Future”, (2013) Video, book, and song by The Blow (Melissa Dyne & Khaela Maricich).
(22) iSn’t She by Morgan Ritter / Publisher: Ambient Press / December 2016
iSn’t She is the evidence of refusing definition while touching myself. This is a promotional video for my poetry reading at Artists Space: Books and Talks (NY).
(23) Abra is a living text: a book that refuses to stay on the page. An artists’ book issued in both a limited and trade edition as well as a free app, in Abra poetry mutates under the reader’s touch, inviting them
to make the text their own. By Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, and Ian Hatcher.
Trade edition: 1913 Press, April 2016
Limited Edition: Center for Book and Paper Arts, November 2015
Free iPad and iPhone App: Ian Hatcher, November 2015
(24) Spiritual Grave Year by Dan Magers / Publisher: REALITY BEACH / 2016
A hallucinatory trip through the last 40 years of popular culture, Spiritual Grave Year examines modern life through the tragicomic. Edition of 150 chapbooks.
(25) The Habiliments by Joe Milazzo / Publisher: Apostrophe Books / 2016
http://joe-milazzo.com/the-habiliments/ The trailer itself consists of a (silent) sequence of 17 verbo-visual interpretations of individual lines drawn from the poems in the collection.
(26) USO: I’ll Be Seeing You by Kim Rosenfield / Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse / 2013
The trailer for USO: I’ll Be Seeing You is a recent collaboration between poet Kim Rosenfield and photographer Nikolas Koenig. Filmed on location in Vienna, the trailer previews themes used throughout the book that include ideas of humor, placement/displacement of human and material objects, forms of service, and the affect/effects of performance.
(27) Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz / Publisher: Timeless, Infinite Light / 2015
Tender Points is a narrative fractured by trauma. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the text explores sexual violence, gendered illness, chronic pain, and patriarchy through the lenses of lived experience and pop culture (Twin Peaks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, noise music, etc.). Music in video by Paul Ebenkamp.
(28) Time Tells: A Visual Essay on Time-Jumps in Cinema by Masha Tupitsyn / 2017.
“It was in time that his fate was to have acted.” -Henry James
Victor Shklovsky wrote: “Love is a play with short acts and long intermissions.” Masha Tupitsyn’s multi-media love manifesto, Love Dog (2013), featured 33 time-jumps in the form of love songs, titles, song lyrics, quotations, and film clips. In Tupitsyn’s new film-essay, Time-Tells, she uses 1000 movie time-jumps and time-stamps to further explore the destinal using what she terms “screen shot criticism.” A largely unexplored cinematic trope and narrative device long present in literature, the time-jump works in cinema as an onscreen visual graphic—a chyron that appears a the bottom of a movie screen to note the time that has elapsed in a narrative. Unlike the time-montage, which
speeds time up by summarizing it, the time-jump is a temporal elision or gap in representation. It is time appearing as itself; not as movement-image, but as a destinal time-image of what is not shown or see in the cinematic story. It is therefore a perfect example of what Gilles Deleuze describes in Cinema 2 as “situations and spaces we no longer know how to describe.” The time-jump is a fated intermission because it uses the space of the film frame, the mise en scene, to log and stamp the interstitial—of what is between acts. An entr’acte, the time-jump is also the interlude between the wrong time and the right time. More importantly, the time-jump is time revealed because it lets us know that the mystery and development of time is all about timing (kairos). In an age when the digital present reigns, the time-jump confirms that time is not for nothing.
(29) Winter in Procession is a collection of still photographs that documents the making of an art film between photographer Brendan Burdzinski in collaboration with John Dante Bianchi. The images capture the process of transporting Bianchi’s sculpture Untitled (Ground Figure) from his studio in Brooklyn to an island across a frozen lake in the Adirondacks. Self-published / 2017.
(30) Alles ist jetzt by Julia Wolf / Publisher: Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt / 2015.
Concept + artistic realisation: Julia Wolf. Music: Jean Szymczak. Editing: Manuel Kappmeyer
Alles ist jetzt means everything is now, a phrase that is repeated in variations at several points in the novel. It refers to the protagonist’s notion that her memories are not in the past but part of her here and now.
(31) Eternal Apprentice by Michael Newton and Emmalea Russo / Publisher: Doublecross Press / 2016.
(32) Everything is Boring – Written and narrated by Maia Asshaq, video by Jason Sudak for forthcoming publication.
(33) Floodgate Companion by Robert Beatty / Publisher: Floating World Comics / 2016.
Debut monograph, a cosmic and immersive collection of artwork from the renowned album cover artist.
(34) Incantation Hour is a trailer for a video series/performance/music/written collaboration between Cassandra Troyan, Rachel Ellison, & Katherine Harvath (2014).
(35) Material Studies by Claire Donato / 2016.
Instagram videos that could be used as trailers for a book-in-progress called Gravity and Grace, The Chicken and the Egg, or: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.
(36) It Was All Very Impressive by Josh Sender / 2016.
A long-term project that has been moving through various forms and iterations. This iteration of It Was All Very Impressive only existed online for a day as a series of digital artworks loosely broken down into chapters.
(37) Double Teenage by Joni Murphy / Publisher: BookThug / 2016. Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(38) Seconds Text and Performance by Ian Hatcher. Video by Ian McAlpin for the book Prothesis by Ian Hatcher/ Publisher: Poor Claudia / 2016
(39) Low Ropes Course / Publisher: Publication Studio, Hudson / 2016. Essay Militant Cloth an essay by Jesse Harrod. Editors: Patrick Kiley, Beth Capper, and Jesse Harrod.
Contributions by Lisi Raskin, Laurel Sparks, JD Sampson, Beth Capper, Anthony Romero, Jenni Sorkin, Ryan Van Meter, Danny Orendorff, Edie Fake, and Allyson Mitchel. Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(40) Landia by Celina Su / Publisher: Belladonna / 2018
Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(41) Libido by Cathy De La Cruz / Publisher: Spooky Girlfriend Press / 2017
Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(42) Door Girls by Max Steele / Self-published / 2015
Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(43) Untitled by Xena Stanislavovna Semjonová
Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
(44) The Estrangement Principle by Ariel Goldberg / Publisher: Nightboat / Coming Soon. Video by Ariel Goldberg and Saretta Morgan.
Produced on-site at Knockdown Center during live-taping weekend.
Please contact info@blondeartbooks.com with any questions or if you would like more information about the publications featured in the reel. Many thanks to all the artists who submitted to the open call and to those who are participated in tapings and performances at Knockdown Center.
A special thank you to Knockdown Center and Printed Matter.
Yours, Blonde Art Books & Poet Transmit.
