The corridors in The Rose Concordance by Angela Carr open onto the linguistic fountains of the Roman de la rose. The Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose) was an extremely popular medieval French poem, whose initial variant was attributed to a writer de Lorris. A scholar, named Joseph R. Danos, then used this variant to create a concordance, that is a key word index, to the poem. The keywords are arranged in alphabetical order and under each keyword heading is a list of lines containing that keyword. Throughout the medieval age, the Roman de la rose was also copied many times by many scribes, and with each copy would have been altered, expanded, re-assembled, deleted, etc., bearing the marks of each copyist. The word copy comes from the Latin copia which means abundance, so one might say that the copyist doesn’t create simulacra but writes out of the spirit of abundance.
The following is a brief survey of four projects — The Tolerance Project, Project Rebuild, endpipe line and The Apostrophe Engine — that either use a website as an interactive forum of collaborative work or collaborate with the web itself to generate work.
and nowhere at once” (Anarchive, 71) An address, as physical location, necessarily connotes boundaries, ownership, enclosure. Land is demarcated and receives an address, a name and number, so that it can be owned, so that it can enter into an economy of production and consumption. But as you, dear Stephen Collis, through your multi-volume, on-going work, “The Barricades Project,” turn the address back into an address, into speech, into the spoken toward someone, I, among many, find myself addressed and become part of this spoken which is not enclosed, not monetarily and economically situated, and which moves. And the spoken that you evoke between us, dear Collis, is not in straight lines, it meanders land and lexicons and authors, swims in rivulets, gets tangled in brambles.
a.rawlings performing with Maja Jantar at Stichting Perdu in Amsterdam, 28 May 2010. All photos taken by Frank Keizer.
“How does text eat itself?” Prologue (a.rawlings, Wide slumber for lepidopterists)
How does a text sound itself?
How does a body text itself?
How does a voice body itself?
How does a sound eat its voice?
How does a voice body its eat?
These are some of the productive questions that arise when faced with a.rawlings’ work, a work manifested in the arena of the printed page, in the voice and composition of its performed embodiment and in a moment full of presence and risk unfolding between rawlings and one of her collaborators.
“If activities and people are assembled, it is possible for individual events… to stimulate one another. Participants in a situation have the opportunity to experience and participate in other events.” (Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings) When positing this simple idea, Danish architect Jan Gehl was imagining the kinds of urban architectures and public spaces that can encourage confluence and assembly, yet this is exactly what Margaret Christakos has created through Influency Salon: a space and structure where, on one hand, poetries and poetic practices can assemble, interact, exchange, and then disperse, though altered and affected by this exchange, while on the other, the exchange itself engenders active participants, i.e. responsive and engaged readers.
Folding Borders: Experimenting in the Canadian Laboratory