Poetics & Place published by IB Tauris

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The book Poetics & Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site has now been release for publication by I.B. Taurus.

How do artworks 'speak', and how do we 'listen' and respond? These questions underlie the investigation here of Roni Horn's Pair Object III: For Two Rooms, Emily Dickinson's later manuscripts, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages Paysages, Fiona Templeton's Cells of Release and Jenny Holzer's Lustmord. The tenets of critical performance, art-writing and site-writing inform the critical method used in Poetics and Place. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these five artworks, and is arranged in order to fulfill three main objectives: to understand how the artworks generate meaning through a material poetics in relation to place; to develop a critical methodology for engaging with them; and to investigate their ethical potential and political imperative. All of this, ultimately, facilitates the development of a triadic relation between theoretical concepts of sign, subjects and site at the crossover between poetry, art and spatial practices. This extends each artwork beyond the dyad of a critical encounter in order to offer - and allow others to grasp - an appreciation of how the artwork figures meaningfully, as well as configures meaning, in the wider world of objects and things. The book concludes with a discussion of the ethics of reading from the second person, opening up a debate concerning the role of empathy within contemporary, politically-engaged practices in art and poetry.

Now available to order on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Poetics-Place-Architecture-Subjects-International/dp/1780763379

 

Drive Derivative at Reading as Art event

Working with sound artist Paul Banister of Audialsense, we will be performing a work entitled ‘Drive Derivative’ as part of the Reading as Art event curated by Sharon Kivland in collaboration with Mura Ghosh for the Bloomsbury Festival.

Evoking a wind that blows through a library, opening books, prompting unexpected stories, this evening of readings, art and performances engages with Victorian psychology from the library’s collections. Expect the unexpected! Artist and writer Sharon Kivland collaborates with psychology librarian Mura Ghosh to stage this special Senate House Library event.

http://bloomsburyfestival.org.uk/ai1ec_event/reading-as-art-turning-the-pages-of-psychology/?instance_id=

October 15, 2013 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Senate House Library
University of London
Senate House,Malet Street,London,Greater London WC1E 7HU, UK

 

Edge City at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale

We will be presenting a new work entitled Edge City at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, which runs from 13 September-19 December 2014. The work is part of the 'Close...Closer' associated projects selected by Triennale chief curater Beatrice Galilee.

Edge City consists of a performance, video installation and mediated city walk each exploring the maritime edges of Lisbon from the Ponte Vasco da Gama to the Ponte 25 de April near the Alcántara Docks. Operating at a crossover between cultural geography, video documentary and fiction, Kreider + O'Leary interweave spatial, historical, social and political narratives to create an immaterial overlay to the city’s urban fabric. Through this, they tell a story of discovery, encounter and overwhelm.

The work has three major strands:

1. Live Performance 
On the opening weekend of the Triennale, we will conduct a mediated guided tour of the maritime edges of the city for small groups of people. Starting at Cais do Sodré on the river's edge and working ‘en-promenade’, we will explore specific details of the city fabric, focussing on its maritime history. With archaeological levels of detail, they will use performance, props, images, texts and architectural elements to explore the site as the fulcrum for a number of inter-related systems.
- Date: 14th Sept 2013, departing at 19.00
- Location: Outside the Terminal Fluvial at Cais do Sodré Station 
- Tickets: http://edgecity.eventbrite.co.uk/

2. Video Installation 
For the duration of the Triennale, we will exhibit the work in the form of a video installation at Lisbon's Lx Factory. Here we work with time-based media and text to inter-weave spatial, historical, social and political narratives of the city of Lisbon. 
- Dates: 14th Sept – 15th Dec 2013
- Location: Lx FactoryRua Rodrigues Faria, 103 / 1300 - 501 Lisboa 
- LxFactory Exhibitions: http://www.lxfactory.com/EN/agenda/exposicoes/2013/09/

3. Self-guided Walk 
A self-guided walking tour will be made available on the Kreider + O'Leary website for the duration of the Triennale. Leading participants along the maritime edges of Lisbon between Cais do Sodré to Alcántara Mar cultivate, the tour works with digitally augmented spatial practice to cultivate an enriched, multi-layered cultural experience of the urban environment. Prior to departure, participants in the walk can log on to the webpage and follow the directions provided.
- Dates: 14th Sept – 15th Dec 2013
- Location: Start outside the Terminal Fluvial at Cais do Sodré Station at any time.
- Map and details: http://www.kreider-oleary.net/edge-city/map.htm

See the following related links:
Trienal de Lisboa: http://www.trienaldelisboa.com/en/#/ 
Close… Closer: http://www.close-closer.com/en/#

 

Blitzkrieg Sonata at Daniel Blau Gallery

The glare of many fires and sweeping clouds of smoke kept hiding the shape.  Then a wind sprang up.  Suddenly, the shining cross, dome and towers stood out like a symbol in the inferno.  The scene was unbelievable.  In that moment or two, I released my shutter.'
Herbert Mason on his iconic 1940 photograph of St.  Paul's Cathedral.

On 18th June we will be performing 'Blitzkrieg Sonata' at the Daniel Blau Gallery in London. Taking its cue from the the vintage 1940's photographs comprising BLITZ: WWII in LONDON (Daniel Blau Gallery, London), Blitzkrieg Sonata combines spoken word with live video and a collaborative sound work with Paul Bavister from Audialsense to capture the progressive degeneration of an imaged ideality; evoking a dreamworld in catastrophe. More prosaically, this piece explores -- as it embodies -- an enmeshment of image, architecture and ideology within the condition of continual and ongoing contemporary warfare.

The performance is part of a reading series entitled 'Amid the Ruins' that runs monthly at the Daniel Blau Gallery, and is organised by Professor Robert Hampson as part of the RHUL Poetics Research Centre with performances by:

+ Kreider + O'Leary with Audialsense
+ Allen Fisher
+ Stephen Willey
+ Becky Cremin

Daniel Blau Gallery, 51 Hoxton Sq, London N1 6BP, 7pm.

 

Of Insects & Ash at Copy Press Launch

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We will present 'Of Insects & Ash', a live performance involving moving image, spoken word and props, as part of the launch for Copy Press held on 25th May, 2013, at Conway Hall.

Copy Press is an independent publishing company based in London, dedicated to extending ideas of writing, pictures and readability. Currently publishing 100-page paperbacks under the series name Common Intellectual, each title provides a proposition for living, thinking and enjoyment. Copy Press publishes authors whose work endeavours to bring writers and readers into a space where common voices can come together and gather mass.

This extraordinary day of demonstrations and propositions will include Barbara Campbell-Lange / Julia Calver / Neil Chapman / Maria Fusco / Vit Hopley / Jaki Irvine / Jaspar Joseph-Lester / Yve Lomax / Sharon Morris / Hayley Newman / Francette Pacteau / David Roberts / Michael Schwab / Francis Summers / Anne Tallentire / Caroline Woodley / Kreider + O’Leary

We will be publishing a book entitled Falling as part of the Common Intellectual series for Copy Press.

 

'Time, Place & Empathy' published in Visual Studies

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Our essay 'Time, place and empathy: the poetics and phenomenology of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film image' has now been published in Visual Studies (Vol. 28, No. 1): 1–16. Engaging modes of creative critical writing and expanded drawing techniques, with one of these drawings appearing on the front cover of the journal, the essay forms part of our research into the theory and practice of Tarkovsky's film image, also pursued through the project Gorchakov's Wish. The following is an abstract of the journal article:

Acclaimed Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovksy’s specific understanding of what constitutes the ‘film image’ is outlined in his collection of writings, Sculpting in Time (1986), and evidenced by his body of film work. Our aim in this article is to identify the specificity of Tarkovsky’s theory and practice of the film image and to argue that the film image is a meaningful composite of poetic, spatial and material properties. We unpack this complexity through a close, careful and attenuated reading of a single scene from Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia (1983).

In this scene, the film’s protagonist – the poet, Gorchakov – carries a lit candle across the expanse of the Santa Catarina pool. The pool, a geothermal bath in the Tuscan hillside town of Bagno Vignoni, Italy, is emptied for this shot, but still steaming. This infuses the film image with atmospheric qualities ofplace. We read these qualities in relation to Tarkovsky’s use of symbol, the relationship of this scene to others in the context of the filmic narrative, and the filmic syntax of the long take and tracking shot. We also examine how the film image is received, as a projection, by an embodied recipient, and to what effect. Through this discussion, we defend Tarkovsky’s work against charges that it embodies a naïve realism, exposing the critical potential inherent in Tarkovsky’s nostalgic impulse.

click here to access publication through Taylor & Francis

Fieldwork: København at the Danish Academy of Fine Arts

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"Architecture is always the ultimate achievement of intellectual and artistic evolution, the materialization of an economic stage. Architecture is the final point in the achievement of any artistic endeavor because the creation of architecture implies the construction of an environment and the establishment of a way of life." - Asgur JORN, Architecture for Life, Potlatch #15, 1954

From 2 April - 9 April 2013 we will run a workshop for students at the Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Entitled 'Fieldwork: København', this workshop will encourage architects to think like ethnographers, poets and critics. We will take as our starting point a triadic relationship between three texts including:

With these in mind, we will students a number of tasks that, together, will document Copenhagen as a system of interconnected spatial relationships: a series of relationships documented through subjective and critical  acts of site-study / mapping / ethnography.

 

Light Vessel Automatic at Tate Britain

 

We will be presenting a new work entitled LIGHT VESSEL AUTOMATIC at 'Performing Architecture' at TATE Britain. The event will be on Friday, 1st February 2013 from 6.00pm-10.pm.

For ‘Performing Architecture’ Kreider & O’Leary present LIGHT VESSEL AUTOMATIC, guided tour ‘en-promenade’ exploring specific details of the building fabric. With archaeological levels of detail, they use images, video and architectural elements to explore the site as the fulcrum for a number of inter-related systems, whether spatial, historical, social or artistic. These systems reveal a series of interlocking narrative threads that coalesce around the site, entangling its history and forming a foundational mesh for its future potential.

With thanks to Caruso St John Architects

Curated by Marianne Mulvey. 
Kreider + O'Leary - Alex Sweder - Lamis Bayer - Emptyset - Film Programme by the Architecture Foundation

Curators Blog - http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/performing-architecture-late-tate-kreider-oleary

 

Rock Video performance at Tate Britain

 
'Performance burns up in its very performing and is gone. Its legacy may rely on the act of remembering. For Bodies of Memory, Tate Britain is inhabited by the collective recollections of many past performances, performed and spoken in passing fragments, rising and disappearing like memory itself. Its participants are an intergenerational group of performers, artists, writers, curators: people who witnessed something being done.' - Fiona Templeton

On 5th October we will take part of a Late at Tate programme entitled Acts of Legacyhaving been invited by the artist and poet Fiona Templeton to devise a component for her piece Bodies of Memory.  

For Templeton’s Bodies of Memory, Tate Britain will be inhabited by a collective memory of many past performances, performed and spoken in passing fragments, rising and disappearing like memory itself. Participants include performers, artists, writers, curators, and people who have watched something being done.  Currently to include: Heather Ackroyd, Gina Birch, David Gale, Helena Goldwater, Dave Goulding, Anthony Howell, Yoko Ishiguro, Glenys Johnson, Lois Keidan, Joe Kelleher, Kristen Kreider, Paulina Lara, Claire MacDonald, Angeliki Margeti, Brigid McLeer, Kate Meynell, Hannah Millest, Lucy Neal, Redell Olsen, Miranda Payne, Lorena Peña, Donna Rutherford, Graeme Shaw, Steve Slater, Gary Stevens, Minna Stevens, Peter Stickland, Fiona Templeton, Howard Tong, Amikam Toren, Caroline Wilkinson, Simon Vincenzi, Sylvia Ziranek .

For the event, will perform a new work entitled 'Rock Video'.

Tate Britain 
Friday 5 October 2012, 18.00 – 22.00

 

Inflagrante Delicto

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We will be running a workshop entitled 'Inflagrante Delicto: A Story of Architecture, Sex and Death' for Masters students at the Aarhus School of Architecture from 10th September-14th September. The workshop, including 280 students, will explore the relationship between architecture & narrative, both theoretically and practically; reflect this relationship directly – even literally – through architectural construction; document this relationship through filmic strategies.

The workshop will conclude with a film screening and banquet on Friday, 14th September.

 

Sideways Lecture at Danish Academy of Fine Art

 

Hyperspace, Sensorium, Connectivity, War... 
A Lecture with interruptions

On 13th April we will deliver a lecture as part of the Sideways Lecture series at the Danish Academy of Fine Art.  

The lecture takes as its starting point the Westin Bonaventure Hotel designed by architect John Portman in 1974. Nested in the heart of Los Angeles, this ‘city within a city’ was infamously interpreted by pre-eminent Marxist theorist Frederic Jameson as a model of postmodern hyperspace and an allegory for the logic of late capital. From this beginning, the lecture will move through the following topics: The Bonaventure Hotel / LA Tapped / Moon Landing / Falling / Bas Jan Ader / Pruitt Igoe / 104 Kilotonne Idea / Whitie on the Moon / WTC / Starship Enterprise / Donna Summer / Bunker Archeology / Dedalus-Icarus / Star Wars / Michael Herr’s Dispatches / Kyoto Station / John Portman / O Superman (For Massenet) / Strategic Defense Initiative / The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism / Ronald Reagan / Wings of Desire / Video Shakkei / The Angel of History / Fight the Power / Terror Paranoia / Satanic Verses / Cell / Falling Man / Basinski’s Disintegration Loops / Iraq War I + II / Parhessia / Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others / Arnold Schwarzenegger / Shock & Awe / Butler’s Frames of War etc…

Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture
Copenhagen, Denmark
17:00 - 18:30 13 April 2012

 

It was and it was not ...

 
"Fang, let us say, has a secret: a stranger calls at his door; Fang resolves to kill him.  Naturally, there are several outcomes: Fang can kill the intruder, the intruder can kill Fang, they both can escape, they both can die, and so forth.  In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.” – Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’

We will be running a workshop from 9th April - 17th April with students  studying architecture at the Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Entitled 'It was and it was not ...', the workshop's aim is to explore the generative possibilities inherent in fiction for the material practice of architecture. We take as our starting point the understanding that fiction is an immaterial imaginary overlay rendered through a representational framework, and we are particularly interested in how architecture students might explore and exploit these generative possibilities through the technique of composite drawing.

We will conclude the workshop with a final review of the students' work.

 

'To forget: Of Air' at Sexuate Subjects Conference

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At the start of December we will be taking part in an international interdisciplinary conference entitled Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics at University College London. For the the panel Understanding Difference: Why Poetry Matters we will present  'Time, Space and Empathy: A Material Poetics of the Film Image' in which we explore how a viewer's relationship to the screen constructs a dialogical space: an intersubjective space of 'shared viewing' and 'shared experience'; a meaningful space of imagination, cognition and feeling; an embodied space where mediation, itself, becomes an object of contemplation.

As part of our presentation will also show video piece entitled 'To forget : Of air', which gathers together footage shot at the Santa Catarina Pool in Bagno Vignoni, Italy – the original location for the penultimate scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). 

Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics
Friday 3rd to Sunday 5th December 2010
UCL, London

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sexuate-subjects

 

Post-Performance Drawings in Melbourne

Drawing related to Video Shakkei performance at Awaji Water Temple.


Drawing related to Video Shakkei performance at Awaji Water Temple.

 

We have been invited by the International Centre for Drawing at RMIT Melbourne to produce a number of large-scale drawing works as part of the Drawing Out festival and conference in Melbourne, Australia, from 7th-9th April. For the exhibition we will generate a number of 'post-performance' drawings relating to Video Shakkei, specifically, and relating generally to our process and practice of site-specific performance and time-based drawing throughout the project.  There will be five drawings in total, each drawn directly onto a wall panel of approximately 3m x 5m and interlinked in a vertically ascending space. 

The drawings will be exhibited at RMIT Melbourne for six weeks.

 

Event-Space, Performance and Time-Based Media at Drawing Out Conference

Still of video composite for Video Shakkei.

Still of video composite for Video Shakkei.

 

Reflecting on our practice and process throughout Video Shakkei we will present 'Video Shakkei: Event-Space, Performance and Time-Based Drawing' at the Drawing Out Conference at RMIT in Melbourne Australia (7-10 April). The paper explores the nature of the ‘captured’ architectural drawing and, in doing so, proposing a relationship between architectural site, performative action and time-based drawing. 

Drawing Out Conference
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
7th – 9th April 2010

http://www.drawingout.com.au/

 

Memento Mori in Performance Research

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Over the past number of years we have worked on projects in Japan (Video Shakkei), Italy (Gorchakov's Wish) and Ireland (Eight Rooms).  During our visits to each of these locations we have often stopped to engage with places of cultural and spiritual significance including holy wells, cemetaries and burial sites - an act of observation, perhaps contemplation. Relating to this experience, we have just published 'Memento Mori' as a sequence of artists' pages in the latest edition of Performance Research (Volume 15:1) on Memento Mori.

The sequence is a a composite of word-and-image. The images are photographs taken at the following locations:

  • Isola di San Michele (‘Island of the Dead’) in Venice, Italy
  • Daigh Bhríde (St. Brigid’s Well) in Liscannor, County Clare, Ireland
  • A burial site in Tenryu-ji (天龍寺) in Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, Japan

The text, some of which is comprised of found materials from the specific locations, is a poetic meditation on death and remembrance.  

 

Video Shakkei at The Centre for Drawing, London

 

Culminating our residency in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing we will present Video Shakkei in the form of an installation work.  The work incorporates video compositions relating to seven of our fourteen performances in Japan, as well as materials generated during our residency, reflecting on this experience.  The resulting environment of image, object and text opens up the system of features we are calling 'our' Japan to a viewer's enactment and interpretation.  

Drawing from the Japanese practice of shakkei, or ‘borrowed landscape,’ artists Kreider + O’Leary engage with a number of sites in Japan - from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka - to perform a series of sequenced actions or ‘live drawings.’ These actions are recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using high definition video as well as recently developed embedded miniature video camera technology. Edited together in series of filmic composites modeled on the multi-scaled architectural drawing, the recordings relate architectural space - to performed event - to narrative sequence. The result is a hyper-digitized, absurdly choreographed and poetically rendered image of place.

Private view : Thursday 3rd September 2009 6pm - 9pm
Exhibition : Friday 4th Sept - Thursday 1st Oct 2009 

Viewing by appointment : Contact Claire Foss 020 7514 9706

The Centre for Drawing Project Space 
Wimbledon College of Art
The University of the Arts London 
Merton Hall Road, London SW19 3QA

 

Artists Residency in The Project Space

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'If I want to imagine a fictive nation, I can give it an invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object ... I can also - though in no way claiming to represent or to analyze reality itself (these being the major gestures of Western discourse) - isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a certain number of features (a term employed by linguistics), and out of these features deliberately form a system.  It is this system which I shall call: Japan.'
Roland BarthesEmpire of Signs.

We will be working as artists-in-residence in The Project Space at The Centre for Drawing throughout the month of August. We will use this time to take stock of our recent trip to Japan, where we visited a number of carefully selected sites in Japan – from ancient Shinto spaces of ritual in Ise to the hyper-futuristic Umeda Sky building in Osaka – to perform a sequence of actions or ‘live drawings’ in response to the spatial and material qualities of each location. These actions were recorded simultaneously from differing points of view using two hand-held and two miniature high definition video cameras. This experience and our response to it throughout the residency will culminate in an exhibition at the start of September.

 

Constructing Atmospheres at Architecture and Phenomenology Conference

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Drawing together preliminary findings from our research into Tarkovsky's film-image, we will present a paper entitled 'Constructing Atmospheres: A Phenomenology of the Film Image and its Relation to Place' for the Architecture and Phenomenology, Second International Conference at Kyoto Seika University, Japan (26-29 June, 2009) .  The paper focuses explicitly on the phenomenological relationship between the film-image and worldly place. The following is extracted from the conference paper abstract:

Tarkovsky theorises the film-image in particular relation to time. In this paper we position his argument in relation to discussions in phenomenology and film-theory to suggest that, imbued with a sense of time, the film-image also gives rise to a corporeal understanding of place for both the film-maker and recipient of the film- image – and we liken this embodied act of cognition to one engendered by certain architectural experiences. We then turn to a specific scene from Nostalghia in order to appreciate that the film-image is, in fact, a ‘constructed atmosphere’: one that bears a naturalistic and poetic – material and symbolic – relation to place; one that therefore cultivates and embodied and imagined occupation of place.