Falling published by Copy Press

We are delighted that our book Falling has just been published by Copy Press, an independent publishing company based in London, dedicated to extending ideas of writing, pictures and readability.

This book begins in zero gravity and ends with everything flowers. In between, figures are falling as we hear something about philosophy, laughter, architecture and war. With writing and drawing coursing through its pages, Falling gathers momentum and, through this, a picture emerges: it looks something like today.

'Falling is a work of natural philosophy, about wire-walkers and moonwalkers, elevators, angels, slapstick, skyscrapers, swerves, and the dynamic figure that links them. Here Kreider + O'Leary describe 'the beautiful mess we're in' with a speculative precision. Their description of falling, in its uncoupling of the tyranny of cause and effect, displaces the now-prevalent despondency of end-thinking with a prolific joyousness.'
- Lisa Robertson

The books' editor is Yve Lomax, reader is Vit Hopley and designer is Ivor Williams.

Available to order:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Falling-Kristen-Kreider/dp/190957001X

Open City artists pages in Performance Research

Reflecting on our recent trip to Open City in Ritoque, Chile, we have just published a series of artists pages in the latest edition of Performance Research: On Poetics & Performance (Volume 20:1).

In this series of word-and-image pages, the collaborative pair Kreider + O'Leary reflect on their site visit to the Open City in Valparaiso, Chile. Situated in the sand dunes just off coast of the Pacific ocean, this radical pedagogical experiment was founded in 1971 by the Chilean architect Alberto Cruz and Argentinean poet Godofredo Iommi. Open City is as much a school as it is an urban laboratory and the embodiment of a utopian ideal. Here architecture is constructed on a foundation of poetry and shifting sand and, as students of the Open City, Kreider + O'Leary examine the place in detail. In this series of word-and-image pages they present these findings in a loose taxonomy: a configuration of words and lines; a cifra reflective of their study of site and that marks the beginning of their story of Open City.

The front cover of the journal shows an image from our performance / installation at Open City, entitled Cifra.

Performance Research: On Poetics & Performance 2015 (Volume 20:1): 70-76.

Poetics & Place published by IB Tauris

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

'Time, Place & Empathy' published in Visual Studies

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

Memento Mori in Performance Research

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.