Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

The Data We Breathe

London-based artist, 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) launched 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.

Histories of the circulation of air in relation to aesthetic, philosophical, social, and industrial dimensions were the foundation of their investigations. The collaborators re-situated and revitalized the poetic notion of inspiration within an expanded sensorium where breath is acknowledged not only as its literal foundation, but as an agent subject to the contemporary realities of contaminated air and bioengineered synthetic life. Their research formed the basis of a collaborative project of collecting and performing the circulation of this fugitive matter that binds interior and exterior, individual and collective, human and non-human currents.

As breath requires friction and contact in order to generate sound and language, it highlights the physical and empirical vectors of textual/linguistic expression. As air is life-giving in some places, but injurious in others (comparing the North Shore suburbs, for example, with the communities surrounding the petcoke piles along the Calumet River)—and as some are given the opportunity to breathe freely while others are not—this notion of inspiration highlights the uneven distribution, even the privatization, of rights and resources assumed to be shared equally by all.

The fellows examined the vast and disparate question of breath from the perspective of literary, linguistic, artistic, and body practice models as much as current activist “forensic research” models and contemporary sociopolitical realities in order to develop a multidimensional and context-specific poetics. This mixed-reality poetics was the backbone of their research guided them toward new ways of working. They implemented a series of studies and experiments that involved eco-sensing, data acquisition, augmented reality, spectographs, transcriptive writing, contextualized vocalization, and performance in order to highlight the dynamics of breathing in metaphorical and actual senses.

Course

Breathing Matters: Poetics and Politics of Air
Winter 2016
Wednesdays 3-6p, Gray Center Lab in Midway Studios, 929 E. 60th St.
Offered through the Department of English / ENGL 35110 & 25110; cross-listed with the Department of Visual Arts / ARTV 30020 & 20020

Course description:
The participants in this collaboratively led teaching laboratory will be asked to re-examine the notion of “inspiration” in its aesthetic and historical senses, revisiting textual and arts practices based on tropes of channeling, dreamwork, revelation and possession as well as current practices based on performative, coded, embodied and/or eco-conscious notions of circulation, interconnection, transformation and receptivity (and their occlusion: choking, expulsing, forced absorption). We will explore the interdependence of inhalation and exhalation as a guide to art methods built on conscious mind-body traditions, on poetics of critical voicing and unvoicing, and on analog and digital mechanisms for receiving, translating, and transmitting im/pulses and data. We will delve into the workings of air as an animating element that bridges and binds individuals to both internal and external forces. We will explore the long history of engagement with this element as it has been used to signify and enhance the circulation and interception of signs, dreams, and voices in literature, performance, audiovisual and electronic media, sculptural and architectural sites. We will examine the modern and contemporary politicization of air as a commons, and will apply forensic research and sensing technologies to the analysis and critique of industrial and post-industrial landscapes. The imagination of air itself becomes relevant to thinking about utopian or dystopian collectivities. Students will have the chance to respond to each set of materials with their own collaboratively produced works, which will be offered up for group discussion. We welcome students from the literary and visual arts, performance studies, film and media studies, as well as those with an interest in translation, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. Sporadic excursions and film screenings will form part of the course, and students should be prepared to make time for them.

Fellows

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.

JUDD MORRISEY

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 acknowledgments including a Creative Capital / Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a Fulbright Scholar’s Award in Digital Culture.

JENNIFFER SCAPPETTONE

Jennifer Scappettone’s work resides in zones of confluence and cross-contamination of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, on the page and off. Her research and teaching interests span the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries, with particular emphasis on ecopoetics, environmental justice, and the environmental humanities; art and activism; radical documentary; comparative global modernism; the history of the avant-garde and of marginalized art collectives; the evolution of cities, geographies of modernity, and critical occupations of place and space; poetry and poetics; literatures of migration, travel, and displacement; barbarism, translingualism, and other futures of language in global contexts; translation; Italian culture and its echo in others; gender and sexuality studies; relations between literary and other arts, including visual poetry, book arts, new media, and performance studies; and art and architectural history, visual culture, and aesthetics. She also works in Creative Writing and Romance Languages and Literatures, and is a faculty affiliate of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. She spearheaded, and currently advises, the Environmental Humanities + Arts Lab (The City and its Others).