Evan Calder Williams' text-based performance "In the Wan Light of Napalm and Moon" presents new research into the intersection of two old and ever-renewing histories: horror and capital. In collaboration with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (AKA Lichens) and an armoire, Williams takes flight through the unfortunate occasion of the Restoration Hardware catalog (a yuppie interior design fantasy of pre-ruined things on which to sit, sleep, or eat), the work sketches the secret hell of production and circulation through a set of tools drawn from the history of the horror genre. Borrowing from the Godwinian gothic of Charles Brockden Brown and the object dread of Edogawa Rampo, from British werewolf films and 1940's radio dramas, this performance, in a mode simultaneously sinister and goofy, maudlin and furious, tracks out a line of thought that insists the only things worse than haunted houses are the actual houses in which we live.
Evan Calder Williams is a writer, theorist, and artist. He is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, Roman Letters, and the recently completed novel Escape From Venice, and he writes the blog Socialism and/or Barbarism for The New Inquiry. He has done performances for the Whitney Biennial and the Serpentine Gallery. His current projects include a film collaboration with Miguel Calderón, a constrained-writing horror novel, and a critical study of the relation between cinema and social war in the Italian 1970s.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b. 1975, lives and works in Brooklyn) is an artist who works with voice in the realm of spontaneous music, often under the moniker Lichens. Creating patch pieces for modular synthesizer with voice has been a recent focus of live performance and recordings. Robert has begun to utilize projections with live performances such as a re-edit of Rose Kallal’s Emerald Vision. Performances and collaborations include Re-visiting Tarab, with Tarek Atoui, Sharjah Art Foundation Sharjah (2012) and Visiting Tarab, Performa 11, New York; CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen (2011); Les Soirées Nomades, Fondation Cartier, Paris (2009); Doug Aitken’s Frontier Happening, Rome (2009) and Migration, 303, New York / Princetown University (2008/2010); and Get Weird, New Museum, New York (2008). He was curator of cinema for Supersonic Festival (2010) and is currently working on the film A Spell to Ward off the Darkness, Finland/Norway/Estonia. Robert has also collaborated with artists including Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Rose Lazar, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Ben Vida, Mark Borthwick, Lucky Dragons, Alan Licht, Michael Zerang, Monica Baptista, Lee Ranaldo, White/Light, Kevin Martin, Chris Johanson, Tyondai Braxton, David Scott Stone and Genesis P-Orridge.
An armoire is large, often ornate cabinet or wardrobe, typically used for the storage of tools, crockery, weapons, or clothing.
Established in 2006, ISSUE's Littoral program is a free public reading series spotlighting writers experimenting with new forms and approaches to poetry, fiction, and essays. Responding to a declining network of support for innovative experimental literature outside academic institutions, Littoral serves as a central hub for fostering cutting-edge writers, publishers, and literary journals.
