Steve McCaffery
Language, Rematerialization, and Expenditure: the 20th Century Sound Poem

3pm-4pm, 60 minutes

Steve McCaffery will play, perform and discuss various 20th century sound texts. Topics to be discussed include notation, simultaneity, non-representation, and sono-poetic movements.

Steve McCaffery was a founding member of the legendary Four Horsemen sound ensemble. He has participated in Fluxus performances and performed his sound text around the world. He is the author of over 45 volumes of poetry and fiction and the author or co-author of 5 critical volumes. He lives in Buffalo where he is the David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters at the University of Buffalo.

Edwin Torres: POETRY IS POW, The Body Politic as Sound

4:30pm-5:45pm, 75 minutes

The body's orientation within sound and language is where the landing points for a sort of territorial poetry can begin — the hearing points that define what we own and the borders that invent our identities. From electro-processed faith to kinetically fuzzed organisms that para-sail vocal ingenuity with pulsified rhythmetics, this session will revolve around the astounding capacity for human invention as a place where poetry can start to pow!

Edwin Torres is a New York City native and self-proclaimed lingualisualist, rooted in the languages of sight and sound. He’s the author of 8 poetry books, including, Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books), and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books). He’s toured overseas solo and as a member of the poetry collective "Nuyorican Poets Café Live" and continues to create multi-disciplinary performances. His poetry CD, “Holy Kid” (Kill Rock Stars) was part of the Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The Last American Century, Part 2. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performing Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the DIA Arts Foundation. Anthologies include: American Poets In The 21 Century, The New Poetics Vol. 2 (Wesleyan University Press), Postmodern American Poetry Vol. 2 (Norton), Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath), and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Holt). His process-oriented workshop, “Brainlingo: Writing The Voice of The Body,” combining sensory exercises with games of permeable awareness, has been presented nationwide. In April 2016, Edwin will be performing a one-person show, “Mi Voca Su Voca” at The Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, PA.

Marc Matter & Swantje Liechtenstein: Conceptual Sound Writing / Sample Poetry

6pm-7:30pm, 90 minutes

This listening session focuses on works of (pre-)conceptual poetry / literature that deal with sound as a crucial element in relation to a European tradition of text-sound-compositions, poésie sonore and experimental Hörspiel, as well as contemporary examples of conceptual sound writing’ and ‘sample poetry'. The discussion will range from our theoretical and practical experiences of sound writing to broader issues related to sound as literature/poetry especially in conceptual writing.

Swantje Lichtenstein is a poet and transdisciplinary artist working in the fields of textures, language, voice, poetronics and sound. Her conceptual writing, improvisations and compositions utilize electroacoustic elements to write poetry and sound works. She is a professor of literature and aesthetic practice in Duesseldorf, Germany.

Marc Matter (b. 1974) works as a media artist, musician and freelance curator. He is a founding member of the group of artists known as Institut fuer Feinmotorik, with whom since 1997 he has published numerous sound recordings, an experimental film, a book and all manner of other trifles, as well as dozens of live performances. 2005 saw the publication of the anthology Feinmotorik Kompendium, an artist's book in the form of a lexicon. His work Radio-Imitat, produced exclusively for Radio Arthur, was released on CD at the end of 2009. For Die 50 Skulpturen des Institut fuer Feinmotorik [The 50 Sculptures of the Institut fuer Feinmotorik], he received the Karl-Sczuka Prize for Works of Radio Art in 2011. He devotes intense research to artist publications (artist books, artist records etc.), acoustic art, Poesie Sonore and Visual Poetry. Together with Marcus Maeder and Bernd Schurer (domizil, Zurich), he has interpreted a dadaistic novel by Hugo Ball in the shape of an experimental radio play for Radio DRS2. In 2012 he was a research fellow at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (NL). In 2013 he was the Edith and Richard French Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library at Yale University (USA), doing research on the sound-poet and publisher Henri Chopin and his publication OU. Since 2010, he has been lecturing in the major Music and Text at the IMM.