Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 4
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Unusual Suspects: Mutopia 7 in Banff / (arranged by Alan Ramón Clinton)
Sound and Video material Produced, Recorded, and arranged by John Grzinich, Leslie Bell, Sage Wheeler, Tomas Jonsson, Michael Hansen, Corinne Thiessen Hepher, Natasha Alphonse, Alan Clinton, Dana Buzzee, Yules Wai.
Scene: Border of Idaho and Canada
My first instinct when confronted with authority is to lie.
"Why are you entering Canada."
"For an artist's colony in Banff."
"You mean like painters and stuff."
"I'm a writer, I'm not sure about the other people."
"Why are you going to an event where you don't know what is going on"
[Call for Participants: MUTOPIA 7
Interdisciplinary workshop Banff Canada
June 19-23, 5 days
Led by John Grzinich
The workshop program will run from 10:00-17:00 each day
Organized by Mountain Standard Time Performative Art Festival (M:ST) as part of M:ST 5.5: Making Way. Presented in conjunction with the 2012 IMAA Conference and with the generous support of The Banff Centre.
MUTOPIA is a process oriented workshop environment that explores collaboration, collective creativity and open forms of authorship. This is done through social and environmental research, creative exercises and game play in parallel with the use of mixed artistic media such as sound, collage, text and performance.
This workshop begins with collecting impressions, objects and local mythologies about the landscape and structures in the local environment where we gather. We then add our own abstract narratives by visiting some of the locations and making creative interpretations from what we discover, share and create. These interpretations can involve discussions, writings, games and site-specific improvisations or performances. In the end we try to build a series of short films based on the photo, video and sound material from our explorations.
MUTOPIA started as experimental research workshop for investigating notions of elemental traits in human culture while simultaneously self-reflecting on the process. Since 2008, six MUTOPIAs have been held in Estonia, Latvia and Portugal, with unique stories, codes and group dynamics arising from each situation. Over the years a rough workshop formula evolved out of the ideas, interests and methods of different facilitators and participants who took part in the workshop. Mutopia now resembles more of a hybrid "folk" culture that shares aspects of performance, experimental theater, anthropology, semantics, OULIPO literature, 60's magical realism on film, folklore, autopoiesis etc, but is more a language or practice to find mutually beneficial connections between such fields.]
An hour later, after having my car thoroughly searched because I was unable to explain what Mutopia was up to (and I fit the profile I suppose of a drug smuggler, single and driving alone), I wondered if John had intentionally kept our identities (a.k.a. professional bios) hidden from one another in order to keep the improvisations more improvisatory.
Already, I was thinking about the concept of nature writing, how it always is interpreted as nature being written about, not in terms of the trace "nature" is always leaving one way or another on various surfaces. So driving there I began to look at the snow patterns in the mountains to see if they might spell out letters or shapes. But it was either "nothing" or old men with large noses. Why should I expect nature to write something in English? I realized then that my Romantic and Surrealist fazes were over, that I had become a collector and arranger of discourse:
some of the game that
he controls
magnifying animals
that did not occur
tundra swan
they no longer do this
John showed me a video about the indigenous peoples on the Northwest coast of the Americas, suggesting that the sheer abundance of fishing and the rainforest provided them ample time to produce their amazing totem poles and perform their potlatch ceremonies---it allowed them to be artists and profligates, which is what we all want to be.
Biologists base all their theories of evolution on the capitalist notion of scarcity. They assume all environments are or must be scarce.
This thing that we want to be might require an attitude adjustment.
only when we are anonymous
do we act purely
helicopter instead
simple in bird stone--essay on alienation
powerline theater post
homo ludens?
alright team, that’s my favorite plucking
we like humming too up towers
and sensitive microphones
you tear off any piece of the phone
and it keeps growing
success right there stomach
more poisonous than other ones
what is the nutrients this rhubarb
has taken in from coal
what would it have in it besides coal
dropped handling it in so many ways
masticate feel the flowing in the wind grass scarf
In this case there are no more miners because the town was literally relocated. That is why, as far as we know, it is a ghost town. Mark Nowak reminds us, in the
first person plural, other reasons they are gone. The park service, rather than threatening to fine us for treading on ghosts, pulls a greater trump card---the coal causes cancer.
So, a proposition on the difference between labor and art: exposure time.
As Mike Hansen puts it, explaining his short film Train, the difference between labor and art is “[c]onstructed from a visit to the ghost town Lower Bankhead, a coal mining community shut down in the 1930s. The coal was transported by small trains. The train has been taped at 3 angle and then collaged together.”
The scratching sound of uneven development on the screen was made by rubbing coke bottle tops together in various ways.
Siege 27
theme of childhood
Jules Verne
pointed out baby
that died the same day
left it in a cemetery
that looked like Hollywood
Do places have like palimpsest (this is for the unborn)
what does 192 mean who cares
we pay so much
attention
to fire
anthropomorphic grates
could you fall for turbines?
nature writing
compound forgetting
obscenic
We wandered around Banff in groups and Mike Hansen filmed the experience his group had. [Day 1 forage/gleam/find]
Dana took us to a place I called the Ghost Trap Escalator which was a non-mechanical escalator to the river below. Dana knew the major haunts, including the ghost town and the hauntings in the mansion across the way. She, like me but in a different way, was fed up with nature writing, said Atwood got nature right by making us aware of how absolutely lonely and disorienting “the woods” are.
Also, the cars that drove pass us were part of nature too. This was an object for debate all through the week, one which only interested me because there was a debate about it at all. John was interested in what we thought nature was and why. He had this tiny notebook he wrote in while we debated and drew maps on construction paper, relief maps, of our wanderings strangely converging at the cemetery where I lost my notebook of “nature writing” and Jules was interested in a baby that died the same day it was born. At the end of it all we put our maps together and produced an affective landscape that did not really exist. I stuck wads of crumpled paper underneath to give it that relief map feel. But it was a diorama feel too as people placed things they found along the way on the places of the map where they found it.
It was very much like something small children would do but nevertheless a quite compelling exercise. Affective mapping is childlike and impossible and obscenic, outside any scene and thus enters the field. . .
“down the mountain to another time time to another place ever encroaching roots visual piece product item product suffocating leave my domestic intentions suffocating unstable your normal airbags abstract and path in philosophy things felt so bled dress up how beautiful is is dedicated especially I forgot cosmic rays uniting the ghosts listened to flowers like the male having both drive and escaped ghosts even the lung to share the scope of the valley history with new profanities igniting the ghosts on the edge of modern times being in nature like this the distance to being in nature like this how does this affect our interaction destruction of desires being in nature like this repopulate my own earth is there under the impulse even the buildings take on stairways outnumber corridors to be sound nails enjoy reconsider ghosts the trace the trace being in nature like this abnormal airbags when I ended things felt so bled being natural and starting it read reassuring it makes me discover escape moments. . .”
If conduction forms a sort of miniature collective unconscious, we could say that ghosts are ignited by profanities but listen to flowers. At the start of the week John had us list on a sheet of paper the things we could all provide for the group and it all started to swirl together all the stuff we had.
A lot of sound and video equipment was being listed over and over and eventually someone said “psychic powers.”
Collaboration is always a psychic Open Field (Ghost Town).
The strings are, as my student Madelaine might put it, “conceptual art,” whose formula is always: “Concept becoming concept art.”
Therefore there is always a remainder, precisely the art which, like a séance, performed with recording equipment either human or mechanical, exceeds every intention. In capitalist idealism, this is not the case with concept becoming concept labor. It is the case with concept becoming concept nature.
“Bankhead a place, a heyday, trains back forth coal to building there are usually cars was by air reduce of methane in tunnels. I like how the sounds even seem muffled even there are no actual walls it felt safer, thinking of a home, almost too much to think of everything else, both as individuals but also trees and roots and such, Bankhead, d’or,
tunnel wagon tones avec par la I was thinking like you were saying, the forest can be so dangerous but it seems peaceful when we can see everything, you allowed yourself to be vulnerable, that we couldn’t get lost in the forest, do you think that’s where it comes from, especially if humans self reference out here, bad investment in the breeze, what you do is walk through the unexpected lake, microphones make you turn around with the paranoiac critical moss and its obsession with intellectual property.”
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