Less Lonely-- The APG and David D'Agostino-- Photographs

Below are some photographs documenting the exhibition by David D'Agostino at the Edge Gallery in Denver from April 26-May 19, 2013, and which included contributions from the APG. The original announcement is here. And here and here are two APG recordings that were part of the exhibition. Thanks again to David for including us. 

Less Lonely-- David D'Agostino (and the APG) in Denver

If you're in Denver, be sure to check out this performance and exhibition.

EDGE GALLERY

3658 Navajo St Denver

April 26-May 19, 2013

Opening Performance 6:30pm April 26

Less Lonely: viz/lingo laboratory

​​

David D'Agostino with Kelly Brewer, Daniel Nilsson, Dave Sole, Tyler Christopherson, Mango Katz

Original frog opus composed and performed by Cop Circles

Poetry text constructed and recorded by the Atlanta Poets Group

Classical music performed by Nathanial Leavitt

Less Lonely: viz/lingo laboratory, a collaborative exhibit/performance by Denver-based artist David D’Agostino, presents uncanny experiments in human-frog relations. Based on the Fish and Wildlife Field Guide to Frog and Toad Malformations, the inter-media event highlights our fascination with little amphibians that inhabits our feel-good psyche to seek ‘oneness’ with an abiding, albeit now malformed, natural world.  Mixing performance, text, photos, painting, dissection tools, burnt drawing, q-tips, concrete sculpture, balloons and music, the show explores the liminal space that exists between the creation of one idealized object or idea and its subsequent corrupted re-imagining.

The work is presented as a visual/language laboratory allowing the audience to participate in live dissections, write balloon poetry, and leave samples of personal DNA to be buried with Coqui frog fragments in Utuado, Puerto Rico.

--
David D'Agostino
www.daviddagostino.com

reading from John Cage Silence "45' for a Speaker"

Here is a recording of a performance of 45' for a Speaker performed by James Sanders (the track is 42 mb). The musical pieces are 26"1.1499" for a String Player performed by Daryl Giuliano and 27'10.554 for a Percussionist performed by Caleb Herron. This performance took place on September 6, 2012 at the Goat Farm, Atlanta, as part of The Ten Thousand Things, a celebration of the life and work of John Cage on the 100th anniversary of his birth, presented by the Atlanta Poets Group, Bent Frequency and the Chamber Cartel.

All three pieces are from the collection of works known as the Ten Thousand Things. You can read more about 45' for a Speaker at Richard H. Brown's blog, A Year from Monday, and more about the Ten Thousand Things from James Pritchett.

Here is a recording of 45' for a Speaker by itself (also performed by James Sanders).

Silence

Wesleyan University Press 

276 pages

APG at Ten Thousand Things (Musicircus)

The culmination of Ten Thousand Things was a Musicircus held at the Goat Farm and included the Atlanta Poets Group, Bent Frequency and the Chamber Cartel.

 The APG performed Anarchy, Empty Words (Parts II and IV, simultaneously) and a selection from "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1967" from A Year From Monday.

Below is a map of the room at the Goat Farm where the Musicircus showing the positions of all of the performers. 

Here is a recording of the event from the Empty Words location (indicated by a box in the map below). You can hear Empty Words II (John Selvidge) fairly clearly most of the time, but you have to squint your ears to hear Empty Words IV. At minute the entire room performs 4'33" (and you can hear the freight train passing by fairly clearly).

Here is another recording from the location of Zac doing "Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1967". 

And some photos:

APG @ Ten Thousand Things

The APG performed three pieces on the second night of the Ten Thousand Things: "Interpenetration I-VI", "invade areas where nothing’s definite: passages from JC" and "Diary: How to Improve the World (YouWill Only Make Matters Worse)."

After that the Chamber Cartel did a fabulous performance of Four4. 

"Interpenetration I-VI" is a cross section of each section of Cage's Eliot lectures, the full title of which is MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotation
IndeterminacyInterpenetrationDevotion
CircumstancesVariableStructure
NonunderstandingContingency
InconsistencyPerformance and which is shortened to I-VI. Each of those words in the title is used to create a mesostic, running those keywords through Cage's collections of his own and other people's writings. Each of the APG readers in this performance is reading the portion of one of the six sections which has "interpenetration" as its mesostic keyword.

"invade areas where nothing's defininte: passages from JC" is a polyphon constructed from phrases plucked from Cage's writings using chance operations.

The pieces were all performed acoustically and recorded via a field microphone so the voices in particular can sometimes fade. Also, that train is pretty fantastic. 

Ten Thousand Things: APG @ The Goat Farm Sept. 6, 7 and 9

In honor of the 100th birthday of John Cage

This experience is created by:

The Atlanta Poets Group
Chamber Cartel
Bent Frequency
The CORE Performance Company

________________________________________________
Performances:

Sept 6 | The Ten Thousand Things | 8 pm

Sept 7 | Four4 | 8 pm 

Sept 8 | Herron Mastrian Duo | 8 pm

Sept 9 | MUSICIRCUS | 3 pm
________________________________________________

The Ten Thousand Things is a four-day celebration (September 6-9) of the work of John Cage (1912-1992)-- a luminary in 20th century avant-garde music, poetry, and visual art--on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Presented by the Goat Farm and curated by The Atlanta Poets Group, Bent Frequency, and Chamber Cartel, the events promise listening experiences rare in the worlds of music or literature.

Among these are a performance of four simultaneous virtuosic solos, an evening length percussion work, a soprano and percussion duo, and a multivoice realization of a mesostic.

The culminating event of The Ten Thousand Things is a "Musicircus," a collage-style musical happening of simultaneous, multiple performances: audience members are invited to stroll around the performance venue and partake in pieces that are of interest to them at that particular moment. Please join us to celebrate John Cage's 100th birthday and revel in sound and silence!

APG will be performing on the 6th, 7th and 9th. Hope to see you there!

Check out the Goat Farm's Facebook page for more details. 

APG at ATHICA

Here's an unsegmented recording of the performance we did at ATHICA on Friday, August 17, 2012. Thanks again to Lizzie, Hope and ATHICA for having us.

And below is a setlist so you can tell what you are listening to. Composer is in parentheses.

*

     variations: these things are shadows merely by virtue of their location (Mark)

      [Note: this piece is not in the recording-- we didn't get the recorder started on time.]

00:00 - selected poems (Zac)

05:08 - dateline: Patriot's Day (Erika)

07:05 - selected monophons (Mark)

14:40 - Untitled polyphon with ATHICA Epiphytes (James)

20:30 - "something happened, on this we agree" (JLo)

35:36 - Phenomenon of Consequence (Zac)

39:10 - Miniphytoharmonium: y'all or you guys (James)

41:40 - Integration Redisintegration (APG)

48:26 - selected poems (Erika)

53:58 - Mark talk about Lattices

56:13 - your call is important to us, or outlyre (Mark)

59: 20 - The Making of Thriller (James)

1:00:55 - calm and respite (Erika)

*

APG at ATHICA

If you happen to be in Athens next Friday, Aug. 17, come to the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art (ATHICA)-- we're doing a performance there at 8PM. Should be fun. Thanks to Lizzie and all at ATHICA for hosting us.

Details can be found at ATHICA's site.

APG in Emergency Index

A description of APG's x (lattice), y (glyph), z (time) performance at Poem 88 that took place last may was included in Emergency Index 2011, an anthology of 2011 performance events published by Ugly Duckling Presse. 

Thanks again to Jon Ciliberto and Robin Bernat for hosting us at Poem 88. 

Video of Poem 88 Event

Jon Ciliberto was kind enough to film and edit some of the proceedings from the "x(lattice), y(glyph), z(time)" performance installation that the APG and David D'Agostino did from May 17-19. The video can be found here at Vimeo. Thanks, Jon.

Three Evening Performance-Installation at Poem88: May 17-19

The APG will be performing in and through a kinetic installation created in collaboration with David D'Agostino and others at Poem 88 gallery. The event is spread across three evenings, from May 17-19, 6-9 each night. Poem88 is located here.

Here is the publicity blurb:

@ {poem 88}

x (lattice), y (glyph), z (time)

David D’Agostino, Atlanta Poets Group, Rassim

With Luke Leavitt, Dessislava Dimova, Andrew Axel, Jean Kern, Lazare Lazarov

David D'Agostino kidnapped the Atlanta Poets Group. They were taken to Bulgaria on a silver ship. Something returned. X (LATTICE), Y (GLYPH), Z (TIME) is an installation-performance resulting from the collaboration between visual artist David D’Agostino and the Atlanta Poets Group and including Bulgarian painter Rassim and other artists. This “in-between-exhibitions-exhibition”, sited for the Poem 88 gallery space, consists of various physical objects (paintings/poetry objects/photos/other), performances, music and sound phenomena. Words are connected to the grid. Life is line-drawn, turned as a table, and unearthed in a city too hussy to bait. The installation-performance will span three evenings, May 17, 18 and 19, from 6 to 9 PM each evening. You may come and go as you please. Sound is a photograph of language how a lattice breathes.

APG at Emory

James Sanders and the Jordanaires APG read at Emory Bookstore on Jan. 27, 2010. This bootleg recording is unsegmented, and it also includes sets by Sandra Simonds and Heather Christle. Thanks again to Emory for having us. We'll get a link to the official recording soon.

poem to read in a car sitting at a stoplight until you get honked at

Below are two realizations of this piece.

The first was done at the intersection of DeKalb and Oakdale (on DeKalb heading west).


View Larger Map

The second was done at the intersection of Moreland and North (on Moreland heading north). Evidence of drivers more patient here?


View Larger Map

Below is a blurry picture of the poem in action (at the Moreland/North intersection).

APG in Bulgaria

Participating remotely at a show at the National Gallery in Sofia. Here's the poster.

wall etchings from the open studio event

On Saturday night at about 9:30, not long after the last iteration of our every-twenty-minute-on-the-dot spontaneous poem in radical vers libre, the APG packed up its stuff and vacated David's studio. Besides some empty beer cans and (hopefully) some serviceable audio recordings of the night's hilarity, the only record left is the following remnant. It's the textual counterpoint (or side-effect?) of the 4-5 voice collaborative/improvised polyphon series we launched into periodically over the course of the evening, this poem typed away at by most of us and projected onto the studio wall as the series howled on:

this is not a poem
it is whited out .....wholly unnoticed

rear in, boo stock
us
whatever portion, daisy

in the blind of never

her a in the bunk
a picture of sy
in the blind of never

her a in the bunk
a picture for a window onto
the form to find a form, ranging ikeCow
each voice is or will be whited out
I was so close to Macedonia,
debt wasrepaid
layer escape--cunei-uh-farm-- op
enter would ghost
end
departure

core
overwriting
along
with a node, negative a fixed documentation of
selfishness
it's whard to blow-up
there, revealed behind a ruse, prison slowed
to hull of different landscape, intuited tomb
ggggggg eeee nnnnnn rrrrrr eeeee -- imagine
two Lennons, third stereo like all of the claims to be
in Bugarlia, written sound keeps goin' on sitch.

I don't

willn't gnot misunderstood

whine am I a live

like a non-us, repetition following

different apprehensive landscapes

upended with paintings, timely

pasties, stallions painted

wells and maybes, hokey-

tyuio

berds

pits

brazen

up in the head

quiescence

through noise

thru noises

truck noose

azzazazazazazazazazazazazazazazazazazazaza

tititititititititititi

froh

froh

froooooooooooh

wererererererererererererererererere

pspspspspspspspspt

claim to be a truth sayer

'twice in one rooster, sorted thru ano0ther fiction

cannibals like

advertising and vacation

muscles and calories

traffic and money

please

sort through the tie reese eat us

trick oh mun nigh is us

lay be uh naise the rabid dahlgren

composure in oklahoma city

okloa

okra homer shitty

hourglass go figure

wait on a text

the sun is brighter than myself

chrochra toner car trish

mandibles laughter ballast and icicle

jolly guy dee bored long vile ig. over well,

more owl fin thin not

onlie superegg, oh

until mind, me adjusted, me and why

the town spanked

APG at Contemporary's Open Studios

This Saturday, Oct. 9, the APG will be hosting/curating/performing at David D'Agostino's open studio from 7-9 PM at the Contemporary Art Center.
Details for the event per the flyer below and at: http://www.thecontemporary.org/programming/programs/fall-open-studios/

APG at Decatur Book Festival 9/04

A couple of Saturdays ago, we performed an extremely well-received 15 minutes at the Coffee Primate as part of their line-up for the DBF. Thanks again, Megan!

Our setlist (all polyphonic):

• untitled lattice work by James (w/Zac)
• sound investigation#2--advice for the inhuman: gears grinding
• club calcium [we need sound effects]
• L-spot harmonium [w/walkout]
  

A scant two hours or so later, APG members served as the backing band for James as he read at the Seen Gallery for the Experimental Writers Asylum, a two-day event sponsored by Eyedrum. Thanks to Bill & Amy for hosting much mischief and to Eggtooth & Ed for organizing it.

Highlights included the two-voice "Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light" (w/JLo), "Muzak for Lenox Mall" from his book Goodbye Public and Private (w/epiphytes by jselv & William), and James' solo reading of a very large lattice piece that scrolled, via laptop projector, along the gallery wall.

Two performances in one afternoon ain't no joke. Oh, and we love football, a'ight?

ACAC: Review and Youtubes

Karen Tauches wrote a review of the APG's show (and Anya Liftig's) at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center at Burnaway.org.

Also, below are two youtube clips that offer glimpses of the show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7OcBRd1G3o&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiBR3-LR6Sg&NR=1

APG at The Drive-By Theater Project, July 15

The APG is pleased to participate in The Drive-By Theater Project's week-long celebration of regional indie theater beginning next week at 7Stages (Little Five Points. ATL). We'll perform on Thursday night, sharing the bill with Kodac Harrison and a couple of others, with a substantial ~45-minute set that will, once we're done, give way to an open mic bacchanal during which all would-be artistes and poetasters of distinction should feel free to jump in and share the limelight.

The evening's performance begins at 8, with advance tickets ready for online purchase for a measly $5 at the link above. Word is, they're going fast and--dare we dream?--may not be available at the door since seating is limited. For a full breakdown of the week's schedule of fantastic DBTP events, click here.

"Low Ghosts": Artifacts from the ACAC

The palimpsest left on my laptop at the end of the show last Thursday at the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, accompanied here by the blocking diagrams for each of the four pieces we performed--or was it all one piece? Hmmm...

stop the joy

air in space is

loss to create space

& spaces

I can't go on

I will

make space(s)

but then fever found the

start of verse till

the gourd exploded ;

identical sac ploppets

jet-laggins-wigglers

START AGONY?

fever is never found on top of

hum, small onion, gas response

ample pan(de Cortez) inharmonium

pie-eaters impious, look at my socks

with a new field uololololo

THAT'S AN open mouth or a window

if awake, then Brazil.

gone. ghost. open, undulating morning

Slap focused, investor beheld

Twas morning, when..... voluptuous gesture that....

in respect to what you're up against...

not phenomenon but phenomendon't;