SEMIOSPECTACLE: A LITERARY REVUE
Performance & Curated Exhibition, 2010-2011

SEMIOSPECTACLE WEBSITE
Installment No. 2: IRT Theater, 2011, Forthcoming
Installment No. 1: Performance Space 122, 2010

"Semiospectacle melted the boundary between pedantry and stand-up comedy without sacrificing a genuine love for words and their power to effect and affect."
- Jordan Hruska, Art in America

Curated by Mashinka Firunts under the auspices of Columbia University's Modern Art: Curatorial Studies program.

This verbal varieté strategizes spectacle in a showcase of live art representing an encounter between the academic lecture hall, the poet's theater, and the vaudeville house. Its players cut across the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, pedagogy, poetics, and performance. Illusionists expose the parlor trick of transparent speech, conjuring floating signifiers that levitate forty-four feet above the floor. Costumes sewn from three million majuscules burst at the semes.


INSTALLMENT NO. 1 AT PERFORMANCE SPACE 122

CO-SPONSORED BY: UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE. Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit art & publishing collective focusing on new poetry, translations, lost works, and artist's books. The Presse favors emerging, international, and forgotten writers with well-defined formal or conceptual projects that are difficult to place at other presses. Its publications employ a variety of handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking.

PERFORMANCES BY: Vaginal Davis | Lord Whimsy | Dr. Lucky | Jeremy J F Thompson | Paolo Javier | Daniel Scott Snelson | Shonni Enelow

STENO POOL: AN INTERACTIVE PERFORMANCE Featuring: Leesa Abahuni | Nicole Abahuni | Jen Zak | Kristen Rhea van Liew | Fyodor Pavlov | Lawrence Gullo | Kyle Hittmeier | Lindsay Comstock

CODEXKAMMER: A FUNCTIONAL LENDING LIBRARY
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT BY: Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators
INTERTITULAR TAP BY: The Minsky Sisters
ONE-MINUTE CURATORIAL MICRO-LECTURES BY Mashinka Firunts

Image Design by Nubby Twiglet
Semiospectacle.com Web Design by Terrrrific
7CV CRITICAL READER
A Critical Reader to Accompany
Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies, 2010
Co-Edited with Daniel Scott Snelson

EDIT PUBLICATIONS WEBSITE

With Chris Cuellar and Event Editors Eddie Hopely and Sueyeun Juliette Lee
Released in Conjunction with Edit: Controlling Networked Publishing, an event series at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania. With excerpts from Charles Bernstein, Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, the American Management Association, and others. For a full PDF of the Critical Reader, visit: http://aphasic-letters.com/edit/publications.html.

Contents include:

A RANGE OF PUBLISHING PRACTICES, WHICH IN TURN PROPOSE READING PRACTICES.

TEXTUAL PROSTHESES

BABBAGE'S ANALYTICAL ENGINE CAN DO WHATEVER WE KNOW HOW TO ORDER IT TO PERFORM.

THESE INCLUDE "CIRCUITS AND NETWORKS," "FEEDBACK AND PURPOSIVE ACTIVITY," "SIGNALS AND MESSAGES," "INFORMATION AND PROBABILITY," "COMMUNICATION."

and

LAUREN BACALL IN THE BIG SLEEP
(1946, USA, DIR. HOWARD HAWKS)

SEMIOSPECTACLE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Edited by Mashinka Firunts
Design by Nubby Twiglet
Publication funding provided by Columbia University.

A catalogue accompanying the first installment of Semiospectacle: A Literary Revue at Performance Space 122.

Edited and with curatorial statement by Mashinka Firunts.
Design by Nubby Twiglet.

Images from the catalogue:






Exhibition poster:






 

PHONON-LEXICAL:
AN OPERETTA IN THE RANGE OF HUMAN RACKET
Performance, 2010
In Collaboration with Jeremy JF Thompson

NOISE! 2010 WEBSITE
Presented at Noise! 2010 at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater


An operetta tabulating remote dialects, specialized terminologies, and particularized speech of all stripes. Including: jive, vaudeville vernaculars, glossolalia, scat, code talking, ciazarn, carny cant, and doo wop.

AURAL FIXATING FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
Performance, 2010
In Collaboration with Jeremy JF Thompson


VAGINAL DAVIS IS SPEAKING FROM THE DIAPHRAGM WEBSITE
Presented at Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm at Performance Space 122

"A sci-fi burlesque that left the SRO crowd agog and panting for more."
- Vaginal Davis, VaginalDavis.com

A techno-lexical citational spectacle envisioning a reality in which the excitatory neurons might be activated exclusively through linguistic activity, with source text drawn from neuromarketing materials and the 1881 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

"A steelcake twists the piston, turns the crank, and performs diagnostics on dangling participles and flickering signifiers."


EXTRA! V ORGANZA
Performance, 2009
In Collaboration with Jeremy JF Thompson

Presented at Boog City Poets Theater at the Sidewalk Café
BOOG CITY POETS THEATER PROGRAM

A data-sleuthed & sculpted ace report on the concomitant rise of sensationalism and disappearance of the sensational.

They are inked up. They are hot off the press. Spinning good yarns. Penciling a National Angle. News Items: His Woman Girl of the Fridays Years (1940) (1942) closes the press box; some curtains. Gets in the wired room; word-ringers, face reporters, and gossipmongers gum up the works. The Rumor Mill, an RSS feed, Perez Hilton, and teeny Tweets are seen slurping Manhattan at the Savoy Saturday. This weak headlines: Wild Parties in Pictureland. Weekend Orgies of the Stars of the Silver Sheet! Singed Startlet Warns of Winding Celluloid Road to Ruin! 80 stab and jab beached bodies, the best and worth less of 1990, the Forbes Celebrity 100-2009. There's something very important on the teletype, six or seven items back. The obits read: Bolshevist sweetheart dead, a relation, you knew her.

FRAULEIN F & THE DANCE OF THE SEVENTEEN FABRIC SAMPLES: A RADIO DRAMA
Performance, 2008
With Musical Accompaniment by Grandpa Musselman & His Syncopators
Presented at Dances of Vice at the Montauk Club

The Golden Age of Radio: audio theater positions itself as primary mass medium of home entertainment. Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre On The Air, Murder at Midnight, The Spotlight Revue, and Quiet, Please! travelling weekly across air waves into the lobes of listeners tuning in on bakelite RCA 66-X-11 models. The arrival of televisual programming cues the radio drama's fall from vogue.

Fraulein F is radio drama investigated as literary spectacular through text loosely framed by the conventions of old-time radio, musical accompaniment, additional dialogue broadcast through a Benjamin radio, and live staged sound effects. Linking spectatorial pleasure to the procedure of auditory-verbal computation rather than visual processing, hyper-stylized speech-units take the place of players on the theatrical stage.

NARRATOR: Fraulein Festkleid's arrival on the stage is preceded by the percussive buzz roll of her swagger.
SOUND: TIN DRUM SIMULATES SASHAY
NARRATOR: She appears sporting saxony broadcloth cape. [...] Festkleid's s[l]ideshow exposed remains the nearest thing to prestidigitation preserved in the memory of Row P Seat Nine.

THE VANITY CASES NO. 2: CONSTANCE CALLOWAY & THE CASE OF THE CLICKING CAMERA
Video, B&W, 2007
Funding provided by the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender.

Constance Calloway, Camera Portraitist: Missing. All personal effects compiled during the investigation of her disappearance are offered for purchase in a portable vanity case in this bio-infomercial miniature motion picture.

Stills:





 



THE VANITY CASES NO. 1: TAMARA TUESDAY & THE CASE OF THE TINKERING TYPEWRITER
Video, B&W, 2006
Russian with English Subtitles
Presented at the UC Berkeley Worth Ryder Gallery.


Tamara Tuesday, Typist: Missing. All personal effects compiled during the investigation of her disappearance are offered for purchase in a portable vanity case in this bio-infomercial miniature motion picture.

Still:


 

THE BEAUTY SECRETS OF MARGARITA MOROZOVA
Novella, 2005
Ed. Roxanne Carter, Persephassa Press
With Introduction by Guy Maddin
Frontispiece pictured right by Xanthippe Svanstrom.

From the Introduction
Ostensibly an account of her own exotic struggle with, and devotion to, the conviction that she is the reincarnation of the real life silent film legend and depraved scintillant Alla Nazimova, Miss Firunts' strange and incomparable novella takes us on a long night-swim through dazzling sequin-strewn, tar-thick death-waters...
- Guy Maddin

A Note From the Publisher
The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova is a lush novel told in a series of chapters numbered in the manner of Coco Chanel's perfume. It concerns the life and times of a daring young woman, Nadja, a Muscovite expatriate who finds herself immersed in modern-day Hollywood, with all the accompanying palm trees, theatre marques, and baubles of the film industry (particularly the studio wardrobe and make-up department). By turns poetic, vitriolic, and nostalgic, this tale of intrigue and obsession is sure to enthrall.
- Roxanne Carter

Featuring a refashioned and re-translated Alla Nazimova Redux; a fetishized fiction of the queer silent film queen and Muscovite émigré. Nazimova stars as cinematic surrogate for the uncertainties of Soviet expatriation and the formation of gendered identity.

The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova is the subject of The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen, a University of Melbourne thesis by Nicola Trethowan, allegorist, belletrist, and photographer from Melbourne, Australia.

From the Abstract for The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen: Metamorphosis and Monolingualism in the Text of Identity
The Cosmological Cosmetics Regimen investigates the construction and transformation of identity in texts. How to narratives project, frame, and identify images of the archetypal femininity? What prevents the agency of this figure, and what role does archetypal imagery perform in transforming narrative progress? The purpose of my study is to generate a hypothetical position about the construction of identity in texts. I draw upon critical discourses of metamorphosis and monolingualism to establish how identity transforms as a text in translation. I develop my argument through close textual analysis of a case study, The Beauty Secrets of Margarita Morozova, negotiating a dual methodology of archetypal criticism and post-structuralist discourse analysis. The study concludes that identities of literary texts dissimulate and disfigure the integral binary terms of narrative subjectivity by translating the archetypal object of desire to an image of identity.
- Nicola Trethowan

GUY MADDIN: DIGITAL FILM STILLS
Exhibition, 2005
Co-curated with Michael Rababy
Presented at The Arsenal, Los Angeles. Co-curated with Michael Rababy.

An exhibition of digital film stills from the motion pictures of director Guy Maddin, with an appearance by the artist.