This program is part of the Night Flights series, presented by the ICP Lab. The ICP Lab is a new home for visual storytellers to experiment with technology and create interactive and immersive experiences.
In the words of program host Christopher Clary, "It would be wrong to say we're reading because of the current state of emergency. The underrepresented and underserved know this less as a state then it just is and always has been. We read to check one's state. To point out flaws. To exaggerate them publicly. We care not if they listen because we read to claim space. Real and otherwise—heterotopias.
Our books are in flux, algorithmic, out-of-print, on loan, PDF only, spiral bound, damaged by the printer, and printed poorly. We barely exist. But exist we do, together with books pulled from the ICP Library because a book, a read, collaborates with or rallies against."
In-person readings by:
Allison Parrish, Our Arrival
American Artist, “Black Gooey Universe,” unbag
Christopher Clary, FkN JPGs on Cam4
Morehshin Allahyari, The 3D Additivist Cookbook
Nora Khan, “Simulating Control,” Becoming Dangerous
Shiv Kotecha, The Unlovable
With excerpts from:
Paul Soulellis, Steve, Harvey and Matt,
Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Psycho Nymph Exile
Vanessa Place, Boycott
William E. Jones, Tearoom
Emergency Readings is also an exhibit on view at the ICP Library from May 21–June 8. Both the show and event are curated by Christopher Clary.
Queering the Collection is a series of exhibitions and events originally conceived by Emily Dunne of the ICP Library and Brett Erich Suemnicht of GenderFail as an intervention in the library. GenderFail is a publishing and programming initiative featuring the perspectives of queer and trans people and people of color. The project looks to build up, reinforce, and open opportunities for creative projects. The hope at ICP Library is to present work of and outside the collection as a way to excavate and acquire new material as well as to expand the voices of artists in the collection.
Speaker Bios
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator, and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is a member of the full-time faculty at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master's degree in 2008. Allison's first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, Articulations, was published by Counterpath in 2018.
American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. Artist attended the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist and is currently a resident at Eyebeam. They have exhibited at the Kitchen, New York; the Studio Museum of Harlem; and have participated in group shows internationally. They have published writing in the New Inquiry and New Criticals and have had work featured in AQNB and Huffington Post. Artist is a co-founder of the arts and politics publication unbag.
Christopher Clary is an artist and curator queering things, usually photography and language. His porn-novella zip file, a Rhizome commission, was named best individual work of Internet art by Hyperallergic and was acquired by the libraries at the Whitney, Walker, MoMA, and the International Center of Photography. The poetry collective Troll Thread is publishing a series of books that Clary has performed at Palais de Tokyo and Brown University. Curatorially, he continues to evolve a pavilion that he produced for The Wrong digital art biennial into a platform on safe space, from intersectional trauma to the end of network culture.
Morehshin Allahyari is an artist, activist, and educator. She was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. She is the recipient of the leading global thinkers of 2016 award by Foreign Policy magazine, and her work has been shown at the Queens Museum, the Tate Modern, Venice Biennale di Archittectura, and Centre Pompidou, among many others. Allahyari is currently developing a new body of work on digital colonialism and “re-figuring,” researching monstrous and djinn female figures of Middle Eastern origin to devise a narrative through practices of magic and poetic-speculative storytelling, re-appropriation of traditional mythologies, collaging, meshing, scanning, and archiving.
Nora Khan is a writer and editor at Rhizome. Her essays and art criticism on experimental art and music, digital visual culture, and the philosophy of technology have won a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art (2016) and an SVA Crossed Purposes Grant for Critical Writing (2018). She was an Eyebeam Research Resident in 2017. She has been published in Mousse, 4Columns, Conjunctions, Flash Art, Art in America, Village Voice, and California Sunday, and written essays commissioned by Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, and Sternberg Press. With Steven Warwick, she wrote a book, Fear Indexing the X-Files, published by Primary Information.
Shiv Kotecha is the author of Extrigue (Make Now, 2015), a shot-by-shot rendering of Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. His book The Switch, is forthcoming by Wonder Press.
