Lab and Field Reports for the Organism of Poetic Research

by EILEEN JOY

The BABEL Working Group is very much interested in fostering and cultivating what we are calling para-academic [coinage: Nicola Masciandaro] alt-lit-cult events, that also involve premodern studies + everything else studies + fine arts mashups, and we will have quite a bit of that on display at our biennial meeting in Boston this coming September [the final program for which will be posted this coming weekend] and also in two symposia-drawing boards to be held in 2013 [in California and New York: details coming later in the summer], AND SO IN THE MEANTIME, I encourage anyone who will be in New York City this weekend to attend an event co-organized by the Hollow Earth Society [who have collaborated with punctum books on various events already] and the Organism for Poetic Research, or OPR [founded and led by Daniel Remein, Ada Smailbegović, and Rachael Wilson, who will be with us in Boston as well]:

Lab and Field Reports for the Organism for Poetic Research on the Skin of Space + PELT No. 1 Release

Friday, May 25th

8:00 p.m.

Observatory

543 Union Street

Brooklyn, NY 11215

The Organism for Poetic Research consists of exactly what its name says it does. The publication PELT constitutes its epidermal organ, its interface with the world. Operating at the crux of empirical and humanist methodologies, fascinated with differentiation, the OPR has been studying the problem of the Skin of Space as an important political effort. This event marks the release of the first volume of PELT, titled ‘The Skin of Space,’ and heralds the occasion with the presentation of additional field and lab reports on the subject, in the form of poetry, lecture, and findings presented in printed graphic arts.

REPORTS FROM: 
 
Lytle Shaw is the author of Cable Factory 20 (Atelos), Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, articles on Smithson, and the forthcoming Specimen Box (Periscope) and Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetry (Univ. Alabama Press). He is associate Prof. of English at NYU.

Ed Keller is Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology and Associate Professor, School of Design Strategies, at the New School. He is also a co-founder with Carla Leitao of AUM Studio, an award winning architecture and new media firm, and his work and writing has appeared in Praxis, ANY, AD, Arquine, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Architecture, Parpaings, Precis, Wired, Metropolis, Assemblage, Ottagono, and Progressive Architecture.

Jeff T. Johnson’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in 1913 a journal of forms, dandelion magazine, Slope, and Whiskey & Fox, among other publications. Critical essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Coldfront, Sink Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, is Editor in Chief at LIT, and edits Dewclaw. He is currently working on LIVE FROM THE VOID, a typographic projection digitally rendered in architectural model space. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.wordpress.com.

Daniel C. Remein and Ada Smailbegović are colleagues as Ph.D. candidates in the English department at NYU, and are co-founders, with Rachael Wilson, of the Organism for Poetic Research.

BF Bifocals is a collective that does contemporary design, free.

Gracie Leavitt’s first book of poetry—Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star—is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is also the author of the chapbook Gap Gardening, out this year from These Signals Press. Poems have appeared or will soon in such journals as The Brooklyn Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, LIT, The Recluse, Sentence, and SET. Transatlantic collaborations appear in Whiskey & Fox’s series “Parks and Occupation.”