WRETI: Writing in Response to ETI
19 July at 9:00 am PDT / 12:00 EDT / 18:00 CESTDuration: 90min
Are we ready to communicate with aliens? This panel, hosted by Gregory Betts, considers the implications of A Sign in Space by Daniela de Paulis, using a wealth of literary experience to engage with the cultural resonances of this artwork. The four established writers on the panel (including Tracie Morris, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök, and Luigi Serafini) all plan to offer their productive impressions of this project. How might we write about aliens? How to respond to alien writing? What are the limits of our language in the face of radical Otherness?
The workshop is postponed to the 19 July.
Hosts
PROJECT FOUNDER & ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Daniela de Paulis
Daniela de Paulis is a former contemporary dancer and a media artist exhibiting internationally. She is also a member of the IAA SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Permanent Committee and a licensed radio operator. Her artistic practice is informed by Space in its widest meaning. Since 2009 she has been implementing radio technologies and philosophies in her art projects.
She is currently Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute and Artist in Residence at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, with the support of the Baruch Blumberg Fellowship in Astrobiology.
In 2009 she developed the Visual Moonbounce technology, in collaboration with international radio operators, and over the past fourteen years she has been creating a series of innovative projects combining radio technologies with live performance art and neuroscience. In addition to her artistic practice, she has published her work with the Leonardo MIT Journal, Routledge, Springer, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and RIXC.
More information: www.danieladepaulis.com, http://somnospace.diejungeakademie.de/, www.cogitoinspace.org, www.opticks.info
Gregory Betts
Gregory Betts is a scholar, editor, and experimental poet with collections published in Canada, the United States, Australia, and Ireland. He is most acknowledged for If Language (2005), a collection of paragraph-length anagrams, and The Others Raisd in Me (2009), 150 poems carved out of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150.
His other books explore conceptual, collaborative, and concrete poetics, thinking about the limits of language and the boundaries of communication. He has lectured and performed internationally, including at the Sorbonne Université, the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, the National Library of Ireland, and the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games as part of the "Cultural Olympiad”, amongst many others.
He is a professor of Canadian and Avant-Garde Literature at Brock University, where he has produced two of the most exhaustive academic studies of avant-garde writing in Canada, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (2013) and Finding Nothing: The VanGardes, 1959-1975 (2020), both published with University of Toronto Press. He has served as the President of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), the Craig Dobbin Professor of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin, and the Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence at Brock University.
He is currently the Curator of the bpNichol.ca Digital Archive and Associate Director of the Social Justice Research Initiative. His most recent books include Foundry (Ireland, 2021), a collection of visual poems inspired by a font named after a 15th century poet, and The Fabulous Op (Ireland, 2022), a collaborative epigenetic romp through the canon with Gary Barwin. He lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Listening to Space
by Gregory BettsNew!!Space is supposed to be silent, so it comes as a shock to learn how noisy it is out there.
Join us on the online (free) platform Discord, where the debate around decoding and interpreting the message is ongoing, with people from all over the world exchanging their thoughts while attempting to discover the signal's content.
DISCORDFollow the conversation on
Panelists
Tracie Morris, Jaap Blonk, Christian Bök, and Luigi Serafini.
Jaap Blonk
Jaap Blonk (born 1953 in the Netherlands) is a self-taught composer, vocalist,
poet and visual artist. After unfinished studies in mathematics and musicology
he discovered the power and flexibility of his voice, and set out on a long-term
research of phonetics and the possibilities of the human voice.
At present, he has developed into a specialist in the creation and performance of
sound poetry. He performs and gives lectures and workshops worldwide on a
regular basis.
Blonk’s music has appeared on about 50 CDs. Books with his visual poetry
have been published in several countries.
Christian Bök
Christian Bök (born 1966) is the author of Eunoia (2001), a globally renowned bestseller, which has won Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence.
Bök is currently working on The Xenotext — a project that requires him to encipher a poem into the genome of a bacterium capable of thriving in unsurvivable environments, lethal to most life on Earth.
Bök has exhibited his artworks at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in the Royal Society of Canada, and he now works, full time, as an artist at his studio in Melbourne.
Tracie Morris
Dr. Tracie Morris is a multidisciplinary poet, scholar, professor and performer who has researched and presented work in 35 countries. Her fellowships include WPR Fellow at Harvard University, CPCW Fellow at University of Pennsylvania, Creative Capital Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and MacDowell, Yaddo and Millay Colonies.
Tracie is a designated Master Artist by the Atlantic Center for the Arts and is a consultant for art and educational non-profit organizations.
She’s a Visiting Professor of the Practice at Brown University and Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent book is human/nature poems by Litmus Press.