SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED

SAVAGENESS; Or, There are veins embraced in the property, Chicago Architecture Biennial, 6018|North, September 2017. Photo: Ji Yang

SAVAGENESS; Or, There are veins embraced in the property, Chicago Architecture Biennial, 6018|North, September 2017. Photo: Ji Yang

LIVE / AUGMENTED /VIRTUAL

POETICS

JENNIFER SCAPPETTONE——JUDD MORRISSEY——AVIVA AVNISAN

with soundscape work by Mark Booth, and sonic interventions by Ted Gordon and Adam Bach

SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED* is a mixed-reality performance/installation work that excavates sites, histories, and languages of mining in a poetics of generative telegraphy, geophysical extraction, and the multilingual hauntings of forgotten laborers. SMOKEPENNY proposes a critical archaeology of contemporary network culture in response to the extraordinary material, political and environmental legacies that make cloud computing possible. Hoisting virtual landscapes and augmented reality textscapes datamined from boom, strike, and bust in the Upper Midwest’s Copper Country, the performance explores the extraction, processing, and harnessing of copper as conductor for sprawling networks of exploitation and control as well as illumination.

*Telegraph codes extracted from The New General & Mining Telegraph Code (1891)

Iterations of SMOKEPENNY have taken place at the following sites:

The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, in November 2016, as a culminating instantiation of our 2016 research project undertaken with Caroline Bergvall, The Data That We Breathe (under the title SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED),

the Block Museum at Northwestern University, in May 2017, as the opening performance for the Ordinary Media Symposium,

the São Bento Monastery in Porto, Portugal, in July 2017, for the Electronic Literature Organization festival (under the title LAMENT; Or, The Mine has been Opened Up Well),

6018|North, in September 2017, as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (under the title SAVAGENESS; Or, There are Veins Embraced in the Property),

and the Poetry Foundation (in collaboration with the Spertus Foundation), commissioned by Ellen Rothenberg.

An immersive mixed-reality installation, LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well, was part of the Digital Trash exhibition at Rutgers University/Camden from September-December 2018.

A version of LAMENT was installed at Counterpath in Denver in April 2019. Read the ‘playbill’ here:

Read a review of the September 2017 performance by Jad Dahshan here.

The celebrated vulcanologist and “geoheritage” pioneer William Rose of Michigan Tech University discussed this project as part of a “Geoheritage and the Arts” panel for the May 2020 North-Central Section meeting of the Geologic Society of America; it is archived here.

SAVAGENESS; Or, There Are Veins Embraced in the Property* is a mixed-reality performance that taps the sprawling veins of modern architecture and telecommunications infrastructures. In September 2017, as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, we activated the metamorphic, collaborative anatomy of the art space 6018|North, located in a dilapidated mansion on Chicago's far North Side. Integrating 3D scans of the house itself, SAVAGENESS mines unseen depths of space and telegraphically coded language to expose the materials and human labor that make the networked domesticity of urban life possible. Combining original and archival sources, and employing a custom augmented reality system, the artists project poetic reformulations of history through high-resolution Lidar scans of 6018|North to create an immersive, yet otherworldly experience of the space. *Title extracted from The New General & Mining Telegraph Code (New York and London: American Code Co., 1905)