Category: The Green Lantern Press

Still from video documentation, Every house has a door, Testimonium, Bourges, France.

Testimonium (quiet form) in Bourges, France

June 29 – 30, 2015

Airing at 2am, 5am, 8am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 8pm, 11pm CDT

By Every house has a door

Video documentation from a performance, 53’15”, La Box ENSA, France, 2014.
Performance documentation by Alexia Morinaux.

Organized in conjunction with the Ghost Nature symposium, Following Nonhuman Kinds.

Presented by The Green Lantern Press

As part of ACRE TV Takeover

During a symposium at La Box, ENSA in Bourges, France, Every house has a door performs a different version of Testimonium — Testimonium (quiet form). Joan of Arc is not present. Instead Stephen Fiehn and Bryan Saner occupy the entire stage with a series of coordinated movements from the original piece. This is a quiet version, a version for a bi-lingual audience, a version focused on the choreography of objects within the original performance.

Every house has a door was formed in 2008 by Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturge, to convene project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performances in which the subject remains largely absented from the finished work. The performances distill and separate presentational elements into distinct modes – recitation, installation, movement, music – to grant each its own space and time, and inviting the viewer to assemble the parts in duration, after the fact of the performance, to rediscover the missing subject. Works include Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. (2009) in response to the work of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev,Testimonium (2013) a collaboration with the band Joan of Arc in response to Charles Reznikoff’sTestimony poems, and the on-going project 9 Beginnings based on local performance archives. 

Performance/Installation still from Devin King & Caroline Picard,
Rehearsal of a Grand Opera for One Person,
New Capital, Chicago.

Pulling from toy theater and the operatic tradition of regietheater, combined with the effect of streaming media in the present day, Caroline Picard and Devin King’s Grand Opera for One Person presents a 48-hour installation, interrupted for 2 hours by improvisatory guitar. The entire 48-hours is conceived as a performance of objects highlighting, in part, the potential for four 3-dimensional paintings to function as micro-stages that illicit a sense of anticipation and promise for aesthetic transformation within the viewer. The 2-hour interruption, or musical interlude, creates an intermission in the tableau, inverting traditional expectations about space and human relation.

Rehearsal of a Grand Opera for One Person assumes that a space can be active without human presence; a painting has the ability to move and affect, even while it is inanimate. Furthering that point, a birds-eye video loops simultaneously, capturing four acts and a curtain call of assorted objects as they move back, forth and around a black table by a pair of gloved hands. This simple choreography establishes a flux and flow of relations between things performing for a camera.

The collaboration was inspired by two separate lectures, samples of which are integrated into a looping 20-minute audio track. The first lecture about Graham Harman, Louis Zukofsky, John Cage and the sample-as-object (by King), and the second about Timothy Morton, Giorgio Agamben and The Pancantantra (by Picard) provide an ambient background text about nature and object oriented ontology.

The Opera is a Total Art Experience. It is massive, expensive, glittering and refined. Its high status and rarified aesthetic is easily inaccessible and exclusive — it is an older tradition, with massive audiences who sit together in vast, ornate rooms. King and Picard are interested in the potential for that form to be appropriated, reduced, tweaked and recontextualized as a one-on-one event, in which humans may or may not be present. This performance was their first rehearsal. This piece was performed on November 19th, 2012 in the basement of New Capital, in Chicago, Illinois.

Still from Sonia Levy, I Roam.

Plants, Machines, Animals, and Objects!

June 29 – 30, 2015

Airing at 12am, 3am, 6am, 9am, 12pm, 3pm, 6pm, 9pm CDT

Presented by The Green Lantern Press

As part of ACRE TV Takeover

Everywhere we turn, we find a territory of nonhuman things. It is impossible to escape the trace of others—from material structures (plants, machines, animals and objects) to those all but invisible bodies outside the bounds of human perception (atoms, molecules, pollution, viruses, satellites, planets, etc.). What would an aesthetic look like that included these many other things? Is such an aesthetic possible?

To further explore a line of research established by its affiliated reading group Following Nonhuman Kinds, The Green Lantern Press curated a series of short, related films that first screened at Sector 2337 in Chicago in June 2015, and again on ACRE TV. This series was curated by Giovanni Aloi, Kathleen Kelley, Trevor Perri, and Caroline Picard.

The screening features:

1. Himali Singh Soin (in collaboration with Dario Villanueva), “The Particle and the Wave” (12:47)
2. Chloë Brown, “Dialogue: Panthera Leo” (3:16)
3. Laura Aish, “The Machine”, (5:14)
4. Laura Cinti, “Nanomagnetic Plants” (1:55)
5. Peter Matthews, “The Ocean Moves Through It” (5:00)
6. Matthew C. Wilson, “Forecast” (2:52)
7. Quiet ensemble, “Orienta” (2:45)
8. Sonia Levy, “I Roam” (3:16)
9. Max Stocklosa, “More World Material”(15:32)
10. localStyle, “Chew”, (3:33)
11. Gillian Wylde, “A as in Animal” (2:46)
12. NEOZOON, “BUCK FEVER” (5:54)
13. NEOZOON, “MY BBY 8L3W” (3:03)
14. Linda Tegg, “Sheep Actress” (2:58)
15. Filip Kwaitkowski, “Tiera” (2:47)
16. Chloë Brown & Ines Lechleitner, “The Hum” (3:19)
17. Smriti Mehra, “Authanakoota (Banquet)” (13:58)