DRIFT A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production Issue 1, January 2011

Nif Hodgson, percept II

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“For Newton, of course, all colour joined in the pure concept of whiteness, of light. But we are attracted to the weakness and impurity of the bond of pigment, because we can identify with nothing other than instability. This identification is admittedly a style of taste, but it also improvises a political alignment. We are aligned with a surface. We exchange mineral components with an historical territory, less like cyborgs than like speaking, ambulatory dirt.”

-Lisa Robertson, “How to Colour,” The Office for Soft Architecture

“I think the notion of textuality was broached precisely to question the kind of thing that it is today seen to be - that is, the verbal text, a preoccupation with being in the library rather than being on the street.”

-Gayatri Spivak, “Criticism, Feminism, and The Institution,” The Post-Colonial Critic

“The alleys are the footnotes of the avenues.”-David Berman (Silver Jews), “Smith & Jones Forever,” American Water

Thank you to Gwen Allen, Suzanne Stein, and Ginger Wolfe-Suarez for their invaluable feedback and words of support throughout the early development of this magazine.

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Editorial Page///

Dear Reader,

Welcome to DRIFT: A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production. This is our first issue, and we are very excited to present it to you. Our mission at DRIFT is to explore the sites of intersection between various modes of artistic and cultural production occurring primarily in the geographic and social land-scape of the American west coast. Anyone who has a stake in the culture of this place is invited to contribute. With this issue, we have endeavored to represent something ap-proximating the breadth of our interests, featuring original sound & visual art, poetry, short fiction, essays, local cultural interest stories, and a strong lean toward cross-disciplinary collaborations and experimental forms. We started with a wide call to artists, musicians, poets, geographers, social critics, public historians and other producers of cultural materials. The resulting submissions were diverse in form and intent and, when gathered together, revealed several thematic threads. The strongest of these concerns the variable natures of public space and the experience of the everyday. Some pieces address it through the politicized lens of contested space, some through a more tactile examination of the physical environment, and still others focus on the social dynamics of collaborative projects. Included in this issue, as well, are a number of pieces that cross boundaries of form and discipline. Some employ scientific methods to quantify and clarify artistic pursuits, and some set out to muddy the waters a little. In the end, the work presented is everything we hoped for, and much more. We want to start a conversation within the pages of DRIFT, which we hope will spill out and get mixed up with other conversations and find it’s way back, with new ideas to share.

Thank you, E. Maude Haak-Frendscho & Sean Collins, Editors

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Table of Contents///

Orange Juice from Concentrate: A Conversation of Words and Images Between

Klara Glosova and Scotty Enderle - 4

SIMULACRUM by Meredith Carty MacKenzie - 11

liminal contour I, II, and III by Nif Hodgson - 17

dance: adequate, language. by Sean Collins - 20

Surround Sound: Power and Freedom by Sarah Boothroyd - 22

A Disciplined Sidewalk by Ian Alan Paul - 23

City Reader, Issue Two by Julie Cloutier - 27

Face-to-Face with the Everyday: An Interview with the Vis-à-Vis Society by

E. Maude Haak-Frendscho - 30

Lab Work by Ryan Wilson - 38

Resonates Well With Others by E. Maude Haak-Frendscho - 40

untitled graphic novella (landscape with sculpture) by Jeremiah Jones - 44

I Am Just Me/We Are Just We: An Interview with Kyle Field by Sean Collins - 46

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Orange Juice from Concentrate:A Conversation of Words and Images Between Klara Glosova and Scotty Enderle

NEPO home_page is a collaborative project spearheaded by Seattle-based artist Klara Glosova. It began as an open house/birthday party, but turned into a series of mul-timedia art events. Artists were invited to install their art in, on and around her Beacon hill home. As Klara describes it: “When people venture out to see and experience something I want to offer them a lot, a lot of good quality work (my aim is to create abundance with discernment). The NEPO shows are like concentrated orange juice, many oranges get squeezed into a can. It is an intensely concentrated moment of time that carries within it the energy of a much longer time of growing and ripening. Afterwards people can take this experience home with them, dilute it with water and drink from it - I hope it can quench their thirsts for a while, supply them with energy and inspiration.” It is an open invitation; if one hears about it, they are invited. I had heard about the most recent NEPO house project but, unfortunately, did not attend. However, with one search-word typed in, “NEPO,” I was presented with a vast catalog of information from the project’s web site: http://www.pictureband.com/nepo.html. There is extensive documenta-tion of all four NEPO house exhibitions, links to many of the artists that have participated in each show, and an archive of projects and works by Klara. I knew early in my research that I did not want to do a traditional question-and-answer interview. In my first email to Klara I suggested a visual interview, and sent some images along. After meeting in person we decided to do a kind of half written half visual interview. In conversation, Klara mentioned that she had been saving tons of images as a source-material file, and has wanted to do something with them. I hope that this project will allow her to utilize this database, to give insight to the forming of the NEPO house project, its outcomes, and also its future. NEPO house, by nature, is an investigation into the personal. It opens up the ques-tion of how we interact with one another and what boundaries we set. What happens when one opens their door to the public and says Come in? What happens when art begins its life in a home? As far as the art world is concerned, NEPO house is an experiment in taking out the middleman. There is no dealer, no overhead, no pressure from boards of directors, or direct need for sales. The art is installed where many artist envision their art to belong: on a shelf next to the globe or a friends ceramic bowl, on the kitchen wall where one walks by it every day, or above the fireplace where friends and family gather. Art is at its best when it is lived with, if not lived in.

-Scotty Enderle

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SE: The first thing I think about from our meeting is when you showed me around and described what has happened in each room, each wall, each space. As I looked around the house it was, and still is, filled with the remnants of the previous show(s), and of your art-making. The buffalo sits next to the television; the hooks that once hung Vidrio Mas-simo a.k.a Daniel Carrillo’s portraits of participating artists are now draped with colored strings and felted masses of yarn. There is a popsicle stuck into plaster melting its color onto a watercolor pallet on the kitchen table. There are also stories of kid-bands, preparing a show in their room “practice space,” and the band breaking up because of differences with the drummer (typical). In the same room a six-hour intergalactic drone jam installation took place during NEPO 3. A dinner was eaten on a giant teeter totter, magically the wine glasses wavered up and down and plates of food hovered at different points sometimes near ones lap others just out of reach at eye-level. The guests adapted and the food was eaten, and conversation was lively and smooth.

What I gathered walking around: while there is not a current exhibition up, the house is still very much filled with ideas and resonates with the past and current creative happenings. The four NEPOs represent the four seasons and four elements: air, water, fire, and back to earth finishing up the cycle. Thus far there have been four NEPO house happenings, ap-proximately one for each season of the past year. When you think back to last year, what was going on in your life that made NEPO house occur?

Scotty Enderle, “Last Year”

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KG: Looking back a year, a lot has changed. Besides the physical changes that come along with having four large shows/ events in my personal living space, I think what changed the most is my own perception. It might seem like a strange thing to say, but there was a time when I didn’t like being in the house very much. It was just after we rebuilt the house. While building the house was an amazing, intense, creative experience for me–not the dreaded “necessary evil” phase most people associate with a house remodel—when it was done I felt almost like a prisoner. The princess locked up in a beautiful castle was an image that came to my mind. Looking back I see that I was projecting my feelings of isolation onto this house-object, as if “it” had the power to lock me up. It took a shift of perception to see it as an asset and a way out of my self-imposed prison.

The house became a tool, a blank canvas, and an opportunity to create something new - again. I saw the potential. I didn’t know what would happen and what I would find when the door opened, but I was hungry curious. The first NEPO party was more about that act of opening the door and throwing some energy “out there” than a well-planned event. It turned out to be a lot of fun, some people brought their Ready Made Formulas (meaning: bring what you have and we will hang it on the wall), some people came just to check it out and others ended up jamming on whatever instrument they could find (from kid size drum set to an iPhone). It was all very spontaneous and I saw how naturally and comfortably vari-ous art forms can cohabitate—literally being at home.

 Klara Glosova presents a composite, a movie strip: the top row is about the inside. The bottom row is about the outside and it illustrates what happened when I took the house for a walk.

SE: What are some of the ways that you think of your home differently now that you have had all of this activity take place inside, on the side, and around your family’s house?

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KG: For my family and me, the NEPO shows became our subjective units of measuring the passage of time. The shows became our milestone markers, just like weddings, childbirth and funer-als are for most people. Given the rela-tive frequency of rearranging everything in our living environment, it feels like we have moved three times within the last year. The idea of constant change acquires physical attributes by which moments in time can be measured and remembered. It was very exciting to see a child’s bedroom turn into an intergalactic space filed with primordial sounds, to have people perform and recite poetry in our shower or eat dinner on a twelve foot long teeter-totter in the middle of our living room. We definitely got to see and experience our house differently with so much creative energy (and so many people) coming and go-ing. On the other hand, we also learned to really appreciate our quiet family moments and simple things like having a cozy living room during the times in between.

 

Scotty Enderle, “These boards are like bones”

Klara Glosova, movie strip about our private encounters with the house after it has been altered by a NEPO event.

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SE: So much of the NEPO house project seems to be about the physical space of the house and the idea of opening doors to artists, art viewers and creative thinkers. Have you had any conflicts with posting the content on the Internet? As a viewer I never made it to a NEPO house show. My only contact with the exhibitions is through the web site and through visiting your house, seeing the remnants of the last NEPO show “Returning to Earth”. I have read that you thoughtink of the NEPO project as a physical website. Does it bother you at all that I, and many people reading this, are only able to access the NEPO house projects via a two dimensional screen?

KG: No actually it doesn’t bother me, I realized a while ago that the project (and it’s docu-mentation) has a life of it’s own even when the physical event is over. Also, I never thought of it as a question of “either/or” (internet versus real life) - it is more about the “and,” a dif-ferent manifestation of a same idea in the real and the virtual world. It’s about exploring a particular issue through different modes of communication - the difference is the distance (how far removed) from the actual physical experience the record is. The web site for me is another step - I see it as a creative challenge in the process of communicating and explor-ing ideas. Just like this interview is another step, another angle, another attempt at creative communication.

Above images are the results of “NEPO” Google image search. NEPO house images are circled in red.

 

 

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SE: The images also bring me back to an earlier exchange when we wondered if it is pos-sible to make a mistake in responding by image. With language, there are the written words and they have a definite structure and fairly ridged rules. If a word is misspelled or the syntax of a paragraph or sentence is mixed up, the recipient may not be able to understand the immediate information. If the writer only submits an image, the interpretations remain much more open; the image can at once be elusive, cryptic and vast. This was the impetus for having a visual interview, and seems to be at the heart of your NEPO project. Opening ones house to artistic experimentation is uncommon here in Seattle. It is a bit more com-mon in other cities, though I have never seen documentation on quite the immersive scale as NEPO house. Opening your home to artists and the public changes the rules, or at least shifts them a bit.

This shift in the idea of doing something “different” or original in the art world in my opin-ion is a myth. The idea of subversion tends toward the impossible. However, NEPO house seems an experiment in immersion and inclusion rather than exclusivity.

Are the ideas of immersion and inclusion outcomes that you anticipated?

KG: Yes, you are right. I think in this case it is immersion rather then subversion that shifts the center of authority. But the shift isn’t about moving power from one entity to another. It is about movement from the outer to the inner authority, about discovering your inner authority.

Interestingly enough, when you open something up, make it inclusive and available, it shifts the parameters of the game. It becomes obvious that it is not enough that something is now available; someone also has to reach for it. It takes a self-initiated action (or at least self assessment) on the part of the participant (artist). Action is power but it also comes with responsibility. A lot of times we act as children, relying on the outside authority to judge how good we are. The art world primarily functions like that—at least seemingly, because even within this system it helps to know your own value—with submissions, applications, juries, selection committees, critics and awards (sometimes it appears that everybody is waiting for someone else to validate or be validated). It is a play of power. It is easy to wear your medals on your chest and substitute them for who you are. And in turn, in the ab-sence of them, to feel like nobody. When you remove this outer authority you have to stand up on your own, to first know for yourself, to recognize how good your work and your contribution is. I have been learning all of this on my own, so I think that’s why these issues come up within my projects. For me NEPO is about testing ideas in real world. What I think at the beginning is not always what I get in the end, I’m learning a lot.

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I think you are also correct in your observation that NEPO House is mainly about people. I started to assemble the images to illustrate/communicate what NEPO is about accord-ing to my own plan. My idea was to show how the places in the house changed during the different shows. I realized the evolution of empty spaces was only mildly interesting to me. I divided the photos into folders named “living room”, “bathroom”, kitchen”, “bedroom” and so on, but the real NEPO didn’t seem to come through until I created a new folder titled “people”. Then the images became exciting as if they carried remnants of the energy and NEPO seemed to come to life.

SE: My last question is about the future of NEPO house if you want to talk about it. What if anything do you have planned for NEPO house 5?

KG: We have both big and small plans for NEPO. The big one is NEPO 5: 5k show and run (coming up most likely in June). Our next show NEPO 5 will be a departure - literally. The plan is to organize a 5k run through the neighborhood (and possibly through a few yards and houses). As you might already be guessing, it will not be your ordinary run, artists or artist teams will run as “horses” and when I say run, I mean hop, skip, compete three-legged backwards or ride a trike. I think it should be a relay—encouraging both competition and cooperation— so that participants can engage in various art and/or drinking related activities while they wait for their teammate to show up with a baton. There will be a NEPO show/event as the final destination as well as possible shows at relay stations. And last but not least, NEPO 5 will be a fund-raiser.

The small plan refers to taking a smaller bite(s). We will be introducing NEPO: Little Treats starting in winter 2011. It will be a series of monthly solo shows in our entry room, an open platform for anyone who has something interesting cooking right now and wants to show it. The idea is to showcase new work, without moving too much furniture:). ///

 

Photos by Dan Bennett, Damon Mori, Todd Jannaush, Rumi Koshino, Robin Crookall, Jen Graves, Amanda Manit-ach and Klara Glosova.

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SIMULACRUMby Meredith Carty MacKenzie

The itch was constant, obnoxious, and always in the same place. Behind her left ear, the annoyance felt like the bristles of a scouring brush working in tiny circles just under the surface of her scalp. Furiously, she scratched the damned spot until she eventually worked a bald spot the size of a silver dollar. When it began, the itch was unobtrusive, a slight tickle. Catherine, the librarian, muddled through her ordinary routine while days fell off the calendar, piling up into weeks and months. Occasionally, the twitch presented itself for a brief moment, adding a slight distraction to her mundane existence. Over time the distraction grew exponentially. On her commute across town to work, Catherine sat staring out the window of the #57 bus contemplating today’s word. Silently and repetitively, she struggled to pronounce the word. It was of Latin origin. The Word of the Day for January 12 is “Simulacrum,” she silently mouthed, staring blankly at the familiar collection of shapes whizzing by. The city outside her window resembled a concrete Lego-land, peppered with historical imperson-ators, people in dark suits, and taxicabs. She repeated the mantra silently, “simulacrum,” visualizing the dictionary spelling, with all of its dots and dashes and accents. The more she mouthed the word, the stranger it sounded in her head. Just as Catherine imagined how she might incorporate the word into today’s con-versation, her vision blurred. Her eye twitched uncontrollably, and an itch squirreled its way up from the base of her neck to meet the back of her ear. All sound around her was in-stantly muffled, as if the bus had plunged itself under water. The rumbling mechanics of the bus and the chatter of its passengers sounded so far away, so deep beneath the scratch-ing noise inside her head. After several deep breaths, Catherine removed her glasses, rubbed her eyes and tried popping her ears. She looked up, focusing her eyes on the STOP REQUESTED light flashing above the driver’s head. In her panic, she had yanked the yellow cord that rang the bell, alerting the driver to stop. Clumsily, she gathered her bags, pushed up her glasses and excused herself through the crowd toward the front of the bus. She walked the next four blocks hurriedly for fear she might be late for her shift at the public library. Arriving at the entrance, she pulled on the heavy door only to find it locked. Confused, she tried again with no luck. In her six years as a librarian, she had never arrived to find the front door locked. Without wasting any more time, she made her way to the back of the building. Sure enough, there was another door, and this one was open. Inside, she shuffled her way down the dark corridor, noticing an unfamiliar opposition to the usual silence of the library: muffled music, with thumping bass and a whiney horn section. Curious about the misplaced music, Catherine made her way to the elevators. Was the sound real, or were her ears playing tricks on her again? Her eyelid started to flutter and

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her hair felt too tight. The scratching noise inside her head was getting louder and more noticeable. Can anyone else hear that? she wondered. “Hear what?” answered a large sweaty man in a dark suit. His fat fingers were drip-ping with gold rings and the little hair he had left was greased backwards. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see you standing there. I was just thinking aloud. It’s noth-ing.” She said shyly. “Don’t mention it. I’m Larry. You must be the new girl. You can put your coat and things in this closet and I’ll show you to the front. Your shift started half an hour ago, but Tammy covered for you. C’mon, don’t be shy. By the way, love the glasses. Guys here go nuts for that school teacher shit.” “Pardon me? What? No, actually, I’ve been working at this library for six years. I’m just a little lost. You see, the front door was locked and I’m just trying to find my way to the elevators.” “Ha! You’re one of those girls that never breaks character. I love it. School teacher, librarian, my mistake. Sorry bout that, Sweetie. Follow me. You’re late.” At the end of the hallway, Larry opened the door and held it for Catherine. Reluc-tantly, she entered the adjoining room and the volume of the music tripled. Against the dark curtains, the gleam of the poles bounced off the mirrors. She could feel the bass thump-ing in her chest. Wide-eyed, she was mesmerized by the naked gymnasts working the room. Larry was saying something inaudible under the pounding club music. Barbie dolls in bikinis and boots made their way around to tiny round-topped tables, each girl bending and stretching like a cat walking a tight rope. Although Catherine’s face was frozen in time, the action of the room leisurely swirled around her. The wet heat of the strip club fogged up her glasses. Before trying to piece together how she ended up here, mistaken for an exotic dancer at a gentlemen’s club, she made an about-face and began scampering for the exit. Despite her sensible shoes, the suit she wore made it impossible to run at the speed she wished. Instead, she was forced to shuffle with her knees pinned together under her pencil skirt. She buried her chin in her chest; afraid to look straight ahead for fear she might be exposed to more indecency. In her rush to leave, her clunky shoes got caught-up in the carpeting. Her hands went down hard and her glasses flew off. She found herself face-first on the concrete flooring. Larry bent down to help Catherine, floundering like a fish on the floor, but she couldn’t take his chubby, sweaty hand. She could barely stand herself up because her hands were busy scratching away. Down on all fours, she crawled through the labyrinth of hallways until she could feel the cold of the January air outside. Panic covered her face. She stood herself up, wiping off her dirty knees and adjusting her glasses.

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The alarm clock screamed 6:45 and she could hear the automated coffee maker starting to drip. Catherine stepped out of bed and into her slippers and bathrobe. She sat down at her desk to return some emails and check her daily horoscope. Sipping her coffee, she peeled yesterday’s page off the calendar and noticed today’s date, March 19. Tonight was the art opening at her friend Maurice’s gallery. She was excited to see the new exhibit and indulge in a few glasses of wine. After reading the paper, she hurried to finish her cof-fee and catch the bus downtown. That day at work, Catherine phoned Leah to ask if she’d be interested in meeting at the opening. Leah was a dear friend of Catherine’s and always up for a night out. At the end of their conversation, Catherine had a burning urge to confess to her friend about the day she accidentally took the wrong bus. She had to tell someone; it was eating her up inside. She had obsessed over her mistake for months and was con-vinced that she was psychotic. “Leah, I’ve got to ask you something. Now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but…” Catherine began. Just as she was about to confide in Leah about the most recent spell of bizarre behavior, she glanced at her feet under her desk. There they were. Pink and fuzzy, with embroidered martini glasses: her bedroom slippers. “Oh Jesus, what have I done?” “What is it? It can’t be that bad.” Leah questioned. “Oh, forget I mentioned it Leah. I’ll see you tonight.” Catherine hurried off the phone. Her hands started tingling and the itch was insistent. Heat flushed her cheeks. She grabbed a handful of her hair as if she were going to yank it out by the roots. Before leaving work, she fashioned her hair in a loose bun off to the left in hopes of camouflaging the bare spot. At the gallery, Catherine studied her hands around her wine glass. The nails on her left hand were worn down to nubs. She circled the gallery mingling with familiar faces and waiting for Leah to arrive, waiting for the itch to stop. Noises filled her ears, like a tooth-brush working overtime. Can anyone else hear that? she wondered. Her eyes scanned the faces around the room. She hoped to catch a glimpse of another sufferer, someone else whose eyes would confirm that the noises were real. She kept double-checking her ap-pearance in the reflection of the front window to quiet her paranoia. Casual chitchat and background music were drowned by the crescendo of the scouring sounds in her head. The tingling twitch behind her ears developed into a full-blown swelling pain, accompanied by a warm heat. The aching itch inched down her spine, settling in her gut where it radiated. Deep breaths, constant blinking and eye-rubbing- nothing seemed to help. Catherine knew she had to focus on something, anything, to distract her from the swirling discomfort. She chose the paintings. The colorful works arranged around the white walls were the only things keeping her from feeling like she was in an asylum.

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Her eyes locked on a gigantic piece hanging over her left shoulder. She stood back and folded her arms to take a better look. The painting was an oversized abstract done in oils. The staccato dance of color was rich and electric, an inviting place to escape the inter-nal torment she was experiencing. She tried quieting the chaotic noise in her head. Every-thing in her line of sight was spinning and she was terrified that it was obvious to everyone around her. The visuals were overwhelming to her. Although there was no particular image rendered in the painting, Catherine started hallucinating, finding hidden figures throughout the piece. She stared, concentrated and focused. For a long stretch, she even stopped scratching. The throbbing in her gut died down and a wave of calm washed over her aching parts. Absorbed by peaceful psychosis, Catherine stretched her arms out to her sides and embraced the painting with her full wing-span. Compelled to give the artwork a giant hug, she grabbed the right and left sides of the canvas in her hands and pressed her face against the shiny paint, desperate to digest all that the artwork had to offer. Catherine dropped her mouth wide open, pressed her tongue against a splash of orange and gave the painting a long, deliberate lick. As the taste of the varnish settled into her taste buds, loud gasps erupted from the crowd. Deafening silence followed. Without turning her head, Catherine put her tongue away, slowly unclenched her grip and peeked over her shoulder as far as her eyeballs would reach. All over the gallery space, whispering murmurs grew. Catherine heard nothing, except for Maurice’s heavy footsteps moving up behind her. Her vision blurred, her eyelid fluttered and the understanding of her own bizarre be-havior sunk in. She knew she had to exit the gallery immediately to avoid the inevitable. She couldn’t bring herself to make eye contact with Maurice to apologize. Instead, Catherine broke into a runner’s sprint and bolted out the front door. Mortified, she ran down the block, practically into the arms of Leah, who was out front smoking a cigarette. “Where the hell are you going in such a hurry?” Leah yelled down the street after Catherine. Leah had missed the entire episode. “No time to talk. I’m not feeling so well. I’ll call you later.” Catherine panted. Leah shook her head, unfazed by her friend’s antics. Throwing the butt of her smoke into the street, she opened the front door of the gallery and was met with an erup-tion of applause. Maurice was standing in the center of the room gladly receiving the ap-preciation of the audience. Members of the crowd mouthed compliments, “Brilliant” and “Genius.” “What’s going on? What is everyone clapping about?” Leah whispered to the woman next to her. “Oh Darling, you just missed the most spectacular performance art.” Her Aztec jewelry jingled as she clapped. “It was all about the raw emotion evoked from the artwork itself, representing our primitivism and passions. You see, the art is not on the walls, the art is us,” explained the self-proclaimed art critic. She was covered top to bottom in an earth-toned tapestry fashioned into a dress. Underneath, she sported a pair of authentic

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Mexican alligator boots. She was art. “Maurice always has the most progressive shows doesn’t he?” Leah shrugged. She had really just shown up for the free wine. Catherine spent the remainder of the weekend inside her apartment. She feared what else the itch might cause her to do in public. She tried to keep herself busy around the house to fool the itch. She reorganized all her books and cleaned out the refrigerator. She made labels for things and put various odds and ends into neat little stacks. When there was nothing more to stack, she sat on her hands and fought the urge to claw at her scalp. Finally, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the phone book. It was time to seek professional help. A week later she had a disappointing visit with her physician. He told her there was nothing he could do for her. This sort of thing was not his specialty. He patted her on the back and handed her the business card of someone he thought might be able to help. On the bus ride home, Catherine studied the ivory card, with its green and black lettering. For the first time in months, she felt hopeful. A few days later, Catherine walked into the doctor’s office and announced herself to the receptionist. The woman behind the desk handed Catherine a pen covered in lady-bugs and asked her to sign her name on the registration. The miniature office was much smaller than she had been expecting. The waiting area looked more like a law library than a clinic. Oak bookshelves lined the room, illuminated by green and brass tabletop lamps. Two overstuffed chairs flanked a low-rising coffee table. None of the academic journals offered on the coffee table interested Catherine. She pulled the wrinkled business card out of her wallet and scanned the words again: Dr. Elliot Beasley, Medical Entomologist. She could hardly focus on words. She wore sunglasses to hide her struggling vision and to soften the migraines. Headphones pumped music in her ears to mute the scrap-ing noises. Leather gloves hid her deteriorating fingernails. Her hair looked slept-on and sparse. The constant butterflies in her stomach had resulted in a loss of appetite and a substantial weight loss. The receptionist looked up from her computer in Catherine’s direc-tion. “Doctor Beasley will see you now.” Inside the exam room, Dr. Beasley reviewed Catherine’s symptoms. He nodded and wrote things in her chart. His forehead was wrinkled. She watched as he removed some lint from his dragonfly-patterned necktie. Catherine wrung her hands, anticipating his diagno-sis. “Well, Miss Shoemaker, let’s take a look and see if we can’t find the problem.” Dr. Beasley asked Catherine to turn around on the examination table. He worked behind her, laying screwdrivers, tongs, and a scalpel on a silver tray. The sound of the metal implements heightened Catherine’s nerves about the procedure. She studied the framed posters and charts on the back wall of the exam room. Numerous specimens, housed in vi-als, jars and drawers, were catalogued by genus and species, arranged alphabetically and

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further organized by country of origin. The paper lining covering the examination table rustled under Catherine’s fidgeting. Doctor Beasley mentioned the importance of staying still while he took a look around inside her head. Without hesitation, he got to work on the opening. Despite the warning he gave, Catherine was still shocked to feel his gloved hand poking around at her brain. She heard the rusty adjustment Dr. Beasley was making to the bendable light. She felt the warmth of the glowing bulb directed at the hole in the back of her head. Within moments, Dr. Beasley had located the problem. The scouring noise stopped. The doctor placed the tongs back on the metal tray and presented his discovery to Catherine. “The taxonomy and general biology of the odontocheila mexicana fauna is relatively well known. Neotropical Tiger Beetles are fairly common predators.” While Dr. Beasley worked to close her head back up, Catherine tried to make sense of the unfamiliar verbiage. “The irritation you’ve been noticing is common,” he assured Catherine. She stared at the details of the six-legged beetle, noticing its resemblance to the insects decorating the charts all around her. The only difference was the beetle’s work clothes. Standing only two and half inches tall, he was wearing miniature overalls and a hard hat. With one leg he managed a tiny bucket full of soapy water and in another he held a flat bristled brush. The look on his hard little face proved his guilt and embarrassment. He waved an antenna and flashed an awkward smile to Catherine. She knew the smile wasn’t genuine. She was in awe of how diligent the tiny pest had been at scrubbing away all these months. Dr. Beasley moved about the room preparing a special jar and label for his newest specimen. After a solid minute of cursing out the ashamed insect, relief began to wash over Catherine. Dr. Beasley assured her that no further treatment was necessary. He whistled a tune that had been stuck in his head all morning. ///

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liminal contour I, II, and IIIby Nif Hodgson

The line of movement along the silhouette of an organic form, and the gesture of the line itself, inspires and grounds my work in printmaking. This line literally defines the edge of a form, the space it contains, as well as creates distinctive intervals in the sur-

Nif Hodgson, liminal contour I, 2010

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Nif Hodgson, liminal contour II, 2010

rounding space. And I am interested in how this ‘living line’ conveys the seen, which is physically expressed, and contains the unseen, the concealed details that inform the truth of this movement. Through explorations in contour, mark making, and material, I investigate shifting relationships with our surroundings. We literally perceive landscape in fragments and lay-ered impressions, creating a topography of elements that draws our eye, which is uniquely our own. Through this lens, I use systems, mapping, and deconstruction to examine the language of the line in landscape.

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Nif Hodgson, liminal contour III, 2010

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dance: adequate, language.by Sean Collins

I asked O’Neal if there was a point in dance where words fail, where the language we use to talk about the world isn’t adequate to describe what’s happening onstage. She an-swered immediately:1

adequate isn’t the languagewhere words fail.happening onstage,she was a point to describe:

if asked She answered in language: what talk is immediately adequatewe use onstage, a point where dance isn’t.

a point about O’Neal:She isn’t language,to talk in adequate dance.

I asked to describe the world where words fail dance:use a point onstage,she talk language.

describe the world where dance fail words.to point isn’t adequate,I answered:

I fail. to describe what’s adequate inthe happening world,She asked about dance immediately:where is language

is dance: we talk,the language isn’t adequateto describe a world happeningonstage.

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Post Script to dance: adequate, language. The article from which the excerpt at the be-ginning was taken, “Dance of Language: The Truth & The Lie,” attempts to explore the nature of dance as a language of it’s own, one that defies the application of verbal/writ-ten language for reference. The author, Claude Souvenir, interviews choreographers and dancers, trying to put a finger on the communication breakdown between the two forms of language.

The poem is an experiment in restrictive ekphrasis, in this case: word-choreography. The words have been re-organized to form new stanzas, each containing the original punctua-tion and no more. (eds) ///

1 Claude Souvenir, “Dance of Language: The Truth & The Lie,” Harness, V2, 1 SMBp, Seattle

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Surround Sound: Power and Freedomby Sarah Boothroyd

Blending recordings of anti-authoritarian protests and rallies, with excerpts from news com-mentary and ambient sound, Sarah Boothroyd’s Power and Freedom* creates a dynamic and textured sonic landscape. The audio documentary captures clashes between citizens and governmental authorities from around the world, illuminating the common ground of contested space. Street noises mix with chants and the rhythmic cadence of marching bands, identifying the spaces unmistakably as sites of public gathering. The juxtapositional insertion of news commentators’ coverage into this collage adds further dimensionality, raising the issue of airwaves and public media in relation to socio-political terrain. (eds)

Hear it at www.driftmagazine.org

* A round-the-world tour of protests in Canada, England, France, Spain, Ukraine, the United States, and beyond. Creative

Commons field recordings provided by Matthias Kispert and Arno Peeters.

Nathan Pask, “Power and Freedom,” 2010.

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A Disciplined Sidewalkby Ian Alan Paul

On November 2nd of 2010, San Franciscans voted in Proposition L, making it illegal to sit or lie down on public sidewalks in the city between the hours of 7am and 11pm. The law is shocking in its institutionalization of anti-poor sentiments, but what is perhaps most dis-turbing is that it conceptualizes and territorializes the public space (and the subjects in it) as a territory in need of protecting, policing and disciplining. Not only does the law create new opportunities and justifications for police officers to harass the homeless and poor people of the city, it also generates a politics of social health, where the health of the social body (the singular society or community) comes to be the organism that is defended and pro-tected from the individual subjects that make it up.

The Sit/Lie law certainly isn’t new in this way - there are volumes of laws on the local, state and federal level that aim to regulate and criminalize certain kinds of anti-social behavior while encouraging the expression of other economically productive ones. The French phi-losopher Michel Foucault, in his famous lectures on biopolitics and writings about disci-plinary societies, described what he saw as the new form in which states exercise power against their subjects. Foucault viewed discipline as a technology of power, a power that generates a bodily economies and politics. More specifically, disciplinary power conceptu-alizes a populace that is in need of control and regulation. In this way, power is exercised on the scale of the population rather than on the scale of the individual. Foucault describes a situation where power emerges from below, as citizens police each other to protect the larger social body at the cost of the individuals beneath it. Biopolitical subjects are both subject to and the subject of power.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, after moving to the Haight district of San Francisco, decided to propose the Sit/Lie law after going on a morning walk with his daughter where they wit-nessed a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk smoking crack-cocaine. When recalling his experiences, Newsom described the problem as “… a behavior issue” that requires new disciplinary and regulatory legislation. While overlooking the fact that smoking crack is al-ready a crime that would get the user arrested, Newsom locates the source of the problem as resting inside of the man on the street and as affecting the whole of society, or the social body. Rather than contemplate the systemic violences and barriers (upon which our con-temporary society relies) that could push someone to end up smoking crack on a sidewalk, the encounter is reduced to an isolated exchange where one persons’ behavior disturbs the social, and the state is expected to intervene.

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In biopolitical and disciplinary regimes of power, negative freedoms (the freedom from other people’s affects) trump positive freedoms (the freedom from larger structural violences such as racism, sexism or classism); the health of the society at large overrides the freedoms of the individual subject. The Sit/Lie law means to code and territorialize public space in this way, by placing certain social standards of a healthy community on all of those whom in-habit or traverse that space. In the case of Sit/Lie, simply inhabiting the public space while not performing a productive function (shopping, commuting, working) becomes criminal in itself. As San Francisco Police Captain Teri Barrett describes it: “The community is just fed up with the lack of civility and how it had changed in the last 10 years, they are very com-passionate people, and they have had enough.”1

San Francisco, through the passage Sit/Lie, is beginning to resemble some of the ordi-nances instituted by Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York city, in the 1990s which aimed to ‘clean-up’ the city of homeless panhandlers, prostitutes and window washers. This rhetoric of cleanliness and hygiene is deployed by biopolitical regimes in promoting the health of the social body, and is used to justify whatever actions need to be taken to clear the city of ‘infection’, ‘trash’ and ‘disease’. This also creates a framework where the health of the city is something that is constantly being infringed upon and compromised, and as a result, costs and measures are implemented to protect and defend that health. Under biopolitical systems, health is never free.

We can look to laws such as Sit/Lie in this way, as they are designed to both extinguish ‘anti-social’ activity in public, while simultaneously encouraging other activity that would instead benefit the state. In the case of San Francisco, immobility and stasis (sitting or ly-ing) in the routes of pedestrian traffic is articulated as being detrimental to the social and economic health of the city. Capitalism is an economy of speed and movement, and is dependent on the constant exchanges of currency and capital in order for it to perpetuate itself. Under capitalism, not participating in the economic activity of the system, or even worse, hindering others from doing so, damages the health of that system. It’s at this hinge that the values of the state, which are firmly aligned with the health of the market, become entangled with the values and health of the community or the social body.

If we carry the logic even further, we can think of Sit/Lie as another form of capitalist accu-mulation. The public, or the ‘commons’, historically has been a space that belongs to ev-eryone and is governed by no one. By juridically capturing it, the state moves to transform and reterritorialize the sidewalk into a space of transit and economy. By generating policed and disciplined sidewalks in neighborhoods such as the Height or Mission districts, the city of San Francisco is attempting to create spaces which are both tourist- and business-

1 William M. Welch, “Sit-lie laws put spotlight on safety”, in USA Today, March 23rd, 2010.

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friendly. David Harvey describes the state’s role in capitalist accumulation as “entailing the taking of land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landlessproletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumula-tion”.2 The notion that the sidewalk could perhaps be used for other activities than shop-ping or moving, for example as a conversation-space, a contemplative-space, or even an art-space, are firmly refused by biopolitical regimes of power as they aim to both purge spaces of anti-social forces while ushering in productive ones.

People from San Francisco have already begun campaigns to resist the Sit/Lie law through the coordinated staging of sit-ins on the sidewalks of the city. Other groups plan on taking the law to court when it goes into effect this January. Writing about this I cannot help but be reminded of the peasant riots that manifested themselves in England early in the 17th century in response to the private enclosing of the commons. Large groups of organized peasant farmers would pull up fences and fill in ditches which demarcated the lands of the

2 David Harvey, Accumulation by Disposition, 2005.

Riots against the Enclosure Acts, etching.

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gentry in an attempt to protect the common ownership of land. If the riots had been more intense, or if more peasants had participated across larger geographies, would private property have developed historically in the way it did? I couldn’t help but be reminded of this when writing about the sidewalks here and thinking of how far away we are from that transformative historical moment. It seems like the only public spaces that are left in San Francisco are the few parks and squares scattered around the city, and even those are increasingly policed by officers on dirt-bikes looking for unpermitted beer drinkers and other anti-social(ites). When the state moves to take away from what is common and what is ‘ours’, it’s important we fight to ensure that these spaces remain open and undisciplined.

Resistance in biopolitical societies manifests as generating a politics of the individual and of the personal. Biopolitical systems emerge when we begin to think of the community itself as a single organism, articulating all individuals within that community as simply constitu-ents of manageable populations. When someone is cast as part of the ‘homeless popula-tion’, part of the ‘immigrant population’, part of the ‘anti-social population’, regulatory laws and police-actions come to be justified against those groups by erasing the diversity and heterogeneity within those groupings. By asserting the positive freedoms necessary for just society, we can move to not only dismantle the laws already constricting open and public spaces such as the Sit/Lie law, but we can also act to protect and generate new spaces which are open, free and democratic. ///

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City Reader, Issue Twoan ongoing project by Julie Cloutier

Everyday places become absent from view not because of their neglect, but because of their relentless use. The space between the façade, sidewalk and street become merely fixed coordinates, in-between places experienced daily as a mode of passing. Within these means of transfer, an abundance of systems overwhelm and contribute to the atrophy of public space. City Reader, Issue Two belongs to Reading Conventions, a sequence of pub-lications exposing altered relationships within the landscape of the everyday. Released on an irregular schedule and distributed through various approaches in readership, the printed insertion, found on the next page, aims to heighten an awareness of overlooked networks within the built environment.

The first issue in the series tackled affairs of pedestrian exchanges, featuring work by local artists, writers and residents. Within one day, one thousand copies were released in public spaces throughout San Francisco. They were distributed along building faces, at points of pauses and transitions, within newsstands, and in assorted sidewalk crevices.

The second issue, found within the pages of DRIFT Magazine, focuses its attention on the building block and spatial prescriptions of the sidewalk. A more detailed look at com-ponents of the sidewalk offers a re-presentation of the city to pedestrians, engaging the public in further questioning of their own urban conventions. Visual fragments of the street, catalogued in the City Reader, begin to reveal and identify themselves with hope for a new dialogue, one that is formed between city and reader.

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Face-to-Face with the Everyday:An Interview with the Vis-à-Vis Society

The Vis-à-Vis Society, composed of the Seattle-based poets Sierra Nelson and Ra-chel Kessler, is a literary performance group. Using the science of the poem-survey in multi-media participatory performances, Drs. Ink and Owning (played by Nelson and Kessler, respectively) take the “poetic pulse” of their audiences. [more specifically on process] Most recently, the Drs. have taken their show out into the public sphere. The Vis-à-Vis Society measures the emotional potency of our collective everyday lives. The Vis-à-Vis Society has worked through this last fall on the public wall project, “How We Came to Be Here.” It is a part of the four-plus year exhibition, “The City: Love, Loss and the Moveable Future,” curated by D.K. Pan. The project spans the construction of Sound Transit’s light rail station, adjacent to Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park. The temporary walls have become a site for public art under the auspices of the STart Program, which is responsible for Sound Transit-related public art throughout the region. Audiences convened around the park to be surveyed for “How We Came to Be Here,” even as the Drs. worked through several rain delays. What follows is a scientific paper-as-interview, documenting the process of coming face-to-face with the collective experience of the everyday.

-E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

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MHF: There is a lot of disciplinary slippage in your work between and through public perfor-mance, participatory research, and written poetic analyses. How do you define the Vis-à-Vis Society?

RK: Jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

In the perfect kids adventure book from 1966, The Egypt Game, two girls play this sus-tained imaginary game where they are high priestesses of an ancient Egyptian temple, built in an abandoned storage shed off an alley. Over time, the game accumulates more and more kids. They make up their own hieroglyphs and write out their own mythology. They make up sacred rites and songs, build altars and create enemies of their secret society. I see us like that.

We are writers; we like to sing, we like to dance, we like to make things out of old sheets and magazines.

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SN: Here, hear! On the logistical side, everything we do feels like part of our research. For example, if Dr. Ink is crying a lot, it goes into the research – is she alone in this phenom-enon? How much are other people crying, lately? Is there a way to measure it, other than capturing tear-liquid in test tubes to measure at home or in the lab? We examine our own lives, and think about what we are curious to know more about in the collective experience.

The next step is usually to create a survey, a collaborative process between the two doc-tors. This involves writing and discussion, and culminates in a poem-survey with multiple-choice as well as fill-in-the-blank questions, and a corresponding graph created during a live performance. Many of our survey topics are also informed by the particular place or event where the participatory performance/research is conducted.

Our performances are a way for us to collect more data from a larger core sample of the population, and also a way to release that information – to give the audience back to itself in an immediate and tangible way, as well as to release the data emotionally. What may have been previously unknown or unexamined in the individual is exposed on the graph in a telling manner, but without putting anyone on the spot. When we see the whole graph, the spectrum represents us all in that moment.

Then there are the other elements that are often part of a performance – song, dance, mess, snacks – either building directly or tangentially on the graphs’ information or part of the larger “notes from the field.”

MHF: The kind of science the Doctors engage in is really interesting. How do the quasi-sci-entific research methodologies that you use play into the project? And why was this trope, quantifying the qualitative, adopted?

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RK: I don’t know. It’s fun to mess around with language while simultaneously taking lan-guage very, very seriously. I think, as poets, we are drawn to any sort of form or structure – the Scientific Method is like a sonnet or sestina, or maybe it is actually its own form of poetry, as the Postcard, and the Survey, are yet another form of verse. As a fearful and religiously-inclined person, I take great comfort from the reassuring tones of faux-science – it’s like a mother’s lullaby or the sport of boy-on-boy high school wrestling: we can go to dark places inside a very secure vehicle. The Scientific Method is like the Humvee of po-etry. Riding inside it’s thick, boxy armor, we can explore potentially explosive topics such as straight men dancing in unison, how to eat a cupcake, and corduroy.

Of course, we are quantifying the qualitative, that’s what poet-scientists do – it’s ridiculous and impossible, but so are Humvees. The Scientific Method is only a method, and anyone can affix a percentage or line graph on something. Looking at it makes you feel wiggly, but what does it mean? The natural world is so outlandish and bonkers and stimulating that we have to tamp it down with some robot dance moves and find a ritual we are all familiar with so we can proceed calmly through this life together for a moment.

SN: Some favorite quotes that speak to the Vis-à-Vis Society process: “A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.” (Vladimir Nabokov)“The work is play for mortal stakes” (Robert Frost)“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.” (Gertrude Stein, “Roast-beef”)

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Poetry and science both yearn to understand. A graph feels so satisfying, as if we’re finally getting somewhere. It feels beautiful to crunch the numbers for the statistics and see the graphs visually growing from the answers, like crystals in a jar. What does science tell us? We start to realize that science doesn’t tell us much, reliably or experientially, at all – or it starts to, but can’t finish it. It needs to come alive again.

As Rachel said, some things are hard to talk about, but science puts it at a comfortable, observational remove to begin the conversation. In the end, the audience has to interpret our scientific and poetic findings in their own way – translating back to the experiential and emotional. But that’s what we have to do with any statistical information – what does the information actually mean to me, as a human being among other human beings?

MHF: Performing science necessarily entails scientists, and Drs. Ink and Owning are the public faces of the Vis-à-Vis Society. How are these characters used? Where do they inter-sect with your lives, and when does the performance begin and end?

RK: The doctors are personas we put on, like pantyhose or lab coats. It is another place to inhabit for a little while. It is a way to ask questions I would never ask someone as myself. But I have loads of personas, (personae?); I went around as an old man for an entire sum-mer when I was 10, wearing a cotton ball moustache and some old eyeglasses on the end of my nose. I have a secret moustache I wear, invisibly, all the time, still, now.

Sometimes in my daily life, I put on my safety glasses and take a scientific look at what I am doing. I make a long list of the mundane activities I perform without even thinking about it and keep track of the frequency I execute a certain move, such as: wipe a kid’s snotty nose, pour milk, clean up bodily fluid not my own, etc. I don’t do this very often because it makes me crazy, but it is interesting to see all the tiny tick marks that compose a day, how mundane movements accumulate and, in their sheer mass, become something larger, er, life.

SN: I have to say it took Dr. Owning a little while to really believe she was a scientist (maybe she was still an old man, not yet ready to reveal her scientist identity). But she’s really em-braced the clinical approach over the years and loves to dominate the calculator. She also sings more and more, to the great benefit of the society. Dr. Ink has always been very fas-tidious about the accuracy of the graphs and findings. She saves every scrap of paper, in case it’s important to retrace the results. She’s anxious and sad and hopeful. She’s glock-enspiel and clogging. Dr. Owning is more accordion. When Dr. Owning loudly, confidently, and bravely reads everyone’s bad habits out loud (as written anonymously by the audi-ence), Dr. Ink is simultaneously madly dancing (with a smile) to reduce the collective shame quotient. I think we’re at some fundamental core of Drs. Ink and Owning.

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It’s true that the characters are not far from who we are outside of the labcoats – but the labcoats help intensify or bring out certain personality aspects. To perform you have to enter an altered, imaginative space, and slipping on the labcoat becomes the ritual to enter that space – for us, and for the audience members as well. Together we have entered science.

It’s also very reassuring to hold a clipboard.

MHF: Speaking of audience members, what kind of relationship do you have with them, and how do you foster it? Is audience even an appropriate term to use, or do ‘participants’ or ‘collaborators’ describe the relationship better?

RK: I am fond of our co-conspirators – we are playing together at the game of perfor-mance. We employ the basic Golden Rule when encouraging other beings to participate: do unto others as you would have done unto you. We give them snacks.

SN: From the start our mission has been “the poetic analysis of the everyday.” Poetry can help reveal what’s strange, new, and true in ordinary and extraordinary experience, internal and external.

The format of the poem-survey helps reduce the chances of poetry-panic, when people freeze up from feeling unsure about what a particular image or metaphor might mean, afraid they’ll get it wrong. Instead, the poem-survey invites participants to try feeling all the options and choosing which one they like (or suits them) best. There are no wrong an-swers, only interesting answers, and we (as scientists, as audience) are genuinely curious to know what they pick. Science and poetry – working together! More fun, less scary!

Seattle’s mayor, Mike McGinn, placing his coordinate-point of data into the constellation, graphing How Fast Does Time Seem to Be Moving? against How Far Are You from Where You Want to Be? Part of public data-collection and mapping throughout October and Novem-ber, 2010.

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We understand that people may have had traumatizing experiences with poetry and with performance art in the past. We are sorry if this has happened to you. We hope to reach people who know they like poetry and people who don’t know they like poetry. You don’t have to self-identify as a poet or poetry enthusiast (or a scientist or science enthusiast) to get something out of what we do. You just have to be alive.

MHF: Your work is so effective because it plays on so many levels, and differently in each piece. How do the literary, visual, and experiential converge in your most recent project, “How We Came to Be Here?”

RK: I am not being sassy when I say the literary and visual and experiential converge in the giant letters on the wall; we wrote a lovely poem-survey about transportation:

How did you come to be here?Carried? (in wheelbarrow, in car, on elephant, in someone’s Loving Arms, etc?)Driven? (by train, by tram, by desires, etc?)Dreaming? (etc?)Self-conveyed? (by foot, by ambition, by peddling apparatus, etc?)

And you can see these words (HOW WE CAME TO BE HERE: CARRIED DRIVEN DREAM-ING SELF-CONVEYED) really big on a giant red wall by a grassy knoll in a park where they are building a subway station. We also ask people taking the survey to describe what brought them. This data has been trickier to collect than we projected, since it rains – hard – every time we try to survey people in the park and paint the resulting bar graphs on the wall. So, the giant graph is accidentally, mysteriously blank.

Mysteriously blank wall graph, How We Came to Be Here

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Although the paint won’t stick while it is raining, sticky dots and strong adhesive product will. The second, smaller graph is dotted with burnt-out stars (LED lights) that form interest-ing constellations built from a self-graphing exercise in which we engaged passersby. We ask each subject to find on the x axis how fast time seems to be moving right now, and on the y axis, how far they are from where they want to be. Then they stick a star on that con-vergence. The act of placing the stars was so transformative, and the stars so much more beautiful than projected.

Data-constellation at night

SN: I agree – the first constellations of data were really lovely, even more than we hoped – both in the moment as people added their individual data-stars, and also viewed as a constellation at different times of day in the following days. Each person has a quiet, reflective moment to find his or her place on the graph – and even if a person feels very very far from where they want to be, the graph point creates a beautiful addition to the larger pattern – every point, even the difficult ones, are meaningful. Many people

have also reported that having to jump really high to represent “light years from where I want to be” feels satisfying and cathartic in itself. The process of asking yourself the ques-tions, and answering, becomes part of the “performance” too – the physical experience. In these moments, Drs. Ink and Owning are really just there to help facilitate, and maybe instigate, some discussions of constellation patterns/objects that seem to be emerging.

Having the graphs live on such a large, public scale feels really satisfying as well. Even if people are just walking through the park and looking at the graphs when we’re not there, the text and graphs invite people to think over their own answers and different possible meanings of the categories. We’re also looking forward to the next dry, clear day when we’ll be able to put up the bars for the larger graph from the first rounds of data we’ve collected. (We’re also developing some corresponding songs for each graph – though it can be a little tricky performing in variable weather in a big, open space – more things we’re still figuring out.)

This is all definitely still a work in progress. The Sound Transit Wall will be up for several years while the light rail tunnel is completed. We’re looking forward to continuing our graphs, finding ways to visually display more data and individual answers for “How We Came to Be Here,” presenting more song and dance in response to the graphs, and think-ing about whether and when to make additional graphs.

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MHF: I can’t wait to see how it progresses. It’s a really loaded, productive site to work in since so many different people pass through it. It’s especially apropos since you play a lot with desire and memory, among other subjective aspects of the everyday, in your projects. What is the relationship with everyday lived experience in “How We Came to Be Here?”

RK: Most of the everyday living we do consists of travel: to and from work and school, to and from the kitchen, to and from the refrigerator, to and from the coffeepot, to and from the photocopier, to and from the present moment from our dreams or daydreams or video games or other fantasies such as songs or books. And many times when we are in one place – say, your desk at school – a part of you is just leaving that place, or coming back; leaving to go think about what is for lunch, or coming back from imagining what it would be like to be consumed by a black hole. What is truly out of the ordinary is to be standing still, really standing still, and have all of oneself, all there, all at once.

SN: So, when we ask our questions, they do make you stop to answer, stop to think, feel, and reflect, pausing in this one moment and place. You Are Here. OK, how did you come to be here? The graph for “How We Came to Be Here” looks to the past leading up to this present. The other constellation graph measures the distance of this present from the de-sired future (How far are you from where you want to be?), while also asking you to breath-lessly try to gauge your experience of time’s velocity in this present (How fast does time seem to be moving?).

MHF: These are essential questions for life lived in the present. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

RK: I try to work in this propaganda wherever possible, but one more thing about the Vis-à-Vis Society: we encourage individual interaction and self-reflection, but we are very interested in group experience. The experience of being part of something, of taking indi-vidual answers to questions and compiling them into a composite sketch of who we are as a whole, in the moment. Just for this evening, we are a team or a body or a robot together, or a marionette puppet made out of pantyhose, whatever it takes to connect each of us to the other.

SN: There is a power in the constellation our experiences make together. ///

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Lab Workby Ryan Wilson

How was your nap? Deep sleep, yes, we hear that often. How are you feeling? Excellent. Let’s begin:

Do you see the three exhibits in front of you? Would you describe Exhibit A as a seagull with its feet glued to a cutting board? Affirmative, thank you. Would you describe Exhibit B as a jar containing pink fluid and a strikingly accurate replica of your face gently stretched between the clips fastened to the inside of the jar? Affirmative, thank you. Would you describe Exhibit C as roughly $50,000? Would you like to count it? Affirmative, thank you. Your tally: $46,800? Fine.

Hmm? Oh yes, you’re going to make some money. Oh, I don’t know how much, but wouldn’t you agree that $46,800 is a fine jackpot? I’ll bet you would. Yes, you could pay down your debt and probably afford an enhanced, double broadband television pack-age. Okay, yes, or a trip around the world in a balloon. We do have a schedule. No, you don’t need to apologize, but we do need to keep moving. Please focus. It’s actually a very simple task. For each feather you remove from Exhibit A, you may take one $100 bill from Exhibit C. Yes, you may take them home. Begin… …and stop. Very good. Very good indeed.

Alright, my official count is twelve feathers, so please remove twelve $100 bills from Exhibit C. No, that’s just fluff. I imagine it was the bird’s own doing, anxiety and so forth. Okay, now for every nick that drew blood from the Exhibit A’s lunges and snaps at your hands, please place one of your $100 bills into the pink fluid in Exhibit B. Um, no. No. It looks like you failed to count all your nicks. Yes, my tally is eleven nicks. Yes.

Okay, fine, since there is some question as to whether the eleventh nick drew actual blood or just appeared to draw blood (ahem), you may keep two $100 bills.

Now, before placing the ten $100 bills in the pink fluid of Exhibit B, carefully remove the contents of the jar and situate the strikingly accurate replica of your face atop your actual face. Yes. Wait, just a hair to the left. Perfect. Now place the $100 bills inside. Thank you. Yes, make the lid as tight as possible.

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Now, do not be disproportionately alarmed to find that you no longer have an “ac-tual face” per se. Indeed, the strikingly accurate replica of your face is your “actual face.” Wait- I apologize. I’m being unclear when clarity is of paramount importance. Let me revise those statements. Your “actual face” is once again in your possession. It was wrongheaded of me to say you no longer have it, because clearly you do. Do not be alarmed. That sound, I’m afraid, is the sound of alarm. Yes. Thank you, yes, it was a bit loud. Yes, well, I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it’s not without precedent. No, no, don’t feel badly—aside from the completely normal, excruciating pain you’re feeling. Emotionally, esteem-wise. Yes, I un-derstand. It’ll take a few days for the searing nature of the—well, I wouldn’t call it a wound exactly—let’s say, the result, to normalize.

What we ask for and gently require is that you are discreet in the waiting room on the way out. Can we agree to that? I don’t hear the sweet sound of concurrence. Well, that’s interesting. An interesting question, though quaint. “Wrong,” huh…yes. No, I’d have to say we’re all operating on the assumption that more understanding is desirable, and clearly, we believe we’re acquiring more understanding every day. Yes, thank you for noticing. We do think of ourselves as committed optimists. In the greater scheme, what reason on earth do we have not to be! Oh look, now you’ve caught me on a soap box and abandoning my schedule! You really have been delightful. Yes. Thanks again. Bye, now.

Lab Work is accompanied by a sound component, The Dreamed, which adds another sensory layer to his writing. (eds)

Hear it at www.driftmagazine.org

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Resonates Well with Others:Recent Sound Art Collaborations

by E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

I make the call. A recording of a female British voice responds with her lines on the other side:

Suddenly I hear the world all around me. My chair is squeaky. Not a single floorboard is si-lent. Even the door has something to say. My writing area is my environment, the site of my everyday experience of the world. It produces more sounds than I had previously realized. I am playing my part in a public collaborative sound piece mediated by phone.

323 Projects is an exhibition space that only exists over the phone and on the web. Found-ed by LA artist, curator, and writer Tucker Neel earlier this year, 323 Projects intends to be a venue for artists who “provide, create, or perform works that can be appreciated in bits and pieces, and at more than one time, in both public and private spaces, by an unseen, yet omnipresent, local and international audience.”2 In Yann Novak’s most recent piece for 323 Projects, developed in collaboration with the public over the phone, the disjointed nature of the collaboration reveals the conditions set by Neel. The interaction is completely mediated and the transmission feels independent and anonymous. Even though I know Yann from past projects, I cannot imagine him on the other end of this line; it isn’t even his voice. I am compelled to participate, but feel betrayed by the loneliness in this mechanically distant and distancing collaboration.

1 Yann Novak’s text, as read by the receiving voice, can be heard at 323.843.4652 or read online at http://www.323projects.artcodeinc.com/ (accessed Oct 27 and Nov 6, 2010).2 “Mission,” http://www.323projects.artcodeinc.com/pages/about/ (accessed Nov 6, 2010).

Hello, Welcome to Drift/Net, a collaborative sound work by artist Yann Novak and you, the caller. From Oct. 12 – Nov. 15, 323 Projects will be collecting environmental recordings via telephone on behalf of the artist to be later incorporated into a larger compositional work. If you wish to contribute to this project, please pay attention to the following instructions: Record the sounds around you, whatever they may be, for up to one minute. If you wish to remain anonymous, simply dis-connect the call at the end of your contribution. Thank you in advance for your participation. You may begin recording in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…1

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But the history of sound art is intimately tied to technological development. Italian futurist Luigi Rossolo developed instruments meant to mimic the sounds of the industrial world beginning in 1913.3 Noise, as cultural indicator, chimed in a new era of production, in-cluding sound production. Since Rossolo, experimental composition and sound art have maintained a relationship to culture at-large, responding to and working with the sounds of everyday experience.

Everyday experience is shared experience, and so is the production of its sounds. The soundscape of contemporary place is a cacophony of natural, intentional, and incidental sonic contributions. Since John Cage’s seminal 4’33” (1952), the space for noticing and validating ambient sound has been opened. It is intended as a democratized realm, where-in all sounds are given a fair shake at being heard.4

But what are our contemporary everyday social spaces, and what do they sound like? More and more, social encounter is disembodied and dematerialized. Technological inter-faces and social media, whether older technology like the telephone or something as new-fangled as networked computers, contribute to an interesting phenomenon: relationships forged by transmission.

Whereas Novak’s Drift/Net can be read as a critique of the alienating effects of sociality mediated by technology, the participatory sound project Autopoetics III posits a more ideal use of technologically produced sound collaborations:

3 Brandon LaBelle, “The Sound of Music: Contemporary Sound-Art and the Phenomenal World,” in Art Papers 23, no 2 (March/April 1999), 36.4 Sally Banes, “Equality Celebrates the Ordinary,” in Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 11-24; reprinted in Stephen Johnstone, ed., The Everyday (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 113.5 http://soex.org/Event/269.html (accessed Nov 6, 2010). The event was performed on Saturday, Oct 16, 2010.* Full disclosure, Maude is and was an unpaid intern at Southern Exposure.

At Southern Exposure,* composer and sound artist Ted Coffey pres-ents an installation performance of his Autopoetics III. Autopoetics III is an open work for any number of networked laptops in which con-tinuously evolving electronic music and video are produced through collective play. The ensemble shares real-time control over streams of complexly enveloped sounds of the classic synthesis variety. Players create, transform, delete, and reorder these events, determine their pace and pitch language, and the logic of their sequencing.5

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I arrived – without laptop – to the sounds of spare blips, echoey whooshes, synthetic string bowing, and electronic water drops. The main space of the Southern Exposure gallery is arranged with ‘laptopistes’ sitting in a round. Each player made visible their glowing Mac-Book tops, downcast eyes engaged in personal screens, and a set of speakers projecting one forward and one behind. Having taken the time to figure out the software, the players began to engage more seriously. They began to operate like experienced improv artists, able to listen, manipulate and play simultaneously. The whirring of computers and synthetic electronic sounds evidenced their play as it was performed live over a network, and experi-enced live within the physical gallery space.

There was a point of crescendo late in the afternoon; the group was pulsing together, some taking high frequencies, some holding a loose rhythm, and others repeating low tones that sounded like a synthesized cello. After about fifteen minutes it began to fall apart. They were either too bored or too playfully experimental to hold the riff. They laughed at each other across the room as they stole each other’s sounds, manipulating them through the programmed variables. They gave appreciative nods when someone developed the stream in an interesting new direction.

Other times the distortions were performed physically by moving the laptop itself; the pro-gram is synched with the MacBook’s internal gyroscope to respond to spatial directional changes in the sound output. As a listener and viewer, I was only privy to the collective sound of the streams and the visual impact of the participants’ non-verbal communications across the room. Although the sonic result by this self-selected group of ‘laptopistes’ was interesting, the experience of being in the space with them as it was improvised was essen-tial for understanding their collaboration.

Participants in the Autopoetics III piece necessarily shared physical space in order to hear the output of their collaborative streams, even as the site of their collaboration was in virtual space. This interdependence of physical and virtual space for the collaborative production of sound presents an extra-dimensional new mode of working, one that is, perhaps, more reflective of our contemporary and future conditions. It posits an interdependence of site with non-site, digital with material, and perhaps, the global with the local, as a productive development in tools for communication and artistic collaboration.

Whether used as a critical tool or a potent new mode, participatory experiments in sound art are viable forms for articulating contemporary culture and its production. Yann Novak and Ted Coffey’s recent participatory sound art pieces orient us to the circulation of rela-tionships within an increasingly tech-oriented social landscape. We have yet to fully realize the complex relationships between digitized and physical social spaces, but these two art-ists problematize and hypothesize in ways that are productive toward our on-going negotia-tions.

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Since the initial writing of this piece, Yann Novak has progressed in the post-production work for his piece, Drift/Net. He contributed this update:

It’s now three weeks since the closing of Drift/Net. The response to the project was a bit overwhelming and it became a daily ritual for me to wake up and preview, download and catalog the previous days’ recordings with my morning coffee. Because this was such an intensive and habitual process, I decided it would be a good idea to give myself some space from the recordings before I took them into the studio for conceptual analysis or composition of the final piece, which will be called The Sounds Around Us.

Yann Novak - December 7, 2010

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Above: Proposed wall text or CD cover art for the final form of the Drift/Net

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untitled graphic novella (landscape with sculpture)by Jeremiah Jones

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This graphic novella excerpt has been translated from a piece typically installed as a looping video installation with sculpture in the room. Photo-documentation and a video montage from the original piece can be viewed at: http://jeremiahjones.wordpress.com

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I am just me/We are just we:An interview with Kyle Field

I’m finding out what chose me, How to use the hand that rose me, How to sing the word that woes me. In a way I’ve just begun. -Little Wings, “Everybody”

Kyle Field is the artist behind the band Little Wings. Formed in 1998, Little Wings has recorded 10 albums and is set to release their next, Black Grass, in January 2011. As a songwriter, Field is a storyteller whose stories have no endings. His songs are narratives that deal with human relationships, and internal struggles. He spreads thematic arcs over several albums at a time. In one series of songs, he sings about the Shredder, an aging skateboarder. The Shredder has fallen from his former glory, physically and socially, but doesn’t seem to notice that anything has changed around him. Field’s sympathy with the character is apparent, and he seems to be hovering somewhere between admiration and sadness: “I watched the day fade/on the ramp that we made/and I asked myself/where should I go now?” Listening to him sing, I sense that same balance of wonderment and melancholy, like he is praising the people around him, while worrying that they will never understand why. To say that Field’s voice is unique falls short of the experience. It crackles, and be-comes a cry in mid-sentence. He often pitches it so high – seemingly out of his range – he struggles to reach the notes; the physical struggle mirrors the emotional one in the song. He seems to be pleading, with someone in the room, or an anonymous personal deity, or both. While Field played, illuminated by a changing projection overhead, alternately turned green, red, or left in the room’s natural darkness, I became mesmerized by the piece under his feet. It was a projection of a ping-pong table, the surface filling the frame, a hand with a paddle popping in at either end to send a blurry white ball back and forth. A metronome, silenced for the performances, accompanied the image. Field sang mainly away from the microphone, and his voice filled the intimate space, already packed with bodies. To say that Field’s voice is unique falls short of the experience. He pitches it so high sometimes, seemingly out of his range, you are made to confront the emotional landscape of his lyrics. He seems to be pleading, with someone in the room, or with an anonymous personal deity, or both. In a room completely quieted by his music, he is straining to be heard.

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I approached him after the show. The ping-pong ball, I told him, had been a strangely hyp-notic companion to his music. He seemed to be shaking off some sort of trance himself. The following interview was conducted in a series of exchanges over the following weeks.

-Sean Collins

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SC: Little Wings appears to have taken many forms over the years. GROW feels loose, more experimental. Meanwhile, the Wonder songs represent a thematic project spread out over a few albums. What is the identity of Little Wings, and how removed, or not, is it from you? How do you decide, if you decide, what is Little Wings and what isn’t?

KF: I think that I see all of the albums as one body of work, and that with each one I can build on the past and continue to create a fabric. It is exciting to me to make a new album because it feels like a reinvention of my musical self, as well as a reinterpretation of what has already happened in the music, an update. So with each new song there are more and more songs to draw from and reference. I string some themes out throughout the whole time line and that is somehow a comfort, like the context is continually living and changing.

Little Wings, the name, is also flexible and it keeps it fresh to me, thinking that if there is a group playing then the group is called Little Wings, or if I am playing alone, my name is Little Wings. But it comes off like a costume and then I am just me/we are just we again. There is something about wanting to avoid permanence, so that I could never say, “This is the band.” There are phases of playing with others and they are a chapter in the book, and the book keeps on going.

As far as what isn’t Little Wings, like the Be Gulls? I wasn’t ready to make a new album and the Be Gulls was a sort of stunt double. I didn’t feel like I was in a place to add a new chapter directly, so By The Beach was a sort of supplementary thing. It references the band mentioned in the earlier record, GROW, as this local band. So, I got to go back and make the album that this band would have made. Although, the record sounds just like a Little Wings record. So maybe it is a multi-leveled joke, wherein I couldn’t admit or accept that another real album was being made.

We knew before we started that we were making the Be Gulls album, and that was excit-ing, because in some sense there was no pressure at all, so it was allowed to be casual, which is what the Be Gulls are sort of all about. A fictitious group that never left their zip code, a local band with their own CD!

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SC: I like that idea of taking on the identity of a fictitious group, casually. You create char-acters in your music that, in my listening, sound almost mythic, like the Shredder. He’s this phantom, sneaking into backyards to skate in swimming pools. More than that, he seems to embody a very solitary sort of pursuit, beyond a point in life when his peers have changed trajectory. When writing a song, do you find that you have a usual starting point- a story, a character, a feeling?

KF: I don’t notice that any starting point is ever familiar, in some way that is what makes it a starting point, the fact that there is some unique inroad. Things can age on a page as welland look different once some time has passed, so that some start that didn’t take the first time could be picked back up when seeing it from a new point of view. The start, depend-ing on its quality, can seem like the spark that fuels the momentum for the completion of the rest of the song.

SC: Does that apply to your visual art, as well? Your drawings often depict textured land-scapes, in which seemingly incompatible spatial relations coexist. Sometimes human figures, explicit or suggested, also appear. Do you find that themes from your music creep into your drawing/painting or vice-versa? How do the two forms of expression overlap or diverge?

KF: I think that the music and art are components to one another but maybe just co-exist-ing, and not directly interacting or affecting the other. I would never be interested in illustrat-ing one of my songs for instance, or writing a song about a drawing...I want them to stand on their own, I guess, or I can only really think of one of them at a single time.

Kyle Field, “gum store,” water color and ink on paper, 2010

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I think I rely on each individual medium for certain urges and probably get things from each that I need. One way to do it I guess would be to work at them both together or make drawings for a video or whatever...somehow, I think of them as separate things, and may even try to keep them a bit separated. I am into low production in some sense; I am not setting out to overwhelm the viewer/listener so to speak. I somehow feel like I want to make things that still have holes in them or imperfections and are not so well produced that everything is closed off.

SC: The first time I saw you perform, not long ago, you kept throwing yourself bodily onto the stage. I thought it was funny. It was like a grand rock and roll gesture, despite the fact that the show was pretty low-key. Because of that contrast, it seemed to teeter on this ironic edge. The balancing act you were engaged in may have been in my mind, but songs like “Boom!”(Light Green Leaves) stir similar feelings for me. It’s like a hip-hop song trans-lated into a Greek chorus, or two islands between which a land bridge appears when the water gets low enough. Why did you throw yourself onto the stage?

KF: I had just seen the new documentary on the doors and there is a montage of Jim Mor-rison dropping to the stage. I got excited watching this movie, which I really liked (and have been a fan of the doors for over 20 years), and I thought, as I was sitting there, “Hey, I play music, why don’t I do that? I bet I only did it ten or fifteen times or so over a two to three month period, and the first time was my favorite time.

SC: Ok, so it wasn’t a conscious thing, then. What about in your lyrics, the balance be-tween light and heavy? You’re very playful, lighthearted, and simultaneously pack a lot of emotional weight into your songs. Is that the result of a conscious effort, or just aspects of your personality that find their way in?

KF: What do you mean by it wasn’t a conscious thing? I knew that I was imitating him, but that it was awkward, and that it didn’t fit with the music, per se, as you mentioned, so the juxtaposition I was aware of.

I think it is the balance of an introvert/extrovert mixing ingredients. I like tension and para-dox, and to mix heavy emotional themes with comedy for me is an interesting thing, I don’t want to merely be a heavy person up there because that is not the totality of who I am.

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SC: I guess that’s what I was wondering, whether that paradox was intentional, whether it was a part of the action. How about future Little Wings projects? Are you returning to recognizable terrain on the new album, Black Grass? Do you think the Be Gulls will record another album, or even tour? Will the Shredder be spotted, haunting the background of a song anytime soon?

KF: I always feel the possibility of new songs, so there is always a horizon and new un-knowns. That really keeps me going, and when I can refresh my mind back to that reality, occasionally, new things are born. In some sense, there are some new characters on Black Grass, but they don’t have a name, so much, just a feeling of them in there, somewhere. The Be Gulls will make another album, I can almost promise. Touring is not the Be Gulls thing, though; they are all married now, and getting settled. The older days are older now. The Shredder figure only exists in old songs at this point. I feel like his story has already been told. At this point, it may feel like making a third Meet The Parents movie, is there anything left to say? The last Shredder song, Fall Sweep (off of Light Green Leaves) was the sunset, so to speak. That is where we were supposed to leave him; if he comes back he will be even older. It might be about his new Saturday-morning sweatpants-style, and tak-ing out the garbage. Do we maybe want to just remember him as he was?

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Photo by Brooke Branch, Pickathon, summer 2010

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Contributors///

Sarah Boothroyd’s radiophonic artwork has been featured by broadcasters, festivals and galleries in over a dozen countries. She has won awards, commissions and residencies from New Adventures in Sound Art, New York Festivals, Third Coast International Audio Festival, the European Broadcasting Union, and La Muse En Circuit.

Julie Cloutier is a French-Canadian, San Francisco-based artist and architectural designer. Her work responds to perceptual, spatial, and social disruptions within existing common site conditions. Through shifted normatives and dislodged prescriptions, she reveals new codifications by exposing altered relationships within the landscape of the everyday.

Sean Collins is a writer and editor living in San Francisco. His writing has appeared in Lung, future/PRESENT, and Earl Grey is Dead. He and Maude developed the idea for DRIFT after a horoscope told him to quit his job.

Scotty Enderle is an outdoor enthusiast, art mover, and artist living in Seattle. He splits his time between a multitude of interests: Building sheds, hiking, biking, skiing, surfing, draw-ing, taking photos, cooking dinners, shipping art, gardening, skateboarding, and mowing the lawn. Raking leaves and eating apples are also favorite pass-times.

Kyle Field: Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, eldest in a family of three boys.Graduated from UCLA as a visual art student. Formed Little Wings in 1998.Got into the fine art world and racket in the early 2000’s. Toured Europe, Japan, U.S., etc. The newest Little Wings album, Black Grass, comes out January 25th, 2011, on Marriage Records/RAD. kyledraws.com.

Klara Glosova: I am from Brno, Czech Republic. I moved to New York when I was 20 and went to NY Studio School and Hunter College. Several years later I landed in Seattle. I got married, started a family, and now have two boys. My work turns inward, towards dreams and subconscious, exploring psychological concepts of self-awareness and perception. I have created an experimental project space called NEPO House.

E. Maude Haak-Frendscho is an Urban Studies graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute and a curatorial intern at Southern Exposure, a non-profit art gallery and educa-tion center. Her research and practice are centered at the intersection of social space and contemporary art. She is co-editor of DRIFT.

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Nif Hodgson is a San Francisco artist working in traditional and contemporary etching and letterpress techniques. She is an artist-in-residence and teacher at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at San Francisco State University.

Jeremiah Jones’ work is informed by observation, formative memories and impressions made on him by those with whom he has come in contact. Jones’ art embraces his place in American and art history, engaging the viewer through the exploration of ideas and im-ages creating art which points outward. He began by crisscrossing the country working with various art and activist organizations. He earned a BA from the Evergreen State Col-lege, and now lives in New York, where he works as a teaching artist with the Guggenheim, New Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Folk Art Museum.

Pie-eating contest winner, rhyming dictionary preacher, senior Writer-in-Residence with Se-attle Arts & Lectures Writers In the Schools and faculty for Port Townsend’s Centrum Arts Program, freelance writer for Seattle’s alternative weekly The Stranger and the Bay Area’s Urban View – Rachel Kessler would like to learn the dance of your country.

After working as a stylist in the fashion and beauty industry for nearly a decade, Meredith C. MacKenzie left the east coast to pursue a Master’s Degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work focuses on feminist television criticism, particularly the depictions of race, gender, and class in reality television. She lives and blogs in San Francisco, CA.

Sierra Nelson earned her MFA in Poetry from University of Washington. Her poems can be found in Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, Forklift, Blackboot, Thermos, and other loca-tions. Nelson’s chapbook with artist Loren Erdrich, I Take Back the Sponge Cake: A Lyrical Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, won NYU’s Collaboration Award. She translates Old Icelan-dic sagas very slowly.

Ian Alan Paul is an artist and writer living in California. His work focuses on the develop-ment of prefigurative politics as a praxis, the exploration of aesthetic manifestations in social movements, and the mining of the relationships between antagonistic and generative practices. Ian is currently pursuing his MFA and MA at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work can be viewed online at www.ianalanpaul.com.

Ryan Wilson lives in Los Angeles with his family. He is nostril deep in his first novel and is anxious to see what it will look like with a forehead, hair, and a blurb from George Saunders or, somehow, Roberto Bolano. His music projects include the folk duo, Gutterbunny, and the noise duo, Dogmonkey. He is Stories Editor at The Black Boot. blackbootstories@mail.com.

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Submit to DRIFT: DRIFT is a quarterly magazine with an open policy for submissions of original work. We are also seeking interviews, criticism, historical essays, proposals, and artist’s texts that respond to place or converse with the works of others. We encourage collaboration, cross-disciplinary engagements, and experimental forms.

All submissions must be accompanied by a brief bio (under 50 words). Please submit via email to: editor.drift@gmail.com, or email us for a mailing address (if you want to send us awesome vinyl). Otherwise, all submissions must be in .doc, .pdf, .mp3, or .jpg formats. Deadlines for each issue are the 1st of March, June, September and December.

Subscribe to DRIFT: Subscriptions and other purchase options are available. Single issues are nine bones, and an annual subscription is only twenty-five. Purchasing a subscription for a year gets you a free issue! Hot damn! But seriously, we really appreciate your investment in this project, which allows us to share the magazine as a labor of love. Please email Sean and Maude at: editor.drift@gmail.com to subscribe or, to use Paypal, go through our website.

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Nif Hodgson, percept I