Graphite 8
Manual
Jordie Oetken 4 Dylan Karlsson 7 108 Annakai 旊� Geshlider Orr Swissa-Amran 10 Brian Sohn 14 Anna Wittenberg 18 Kirk Silva 28 Maggi Zheng 32 Mike Lind 38 Maya Martinez 40
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Taha Heydari 46 Giovanna Pizzoferrato 48 Gabriel Cohen 50 Cheeny Celebrado-Royer Bartholomew Ik 76 MJ Tyson 80 Mona Welch 82 Ben Van Buren 84 Jules Garcia 104 Symrin Chawla 110
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Manual points to the hand, as in handbook or labor by hand. As a vehicle of dissemination, it can provide significant (or insignificant) information and instruction. Graphite 8 considers how the “manual” impacts our understanding of labor, access, and communication to an area that needn’t be limited to a hand or book. How is the need for instructional legibility and availability weighed against the need for specificity and novelty? The works in this journal use concrete forms and language that continually reorient the reader’s relationship to “manual.” They extend to talk not only about the hand, but any site on the body or environment that participates in creative production, grounding the progression of time and labor through marks-made. Approached with a social consciousness, the manual brings attention to agency and bears the potential to transform the relationship with one’s self or with other people. We hope to explore the manual as a viable tool for meaningful cultural transmission. Love, Graphite Staff
Jordie Oetken Untitled (Grabbing), 2016 Archival pigment print 38� x 56�
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Jordie Oetken Untitled (Impact), 2016 Archival pigment print 38� x 56�
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Jordie Oetken Untitled (Water), 2017 Archival pigment print 38� x 56�
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and pure
the sweet
watch as
we taste
she and i
complicated
kissing
we charge
turns to
belt-loop
limb
of interest
to wallet
a holy Future
back & forth
up & into
NOISE
sticky globs
w/ prosthetic
a chain from
holding baby
carcinogen
HEAT
the
two mothers
lifespan like
Handshake Emoji Dylan Karlsson
the lightbulb’s
shivering
Near the end
our World
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Heart Like Satisfy, Mouth Like Sea Kelp Annakai 早川 Geshlider FLABBERGHAST: You’re takin part in conversation and it’s amazing you can hold up your head. It’s amazing you can hold up your head. Sprinkled cinnamon on our conversation you did, and called it a day. Jumbled exchange blend with chisel scroll of spicy bark we carve with the tip of your fruit knife then plop into tea. Hark. We sit on this couch who cushion each limb jell-o cozy, floating observation to question to ______ forth and back forth and back. Remindbering vulnerable at age six. Cracking that’s scary that’s I don’t know what TEAR? RAIN? TEAR? RAIN? CAN’T TELL HAHA stream every way which.
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......................................................... While we talk we are eating avocados. Nervous scooping and listening gorging. After chat, we now in different rooms, sheetrock between us and our words sitting in our limbs the avocado skins spoon scraped smooth now resting deep in the compost Peer out my body in different shapes depend on who I am talk to.
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Orr Swissa-Amran Songs that sang, 2016 Video, 09:54
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Brian Sohn Erasing a Microphone, 2017 Video; C-print 8000 x 4500 px
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Brian Sohn Air Raid Siren, 2016 Performance; C-print 16” x 24”
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Brian Sohn Erasing a Microphone, 2017 C-print 36” x 18.5”
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How to Relax Anna Whittenberg A selection from the recorded conversation on relaxation between Kitty and Krista Kitty and Krista each assumed comfortable positions in rooms at opposite ends of the house they share - one on a couch and one on a bed. They were each mic’d and tethered to headphones in order to hear one another. (Transcript of “Fantasy Foam” 2016, looping video installation) Kitty – Mmmm, yah yah yah 18
Krista – [soft exhale]
......................................................... Kitty – Cute… very cute…
Krista – Kibbles and nibbles… Kitty – Mmm, billowy, yah, very billowy… on your pillow-y [light chuckle] Krista – [Giggling]… Is kibble the name of the cat, or is kibble what the kitty eats? [Pause] Krista – Ahhh…. What? [Pause] 19
Kitty – I was going to tell you, sometimes when I’m on the couches,
......................................................... I imagine that I’m at the beach… and its not high tide, and its not low tide… Krista – Oohh Kitty [cont.] – but its getting to be that time when it’s kinda chilly… but, there’s a nice fire… not too windy… Krista – Ahhh I love it when the sun’s going down Kitty – and I’m super tired because I’m crispy from the sun… And I think about that sometimes and it relaxes me and helps me go to sleep, and I just love that time, like when the sun is starting to go down… [Pause] 20
......................................................... Kitty [cont.] – Right, right... And…
Krista – I love it, and am the most comfortable I think Kitty [cont.] – and it looks like tinfoil, all sparkly…. The ocean is just tinfoily lookin’… Krista [cont.] – by a waterfall… and… I went camping one time with a group of people, and I went by myself, down to the waterfall and I was all alone… Kitty [cont] – and I really think of that detail as I’m going to sleep, and wake up thinking, “Huh! Cool!” Krista [cont.] – and I did yoga, by the waterfall, and it was sooo peaceful… and I meditated 21
......................................................... Kitty – Mmm
Krista – Soooo relaxing [Pause] Krista – Yes…. Thank you… [chuckle]… [Pause] Krista – First of all I would make sure that around the whole top of my room, of my bedroom, maybe even to go all the way around the house, would be a ramp… Kitty – Huh, my room is different… 22
Krista [cont.] - Like a shelf? Near the top, like a foot and half down
......................................................... from the roof, so kitty cats could run all the way around the house…
Kitty [cont.] – Really, really different. If I had my ultimate dream, I would live on the beach Krista [cont.] - Especially if the doggies didn’t like them so they could be ok… And…. It would have one whole wall that would be a bookshelf… or bookshelves… Kitty [cont.] - A place like out on a point where there was lots of space between the houses, and there would be lots of sea grasses all around the house… Krista [cont.] - Annndddd… then I could make, like in those old, old fashion libraries, how they have the ladders with the little roley things, where you could get the books really high… 23
......................................................... Kitty [cont.] - And the room that I would sleep in would be on an upper floor, and it would be nothing but windows, no billowy – unless maybe a light see-through fabric, but it would be all windows and it would be all crispy warm from the day’s heat
Krista [cont.] - You could climb up the latter, and if there was a kitty cat sleeping up there, you could go pet your kitty cat while you’re on the latter [laugh] Kitty [cont.] - And some of those same sea-grasses inside my home. And it would be very pared down, and teak wood, and like - white slat wood floors Krista [cont.] - while you’re on the ladder picking out a book to read… before you go to sleep 24
Kitty [cont.] - and woven carpeting, or rugs… And definitely a cat –
......................................................... for sure a big fat cat – and kibble… and just, lots and lots and lots of pictures of my family Krista [cont.] - And… I would have lots and lots of drapes and fabrics, all kinds hanging from the ceiling, kind of like if you had a parachute above… billowy, billowy, that’s a really good word… Kitty [cont.] - Kibble for the kitty so he would stay close by… Krista - Billlowwwyyy…. [exhale]
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Kirk Silva llss, 2016 Digital drawing 4320 x 23,040 px
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0=0 (immuno-compromised) Maggi Zheng who knew residual feelings from childhood could unintentionally manifest themselves into an act of unplanned homicide. but when news of her leukemia spread via social media, it rippled through my consciousness like a bagel floating in water. late July, i finally made the long drive to her sleepy town. many years had passed since we had seen each other, and if the spectre of death had not been there, it would have been many more before i made such lengthy efforts to see her. camaraderie in childhood, even if colored (tainted) by irreconcilable differences probably stemming from racial difference (a divide), was a bond to respect. 32
her chances of staying alive were given in percentages––at one
......................................................... point, in single digits. i suddenly remembered she was the first to say i had big ugly monkey nostrils, i remembered she had big beautiful eyes and was proud of her 20/15 vision, i remembered: after getting big glasses to match big nostrils in sixth grade, she would kindly read things from afar for me. we all have blind spots.
we embraced upon my arrival, our private pains throbbing. she had been housed in the same hospital i had been in eight years prior under very different circumstances. the facebook messenger conversations we had before meeting in person revolved around ice chips1, medical student rounds, and our dreams of staying there forever, for the community and the love. it had been seven years since we last touched and i couldn’t remember what had brought us together as youngsters. was it mutual interest in the attainment of educational success? playing the basketball game h.o.r.s.e.? being lil tomboys? 33
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ice chips = chewable ice frozen in a certain way so the bubbles of air allow it to become the perfect crispy cold snack
......................................................... i placed the cactus leaf from Food 4 Less on her countertop. in my imagination, i hoped to power a cooking spree that could replace conversation. cooking is not a neutral activity, but it feels better than most other activities and does not require much talking because the tasks of looking up the recipe, measuring out ingredients, choosing the pan become the topic of conversation. But it is still intimate, and perhaps too much so. if i really wanted to avoid conversation, though, maybe i should have brought a deck of cards. she thanked me for the cactus leaf and picked it up to inspect. the cactus immediately pricked her pinkie finger and the spine pierced her thin skin. realizing the implications, i felt preemptive guilt and dread wash over me. we did not cook, we did not eat.
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gingerly, she dislocated the cactus spine from her skin. her sister ran over, worried. they debated going to the hospital. it did not puncture skin. there was no blood. but the spine could have an
......................................................... infectious disease, and could kill my immuno-compromised friend. the fear that welled up in us was enough to puncture any sense of immortality we ever imagined, and we called upon the white blood cells to ward off deadly infection, the same heroic lil whites in battle. what do you do when you give a friend recovering from leukemia a cactus leaf only to have it almost kill her.
i thought: perhaps i have a moral cancer and am undesiring of anything real. google was consulted to assess the damage, but eventually my friend’s desire not to return to the hospital won. casually gambling on her life, we slunk out onto the porch
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and it was staring at the trees that saved us. they were comforting to look at, and neither of us wanted to make much eye contact. i pressed clammy fingers against the part of my forehead that felt explosive. she lit a candle to add to the ambiance, and nearly started a fire by dropping the match.
......................................................... my biggest fear as a child was being convicted of a crime i did not commit. however, now i realize bad intentions could also arise from the same fear of wrongful accusation, all stemming from the same root: aversion to any responsibilities i did not explicitly prepare for. the entire time we conversed, my mind wandered somewhere to her veins and i asked if the blood cells were okay. what was the cell count?
i felt as if we did not know each other at all. there was no tension between us, though it easily could have been pulled out and we could have touched upon it. uneasiness rested on the spatial relation of our bodies to each other. it felt almost as if we were held down by a rope to the outdoor chairs. we were strangling each other in conversation. it felt pleasing. she told me about her study abroad in South Africa. 36
......................................................... shame boiled me down to a crisp. via instagram, i find out two days later after almost killing her, that her once-strawberry blonde hair is growing anew brown, and the caption for the picture delivering this news reads: “help!!�
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Illustration by Pooja Tripathi
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Mike Lind As We Do, 2017 Acrylic, watercolor, pastel, graphite on paper 16” x 12” 39
Alannah Maya Martinez
Two girls sit in a room with a pink carpet, a white vanity girl one looking up to the taller girl who has white fringe around her ankles her pleats stay ironed
She looks up to her and asks her how to be so pretty How come everything you say sounds like milk? fake pearls on creamy skin like porcelain The girl looks down on the squatting girl the girl on the floor playing with the plastic spoons drinking imaginary tea She makes a slurping sound
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She spits on the squatting girl’s head and moves her hand to rub it into her hair “now you’ll be just as pretty as me” she says the squatting girl smiles
read every word you have written in the past six months looking in the mirror at yourself, every night for sixty days then look at me and tell me “Yeah humans are very genuine creators” Look in the physical book and see that stained wood doesn’t protect you anymore
“My favorite economy is cruelty” I repeat as I lie flat on your floor ever crave to be a needy mussel?
She is walking through the palm tree farm and everything tastes like a humid sunset. She also thinks about cruelty and lets mud
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cake onto her boots. It is pink mud, all wet. It is bits of fish bone She takes two long braids and sets them on fire.
Throw a rock hard enough and you’re bound to hurt something. In the palm tree farm I can father all of you and you can father me too.
Fantasy economy where I wake up enjoying cruelty And I ask her how she feels “wet” the men sit in the circle puffing cigars with tan lips and the pig is cooking slowly in the box 42
I saw the pig the week prior
......................................................... frozen and smiling
we eat the ears for good luck and the eyes hold juice say may-ita may-ita may-ita with sugar at the bottom of the cup I drink the coffee sweaty her old hands cleaning the men’s plates of pig We sit on the grass, the four of us. Looking out to the cows and looking left to the swans. We talk about playing a game. Maybe we’ll play ghosts in the basement. Maybe we’ll play mermaids. 43
......................................................... It is night now and the four of us get into the pool. “You have to pretend my mermaid has long blonde hair and her shell bikini is pink and her tail is green.” “Well you have to pretend I have long black hair and my shells are purple and my tail is pink” “Who is gonna be the evil mom?” “Well I am in love with a prince and also I have a pet dolphin” “My name is going to be Regan-Mary”
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We race from one side of the pool to the other trying to swim with our legs pressed together. We all just end up comparing underwater handstands. They try to make a cheerleading pyramid and I have to stand on their shoulders cause I am the smallest. Our cheer tower crashes back into the water. We fall asleep together on the pullout couch. Did you ever pretend to be a puppy? Like you barked and walked around on your hands and knees and your cousins acted like you were a puppy too? When it is summer we don’t have to shower so often. My mom says it’s because jumping in the pool is
......................................................... just like a shower. I wonder if this is a normal thing, or it is like when she says there were women saints, but the men just wrote them out of the bible.
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Taha Heydari On the Roof, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 72” x 92”
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Giovanna Pizzoferrato Under the Hood, 2015 Charcoal on paper 30” x 22.5” 48
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Even the gorgeous royal chariots wear out Gabriel Cohen
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......................................................... The following selections have been excerpted by Graphite editors from a longer work.
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88.1 There is a road in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains, that runs next to a lake. The view from the road is beautiful, one worthy of duplication on a postcard. It is likely that such a postcard already exists for sale in a gas station somewhere along the strip of highway that runs along the lake, in between the mountainside and the water. Of course, this view is most easily accessible from a scenic overlook. In Colorado, scenic byways and overlooks, in addition to providing a place to stop and see this specific view, offer you, a typical American driver in a Ford F model pickup (a vehicle that makes up almost five percent of all cars on the road in the United States), an opportunity to trace the paths of migrating bisons on Highway 14 and Interstate 76. In 1964, the Recreation Advisory Council recommended the development of a national program of scenic roads and parkways.
......................................................... The Department of Commerce was commissioned to conduct a study of such a possible program; the rationale for this study was the burgeoning middle and upper middle classes in the United States, much of whom owned automobiles and had access to leisure time. More important, perhaps, was the council’s belief that driving for pleasure was one of America’s most popular outdoor recreational activities. It was theorized that the rapid urban growth occurring in the United States would increase the need for spaces dedicated to outdoor recreation while at the same time diminishing the resources to create such spaces. The logical conclusion then was to imagine the byway and parkway as sites for a new type of recreation: driving.
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88.3 In Iowa on a hot summer day, even in an air-conditioned car, you can feel sweat accumulating on your skin. Staring out at the horizon, the back of your neck damp, your eyes become trained on the only pieces
......................................................... of visual information they can locate. In an attempt to differentiate between the large even fields of tone comprising corn and sky, you snap in on even the smallest perceptible change in vision. The even aquamarine blue of the sky becomes a backdrop for the shadows of undissolved vitreous gel material floating in the back of your eyes. You wonder if you’ve always had floaters but somehow never noticed them through all the noise of visual information in the world around you. Or perhaps it has something to do with the humidity, causing your eyeballs to wrinkle, or maybe swell. In any case, you see them clearly now.
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88.5 The scenic overlooks in Colorado and Utah constructed following the Recreation Advisory Council’s recommendations not only overlook vast mountain ranges but also frame the sky. But, of course, it is more than the sky that is being framed, as the bright afternoon sky inevitably
......................................................... becomes a backdrop for your floaters. A visual phenomenon specific to you, not created by any sort of psychoactive drug or altered state but by your eyes themselves. A thin veil that lies in between you and your vision of the world. A veil so thin that your brain generally filters it out, sort of like the ability to see your own nose — the sort of thing that you wouldn't notice when she paused to look at you the night before you left. The objective of image compression is to reduce irrelevance and redundancy in image data. Your brain filters in this way all the time, reducing irrelevance from visual information.
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88.7 There are digital communities, made up mostly of middle-aged Caucasian men who discuss the depression their floaters cause them on a daily basis. In a video diary on Youtube a member of one such community describes his first visit with his ophthalmologist to discuss potential treatments for the floaters that ail him. In his
......................................................... recounting of the events, the man explains that his doctor told him that he would not recommend invasive corrective surgery. That then the doctor joked that the man had made a “friend for life.� Perhaps on the drive from Chicago to Los Angeles you are not truly alone in your car, but are traveling with a companion.
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88.9 It should be noted that floaters are caused by the shrinking and clumping of the vitreous with age, and should not be confused with other visual phenomena that can occur when looking at flat and evenly colored fields, such as the bouncing points of light of the blue field entoptic phenomenon, which is caused by the shadows of white blood cells moving in the capillaries in the front of the retina; or the multi-colored haze of closed eye visuals, which, along with occurring when the eyes are closed, can be seen in a darkened room or when looking at evenly colored, shaded objects.
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89.2 While the humidity in Utah is relatively manageable, it does get hot. At temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit the average American driving a Ford F model pickup is absorbing more heat than the body can dissipate effectively. Eventually, the heat-regulating mechanisms of the body are overwhelmed. No longer protected by the body’s cooling processes, the chemical reactions in human cells become subject to the temperature rule, doubling their rate every time the temperature increases by 18 degrees. At this point, even if the temperature is no longer increasing in the Ford F model pickup, the body’s metabolic rate will continue to climb. Every time the metabolic rate increases, it generates more heat, creating a positive feedback loop. Without intervention internal, body temperature will continue to rise until death at 107.6 degrees, the upper lethal temperature for the average American. Thankfully, your Ford has air conditioning, even if its effectiveness is questionable in this heat.
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89.4 When you were born, much like a baby rat, you lacked the ability to focus your eyes or move them accurately. At birth, your vision was abuzz with all kinds of visual stimulation, and you lacked the perceptual skills to easily tell the difference between things. In computer vision, the points at which image brightness changes sharply are organized into a set of curved lines called edges. This type of image parsing has been implemented in various processes such as facial and gesture recognition. Edge detection is what allows a piece of software to tell the difference between one thing and another.
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89.5 The song “One,� by the American heavy metal band Metallica, begins playing on your car radio. You could have sworn that your radio was tuned to an unused FM bandwidth. More likely than not, an exposed
......................................................... wire somewhere in your dashboard has begun to function as an antenna, catching a local transmission. In the novel Johnny Got His Gun, which heavily inspired “One,” a young American soldier serving in World War I awakens in a hospital bed after being caught in the blast of an exploding artillery shell. He gradually realizes that he has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue), but that his mind functions perfectly, leaving him a prisoner in his own body.
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89.6 In the United States in the 1970s, there was a large amount of federally funded research done on isolation tanks (salt water–filled enclosures meant to free the body from any external stimuli). John C. Lilly, a neuroscientist, actually claimed that the deprivation of his senses allowed him to contact beings from other dimensions. Today, however, the tanks are used primarily for relaxation and meditation. The closest historical tradition of isolation in darkened
......................................................... environments for the purpose of meditation rather than torture is the dark retreat, an advanced practice of certain lineages of Taoism and some schools of Tibetan Buddhism. A dark retreat is a solo retreat in a space that is completely absent of light. The time an individual spends in a dark retreat can vary from a few hours to decades. Extended periods of sensory deprivation—especially visual—can induce what is known as prisoner’s cinema, a phenomenon involving the hallucination of colorful forms reported by prisoners confined to dark cells, practitioners of intense meditation, pilots, astronauts exposed to cosmic rays, and truck drivers. When you were younger, your parents wouldn’t let you drive at night. At night the highways in Illinois are filled with drunk drivers and truckers.
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89.7 “Seeing the black dog” is an expression truck drivers use to describe the hallucinations they get from long periods of driving through monotonous terrain. The expression, while popularized by
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the American film Black Dog, is derived from the folklore of northern Europe, particularly the United Kingdom, where it referred to nocturnal apparitions often said to be malevolent and sometimes regarded as portents of death. It is believed by some groups that there is a relationship between sightings of nocturnal hallucinations and the intersections of telluric currents. ...
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90.1 In bed before you went to sleep, you flicked through a dating app on your smartphone. The volume of people whose names and faces you didn’t recognize made you feel more alone than you can remember. According to recent scientific research you can be born with a predisposition to loneliness, that it can be largely circumstantial, that there’s large-scale social changes going on that will trigger loneliness in vulnerable people. Leaving the small town in Nebraska the next morning you passed a store that advertised selling hot tubs
......................................................... and religious guidance. The influence of a body of water on the temperature and humidity of air is best determined by conducting experiments simultaneously on both shores. ...
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90.4 According to Latter Day Saints belief, a prophet warrior named Moroni inscribed what would become the Book of Mormon on a series of golden plates shortly before his death in a great battle between two pre-Columbian civilizations in AD 400. After his death, Moroni became an angel who was tasked with guarding the plates until the 1820s, when he directed Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, to their burial location. The plates, as described by Smith, were written in a “reformed Egyptian� language, which he was able to translate over several years with the assistance of a seer stone. No archaeological, linguistic, or other evidence of the use of Egyptian writing in ancient America has been discovered.
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90.6 As it gets darker, the floaters that plague your vision during the day become less intrusive. The last time you were in Colorado you were much younger. You remember visiting a cave in the Rocky Mountains with your extended family. On the tour of the cave system, after pointing out the calcium salt mounds known as stalagmites, your tour guide stopped in one of the deepest points of the cave to give a demonstration of total darkness. It really was total darkness. Your eyes couldn’t make out a single outline or shape or anything. If one were to stay in total darkness for an extended period of time, the brain would start to react by exaggerating sounds and eventually creating full-blown hallucinations. Charles Bonnet syndrome, which afflicts people with vision loss and impairment (particularly the early stages of sight loss), causes vivid hallucinations. For those stricken with the syndrome, the world is occasionally adorned with vivid yet unreal images. Some see surfaces covered in nonexistent patterns
......................................................... such as brickwork or tiles—likely an exaggeration of closed-eye visual patterns, which normally consist of the seemingly random noise of pointillistic light and dark regions. Others see phantom objects in detail, including people, animals, buildings, commonplace objects such as bottles and hats, or more elaborate hallucinations such as dancing children with giant flowers for heads. Among older adults with significant vision loss, the prevalence of Charles Bonnet syndrome has been reported to be as high as 40 percent.
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90.7 After enucleation, or evisceration of an eye, or similarly, retinal damage, some people begin to have spontaneous activity in the visual cortex. Most hallucinations of this type consist of basic perceptions of shapes and colors. These types of hallucinatory occurrences have been linked to other types of phantom limb syndromes and have been appropriately named phantom eye syndrome. Unlike Charles Bonnet syndrome, phantom eye hallucinations appear to be closer to
......................................................... accounts of phosphenes produced via direct electrical stimulation of the visual cortex and transcranial magnetic stimulation. The rapidly changing magnetic field of a close lightning flash is strong enough to excite neurons in the brain inducing seizures in the occipital lobe, which has been linked to certain visual hallucinations. These naturally produced magnetophosphenes have also been associated with the phenomenon of ball lightning. ... 91.0 Helen Keller is quoted as having once said, “I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold when death sets me free.� In the dark of that cave in Colorado you saw lights twinkling in front of you, if even just for a moment. ... 64
......................................................... 91.6 You’ve never been to Los Angeles before, but every cell in your body seems to be pushing you that way. Perhaps your yearning is some echo of a past life. Much of attraction happens on an energetic level that many people are not consciously aware of. So much of our lives revolve around the individual and collective energies and vibrations buzzing through our world every second. According to Jung, there is compelling experimental evidence to substantiate the existence of transpersonal, subconscious elements of the psyche, proposed as a kind of absolute knowledge in the form of a collective unconscious. Jung found proof of this in the fact that certain archetypal fantasyforms have been reproduced spontaneously without there being any conceivable trace of direct transmission. The archetypes are, so to speak, organs of the pre-rational psyche. They are eternally inherited forms and ideas that at first seem to have no specific content. ...
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......................................................... 92.1 While the nature of habitation loss within the Great Desert Basin is extreme, the area is the only known home of the Pinus longaeva, better known as the bristlecone pine. These trees are the stuff of legend; they endure not centuries, but millennia. A bristlecone pine found in the White Mountains of California was determined to be the world’s oldest known living organism. A ring count on a small core sample taken with an increment borer showed the tree to be 5,062 years old. ...
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92.3 A snake slithers down from the branch of a bristlecone pine and whispers in the ears of a young Native American couple. Many of the earliest English explorers venturing to the Americas described the New World as an earthly paradise, or a recovered Eden. While this was probably, at least in part, an attempt to encourage private
......................................................... investors to subsidize new explorations, it spurred interesting theological interpretations and implications regarding the presence of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. One Spanish priest believed that the Native Americans were direct descendants from the garden of Eden, and that therefore Europeans must be the banished children of Cain. ...
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92.7 In addition to the being most commonly recognized in relationship to music, poetry, and the sun, Apollo, as the patron of Delphi, was also a prophetic deity. Apollo’s dominion was medicine and healing. To this extent, he also was seen as a god capable of bringing ill health and deadly plague. Apollo also came to be seen as the protector of colonists. On January 27, 1967, during a launch rehearsal of Apollo 1, a cabin fire broke out killing all three crew members and destroying the command module. Approximately five minutes after
......................................................... the first report of fire, the personnel on site were able to successfully open the craft’s hatches. Upon gaining entrance to the command module, they found visibility to be extremely poor. Although the lights remained on, they could be perceived only dimly. No fire was observed. Initially, the crew was not seen. Subsequent inspection by a team of firefighters revealed that the intense heat of the fire had fused the astronauts to the interior of the cabin with melted bands of nylon. Removal of the crew’s bodies took approximately 90 minutes and wasn’t completed until more than seven hours after the pilots’ deaths.
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92.8 Some people say it was Apollo who brought up the sun each day. In the version of the myth told by Ovid in Metamorphoses, Phaethon goes to his Sun-God father to ask permission to drive the chariot of the sun for a day. In an attempt to dissuade his son, Phaethon’s father tells him that not even the king of the gods would dare to drive
......................................................... it. Phaethon, rather than yielding to his father’s concerns, continues to plead. Having grown tired, his father agrees to allow him to prove himself capable. The next morning Phaethon mounts the chariot, taking the reins tightly in his hands. The fierce horses that pull the chariot, sensing the incompetence of their driver, rip the reins from Phaethon’s hands and run wildly through the sky. Dipping too close towards the Earth, the hot sun begins to dry up the oceans and rivers leaving deserts in their place. ...
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94.1 Highway hypnosis is a mental state in which a person can drive great distances with no recollection of having consciously done so. This is generally considered a manifestation of the process of automaticity, where the conscious and unconscious minds are able to concentrate on different things. Other theories, building on Ernest Hilgard’s hypothesis that hypnosis is a form of dissociation, hold that
......................................................... it is possible for one stream of consciousness to be focused on driving the car while the other is dealing with other matters. The splitting of consciousness into multiple streams can often result in amnesia, as the brain attempts to reconcile co-occurrent experiences.
94.2 When you were younger your parents wouldn’t let you drive at night. Numerous studies have found that sleep deprivation can affect driving as much as (and sometimes more than) alcohol. In the evenings, after a full day behind the wheel, you often become drowsy. You almost fell asleep when arriving in Nebraska. You had to keep rubbing your eyes. ...
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107.9 It is important to remember that the lines on the map are just ideas— logical places for future roads to run, they could easily shift a mile
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in any direction. At rest stops, and sometimes while you drove, you had absentmindedly swiped through the local singles in a dating application on your smartphone. In Nebraska, you matched with someone and considered— if even for the briefest moment— what it would be like to stay there for the rest of your life. 108.0 Aries, life will continue to move forward without you.
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Cheeny Celebrado-Royer Sarong Banggi (One Night), 2016 Installation 2.5’ x 4’ 72
Cheeny Celebrado-Royer Rebuild, 2016 Concrete 0.5’ x 1’ x 1.5’ (individual blocks) Dimensions variable
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Cheeny Celebrado-Royer Pamilya, 2014 Digital collage 2.5’ x 4’
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Led by the Hand Bartholomew Ik It was the hand Lifting the paw off the savanna as it fled Shedding grasp of the green branch above stretching Out to reach for brown sticks and bones below extending The first blows at last against Anything unfit to its wish.
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It was the hand Aspiring to the desires of fast eyes guiding Throws ever faster after Flashing shadows of prey and predator With transmissions of stone Thrown to slow lumbering life into death.
......................................................... It was the hand Rolling boulders round circular furrows of earth Following the firmaments above to affirm Forms for the first worlds below— Entering the first outside from its inside, Forever centering a center.
It was the hand That limned the first rhythms on rock Rendering repetitious gestures into noisy objects, Entraining labor’s pain with the clamor of things Chanting in eternal prophesies of their production Inventing process in the process inventing time.
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It was the hand Cutting itself on the first sharp edge that found itself Within itself, bound by the need of what is alive to remain inside
......................................................... Itself instinct dividing what is intended from what is not, Autopsying what lives looking outside Cutting what’s dead into names. It was the hand That only yesterday put edge to clay Laughing at its first obscenity Before its mastery’s unending need—to lead— Withdrew gesture from view and went unheard Cutting the lines of the world’s first words.
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MJ Tyson Ag+Cu: Map, 2015 Paper, ink, graphite 14” x 14”
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MJ Tyson Ag+Cu: Material, 2015 Silver, copper 14” x 14”
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Mona Welch When the Honorable Collector Acquired and Proceeded to Repackage Vesuvius, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 9’ x 5 1/2’
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Notes on Faith and School Ben Van Buren This text was composed through a combination of speech and writing. It continues to be a constant, repetitive, work in progress. As a result of this process some names and texts are referenced only partially, most citations are improper, and all memories are doctored. Thank you for listening. I. Love I love the way Anne Carson prefaces her translations of Euripides. “Why does tragedy exist?” she asks. “Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
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There is a story that I don’t quite remember in Yvonne Rainer’s autobiography about how she came to be misquoted in Time
......................................................... magazine. When asked what she thought was important she answered, “To be a part of one’s time.” But Time remembered it differently and published the quote as “Using one’s time well.” But why are we full of grief? As we were sitting on the well-cut grass of the median that runs down a leafy avenue, my friend Nina turned to me and said, “I don’t buy that. I don’t buy that we are filled with grief because we are filled with war” (which I had just suggested via Critchley). “I think we are filled with grief because we are filled with love.” I know she is right.
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Sitting on a studio floor. Watching half of my cohort dance, when quickly, quickly enough to interrupt the first yawn of the afternoon, Jean runs and jumps on Krish’s back and they both fall clumsily to the floor. We. The half who are sitting, all laugh. A few minutes later, when the timer goes off, we circle up and talk about what worked.
......................................................... Someone mentions a moment of accidental symmetry, someone mentions juxtaposition, we repeat ourselves and each other, no one mentions the fall.
Living away, living far away from a love is especially hard. No? We meet at 11 a.m. (their noon) on Skype. It’s summer there and winter here. Hola. There is no mailbox stuck in the mud at the end of the drive nor slotted in a row in the belly of the apartment building. It is in us, we bring it along, our mailbox is where we are at 11 a.m.
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I love Sans Soleil. The footage of Tokyo before cell phones is so seductive. At one point in the very beginning, in between shots of Guinea-Bissau, Tokyo, and Iceland, the narrator says something to the effect that in the nineteenth century, the world came to terms with competing conceptions of space, and the problem of the twentieth century is coming to terms with competing conceptions of time. I believe he is right.
......................................................... I’ll meet you at 11. I’ll check my email throughout the day.
Jean and Krish went to the floor and we all laughed. Why did we neglect to mention it? Simple. We assumed we were learning to make dances for strangers, not each other. That moment when Tom and Jason entered at the same time without looking at each other was interesting, it really changed the space; anyone, anyone would find it compelling. But we who had spent years together, who had loved each other, didn’t mention the fall. Art doesn’t happen out of the blue. This we know for sure. Art is always in dialogue and debate with the world it encounters. This we know for sure. This we know for sure. The artist does not work in a vacuum. This we know for sure. Therefore, a practice of art is a practice of life. This we know for sure. 87
......................................................... I don’t remember your room, I remember the light in my room. I don’t remember your smell, only what your eyes did.
I remember reading Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase in high school. She was a nun for most of the 1960s. The book is a chronicle of her difficult reentry into secular life. A turning point for her was a reading of Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. It is a beautiful poem that asks the question of what to do when, over the common course of life, one finds that nature, in all its beauty, no longer suffices. I’ll save you the long quote. The short answer, for Karen, was, “We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind.”
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Nature has changed. It, of course, has not, but as a word, to those of us who made up that word, it has. Nature, as that place that once we could return to, attune to, emulate, has shifted. This we know for sure.
......................................................... Our moods are no longer swept up only in the casual undulations of the natural world, but also in a certain rhythm and periodization of communication and knowledge. Call it texting, call it searching. We no longer live in place only, we now also live in time. On occasion. What to do with grief?
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This we know for sure: that tragedy was invented and that we have carried something resembling theater alongside ourselves for the past twenty-five hundred years. We seem to have chosen to grieve not, but rather to find perpetual strength in certain practices of theatrical technology that have served many generations. But while we have lugged mimesis, representation, narrative, and the proscenium arch into the present, we have more recently forgotten to pass down any set of instructions on how to care for that which precedes our grief. We have come to neglect the originary theatrical technology, love.
......................................................... Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of love. Because there was a Peloponnesian War, and we needed to grieve together. Why does something called dance exist today? In 2017, in Brussels, in New York? Love, that sensation of remembering something one has never known. Love, which makes space in time, of time. II. School I first encountered muscular Christianity on the big TV in the townhouse on Avenue Albert, that we magically ended up housesitting for the last year of school. 90
......................................................... We trained in the garden behind school with kettlebells, parallel bars, push-ups. We were quiet, often there was silence. In the spring and summer months, the garden behind the reclaimed industrial building that constituted school was luscious, green.
There was a slight air of penitence in everything we did. We rarely, if ever, set out to break our own records, although it happened incidentally on occasion. The quality of our movement was more important than its being recorded. We believed we knew the laws of the human body, certain immutable laws concerning the correct way to squat, to push up, to run. There was morality there, a right and a wrong way of repeating oneself.
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When we would collapse on the grass (and maybe a train was whirring by), we would feel in our exhaustion a true and joyous piety. Not elation, which glows outward, but something closer to ecstasy, which, in the violence of its sensation, is always clutched tightly for
......................................................... fear of the destruction it might cause upon exiting. And within the hollow roundness of our exhaustion the rigorous separation between knowledge and belief would relax, and for a moment the two would become indistinguishable.
At home we watched Gill Hedley dissect a human form. The massive pus-yellow vestment of the superficial fascia lying on the stainless steel table. We watched his scalpel scrape away the “fuzz� that accumulates in between underused muscle tissue. It was our testimony. What more proof did one need? But we could not truly pretend to be good pious physiological essentialists, good muscular Christians, because we were training to be better dancers, better asymmetrical, unnatural movers. We loved two contradictory eternities. The eternity of training and the eternity of performance. Metaphysics and its opposite. 92
......................................................... In school we took ballet, we took workshops, we took contemporary dance classes. School was not a church like the air of our garden was. It was a parliament of happy faiths, a commonwealth of religious variety. In school students were given the power of the decision, the power to choose what information each wanted to believe in. School taught exceptionalism.
But we did not believe in exceptionalism. So we trained both outside and inside school, faithfully observing both the personal private God of our garden exhaustions and the civic leviathan of our indoor studies. It was when we committed to bringing our faith into contact with our education that we understood both the origin and purpose of something like civil disobedience.
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III. Memory Art does not happen out of the blue. Sometimes airports explode. Art is always in dialogue and debate with the world it encounters.
......................................................... Sometimes airports explode. Sometimes another airport explodes. A practice of art is a practice of life. Sometimes airports explode.
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Art does not happen out of the blue. True, but its metamorphoses are far from transparent. Can I ask why you do art? Well, because the aristocracy wasn’t hiring, because it is the only logical outcome of the liberal arts, because it’s how I can get away with publishing experimental erotica, because I love websites, because I’m only alright at sports, because I want to further the cause of animal rights, because I love to read, because Chris Burden did it, because I have a unique digestive system, because sex, because my parents were, because my childhood was, because the world is. Sitting in the university courtyard, surrounded by the smokers, we would sheepishly improvise an answer. Art because the world is fucked. Art to change the world? Yes. How? By… by… (read the next bit quickly) By growing the presence of dance within universities. See Agamben, see Schmitt, “the tradition of the state of exception is
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a tradition of liberal democracies and not of dictatorships,” “the sovereign is he who decides the state of exception.” Check. Check. By engendering a kind of epistemic disobedience. See Mignolo. Check. Via Althusser. By positing new and uncomfortable (always uncomfortable) relationships to knowledge within the academy, that organ charged with vetting unproductive youth into their future roles within capitalism. Check. See Martin, on the university dance class, “‘practice’ is the key term that joins epistemology and politics.” Check. But first, see H’Doubler. 1917. The first dance program in an American university. But first see Charles William Eliot right at the turn of the twentieth century. Harvard, the introduction of what would become the liberal arts. Observe how the advent of industrialized, agro-mechanical farming demanded a different kind of higher education than what was on offer in the seminaries. Note how the church was thanked and dismissed. “I’m just a farmer trying to cure hog cholera. I’m just a farmer.” Remember Walter, who asked, “to the West of what?” And answered, “of Jerusalem, of course.” Art
......................................................... because in Hobbes—because in Chapter XIII, in Hobbes, we learn that the state of nature is ahistorical and that we cede our right to violence to the sovereign because in the state of nature even the weakest may kill the strongest. Art because the weakest, through cunning, can kill the strongest. That can’t be right.
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Walking toward Duden Park on a chilly night in November when B gets a call to tell her, to tell us, about the ongoing attacks in Paris. Or sitting on the cafe steps in Kadiköy in the gray light of October with a friend. It is two days after bombs were detonated in the middle of a peace rally organized by the KDP, and my friend, who was born and raised close to the explosions, is beyond comfort. My friend’s eyes search the sidewalk in front of us, but find nothing to recommend a solution. Some distant hand has their throat in convulsions. Sitting with them, I forget everything I know. All the knowledge of a world that had arranged for the emergence of this thing called terror disappears as I attempt to render the simple act of sitting there on a
......................................................... step together, enough.
“The culture of the wretched of the earth,” writes Cornel, “is deeply religious.” Following the lessons of Cornel and others I have become skeptical of any dialogue and debate that excludes, as so many seem to, a consideration of faith as something integral to politics. I have come to believe that if something called artist wants to engage with the troubles of the world something called artist would do well to come to terms with something called faith.
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I remember Dennis leaning against the downstage right wall in Utrecht. Holding a wireless microphone. Reading from a folded piece of paper that some might call a script. A single warm light from high above and slightly behind illuminates him in his own clothes. He is describing a scene, of men, on a rock, in the distance, fucking. He reads, “I want to grow up expressly to do something like that.” I stand on the other side of the stage transfixed. In my memory I’m in
......................................................... the wings. Though I don’t think that theater had wings. In the beginning of Sans Soleil, the narrator says
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?
As Dennis reads, I have my first experience of truly forgetting. A new knowledge capable of supporting the existence of this new evidence, this pause, this ecstasy, this terror, has to be produced. My memory excuses itself to a private corner of the mind and, unbeknownst to me, rearranges its own order, its own knowledge, so that this new encounter might be known as the culmination of many disparate events. 98
Faith, which is not the opposite of politics, but rather its lining.
......................................................... IV. Selfless Autobiography To live in time, on occasion, is not pure fantasy. The eyes don’t roll back into the skull. One doesn’t ferry away to some sufficiently convincing virtual reality that since the advent of the internet has been suspended, shimmering and perfect, above the cold, wet rest of the earth. No. It is rather what has come of wanting to stir when they do, despite not sharing the bed. “How does autobiography begin?” asks William, who answers himself, “with memory.” I remember Simon reading Wallace. Wallace, whom I love too. Wallace Stevens lived a life divided. He was an national authority on insurance law as well as a poet. The vacuum between his two lives has produced no end of speculation. 99
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Modern poetry, writes Wallace, in a poem from 1940, about Modern Poetry, called “Of Modern Poetry” It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage Modern poetry lives a life divided, said Wallace. Simon read “Ideas of Order at Key West” aloud in a typical lecture hall in the spring of 2014. Fluorescent lights lit an amphitheater of chairs screwed into the floor. He sat on a folding chair with his elbows on a folding table up on a small raised stage in the front. The stage floor was fitted with gray carpet, and behind him the backdrop was a blackboard.
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It was so soon after the Civil War. Right after, in fact. A great metamorphosis was taking place. A process of reverence was becoming a process of triumph. Students would no longer strive to
......................................................... learn a common map of the world that waited for them outside the university walls. They would instead become like modern poetry: making and standing on a stage half themselves, half their schooling. So long as the goal was the authenticated degree, the student was encouraged to become the measure of all things. As a result, the art of teaching a language of selflessness became dated. That we have memories, this we know for sure. We memorize Yvonne’s childhood, just as we peer into the chasm left by Wallace’s lives. What are we looking for? Simple, we want to know for sure. To stir alongside them, despite not sharing the decade.
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I remember the rich amplification of Dennis’s quiet voice. How it echoed in the modest lecture hall. How the lights dimmed and how the fog snuck in through the doors and tiptoed down the stairs toward the stage. How you peeked out from the kitchen and took in the scene before returning silently to making coffee. I remember Jean
......................................................... and Krish interrupting the dancing by falling clumsily, indulgently, to the floor. I remember how they deflated the poignancy of the improvisational exercise. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s not a part of it. That’s them just fooling around. Come on, guys, take it seriously.” But then I also remember laughing and feeling instantly guilty for endorsing their foolishness. And whom do I trust? The self that knows better or the self that simply reacts?
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Jules Garcia Flood, 2016 Acrylic on canvas 77” x 84”
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Jules Garcia Sword, 2016 Acrylic and ink on canvas 77” x 84”
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Roomie Nation Annakai 早川 Geshlider Ballad of the Host and the Friend O nuh-noh, don’t bother washing that dish. Naw, it’s ok! Cummon, I can just do it later. Whoops, too bad! I just finished. Ballad of the Pals Walking Home Want me to walk you home? Sure *Leave, walking walking walking, get there* Want me to walk you home? Sure *Leave, walking walking walking, get there* Want me to walk you home? ∞
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How to Make a Day Outta It How ta pack a coffee, How ta brew a lunch? How to soap your knees,
......................................................... How to offer a roomi a sore neck hot washcloth an lavender muscle tea. How to bite into a peach for the first time. How to deal with your body. How to ask how your day [How to ask how hart?] How to ask take care now! How to make cluster of habit from nothing, from tending, from Wow each one spawn diff and now? Here we be baby, babeys, chuggin, doggone daily breath in yer face clay.
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Monitor Dylan Karlsson
tenuously, there are shapes forming behind curtains, -------- behind screens, some covert work of windows, certain to tug at the neck of ur shirt --------- enough to make me aware -------- of gaps in our imagination. how can i collect language? was never such a scary question. but in the back of our tongues, what thrusts, our name. me, and not me -------- we — linked data in a field study. my CO, listening in a pocket; my INTEL, already in formation; my PRO, waiting for -------- finger pressed button. what i search for --------- is not what u
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search for. bordering on the same words, my results are not urs -------- becoming, monitors full of names, the two-fold registry grows another set of limbs -------behind the fire -------- walls, now gathering the names up, one half of the brain watches -------- while the other colludes with an unknown, saying our name, our nation. tenuously, there are shapes forming behind shoulders -------- tapping on that spinal cord of urs til u shiver into this new mode -------- of operation. i’ve heard of something similar: a burning building and the aftermath.
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Symrin Chawla Copper 4, Sep 29 2016 Performance (1 hour, Los Angeles) Still, photograph by Dicko Chan 110
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......................................................... Cheeny Celebrado-Royer (b. 1991, Naga City, Philippines) received her MFA in Multidisciplinary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Celebrado-Royer is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, digital and performance art. She moved to the United States in 2005 and received her BA in Studio Art at McDaniel College, Westminster, MD, in 2014. Her work has been shown around the Baltimore region and is currently a resident artist at School 33 Arts Center in Baltimore. Symrin Chawla is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work bridges performance, sculpture and sound –– exploring intuitive movement and the artifacts of emotion. In primarily autobiographical performances that range from 15 minutes to multiple days, imprints of the female body take form against invisibility, perishability and the limits of reason. She is currently completing her MFA in Design | Media Arts at UCLA.
......................................................... Gabriel Cohen is a student at the Rhode Island School of Design double majoring in New Media / Video and Sculpture. He isn’t very good at describing himself or his work in a third-person “bio” format. Someone once described his work as having to do with locating himself within larger systems of control. Jules Garcia (b. 1992, Miami, FL) received her BFA from School of Visual Art in 2014 and her MFA in 2016 from the LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has been included in exhibitions such as Summer Show at C.Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore (2016), The Edge at Ballroom Gallery in Baltimore (2016), and Pagina at Libreria Cascianelli in Rome (2015). Annakai 早川 Geshlider likes to gab, gawk, and go get boba. Wondering: WHO GETS TO SPEAK? WHEN / WHERE / HOW / WHY? She currently serves on the board of Chancellor Gene D.
......................................................... Block’s Office for the Abolition of the Academic Industrial Complex. She writes to unpack the ways in which capitalism fuels FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Taha Heydari (Iranian, b. 1986) lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Having recently completed his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Taha Heydari’s work points to the history of painting and its deep connection to image making in order to consider how the made image functions in the present day. The paintings are informed by technology and the media, and are compiled from second-hand images that are brought together on the canvas, speaking to the current all-consuming image-condition of the digital age. Bartholomew Ik is a doctoral-level candidate student at Universitatea de Stat din Moldova (Moldova State University). He specializes in Classical Romanian poetry, 20th century American modernism, and contemporary theories of translation. He is currently
......................................................... working on his first collection of long-form poems entitled Limitările solidului.
Dylan Karlsson is a poet/writer based in Los Angeles. He is the senior poetry editor of Westwind, and is currently pursuing a BA in English at UCLA. Kirk Silva is a queer person living and producing digital works in San Diego. Some of their work can be found on Instagram @ pricelesskirk. Mike Lind is a multimedia artist pursuing a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research examines our experience as humans and how we perceive truth, in both a Kantian sense and in the face of proliferating “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and a supposed “post-truth” era.
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Maya Martinez was born in a small town in Florida. She will graduate with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017. She is currently drinking cold brew out of a glass boot. Jordie Oetken​ was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2012, she was awarded the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to study at the Yale/Norfolk School of Art before graduating with a BFA from Murray State University in 2013. She has held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Vermont Studio Center. She will graduate with an MFA in photography from UCLA in 2017. Giovanna Pizzoferrato​ was born in 1991 in Los Angeles, California. In 2016, she received her BFA in Illustration with a Fine Art Minor at Art Center College of Design. She was awarded scholarships and actively participated in art shows both on and off campus. Giovanna currently lives and works in her hometown of
......................................................... Sunland, focusing primarily on painting and drawing. Her daily driver is a green manual transmission 1979 diesel Rabbit, her personal secret to happiness in LA.
Brian Sohn is currently based in Los Angeles. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley, went to New York for a bit, and wishes to stay in Los Angeles. You can see what he does next at briansohn. net. Orr Swissa-Amran (b. Las Vegas, Nevada) works primarily in video and animation. Her work explores structures -- interiors and constructed environments -- often with relation to transnationalism and female affect. Using housing as an armature for her work, she mobilizes these properties to create quasi-narratives, ones that read the structure’s physical space and the people that embody them. MJ Tyson is a graduate student in the Jewelry + Metalsmithing
......................................................... Department at Rhode Island School of Design. Through material research MJ looks for new expressions of traditional jewelry metals. Originally from Burlington VT, Ben Van Buren​ is currently living and working in New York City. He studied philosophy and dance at Eugene Lang College in New York as well as performance and choreography at the Performing Arts Research and Training Studios in Brussels. Having showed and taught internationally, Ben is currently a Masters student at the New School for Social Research. His most recent performance works include Sunday Morning (The Kitchen, NYC, 2015) and Wednesday (September Festival, Brussels, 2014). Mona Welch was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is a third year in the UCLA Departments of Art and Germanic Languages. She plans to move out of her parents’ home, and perhaps the city, soon.
......................................................... Anna Wittenberg (b. 1985, Houston TX) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She received her BA in Media Studies at Pitzer College in 2008 and is currently working toward her MFA in visual art at the University of California Riverside. Anna employs both installation and performance in association with video and sound to explore the corporeal dimension of experience, and to interrogate contemporary and historical cultural mores. Maggi Zheng​ Angeles.
paints, writes, and studies / teaches art in Los
......................................................... Graphite Journal was founded in 2009 and is the first printed interdisciplinary arts journal on the UCLA campus. The journal is produced annually and supported through the Hammer Museum and the Hammer Student Association.
Graphite prides itself in cultivating a student publication that brings into proximity a series of critical, activist and creative projects. Each yearly printed journal responds to a theme or proposal that is crafted to provoke a reorientation around contemporary events and ideas. The journal has been read by a range of people belonging to such diverse groups as: the UCLA student body, the contemporary art world and an extended network of thinkers that is not confined to academia. We are also dedicated to supporting a community of contributors who include: undergraduate students, graduate students,  doctoral contributors and working people both in Los Angeles and internationally.
2016-2017 Editorial Staff Editor-in-Chief Erica Vincenzi Co-Editor-in Chief Nilo Goldfarb Associate/Multimedia Editor Karen Achar Essay Editors Lisa Aubry Devin Johnson Maya White Art Editors Camille Clair Jake Stutz Sasha Zamani Contributor Brian Pea Distribution/Development Ramona Blowers Designer Connie Chang
......................................................... Issue No. 8 Š 2017, Los Angeles, California Printed by Typecraft Inc. Wood & Jones
The Graphite editorial staff would like to thank Zoe Silverman, Specialist for University Audiences at the Hammer Museum. Her devoted support and guidance have helped make this journal possible. graphitejournal.com graphitejournal@gmail.com www.facebook.com/graphitejournal All rights reserved. May not be reproduced.
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