a kind of forever present that takes the form of a theatrical script to perform a fictitious conversation among cultural theorists that considers what ever happened to postmodernism. The script culls parts of seminal texts by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, Clement Greenberg and Jennifer Allen and combines them into a discussion about the transformation of postmodernism into a hybrid, constant stream of social media and digital technology that inherently changes our relationship with time.

Frances Scholz and Mark von Schlegell premiere Amboy, a new horror film project that interlaces passages of genuine documentary (for instance with Lydia van Vogt, widow of the celebrated sci-fi writer A.E. van Vogt) with carefully scripted and acted sequences that serve the loose narrative arc of the film. The film charts the journey of an artist-filmmaker who is led astray from her attempts to make a documentary in Los Angeles by the mysterious history of a deceased male artist named Amboy. Amboy’s storyline is expressed with a disorienting array of cinematic strategies taken from feature films, documentaries, B-movies, and ...

Although a “closet drama” is by definition a play meant to be read rather than performed, this does not preclude an attempt at staging the anima. Unlinking “closet drama” from its primary theatrical definition in this way frees up other connotations for “closet drama” as well, which I think serves the plays. “Anima,” Latin for soul or vitality, is also Jung’s word for emergent femininity. If we proceed towards a performance, anything in italics should be considered a stage direction, even if it seems to interrupt speech. These directions should be taken seriously and enacted wherever possible (through set, lighting, audio, ...

What is printed in this notebook is film material, if not in the physical sense of celluloid, chemicals, video cassettes. For me, film material is everything that accumulates during a film project and accompanies it. That includes rejects or what was merely thought of and remained notes. Many things shape a film, not just the script but also the working environment and production processes, self-censorship and prohibitions. Certain of one’s aims remain unfulfilled, falling victim to constraints, or only in post production is the right tone found. The script is the working template for director, cameraman, and actors during shooting. Why was ...

Blast from the Past theatricalizes found texts about the work of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson, combining their words with contemporaneous interviews and articles to propose the genesis of two artworks Blast from the Past (1972–73) and Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1974) by Matta-Clark. The text is written by Jessamyn Fiore and commissioned for The Marienbad Sessions, a public event series produced as part of the exhibition Last Year at Marienbad redux. It is part two of a two-volume publication.

…Some paragraphs hatch in other paragraphs. Distinguished by font, sometimes end in original bed, sometimes step out and appear in other paragraphs, here map appearance and disappearance… Also last month, I got an e-mail from someone named Howard, who had cc’d me regarding work he wanted done. I replied, saying that I was not the person he was looking for. Instead of that being the end of it, I got argued with. I don’t remember the specifics anymore, but he did try to tell me he had the correct e-mail address; he added, “Michelle, it’s Howard” (emphasis mine). Howard sent me another ...

Documenta 11: An Exhibition in Three Acts was collectively written and performed by graduate students enrolled in James Voorhies’s spring 2018 graduate course Binding Agents: Toward an Aesthetic of the Postcolonial in Contemporary Exhibition at California College of the Arts. The script was written by culling parts of seminal texts on the discourse around Documenta 11, Magiciens de la Terre, postcolonial studies, and critical theory. Documenta 11 unleashed a discourse led by artists, curators and institutions in contemporary art to re-write and re-address colonial histories. The exhibition as a delineable thing, a form, with political potential to change perspectives and increase ...

The original version of this play was staged as part of the Syndrome arts series in 2015 in Liverpool with CGI by Chris Boyd, projection mapping by Simon Jones and sculpture by Madeline Hall. A sagging of your face. A high-pitched noise like several insects turning on at dusk close to your left ear, certainly. And it is unlikely many of the symptoms of the neoplasm will stop once the neoplasm itself is removed, so although the removal is essentially inevitable the results it produces are permanent in the main. Channels which carry waste, filth from the surface, protective scum, bottlenecking, headaches, ...

“Lord, have you nothing pretty from China about you? Something that one does not know what to do with?” A video and script that tell of Chinese characters conjured by a New England industrialist to manufacture superior ceramics for the glory of the nation (and amusement of the local Orientalists).

We see what she sees: the screams were not serious…

Live Audio Essays presents transcripts from performances and films by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist known for his political and cultural reflections on sound and listening. Abu Hamdan’s intricately crafted and heavily researched monologues are at times intimate, humorous, and entertaining, yet politically disquieting in their revelations. Using personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media, and transcripts rooted in historical and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. These live audio essays turn our focus to acoustic memories, voices leaking through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the ...

In this text written for the 2016 UNdocumenta film festival in Gwangju, Anne-Françoise Schmid investigates the relation between film and philosophy, and presents a series of mini film-scripts to explore the method of ‘without.’ Accompanied by images from Benoît Maire’s series Cloud Painting.