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Project Website (with 102 min. multimedia recording): http://slought.org/content/11249/
Please join us on Thursday, November 11, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation for a public conversation with Bob Perelman and Jean-Michel Rabaté, and moderated by Aaron Levy and Thaddeus Squire. This inaugural event is part of the “The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Organization" series, and is co-produced with Peregrine Arts. Perelman will address fakes and forgeries in contemporary literary practice; Rabaté will address the practice of lying and its implications.
“The Alexandria Project: On the Future of the Organization” is a discursive event series that proposes a new culture of temporality and non-permanence. This series focuses on the American organization as one of the most overt and prolific embodiments of contemporary cultural practice. The series title acknowledges the incendiary aggressiveness with which Marinetti questioned the cultural establishment of his time. "The Alexandria Project" translates the literal incendiary desires of the Futurists into a purely conceptual framework and extreme metaphor as a way of striking at the heart of our cultural discomfort with the idea of non-permanence and change in all their forms.
At a time when organizations valorize work that is accessible and that provides immediate gratification for audiences, this event examines practices that are predicated on, and in turn encourage more reciprocally cunning and mercurial tactics of engagement between contemporary practice and audiences. This event questions the organizational impulse to prescribe and proscribe contemporary practice in the interest of consistently fulfilling organizational and audience expectations. Ideas of duplicity and cunning may be read positively to suggest alternative modes of engagement with cultural practice.
This event will be accompanied by an introduction to and reading by Thaddeus Squire of the “Traité particulair de l’Echo” / “Treatise on the Echo” (1626), author unknown, transmitted as a letter to Marin Mersenne during preparation for the Traité de l’Harmonie universelle / Treatise on Universal Harmony (1636). The “Treatise on the Echo” appeared in Mersenne’s correspondence during the time he was developing the first science of spatial acoustics, which he named Echometrie / Science of Echoes and figured prominently in his theoretical works on music. The echo became a particular obsession of 17th-century scientists and appeared frequently as a trope in both literary and scientific works of the time. Almost universally, the authors express a concern and even fear that the echo’s mercurial and duplicitous manifestation may never fall subject to their mastery (A rough translation of the treatise is available above as a PDF download).
 Read More About this Project (PDF Download)
Bob Perelman has published numerous books of poetry, recently Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1999) and The Future of Memory (1998); two critical books, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (1996) and The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (1994); and has edited two books of poet’s talks, Writing/Talks (1985) and Hills Talks (1980). Forthcoming is Playing Bodies, a painting/ poem collaboration with Francie Shaw (Granary Books, 2003). He is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jean-Michel Rabaté, a Senior Curator at Slought Foundation, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, and has authored or edited twenty books on Modernism, Joyce, Pound, Beckett, Lacan, Derrida, psychoanalysis and literary theory.
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