Drafts: Phase I: Advanced Mechanics of Materials
Phase I of Drafts,Advanced Mechanics of Materials will consider drawing as an index of movement. Deriving from nine images from the Reanimation Library's archive selected by series organizer Kaegan Sparks, the program will include presentations byZoe Beloff Kamau Amu Patton andMark Sussman.
Listen to Introduction by Kaegan Sparks
Zoe Beloff will present a screening and talk on a multimedia project exploring the intersection of the cinematic apparatus, industrial management, and modernism.The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff sets the eponymous cartoon alongside an investigation of productive and unproductive bodies, incorporating Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s time-motion studies, instructional films promoting worker efficiency, and documentation of mid-twentieth century cases offolie á deux or contagious psychosis. Listen to Talk and Watch Film
[[www.kamaupatton.com/">Kamau Amu Patton will present a live performance using an amplified extended drawing system. Patton’sField Drawings are composed with piezoelectric sensors attached directly to a drawing surface, onto which he applies gestural marks. Each mark produces a sonic analog, and the drawing’s graphic structure emerges in a reciprocal relationship to the sonic environment, resulting in a procedural feedback loop. Watch Video and Listen to Performance
Mark Sussman will give a talk on contemporary toy theater and the live animation of objects, on both tabletop and screen. Connecting scholarship with his creative practice as Co-Artistic Director of the theater collective Great Small Works, the presentation will incorporate earlier research on manifestations of electricity in performance with recent examples of tabletop magic. Listen to Talk
ABOUT DRAFTS:
Activating The Drawing Center's newly inaugurated Lab gallery as a site for innovative, impromptu, and experimental considerations of drawing, Drafts, a series of curated public programs organized by Kaegan Sparks, encourages speculative tangents from images in a variety of creative practices. A draft—as a preliminary sketch, an embryonic form subject to revision, a current of moving air—provides a model for the series, promoting conjecture, digression, and dérive through overlapping curatorial and creative functions.
Each program will derive from images in the archive of the Reanimation Library, an initiative based in Brooklyn dedicated to salvaging and stewarding obsolete or ‘pedestrian’ books that have fallen out of circulation, with an emphasis on remarkable visual content.
Drawing on the collaborative energy and associative thinking of the Surrealist exercisecadavre exquis the programs of Drafts will unfold in a participant-driven evolution. An initial series of nine images culled from the library’s books will mutate over the course of the series, as multiple curators and artists take turns at revision, extracting an image from the preceding set and re-contextualizing it among other images. Each resulting set will form the basis for a program, in which assorted artists, writers, and other cultural producers will respond.
Various voices are thus gradually incorporated into a capricious and collaborative line of thinking: working in contingent succession, every contributor builds and strays from the mark of the last.
Drafts: Phase II will take place on March 12, 2013.