Drafts: Phase III: Information Transmission (Bodies of Evidence)

Phase III of Drafts,Information Transmission (Bodies of Evidence) is based on nine images from the Reanimation Library's archive selected by artist Nikolaus Gansterer. Expanding upon an image from Phase II of a blindfolded test subject navigating a maze with a stylus, this third set plots apparatus of experimentation against a diagrammatic circuit of inner images, afterimages, phantom pains, and magic cubes. The program will include performances byCally Spooner Avi Alpert Mashinka Firunts andDanny Snelson.

Listen to Introduction by Kaegan Sparks

Avi Alpert Mashinka Firunts, and Danny Snelson will perform a collaborative lecture entitled “Zero for Conduit,” an exploration of how a presentation might re-circuit notions of transmission. This coordinated set of critical responses and theatrical procedures will consider the space between bodies of knowledge and knowledgeable bodies. Watch Performance

Cally Spooner will perform a talk around concepts of automation, prosthetics, stultification, and fossils, creating a movement antagonistic to (or, at least, polemical against) the inscription and certitude evinced by many of the Phase III images. Treating writing and reading as activities of live research, sampling, and editing, the talk itself will comprise a drafting process for her forthcoming exhibition and essayCarol, I Think My Place In History Is Assured.Listen to Performance

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.