Maya Carroll, Roy Carroll, and Christian Hawkey

Ingesture features a first-time collaboration between three different artists—poet Christian Hawkey, choreographer and dancer Maya Carroll, and composer Roy Carroll—and it sets in motion an open-ended, process-oriented investigation into gesture as it intersects in movement, poetic language, and sound. Gestures are intentional sensory phenomena that have no clear beginning or end (movement without finality) and […]

Valentina Desideri & Christian Hawkey // Decolonizing Gestures

Week Four at the Naropa Summer Writing Program. In 1933 the ground-breaking feminist and working physician Charlotte Wolff was arrested and briefly detained by the Nazis for dressing as a man; she fled to London (via Paris) and went on to publish two astonishing studies of chirology and gesture. The seminar is inspired by this […]

WordHack XIX Feat. Sam Lavigne, Stephanie Rothenberg, Christian Hawkey and Cat Tyc

Thursday, January 21 at 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM Babycastles 137 W 14th St, New York, New York 10011 WordHack is a monthly evening of performances and talks exploring the intersection of language and technology. Code poetry, digital literature, e-lit, devArt, coders interested in the creative side, writers interested in new forms writing can take, […]

GEOMETRIES OF RECOGNITION: An OORS Workshop with Stephanie Gray and Rachel Levitsky

OORS was part of this bit of urban magic. The Fallow Time Festival, sponsored by iLand, one of our affinities, is an amazing weeklong celebration of the wild world here in the five boroughs, through dance science writing planning performing camping activating, etc. Here’s the OORS Workshop description for Geometries of Recognition* “I enter into […]

THE ENDS: a film by Ethan Spigland

The Ends is a film by Ethan Spigland. It is composed of the endings of 165 recuperated films. It premiered at the Gowanus Open Studios kick-off at the Gowanus Ballroom, October 18-20, 2013.

OoRS on Governors Island: Writing On It All

SUNDAY, JUNE 23 at NOON Dance improvisor Jovanina Pagano, and OoRS officer Rachel Levitsky will facilitate an afternoon happening in a house on Governors Island, part of Alexandra Chasin’s visionary project: Writing On It All. Our happening is called: Against the Wall: Migration/Habitation/Erasing/Tracing Writing On It All invites people to write on every conceivable and […]

OoRS to Present at Ecopoetics Conference

UC Berkeley, Wheeler Hall
Sunday, February 24, 8-10 a.m.

OoRS on Roundtable:
Ground Scores: Unburying Ecologies through Embodied Practice
David Buuck, Seung-Jae Lee, Rachel Levitsky, Ira Livingston, Jennifer Scappettone, Kathy Westwater

Visit conference site!

OoRS aims to share OoRS’ transdisciplinary pedagogical strategies as deployable ecopoetics tools for practice. OoRS strategies are designed to encourage the rerouting of nostalgia into emergent fields of knowing and making and to maximize the use of a present and helping community in the making of constructing ideas, work and new forms. As we conceive ‘community’ to include place, objects and environment, we formulate our workshops and installations to be site-specific. Work that comes out of OoRS may be individually constructed and/or of a single discipline, but it necessarily emerges from conversation and border-crossing exercises. We will provide the materials and directions for conference attendees to try some recuperative strategies on-site at the Berkeley campus during the conference.

Pamela Sneed on Poetry as Language and Intervention

“Part of my political work is to continuously assert the names and the work of black lesbian and gay poets.” OoRS caught up with Pamela Sneed, a New York-based poet, performance artist, teacher, and activist, during the Occupy Town Square gathering in Fort Greene Park, which took place on Sunday, March 25th, 2012. A small but resolute crowd braved wind and rain to listen to her talk and read poems.

Kate Eichorn, Futurity in the Archive

A Short Note on Preparing a Talk for the Office

As I prepared this talk, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “What is the ‘Office of Recuperative Poetics’?” Despite my conversations with the bodies acting in its name, to date, the Office’s mandate remains elusive. I know or think I know that the Office is oriented to the archive, but it does not live in the archive and certainly does not live for the archive (there is no indication, not yet, that the Office has any such pretentions or aspirations). I know or think I know that the Office is not oriented to the past, at least not in any teleological sense. I suspect that the Office regards time as something that does much more than simply wear against the body. I suspect that the Office is a temporally complex institution and an institution that holds no desire to become an institution. I assume the Office is uncomfortable existing in institutional time, with its expectations, with its demands. I suspect the Office is a utopian idea. I suspect the Office does not exist and perhaps, never will exist. I suspect I am preparing this talk for a possibility—indeed, this is the subject of my talk—not the Office, which I’m just visiting, but futurity and more specifically, futurity in the archive.

OoRS in Amsterdam

Friday, August 10th, 6-8pm. University of Amsterdam. More info and location here.

Walk: INGESTuring the Gowanus


Friday, July 6, 2012 at 5 pm:

Join writer Rachel Levitsky, Landscape Architect Elliott Maltby and Translator/Poet Elizabeth Zuba for an expedition to collectively recuperate latent words, meanings, objects and gestures from the Gowanus Canal and then re-embed them in the group show To the Stars on the Wings of an Eel, Brooklyn and the world. To the Stars on the Wings of an Eel is a show organized by OoRS officer Ethan Spigland along with several others we admire. The show begins June 29. Its impressive roster of participants and events can be found at the Gowanus Ballroom website.

Everyone is welcome to join this walk. It’s free. Sign up in advance is encouraged but not required. Email yoors@oors.net to let us know you are coming.
We will meet at 5:00 PM at The Gowanus Ballroom
55 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
There will be lots of signs but feel free to call us if you have any trouble: 917 495 7075

Walk 5 -7 PM

Embed/Imbibe 7 PM onward

OoRS Leads Walks in Berlin for Elastic City

July 28-29, 2012
Berlin, Germany

DES INTEGRATION

This walk will reanimate “gesture” as a field of investigation so that participants might embody a more congruous and attentive way of moving through urban space. The movement of a hand. The position of an arm, a head, a body. A manner of being. A mode of action. Berlin as multipliCITY, as a city of multiplicity–of overlapping bodies, communities, laborers, cultures, languages, and gestures–is our common ground of research.

May Day U-Haul Rental Gallery

May 1, 2012

The second year of Pratt student projects coming out of the class: “Cultural Sustainability and Recuperative Poetics.” It being May Day, we created an off-site non-site in a rental U-Haul truck.

OoRS visits BAM Archives, speaks with Joseph Bradshaw

On March 6, 2012, OoRS’s Pratt class went to the archive collection of Brooklyn Academy of Music, located in Metrotech, Downtown Brooklyn. We learned about the making of a collection for this iconic institution–a collection destroyed twice by flood and fire, and ever being reconstructed and recuperated.

Sound Archive Workshop at Woodberry Poetry Room

January 13–20, 2012

listen
(sample track by anna ondaatje)
Taught by Christian Hawkey and Rachel Levitsky, Recuperative Poetics features a week of classes interspersed with poetry writing workshops and guided creative interventions conducted by students, culminating in a final audio/sonic presentation. Our first pedagogical goal will be to introduce ideas of cultural sustainability and recuperative poetics, i.e. the importance of locating aspects of culture that are in danger of being lost or elided due to any number of different material and ideological forces: the simple “progress of time”; the relentlessly forward program of techno-capitalist innovation, including the waste and “junk space” produced by such a program; the continued obsession (informed in part by this program) with “newness” and “originality”; or the process of consolidation and reduction that takes place within institutional and bureaucratic structures, whether cultural or governmental or corporate.

Millay Colony Weekend Workshop

April 14–15, 2012
Trisha Brown Studios, NYC
In this workshop, Christian Hawkey and Rachel Levitsky, co-founders of the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS) will share their research into strategies that intervene and repurpose the brutality of technocapitalism’s obsession with speed, newness, able-bodiedness, originality, and innovation. Our focus as a class will be to encourage a memory-based politics that draws on poetic thought to invent new fields of vitality, desire, and dwelling. A wide range of recuperative strategies and media will be supported in this workshop (bring all ideas and projects in process!), including such practice-based interventions as archive investigation, field-research and recording, digital sampling, and the realignment of author/reader, subject/object positions. Writers of all genres are welcome. Participants will be sent an advance list of links to existing recuperative strategies and supportive texts. The workshop will document research and creative production and will conclude with a performance!
more

Jen Hofer, Uncovering: Forages into Public Practice and Narratives of Place

A web translation of Jen Hofer’s OoRS/Pratt Institute presentation has been published as “Materiality: Mortality” at Alligator Zine, online here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March 28, 2012, 12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Lectures for the Office Of Recuperative Strategies at Pratt
Steuben Gallery

Jen Hofer will present a slide show with conversation about the process of making hand-stitched quilted poems to uncover questions about the poetics of place, public practice, land use issues, and how material and ephemeral artifacts narrativize personal and social history. Her most recent quilted poem is currently on display at The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Utah.

The Plain Edition: Gertrude Stein and Modernist Book History, a talk by Sarah Stone

Pratt Institute
October 18th, 12:30, Alumni Reading Room

During the two years before The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas won Gertrude Stein popular success, she and Alice B. Toklas undertook their own publishing venture, the Plain Edition, “an Edition of first Editions of all the work not yet published of Gertrude Stein.” The design, paratexts, and distribution of these five books provide an opportunity to think about Stein’s poetics as they extend into material objects. This talk will discuss the connection between Stein’s writing and her books as material objects.

Sarah Stone is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Yale University. Her current work explores the intersection of poetry and media studies, focusing on modernist book history, as well as contemporary small-press publishing and digital poetics. She holds a B.A. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley and an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University. Her poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Jacket, Modern Review, Boston Review, Sentence, and Mandorla.

Office of Recuperative Poetics Exhibition

Working with Pratt students OoRS (under its intitial disembodiment as the Office of Recuperative Poetics) re-purposes an unrented store-front and launches a pop-up gallery and week-long exhibition and series of performances at 14 Putnam Ave, Brooklyn, NY.