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.

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 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.

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.