The slide show for ev-ent-anglment 3: Dublin, an event presented as part of the panel "Making Neww Materialisms Matter for Feminist Media Studies" at Console-ing Passions
5. Event 2: Visible Evidence, Dehli
Performing the same ideas to another audience
Winter, 2014.
6. Event
“Something shocking, out of joint, that appears
all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of
things.”
Slavoj Zizek
Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept
(2014)
7. Event
“a rupture in the normal order of bodies and
languages as it exists for any particular
situation.”
Alain Badiou
The Communist Hypothesis (2010)
8. To Cut
“Cuts are part of
the phenomena they help produce.”
Karen Barad
Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007)
13. From KJ to ev-ent-anglement 1
ev-ent-anglement.com
August 27, 2014 at 8:19 pm
I have recently made a rather large cut
to myself
or rather a surgeon made it for me
out of great necessity
(It was a kind of a “do or die” situation)
This edit to my physical body invites interpretations,
many times by strangers
People whom I don’t know
and who don’t know me.
I don’t mean to be mysterious
but
it’s complicated.
Online I am a composite of many identities
gendered this way or that
and strangely
I find myself entangled in fragments of former selves
which are constantly colliding
shattering the illusion of the seamless narratives
about gender identity
about cancer
often required for the comfort of others.
#eventanglement
15. Comment From KJ
on ev-ent-anglement.com
August 29, 2014 at 3:52 pm
This reminds me of Bill Shannon’s creative
dance movement at the nexus of art &
disability; my 6 year-old son also has the
same pediatric hip disease (Legg-Calve-
Perthes) and we have been relearning
what it means to move freely in the world,
always subject to limitations of the body.
16. I cut+paste Alisa Lebow/Egyptian
Media into ev-ent-anglement 2, Dehli
18. Material Entanglements
“joins and disjoins—cutting together/apart—not
separate consecutive activities, but a single
event that is not one.”
Karen Barad
Mar(k)ing Time: Material Entanglements and Re-memberings:
Cutting Together-Apart”
(2013)
19. The Last Cut is not the Deepest
From Sarah Kember, e-e-e 1
22. Affect
“Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in
the capacities of a momentary or sometimes
more sustained set of relations as well as the
passage (and the duration of the passage) of
forces or intensities.”
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth
“An Inventory of Shimmers”
(2009)
23. An actant never really acts alone
From Ingrid Ryberg@Utrecht
24. An actant never really acts alone
“While the smallest or simplest body or bit may
indeed express a vital impetus … an actant never
really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always
depends on the collaboration, cooperation or
interactive interference of many bodies and
forces .”
Jane Bennett
Vibrant Matter
(2009)
27. Some PLACES/ART/PROJECTS that are cut+pasted
=objects
A Day in the Life of Janet Smart: novel
Arizona
“Affective Aesthetics: Ethics, Ecstasy and
Ecosophy,” talk
“Affective Noise in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi,
talk
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Artforum: journal
b.a.n.g. Lab
Bollywood
Bombay
Call of Duty: Heroes: video game
Cinema Interval, book
Cougar This: poem?
Dartington College in the UK
“Deep Lab”: video 20. Michel Foucault
Richard Fung
Victor Frankenstein
Sarah Franklin
Delhi
“Digital AIDS Documentary,” article
‘Disertaciones de la Chingada’: novel?
Egypt
“Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights”:
project
envisioningLGBT.com: website
evacuated Israeli military fortress
“Everything,” film
Eugene Lang College (The New School)
facebook, youtube and twitter
FemTechNet
“Free Angela Davis” and “All Political
Prisoners”: films
Gender and Media Studies at the
University of Utrecht
Golden Gate Bridge
Goldsmiths
Goldsmiths iTunes U
28. Ideas are material
“Ideas are material in that they become rituals
and then sedimented at a corporeal level.”
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics
(2010)
29. Some PEOPLE (who have engaged and/or are
mentioned via cut+paste) = objects
Sarah Ahmed
Alain Badiou
Karen Barad
Mary Beard
Yasiin Bey
Marci Blackman
La Chica Boom
Gregg Bordowitz
Micha Cardenas
Sheba Chhachhi
Dianne Chisholm
Rey Chow
Helene Cixous
Trucos Clash Of Clans
T.L. Cowan
Ellen Diamond
Ricardo Dominguez
Basak E.
Cesar Enriquez
Michel Foucault
Richard Fung
Victor Frankenstein
Sarah Franklin
Elizabeth Freeman
Donna Haraway
Pato Hebert
Herpes Protocol Cure
Alexandra Juhasz
Antonia Juhasz
Alisa Lebow
Kara Keeling
Sarah Kember
Petra Kuppers
E. Larson
Jesse Lerner
Tarja Laine
Shola Lynch
Patricia MacCormack
30. Matter is an actor
“Matter is an actor … matter is not a ‘thing’ but
a doing.”
Karen Barad
“Posthumanist Performativity
(2003)
31. The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin
“Cut ups are for everyone. Anybody can make
cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being
something to do.”
William S. Burroughs
32. Affect is what sticks
“Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or
preserves the connection between ideas, values,
and objects.”
Sara Ahmed
Queer Phenomenology
(2006)
34. Intra-action
“There is no ‘between’ as such, human and non-
human organisms and machines emerge only
through their mutual co-constitution.”
Karen Barad
35. “Then Along Came STS/And…” by Nina
Wakeford, pasted by Sarah Kember
39. #eventanglement
cut+paste/bleed
• Everything you paste needs this hashtag
to be seen: #eventanglement
• On Twitter: #eventanglement
• On Instagram: #eventanglement
• On Vine: #eventanglement
• On Tumblr: #eventanglement
47. We cut/paste+bleed binaries
Art/Craft
Long take/Montage
On/Off screen
Invisible/Visible
Dull matter/Vibrant life
Loop/Line
Hierarchy/Flat
Politics/Feelings
Past/Present
Present/Future
Cut up/Happening
Time/Space
Virality/Duration
Critique/Create
48. Some PLACES/ART/PROJECTS that are cut+pasted
=objects
A Day in the Life of Janet Smart: novel
Arizona
“Affective Aesthetics: Ethics, Ecstasy and
Ecosophy,” talk
“Affective Noise in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi,
talk
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Artforum: journal
b.a.n.g. Lab
Bollywood
Bombay
Call of Duty: Heroes: video game
Cinema Interval, book
Cougar This: poem?
Dartington College in the UK
“Deep Lab”: video 20. Michel Foucault
Richard Fung
Victor Frankenstein
Sarah Franklin
Delhi
“Digital AIDS Documentary,” article
‘Disertaciones de la Chingada’: novel?
Egypt
“Envisioning Global LGBT Human Rights”:
project
envisioningLGBT.com: website
evacuated Israeli military fortress
“Everything,” film
Eugene Lang College (The New School)
facebook, youtube and twitter
FemTechNet
“Free Angela Davis” and “All Political
Prisoners”: films
Gender and Media Studies at the
University of Utrecht
Golden Gate Bridge
Goldsmiths
Goldsmiths iTunes U
50. A Tweet with a video about AIDS
nostalgia and death@Utrecht
51. Domi and Noortje from Utrecht with
Jesse in India, #eventanglement
52. Your Script from me and vj_um_amel
#eventanglement 3: Dublin
1. Go to http://cells.ev-ent-anglement.com (this site is new and under-construction)
2. Find an object (there are currently three categories: ALL, PHOTOS and VIDEO)
3. CUT up your object (use a part of it), or add to it (PASTE)
4. NOW ENTANGLE (this is new) by:
Choosing a term from cut+paste pull-down list (at top right) and hashtag it to your object (i.e. #cut,
#paste, #montage)
Choosing a term from the pull-down bleed list (at top right) and hashtag it to your object (i.e. #pain,
#affect, #pleasure)
5. Move it through a social network of your choice and hashtag #eventanglement plus your two
additional hashtags
(the site is not yet ready to “entangle” but it will do so soon. That is to say objects inside of it will being
to live together in cells organized by the ideas of cut/paste hashtags and bleed hashtags)
56. Our object is our-self and our-selves
Performing the same ideas
to another
audience,
Summer, 2014.
57. Justice to our fragments!
Performing the same ideas
to another
audience,
Winter, 2014.
Editor's Notes
Hello and welcome to the third ev-ent-anglement. What is that? you might rightfully inquire.
An ev-ent-anglement cuts and pastes an event to an entanglement making use of two hyphens for its highly visible stitches: ev-ent-anglement.
The first two events were actually talks, linked to and much like this one,
the first held in the Netherlands in August 2014 at the European Summer School in Women’s Studies at Utrecht University and the
second in Dehli at the Visible Evidence documentary conference in December of 2014.
“I call these two talks “events” because their participatory and performative nature differentiates them from the more circumscribed set of routines and protocals of typical conference fare. Here, I am indebted to Zizek, who defines an event as: “Something shocking, out of joint, that appears all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things.”
Similarly, Alain Badiou calls an event “a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation.”
What may present as shocking or out of joint or even something akin to a rupture in this series of talks cum events—yours being the third—is that I ask the audience, in this case you and others engaging with us online today and for the next week or so, to act with me, to cut and also to paste, thereby digitally entangling fragments of yourselves into the online record of the ever-growing and always-changing event, which itself is housed and becomes anew online. “Cuts are part of the phenomena they help to produce,” writes Karen Barad. Here your cuts are not only formative they are saved and reusable.
For the ev-en-anglement, your cuts and your pastes, like those of others before you, are what produce the ev-ent-anglement: a digital place that archives, grows, and changes via the acts, interests, and values of its diverse feminist community. This photo was cut+pasted by a Women’s Studies graduate student during the talk in Utrecht. It is captures her reading a book on French Feminism, and was easily linked to the ev-ent-anglement from her instagram account. You are invited to change the ev-ent-anglement now or at any time during the event by tweeting, moving a photo or video or link via instagram or vine or tumblr with the hastag above. Your more formal and detailed script is forthcoming.
Hers and your cut+pastes into the ev-ent-anglement are both a “causal procedure and act of decision,” acts that Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska understand as potentially ethical. In the first talk, Kember and Zylinska’s writing about cutting, as well as that of earlier theorists of cinematic montage, and Robin Weigman’s Object Lessons, were central to the performance. But then, Kember, Zylinska, and many others cut in new fragments to mark their attachments. So things have moved and changed and this talk includes their many fragments. The first talk, and its power point are of course available on the ev-ent-aglement, as will be this one.
Each event that forms the ev-ent-anglement is initiated by a provocative invitation or script that is place-based—Utrecht, Delhi, now Dublin—while being simultaneously online. I’ve invited you to participate already. Here is photo tweeted to me in Dehli by online participant vj_um_amel. Her fragment depicts her collaboration with media theorist and artist Micha Cardenas’ in a performance called "Immobility: A score about mobility”
Every event in the ev-ent-anglement is bounded by a window of time: how long you and others can interact, stitch in. As I move across time and place extending new scripts at different events in new places the digital ev-ent-anglement grows and changes. But it is not seamless: each stitch, like the hyphens I began with, remains visible and usable.
For instance, when I was in Utrecht, new media scholar and trans theorist KJ Sturken, entangling from afar, added a poem about the cutting off of some of his body parts. He wrote: “I have recently made a rather large cut to myself or rather a surgeon made it for me out of great necessity.” Not to worry, the poem is entangled in the ev-ent-anglement, and you can read the rest of it at the website listed above, if you’re curious (and review the other fragments I’ve shown so far there as well). You have my permission to wander. Your script is forthcoming.
Similarly, disability theorist and artist Petra Kuppers cut+paste to a now largely defunct website about experimental poetry and hypertext. She wrote that the ev-ent-anglement had taken her to this place and its set of concerns about digital poetics, once so central to her: “ I am visiting them now wondering how I feel now about presence and absence, words and sounds.” In her fragment, she also remembers poet Alaric Sumner, “someone who passed much too young.” He enters the ev-ent-anglement there. One more object to consider and entangle.
Then KJ entangled with Petra. We had moved far from, yet still connected to, the feminist, editing, affect and new media theory that grounded the initial event in Utrecht.
When I wrote about Alisa Lebow’s keynote address at Visible Evidence in Dehli as part of the second ev-ent-anglement, media from the Middle East began being cut+pasted to the entanglement.
the ev-ent-anglement opened out to encompass new and connected lines of inquiry and activism yielding expanding possibilities for further audience attachments(like yours) at later events. Now that I’ve shown you these digital fragments, you too could cut and paste around these themes or stretch them in new directions. Not to worry: your instructions are forthcoming.
Entanglements, the second word fragment roughly cut with just two little dashes into the neologism ev-ent-anglement, are according to Karen Barad about “joins and disjoins—cutting together/apart—not separate consecutive activities, but a single event that is not one.”
The word that I invented by cutting and pasting is itself about montage; the process of making not one from many. Sarah Kember cuts into the ev-ent-anglement with a long post and a video of Nina Wakeford singing her paper on a panel on Feminist Writing. The people, the video, the writing, all now objects for you to peruse, enjoy, and entangle.
And this event, like any, is not one: it is my words, my stance, your thoughts, your attitudes, the images on the screen, the electricity and hardware that puts those images there and online, the electricity in the air because I’ve told you that you will soon participate. This event is not one, it is also the behind the scenes labor of two programmers, first Risa Goodman on ev-ent-anglement.com and then Laila Shereen Sakr, on ev-ent-anglement cells (a site very much in process) who each built a Wordpress site where ev-ent-anglements can take place. This is a screengrab of the first ev-ent-anglement site: it holds fragments from the Utrecht and India events in the form of tweets, comments, photos, links, and records of my presentation and responses
Here is the new site. It is under construction but allows you to entangle the objects that have been cut+pasted into the ev-ent-anglement. Be prepared: your script is forthcoming. For instance all the theorists I have quoted are there: Badiou, Zizek, Sturken, Kuppers, Lebow, Barad, Weigman, Kember and Zylinska, and soon enough Gregg and Seigworth, also there you might find some of our feelings.
Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth call this affect, of course: “Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities of a momentary or sometimes more sustained set of relations as well as the passage (and the duration of the passage) of forces or intensities.”
In this event, and better yet in the ev-ent-anglement that holds it, you will see and hear how I have cut and pasted editing theory and practice by way of media studies and production with what is often called new materialism and also affect theory and have used this patchwork theoretical monster to think about and then also enact a feminist collective critical digital practice with audience members who have chosen to participate and stretch the ev-ent-anglement as they will, in this case, thanks to queer feminist film critic Ingrid Ryberg, to encompass Border Disorders and Queer Film.
The ev-ent-anglement records border disorders. An in-between-ness of fragments and forces from several single events that is and are not one, as well as the actions of many who are and are also not one. “While the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus … an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation or interactive interference of many bodies and forces” explains Jane Bennett. You are always an actant, but your collaboration is more staged and intentional on the ev-ent-anglement.
The ev-ent-anglement is at once a digital platform and record that allows audience members in a room at a conference and attending an event live and in person, as well as our fellow travelers on the internet (those we can reach; those who are so inclined), to cut and paste evidence of their entangled, collaborative, cooperative, interactive role in the event so as to be part of something new. The ev-ent-anglement holds an image of a book about The Costa Rican…
The evidence of your presence takes the form of a fragment of your choice. You will entangle both it and yourself in.
By so doing you become an object in our archive, as does your fragment, as does the people, places and things you summon up and link to. In this way the site manifests one of the central ideas of new materialism
“Ideas are material in that they become rituals and then sedimented at a corporeal level.”
Our website, the ev-ent-anglement, engages in changing our conception of the archive from a repository of things to a process of shared feminist knowledge production. Nouns and verbs; things and their processes; feminist cuts and connections that bind. Many people, and their thoughts, writing, images, and feelings are now here linked and linkable objects.
With Barad in our minds, we might act knowing that “Matter (too) is an actor … matter is not a ‘thing’ but a doing.” Your instructions for doing are forthcoming.
William S. Borroughs wrote: “Cut ups are for everyone. Anybody can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do.” I hope you will soon act with us.
But certainly, to entangle a digital fragment of yourself, with a cut and paste via a simple hashtag, while you are attending what you thought was a talk where you thought you were going to sit and listen is neither required nor easy. I’m wondering how you feel, and how that matters. “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects,” explains Sara Ahmed. I hope you might consider entangling your affect as well as your ideas, values and objects. I wonder how this invitation makes you feel?
Rather than sit and listen, take notes or not, let your mind wander and make connections which will never be shared or recorded, the ev-ent-anglement requires your intra-action, a mark of what you have done, or liked, or thought, or learned like this frame grab of a film by Minou Norouzi.
Intra-action, another of Barad’s terms, marks again where “there is no ‘between’ as such, human and non-human organisms and machines emerge only through their mutual co-constitution
Your intra-action with the ev-ent-anglement cuts+pastes a small piece of your digital self or that of others who you care about, by generously and knowingly gifting it to me, and the ev-ent-anglement, rather than to the man or the corporation, the many places where our fragments currently call home.
This movement marks and holds your co-presence and allows for a new sort of co-constitution. You always co-constitute an event with your presence, ideas, and values. But the ev-ent-anglement has been made to receive, hold, and build from you and your fragments, transforming them into objects for others’ further intra-actions.
And, the ev-ent-anglement, unlike the corporation, believes that there is something that exceeds both the mimetic copy of some part of yourself or others that you can so casually give away or pass along. We call this the bleed: the actions, affects, and activities that will never be caught and saved as objects in a database. What sticks. What seeps.
An ev-ent-anglment cuts and pastes your fragment into this event and also takes account of the bleed. You can entangle at will. That might be pleasurable, or painful. Your script is forthcoming.
How does it work you might ask? How do we cut+paste/bleed? When we cut and paste a hashtag onto the front of it, #ev-ent-anglement allows a live and digital audience at an event, in this case this academic talk about ev-ent-anglments in Dublin and its iterations online, to cut+paste and bleed digital fragments of their choice into what is and becomes a small user-generated, highly-focused collection of fragments, themselves about cutting, pasting, events, entanglements, and also the bleeding that ensues. The ev-ent-anglement is not so different from a mashup of Facebook and Pinterest, say, except in the highly focused set of questions it ponders, the deeply architected pathways for connection it engenders, the closely knit nature of the community it calls upon, and our planned uses for the fragments it collects.
For ev-ent-anglement 3 we have built a new site that allows you to find an object of your liking, one already gifted to the project, and entangle it further with other objects. Cut/paste+bleed. Your script is forthcoming.
What will be done with thee objects and your traces? We won’t sell you anything, not even yourself. At the fourth and final event, to take place in Los Angeles this Fall, new media artist/theorist VJ Um Amel and I plan to finish the experiment with a live event: itself a generative visualization of some international feminist documentary and new media theorists’ thinking and practices about cutting, pasting, and bleeding within Internet culture. From your fragments will come art and community as a form of theory-making.
Importantly for our project here, cutting or editing as both theory and practice, is historically women’s work, and craft, and arguably feminist work; “like doing the washing up,” as much as it is like creating art.
Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera also draws out cutting and editing in gendered terms.
The man, the cameraman, Vertov’s real-life brother, Mikhail Kaufman, projects exuberantly into the world, empowered by his phallic camera that allows him to see and own the world newly. But soon after (or actually in the middle of) his adventure, we meet someone else: the editing-woman. In the film’s central scene, we meet Vertov’s real world wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, who sits quietly in a dark room attending to what remains after the man’s cocky adventures (climbing towering smokestacks, wedging himself below hurtling trains), and almost effortlessly it seems, does with it whatever she will or wants. His shots’ indexical traces tremble beneath the simple, graceful snips of her scissors and the sticky pastes of her editing console.
Of course the contemporary act of self-cutting, like editing, can be understood in gendered terms: a violent act of power-seeking performed in yet another of those private places allocated to women and those understood as female in patriarchy. Interestingly, this kind of cutting does not bring with it an associated paste. What this cut brings with it, what it wants, its dyadic, is a bleed.
While all human bodies (and those of other animals) bleed, a particular kind of bleeding will help focus the bleed’s role in our feminist project of #ev-ent-anglement 3—one where our directives are to #cut/paste+bleed —because the menses are one of many in-between bodily acts that are uniquely and distinctly female. Julia Kristeva asks us to consider bodily acts, like menstruation, at the border between clean and dirty, live and dead, inside and out: “Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting.”
The seeping and connecting quality of all blood allows it to be a metaphoric glue, like affect, that marks the many pulls, movements, and actions of our present entanglement—from in to out and on to off, from me to you to us, from digital matter to living body. Of course all people—men, those in-between or indeterminate, and females who don’t menstruate—can bleed with us too! Cyborgs all, we use technology and place to flow through binaries. Let’s cut/paste and bleed through! There is no in-between.
During this event, I have been talking while also sharing with you many of the roughly 300 fragments, or objects, that have been entangled into the ev-ent-anglement over its first two iterations and in preparation for this event.
There are about 50 photographs that people have cut and pasted, and as many tweets, often with photos or videos in them.
There are links to websites and hours of video. People have entangled poems, and their favorite authors. Many theorists have arrived after the fact. How did this happen?
As will be true for you soon enough, I gave the audience of each event a script, and for the next few minutes sitting in their place in the audience (and for another week on the Internet), they pasted and cut ideas, links, images, videos, tweets, and comments onto the ev-ent-anglement
This is the third ev-ent-anglement, and after the second ev-ent-anglement a participant who engaged with the project online has since become a collaborator. VJ Um Amel built a digital device that lets you see and engage with the ev-ent-anglement newly. And now, I also share with you your script for intra-action: it might help you to act. The event begins again now and your intra-action is desired. Just remember, by entering you become an object and so being you might just be entangled by another. (had out script)
Together we can intentionally build and save some kind of record of this feminist event, comprised as it is of our shared now, and our linked thens. Unlike much on the Internet, our community is limited, our database is small, the ideas and things gathered here are complex and deep, to know what is here demands time, and your presence is generative. This is undoubtedly a messy but loving experiment that seeks to produce a collective critique of contemporary Internet culture through very small but infinitely large feminist, theoretical, activist, and artistic gestures.
When you participate, you become an object, an actant, and a collaborator.
If the Internet is an unorchestrated archive of fragments of all our selves we gladly gave away being mined to sell us more things we never needed, including commodified versions of ourselves, we might want to take on the empowering feminist role of editor and curate ourselves, together, into a collection that matters and has some sense.
Our object is ourself and ourselves. Our Bodies/Our Selves Redux. Lopped. Looped. Lined. Linked. Re-Aligned. Show the Seams.
Justice to our fragments! I invite you to join or at least bleed to us. Thank you.
