We’re pleased to announce the opening of our new workspace and venue, located at 264 Canal Street in Manhattan. In the coming months there will be many opportunities to visit for intimate and incisive conversations, readings, and performances. The first public program, Compatibility Issues, asks how engineers and technocrats devise obscure protocols that end up shaping our senses, memories, and expressions. The event is part of Standard Evaluation Materials, an issue devoted to harmonizing bodies, regulating speech, and fixing time. The three events in October will coincide with the launch of Vanitas, an issue that explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence. For information regarding event admittance and accessibility, please read below.
Compatibility Issues
with Hua Hsu, Jonathan Sterne & Mika Tajima
September 28, 2016
7:00 p.m.
The world that we perceive is an elaborate artifice, produced in the past century through tests that seek a universal model of human perception and decisions to emphasize particular kinds of information: the timbre of a chord being struck on a piano, the tawny hue of Caucasian flesh. Compatibility Issues will address the technological infrastructures underlying our media. How do engineers and technocrats devise obscure protocols that end up shaping our senses, memories, and expressions? What do we hear when we listen to an MP3 or cassette tape? What do we see when we turn on an old-fashioned color TV or cutting-edge OLED display? What do we fail to hear and see, and why? Critic Hua Hsu, scholar Jonathan Sterne, and artist Mika Tajima will speak about how we can meaningfully represent—and perhaps disrupt—the opaque processes that turn our most natural gestures and intimate communications into generic bits of data to be harvested. They’ll also discuss how certain technologies of representation enable some people to hear, see, and speak for others.
Compatibility Issues is part of Standard Evaluation Materials, an issue devoted to harmonizing bodies, regulating speech, and fixing time.
We Are Our Own Now
with Frances Bodomo & Namwali Serpell
October 5, 2016
7:00 p.m.
“The condition of this story is an invisible eye,” narrates the police officer in Namwali Serpell’s story “Triptych: Pool,” which draws from documentation of an incident at a pool party in 2015 in McKinney, Texas, in which a police officer tackled and restrained an unarmed African-American fifteen-year-old girl, kneeling on her while she was face-down on the ground. The episode was captured on video and subsequently uploaded to YouTube by another teenage partygoer; within a few hours, the footage had been viewed millions of times. For We Are Our Own Now, Serpell will read selections from “Triptych: Pool,” and filmmaker Frances Bodomo will screen Everybody Dies!, a short film in the style of a public access TV show that stars Ripa the Grim Reaper, who teaches black kids about the day they'll die.
The reading and screening will be followed by a discussion, moderated by Triple Canopy senior editor Emily Wang, about the lenses through which we understand and respond to systemic violence against black people. Today, the resources for survival (and the threat of deadly force) are meted out with ever-widening disparity, even as technology promises to “save” and “extend” ourselves like never before. Self-documentation under these conditions might take on an increasingly significant role in self-protection—as testimony, as evidence, as story—in the face of erasure. Serpell and Bodomo ask: What ethical demands do the facts of systemic brutality make on us, as spectators, as artists, as citizens? How can fiction mediate in the narratives and discourses that accrue around violent events and their documentation?
We Are Our Own Now is part of Vanitas, an issue that explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence.
A Necessary Ecology
with Simone Aughterlony & Jen Rosenblit
October 21, 2016
7:00 p.m.
For A Necessary Ecology, Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony will present an excerpt of their forthcoming performance, Everything Fits in the Room, followed by a conversation with Triple Canopy contributing editor Lizzie Feidelson. Rosenblit and Aughterlony invite us into a room of decaying things: bones, pine needles, grated nutmeg, the rind of a grapefruit. A collection of everyday artifacts—chairs, ladders, clamps, and rope—form the basis of a series of precarious physical entanglements. We might think of the collection of things in the room as a societal network that encompasses fixed and shifting relationships. But what is at risk in such an organization? Who doesn’t fit into the family? How do you take a bath when the tub has decomposed? Who does the washing? Should we be gentle as the beat goes on?
A Necessary Ecology is part of Vanitas, an issue that explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence.
Double Features IV: The Faces of Others
with Dan Fox and Okkyung Lee
October 26, 2016
7:00 p.m.
For the fourth installment of Double Features, a series of audio-visual exchanges, Dan Fox and Okkyung Lee will each perform alongside moving-image works. Fox will perform a textual score in response to a series of film excerpts that employ the convention of breaking the fourth wall—the common technique in theater and film whereby an actor directly addresses the audience or camera. This device, which provides a meta-commentary that crosses the boundaries of the fictional world, is almost theological: It enables a reckoning with the beyond, with a consciousness (shared by the viewer) that has a God’s-eye-view on the lives of the characters. Breaking the fourth wall also grants the character a brief moment of power, as she reveals herself to know more of “the beyond” than any of her fellow protagonists. Lee will improvise on the cello in response to excerpts from three films whose protagonists have suffered severe disfigurement due to industrial accidents, scientific experimentation, or the pursuit of impossible beauty.
Double Features was begun in 2010 by artist and musician C. Spencer Yeh, who recently joined Triple Canopy as a contributing editor. The Faces of Others, which marks the return of the series after a three-year hiatus, is part of Vanitas, an issue that explores contemporary meditations on mortality as well as the delights, delusions, and pressures of fleshly existence.
Admittance and accessibility
Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to ensure that events are accessible and comfortable, we’ll open the doors at 6:30 p.m. and strictly limit admittance to our legal capacity. Please check Triple Canopy’s Facebook and Twitter accounts for updates, as we’ll indicate if events are sold out.
Triple Canopy’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have specific questions about access, please write at least three days before the event and we will make every effort to accommodate you.