Talks & Events

• syntaxerrors: a series of performed lectures

  MARGOT LEIGH BUTLER, JEANNE RANDOLPH, AARON VIDAVER
  October 23–November 6, 2001

  syntaxerrors: a series of performed lectures

  Jeanne Randolph Tuesday, October 23, 2001

  Margot Leigh Butler Tuesday, October 30, 2001

  Aaron Vidaver Tuesday, November 6, 2001

  all at: Fletcher Challenge Theatre

  SFU Harbour Centre 7:30 pm

  515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver

  Admission $5/$3

  syntax errors are the symbols and letters produced by technology when given the task of translating data from one representational form to another:

  ”

  -_ræ»[Ñê

  òÝ-

  8

  ¡

  »

  Artspeak will present a series of three ‘performed lectures’, investigating the relationship between authoritative language, presentation technologies and performance art.

  Three evening events will combine forms of art performance, pedagogical histrionics and conference tactics to create, along with technological tools, a form of cultural practice that confounds the categories of public address with inventiveness and humour. This series will negotiate the systems of language delivery found in performance art, with its history of personal confessional narrative and attention to the body of the Performer, and the passive authority and implied objectivity of the Speaker with her/his disembodied “meta-voice”. The series will take place in the hushed comfort and the seamless technological support of an SFU Harbour Centre lecture theatre.

  In the context of ‘Live: Vancouver Biennale of Performance Art’, the series broadens the definition of performance to include a critical investigation of the relationship between language, technology and visual art, challenging festival audiences to consider the tradition of performance art in relation to institutional interventions.

  syntaxerrors has been generously funded by the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council. Co-sponsored by LIVE: biennial of performance art and Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

  Jeanne Randolph

  Acting out, Play-Doh* and Doubt: a personalized history of performative lecturing

  Tuesday, October 23, 2001

  SFU Harbour Centre 7:30 pm

  Fletcher Challenge Theatre

  Jeanne Randolph, a psychoanalyst and writer of highly inventive visual arts criticism will recount, illustrate and distort the psychoanalytic theory and self-induced neurosis that compelled her to extemporize her lectures rather than read a rationally composed, organized essay to her audiences.

  Randolph’s lectures and presentations draw upon current research interests as evident in articles such as Ambiguity and the Technological Object, Technology and the Meaningful Body and Why Stoics Box. Randolph has participated in a wide range of photographic and new media projects, such as Stan Denniston’s Fictional Portraits, the internet project Videoscopia curated by Jorge Marzos (Barcelona), Virtual Metropolis, and was a “barfly” in Vera Frenkel’s Body Missing.

  Margot Leigh Butler

  “The honey’s not far from the sting”

  Tuesday, October 30, 2001

  SFU Harbour Centre 7:30 pm

  Fletcher Challenge Theatre

  Margot Leigh Butler’s recent research into genetically modified organisms features in a bookwork project for WestCoast Line, a Vancouver literary journal (Autumn 2001). As figures, bees are efficient, industrious, mobile, manageable and profitable workers; they make honey and pollinate the flora, diligently crossing between GM and non-GM crops, and, in the process, they are themselves being modified, contaminated, mutated – and are we? Bee culture offers suggestive metaphors for activism, such as the noisy, fearsome, unpredictable swarm. This performance uses an incitement to swarm from a 17th century musical score for voice, slides, and spoken and sung texts.

  Butler is a visual artist and writer whose ‘book installations’ have been published in The Virtual Embodied (Routledge 1998), WestCoast Line and Capilano Review (Vancouver) and cultural criticism in the periodicals Mute Magazine and Women’s Studies International Forum (London).

  Aaron Vidaver

  Counter-Interpellation

  Tuesday, November 6, 2001

  SFU Harbour Centre 7:30 pm

  Fletcher Challenge Theatre

  Aaron Vidaver is a writer and archivist. Drawing upon his archival work for cultural organizations, artist-run centres, and educational institutions as well as his previous interventions in public space, Vidaver builds a performed lecture addressing juridical selfhood and linguistic dissent. Counter-Interpellation uses a recitation of his report card evaluations, beginning in kindergarten and extending through to his university studies to punctuate a discussion of subjection in Althusser’s theory of interpellation.

  Vidaver edits the Documents in Poetics series for the Friends of RuncibleMountain and is an associate of the Centre for Contemporary Writing. He coordinates Studies in Practical Negation, a seminar on oppositional writing at the Kootenay School of Writing, and is currently working on Unentitled, a long poem, and A Field Guide to Feral Ornaments, a prose collaboration with Steven Ward and Roger Farr.

  PART I

  PART II

  PART III

  PART IV

  PART V