SEGUE 4/25: Poetry and Architecture Event Featuring Vito Acconci, Benjamin Aranda and Robert Kocik

The Segue Series Presents

POETRY & ARCHITECTURE

Vito Acconci, Benjamin Aranda and Robert Kocik

Saturday, April 25, 2009 ** 4PM SHARP**
Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery, NYC
$6 admission
hosted by Tim Peterson

What is the nature of the conversation between poetry and architecture today? In this event for the Segue Reading Series, poets and architects will present works exploring a dialogue between these two disciplines.

Vito Acconci will show an image-stream of built & unbuilt spaces & instruments as he reads: 1) about furniture & houses (80's), cities & landscape (90's); 2) from rules for assemblage & incursion (00's); 3) architecture in words only (00's). Benjamin Aranda will present images and talk around the issue of self-assembly, where top-down methods for determining form and making decisions are complicated and sometimes replaced by bottom-up rules of formation. As in natural systems, the architectural structures up for discussion are not carved or composed in a traditional sense; they are grown through simple interactions to produce complex patterns that are both useful and buildable. Robert Kocik will present a plan for the Prosody Building, a note on mercenary poetry (without which business is biocide), Missing Civic Services, and a few architectural plans made entirely of words.

PARTICIPANTS:

Vito Acconci's design & architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing & art. By the late 80's he crossed over & joined with architects to form Acconci Studio. They mix poetry & math, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology as they range from plazas & parks to buildings & interiors to furniture & products to clothing &vehicles. They are currently working on a street through a building in Indianapolis, a building that twists from a courtyard in Milan, a makeover of a former strip-mall in Athens, Georgia.

Benjamin Aranda is architect and principal of Aranda\Lasch, New York, NY.

Robert Kocik, poet, essayist, artist, design/builder, lives in Brooklyn where he directs the Bureau of Material Behaviors. His architectural works are committed to the realization of 'missing' functions, services, organizations, or agencies. He is currently developing a building based on 'prosody' and poets' imagined importance to our society. With the choreographer Daria Faïn, he has initiated a field of research called The Prosodic Body. His publications include: Overcoming Fitness (Autonomedia, 2001), and Rhrurbarb (Field Books, 2007).

Comments

[Stephen Vincent]

Wow, what a great 'graphic'!!!

Stephen Vincent, applauding!
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/

[Tim]

Thanks Stephen -- it is "City of Words" by Acconci Studio.

By the way, I really enjoyed your reading on POGSound.

[Sommer]

This sounds like a great event. See you there.