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Teuta Gatolin [HR] : Wordy Workshop
This workshop approaches language and literature through generating texts from “raw” data found in online archives, code, old manuals, pop-ups, or simply gathered in a diary-like format from various sources on the internet that one encounters during everyday browsing.
Starting from Kenneth Goldsmith’s idea that “the internet is to literature what photography was to painting”, this workshops attempts to ask what would happen to literature if it embraced this change, instead of resisting it? What could we imagine with this new literature, what forms would it take, who would it speak for, what relationships would it make?
The first part of the workshop is a short overview of literary theory and base terms in semantics and semiotics that refer to language – such as common literary forms, stylistic devices, signifier/signified relationship, semantic satiation, communication noise etc. – just to get a bit of a grip on what things make up language and writing.
We’ll look at works that used words in experimental ways, such as Mallarme’s poetry, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, stream-of-consciousness and asemic writing, Laurie Anderson’s performances or Tim Etchell’s billboards. We’ll also look at ways of relaying messages that differ from the ways we use language today – such as the quipu notation made out of knots, or epithets in Homer used as mnemonic devices.
In the second part of the workshop, we’ll make experimental poetry by glitching parts of found text with online OCRs and text-to-speech synthesisers, collaging screenshots of archival material, bouncing sentences between online translators until their meaning fritzes, using erasure methods to make a new text out of an old one, or roaming the internet and our computers for inspiring dialogue boxes, variable names, ads and pop-ups that we can use as “raw” material in our literature-making.
If there are ghosts in these machines, we’d like to ask them how they feel about penning some sonnets with us.
* No pre-registration necessary
Teuta Gatolin
Works as an intermedia artist based in Croatia, currently interested in storytelling ecology, the ways narratives about nature are constructed, the subversive potential of mythological tricksters, and considering technology as one of the companion species to humans. Her work is often process-oriented, spawning iterations of itself that are then realized with other fabulators. She also collaborates on intermedia performance projects, often with the contemporary dance community in Zagreb.
She had three solo exhibitions, and many group shows, so, for a while, her work inhabited Pogon, Vladimir Nazor gallery, Hall V. of the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum, GMK gallery, Lipa memorial Centre, Greta gallery, the internet and other places. These works have taken the shape of installations, text, collections of objects, workshops, letters, costumes, virtual spaces and a range of mixes, mashups and negotiations between them. She studied New Media Arts at the Fine Art Academy, and Journalism/Media Studies at the Faculty of Political Sciences, both in Zagreb, Croatia.
She often distrusts the white box but enjoys making it darker. She’s good at finding objects lost in the streets. She likes to linger around exits and entrances. If she weren’t an artist, she’d be an archivist.
* Important:
Workshop is switched to ONLINE – no pre-registration necessary!
