The inaugural issue of VLAK will be launched at the St Marks Poetry Project, 131 E. 10th St., New York, on the 27th of September, and at the Prague Microfestival Poetry Series in October.

Contributors to VLAK 1.1 include Abigail Child, Holly Tavel, Marjorie Perloff, Alexander Jorgensen, Joshua Cohen, Eileen Myles, Stephanie Barber, John Wilkinson, Matt Hall, Stephanie Strickland, Allen Fisher, Marjorie Welish, Catherine Hales, Mez, Karen Mac Cormack, Robert Sheppard, Bill Mousoulis, Ali Alizadeh, Ron Padget, Brandon Downing, Pam Brown, Thor Garcia, John Coletti, Jessica Fiorini, Bruce Andrews, Richard Tipping, Vincent Farnsworth, Mark Terrill, Elizabeth Gross, Douglas Piccinnini, Stephan Delbos, Arlo Quint, Vincent Katz, Veronique Vassiliou, Vadim Erent, Pierre Joris, Habib Tengour, Aaron Lowinger, Darren Tofts, Ian Haig, Louis Armand, John Kinsella, Steve McCaffery, Stacey Szymaszek, Mike Farrell, Andrea Brady, Edwin Torres, Alli Warren, Jess Mynes, Tim Gaze, Jen Hofer, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Ales Steger, Betsy Fagin, Amande In, Jena Osman, Henry Hills, Keith Jones, Octavio Armand, John Godfrey, Allyssa Wolf… and more!

Texts by mez breeze

3 June, 5pm-8pm
Reading Room in Arnolfini and online at
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice
contact common_practice on Skype to join the session
(next sessions: 24 June, 9 and 30 September)
Italo Calvino said ‘the storyteller explored the possibilities implied in
his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures
and the actions, and of the objects on which these actions could be brought
to bear’. It is by following this principle that common practice will start.

The first session will open with mez breeze’s mezangelle poems, written in a
blend of code and language, and we will be practising a simultaneous
reading/writing reworking of these texts to experience their language-code
operations during the event.

common practice is a reading group that uses Wiki and Skype to perform a
Calvino-style manipulation of texts. Through unpredictable cobbling together
of texts, poetry, people, code, language, Wiki, chat, conversations etc. we
will co-produce untagged and free style body/ies of knowledge.

The reading groups that make up common practice will take place in June and
September. You are invited to read, write, tinker with and intervene in the
literary and theoretical texts and poetry together with others through the
simple-to-use online tools. You can join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini
or online and via Skype (contact: common_practice).

common practice references the widespread and increasingly familiar activity
of using online tools in everyday to communicate, contact, work, socialise,
play, research, be entertained etc. The practice embodies the curiosity to
experience ways in which human and machine skills and abilities perform
together.

More importantly, however, common practice also refers to the fact that it
is done in common – together with others. Thus it is social space of
knowledge materialised through co-labour, codeworking and language. Anxiety,
concern and conflict might be part of the practice in the same way that
curiosity, hospitality and kindness are hoped for. This is practice in flux,
nomadic practice that exists in the common. Knowledge and experiences
generated during the session will be captured by its users.

common practice is a series of curated events initiated by Magda
Tyzlik-Carver, hosted by the Reading Room in Arnolfini, and online by
Department of Reading
http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice and
project.arnolfini  http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/?t=5 .

Please bring your own laptop with wireless enabled to join the common
practice in the Reading Room. If you don’t have your own laptop, there will
be a common computer available to use by those without one. Wiki-page will
be also projected on the wall so it will be possible to follow the practice.

- MANUAL FOR THE COMMON PRACTICE SESSION -

In order to take part in common practice all you need is an account on Skype
and a connection to the internet for the time of the session. You can also
join us in the Reading Room at Arnolfini at the time of the session. Please
bring your laptop with you.

The space of the session is a Skype-chat and a Wiki-page. The Wiki
(http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/Seisure) contains two
poems by mez breeze, each line marked by a number.

The Department of Reading Internet System (doris) connects the chat and the
pool directly. doris listens to the chat, records all entries and allows for
manipulation of the poems directly through the chat. In this session we will
make use of the module [getput]. This module consists of two commands,
namely [get], which allows to get any one of the lines from the poems
directly to the chat; and [put], which allows to put any entry of the chat
into any one of the numbered lines on the Wiki.

To get any line from one of the poems into the chat, write: “get 1″ or “get
6″ depending on which section you want to get the line from. The text will
not be deleted on the Wiki, but can be altered in the chat and replaced
later on by using the command “put”. In between the two poems is an empty
column that can as well be addressed by the commands [get] and [put] via the
related numbers – this will become operative during the session.

doris allows to modify, rewrite, edit or manipulate the poems with the
command [put]. To place any entry or rewritten line into the poems, write it
in the chat, then press ENTER, and then write: “put 1″ in the chat and press
ENTER again. This will place the entry in line 1 of the Wiki and overwrite
the previously given line of the poem. If you want to position an entry in
section 3 or 4 or 9 or any other, you need to change the number in the
command accordingly. For example, if you want an entry to be in section 4,
the command should be: “put 4″, etc.

There are some signs, so called markups, that allow for italic, bold and
coloured text. They can be used as well through the Skype-chat, simply in
writing them along with the related entry that you would like to post on the
Wiki. In order to set an expression italic, you would have to use two
apostrophes at the beginning and the end of that expression – like
”italic”. When it comes to bold, just use three apostrophes ”’bold”’.
It’s also possible to use colours in this reading session. The signs % is
necessary in this case, again one before the name of the colour, then one
after the name of the colour. Next comes the text and then comes another %
sign to stop the colouring. Like this: %blue%coloured-invisi.belles%.
The mark-up [[<<]] introduces a line-break.

You need to refresh the Wiki-page from time to time to see the changes.
Since the poems easily might interfere with the marks-ups as it plays with
quite similar signs, it can happen that you don’t necessarily get, what you
might have intended with an entry.

Drunken Boat 10th Hurrah

The mammoth 10th anniversary issue of the online journal Drunken Boat is now out. I have a piece “Electronic Literature (in Performance)” in the DB Electronic Arts and Literature folio about the work presented at last year’s Electronic Literature in Europe conference, describing many of the works and including video documentation of many of the performances. Jessica Pressman also has an excellent essay, “Charting the Shifting Seas of Electronic Literature’s Past and Present” close reading e-lit from the Drunken Boat archives and discerning emerging genres, and there is a new hypertext poem, “That Night” by Steve Ersinghaus and James Revillini, among other delights. The other folios in the 10th anniversary issue of Drunken Boat include the Mistranslation project, with contributions from a number of digital poets, a huge collection of materials from Black Mountain College, 100 new poems, conceptual fiction, visual poetics, nonfiction, and a folio on arts in Asia. It is less a journal issue than an entire library of interesting literary production. I look forward to exploring it in more depth.