The Ideal Glass

On Laura Elrick’s «Stalk»
and the Poetics of Spatial Practice

Laura Elrick’s Stalk is a deeply unsettling and question-posing video poem (a recording and artistic expansion of a real-time poetic event) in which Elrick dresses as a Guantanamo detainee (shackled, in orange jumpsuit) and walks through the streets of Manhattan. Here, a long recorded poem that shifts from lyric to found material, from narrative to song, is overlaid by Kai Beverly-Whittemore’s jerky, handheld recording of the event, the conventions of which are unique — I can only think to describe them as part French New Wave, part amateur-tourist, where, crucially, mirroring effects through the use of training the camera’s lens on reflective surfaces (glass), is a recurring trope. Here, a dialectical (or beyond dialectical) tension between spoken text and visual art is maintained throughout, performed: dividing our attention at crucial points in ways that one of its elements of excavation does, the corrosive effects our acutely visual culture has on the already distracted, liquidated subject.

The work is recursive: a rehearsal of crisis as crisis, metaphor within metaphor as metaphor, and this produces an urgent and complicating picture of picture (narrative) making. Yet, like the glass window of a city, one can easily pass by Stalk without seeing one’s reflection in it. And like the proprioceptive being, the sensing subject, one can manipulate it at least this much: turn it on, off, rewind, fast forward, skip or let go — Interrogate. As poem, the digital artifact becomes fleshy and vulnerable in “the premise of… place.”

This is also a work which demands more than one viewing in order to see or sense on a micro level, those moments, planned and unplanned, that occur just at the edge of the frame, and in the between aural spaces — between spoken lyric and cinematic (de)tour, between overt signification and fractured, sublating voice(s) underneath, including the sublingual voice of the music (composed entirely of MRI machine sounds) by Rizzia, member of the Chain Tape Collective.

Elrick worked with a number of important collaborators on this project, including poets Kythe Heller and Kristin Prevallet. All have contributed widely to poetry as performance and to ambulatory poetries as part of a movement interested in projects of dissensus, events where aesthetic and political practices collide. As Kaia Sand, who gave a major talk on Stalk for Nonsite Collective several months ago called “Poem/Nonpoem,” puts it, these are works that “allow the two to be translated into and through each other.” Stalk is certainly functioning at this level. Not unlike David Buuck’s BARGE or Sand’s own Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press) the poem-as-artistic ecosystem assumes a use value beyond art-cum-art, desires to be seen/heard as a map decentering a much larger sociopolitical map, one that will activate the subject to be both collaborator and conspirator in a re-narrational becoming.

There has been a resurgence in contiguity between poetics and political intervention in the past several years, particularly a re up and rethinking of Ranciere’s “redistribution of the sensible.” Though still unusual in today’s contemporary poetic landscape, such a re-imagining of poetic terrorism a la Hakim Bey, or of a more directed, politicized recalibration of the happening, have served as points of departure for increasing numbers of socially concerned poets, and this archival/spatial practice is every bit as conditioned by our eternal present’s situation of deepening crisis as it is a response to a long (in art time) period of underwhelming aesthetic-political production — both in poetry and in experimental visual art, a period that poet and critic Thom Donovan has aptly summarized as the decade of the reenactment.

The re-thinking of a kind of guerilla poetry for today’s aesthetic and political realities, on the tactical level, has often meant a refocusing of one’s commitments: from the ephemeral/expropriative of past practices to the archival and site-specific. A poetics of the archive is broadened through an intermingling of Foucault and Derrida’s pivotal work on archival practice, the archive re-theorized, as Werner and Voss have put it, to be an ideological space insofar as how one maps and generates systems that order the textual materials of that space amounts to controlling a narrative.

In recent artworks this has manifested as a radical re-narration as juxtaposition to, and undermining of, dominant modes of discourse. And site-specificity, informed by a poetics of the archive, speaks to what Ranciere calls a shared “apportionment of parts” that make up the sensible, thus the collective re-arranging of those parts via dissensus (12). Such a project realizes the most invisible spatial marker to be potentially crucial in a re-mapping process, the smallest geographical place to be a potential metaphor for a broader discursive poetics, thus politics. Through its colliding of crowd and shackled “detainee,” Stalk complicates (and is complicated by) the narratives of “terrorism” and “threat” post-September 11, in the era of Bush and Guantanamo, and does so in and through place; the event occurring in the high security/low tolerance atmosphere of New York City, ground zero with respect to these discourses. Elrick produces a sub-dominant narrative here, one that is to be juxtaposed to what is now a shared mythos of the contemporary (detained, contained, and still dangerous) Other.

And in Stalk, one can see just how completely different are the artistic-political concerns from the American avant-garde poetry that has dominated a great deal of the 90s and the first five or more years of this century. Situated among the “lived forms” of Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater, Juliana Spahr’s poetry of witness, Kristin Prevallet’s ambulatory urban lyrics, Brenda Iijima’s sound-image-text compositions out of Yo Yo Labs, CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock’s PACE actions, just to name a few, Stalk breaks radically from the concerns of Conceptualism and Flarf, in which institutional critique often usurps wider political engagements enacted through language, and where lyric, and (in for example, Kenneth Goldsmith’s work) most elements of verse so-called, are thrown out in favor of an aesthetics that wants poetry to have the commodity value of conceptual visual art. In both Flarf and Conceptualism parodic appropriations a la Duchamp are not so much recalibrations of older paradigms (Dada, primarily) as they are — self-admittedly — ironic reenactments, which act, in part, to exemplify the lateness of art, its present status as waste, as Goldsmith puts it, as pure commodity.

The landscape of crisis is what Elrick’s Stalk confronts through a kind of conceptualism, but one that does not throw the proverbial lyrical baby out with the verse culture bathwater. The work is grounded in both place and in a new lyricism that factors in place as the corporately owned funhouse mirror that constructs the catastrophic identity, then reflects it in equally contradictory, strange, and catastrophic ways. This is a lyricism with its poetic roots in, among others, Armantrout, a poetics that sees Whitman’s multitudes through the fractured lens of Oppen’s studied critique of Whitman’s civil war poems, and thus relinquishes a wish for control of the multitudes through strategic fractures of voice ordinarily understood, through, for example, polyvocality, or provisional poetic arguments that are later undermined. In Stalk, as in much of Elrick’s more recent poetry, I’m reminded of Rob Halpern’s urgent lyrics in Disaster Suites and his forthcoming Music for Porn — where, in Disaster Suites, place and body are mimetic of one another in their degraded capacity to archive and witness, where both are predicaments shorn by militarism and capital, and where failure to re-document or intervene walks hand in hand with the utopian traces of the work’s aesthetic-political roots. From Disaster Suites:

— my body will have been this place (49)

is followed, at the end of the next poem, by:

— this place has failed to read us (51)

Stalk as video poem is what its tagline calls “part dystopian urban cartography.” Elrick’s work — like a lot of recent work, overtly political or not — is part cartography, though utopian in contrast to the appropriative, post-Situationist poetics of Conceptualism or Flarf. And cartographical elements, the “orchestrated drift,” in any Situationist sense, is just one set in array of tactical elements, as poet Tonya Foster has noted, that make up the new guerilla poetry of the site specific, art that is spatial practice. To trace or draw out a landscape involves more than seeing with poetic eyes what is out there and recording it. The Marxist utopianism of Situationist practices, informed by nearly forty years of post-modern theory, have given way to anxieties about the use value of any poetic attempt, yet today’s interventions, and Elrick’s work is exemplary here, allow for the possibility that particular re-narrations informed by Situationism need be neither nostalgic nor ironic, but just as urgent as earlier attempts — urgent as long as we, art’s practitioners, remain mired in the crisis of late capitalism.

Today’s spatial practice involves what David Buuck dubs a kind of pre-enactment, setups which demand that we (all of us) trace what is invisible but right in front of us, the present’s predicament as seen through the future’s eye (an anterior subjunctive mapping). [1] Which, in part, must involve tracing our affective labors in a world where, as Zukofsky reminds us, the eyes are wrecked, our somatic systems occulted, our languages ours but not ours. Inner and outer become confused in this tense (what is inside the orange jumpsuit, and what is observable outside it, shows the border, among several such borders in Stalk, to be semi-permeable). The setup is getting us to bodily inhabit a future that is not a logical deduction of present conditions, but a seeking of a “vast perhaps,” or what will have been, and as such this is the utopian fault line revealed in Stalk as well as in Disaster Suites. Who is shackled and what or who is being stalked — these are questions implicitly posited by the work as fallout from its anterior-subjunctive tense.

In Stalk, crisis embodied is the fragile and self-same subject, the ignored, and transparent, where a question of whether it (the “I” objectified or othered, eyed) is breakable and/or visible, is tested. Glass as shifting metaphor becomes the ethical burden of the crowd of voices in the poem: the transparent subject as it, the reverberating windows of the Manhattan skyline, one sort of ideal (corporate and one-way) glass, glass as target of the invisible’s destructive impulses, and the camera’s lens that captures and fails to capture all these reverberations. Is Manhattan’s crowd that which washes it ashore, or away? Are we that crowd? Am I both or neither? “Is that a person?” begins the poem, the screen dark for nearly a minute of forefronting language that Elrick and others overheard and recorded, individuals who voiced from within that crowd some response to the lone, hooded figure in orange jumpsuit, shackled.

Among the multitude comes another voice in that dark: “I feel like asking: do you want me to call somebody?” Due to the cadence and intonation of the speaker, “to call somebody” here seems to suggest that the figure is either crazy or the act frivolous, in need of professional cleanup, not “one of us.” And yet in each voice there remain the seeds of possibility — archived is the possibility to be no longer invisible, to act or behave otherwise, to construct what is not now. Sand discusses the multivalent signification of these textual-visual movements between “I” and “We” — that which remains in the movement between multitudes contained and multitudes let be:

Elrick’s trudge through New York streets juxtaposed prisoner and public crowd while drawing a contour line — as geographer Cindy Katz terms it — to the prisoner that is not juxtaposed, the out-of-sight prisoner, caged at Guantánamo, for whom we are the same public crowd.

On one level of reading this work, there is the obvious interventionist centrality of the hooded figure wearing the iconic Guantanamo orange, the walk (or stalk?) through an otherwise self-same crowd as overt political protest, as reminder to anyone who sees/hears and is confronted by the work (either the event or its archive in the form of video poem) that there are hundreds of detainees being tortured at this moment, right now — the poem working to unearth the shared mythos enacted by the mainstream media, then playing these narratives of universalism to its poetic advantage. But, as Sand asks through Herbert Marcuse, what alternatives are there to work that is simply “consciousness raising”. . . “puppets and protest”? That is, the artform that collides politics and art without leaving both, or either, normatively fixed, intact? How to transform both “politics” and “art” in and through this collision? By foregrounding the crowd over the hooded figure, and by foregrounding the difficult and fractured voice(s) of the poem over (or with) the crowd, Elrick gives us one preliminary answer in Stalk. Possibility archived, that which is absent or invisible is made visible through its absence, signified by various cues, not least of which, the hooded figure.

In bracketing this provisional answer, I juxtapose Stalk to artist Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib Series, and what David Buuck wrote in his 2007 Artweek review of this “controversial” work, the review reissued on Buuck’s BARGE website in 2009 on the occasion of the Series’ second major exhibit. These paintings of tortured men, beautifully wrought, erotic, stylized in the fashion of the Vienna School, gained a lot of negative and positive excitement, praise for the “empathic” and “humanizing” images of detainees, whose atrocious treatment by American military police had just been captured on film. For Buuck, these paintings responding to the photos are, however thought-provoking, lacking in dissensus:

Ultimately, it will take artists, critics, and everyday image-consumers to construct new idioms of visual criticism by which to engage such images in a manner that attends to the complexities of such travesties while at the same time risking the same kinds of confused and contradictory responses in our own politics and protests, that might move beyond the necessary exclamations of disgust and/or empathy, towards active dismantling of the image-worlds and militaristic policies that give birth to these new forms of torture and image-making.

Perhaps despite all the juxtaposing of the erotic with sadism, pain with our pleasure in watching it (Sontag echoes here throughout), contemporary atrocity with the baroque, the work recapitulates old divisions, normative vocabularies, becomes itself a mode of “consciousness raising” on the one hand, and painterly skill on the other, the two only joined by the singularity of each painting, and not much more. The Barthesian twins of punctum and stadium have long since died as insufficient terms in a dusty paradigm, and yet in representational visual arts, like in much poetry, our aesthetic modes seem to desire that a wounding universalism and its resultant criticism be at the ready. The Abu Grhaib photos, and leaked memoranda on torture, though, call out, more than any recent image-systems, for a vocabulary that meets the demands of habituated paradox and contradiction.

Then what is the vocabulary of this atrocity? What would a new aesthetic language that confronts our contradictory impulses to these particular atrocities — these leaked images and reports of torture — look or sound like? As if in direct response to Botero and his work’s positive reviewers, Elrick’s voice, with a strange, detached sadness, reminds us to shine a light back on our eyes as they watch, to see in them these contradictions and self-same urges, to question our own understanding of what we take to understand, or relate to:

Empathy intoxicates the premise of this place . . . We . . . We that is temporary and abundant, something that waits . . .

Stalk takes us out of the gallery, away from the normative in many respects, through the spatial grounding of its event, the imagerie of the city’s commerce. Gone are the usual conventions of the poetry reading, gone for us (viewers) is the page with its lineations allowing us to see where the report begins and the lyric ends, where they blur. Gone, for us (experiencing the video poem), is the event of being there.

Gone, too, is the straightforward didacticism of “message,” as the central character in this narrative is not the hooded figure (the hooded figure is only the trigger), it’s the crowd, and at times, individuals within that crowd, and the city which, as Prevallet notes elsewhere, is us insofar as we construct it. During a proceeding viewing, I, like Sand, took notes, scene by scene, pausing, of the crowd’s reactions. Sand rightly links this work to the questions that manifest in and have resulted from her latest, and most difficult book of poetry, regional mapping, (de)tour guide, and collage, Remember to Wave. She keenly takes note of the predictability of particular crowd (group) reactions to the sudden proprioceptive redistribution, the shift, as the living, breathing metaphor exits a Manhattan taxi:

In June, her walk through the city was planned with precision, but submitted to the unpredictability of the city. Yet much was predictable about the reactions of crowds of people . . . Homeless woman under a blanket. Fervent believer shouting scripture. Orange jumpsuited prisoner shackled and shuffling. We among the crowds don’t respond, part urbane (nothing surprises us); part safe-sure (less contact, less mugging); part co-habitationally respectful (we can all do our “thing,” living in close contact while retaining partial autonomy).

True, much of the video poem shows Elrick going seemingly unnoticed, or noticed but not noticed. In all, by my count, there were only two occasions in which (interesting in itself) a person took a photo (camera, phone camera) of Elrick, and only once did a person (man, striped shirt, midtown) try to talk to Elrick. For the first ten or so minutes of the work, I saw very few (hardly any) double takes, or obvious stares — yet for the second half (mostly filmed in midtown Manhattan) there were several (whether this was a purposeful edit, or whether part of midtown’s psychogeography entailed this “naturally,” I don’t know).

The loneliness of the hooded figure, and the crowd’s dynamic as crowd (it’s easier to ignore the othered, the marked, among a sea of strangers) is a deeply haunting feature of the work, haunting in how familiar this phenomenon is. Elrick’s lyric is here interspersed with lines by Baudelaire, Silliman, and other poets concerned with breaking down universalisms in favor of re-humanizing, thus complicating, the subject (and thus art itself), through various sorts of controlled drifts, derives. These quoted lines act as a sort of fulcrum between the first half of Stalk and the second (the scene, at this juncture, is of Elrick walking down steps, descending into a public garden).

The lyric multitude then dissolves back into detainee reports, which, having worked with these myself for a forthcoming book are, as one might imagine, both horrifying and emblematic of the extreme ways we can treat each other whenever a perceived threat (foreign, alterior) approaches. As the video plays on, these reports, and the soundscape generally, seem to take over that which we are seeing (“as the eyes / near wreck”), imploring us to look at the frame’s edge, train in on details within the crowded shots, to look, if at all, for what is hiding, maybe not even there. The subject is now othered to such an extent that his name is redacted, replaced only by “detainee,” and this absence of name (of person) becomes an archive of who he “used to be”.

The ideal glass, big public . . . again detainee was shown 9/11 video. Detainee did watch, but this time without exhibiting any emotion . . . averted his eyes . . . Great place for people watching . . .

And this ghostly voyeurism, our synaesthetic voyeurism, this haunted glass sea of individuals watching or averting (which is a kind of watching), complicit but not complicit in the torture of humans, nameless too, is rehearsed in the sickening jamming of textual materials that form part of the anterior-subjunctive lyric — official report and overheard language (forced and implied interrogation). This occasions Sand to ask if we (all of us) are too urbane and frightened simultaneously, where such contradictory features of our subjecthood we sublimate or project outward, yet in such numbers, have the potential to deconstruct:

Are we always among a crowd, the prisoner — shackled on the street, the prisoner shacked on an island — while we are urbane, safesure, cohabitationally respectful?

It’s hard to conjecture on a whole crowd, what the mindsets are here, and whether there is some uniformity of intention, so to speak, as there is of behaviors. But to elaborate on what I take Sand to be getting at in suggesting the individual might “always be among a crowd, the prisoner”: what one notices, in the crowd, especially in the second half of the work, or what I felt I noticed, was an interest in the hooded figure, but a hurried one. Like the man who approaches Elrick briefly, like myself, now part of a crowd watching this crowd watching Elrick, everything (including the camera, its use of jump cuts) is brief, everything is hurried, all are on their way, in a hurry, always on their way. Where are they (we) going? We may be urbane, especially in New York, given the term’s association with this diverse city of high-end purchasers, but we’re also alienated, segregated, out in public standing on private property.

Here, as if a purposeful 3D fast-forward of Renee Gladman’s dystopian The Activist (what Juliana Spahr succinctly calls “a covert narrative operating as an event disguised as report” in her blurb for the book’s back cover), contained and detained resonate one another as terms that denote the conditions of the crowd, of us. We’re going to work and in a hurry, and if not in a hurry to get somewhere because that is what we’re told we must do, we’re often thinking about being in a hurry — soon, which is also being in a hurry.

Propelled like buckshot from a gun we hurry, or we stand and ponder jack-jawed like marionettes about to be manipulated, and the hooded iconic figure of the detainee is an erotic, repulsive flicker in the corner of our eye, one that garners some (at least fleeting) moral sensation which is its degraded aura, and if you only had the time to stop and ask yourself . . . “Is that a person?” Which is really to ask, Is the detainee (terrorist) really a person? That’s so horrible! And horribly interesting! Which is a built-in, repeating metaphor/contradiction in Stalk: the anonymity of the figure in the orange jumpsuit, shackled, shuffling along, and the invisible “reason” for its (not hers) existence/behaviors here, arousing us in contradictory ways, is metaphorical of the Guantanamo detainee at Guantanamo. We who are being watched, like the detainee in the media, are defined by our absence, where absence, and thus the trajectory of the construction of our identities, is temporally mediated. The resolve is quick, and, one wants to say, barely articulate. We can know but not know the tortured Middle-Eastern man (or woman) behind miles of guarded fencing an ocean away — we can know of but not feel; we can feel but not feel; we have, as Wittgenstein writes so often in Culture and Value, “nothing to go on.” Like the hooded figure the Guantanamo detainee on the news is only the imagerie of the detainee, torture only the imagerie of torture, as to say “detainee” is to refer to . . . what? Who?

Were you a tourist in one of those shots, your reasons for looking the other way, or beyond, or briefly, might not be dissimilar: you have no time for troubling matters — maybe you’re liable to be dismissive even (“stupid radicals!”), because your boss gave you exactly five days to see everything New York has to offer, which includes the statue of liberty, the museums, the Empire State Building, and Ground Zero. You’ll ponder art in relation to politics, you’ll have to ponder the U.S. policy on detainees and torture, later, because how are you going to fit all this in in five bloody days? I can’t grope for a vocabulary, a new language, for this . . . now! I would call someone, you think, but I have to be downtown in ten minutes, someone else surely will, later — soon . . .

Perhaps the concreteness and unexpectedness of Elrick’s trudge is just too much for “we who are shackled” to handle under current conditions, conditions that only allow for and encourage trading in abstractions, news crawls, categorical declamations culled from talking points. But what flimsy materials is all this lateness built on; the possibility of something else lingers here, within and around us, like live wires.

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno gives us a rich sense of how, in part, successful art operates. Where “success” is to have use value, and to have use value as transfiguring and transgressing sensuous material that points in its negative articulation to a world that could be, to a future that isn’t necessarily a worsening of present conditions, the further liquidation of the subject, the person:

Only by immersing its autonomy in society’s imagerie can art surmount the heteronomous market. Art is modern through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become eloquent. (Italics added, 28)

Stalk retains the contradictions of the crowd that it becomes, which is to retain and amplify the contradictions of its own behaviors and affects, the conditions that necessitate its own production — art’s failures to witness or document (our bodily failures), its blurring of distinctions between I and we, site and nonsite. The reality of our alienation bubbles up to the surface in this work, results from the refusal to nicely delineate in ways that would allow for terms like “empathic” or “humanizing” to exist as summative taglines. Yet, insofar as Stalk is a necessarily degraded witnessing of a crowd experiencing dissensus (however brief or fleeting), what becomes obvious is that the great love affair between capitalism and militarism is worn not just on our faces and in our gestures, but in the temporality of our behaviors, the speed at which we traverse and inhabit spaces that are privately public. We are walking the streets of New York, ground zero of high and late capitalism; we are individuals given over just so briefly to the picnolepsy of another’s performance, and in turn, our own performances: of the rushed and pushed, and of the “something that waits” for an alternative social existence. Our eyes project back the effect of our information gathering and dispersal, the beautiful delete button talk talk talk of cable news living. It is us who are being watched if we watch the logic of our watching (and listening) in this space. Like they say, you are what you (are made to) watch.

---

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

Buuck, David. “Botero’s Abu Ghraib Paintings Back in Berkeley.” Published September 23, 2009. http://buuckbarge.wordpress.com/.

Donovan, Thom. “Replay as Revivification: Parades & Changes, Replays at Dance Theater Workshop, Performa 09, November 18, 2009.” The Brooklyn Rail Online, December 9, 2009 edition. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/12/dance/replay-as-revivification-parades-changes-replays-at-dance-theater-workshop-performa-09-november-18th-2009.

Elrick, Laura. Stalk. Published online at http://blip.tv/file/2192353, 2009.

Foster, Tonya. “Continued . . .” from Harriet Blog, The Poetry Foundation, October 19, 2009.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/10/continued/

Gladman, Renee. The Activist. San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2003.

Halpern, Rob. Disaster Suites. Long Beach, CA: Palm Press, 2006.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sand, Kaia. “Poem/NonPoem.” Delivered as talk for Nonsite Collective, February 7, 2009. Published February 26, 2009. http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/603

---

[1] See, especially, the BARGE work, Buried Treasure Island, which, like Stalk, is both a pre-enactment and formally akin — a documented (video, audio poem, song, installation booklet, virtual tour) extension of a real-time event, hence a localized archive that serves as both document and metaphor, shedding light on broader political realities. http://davidbuuck.com/barge/bti/index.html.

David Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and new media at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking. His most recent books are Occultations (Black Radish Books, forth. 2010), Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox, forth. 2010), Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, forth. 2010), Acts of Art/Works of Violence: Essays on the New Music (SSLA/U of Sydney, forth. 2010), and book burning to ashen strophe (Dusie Press, 2009). Wolach’s poetry has appeared most recently or is forthcoming from journals and anthologies such as Aufgabe, Ekleksographia: An Imprint of Ahadada Books (Amy King ed.), No Tell Motel, Little Red Leaves, 5_Trope, Cannot Exist, and XPoetics. Often collaborative and using multiple media, Wolach’s work has been performed at venues such as Buffalo Poetics Series, The American Cybernetics Conference, and The EconVergence Conference. He’s currently working on a translation of the script from Charles Burnett’s film, Killer of Sheep, and working with composer Arun Chandra on an 8-channel sound-text piece for 4 voices, adapted from Occultations, called “Modular Arterial Cacophony.” An active participant in Nonsite Collective, Wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, which curates the yearly series on the intersection of experimental text arts & radical politics, PRESS. http://www.wheelhousemagazine.com