This Friday, 16 December, Requited will celebrate the upcoming release of its sixth issue at Enemy in Wicker Park. In addition to a few readings, Guest Editor Ryan T. Dunn will curate a series of multi-media / performative works focusing on language as sound.

• Friday, December 16th 8pm–11pm
• (please note that the live performances will begin at 8pm sharp)
• Enemy, 1550 N. Milwaukee Fl 3, Chicago
• Suggested donation is $7 at the door.
• Some snacks (“light winter fare”) will be provided.
• RSVP on Facebook, or just show up!

The night’s program is listed after the jump…

From Ryan:

Sound & Language—Performance: Work will consider the psychological and phenomenological aspects of the reception and manifestation of sound as a linguistic act, as a revisitable document, as an intangible moment on breath and a long distance transmittable gesture. It will ponder the history of the textual document and its relationship with the relatively young sonic document and encompass methods of transmission and reception, the notable and the mundane, the intentional and unintentional, public and private, seen and heard.

The Performers:

Reed Esslinger is currently finishing up an MFA at the University of Michigan and has been making performative sculptural installations dealing with communication, interpretation, translation and other themes that are broadly enveloped in language. “Enter Here” is a performance depicting tension, (or cooperation), in the literal “see-sawing” back and forth of graphite threads drawn through the membrane of language. The back and forth nature of performance alludes to dialog, a process of reaching mutual understanding. Communication becomes a means of entering each other.

Peter J. Woods Blurring the line between absurdist theatre and harsh noise, Peter J Woods presents works that deal with the brand of existential dread and uncertainty unique to our current society.  In “What I’m Going to Say Is This Is What I’m Going to Say,” Woods stages a tediously prepared failure in communication that speaks to both how we interact and why our interactions inevitably fail.

Edward Breitweiser is a Chicago-based artist, musician, and writer. Typically, his work does or does not involve the use of computers. “Converging Interstices”  Or, “Delmar” and the Immortality of Influence is an ongoing catalog of history-in-the-making. This catalog takes the form of relationships between documents, experiences, artifacts, and personal narratives.

Katrina Schaag is a Madison-based performance artist who makes text-, movement-, video-, and installation-based works. Her interests include performativity, artifice, presence, absence, plasticity, queer masochism, and Deleuzian becomings. The landscape cracks and I sink into a nameless current – What can I salvage? – I imagine you swimming in a clear blue lake – If only I could move past this is a lecture on biology and plasticity as disrupted by the unconstrained murmuring of the field beneath. The field enacts only itself, and the landscape is still cracking, even in the midst of all the rampant flowering.

Ángel Faraldo (Spain, 1980) is a composer, sound artist, improviser and digital instrument designer currently based in The Netherlands. His works usually maximize minimal means to generate threshold conditions. “La memoria y el olvido” (2011) is an instrument/installation based on a textwork by Dutch artist Tanja Smit. It explores the expressive capabilities of a text as a map, which can be freely navigated creating new orderings and meanings, and at times surpassing language itself to become pure sonic gesture.

Ryan T Dunn is a curator and media and performance artist working with communication and perception. He is heavily concerned with extra-institutional context specificity and the ways in which direct action transcends and traverses the moment in which it originates through mediation, whether that be through document or memory.

In addition to that, there will be reading-performances by Daniel Godston, Jennifer Karmin, and Big Other’s own Tim Jones-Yelvington.

Hope to see you there!