SAVAGENESS; Or, There are veins embraced in the property and SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED, created in collaboration with Judd Morrissey and Jennifer Scappettone, are two iterations of a mixed-reality performance/installation work that excavates sites, histories, and languages of mining in a poetics of generative telegraphy, geophysical extraction, and the multilingual hauntings of forgotten laborers.

The project proposes a critical archaeology of contemporary network culture in response to the extraordinary material, political and environmental legacies that make cloud computing possible. Hoisting virtual landscapes and augmented reality textscapes datamined from boom, strike, and bust in the Upper Midwest’s Copper Country, the performance explores the extraction, processing, and harnessing of copper as conductor for sprawling networks of exploitation and control as well as illumination.

*Telegraph codes extracted from The New General & Mining Telegraph Code (1891)

Iterations of SMOKEPENNY have taken place at the following sites:

The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, in November 2016, as a culminating instantiation of our 2016 research project undertaken with Caroline Bergvall, The Data That We Breathe (under the title SMOKEPENNY LYRICHORD HEAVENBRED),

The Block Museum at Northwestern University, in May 2017, as the opening performance for the Ordinary Media Symposium,

The São Bento Monastery in Porto, Portugal, in July 2017, for the Electronic Literature Organization festival (under the title LAMENT; Or, The Mine has been Opened Up Well),

6018|North, in September 2017, as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (under the title SAVAGENESS; Or, There are Veins Embraced in the Property)

The Poetry Foundation (in collaboration with the Spertus Foundation), commissioned by Ellen Rothenberg.

An immersive mixed-reality installation, LAMENT; Or, The Mine Has Been Opened Up Well, is part of the Digital Trash exhibition at Rutgers University/Camden from September-December 2018.

Read a review of the September 2017 performance by Jad Dahshan here.