Fault Tactical Network

artists:
Claudia Hart, cris cheek, Jerome Fletcher, Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffery, Fiona Wright

venue:
Performance Studies international #15
Zagreb Youth Theater
Zagreb, Croatia
June 27, 9:30-12:30pm

episode:
Fault Tactical Network, episode #1 enacts the question: why pulverized poem? The artists consider, as a central generative source, The Library is On Fire, by the French poet René Char. Char’s poem responds to a transforming experience he had as a member of the French Resistance. In an essay on this subject, Mary Walling Blackburn cites the following from poet and translator Christopher
Merritt1:

“The Library is on Fire. These were the code words [during the German occupation
of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste maquis of the French Resistance –
words that acquired a mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and set
fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the position of René Char’s group. The
Frenchmen barely escaped with their lives. And the poet thought the fire was proof
of the power of language to shape the world. ‘I believe in the magic and in the
authority of words,’ he told his superiors in London, insisting the code be changed.”

What are the implications of Char’s astounding (mis)reading of this episode? The poem is used as
material for surrealist and expressionistic engagement with text, performance and image-making.
Char’s vision of language is also considered in relation to computer code (literally, executable
language), networks, and other contemporary sites for the misfiring of language.

The content and sounds of US-based British artist cris cheek’s performances seem to the spectator to be largely driven by spontaneous reading errors discovered within vast archives of layered, semi-legible printed or digital texts. Similarly, Jerome Fletcher, also based in the UK, works with multi-layered, multi-lingual digital palimpsests in which the reading is driven by
processes of composition, decomposition, decadence and decay. Claudia Hart’s avatars are subject to the simulated natural forces of their environments and she is currently investigating the choreographic potential of this combination of avatar body and strong environmental currents.
Mark Jeffery and Judd Morrissey juxtapose the choreographed live voice and body with dynamically generated texts that make use of the compositional and also disruptive potentials of digital media and computer code. UK-based artist Fiona Wright’s performances evolve from an open-ended process sensitive to the opportunity to be misled, to the unexpected.

Fault Tactical Network is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state
agency.

1 Mary Walling-Blackburn, “The Library is on Fire: Wood as Cultural Signifier”, CTheory,
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=570, (January 2007).