
weather, whether radar: plume of the volants
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“Silence cannot be heard in terms of pitch or harmony: it is heard in terms of time length” John Cage “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence” Middlemarch, George Eliot.
from: Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants Limited Edition to coincide with exhibition (200 copies): currently available from foundmaterials@me.com £15 Digital Studio: https://weatherwhetherradar.art/work
https://www.tea-assembly.com/issues/8/moonflower-2021-or-a-scarlet-transfer
Details of the full issue and introduction from Felix Driver and Caroline Cornish below:
A question of measurement arises both in relation to weather and noise. How to take a ruler to the weather or a gauge to more than rain: the flicker of wings in swarm, a memory of crushed insects on a car windscreen.
The naming of clouds proves a starting point. In possibility we name the shapes as if to produce an inventory of natural phenomenon of the unnoticed or forgotten. A change in climate affects the dew point. An increase in humidity magnifying the effects of heat waves. A body unable to cool.
Noise of silence as music is not a new approach. Thunder sheet. A roar on the other of silence. Go back into the things dismissed as noise with new parameters of attention, make new sense of the data. Parameters set while agreeing that it cannot know how to in advance of itself. A process of unfolding.
Distinctions between central and peripheral tone are eroded or bagged out into new stories. This is not about the expansion of everyday sounds into music but concerns the attention and tuning of location to the everyday.
Once the containers and containment of measurement are exhumed we find ourselves in the frame as prime enemies of climate justice and more. Facts picked up in the data with the question of what is noticed, how and for what purpose?
How to find ways to monitor wildlife in our skies through the repurposing of older technologies once developed for war. Radio Research. Research Radio. The colocation of the question.
What was later a possibility for the detection of insects began with the identification of destroyers.
3 November – 7 November 2021
10:00 – 17:00
Talk on Saturday at 2 pm (booking required)
3 November – 7 November 2021
10:00 – 17:00
Free, No Booking Required
The DARE Art Prize presents Redell Olsen‘s new body of work, Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants at The Tetley. Join us to view Olsen’s visual, text-based and audio-visual work in her open studio.
Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants engages with the work of BioDAR researchers at the University of Leeds. These scientists are using weather radar to monitor insect biodiversity. With its origins in World War Two, radar is often used to determine information about the weather. The plumes of insects that sometimes show up in this data, most famously on days such as flying ant day, have often been dismissed as just being ‘noise’.
Through a consideration of objects from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and related archives, this body of work tracks and imagines a range of poetic, narrative, historical and cultural noises at the fragile intersections of radar, insects, weather, objects, people, music and film.
The works have involved dialogue with the BioDAR scientists and incorporate materials from their research, alongside additional sources from vintage natural history and fashion magazines. Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘The Death of The Moth’ and George Frederic Handel’s pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea inform the lyrics of an imagined inter-species opera, extracts of which are performed in collaboration with the Chorus of Opera North and bass-baritone Matthew Stiff, as a response to the current climate crisis and environmental degradation.
In Conversation with Redell Olsen and Dominic Gray, Projects Director, Opera North Saturday 6 November, 14:00, City Workshop (Book in advance).
Friday 3 November 2017, 7pm-9pm
The Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, 14 Wharf Road, London, N1 7RW
Redell Olsen in conversation with Carolyn Pedwell
S A L O N – LONDON, a site for reading and responding to the present through women’s experimental writing, is pleased to announce its launch event, featuring Redell Olsen, who will be reading from two recent works, ‘Woolf / Apelles’ and ‘Atomic Guildswomen’, followed by conversation with Carolyn Pedwell.
Redell Olsen’s poetic practice comprises poetry as well as texts for performance, film and installation. Her publications include Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014), ‘Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel’ (Subpress, 2012), ‘Secure Portable Space’ (Reality Street, 2004), ‘Book of the Fur’ (rem press 2000), and, in collaboration with the bookartist Susan Johanknecht, ‘Here Are My Instructions’ (Gefn, 2004). Her work is included in Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by UK Women Poets (Shearsman, 2010), I’ll Drown My Book: ‘Conceptual Writing
by Women’ (Les Figues Press, 2011) and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Press, 2016). In 2017 she published two bookworks Smock and Mox Nox. She has also published a number of critical articles on contemporary poetry and the relationship between contemporary poetics and the visual arts. In 2002 she set up the influential MA in Poetic Practice at Royal Holloway which she still runs as part of the MA in Creative Writing. From 2006 – 2010 she was the editor of How2, the international online journal for Modernist and contemporary writing by women. In 2013-14 she was the visiting Judith E. Wilson fellow at the University of Cambridge. In 2016-17, in association with other members of staff from English and Modern Languages at Royal Holloway, she led the HARC funded project ‘Nature and Other Forms of That Matter’. She is Director of the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway. redellolsen.co.uk
Carolyn Pedwell is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, where she is Head of Cultural Studies and Media. Carolyn has been Visiting Fellow at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary University of London; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Her new book, Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press. Carolyn is also an Editor of Feminist Theory journal.
S A L O N – LONDON is organized by Georgina Colby and Susan Rudy. The launch of S A L O N – LONDON has been funded by the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, the Centre for Poetry, Queen Mary University of London, and the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London.
Please register here: Eventbrite
Further details here
ANATHEMA is a new reading series for experimental poetry and writing in Bristol, curated by Moot Press + Hesterglock Press + Sad Press
The Light Room
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol
BS1 4QA
Friday 31st March
6.30pm
Free (donation)
Poetry Reading in Bristol at the Arnolfini – More details here.
FRIDAY, 10 March
Poetry Reading
Drew Milne, Jeff Hilson, Redell Olsen
Drew Milne was educated in Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has previously taught at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex and since 1997 he has been the Judith E Wilson Lecture in Drama and Poetry, Faculty of English, University of Cambrige. In 1995 he was poet in residence at the Tate Gallery, London. His books of poems include: Sheet Mettle (London: Alfred David Editions, 1994), Bench Marks (London: Alfred David Editions, 1998), The Damage: new and selected poems (Cambridge: Salt, 2001), Mars Disarmed (Barrington, M.A.: The Figures, 2002), Go Figure (Cambridge: Salt, 2003).
Jeff Hilson has been a prominent figure in London poetry since the 1980s. His publications includestretchers (Reality Street, 2006), Bird Bird (Landfill, 2009) and In the Assarts (Veer, 2010). He editedThe Reality Street Book of Sonnets (Reality Street, 2008) and runs the reading series Xing the Line. He teaches at the University of Roehampton.
Redell Olsen is a poet and visual artist whose work includes performance, writing and installed texts. Her recent publications include Secure Portable Space (Reality Street, 2004), Punk Faun (Subpress Books, 2012) and Film Poems (Les Figues, 2014). She was, for many years, the editor of the influential online journal HOW2 (How2journal.com), which promotes modernist and contemporary innovative poetry by women. She was Judith E. Wilson Fellow at Cambridge for 2013-14, and she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Royal Holloway.
7.00-8.45 11 Bedford Square, London WC1
Runnymede Festival
curated by Robert Hampson
All Welcome