June 2021: The Sound of Finding w/ Janice Lowe
Merge with the word and sound environment to create a multimedia experience.
This workshop explores writing as a multi-media entity, offers exciting ground for collage, remixing, experimentation and is, in a Dadaist sense, a portrait of the writer and the times. Explore hybrid, multi-media texts by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writer-performers, social justice activists, musicians and installation artists. Grow your audio and video assemblage practice by experimenting with found language, found sound and cross-genre collaboration. Play with possibilities of music-text-video interaction.
Increasingly, the collection of digital media is a daily practice. How can these digital findings both aural and visual, inspire inquiry, conversation or become writing? Explore digital writing and performance as a personal and cultural audio-visual assemblage art.
Materials: Participants will need smart phones or devices of choice for recording audio and video. They also need to use a freely sourced daws program for audio editing like Garageband or Audacity, as well as a video editing program such as iMovie or Photo Editorpaper. Other materials can include writing tools and any additional art materials you'd like to work with.
Bio:
Janice A. Lowe, composer-poet and pianist, is the author of LEAVING CLE poems of nomadic dispersal and SWAM. Her poems have been published in anthologies including Callaloo, Best American Experimental,The Hat, Renga for Obama, Boog City, Radiant Resisters, (Pre) Conceivable Bridges and RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music. Lowe is the composer of Desegregation Remix: 3 Women Sing the Borders, a multimedia theater collaboration with Lee Ann Brown. Her musical theater compositions include Somewhere in Texas, libretto by Charles E. Drew, Jr.; Lil Budda, text by Stephanie L. Jones and Sit-In at the Five & Dime, words by Marjorie Duffield. Lil Budda has been presented at the National Alliance For Musical Theater’s Festival of New Works and at the Eugene O'Neill Musical Theater Conference. Lowe was commissioned to compose the score for The McKoy Sisters’ Syncopated Sonnets in Song, a song cycle based on Tyehimba Jess’ OLIO. She has composed music for numerous plays including Liza Jessie Peterson’s Chiron’s Homegurl Healer Howls (New Black Fest) and 12th and Clairmount by Jenni Lamb (Stage Left-Chicago). Currently, Lowe performs and records with the band Janice Lowe & NAMAROON and will release an album this fall. A recent Creative Capital Awardee, she has received fellowships from the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, University of Pennsylvania and The Rauschenberg Foundation. She is a co-founder of The Dark Room Collective. Lowe holds an MFA in musical theater composition from New York University. She has taught Multimedia Composition at Rutgers University and in Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. www.janicelowe.com
Logistics:
- This workshop runs from June 1, 2021 - June 30, 2021.
- Workshops consist of one video per week for each week in the month. Videos are 45-60 minutes long, and are shared on a private YouTube account.
- Class discussions are held via Slack.
- All readings, creative prompts, and shared artwork will be exchanged via a private Google Drive folder.
- All workshops are designed for you. Dedicate as much or as little time to the workshop per week as you'd like.
- This workshop is taught in English, but collective.aporia offers subtitles for the workshop videos in over 60 languages. If you have questions about language accommodations, please feel free to email us at [email protected].
Donations:
Collective.aporia believes in paying working artists fairly for their time and work. As a diverse international collective, we also believe strongly in valuing fair exchange—whether that be monetary, energetic, or otherwise.
Because of these beliefs, our workshop donations all begin at a $40 base rate with the option to give additional donation amounts, if you’re able. Seventy percent of the donations go to facilitator, and the remainder goes back into collective.aporia for operational expenses.
Participants also have the option to donate money towards the community scholarship, which provides opportunities to folks from these communities to attend workshops at no cost.
Please check out this page to learn more and/or apply for the scholarship.
We understand that not everyone has the financial means to donate $40. In the spirit of collaboration and exchange, we have developed a work exchange initiative that allows folks to choose what kind of work they would like to trade for free entry into the workshop. Examples of this work include writing blog posts, creating and sharing social media content, editing video subtitles, etc.
Thank you for your generosity!
[Image credit: Janice Lowe]