Louis Armand events

louis armand is a writer & artist living in the czech republic, where he directs the intercultural studies programme at charles university. his work has appeared in journals & anthologies internationally, including poetry review, stand, sulfur, meanjin & calyx: 30 contemporary australian poets (2000). his books include seances (twisted spoon, 1998), the garden (salt, 2001), land partition (textbase, 2001) & inexorable weather (arc, 2001). most recent titles include techne (karolinum, 2003), strange attractors (salt, 2003) & mimo provoz (equipage, 2003). he recently completed work on a volume of prose fiction (menudo) and a monograph entitled incendiary devices: discourses of the other. he is the editor of the PLR (prague literary review) & an editor of the literary critical journal litteraria pragensia.

current events
SOUTHERN: 10 contemporary australian artists, curated by nicole tomlinson & kristi monfries, co-curated by louis armand. HOME gallery, prague, until 17 march.

POETRY READING: travis jeppesen, nicole tomlinson & louis armand, globe bookstore, prague, 28.2.2004, 8:00pm.

LECTURE & POETRY READING, Centre Interdisciplinaire de Poetique Appliquee, Universite de Liege, Belgium, 9.3.2004; 4:00pm + 8:00pm. Hosted by Michel Delville.

NEW RELEASE!!! MALICE IN UNDERLAND (poetry) by Louis Armand. Melbourne: Textbase, 2003. Read an excerpt.

PLR (prague literary review), shakespeare & sons bookstore, and the intercultural studies programme at charles university, will host the FIRST PRAGUE INTERNATIONAL POETRY FESTIVAL, 16-22 may 2004. international participants will include charles bernstein, trevor joyce, john kinsella, allen fisher & many more. for more information contact praguepoetryfestival@yahoo.co.uk.

recent issues of the PLR include work by marjorie perloff, simon critchley, ales debeljak, gregory ulmer, karen mac cormack, ron silliman, bruce andrews, anselm hollo, bob perelman, allen fisher, mtc cronin, joshua cohen, emmanuelle pireyre, drew milne, michel delville, d.j. huppatz, petr borkovec, william allegrezza, kevin nolan, sandra miller, mckenzie wark, alan sondheim, tom mccarthy, adrian hornsby, john kinsella, nicole tomlinson, keston sutherland, ethan gilsdorf, pierre daguin, errol sawyer, kate fagan, david seiter, larry sawyer, ian ayers, damian judge rollison ... & many more. plr.louis-armand.com

NEW RELEASE! louis armand TECHNE: JAMES JOYCE, HYPERTEXT & TECHNOLOGY (prague: karolinum, 2003)

strange attractors (salt, 2003) books.louis-armand.com

rhizomes 6: cultural studies in emerging knowledge, special issue on "codework/surveillance" edited by louis armand.

"eyes lips dreams & then night goes first night & then day & she must open her eyes & confront that other that intractable real of light & solid objects ..."

louis armand the garden (cambridge: salt publishing 2001)
108pp paperback
isbn 1-876857-05-6

"An idea began to form of her body as a hive of wounds that somehow pre-existed an implement a secret mutilation from within." She is everywhere here, and yet always she is not quite. The text is always too early or too late to hear. The more it chases her the more she slips the line of its noose. Text working a different time from what it desires. "I opened my mouth and a stone fell out." This is a text haunted by feeling. It deals in abstract emotions, delicately. "Fragments of lost intimacies." There's a practice, an ascetic aesthetic, for moving toward feeling in the pure form of its impurity. "But to experience oneself as cut off from others is also to hold open the possibility of transcending this isolation entering into all of those lives experiencing them like a mirror in which no division of time or space prevails." You sense it when you think you can't. --McKenzie Wark, Saline

link to other louis armand websites
other texts ('stemmata: mode d'emploi')
criticism (essays on art & literature by louis armand)
synopticon (collaborative text with john kinsella)
action enchaine (sept poemes)
killing time (new poems)

� louis armand, 2001

event horizon

recent events
louis armand recently guest edited an issue of litteraria pragensia on 'contemporary poetics.'

shakespeare & co. paris literary festival: "lost, beat & new" & van gogh's ear magazine, poetry reading, 20:30, 14 june, 2003 with edwin torres, pansy maurer-alvarez & susan fox at polly magoo's.

louis armand "paintings/obrazy," GALERIE GAMBIT, MIKULANDSK� 6, Prague 1, 18.10-15.11.2002: extended until 25.11.

symposium: "the avant-garde under net conditions," perspektive magazine, gallery ESC, graz (austria), 17+18. january.

trieste international poetry festival 6+7 december, 2002.

in july, louis armand, rod mengham, marc atkins & tadeusz piero performed at prague's historical cafe montmarte (poetry & video installation).

on march 9, 2002, louis armand read excerpts from the garden at cipM (centre international de poesie, marseille). translations read by veronique vassiliou, jean-michel espitallier & cyrille martinez.

a series of prints, 'indirect objects' exhibited during the eleventh cambridge conference of contemporary poetry (uk), april 27-29. first solo exhibition, gallery artnatur, prague, october 12-19, 1999.

louis armand will be co-ordinating the english-language programme of the 2002 prague "day of poetry," november 16, cafe montmartre. at the 2001 "den poezie" at the globe bookstore, he launched his recent collection of poetry, inexorable weather, which was published by arc publications in the uk.

RHIZHOMES: CULTURAL STUDIES IN EMERGING KNOWLEDGE
www.rhizomes.net
Issue 6: Codework/Surveillance guest-edited by Louis Armand, with contributions by McKenzie Wark, Alan Sondheim, Zoe Beloff, Darren Tofts, Ondrej Galuska, MTC Cronin, Alan Roughley, Philip Hammial, David Seiter, Tom Mackey, Damien Judge Rollison.

"Codework/Surveillance" attempts to work the seam between critical paradigmatics & social discourse, between codework as invention, aesthetic practice, activism, sabotage & its recuperation within and by institutions of knowledge & techno-social surveillance (& vice-versa).

"Codework/Surveillance" attempts to go beyond the usual pseudo-antagonism of theory/praxis by investigating how the contest over such terms (and other terms which are supposedly defined by them) is itself a mirage effect of the oppositional assumptions of institution vs. anti-institutional practition.

"Codework/Surveillance" designates a relation of terms & of social postulates which are & remain biomorphic, parac(r)itical and dialectically irreducible. As "criticism" is placed under increasing pressure to account for itself in terms of action within the social/technological sphere, the artist & "public intellectual" may be regarded more in terms of "codework" than of traditional critical or aesthetic practices--in the sense that "codework" implies not only a working with the language and means of contemporary technological conditions (& of "taking responsibility" or "coming to terms" with these), but also a tactical counter-coding which exploits the margins of error within control apparatuses exemplified by such mechanisms as "surveillance."

The linkage of "surveillance" to "codework" here stands for the way in which infrastructures of power always operate on a basis of hybridity & structural discontinuities which leave them open to "uses" other than those sought or intended by the various institutions of "authority." That authority, too, is inherently linked to codework, to the authenticity & authorship of certain codes or codices (of the law), points not only to existing critiques of "writing" but to the institution of critique itself & the enormous resources of codification which are today applied in the name of learning &/or knowledge.

As in Orwell's 1984, it remains necessary to consider seriously the fact that "authority," in order to be what it is, deploys its resources in a hugely asymmetrical way "against" the "individual"--that sabotage (or terrorism) is not exclusively a means used by individuals (or cells of individuals) against the symbols & institutions of "authority." Codework in this sense is not the masturbatory fantasy of the programmer or hacker, but above all the game of power calling its own bluff & still trying to reduce all the bad odds to zero.