Disjunction Notice: A Poetry Archives is a router show in the Wrong Digital Art Biennale (November 1, 2019 - March 1, 2020).
The show comprises a poetry archives hosted on a wrong router, a device that transmits text, image, sound, and interactive content via wi-fi signal. The router is offline, providing local access to the hosted content to anyone within range of the device. The poetry archives is both performed and recorded, something between a reading and a journal or anthology. Like a poetry reading, the poems are experienced in a shared location for a limited time; like a journal or anthology, the poems occupy a material record, traces that readers/viewers/listeners can probe and pull apart. Like both reading and journal, an archives is full of whorls, generative of mishearing and disorientation. As with other kinds of archives, the poetry archives amasses: the various poems get messily implicated with each other; an archives becomes a whole, understood as an entity unto itself. As with other kinds of archives, the poetry archives is there until it isn't.
The poetry archives, under the name Disjunction Notice, collects poems on the theme of networks - but starting from disjunction rather than connection as the operating principle. That is, beginning by inquiring into the set of conditions necessary for inter-connection, or how a network is founded on asymmetries. Attending to networks through the frame of disjunction highlights the points rife for interference and failure // those points that strengthen the signal. What networks might we imagine, but never build? What networks might we encounter, but never dismantle? Across this, I intend networks in the broadest possible sense, inclusive of the technological, inter-being, and the social.
The poets:
For the duration of the biennale, the router will be set up in the Information and Library Science Library at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Visit the library to access the archives, and read these instructions on how to connect if you need assistance (print-outs of the instructions will also be available at the library).
The archives is only accessible via the wrong router. Updates and further information about the status of the router (both during the bienniale and afterwards) will be posted here. Send any inquiries to Colin Post, the archivist.