Sitting in front of a laptop with a digital drawing pad at his side, Gruber asks for a volunteer from the audience to do an improvised animation of their psychic spirit. A contemporary dancer from the front row steps up, and Gruber asks him to choose a background and foreground color from the computer’s colour wheel. He begins to doodle, narrating as he goes along.
I know the psychoanalysts among us may find this a bit disconcerting, but I’ve been thinking a lot about poor, old Oedipus these days. It’s not Freudian, at least, for my parents’ sake, I hope it’s not; but there is a deeply seated mix of admiration and jealousy at work here. You see, when I think about Oedipus, I think about Sophocles, and when I think about Sophocles, I picture a figure I think I can understand: a writer with a deadline, trying to pull something together in time to make the cut for the annual drama competition in Athens in 429 BC.
I asked new media artist (and friend) Frances Adair Mckenzie if I could join her in her studio. Pedaling through the plateau, the bustling streets gave way to empty ones lined with boxy concrete condos and towering buildings full of studio space.
This is the seventh installment in a series of 11 audio poems collectively known as “The Benjy Poems,” written and directed by Benjamin Hackman, and produced and engineered by Craig Saltz.
This Really Happened, the popular nonfiction storytelling series, is coming back to Calgary’s WordFest on October 16th. We’re looking for stories on the theme of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: stories about small offences, divine retribution, or actual felonies.
What German I know
Is from movies and Karl Marx
So: Arbeiter, Schnell!