Christian Bök, Sommer Browning, and Erin Espelie, Saturday, March 31, 2018, 7pm
Still from Tattva, Kalpana Subramanian 2018.
Counterpath (7935 East 14th Ave. in Denver) is excited to host a reading by Christian Bök and Sommer Browning, with a screening curated by Erin Espelie, Saturday, March 31, 2018, starting at 7pm.
Screening will be:
Insecta
Ramey Newell
2017, 5 min, color, sound, HD video
A Net to Catch the Light
Erin Espelie
2016, 9 minutes, color and B&W, sound, HD video & hand-processed 16mm
Inside the Shared Life
Erin Espelie
2017, 9 minutes, color and B&W, sound, HD digital video & 16mm
He Begins, She Returns
Anna Kipervaser
2015, 2 minutes, color, sound, HD video
Tattva
Kalpana Subramanian
2018, 5 minutes, color, sound, HD video
The Sea Seeks Its Own Level
Erin Espelie
2014, 6 minutes, color, sound, Super 8 to video
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001)—a bestselling work of experimental literature that won the Griffin Poetry Prize. An early founder of literary conceptualism, Bök created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. A virtuoso reciter of sound-poems, Bök has performed lectures and readings at more than 200 venues around the world. His current project, The Xenotext, is a work that requires him to engineer the genome of an unkillable bacterium so that the DNA of such an organism might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response. Bök teaches in the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.
Erin Espelie is a filmmaker, writer, and editor, living and working in Boulder County’s Four Mile Canyon and New York City. Her writing and filmmaking investigate current scientific research related to the Anthropocene, issues in environmental history, questions of epistemology, and our expectations of the moving image. Espelie’s films have shown at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute, the Natural History Museum of London, Whitechapel Gallery, Crossroads (San Francisco), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, and more. Her feature-length experimental documentary, The Lanthanide Series, examines the materiality of the digital world, combining approaches of non-fiction narrative essay, abstract visual and sound exploration, and the history of black mirrors; it recently premiered at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen. Most of her professional career in print journalism has been on the staff of Natural History magazine, where Espelie serves as Editor In Chief and as a columnist. Since 2002 her monthly column, “The Natural Explanation,” has highlighted high-caliber wildlife photographers and human influences on the environment. She has also worked in television production for public broadcasting and various other channels. With a degree in molecular and cell biology from Cornell University and an MFA in experimental and documentary arts from Duke University, Espelie taught courses in environmental issues and the documentary arts from 2012 to 2015 at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, the Nicholas School of the Environment, the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, and the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image. She now has a joint appointment at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Film Studies Program and the Department of Critical Media Practices.
Sommer Browning writes poems, draws comics, and says jokes in Denver. She is the author of Everything But Sex (Low Frequency Press, 2017), You’re On My Period (Counterpath, 2016), Backup Singers (Birds, LLC; 2014), and other things. With Elisa Gabbert and Brian Foley, she curates Death Horse, a monthly reading series. In 2017 she opened GEORGIA, a popup art space in her garage. She is a librarian.