Object:Paradise, z.s. | |
![]() | |
![]() | |
Formation | November 2018 |
---|---|
Founders | Tyko Say, Jeff Milton |
Founded at | Prague, Czech Republic |
Type | Artist Collective, Non-governmental Organization |
Registration no. | 09829911 [1] |
Professional title | Performance and poetics collective revolving around the pragmatics of language. |
Headquarters | Prague, Czech Republic |
Tyko Say, Sandra Pasławska, Jaromír Lelek | |
Website | www |
Object:Paradise (stylized as OBJECT:PARADISE) is a performance and poetics collective based in Prague, Czech Republic, formed by writers Tyko Say and Jeff Milton in 2018. The non-profit collective produces anti-poetry happenings, installations, and other multi-media works regarding their manifesto which calls to make poetry readings more dynamic, interdisciplinary, and contextually-dependent, in the name of a language happening. [2]
Object:Paradise was formed in 2018 with the meeting of Tyko Say and Jeff Milton in the Ouky Douky cafe in Prague's Holešovice neighborhood where the two scheduled their first performance to involve characteristics of beat poetry, bebop jazz, and elements of theater, involving a cast composed majority of expats where English would be used as the lingua franca. This event would later be recognized as the first step of the collective's push to create a space where the poetry reading is promoted as a pragmatic performance rather than a literary event, prioritizing shared language and experience between audience and performer. [2] [3]
On 13 November 2019, Say and Milton self-released the collective's first album Object:Paradise Volume 1 at their event Channels of Communication where compiled VHS video from the Los Angeles collective Everything Is Terrible! was projected which would later be a common aesthetic and convention of their curations. [4] Later on 20 January 2020, a documentary of the event under the same name was released, signifying the first video production of their events and manifesto in the works. [5] [6]
In July 2020, the collective began their transition from hosting events in private spaces to public spaces, specifically at their event Tunnel Vision(s) which was held in the Starý Vítkovský tunel where three stages were erected and the performed language could be interpreted separately depending on the audience's position within the tunnel. The cast of the event was composed primarily of the expat community of Prague and featured various acts such as body grooming, interpretative dance, protest, installation, and readings. The event would later be a critical happening in the writing of the collective's manifesto which would not only prioritize an interdisciplinary approach to poetics, but also highlight the importance of the space in which it occurs. [7] [8]
In 2020, the collective's second film, Oject:Praha, was released. Premiering at Prague Microfestival [9] and later screened at the Versopolis Festival of Hope, the film documented scenes of Tunnel Vision(s) as well as other happenings in Prague from 2019-2020. [10]
In April and May 2021, the collective had its first curated language installation, titled Now Showing with the New York-based Flow chart foundation where a curation of texts were projected from a high rise balcony before the Žižkov Television Tower in Prague. The installation featured texts from eight writers: Tyko Say, Marc Fischer, Michael Ashkin, Jason Geistweidt, David Levi Strauss, Kay Rosen, Max Goldfarb, and Norman Douglas. The objective of the projection, which occurred during the Covid-19 Pandemic, was to "bring poetry back to an accessible space: on the way to the store". [7] Tyko Say's piece titled We was in turn projected in Hudson, New York in March of the same year. [11] [12]
In February 2022 the collective released their second album, OBJECT:PARADISE Volume II, on Seattle-based record label Sifter Grim, featuring over 20-Prague based artists and focusing primarily on topics concerning Prague's Žižkov neighborhood. [13] The composition was released alongside a documentary, Object:Praha II, on the filming of the project. [14] [15]
In August 2023 the collective's first international language happening was co-curated by Visegrád collectives ARS LATRANS, Poland; Slam Poetry SK, Slovakia; and ArtPortal, Hungary. The curation featured over fifty performances across Poland and Czech Republic in three events--one of them occurring on a train between Prague to Kraków. The event was funded by the visegrad fund, and was documented in Object:paradise's fourth film OBJECT:PRAHA : IV : Performance, Deformance, Reformance which would later be screened in the four countries. [16]
Since June 2022, the collective has published a monthly zine titled KROTCH which features anonymous works from their collective and wider community. The objective of the magazine is to promote an anonymous poetics that can be looked at instead of being read. The publication features poetry, satirical reportage, missed connections, and collages. The print-only magazine is distributed in a samizdat method to prioritize community circulation. [21]
Poetry, also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle.
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate oceanic climate, with relatively warm summers and chilly winters.
Jaroslav Seifert was a Czech writer, poet and journalist. Seifert was awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his poetry which endowed with freshness, sensuality and rich inventiveness provides a liberating image of the indomitable spirit and versatility of man".
A happening is a performance, event, or situation art, usually as performance art. The term was first used by Allan Kaprow during the 1950s to describe a range of art-related events.
Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a public in a fine art context in an interdisciplinary mode. Also known as artistic action, it has been developed through the years as a genre of its own in which art is presented live. It had an important and fundamental role in 20th century avant-garde art.
Performance poetry is a broad term, encompassing a variety of styles and genres. In brief, it is poetry that is specifically composed for or during a performance before an audience. During the 1980s, the term came into popular usage to describe poetry written or composed for performance rather than print distribution, mostly open to improvisation.
The Language poets are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Stephen Rodefer, Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Mandel, Bob Perelman, Rae Armantrout, Alan Davies, Carla Harryman, Clark Coolidge, Hannah Weiner, Susan Howe, James Sherry, and Tina Darragh.
Russian formalism was a school of thought literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Athletic Club Sparta Praha, commonly known as Sparta Prague and Sparta Praha, is a professional football club based in Prague.
Žižkov is a cadastral district of Prague, Czech Republic.
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and since 2020 is the ongoing artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches. He is also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He has published 32 books including ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008), 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2011), and 'Capital: New York Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015). He also is the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.
Mohammed Bennis is a Moroccan poet and one of the most prominent writers of modern Arabic poetry. Since the 1970s, he has enjoyed a particular status within Arab culture. Muhsin J al-Musawi states that "Bennis’ articulations tend to validate his poetry in the first place, to encapsulate the overlapping and contestation of genres in a dialectic, that takes into account power politics whose tropes are special. As a discursive threshold between Arab East and the Moroccan West, tradition and modernity, and also a site of contestation and configuration, Muhammad Bennis' self-justifications may reveal another poetic predilection, too."
Anti-poetry is an art movement that attempts to break away from the normal conventions of traditional poetry. Early proponents of anti-poetry include the Chilean Nicanor Parra and the Greek Elias Petropoulos.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.
Net-poetry is a development of net.art, involving poetry. This kind of experimental art was born in several different cities and countries around 1995.
Milan Knížák is a Czech performance artist, sculptor, noise musician, installation artist, political dissident, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art associated with Fluxus.
Micha Cárdenas, stylized as micha cárdenas, is an American visual and performance artist who is an assistant professor of art and design, specializing in game studies and playable media, at the University of California Santa Cruz. Cárdenas is an artist and theorist who works with the algorithms and poetics of trans people of color in digital media.
Andy Field is an artist, writer, curator and academic based in London.
Playerist Poetry Magazine was an annual journal of poetics and graphic arts based in London (UK). Playerist was founded in 2011 by writer, composer and publisher Martin Slidel, and ran until 2018. Its patrons were Jillian Miller FRSA and poet and actor Amy Neilson Smith.
Zorka Ságlová (1943–2003) was a Czech textile artist, painter, and performance artist.