A Whirlwind of Digital Humanities

October 05, 2012

After submitting on a whim, I was invited to perform last weekend at the SLSA conference in Milwaukee, and I went. This was not a reasonable thing to do.

Friday

It was a whirlwind of a weekend. The piece, The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World, as Represented by a Post-Obsolete Book About Dance, requires a long list of props, but all I took along was a shopping list:

overhead projector

party hats

noise makers

an old book about dance

10-page printed handouts

tweed jacket

whiskey

I flew in on Friday night, drank a bottle of sake, and commandeered my friend, Micah, as a driver for the next day.

Saturday

Overhead projectors are not easy to find, but Micah tracked one down at a party-supply rental shop on the other side of town. When we arrived, they had to dust it off and test the bulb. Lucky for us, it worked.

And our luck lasted the entire day. Apart from a few problems with printers and staplers, we found everything with time to spare.

handouts! — (1) Two trips to FedEx & two shitty staplers, but we have handouts. (2) Party supplies & a cute boy behind the counter at Walgreen’s. (3) Goodwill has tweed & an old book for me, and three gilded soccer trophies for Micah. (4) A bread knife helps make this old western more anonymous. (5) Just enough to whiskey for a 10-minute piece. (6) “Mad GAY” graffiti conversation above the urinal (unrelated).

party supplies! — (1) Two trips to FedEx & two shitty staplers, but we have handouts. (2) Party supplies & a cute boy behind the counter at Walgreen’s. (3) Goodwill has tweed & an old book for me, and three gilded soccer trophies for Micah. (4) A bread knife helps make this old western more anonymous. (5) Just enough to whiskey for a 10-minute piece. (6) “Mad GAY” graffiti conversation above the urinal (unrelated).

We had to sneak into the conference, because neither of us had registered, carried our gear upstairs to Frontier Airlines Center 201C, I performed for ten minutes, and flew out again the next day.

The other performances included Jeremy Douglass, Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, Patrick LeMieux, Clarissa Lee, Amy Letter, M.D. Coverley, Mark Marino, Nick Montfort, and Stuart Moulthrop. A great group!

Sunday

Frontier Airlines flight 577.

There is video of the performance, thanks to the wonderful Mark Marino. You can’t see things very well, but you can follow along on the website and put all the pieces together. It will be just like you were there with handout in hand!