bibliodérive

Highlighted Situations prior to the 2023 Bibliodérive (aka happenings, events, gatherings, performances) are listed below.

Surrealist Treasure Hunt

Thursday: 9:00 am - 9:00 pm, drop in anytime

6th floor Sharp

The members of the surrealism seminar have created treasure hunts for each other, each leading to an object in the library that seems intuitively to belong to the person in question. You can find the instructions for the searches, and follow the treasure hunts yourselves. Stop by the front desk at the library for more information.

Library As Site 

Thursday: 9:00 am - 4:00 pm, performance at 3:45 pm

6th floor Sharp

As a substitute for the day, Alberto Aguilar will direct Ginger Krebs’ class Body as Site. Students will inhabit the library for the entire class day (9am-4pm). They will come in with empty hands only their bodies and treat the library as raw material for making work. They may use the picture files, record players, game boards, library furniture, bound journals or other oddities for props or research guides as we develop this performance. Throughout the day they will play and do tangential research that will culminate as a performance that will take place at 3:45pm. Open to guest participation.
 

The Telegraphic Path

Thursday: 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm - Open to anyone to participate
6th floor Sharp
if vision has replaced touch

as the dominate form of non-verbal world making

maybe we can take our atrophied muscles

back to the drawing board

1. a map of the library

2. dice

3. a drawing pad

4. a marker

5. people in a line

6. one input

7. one output
 

A Wall To Be Read

First-year students from the Contemporary Practices course, Research Studio II: Words to be Looked At, create posters to cover the elevator wall of the Flaxman Library. Inspired by their engagements with the library’s holdings, students use their posters to share their favorite books and journals, question language barriers, highlight cultural diversity, and prompt visitors to browse the Flaxman’s holdings through their works’ multifaceted interests and expressions. Students benefited from a workshop with the Flaxman’s Information Literacy Librarian, Mackenzie Salisbury, and the generous support of Jennifer Keats and the Service Bureau for the production of the risograph posters.
 

Read as a Whole

In a site specific installation for ArtBash 2022, Ariel Zhang created a collection of concrete books that focus on the book’s functionality and symbolism rather than its content. A book is generally acknowledged as a container that envelopes texts, conveys messages, contains knowledge, raises curiosity, stores memory, records history, and freezes time. As we all read, write, record, and reflect, books are one of the essential components of the mundane. This installation aims to transform the “visible” into the “invisible” to ponder on the meaning of books, and to present a poetic approach to perceiving an unreadable book, suggesting a metaphysical embodiment of books. What truly matters is not the content but the book’s symbolic meaning and functionality.
 

After Party

Elena Ailes’ RS Nightmoves class is creating an oracle using a simple 3 card Tarot read to unveil students’ narrative destinies, their own  hero’s journey, and mis-reads! Time limit of 7 minutes to scour the library for resources to interpret their own twisted plot to bring back to the Xerox oracle, where they will be guided through image stretching, language redacting, sloppy collage and more to make their own simple codex (uh, zine.) Take your new codices home to ponder, or slip one back into the stacks to forever live in book heaven.
 

Sanctioned and Unsanctioned Knowledge

Knowledge is housed in sites with high gates that produce an inside and an outside; and, it is guarded by gatekeepers who vigilantly police against uncredentialed outsiders accessing it. Rhoda Rosen’s Socially Engaged Art class offer this multivalent biblioderive intervention as social practice, as a form of art that is not a commodity but a medium of human connection by seeking to remove barriers to knowledge for those excluded from it by addressing:
 

POLICY - The crafting of new policies that aim to remove barriers to access at the Flaxman Library and other areas of SAIC will be shared with guests for feedback and review and presented to the relevant staff/administrators.

INFORMATION - A document comprising little known facts about what can be accessed at SAIC/AIC will be distributed to all library guests.

COMMUNITY - an evening of developing intentional belonging for all guests to the library.

Chaos, but a bit of comfort

Sadie Wood’s RSI class will takeover the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection by installing works that respond to the work of Edward Owens–paper collages made with discarded library materials and films–made in the spirit of experimentation. Owens was an SAIC student in the 60’s, a posthumously celebrated artist known primarily through his experimental films. This exhibition shows a complementary side to his work, layering the gaze and the gazed-upon. An exhibition of Edward Owens’ work is on display in the 5th floor, Sharp exhibition cases.

Musical Matter

Join Emily Hoyler’s FYSI: Music and Society class as they find examples of music-containing objects throughout the library. Explore unexpected and diverse music sources with intellectual curiosity. Listen to various audio examples in the library’s AV playback room (603 Sharp). 
 

Covert Camouflage

Kevin Kaempf’s Professional Practice class will identify group exhibition catalogs and create tip-in spreads featuring their own work which mimic the look, design, and feel of the catalogs to create a dialog between their work and the artists included in the original exhibition. Open to class members only. 
 

Halloween on Video

Come watch some spooky, campy, Halloween-themed titles from the collection of the Video Data Bank! The screening program will include “Psycho III: The Musical,” Tom Rubnitz’s drag remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” “Possibly in Michigan” by Cecelia Condit, and “Trick or Treat Pony” by Ben Coonley.
 

SAIC Free Radio Dance Party 

As part of bibliodérive, this Halloween Free Radio is occupying the library’s classroom for a one hour lunchtime dance party featuring student Djs. Costumes optional.
 

Soft, Still, and Sleep    

Students in Jade Yumang’s class “Move! With Every Fiber of Your Being,” a course on fiber/craft and performance, have made impromptu soft sculptures and will sleep with these pieces in the library. This performance is based on course readings  Ric Allsopp’s “On Sleep” and Max Kozloff’s “The Poetics of Softness.”  Open to class members only. 
 

A Path of Possibilities

With a piece of paper and pencil on hand, have a partner lead you to an isle blindfolded. Once an isle is chosen, follow your partner and have them choose a random book from the isle for you. From only observing the cover of the book, write a description to what you think the book will be about. After you’re finished, place the piece of paper inside the book. Open to everyone. 
 

Choose Your Own 16mm Film Festival

Students in Sid Branca Cook and Yaloo Ji Yeon Lim's Media Practices Moving Image class have selected a number of 16mm experimental films housed in the Flaxman Library to screen for their class. Not all films suggested may be projected due to duration and condition. Open to class members only.   

Trip to the Moon (1902), Georges Melies, sound, 11min

Making a Living (1914), Charles Chaplin, silent, 10min    

Night on Bald Mountain (1993), Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, sound, 8min

Nymphlight (1956), Joseph Cornell, silent, 7min

The Midnight Party (1969), Joseph Cornell, silent, 11min  

Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1974), Bruce Conner, sound, 5min

Swish (1982), Jean Sousa, silent, 3 min.

Mallact Macha: Macha’s Curse (1992), Rose Bond, sound, 9min

Story of the Western World, or Mom and the Arabs (1980), Rebecca Abbott, sound, 18min  
 

Flasch Dance Backwards Records
Join us for the casual and occasional dance party series, Flasch Dance, in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection Reading Room. Bibliodérive theme: spooky songs and backwards messages.
 

Brexit Jeopardy

October 31st [2019] is also Brexit day in the UK. Students from Abbey Odunlami’s class have explored how Brexit will affect artists in Europe. A Jeopardy style table will be set up in which participants will pick a question and look for the answers in a series of selected articles. All bibliodérive participants are welcome.
 

Exquisite Corpse Theater – Nightmoves 4 Bibliodérive
Communal Zombiefication
Performance
Inspired by the drawing game ‘exquisite corpse’, experimental writing and improv theater, NIGHTMOVES (Elena Ailes RSII class) is inviting the public to join a durational performance. Their play will be guided by a series of dérive-esque prompts, random text generators, occasional interruptions of mayhem, and, of course, zombies and voice modulation. ‘Dialogue’, will be created by talktotransformer.com. Narrative text will be generated by inputs derived from the library itself, via book titles, word salad, dart throwing and rune casting. This algorithm, like all algorithms written by dominant social sub groups, may produce texts that verge on the racist or sexist! If so, declare it unfit for this world and destroy it as you see fit. Destruction supplies available. To perform you must present as a zombie – zombie supplies are available. Extremeness of zombiehood is flexible.

Stamp Out the Patriarchy
Artist Dano Wall has created a stamp that transforms the $20 from a Jackson, into a Tubman. Harriet Tubman was a “disrupter” who led the underground railroad and dared to think differently about race and gender in the United States. In Wall’s words “…Who we choose to honor as a society affects the moral attitudes that are baked into us as we grow up. The impact that seeing the face of Harriet Tubman staring back at you from a $20 bill should not be underestimated. This sort of representation can subtly but deeply affect someone’s conception of themselves and their place in society. The slightly subversive nature of it being currency that’s been hand-stamped by another human makes a discovery of one of these bills all the more joyous.”  Join us in changing the face of history – stop by and stamp your own $20 or use our fake twenties to commemorate Tubman!  

Microbookmarking

Individuals passing between rows 4 and 5 (NA958 to NB497) are to select a book of their choice and make window cut-outs on paper that would serve as a bookmark. Microbookmarking is a term that Megan Nugroho made for this action that allows for a unique revealing of words from pages of a book. “Is this highlighting a certain part or is it censoring the rest?“