Scholar lecture: NEW OLD MEDIA: TAPE, TYPE, AND THE UNDISCOVERED COLLAGES OF HENRI CHOPIN

Manton Post-doctoral Fellow Caitlin R. Woolsey presents “New Old Media: Tape, Type, and the Undiscovered Collages of Henri Chopin.”

Henri Chopin (1922–2008) is known for mining expression beyond language in layered “audiopoems,” created by manipulating his voice and body noises with a portable tape recorder, and graphic concrete poems made using typewriter symbols. After his death, a trove of collages was uncovered that further challenge conventional distinctions between the acts of listening and looking. This talk considers how the medium of collage, favored by avant-garde circles in the early twentieth-century, offered a way to reimagine the relations among image, text, and sound in the postwar period. More specifically, how might the finitude of Chopin’s chosen materials—magnetic tape, paper and typewriter ink, found objects, and ephemeral detritus—reflect the obsolescence of media at the same time as the artist was confronting his own mortality?

TUESDAY
FEBRUARY 18, 2020
5:30 pm-6:30 pm

Auditorium