Programs

Triple Canopy is pleased to present the American debut of “Kashmir,” a musical composition by the ensemble Dawn of Midi with a film by Prashant Bhargava. “Kashmir,” which was commissioned by Triple Canopy with the support of Chamber Music America, charts the relationships between trauma, memory, and technology through the prism of the conflict over the region of Kashmir. The concert will take place at Roulette in downtown Brooklyn on May 30, with performances at 8:00 and 9:30.

Dawn of Midi consists of Qasim Naqvi (percussion), Aakaash Israni (contrabass), and Amino Belyamani (piano), and melds free jazz, minimalism, and musique concrète. In four movements, through the modulation of a single melodic figure, “Kashmir” evokes the life cycle of a piece of information: inception, dissemination, reception, decay. This melodic figure—a bit of basic data modulated and warped by the accumulation of information—serves as the nucleus of “Kashmir.” As the film navigates the streets of Srinagar Kashmir and the proliferation of images of the conflict, the music shifts from distinct, mechanical patterns to billowing overtones anchored by propulsive rhythms, essaying to describe the course of history as experienced in the daily lives and memories of residents and their technological mediations.

“Kashmir” will be performed worldwide in 2012 and featured on Dawn of Midi’s second album, to be released by the venerable Thirsty Ear label later this year. Click here to view a trailer for “Kashmir,” here to download Dawn of Midi’s recent live EP, and here to listen to a recent set of recordings posted as a podcast by Triple Canopy.

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Dawn of Midi released its debut album First (Accretions) in 2010 to widespread critical acclaim. The ensemble has since been featured in Time Out New York, the Chicago Reader, The Wire, and DownBeat Magazine. Dawn of Midi has recently performed at Le Poisson Rouge, the Vision Festival, the Stone, Issue Project Room, and Iridium in New York and at concert halls and festivals around the world, including Gasteig Black Box in Munich, Germany, the Yokohama Improvised Music Festival in Japan, and the Serralves Foundation Documente-se! Festival in Porto, Portugal.

Prashant Bhargava is a film director and designer. His latest feature film, Patang, a family drama set against the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011. His short film Sangam premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004; it garnered several awards and distinctions and has been broadcast on the Sundance Channel and PBS. Bhargava is the recipient of a Copeland Fellowship from Amherst College and a Computer Arts Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

“Kashmir” is produced and presented by Triple Canopy, with the support of a Presenting Jazz grant from Chamber Music America and the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC); the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts’s Strategic Opportunity Stipends Program, administered by Garrison Art Center.

What is the logic of Anonymous, the online army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice? What is the relationship between the online message board 4chan, the legacy of Internet masquerade, and Occupy Wall Street? What does the thriving culture of anonymity online tell us about the depravations of Facebook and those who profit from it? Anthropologist and technology critic Gabriella Coleman and critic and programmer David Auerbach will discuss these questions and their recent articles in Triple Canopy with lawyer and technologist James Grimmelmann.

“Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief,” Coleman writes in her essay “Our Weirdness Is Free.” Coleman has spent the past four years studying Anonymous, the hacktivist group that has recently targeted the MPAA, the RIAA, the former government of Tunisia, and the Church of Scientology, and figured prominently in the Occupy Wall Street movement. “While Anonymous has not put forward any programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, ‘transparent’ social networking of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading individualism for collectivism.”

Anonymous emerged from the rich (and sordid) world of online message and image boards such as 4chan, which Auerbach identifies as A-culture: a space formed in opposition to recognition, prestige, and celebrity—in other words, what we so often imagine to define social life online. “The growth of these anonymous spaces marks the first wide-scale collective gathering of those who are alienated, disaffected, voiceless, and just plain unsocialized,” Auerbach writes in “Anonymity as Culture,” his incisive study of the denizens of the Internet’s nether regions and their attitudes toward homosexuality, suicide, hate, and Brazilian scat-porn. “These are people whose tweets will not make the headlines. They do not wish to create a platform that enables them to be heard by the world; they want to shut out the world.”

We Are All Anonymous also marks the publication of Triple Canopy‘s first e-book, Here Comes Nobody: Essays on Anonymous, 4chan and the Other Internet Culture, which compiles Auerbach and Coleman’s articles and is available for the Kindle.

This event is supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc. of Houston, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the New York Council for the Humanities.



Gabriella Coleman examines the ethics of online collaboration and institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press; she is currently working on a book about Anonymous and digital activism. She is the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University’s Department of Art History & Communication Studies.

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer living in New York. His essays have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, n+1, Triple Canopy, the Quarterly Conversation, and the Millions. He blogs at Waggish.

James Grimmelmann is an associate professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy. He studies how the law governing the creation and use of computer software affects individual freedom and the distribution of wealth and power in society. He writes about intellectual property, virtual worlds, search engines, online privacy, and other topics in computer and Internet law. He blogs at the Laboratorium.

Join us in celebrating Soft Power, the twenty-sixth issue of Bidoun, which considers art and patronage, state-sponsored media, cultural diplomacy, revolution and counterrevolution, nation and/or corporate branding, and potato chips as public relations.

Artist Iman Issa will discuss monuments and mysteries, among other things, with Bidoun contributing editor Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, who writes about Issa in "Radical Subtraction." Issa's work, which was part of the recent New Museum Triennial, "The Ungovernables," creates an eloquent language of forms to address unruly questions about place, power and memory.

Writer Anand Balakrishnan will read from his story “The Serendipity of Sand,” which ponders the ultimate civilizational soft-power gambit — the monumental ruin — and what that might have to do with the zebra’s beguiling stripes.

Bidoun senior editor Michael C. Vazquez will present outtakes from his essay "The Bequest of Quest," which contemplates the curious legacy of Cold War magazines funded by the American CIA, including the Indian literary magazine Quest and the African journal Transition.

A slide show of covers of nation-state self-help books, drawn from Shumon Basar and Parag Khanna's article “Soft Readers Prefer Hard Covers,” will be shown.

Throughout the evening, Bidoun's Tiffany Malakooti will play Iranian wedding trance and Lebanese happy softcore.