Spurse: Crooked River, in 1st and 3rd Persons - Saturday

Spurse, with collaborators David Jensenius and Sean White

(New York, NY)
presented by the Flats Oxbow Association

Tune in to the sonic path of the Cuyahoga River as it courses through the urban grid of Cleveland. Eavesdrop at live listening posts along the river to hear something unexpected. Engage with multiple histories of the river as you trace its flows through time.

About Crooked River, in 1st and 3rd Persons

International art collective Spurse, with collaborators David Jensenius and Sean White, present “Crooked River, 1st and 3rd persons,” a 48-hour recording and broadcasting project that re-engages the multiple legacies of the Cuyahoga River - its industrial fires, marine life losses, engineers’ ambitions, immigrant dreams, serpentine navigations - with its contemporary forms of agency.  The river’s complex template as an industrial, cultural and natural waterway is re-inscribed as a sonic way-finding system through the city grid of downtown Cleveland and the venue of the Ingenuity Festival.  

The project intertwines macro forces and events of this dynamic waterway with the performative dimensions of the festival, harnessing nimble recording and broadcasting technologies to enable new methods of dialogue.  Participants will encounter audio and video data collected from various means of research (including the water surface itself), brought to life via web, cell phone, radio broadcasts, eavesdropping and interactive landmarking, in an attempt to connect with and unite the past, present and future Cuyahoga River.

YOU are invited to be a part of the project: Share your stories of the Cuyahoga river. Become an important part of this project. What have you seen? What has happened? Please call and leave a message with your story. Call: 216-916-6464
 

About Spurse

Spurse is an open-ended group of individuals and organizations that work together as a type of experimental consultation service towards the development of new forms of engagement, practices and knowledges.  Spurse believes that there is a necessity today of working collectively to rethink all of the givens of our modes of being in the world so to develop new forms of practices and knowledges. They are interested in the development of new critical practices and experimental forms of wonder which complicates judgment and defeats easy essentializing habits. They are curious and thus they work to experimentally allow for divergent things and matters of concerns to emerge or inflect their own becomings. It is from this perspective that Spurse comes up with forms of interdisciplinary research methods and practices. Much of their work involves the setting up of various types of methodologies to first consult/probe/problematize the given and then collectively develop, with communities (both human and nonhuman), new practices and systems of engagement which can allow for new forms of knowledge production and systems of engagement. These endeavors often take on the form of a temporary research institute/laboratory or consultation service. Spurse has opened restaurants, installed archives in government buildings, built microbiological laboratories for museums, developed housing and clothing systems for migration, conducted urban research with collaborators on a global level, collaborated with dance companies, prepared musical performances, worked with communities to record oral histories, hosted symposia on various topics, organized community soccer games, and published books and DVDs.  Spurse has been working this way for the last ten years in various locations and situations internationally.  In their collaborations each collaborator brings many differing sets of skills -- some are computer scientists, urbanists, geographers, philosophers, artists, architects, designers, microbiologists, skateboarders etc. Spurse sees skills not as forms of elite expertise but as composing an open tool kit that allows engaged participation in the unfolding of the world, and the development of new modes of doing, acting, thinking, and building with others.