391 - Three Nine One - dada manifestos, dada art and music (original) (raw)

391 rises from its own ashes, a phoenix of pixels, algorithms, and echoes of ink. Revue Part 1 devours ten issues of 391 magazine and spits them out as a kaleidoscope of chaos, AI-twisted visions, and glitch-born revelations. Inspired by the wild spirits of Picabia, Tzara, Höch and others, aided by the digital prophets DALL·E and Stable Diffusion, it defies death by remixing it.

This is not nostalgia – it’s necromancy. Francis’ ghost waltzes with data, Duchamp’s urinals now flow with code. Forget the past: this is the portal to MADA, where madness meets method, and the future cracks open like a dadaist’s egg.

391-48: 2-2-2-2-2

Editor: babel

Contributors: Samantha du Raeno, Taylor Phillips, Jenny Asprey, babel

22/02/2022

391-47: Karawane

Editor: babel

01/06/2016

Infinite dadaist phonetic poetry: multiple authors read Hugo Ball’s Karawane. Add your own line to join the chorus.

According to Hugo Ball, inventor of dadaist phonetic poetry, we must withdraw into the deepest alchemy of words, reserving to poetry its “most sacred ground”. Illogical phonic sound, abstract poetry, was taken up by dadaism from Italian and Russian futurism. In Zurich, at the Cabaret Voltaire, founded in 1916 by five friends, Hugo Ball Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck, the first simultaneous poems by Henri-Martin Barzun and Jarry’s “Ubu Roi” were recited.(1)

On 23rd June 1916 Hugo Ball read his “Verses without words”. Dressed in azure, scarlet and golden cardboard, with a cylindrical shaman’s hat on his head, as Ball described it: “The accents became heavier, expression increased with the intensification of the consonants. I soon noted that my means of expression, when I wanted to be serious (and I wanted to be at all costs) no longer corresponded to the pomp of the staging… to the right on the lectern I had “Labadas Gesang die Wolken” (Labada’s song to the clouds) and on the left “Elefantenkarawane” (The caravan of the Elephants)… the dragging rhythm of the elements had permitted me a last crescendo, but how to continue to the end? I then noticed that my voice, which apparently had no other choice, was assumed an ancient cadence of sacerdotal lament in the style of the masses sung in the Catholic churches of the east and west. I do not know what this music inspired in me, but I began to sing my sequences of vowels in recitative liturgical manner. The electric light was turned off as arranged and I was carried away covered in perspiration like a magical bishop who disappears into the abyss”.(2)

1 Ubuweb

2 Hugo Ball, Die Flucht aus der Zeit (1927), edited by John Elderfield as Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (1996)

391-46: DaliKrab

Editor: Justynn Tyme

09/03/2013 (last update: 08/04/2024)

DaliKrab Day is a fringe holiday. It’s about enjoying who you are and what you do. It’s about having fun and creating something on pure impulse. It’s at least 28 hours long. Hell, it can one day long or 366 days long. It’s not about pride, it’s about Legos dipped in chocolate. It’s about standing on top of an open umbrella in a downpour. It’s about immersing yourself in yourself. Post your submissions to dalikrabday@gmail.com

Submissions from previous years can be seen on Instagram, Blogspot and Tumblr.

391-45: The 4th Search

Editor: Sebastian Elk

26/04/2012

Moderari et tueri omnia: Questions for the 4th Replacement Search.

391-44: dada.tv

Editors: Justynn Tyme, babel

01/01/2011 (last update: 7/07/2015)

Turn on, tune in, dada out.

Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of dada. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present – turn on, tune in, dada out.

391-43: BLAST-UP!

Editors: Katy Price/babel

Contributors: Wyndham Lewis

30/11/2009 (last update: 29/01/2015, version 1.2), Cambridge, UK

BLAST-UP! is a computer game, a poem and a tribute to Vorticism, the English response to continental avant-garde provocations in the years just before the First World War.

Conceived by Katy Price and programmed by babel, BLAST-UP! is loaded with vocabulary drawn from sources in British mass culture such as Heat Magazine and the Daily Mirror.

The player of BLAST-UP! fires at these invading words as they swarm across the screen, accumulating a list of ‘Blessed’ and ‘Blasted’ terms.

At game over, BLAST-UP! prints a manifesto in the style of the short-lived Vorticist publication, Blast, produced by Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis from 1912-1914.

BLAST-UP! has been created to bring the spirit and ideas of Vorticism into contact with a wider audience. It also aims to extend the capacities of digital poetry, by exploring the extent of reader / user involvement in creating output and supplying input names and terms.

BLAST-UP! invites your text suggestions: please post them here as comments.

Festival of Ideas, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK (10/2009)

391-42: Reconstructing Mayakovsky

Editor: Illya Szilak

Contributors: Pelin Kirca

01/03/2009, New York, USA

Set in the future, the novel revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, the novel imagines a world where uncertainty and tragedy have finally been eliminated through technology. Like the novel, the site uses appropriated objects (image, sound, text) and combines elements of historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, and the detective novel, to tell the story of Mayakovsky in a radically different way.

391-41: 45 letters to Magnussons before the spring…

Editor: Annabel Castro

13/04/2007, Mexico City, Mexico

This net.art project is a search for the physicality behind data, in an allegory on the behavior of spam. It questions whether only advertisements have the right to track our data and contact us in second person using the facts they unearth about us?

I explore digital geography, in the analog world. I write to people whose data I find in the virtual stream at the physical and real spaces where they are. I take pictures of the handwritten signs in my letters, signs that speak about me, and I send them in physical form to persons that enter into contact with this “intromission” as they rip open the envelope. I write to a remote name about what I hope we both have: existence.

*45 letters to Magnussons* on line returns the data to where it came from, but with new layers. All the jpeg and html files that document the letters are named for the persons I send them to. This means that the files can appear as links when looking up the person’s name on a search engine. The web page is a public document of the private epistolary event between each Magnusson and me.

391-40.4: WP

01/01/2007, New York, USA

The 404 wordpressed… (at least) a post per day for (at least) 404 days.

391-40: universal wish

Editors: Magda Bielesz (concept, images) and babel (coding, images)

01/08/2006 (last update: 24/04/2022), Warsaw, Poland

Make a wish… the best wishes will be turned into images. In English and Polish.

iS.CaM Web Biennial 2007, Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Turkey (3/2007)
Radio Bis, Poland (2/2007)
Gazeta, Poland (1/2007)
Aijima Art Center, Tokyo, Japan (10/2006)
MoKS, Mooste, Estonia (9-10/2006)

391-39: Vertovia

Editor: babel

31/07/2006, Montreal, Canada

Remix of Vertov’s 1929 film ‘Man With A Movie Camera’. Welcome to the land of Vertovia, where a person cannot tell whether he or she is being observed, and so will behave at all times as if they are. In English and Russian.

FILE 2007 – Electronic Language International Festival, SESI Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil (8-9/2007)

391-38: Urbanalities

Editors: babel vs Escha

23/01/2006, Montreal, Canada

An urban short story-poem-animated comic-musical collaboration. The text is generated randomly as you watch, so you will never see exactly the same story twice.

more information

CultureNet (11/2009)
Digital Fringe, Melbourne, Australia (9-10/2007)
FILE RIO 2007 – Electronic Language International Festival, Oi Futuro Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (3-4/2007)
Selected Finalist, Videomedeja 10th International Video Festival, Museum of Voivodina, Novi Sad, Serbia (12/2006)
With the ELO collection vol 1 in Autostart: a festival of digital literature, Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA (10/2006)
FILE 2006 – Electronic Language International Festival, SESI Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil (8/2006)
Jury Selected Work (‘net art’ category), Eighth International Digital Art Exhibit and Colloquium, Havana, Cuba (6/2006)
Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 (CD-ROM), The Electronic Literature Organization, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA (3/2006)

391-37: Zinhar

Editor: babel

Contributors: Serkan Işin, Derya Vural, Deniz Tuncel, Baris Cetinkol, Asli Serin, Abraham Abulafia, Keith Martin, Escha

05/05/2005 (last update: 23/10/2005), Istanbul, Turkey

“Imagine a day when any living thing can be identified accurately and rapidly to the species level using a hand-held device the size of a cellular phone. A day when the biodiversity of an entire nation can be inventoried and monitored… thanks to an ambitious effort by a growing consortium of scientists, it is poised to become reality. The method that will enable this advance is ‘DNA barcoding’, an approach that employs a small fragment of DNA, a portion of a single gene, to provide a unique identifier – a ‘DNA barcode’ – for each living species on Earth.” – Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding (‘Barcode of Life’ project)

One of the most important components of the ‘Barcode of Life’ initiative is the construction of a public reference library of species identifiers which could be used to assign unknown specimens to known species. This database will lead to the ‘Life Barcoder’, linking biological identification to developments in DNA sequencing, electronics and information science.

In order to construct the database, DNA barcode data must first be obtained from all known species. Perhaps it is no surprise then that barcodes – designed to tag physical objects with information in order to be processed by computers – are now being extended to humans in the form of ‘bio-barcodes’ that can be implanted or injected. Despite the ethical concerns about this surreptitious physical integration of the digital into the biological, a number of companies are rushing to patent human bar code systems in a market already estimated to be worth $100 billion.

Both these developments are at the root of Zinhar – a representation of a future handheld bioscanner that is broken and incomplete, but can be fixed by the user in order to complete its scan for life.

391-37: Zinhar is a collaboration between Zinhar and 391.org in Turkish and English.

‘Web-work’ category Finalist, Seoul Net Festival, Seoul, Korea (5-7/2006)
HyperRhiz issue 1 (12/2005)
Jury Selected Work, International Festival of Electronic Art 404, Rosario, Argentina (11-12/2005)
VAD Video and Digital Arts International Festival, Girona, Spain (11/2005)
Electrofringe 2005, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia (9/2005)
International Media Art Festival, Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia (8/2005)
Prog:ME, 1st Festival of Electronic Media of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (7/2005)

391-36: singaporeasy

11/11/2004, Cheltenham, UK

Singaporeasy is a hypertext story based on an experience of a stopover in a strange city. It is a cross between a travel guide and a jumble of trivial memories and fleeting ideas. It contains narratives, which overlap and inform one another but never conclude. It invites the reader to click on the links, to choose their own path, to wander.

Singaporeasy is part of ongoing research by Void:Projects into ways of using hypertext to create digital scripts for use with live theatre work. For more information on this and future projects contact Liz Swift.

391-34: Dadaventuras

Editor: babel

Contributors: Maria Colino

24/02/2004 (last update: 21/04/2004), Madrid, Spain

Dadaventuras is an experiment in aleatory narrative, using comic book conventions to generate stories from 8 distinct but overlapping perspectives.

The language of our narrative is hybrid (from the greek ‘hybris’, outrage or violation): composed of parts from different languages, in this case our own blend of ‘spanglish’. This intentionally recalls the Dadaists use of nonsense to express dissatisfaction with a world society that continued its insane addiction to war. But don’t feel limited by our nincompoopery. You can use your own text as the basis for the generated narratives, or one of 8 classic texts, or just turn the text off completely and make the story up in your head.

Jury Selected Work, International Festival of Electronic Art 404, Rosario, Argentina (11-12/2005)
II International Exhibit Of Digital Art ORILLA#05, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, Argentina (8/2005)
Prog:ME, 1st Festival of Electronic Media of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (7/2005)
FLUXUS 2005 – 5th International Film Festival On The Internet, Brazil (5/2005)
Thailand New Media Arts Festival 2005, Bangkok, Thailand (2/2005)
Special Mention, 3rd Annual Gangart Awards, Australia (10/2004)
VI Salon Internacional de Arte Digital, Cuba (6/2004)
Random (4/2004)

391-32: Twentythree

Editor: babel

Contributors: Charlie Chaplin, Benny Goodman, Gale Henry, Max Linder, Mabel Normand, Panoptica

23/02/2003 (last update: 26/08/2011), London, UK

391 at the speakeasy. No issues of 391 were published in 1923: twentythree is a playful speculation of what Francis Picabia may have been doing in his time away.

Electronic Language International Festival (FILE) 2004, São Paulo, Brazil (11/2004)
neural.it review (4/2003)

391-31: Videodynamism

Editors: artEficial / babel

Contributors: Hans Arp, Fernand Léger, Hans Richter, Kurt Schwitters

09/09/2002 (last update: 07/03/2003), Montreal, Canada

In 1913 Anton Bragaglia contrasted his notion of a futurist ‘photodynamism’ with the contemporary methods of cinematography and chronophotography: “We are not interested in the precise reconstruction of movement, which has already been broken up and analysed. We are involved only in the area of movement which produces sensation.” Photodynamism records images in a distorted state “since images themselves are inevitably transformed in movement”.

‘Videodynamism’ is similarly unconcerned with perfect reproduction or the moment: “our aim is to make a determined move away from reality, since cinematography, photography and chronophotography already exist to deal with mechanically precise and cold reproduction.” We see the images devolve into broken idealised forms, and without user interaction, they eventually fade away completely.

The intention is to capture something more essential, to represent the motion itself, its form and volume in space across time: “We seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion”. Videodynamism takes account of both the motion of the subject and the motion of the screen upon which the subject is depicted. This may represent the movement of the eye around its visual field, as well as the dynamism of screens/windows in a digital environment.

391-30: 404

Contributors: artEficial, babel, Binnorie, Champking, Cheeky, Lilly Von, Sarawut Chutiwongpeti, Royce Icon, Piero Manzoni, Phooty Raskel

03/09/2002 (last update: 25/02/2004), New York, USA

391-29: Access Points

Contributors: Jenny Asprey, babel, Beta, Ben De Lisi, Panoptica, Phage, Juli Singh, Inese Vepa

23/04/2002, South Pasadena, USA

A geographic parody of the social, political and cultural practices that function as access points in an average city.

Nowadays, production is cheap and easy. The bottleneck is not so much in recording an album or printing a book, as it is getting your album or book ‘out there’. With this in mind, those who control the points of access to information and products are increasingly the most powerful and important people and corporations in the world. Clearly a television station programmer or a newspaper editor has a great deal of control over what people learn and think, but there are even more critical access points. For example, on September 11th, the phone companies limited the number of circuits available that people could use to contact people in New York so that emergency workers would have reliable communication. In that situation, the action was justified, but it demonstrates the unbelievable power of the person who flipped the switch to cut one of the world’s biggest cities off from the outside world.

Access points exist in almost every area of our lives, from search engines to supermarkets. They are necessary for the organization of all the information, products, and people in the world, but as they become more concentrated and more centralized, great amounts of power and influence are concentrated and centralized with them. Every business on this map represents a point of access that is at once necessary and problematic.

Digital Visions, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (6/2004)

391-27: Level 7

Editor: You

22/02/2002 (last update: 21/11/2021), Cambridge, UK

391-26: Tunnel

Editors: Shixa, babel

20/02/2002 (last update: 06/06/2006), Philadelphia, USA

An audio-visual collage featuring the work of EJ Marey, Francis Darwin, David Hamel and others to explore the concept of a tunnel.

391-25: Binary

Editor: babel

Contributors: Jane Jones, Georg Lakoç, Samantha du Raeno

01/10/2001, Riga, Latvia

“All opposite elements are like this: because of certain conditions, they are on the one hand opposed to each other and on the other hand they are interconnected, interpentrating, interpermeating and interdependent; this character is called identity.” – Mao Tse-Tung

391-23: Monument

v2 – Editor: babel

03/02/2023, London

v1 – Editor: mycat8u

06/06/2001, Jerusalem

391-22: Digital Divide

Editor: Lilith

Contributors: artEficial / babel

01/05/2001 (last update: 25/02/2003), Washington DC, USA

391-21: AntiTram

Editor: babel

Contributors: Shixa, Phage, Escha, Juan M. Hernandez, Cheeky, Taylor Phillips, Inese Vepa, Cynical Blues, artEficial,DALL·E

01/01/2001 (last update: 2022), London, UK

AntiTram was formed in the spring of 1995 to prevent an insidious Cambridge tramsprawl. It continues to say NO! to trams.

391-19: Journal de l’Instantanéisme

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: André Breton, René Magritte, Pierre De Massot, E.L.T. Mesens

08/1924, Paris, France

391-18: Black and White

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Louis Aragon, André Breton, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Pierre De Massot, Ezra Pound, Erik Satie, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Laurence Vail

07/1924, Paris, France

391-17: Pierre de Massot

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: André Breton, Robert Desnos, Man Ray, Erik Satie

06/1924, Paris, France

391-16: Superréalisme

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Catawi-Menasse

05/1924, Paris, France

391-15: Le Pilhaou-Thibaou

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Céline Arnauld, Georges Auric, Suzanne Beguin, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Christian, Jean Cocteau, Jean Crotti, Paul Dermee, Funny-Guy (Francis Picabia), Pierre de Massot, Clément Pansaers, Ezra Pound, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Erik Satie, Christian Schad, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Walter Serner, Guillermo De Torre, Edgar Varese, Georges Verly

10/07/1921, Paris, France

391-14: Copie d’un autographe d’Ingres

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Maurice Aisen, Céline Arnauld, Hans Arp, Marguerite Buffet, Serge Charchoune, Jean Cocteau, Jean Crotti, Paul Dermee, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Marie De La Hire, Man Ray, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Walter Serner, Tristan Tzara, Edgar Varese

11/1920, Paris, France

391-13: Ce numéro est entouré

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tzara

07/1920, Paris, France

391-12: Tableau Dada

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Louis Aragon, Céline Arnauld, André Breton, Marguerite Buffet, Paul Dermee, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Walter Serner, Phillipe Soupault, Tristan Tzara

03/1920, Paris, France

391-11: calendrier cinéma

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Pierre Albert-Birot, André Breton, Max Jacob, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Walter Serner, Tristan Tzara

02/1920, Paris, France

391-10: La bicyclette archevêque

Editor: Francis Picabia

Contributors: Guillaume Apollinaire, Hans Arp, Henri Asselin, Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia, Albert Gleizes, Georges De Pawlowski, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Tristan Tzara, Clément Vautel

12/1919, Paris, France