LIFEWORK
ESTAR(SER)
Events and Writings
ESTAR(SER) is an international collective of artists and scholars concerned with archival poetics and the history of practices of attention.
Listening to the Nightingale:
an Evening
with ESTAR(SER)
(October 2024)
Keynote at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, with Justin Smith-Ruiu, as part of the Coded Objects symposium held at the Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, Florence, Italy
Split the Lark:
the Order of the Third Bird
and the Limits of Critique
(February / March 2024)
Exhibition at the Brant Gallery (Boston) with the ESTAR(SER) collective
Talking Birds:
An Inquiry into the Mystery
of Radical Attention
(September 2023)
Live documentary theater performance by Hermione Spriggs and Kyle Berlin, based on interviews with alleged and suspected associates of the Order of the Third Bird; features a "woodpecker" who is one of my earliest artistic creations.
Metafiction and the Study
of History: Makerly
Knowledge in the Archive
(July 2023)
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice Vol. 27, Issue 3, with D. Graham Burnett, Jeff Dolven, and Justin E. H. Smith.
Pas de Trois: The Music of Attention and the Frye Trunk (June 2023)
A keynote talk, musical performance, and gallery walk at the Frye Museum, Seattle, with writer Brad Fox.
The Third, Meaning: ESTAR(SER) Installs
The Frye Collection
(10.15.2022 - 10.15.2023)
An artist-curated installation of The Frye Museum collection, led by D. Graham Burnett and Joanna Fiduccia. Catalog by D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen, and Joanna Fiduccia.
In Search of the Third Bird
(Strange Attractor Press, 2021)
The definitive account of the intertwined history of the scholarly organization ESTAR(SER) and the principal objects of their inquiry: The Order of the Third Bird. Editors: D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen, Justin E.H. Smith.
Kiss the Wing
Tank magazine, Issue 89 (Travel issue), 2021. "Kiss the Wing: the secretive operations of the Order of the Third Bird."
The Milcom Memorial
Reading Room
(Board of Trustees)
2018 – 2023
Opened in August of 2018, The Milcom Memorial Reading Room and Attention Library was a space devoted to the study of attention — to the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the focused mind and the directed senses. The installation housed a book collection, a portion of ESTAR(SER)’s archives, and an exhibition of archival objects bearing on the historicity of the so-called Order of the Third Bird.
The 2016 Joint Symposium: ESTAR(SER) at the Museum of Jurassic Technology – September 10, 2016
An exhibition of curious objects and a lecture series hosted by the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Culver City, CA). Co-chairs: D. Graham Burnett and Catherine Hansen.
Events Highlights
Selected workshops & performance-lectures done with ESTAR(SER):
* Arts Initiative Tokyo (Tokyo, Japan)
“Polishing the Spectacle of Myself: a Brief Introduction to the Work of ESTAR(SER)” (11/24, 2017).
* Salt (Galata) (Istanbul, Turkey)
“The Boğaziçi Rolls: Erich Auerbach and Practical Figuration in Istanbul, circa 1943” (1/28, 2016).
* Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA)
“The Nachtigall Convolute: Metempsychotic Figuration & the Matter of Lost Objects” (12/3, 2015).
* The New Museum (New York, NY)
“The Hale Transcripts” (5/12, 2015).
* The American University of Beirut
“The Second Philistine Protocol” (4/20, 2015).
* Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Istanbul, Turkey, with artist Sibel Horada)
“The Void: An Archaeological Survey” (8/22-31, 2014).
* MoMA P.S. 1 (New York, NY)
“The Rülek Scrolls and the Practice of the Door” (4/6, 2014).
* Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France)
“The Rülek Scrolls and the Practice of the Door” (3/15, 2014).
Communiqués
(Co-editor)
ESTAR(SER)'s blog. Selected entries: "Sanchōden: The Transmission of the Three Birds" (July 23, 2017); "The Ornithologists: Notes on A Walk Through H" (February 24, 2017); "Embodied Thought" (January 21, 2016); "The Gulls" (September 26, 2015); "Je Te Veille: The Masked Ball of Judex (1963)"; (March 3, 2015).
Twelve Theses on Attention
Written with the Friends of Attention at the workshop and symposium The Politics of Attention: Art, Time, Technology, Action (Mildred's Lane, PA; August 19-25, 2019), later published with Princeton University Press (2022), edited by D. Graham Burnett and Stevie Knauss.
Manifesto for the Freedom of Attention
I wrote this manifesto at the workshop and symposium The Politics of Attention: Art, Time, Technology, Action (Mildred's Lane, PA; August 19-25, 2019). Parts of it were later used in Twelve Theses on Attention.
October 176 (Spring 2021): On Burnout
"The Fuse; Its Refusal: Notes on the Politics of Burnout" (with the Friends of Attention)
Los Angeles Review of Books – Blog
“A Roundtable on COVID-19 and the Attention Economy” (with D. Graham Burnett, Carlos Montemayor, Gabriella Warren-Smith, and Josefina Massot)
EASTER MCCRANEY
Events and Writings
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The Public Domain Review, Inaugural article of new "Conjectures" series (August 2015)
"In Search of the Third Bird: Kenneth Morris and the Three Unusual Arts"
The Milcom Memorial Reading Room and Attention Library (Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, October 2018) – Inaugural essay of the Reading Room's opening
"Milcom the Metagnome"
CABINET
Articles for Cabinet Magazine
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MISCELLANEA
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