Events
Secret Wars Party with Short Attention Span Theater
Saturday, April 6, 7pm
At 7pm, join us for a final ‘surveillance’ under the watchful eye of spies, cameras and avian informers, present, of course, for your own good and the Homeland’s too. There will also be spy music and wine to loosen lips.*
*We are required to inform you that your words and actions may be documented and used against you. No warrants required.
At 8pm, David Goren, Secret Wars contributor, will present the radio-inflected soundscape, The Short Attention Span Audio Theater, featuring excerpts from Antimatter, a sci-fi noir tale of shortwave radio espionage written by the mysterious C.M. Stanbury.
Spy music mix created by the polymusicologist Friese Undine.
Shipbuilding Workshop: a Battle Pass Project
Saturday, April 6 from 1-4pm
Location: the Waterfront Museum, 290 Conover Street, Pier 44, Red Hook
Free and open to children ages five and up with their families
Led by artist Eva Melas, this workshop explores the important role ships played in the Battle of Brooklyn. In the summer of 1776, Red Hook residents could see the imposing fleet of more than 400 British ships bearing down on Brooklyn. Gen. George Washington later rounded up humble vessels to make his retreat to Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights.
Participants in this family workshop will make their own improvised armada from objects found in Brooklyn today, such as coffee cups and cardboard packaging. Weather permitting, the toy boats will be test launched from the deck of the Waterfront Museum barge. [continue reading…]
The Atomic Priesthood with artist Bryan Wilson
Monday, April 1 at 7pm
Secret Wars artist Bryan M. Wilson will discuss his ongoing, multidisciplinary project, The Atomic Priesthood, and the two attendant installations at the Proteus Gowanus space, The Canticle for Sebeok and Vestments for Ten Millennia. Wilson will address the ecological stewardship, strategies for deep-time communication, and ritual inherent to the project and how an artistic practice can bridge seemingly disparate conditions. The talk will be a survey of The Atomic Priesthood’s genesis, status, and potential future as it expands to collaborate with other potent collectives such as Smudge Studio and The Mildred Complex(ity). [continue reading…]
Secret Wars: Readings
Sunday, March 24, 5pm
The battles fought at night between white and black witches. The battle fought at bedtime between a newly married royal couple. The battle fought in subway stations with poisoned chewing gum. The battle fought with children in a dream. The culture war fought as an emergent species struggles for recognition as a civilized kind. The key battles of such “secret wars” will be the matter read aloud from translations of Czech, Japanese, American, Italian, and Old Irish crypto-military histories. Organized by Wendy Walker, editor of Proteotypes, the publishing arm of Proteus Gowanus.
David Kahn: How Codebreaking Helped Shorten World War II
Thursday, March 14, 7pm
$5 admission
As part of our exploration of Secret Wars, Proteus Gowanus is very pleased to present David Kahn, the world’s leading expert on the history of codes and cryptology. Dr. Kahn will discuss how the frantic race to break enemy codes helped bring about an earlier end to World War II.
Kahn’s monumental 1967 book The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing is the definitive account of secret writing from ancient hieroglyphs through the 20th century. The book was a finalist for the 1968 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction, and was republished in a revised edition in 1996. [continue reading…]
Poems & Stories by Two Immigrants
Anna Halberstadt and Mikhail Iossel:
A Reading of Poems and Stories
Saturday, March 2, 5pm
As part of our yearlong theme, Battle, Anna Halberstadt and Mikhail Iossel will read their poems and stories.
Halberstadt will read poems that touch on the legacy of second-generation Holocaust survivors from the former Soviet Union. Iossel will read stories that deal with the interconnected nature of memory and imagination, past and present.
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Mikhail Iossel, a professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal, is the author of Every Hunter Wants to Know. He is the co-editor of the anthologies Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States and Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. His stories have been published in literary magazines in the US and abroad, translated into several foreign languages, and anthologized in Best American Short Stories and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowship, among other awards.
Anna Halberstadt is a clinician, teacher and administrator of mental health clinics specializing in the adaptation of immigrants, with a special interest in immigrants from the former Soviet Union and other Eastern Block countries. As well as many publications in her field, her poetry has been accepted by Cimarron Review, St. Petersburg Review and Tiferet, as well as translated for Lithuanian journals like Literatura ir Menas and Shiaures Athenai.
Day Night Day Night: a Film
CANCELLED DUE TO WEATHER!
Secret Wars presents Day Night Day Night, a 2006 film exploring the solitary hours in the life of a shy young woman of indeterminate ethnicity preparing to detonate a suicide bomb in Times Square. Join us for wine and moviegoing. [continue reading…]
On the Air: Tuning In to Secret Wars Live from Cuba
Saturday, January 19, 4:30 pm
- Under deep cover, a spy waits by a shortwave radio ready to copy down a long string of numbers.
- Dictatorships jam signals beaming in from clandestine stations operated by opposition groups.
- The first act of a conquering rebel group or invading army is to take over the radio station.
- Sarcastic and seductive voices: In World War II Lord Haw Haw, Tokyo Rose, and Ezra Pound tried to demoralize the troops and the folks back home.
- Urban gladiators like Skyhawk, Lt. Columbo and Switchblade take to Channel 6 on Citizens Band radio for a keydown. The winner takes the frequency. The loser is a “mud duck.”
Radio producer and audio archivist David Goren hosts a listening session and informal discussion about the way radio is used in battles of ideology and territory. The session will include a live tuning of a Cuban numbers station intended for Cuban spies in the United States.
Bring Your Lost Things to the Portable M{}esum
Sunday, January 13, 4pm
Swedish conceptual artist Anna Livia Löwendahl-Atomic invites you to contribute your nØbjects–things lost or missing–to the Portable M{ }esum. Only that which is lost or missing can enter the m{}esum. Your lost thing will be written down and archived on a gallery wall. (“There are many museums in the world, but only one muesum”). Join us! Wine will be served to jog the memory. [continue reading…]
Neuroscience, Art and Music Explain the Emotional Brain
Tuesday, January 15th, 7pm
Artist Nene Humphrey has been artist-in-residence since 2005 in the neuroscience laboratory of Joseph LeDoux, focusing on the emotional brain, the seat of much internal warfare (often secret war). On Tuesday, they will talk about their mutual interest in the emotional brain through video, song and discussion. They will be joined by Amanda Thorpe of the Amygdaloids Band, guest singer Ward White and Zoe Fitzgerald, Humphrey’s video collaborator.
Participants: [continue reading…]
