Events
Secret Wars: Opening Reception
Saturday, January 12, 7pm
Predator 2 by Joy Garnett
Secret Wars, the second exhibition in Proteus Gowanus’ yearlong exploration of Battle, explores the cryptic ways of warfare waged behind the cloak of invisibility. From neurophysical conflict deep inside the human amygdala, to the broadcast signals used by spies and intelligence agencies, to the everyday observation of ordinary citizens by omniscient bureaucracies, Secret Wars reveals covert communications hiding in plain sight.
Translation Workshop for the Mono-Lingual
Saturday, December 29, 2-4 pm
Cost: $10
Free wine for $2/glass donation
Texts and paper will be provided; please bring a pen.
The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable since, of all readers, the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know only one language? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge. [continue reading…]
War of Words Reading
Saturday, December 15, 7-9pm
$5 admission
A Celtic curse. A duel of poetries. Language as virus. Language as a tool for ingeniously tormenting. The unsettling impact of Algonkian place-names in settler descriptions. Words of children as a vector for lethal disease spread among their parents:
These and other word-struggles will be read aloud, to amplify the “War of Words” segment of our Battle year. Please come and enjoy the language of Jane Collier, William S. Burroughs, Ben Marcus, Paul Metcalf and Kurban Said, not to mention that aggrieved anonymous cursing Celt.
Learn Diplomacy the Easy Way with Tom LaFarge
Sunday, December 2, 2pm
Proteotypes editor Tom LaFarge will conduct an instructional Diplomacy workshop in the Proteus Gowanus War Games Room. Diplomacy is a board game set in Europe just before WW1 requiring both negotiation and strategy in order to win. This workshop is intended for those who would like to learn the basic rules of play. When you’ve learned the basics, you can play the game in our War Games Room, Saturdays and Sunday, 12-6pm. Class fee: $7
Scrabble talk with David Bukszpan, author of “Is That a Word?”
Saturday, December 1, 7pm
Perhaps nowhere is the fighting more furious and fundamental in the War of Words than on the Scrabble board or the Words with Friends app. Join David Bukszpan, author of the new book “Is That A Word? From AA to ZZZ: The Weird and Wonderful language of Scrabble,” as he explores the most useful and unusual words in the Scrabble lexicon. Bukszpan will present scores of surprising words, offer tips and tricks, and share other highlights from his book to help word warriors from all skill levels.
Can Dialectics Break Bricks? with Keith Sanborn
Friday, November 30, 7pm
As part of the War of Words exhibition, Keith Sanborn will screen, present and contextualize the Situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) by René Viénet.
Viénet was part of the Situationist International and the film is a classic example of the Situationist strategy of Détournement. In this work, Viénet brilliantly appropriates a martial arts film and subverts its original meaning by dubbing in his own text dealing with class conflict and alienation.
Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, curator and translator who translated this work “in order to add to historical understanding and to release what remains of its revolutionary analysis and praxis—in short, its orgone energy.”
Sanborn will present the film and conduct a discussion and analysis following the screening.
War Games Room opening; Discussion of Game Theory and War
Sunday, November 25, 12-6pm
Lecture: 3pm
$5 per player
As part of our yearlong theme, Battle, and in conjunction with our current exhibition, War of Words, we are pleased to launch the War Games Room, a space to play at war with your favorite friends and enemies. You can play on a handmade Risk game, designed by Ryan Jones with New York City boroughs, not nations, vying for the upper hand. Also featured will be a magnetized Diplomacy board assembled by Tom LaFarge, a beautiful hand-tooled game of Connect Four by Nick DeFriez [continue reading…]
Sandy Update as of November 12
There is still no power in our building, 543 Union Street, so we must push our projected re-opening to after Thanksgiving.
Therefore, the Writhing Society Wednesday sessions are meeting at various homes until Proteus opens. For information on upcoming meetings, email email hidden; JavaScript is required
This Thursday’s Fixers Collective session will take place from 7-10pm at Tony’s Studio, 123 8th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Gowanus, Bklyn (R, F, G to 9th St station at 4th Ave)
This Saturday’s War of Words Reading is postponed. We will notify you when it is rescheduled.
The War Games Room opening is postponed until further notice.
Observatory events are also postponed until further notice.
Post-Sandy Closing
Proteus Gowanus and our Projects-In-Residence Observatory, Morbid Anatomy Library, Reanimation Library and Hall of Gowanus, prepared for the worst before Hurricane Sandy and we are very happy to announce that our preparations were unnecessary. We feel very grateful that our floors and books and artifacts and shelves were not bathed in toxic sludge. The floodwaters around the Gowanus area barely penetrated our galleries, seeping slightly through our alley door but covering only a bit of the floor. We did, however, lose all power due to extensive flooding in the basement of our building, which is now filled with six feet of standing water and has extinguished the power indefinitely.
As a result, we must close our doors for the next two weeks, [continue reading…]
A Taste of Class Warfare While Waiting for Election Results
Saturday, December 8, 7pm – CANCELLED
Free wine for a $2 donation
Join us for the first in our Battle film series, curated by Joseph Martin. The topic is relevant: class warfare using words for weapons. The Servant (1963), starring Dirk Bogarde, was written for the screen by Harold Pinter. It is the first of three films written by Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey and is arguably the jewel of the Losey/Pinter collaboration, a slow-burn of a movie about the complex — and eventually toxic — relationship between manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) and his upper-class employer Tony (James Fox). [continue reading…]
