Remote Links
REMOTE LINKS
Celebrating the publication of Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews
Presented by
The New York Public Library
The Maryanne Amacher Foundation
Blank Forms
Fundação de Serralves, Porto
On December 8, 2020, Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz was released by Blank Forms Editions. Assembled 11 years after Amacher’s passing, this volume of mostly unpublished writings by Amacher signals an opening into public accessibility that is long overdue. The release also coincides with the Amacher Collection’s placements at the New York Public Library, which heralds new engagements in the near future yet to come. To celebrate the publication of Selected Writings and Interviews, the publisher, in cooperation with the New York Public Library and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, presents Remote Links, a series of online events.
In a short text from the early 1970s, Long Distance Music, Maryanne Amacher sketches the conceptual framework out of which her renowned, telematic City-Links series (1967-1981) is imagined. In turn, we imagine this celebration as a shared engagement across social time and distance.
Long distance music is developing occasions where boundaries of ONE-PLACE situations can begin to vanish. Some involve electronic links; some do not.
Amacher’s text not only considers the generative possibilities of a music in which participants no longer share and occupy the same physical space, the text also considers the political problematics of what she calls “ONE-PLACE situations.”
The music we make is confining us to boundaries of ONE-PLACE situations ALL THE TIME. Receptive to our own structures ONLY as we are making them.
Both in an effort to conceive of celebrating Amacher in a framework that gestures to the complexity of her work and thought, and in light of the current pandemic driven limitations on convening, “Remote Links” offers a series of online occasions that underscore the creative possibilities of remote participation. Eight weekly episodes will feature guest artists and theorists reading from the Selected Writings and responding to the book from their perspectives. We also invite audience members to submit questions that engage these episodes and the book, more broadly. In a concluding panel event, remote participants will convene online and, together with editors Cimini and Dietz, reflect on Amacher’s writings and discuss questions submitted by members of the public.
Becoming more alive to each other — open to receiving and sharing outside our immediate structure — we no longer sit down to play with the same listening habits. We must STOP. Extend our listening out of customary circumstances. OUTSIDE OUR OWN STRUCTURES. Producing change in us and in the Music we are making.
The experience of being in more than 1 place at 1 time. Ear is the channel. It activates.
This remote celebration is developed in eight episodes and a panel discussion (all online), starting with an introduction by Bill Dietz and Amy Cimini on January 9, 2021.
https://blankforms.org/publication/maryanne-amacher-selected-writings-and-interviews/