8 People Have Been Invited to Give A Talk About Geography
A symposium event,
24 & 31 March 2009
The Orientation Center, 2129 N. Rockwell, Chicago, IL 60647
An ongoing conversation, beginning several years ago, about educational structures and their
influence on a personal experience of knowledge, lead to a symposium event, for which we asked
8 people, of diverse practices, to give talks on a "Specific Significant Educational Experience",
leading to an ongoing series of similar events. Those invited are people whose experience might
lend an interesting vantage to the topic, but who are not necessarily experts.
-- Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish - Abandoned Cartographies
Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish teach at the School of the Art Institute and have a new company
called Every house has a door. Matthew is the author of 39 Microlectures in proximity of
performance and co-editor of Small of Acts of Repair - performance, ecology, and Goat Island. Lin's
writing on directing and performance has been published widely in journals and anthologies.
-- Laurie Palmer - Mounds and Holes
Laurie Palmer is an artist and writer whose current book project titled Raw Materials includes 18
chapters named after chemical elements: helium, carbon, sodium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorus,
sulfur, chlorine, potassium, calcium, iron, copper, silver, iodine, gold, mercury, lead and uranium.
-- Samuel A. Love - Chicago April 1968: A West-Side centric series of panels about the April
1968 Riot
Samuel A Love is from the Calumet Region and currently resides in Rogers Park, having never lived
more than 5 miles from Lake Michigan. He teaches courses on Research Methods at Westwood College,
in the Loop, and also works as a photographer, writer, and interviewer. He is good-bad but
definitely not evil, and is a rocker until the day he dies.
-- Devin King - But Only Soap, and Tobacco, but chiefly Soap
Ambling in the style of Leopold Bloom, Guy Debord, and W.G. Sebald, Devin King passively
investigates the geographic ghost notes bred between soap, movie theatres, musicals, professional
wrestling, the poet Louis Zukofsky, that sound on that one Pink Floyd record, and maybe, just maybe,
dungeons and dragons. Devin King was recently awarded an MFA from the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. A philologist with a heart of gold, he writes about pop music for The Boston Phoenix,
teaches poetry to young adults, and probably listens to too many showtunes and too much bubblegum
pop. His serial-opera Dancing Young Men From High Windows can be seen bouncing monthly from gallery
to gallery in Chicago and his long poem, CLOPS, will be out from the Green Lantern Press in fall
2009.
-- Nance Klehm - Geoherbology of the Congress Theatre Footprint
Peripethetic naturalist whose karmic debt as an urban dweller is nearly complete, Nance connects to
the nearly invisible realm of wild plants and animals to remind herself and others of other ways of
moving, being and living in cities.
-- Megan Ransmeier - At the Scale of the Sun: the World in a Spoon
Megan Ransmeier, among other activities, sings, dances, teaches, and converses in Chicago IL. She
lives in a building which, among other things, once served as sink factory and as a storage place
for used bank safes, with - among others - two black cats and eleven chickens.
-- Andy Yang - Geography, Genealogy, Making Places (Venus, Slovakia, Brazil, Chicago)
"I study biology and the visual culture of science and teach at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago. Having moved to the Midwest just over 3 years ago I have been thinking a lot about geography,
but this is the first time I get to talk about it."