Margaret Sgier and Nicholas Hemendinger will be married at Counterpath on Saturday, July 22, 2017, with a reception following.

Artwork Johanna Mueller : www.feverishart.com
www.johannamuellerprints.com

Mexica: 20 Years–20 Stories [20 años–20 historias] contains 20 short narratives developed by the computer program MEXICA. Plots describe fictional situations related to the Mexicas (or Aztecs), ancient inhabitants of what today is Mexico City. This is the first book of short-stories produced completely by a creative agent capable of evaluating and making judgments about its own work, as well as incorporating into its knowledge-base the pieces it produces. By contrast with other, statistical models, MEXICA is inspired by how humans actually develop fictional stories. The book, in both Spanish and English, also includes source references related to the program.

Part of the series Using Electricity.

Rafael Pérez y Pérez specializes in artificial intelligence and computational creativity, particularly in automatic narrative generation. He founded the Interdisciplinary Group on Computational Creativity, which develops models for plot generation, plot evaluation, representations of social norms, visual narratives, and creative problem solving, and he is the chair of the Association for Computational Creativity, which organizes the annual International Conference on Computational Creativity. He is a professor at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana at Cuajimalpa, México City.

Mexica: 20 Years–20 Stories [20 años–20 historias]
December, 2017
Rafael Pérez y Pérez
$21.00; 6″ x 8.25″
150 pgs.
ISBN 978-1-93-399663-9

Counterpath is looking for a volunteer curator to organize a show on presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner. We have already sourced from Amazon Turk 7 ideas (for $3 each) for pieces to appear in the show and need someone to create, as quickly as possible, each piece (we have no budget). Once we have each of the pieces we will open the show. Please reply to counterpath@gmail.com.

Description of works to appear in the show are as follows:

1. The large object should be a giant newspaper that is opened. The texture should feel like actual paper. Instead of black and white, the newspaper will be colorful and have photos. The newspaper could have a history of Kushner’s life. Each section will have a headline of a major event/events in Kushner’s life. The first could mention his family, childhood, and journey into his career. Another section could mention his time spent in prison and what he learned from the experience. Also, a section could mention how he became apart of the Trump family. Other headlines could mention his many business ventures, from reality to company owner. The main section would be about his path to becoming Trump’s advisor. The section should include his duties and goals as an advisor to the president.
2. With the very current events, I think a large couch with a cartoonishly large Donald Trump sitting on it my be nice. The couch could be accompanied by advertisement as a Kushner brand, or could be altered to appear as if it is wearing a suit, or even an anthropomorphic version of Mr. Kushner. It seems as President Trump has invited him into the fold to be a patsy, or perhaps someone to “fall back on” in a negative event. This large couch is also a clever play on the last name as a couch has a cushion, which is similar sounding to the last name Kushner.
3. A very large fantastic sculpture of a beautiful flower in grand detail. This fantastic flower creation has been crafted out of the worlds finest natural materials and gems. The base material is from the finest quartz and marble. The delicate details use various precious gems including diamond, emerald, ruby and opal. The foliage around the bottom has also been constructed from quartz and marble. You will also find addition gem dust used in the details of the foliage. You will notice how the lighting creates the illusion of glitter and that is the various gem dusts reflecting the lights. The inspiration behind this grand sculpture is the beautiful wife of Mr Kushner, Ivanka. The piece is named after its namesake and is meant to be as beautiful as his love is for his wife. As you walk around the spectacular piece please take you time and allow your mind to capture all the intricate artwork.
4. A very large fantastic sculpture of a beautiful flower in grand detail. This fantastic flower creation has been crafted out of the worlds finest natural materials and gems. The base material is from the finest quartz and marble. The delicate details use various precious gems including diamond, emerald, ruby and opal. The foliage around the bottom has also been constructed from quartz and marble. You will also find addition gem dust used in the details of the foliage. You will notice how the lighting creates the illusion of glitter and that is the various gem dusts reflecting the lights. The inspiration behind this grand sculpture is the beautiful wife of Mr Kushner, Ivanka. The piece is named after its namesake and is meant to be as beautiful as his love is for his wife. As you walk around the spectacular piece please take you time and allow your mind to capture all the intricate artwork.
5. I think I would show an apple tree with rotted fruit growing on it, and Jared Kushner under it. The saying the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree is a very accurate description of who he is and his role to America. His father was similarly a deeply dishonest, unfair, and criminal individual who Kushner continues to defend despite the mountain of evidence. He and his wife are also entirely complicit and actively involved in all of Donald Trump’s misdeeds. Their businesses are incredibly corrupt, and they are actively involved in cheating people just like their fathers. They might benefit from years of preparatory school and elite colleges and as such have fooled much of even the most liberal of the elite, but they are crooks just like their fathers.
6. I think that the gallery should include a sculpture of a very large ear, or two ears, one across from each other, like they are listening to each other. They could also include a sculpture of a mouth. Considering that Jared, is a Senior Advisor to his father in law, the president of the USA, it would make sense to include the mouth and ear (or ears), as it would express the idea that Jared receives dialogue from our president and listens to his words very carefully so that he can advise the president further. The narrative would strike a picture in the audiences’s minds and depict the role that Mr. Kushner holds in the White House. I was originally thinking that a gavel could be put in place, to represent Mr. Kushner’s education background, from the New York University School of Law, however, that may depict him as judge and jury. I believe, at minimum, an giant ear on the stage would be representative of his current role, because Jared has “all ears” on the President’s words and he is sitting closely enough, in his position and in the family position to “hear” what President Trump is saying and most likely hears more than most other people. Jared Kushner, carefully listens to President Trumps policies, plans and thoughts using his best judgement to really understand what the President is saying, understanding the meaning behind his words , deciphering them, using his legal education and his personal family history with the President, to formulate the best response to advise the President accordingly, keeping America’s best interests at heart.
7. SUGGESTED PIECE: “Puppeteer,” a larger-than-life sculpture installation, tops out at 8 feet tall. The piece consists of a wire-mesh armature sheathed in molded plaster which is completely coated in gold spray paint. “Puppeteer” depicts Jared Kushner seated on an ornate golden throne. Kushner manipulates a Donald Trump marionette. Behind Kushner stands his “real” father-in-law, who also holds marionette sticks, but his strings are attached to Kushner. DESCRIPTION: The artist, an avid follower of the 24-hour news cycle, observed that in many photos, Jared Kushner appears aloof, and cold to the point of silently threatening. To her sculptor’s eye, he also looked as if he were molded of plastic, then polished smooth. As the artist reflected on Kushner’s role in his father-in-law’s new business, images of Pinocchio floated in her head. According to the artist, “The concepts for most of my installations come only after deep internal struggle. But, on rare occasion, a piece grows naturally in my mind. ‘Puppeteer’ came to me like a weed in my creative garden; one that is tall and unseemly, and covered in aphids.”

Counterpath is accepting applications for an internship involving the creation and distribution of titles in its Reading @realDonaldTrump series of books (please see this link for details on the series). We are looking for someone who is comfortable working in Microsoft Word and would be willing to travel to local book stores. Duties include: tracking Tweets that appear on @realDonaldTrump, posting tasks to Amazon Mechanical Turk, flowing text into a templated typesetting layout, light proofreading, posting books for sale on Lulu and Google Play, distributing copies to local book stores, light accounting. The position includes rigorous training but, at least initially, comes with only a modest stipend. 10 hours per week. Please reply to counterpath@gmail.com.

Counterpath has an ongoing open call for work to appear in a section of its outdoor space. The area is 15 x 15 x 40 x 28, and borders Counterpath and 14th Avenue in Denver. Please reply to counterpath@gmail.com. (The above photo shows the area containing an installation of yellow caution tape).

If you have any art that you purchased at Target or Ikea and that you would like to either get rid of or place on loan for a gallery show, please drop off at Counterpath gallery, along with a c. 100 word description of when you bought the work, why, and how you have used it (what it has meant) by July 4. Mail ins also welcome!

The monthly meeting of the East Montclair Neighborhood Association takes place at Counterpath on Tuesday, July 15, 2017, 6:30 p.m. Agenda TBD.

As part of an installation project that uses images of current events, Counterpath is looking for volunteers to travel to different locations around Denver and take photographs (cellphones preferred but any equipment is fine). Volunteers are asked to respond to issues and events that appear in the Denver morning news, traveling to a designated site and taking photos of whatever presents itself at the site and is related to that day’s issue. Volunteers are then asked to print the photos, ideally at a larger size like 8.5 x 11 (Counterpath will fund the prints), to be mounted for a gallery show at Counterpath that same evening, beginning at 6 p.m.

No experience necessary and anyone who is willing to drive may apply. Please write to counterpath@gmail.com if you are interested.

Vivarium is a site-specific installation created for the Counterpath bookstore window. Formed using a “3-D pen,” these plastic sculptures play on the aesthetics of high-tech/digital culture alongside the handmade and tactile. Stuart’s hand-rendered sculptures are suggestive of craft traditions, such as weaving, knitting, and basket making, as well as wire-frame geometry, neural networks, cloud computing, and bio-systems.

Jodi Stuart holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Manukau Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and an MFA from Auckland University, and is a recent alumni of RedLine Contemporary Art Center’s Artist in Residence program. Her work is an on-going exploration of issues surrounding the body and technology. In her practice she oscillates between the desire to re-insert the body into virtual experience and the materialization of real objects out of the virtual.

“Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation.”
—William Julius Wilson

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as “brilliant” (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a Fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He lives in California, where he is a Fellow of the Haas Institute at the University of California–Berkeley.

“Season Carnadine” is the second work to appear in Counterpath’s installation space The Trap, a trapezoidal area between Counterpath and 14th Avenue. This installation, by Tim Roberts, is on view from July 13, 2017, to mid August, 2017. Seven plastic kiddie pools overflowing with Kool-Aid.

(There is an open call for work to appear in The Trap and please consider sending a proposal. Information here.)

The monthly meeting of the East Montclair Neighborhood Association takes place at Counterpath on Tuesday, August 15, 2017, 6:30 p.m. Special guests Leslie Herod and Chris Hansen.

The poems in Articulations are the output of a computer program that extracts linguistic features from over two million lines of public domain poetry, then traces fluid paths between the lines based on their similarities. By turns propulsive and meditative, the poems demonstrate an intuitive coherence found outside the bounds of intentional semantic constraints.

Part of the series Using Electricity.

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, and game designer. Named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, her computer-generated poetry has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Vetch. She is the author of “@Everyword: The Book” (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. Allison is a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and lives in Brooklyn.

Articulations
January, 2018
Allison Parrish
$21.00; 6″ x 8.25″
125 pgs.
ISBN 978-1-93-399665-3

Margaret Sgier and Nicholas Hemendinger will be married at Counterpath on Saturday, July 22, 2017, with a reception following. (Private event.)

Artwork Johanna Mueller : www.feverishart.com
www.johannamuellerprints.com

Redefining the course of experimental film with two weeks of nightly screenings, OFF Cinema presents “The Unseen,” exploring notions of the resistant, the excluded, and the unacknowledged. Film changes the world by bringing it into art, but film is perhaps at its best when it refuses the documentary impulse of direct representation.

For two weeks we enter the realm of the unseen, with evening programs featuring artists from across the spectrum of experimental filmmakers, as well as writers and musicians (as well local restaurants). Filmmaker Amir George will be in residence at Counterpath throughout the festival.

The festival is curated by Jacob Barreras and Libi Striegl.

Tickets are $7 for each evening, with full access passes being $100. We hope you’ll also join us for a benefit screening on Monday, September 18.

Full schedule:

Monday, Sept. 18
7:30–10pm
Benefit screening
Tickets, which include a full access pass to the festival, $150

Thursday, Sept. 21
7:30–10pm
Opening night
Joao Vieira Torres, Ghost Children
Carolina Charry Quintero, BLUA
Blair McClendon, America for Americans

Friday, Sept. 22
7:30–10pm
Better Made Progress: The Films of Amir George
TRW, El Quatro, Journal, Basilica Weeping, Vicissitude, Place, Shades of Shadows, Moments of Intention, Invocation of the Ancestors, Gold, The Encompassed Wisdom of the Inevitable Manifestation, Decadent Asylum

Saturday, Sept. 23
7:30–9:30pm
Contemporary Psychedelia
Fern Silva, Ride Like Lightning, Crash Like Thunder, and Wayward Fronds
Dakota Nanton, Oh, Ophelia
Christin Turner, What Happens to the Mountain
Andrew Busti, Binary Stars
Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie, Dot Matrix

Sunday, Sept. 24
5–7pm
Community Night–Pot Luck Supper
Storytelling

Monday, Sept. 25
7:30–9:30pm
Documentary Feature
Thorsten Trimpop, Furusato

Tuesday, Sept. 26
7:30–9:30pm
Mit Out Sound: Silent Films with Sonic Accompaniment

Wednesday, Sept. 27
7:30–9pm
Quietness: Contemplated / Loudness: Personified
Musical soundscapes with visual imagery

Thursday, Sept. 28
7:30–9:30pm
The Black Radical Imagination
Film program curated by Amir George and Erin Christovale
Sune Woods, A Feeling Like Chaos and Falling to Get Here
Jamilah Sabur, Playing Possum
Christopher Harris, Halimuhfack and Reckless Eyeballing

Friday, Sept. 29
7:30–9:30pm
Contemporary Animation
Travis Wilkerson, Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?

Saturday, Sept. 30
7:30–9:30pm
The Films of Andrew Busti
Short 16mm films accompanied by visual interludes

Sunday, Oct. 1
7:30–9:30pm
Closing Night: Indigenous Filmmaking
Sky Hopinka, Jaaji Approx
Zack and Adam Khalil, INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place. / it flies.falls./]

Please join us for a benefit evening for “The Unseen”, a two week film festival curated by OFF Cinema. Tickets are $150 and include a full access pass the festival.

Join us for opening night of the The Unseen festival, curated by OFF Cinema. This evening’s screenings include Jao Vieira Torres’s Ghost Children, Carolina Charry Quintero’s BLUA, and Blaire McClendon’s America for Americans.

Joao Vieira Torres, Ghost Children. Video. Color/Sound. 2016. 16 min

Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

Carolina Charry Quintero, BLUA. Video. Color/Sound. 2016. 22 min

Humanity and animality are enigmatically confronted and entwined. Combining rich high-contrast 16mm images with crisp digital color scenes, BLUA composes an uncanny entry into the relationship between human and animal existence. Unfolding like a tapestry, its montage complicates the relationship between observation and fiction. Reaching for equal beauty and strangeness, BLUA is an assertion of the uncanny, a cine-poetic philosophical speculation.

Blair McClendon, America for Americans. Video. Color/Sound. 2017. 35 min

America for Americans has a simple premise: you have heard this before, you have seen this before, you already know. There are found images you may have seen or assiduously avoided. There is dancing, dying, rioting. It is a collage of quotes drawing upon various histories of suffering and resistance. The speakers are writers, musicians, the aggrieved, the grief-worn, bystanders all at a moment of engagement with the precipice upon which black life is perched. It is the presentation of a siege.

Ghost Children [As crianças fantasmas], by João Vieira Torres, will screen at The Unseen Festival at Counterpath on opening night, Thursday, September 21, 2017.

About Ghost Children:

Video. Color/Sound. 2016. 16 min. Ghost Children presents seven reminiscences of early childhood, read in seven different voices, as the camera presses close against the faded dye and exaggerated grain of family photographs from the early 1980s. Whose faces and memories are those? The film encourages the audience to interrogate assumptions about gender, memory, performance, and death.

Watch a trailer.

About João Vieira Torres:

João Vieira Torres is a director and actor, known for Le bain (2012), A dupla coincidência dos desejos (2013) and Ici, là-bas, et Lisboa (2012).

A performer lip-synchs to archival audio featuring the voice of author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting African American folk songs in Florida. By design, nothing in this film is authentic except the source audio. The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear projected, grainy. Looped images of Masai tribesmen and women recycled from an educational film become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation. Watch a trailer.

Video. Color/Sound. 2015. 4 mins.

This film will screen as part of The Unseen Festival at Counterpath on Thursday, September 28, 2017.

Christopher Harris was awarded a 2015 Creative Capital grant in support of his film Speaking in Tongues. His work has screened at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout North America and Europe including the 2014 Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005, 2008, 2010), the VIENNALE-Vienna International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Leeds International Film Festival (2007, 2009), the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Rencontres Internationales Paris, among many others. “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afro-Surrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris” was published in the summer 2016 issue of Film Quarterly.

Taking its name from the Jim Crow-era prohibition against black men looking at white women, this hand processed, optically printed amalgam is a hypnotic inspection of sexual desire, racial identity, and film history. Watch a trailer.

Video. Color/Sound. 2015. 4 mins.

This film will screen as part of The Unseen Festival at Counterpath on Thursday, September 28, 2017.

Christopher Harris was awarded a 2015 Creative Capital grant in support of his film Speaking in Tongues. His work has screened at festivals, museums and cinematheques throughout North America and Europe including the 2014 Artists’ Film Biennial at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2005, 2008, 2010), the VIENNALE-Vienna International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Leeds International Film Festival (2007, 2009), the San Francisco Cinematheque, and Rencontres Internationales Paris, among many others. “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afro-Surrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris” was published in the summer 2016 issue of Film Quarterly.