Ekphrasticism as an Antidote to Boredom
Workshop with Vi Khi Nao
Honeycomb. Photograph by Vi Khi Nao.
About the workshop
This is an online workshop and will take place on Zoom.
Date: Saturday, May 22, 2021
Time: 1pm–3pm EST (2 hours)
Capacity: 20 participants
Cost: $25–$75 (Sliding scale, discounted from $40–$90)
Register here.
We live in an anti-ecological city, comprising millions of images and sounds, especially as our lives continue to be defined by Zoom. How do we slow down? What will compel us to slow down? What will give us the necessary spatial, psychological, and intellectual boundaries against the information, voices, and images flooding the flickering avenues of our eyesight and the hyper trafficked streets of our imagination? How do we cope with hyperrealism?
A standard definition of the Greek word ekphrasis, or ecphrasis, is “the description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise. It is a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.” Ekprasticism, in the technological or Zoom sense, is the art of gazing without boredom, with complete utter autonomy and awareness of the object/material before us. Here, the viewer and the artwork can be in conversation without needing to tolerate each other’s indifference and impetuousness.
This workshop is designed to slow your consciousness down, to give your mind the quality attention it deserves so that your consciousness can breathe again, can process time and oxygen again. We will turn to Dao Strom’s Instrument (2020), Mike Corrao’s Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (2021), Wim Wenders’s The Logic of Images (1991), and other filmic tools, including Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring) to help us ekphrasticize into something that is capable of sustaining our interest for not just seconds, but years after we exit the digital page.
About the instructor
Vi Khi Nao’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, play, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of the novel, Fish in Exile, the story collection A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) and of four poetry collections: Human Tetris, Sheep Machine, Umbilical Hospital, and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Prize). Her poetry collection, A Bell Curve Is A Pregnant Straight Line, and her short stories collection, The Vegas Dilemma, are forthcoming from 11:11 Press Summer and Fall 2021 respectively. She was the fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.