Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. His online editorial work can be found on UbuWeb, PennSound, Jacket2, and Eclipse. He works with James Hoff as No Input Books, with Alejandro Crawford as Ex Libris, and lives in collaboration with Mashinka Firunts. Screenings, readings, lectures, and performances at Centre Pompidou, PERFORMA 09, Performance Space 122, Dispatch Bureau, Ontological Hysteric Theater, Gallery D21 Leipzig, Capricious Space, CRG Gallery, Lisa Cooley Gallery, and with free103point9 Transmission Arts. Recent projects include The Dark Cloud of Dr. Mabuse, Inventory Arousal, Endless Nameless, and Edit: Performing Network Publishing. Currently, he's working around textual conditions, editorial strategies, and media technologies at the University of Pennsylvania.
"Couched in Snelson's labyrinthine hack of Blogspot presets, the protracted clashes of nineteenth-century science and twentieth-century literature, of synaesthesia and logocentrism, enact the schizophrenia of search-engine intertextuality based on little more than lexical units."
Brian Droitcour, Rhizome
PRESENTING:
THE DARK CLOUD OF DR. MABUSE, an ongoing cinema lecture exploring haunted technology and criminal dispersion alongside Fritz Lang's 1922 film Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler.
FOR SEMIOSPECTACLE Nº 1:
TESTIMONY: THE UNDATED WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF ELEVEN WITNESSES CONCERNING THE 1830 TRANSLATION OF THE GOLDEN PLATES, RENDERED ALGORITHMICALLY THROUGH THE DESERET ALPHABET INTO A SOUND POEM FEATURING A DOZEN OF THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR LANGUAGES. An exploration of autobiography, linguistic subjectivity, &faith-in-translation. The piece weds visual presentation, vocal intensity, &experimental prosody. The sound poem is a word-by-word translation of the artist’s combined edition of the Testimonies of Three and Eight Witnesses first into a dozen of the most popular tongues &then back through the arcane-obsolete Deseret Alphabet into the spoken vernacular of 1850s Utah. This translation is then hybridized with patches of spoken English, orienting the listener to the repetitive, durational, and transformative aspects of the translations.
"The effect was one of a polyglot preacher running into starts and stops with a meditative, trance-like cadence, that merging into some new language worthy of Joseph Smith's surreal divinations."
Jordan Hruska, Art in America
