Jefferson Hansen's introduction to Altered Scale.
Filmed by Ann Bogle
A few quick notes:
•With some browsers, you may receive an "insecure site" notice on the "Charles Bernstein, Oscar Sparrow" the "Multimedia—Wang Ping" pages. The website has been professionally vetted and secured, and this is a mere unavoidable glitch. Click "proceed anyway" with confidence. If you have any concerns, email me at jh4090@gmail.com.
•All embedded videos are placed by permission of the artist being depicted. The artist holds all copyright, to both the work and the performance.
•I chose to use embedded videos—usually linked to YouTube— because they take up less space on this web page and they allow for links across the web. If a video buffers, it is the result of your connection to the web, not the page itself. Allow the piece to play through, and replay it. The buffering should be fine at that point.
•The musicality in this journal is highlighted by my editorial decisions: I want the texture of various pieces of writing or performance to creak and crimp against one another, thereby revealing something about what is at the musical heart of each piece. For instance, in the second page of the poetry section, which begins with Larissa Shmailo, I purposely played poems using abstract language and forms against others that were more traditionally referential and, well, a little boozy and downhome. As you move through that page, I hope the poems can be felt in specific ways due to their placement next to other, dissimilar ones. The editing of the whole journal was executed in this manner.
Of course, editing should not override the presentation of art. When it became necessary to set aside this focus to one degree or another in order to do justice to the work, I did so.
•In terms of the line-by-line writing, by editorial hand was light, and I limited myself to mostly proofreading. I didn't interfere with what appeared to be specific, idiosyncratic choices on the parts of artists. For instance, one poet seemed to distinguish between the double hyphen "- -" and the dash "—," which in traditional proofreading circles is considered the same punctuation mark. I respected what seemed to be the writer's particular use of these marks.