Moving pictures

A one-hour film I made in 2017 based on an on-air radio work and home movies appears as Open Anything without altering its form on my vimeo channel. At Steve Benson on vimeo, I will continue to post any video material I make, like watching moving water.

A 25-minute video I made, using the sound and images from a reading I gave in Rockland, ME, in 2014, appears in YouTube as What Is Empty.

At my PennSound page you will find five very different videos documenting complete public improvisatory performances:

• • 02 05 2008 reading of an unpublished essay, with technical and other difficulties, at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY,

  • 02 14 2009 work in which I silently read a series of notes while improvising simultaneously on voice and on a keyboard, using a microphone and projection to present these to audience at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, filmed by Brandon Downing, production by Konrad Steiner,

  • 03 14 2009 performance of a closing talk at the Medium and Margin conference in the Maude Fife Room at Berkeley, CA, filmed by Konrad Steiner (Note:  A transcript, with photographs from the video, appears in pages 274-285 of Vlak2, which can be read online [web.archive.org link] ), after signing into issuu’s website

  • 03 20 2010 performance of “unfinished and perfectly still,” a collaboration with filmmaker Konrad Steiner and with the Jon Raskin Quartet, and

  • “A moment on life, or not,” Robert Withers’s film edition of my 02 16 2013 Segue reading, with Ariel Goldberg’s unusual introduction to it.

  • “NOW,” a half-hour collaborative work that Suzanne Stein and I made in November 2017 for inclusion in the third, streaming-video day of the Third Annual Festival of Poets Theater, December 10, 2017.

At the start of the social distancing, I responded as soon as I saw a call for poems on video to post at Orchid Tierney’s new YouTube project, Off Topic Poetics, with Poetry Reading my Mind. Then later in 2020, I participated in a Brooklyn Rail Radical Poetry reading, in a Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment, improvising at the end of a long conversation on edges in artworks, and the Poetry Project’s New Years Marathon Reading, which I posted on my Vimeo page, which also has a couple dry runs for some one of these.