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 and a couple short videos presenting from home.

A 25-minute video I made, using the sound and images from a public reading I gave at the Steel House 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:

• • 07 28 2022 reading presented live online as the first episode of a Grand Piano retrospective TV series

  • 02 05 2008 reading of an unpublished essay, with technical and other difficulties, at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY,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