Declaration of the Technical Word as Such is a high-theory slapstick routine in response to Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexie Kruchenykh's iconoclastic 1913 essay "Declaration of the Word as Such." Whereas Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh suggest that an entire poem may be created from deliberate etymological permutations of a single word, Wenaus' players declare what this means a century later when the word has become aggressively mediated through quantitative interfaces. Like a surrealist chain game for the stage, the players ...
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Declaration of the Technical Word as Such is a high-theory slapstick routine in response to Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexie Kruchenykh's iconoclastic 1913 essay "Declaration of the Word as Such." Whereas Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh suggest that an entire poem may be created from deliberate etymological permutations of a single word, Wenaus' players declare what this means a century later when the word has become aggressively mediated through quantitative interfaces. Like a surrealist chain game for the stage, the players sequentially declare their manifesto, dying mid-sentence, only to have that very sentence picked up by another player without stutter or loss of beat. Unlike a surrealist chain game, however, no collective unconscious reveals itself; instead, we get a cohesive, inhuman processualism steering an entire group with unknowable intentionality. With spray-tanned bodybuilders, unwitting players, praise for Kenji Siratori's glitch poetics, patamathematical acrobats, knock-kneed police officers, a pickpocketing man adorned as a palm tree, and a body count in the hundreds, Wenaus turns a clinical, impersonal eye on the processes of poetic articulation at a time when we emphatically declare that we are the masters of our language yet, with the word having transformed into the Flussurian "technical word," that very language relentlessly and tirelessly shapes, steers, uses, and optimizes us for its own inscrutable ends. Praise for DECLARATION OF THE TECHNICAL WORD AS SUCH A PLAY IN ONE ACT: "Wenaus' book is a model of time itself, a channel-scape vision of the Lemurian demon worlds of those rhizomes in-between the "as if" and the Real that seems ever about to be but is always already now. A flight of fantasy or a fantasy of flight? A Guide Book to the intricacies of a narratology-machine are the posthuman matrix of a new thought-form arriving out of the 'technical word'? Maybe what he says of Baktin's "chronotope" should be applied to a reading of his new play: "The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays." Lost in the weave of time-space we as reader's begin to slowly turn the keys of this time-machine till it unlocks its secret portals to the imaginative multiverse of Wenaus himself. Enjoy the ride!" -S.C. Hickman, Writer, Digital Artist, and AI Collaborator at The Dark Fantastic and The Art of the Dark Fantastic "a theoretical desert-island palmtree offers shade to sartorial Siratori clones paraded Ms-Universe-like while monologically flexing their glutes, each sublimely ambivalent to an audience buried up to the neck in language it's doomed to misapprehend till after reality "sinks in." reader, that means you."- Louis Armand, author of Vampyr (2020), GlassHouse (2018), The Combinations (2016)
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