Proteotypes editor Tom LaFarge will conduct an instructional Diplomacy workshop in the Proteus Gowanus War Games Room. Diplomacy is a board game set in Europe just before WW1 requiring both negotiation and strategy in order to win. This workshop is intended for those who would like to learn the basic rules of play. When you’ve learned the basics, you can play the game in our War Games Room, Saturdays and Sunday, 12-6pm. Class fee: $7
Perhaps nowhere is the fighting more furious and fundamental in the War of Words than on the Scrabble board or the Words with Friends app. Join David Bukszpan, author of the new book “Is That A Word? From AA to ZZZ: The Weird and Wonderful language of Scrabble,” as he explores the most useful and unusual words in the Scrabble lexicon. Bukszpan will present scores of surprising words, offer tips and tricks, and share other highlights from his book to help word warriors from all skill levels.
As part of the War of Words exhibition, Keith Sanborn will screen, present and contextualize the Situationist film Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (1973) by René Viénet.
Viénet was part of the Situationist International and the film is a classic example of the Situationist strategy of Détournement. In this work, Viénet brilliantly appropriates a martial arts film and subverts its original meaning by dubbing in his own text dealing with class conflict and alienation.
Sanborn is a media artist, theorist, curator and translator who translated this work “in order to add to historical understanding and to release what remains of its revolutionary analysis and praxis—in short, its orgone energy.”
Sanborn will present the film and conduct a discussion and analysis following the screening.
As part of our yearlong theme, Battle, and in conjunction with our current exhibition, War of Words, we are pleased to launch the War Games Room, a space to play at war with your favorite friends and enemies. You can play on a handmade Risk game, designed by Ryan Jones with New York City boroughs, not nations, vying for the upper hand. Also featured will be a magnetized Diplomacy board assembled by Tom LaFarge, a beautiful hand-tooled game of Connect Four by Nick DeFriez [continue reading...]
There is still no power in our building, 543 Union Street, so we must push our projected re-opening to after Thanksgiving.
Therefore, the Writhing Society Wednesday sessions are meeting at various homes until Proteus opens. For information on upcoming meetings, email email hidden; JavaScript is required
This Thursday’s Fixers Collective session will take place from 7-10pm at Tony’s Studio, 123 8th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, Gowanus, Bklyn (R, F, G to 9th St station at 4th Ave)
This Saturday’s War of Words Reading is postponed. We will notify you when it is rescheduled.
The War Games Room opening is postponed until further notice.
Observatory events are also postponed until further notice.
Proteus Gowanus and our Projects-In-Residence Observatory, Morbid Anatomy Library, Reanimation Library and Hall of Gowanus, prepared for the worst before Hurricane Sandy and we are very happy to announce that our preparations were unnecessary. We feel very grateful that our floors and books and artifacts and shelves were not bathed in toxic sludge. The floodwaters around the Gowanus area barely penetrated our galleries, seeping slightly through our alley door but covering only a bit of the floor. We did, however, lose all power due to extensive flooding in the basement of our building, which is now filled with six feet of standing water and has extinguished the power indefinitely.
As a result, we must close our doors for the next two weeks, [continue reading...]
Join us for the first in our Battle film series, curated by Joseph Martin. The topic is relevant: class warfare using words for weapons. The Servant (1963), starring Dirk Bogarde, was written for the screen by Harold Pinter. It is the first of three films written by Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey and is arguably the jewel of the Losey/Pinter collaboration, a slow-burn of a movie about the complex — and eventually toxic — relationship between manservant Barrett (Dirk Bogarde) and his upper-class employer Tony (James Fox). [continue reading...]
Cost: $10
Texts and paper will be provided; bring a pen.
Free wine for $2 a glass.
The War of Words contains at least one fruitful struggle: the clash of languages on the battlefield of the translator’s brain, as loaded vocabularies mass and charge. Yet no struggle is more pleasurable, since of all readers the translator enters into the most intimate relationship with the source text. But what if you know one language only? Or don’t know the language you want to translate? To this dilemma solutions will be offered by Writhing Society leaders Wendy Walker and Tom La Farge. [continue reading...]
At the Battle of Brooklyn on August 27, 1776, a small band of soldiers from Maryland fended off British and Hessian forces at the Old Stone House; their bravery allowed other Americans to escape across the Gowanus. [continue reading...]
Join us for wine and conversation to launch Proteotypes’ new publication, Cryptozoo. In this handsome feuilleton twelve writers have undertaken to respond to twelve images from Erik Schurink’s “Cryptozoo” portfolio. With his mind on paradise, theme of a Proteus Gowanus show he was co-curating, he started to notice animals coming out of hiding as if summoned. They emerged from sidewalks, walls, and streets, from bits of industrial scrap, from wire window-grates, from rust stains and scuffings in dust, and posed briefly for his camera. [continue reading...]
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Proteus Gowanus
543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
718.427.2200
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