Creative Onslaught



Image projection: Aaron Levy, head of Slought.net, thinks visual while at the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn.

A young intellectual-about-town brings thinkers together through a new art initiative called Slought.net.

by Meredith Broussard

When I first meet Aaron Levy — in the lobby of the ICA, where he’s chatting about John Cage with a friend — I’m tempted to write him off as just another arty, bedheaded corduroy boy. Not so fast. His chic’s not shabby (the trenchcoat’s DKNY), and Aaron Levy’s no dilettante. He’s more like a technology-savvy Stephen Daedalus, and he’s the head of one of Philly’s freshest contemporary art initiatives, Slought.net. Like the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania, where many of Slought’s programs are held (and where Levy was a Junior Fellow upon graduation from Penn in 1999), Slought’s a genre-blending, mind-bending whirl of intellectual activity that’s bringing together writers and thinkers from all over the city and even the world.

All In A Week’s Work

As its name suggests, Slought includes a veritable onslaught of arts events. The site, www.slought.net, functions as a metaphor, announcement list and umbrella organization for an arts community whose members include a substantial presence as far away as Japan. Mostly collaborative, the various conceptual, visual, performance and intellectual initiatives include some created by Levy and others in which he is a participant. Current projects include "PhillyTalks," a dialogue on experimental poetry, which Levy co-curates with Louis Cabri, as well as a label devoted to experimental music. The label’s recent release of electronic music is called Elements by Hoopty Heaven.

Slought is also collaborating on a sound installation on April 14 at the Kelly Writer’s House at Penn, entitled "Aural Text." The installation is billed as "A commentary on memory, place, voice and sound/silence made manifest in recorded audio and image." In it, Levy and crony Andrew Zitcer translate musical distortions of John Cage’s words into bar codes. The bar codes, when read by portable scanners suspended from the ceiling, regurgitate the distorted words in two layers. One layer is a simple distortion, the other a musical sequence created by running the same words through a seemingly infinite series of amps, synths and other hi- and lo-tech manipulations.

The launch of a collaborative installation might be adequate for the week of the average artist. But Levy doesn’t primarily work in sound; he’s a photographer — a photographer who is working on opening a gallery space. He’s set to meet this week with a potential NYC investor, but meanwhile he’s already created the online version of the gallery and launched it on his site; it features work by a number of emerging photographers and digital artists.

On Tuesday, Levy plans to host an event in one of his two lecture series at the Writer’s House, "Theorizing in Particular." Daniel Libeskind, an architectural theorist and professor at the Penn Graduate School of Fine Arts, will speak on the topic of "Architecture and Memory." Oh, and on Friday, "Theorizing" has another lecture: "The Earth as Aesthetic Phenomenon: Images of Myself" from Stephen David Ross, a philosophy and comparative literature prof at SUNY Binghamton. Between all of these high-octane pursuits, Levy plans to squeeze in some work on his upcoming poetry chapbook, as well as some time on the four or five upcoming CDs from his record label. He’ll also send out some upcoming event announcements to the 3,000 people on his electronic mailing list. And then there’s his job: Levy supports his substantial art habit through a part-time gig as a digital media specialist at Penn.

The head spins.

"Everybody spends their time on something," Levy offers by way of explanation. "I just try to be as efficient as I can with the very inefficient subject matters that I’m interested in."

In The Moment

"You want to be trying to loosen the bounds of what everybody is doing and thinking in the moment," says Levy of Slought’s events. "You’re trying to conceptualize it in a way people might not have embraced or approached otherwise, be it theoretical, political, social or whatnot."

We’re at our second meeting, outdoors at Sansom Commons, to which I’ve brought my tape recorder. Levy’s fascinating to talk to, but he tends to cavalierly toss around phrases like "pedagogical framework." After our first encounter, I found myself with the sense that I’d had an important and highly conceptual conversation, the substance of which totally escaped me.

"There’s a lot of grandiose thinking going on," Levy admits, referring to a new project, that of opening a Writer’s House in Calgary. "It’ll take place, it’ll be realized in some form. What that form is, it’s hard to pin down."

Levy shows me a poster from a recent Slought conference with Osvaldo Romberg, a European conceptual artist. I flip through Levy’s large leather portfolio, and we discuss the ironies of being a vegetarian who wears leather. I recognize something in his portfolio, an advertisement for a performance by Gate to Moon Base Alpha, Aharon Varady’s ambient music group. Varady, like Levy, is a hyperproductive artist: In addition to Gate to Moon Base Alpha, Varady runs a site and a list devoted to ambient and otherwise hard-to-categorize music in Philadelphia.

Levy’s initiatives are perfectly in line with the fusion of art, intellectualism and community outreach that have exploded from the Writer’s House, a former chaplain’s residence, since it opened in 1995.

The Writer’s House functions as a hub for all things literary, offering a bewildering array of free and open to the public events. Regular programs include a Lacan study group and a weekly radio show showcasing emerging writers; a recent visit from writer David Sedaris drew a sell-out crowd. As a Junior Fellow at the House, a year-long position awarded annually to a recent Penn grad, Levy received a $1,000 stipend to spend on creating or sponsoring such events at the House. Levy’s experience was additionally swank, in a Virginia Woolf sort of way: He received a Room of One’s Own, living in the house for a year as caretaker.

The Writer’s House is totally unique in that its institutional focus is on community-building among writers, be they Penn undergrads, graduate students, alumni or regular Philadelphians. The Alumni Visitors Series, for example, brings Penn alums from the publishing industry back to campus; the last event was entitled "The Book Deal and Beyond," and featured Meg Lenihan ’91, formerly at Knopf, and Caryn Karmatz Rudy ’92, a senior editor at Warner Books, speaking about the very practical concern of what happens during the editorial process.

The brilliance of these sessions is that they unite practical knowledge and networking. For struggling writers or undergrads trying to get a book deal or break into publishing, the invitation to network with senior editors from publishing houses or major magazines is worth more than any night in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Similarly, Levy’s events don’t exclusively focus on the university community, but they do take place largely at the Writer’s House. Given the weight of this name, the heavyweight academics and artists Levy invites are unusually enthusiastic about cooperating with an initiative that’s only a year old. And there’s the audience: Events like the Romberg conference attract the non-academic types whom theorists may yearn to address but fail to reach. Slought audiences, composed of an unusually diverse group of artists, students and interested intelligentsia, will go to hear philosophers the way others might go to a club to hear a favorite DJ.

"Philosophers," says Levy, "rarely have that."