artist book

The Word Made Flesh and its immediate predecessor, Through Light and the Alphabet, were both made as distinct formulations in response to theoretical issues in writing and ecriture. Both address the status of materiality in visual presentation of poetic work. Both are direct responses to the work of Jacques Derrida, and also, to the dictates and orthodoxies of many of the California Language Poets whose work and lives had been so intimately bound to mine. The typographic format of the Word Made Flesh was meant to trip the eye, return one constantly to the plane of discourse, of material production. I made this book, and Through Light and the Alphabet, out of complete love of letters. Probably more than any other of my books, these two are absolute celebrations of the beauty and expressive capability of type.

(Source: Author)

Zang Tumb Tumb was Marinetti's first published collection of parole in libertà (words in liberty), a form of poetry at the same time verbal and visual. Begun in 1912 and published in 1914, the work is an account of Marinetti's experience of the Siege of Adrianople (now Edirne, Turkey) during the Balkan War of 1912, which he covered as a war correspondent. The title Zang Tumb Tumb evokes the sounds of mechanized war—artillery shelling, bombs, explosions.

(Source: MoMA)

This book allows a user to navigate a choose-your-own-adventure story through folding patterns that physically trace her journey and decisions. Near the end of any particular path, a smartphone and QR tag can be used to link to an online video segment that brings the story to an interactive conclusion.

Source: MoMA

Eileen Hogan, the Co-Investigator in the research network, presented a screen-based project showing sketches and paintings she had made between 2008 and 2011 at the third workshop. The project explored how the experience of creating a portrait might be affected by the simultaneous recording of an audio life story with the sitter. Hogan sketched Anya Sainsbury while the latter was being interviewed by Cathy Courtney, Project Director for National Life Stories at the British Library. The resulting drawings in Hogan’s sketchbook, the final portraits, Anya Sainsbury’s recorded words and a short film of one session were brought together in A Narrated Portrait 2008–2011. Hogan soon realised that rather than being a new version of existing work, A Narrated Portrait was a new multi-media work in its own right which allowed viewers to listen to sound recordings and watch the film while virtually turning the pages of the sketchbook. Using turning the page technology, the project was developed with Armadillo Systems and published in 2013 at http://eileenhogan.onlineculture.co.uk/ttp/.

Source: Tate Gallery

This is an original art publication made for the iPad. Scroll, glide and plumb the depths of Helen Douglas's The Pond at Deuchar, exploring with your fingers and eyes this long unfolding artwork showing the multitude of life at the fringes of a pond.

As you move past frog and toads you encounter arabesques of toad spawn, squiggles of tadpoles and other denizens of the pond. Plants embroider the edge and, intermingling with reflections, weave from below to the surface of the water and screen. All contribute to a dance of light, colour, surface and depth.

Source: Clive Phillpot: http://www.weproductions.com/epub.html 

Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist's book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers "hold the light" of language. In the artist’s book, the poems grow and mutate as the reader turns the pages, blurring the boundary between text and illumination, marginalia and body. Animating across the surface, the poems coalesce and disperse in an ecstatic helix of words, taking turns "illuminating" one another's margins and interstices.They play with the mutation of language, both by forming new portmanteaus and conjoined phrases, and also through references to fecundity as it manifests in the natural world, the body, human history, popular culture, decorative arts, and architecture, placing the shifting evolution and continuous overlap of all these spheres in dialogue with the ever-changing technology of the book. The iPad version of Abra, which provides a physical backdrop for the artist's book into which it is inserted, extends and revels in this ephemerality, putting special emphasis on interactivity to highlight the role of the reader. The poems spring to life onscreen: not only do they conjoin and separate, with a swipe of his or her finger, readers may join the collaboration and mutate the text further, creating new juxtapositions and surprising turns of phrase. Their texts provide scores for potential performances of the work, making Abra function much like the magic word of its origin–abracadabra–as an unpredictable living text. We are interested in both exhibiting the hybrid artist's book / iPad app and performing from the work. We would also be happy to give a presentation, if that is of interest. While the project is a collaboration between 3 people, only Amaranth and Ian are applying to present it. We both plan to attend the conference and are especially interested in the opportunity to expand the performative possibilities of the text, which to date has been performed by Kate and Amaranth in conjoined costume. Abra is being produced under an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The project will launch this spring. For exhibition, our piece requires an iPad running iOS7 and a podium. We can provide the artist's book. For performance, we can provide iPads and adapters. Amaranth Borsuk's books include Between Page and Screen and Handiwork. She teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Kate Durbin's books include The Ravenous Audience and E! Entertainment, among others. She teaches at Whitter College. Ian Hatcher is a text/sound artist and programmer living in New York.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This piece won the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize.