We come to language on and beyond the page—articulations of the book: snapshot, found object, film, and field. Bridges between beings and beliefs. Embodiments in the sensual infrastructure. More practice than performance. Our witness, the anti-binary, beating between.

—Deborah Poe

Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (Dusie Press), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords), as well as a novella in verse, Hélène (Furniture Press). Her visual works—including video poems and handmade book objects—have been exhibited at Pace University (New York City), Casper College (Wyoming), Center for Book Arts (New York City), University of Arizona Poetry Center (Tucson), University of Pennsylvania Kelly Writers House at Brodsky Gallery (Philadelphia), and ONN/OF “a light festival” (Seattle), as well as online with Bellingham Review, Elective Affinities, Peep/Show, Trickhouse, and The Volta. She lives in Seattle.

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The book gives weight to information & puts spine in our reading. It adds gravity to our erudition & gives substance to knowledge. The book is manual not automatic: slow, thoughtful & purposeful, building scholarship with turning pages. The book is.

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—Scott McCarney

Scott McCarney is an artist, designer, and educator in Rochester, New York USA. He received formal design training at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia and an advanced photography degree from the University at Buffalo/Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York. His works can be found in The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. His teaching and lecturing itinerary has carried the banner of artists books to Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Mexico, and South America.

His primary art practice has been in book form since 1980 and spans many media, from offset and digital printing to sculpture and site-specific installation. Many of his visual books utilize photography and incorporate frequently overlooked details of day-to-day living — discrete moments unbound by daily existence.

scottmccarneyvisualbooks.com

scottmccarney.blogspot.com/

A book is a protean kaleidoscope.

—Zuzana Husárová

Zuzana Husárová is a researcher and author in the field of electronic literature, teaching at Comenius University (SR) and University of Applied Arts (AT), an ex-Fulbright scholar at MIT, USA (2011). She is the author of experimental literature across various media, has created sound poetry, interactive digital poetry, poetic performances and transmedia poetry. She has collaborated with Ľubomír Panák on interactive literary pieces (with the use of Kinect: Enter: in’ Wodies, I: *ttter, Android application Obvia Gaude, digital literature BA-Tale, Pulse). She has co-authored with Amalia Roxana Filip transmedia projects liminal and lucent 2012-2014 (visual poetry books, sound poetry and live performances www.liminal.name), with Olga Pek a book Amoeba, has collaborated on interdisciplinary performances. She co-edited theoretical publications V sieti strednej Európy (with Bogumila Suwara) and ENTER+ Repurposing in Electronic Literature (with María Mencía).

zuz.husarova.net/

A spatiotemporal capture device, a survival that, in your hands, unfolds transactional passage-ways of untold dimensions. Yet also a gesture, differentiating inside from out, frame from field with a finger drawn. Equally determined to catalyze and surpass their material binding in the here and now, they slyly posture as self-sufficient objects with no need for reading, translation, or circulation. Yet as they are destroyed, re-deployed, incinerated, unwritten, ingested, buried, unopened, deteriorate, obfuscate, or erase, so too are the stalled spacetimes (i.e., meanings) and potent coming-into-relation that books and their readers cannot help but realize, giving away the lie.

—Laura Shackelford

Laura Shackelford is associate professor of English and director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. She is the author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction (2014); her research in literary media practices, narrative theory, and feminist science studies examines the Ordinary Entanglements (manuscript in progress) through which bioinformatic sciences, digital languages, and their spatiotemporal orientations enter into literary fiction and contemporary knowledges of lived space.

rit.academia.edu/LauraShackelford

What is a book? It stinks. B.O…O.K. Like a drunk. L’IVRE. Each one is a long island, brother. L.I. BRO. A kit full of As and Bs. KITĀB. Latin LIBERation & Saxon BOG. The Taíno language would not have had a word for it but it had GUAROCO = to know, but also to remember (see petroglyphs). A book is a way of knowing, re-membering what is forever lost in translation.

—Urayoán Noel

Urayoán Noel is a South Bronx-based writer, critic, performer, translator and intermedia artist originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is an associate professor of English and Spanish at New York University, and also teaches at Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas. Noel is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015), as well as the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA Latina/o Studies Book Award. As translator, his works include the bilingual edition Architecture of Dispersed Life: Selected Poetry by Pablo de Rokha (Shearsman Books, forthcoming) and the chapbook No Budu Please by Wingston González, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. His non-print work ranges from durational performance and text-sound-video installations to collaborative projects with musician/composer Monxo López, artist Martha Clippinger, and dancer/choreographer Alethea Pace, among others. Noel has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, and CantoMundo. His vlog is wokitokiteki.com.

urayoannoel.com

urayoannoel.bandcamp.com

A book is a vessel and a vector.
—Lisa Radon

Lisa Radon makes poems, sculptures, performances, sounds, scents, digital worlds, publications, websites, as the proposition requires. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Et al. (San Francisco), Muscle Beach (Portland), Jupiter Woods (London), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), and Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), a two-person show at RONGWRONG (Amsterdam) and read at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art (San Francisco) as part of A Reading by…. Her books include Wholeness Engine (2017, Jupiter Woods), The Blind Remembrance of the Swirling Bone (2016, Ditch Projects/Artspeak), Infinity Increaser (2014, PICA), The Plumb and The Wave (2014), The Book of Knots (2013, cL_books), and Prototyping Eutopias (2013). Atrium of the Sun (atriumofthesun.com) was commissioned by Disjecta in 2017. Radon edits the journal EIGHTS.

lisaradon.com

A book is whatever you want it to be or don’t want it to be.

For the artist, it is a medium to be used to explore an idea and tell us something new about the world.

For the writer, it is a sequence of pages, one after another, one before another, one next to another.

For the reader, it is a site to resist or to become complicit with the intention of the artist or writer.

—Stephen Bury

Stephen Bury is the Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York and the author of Artists’ Books (1995, 2015) and Artists’ Multiples (2001).

frick.org/person/bury

—If, with the intention of creating a book, you put a cover around practically anything, that item is a book.

—So six blocks of ice held in a book cover can be a book until they melt?

—Yes. And maybe even after they melt. Then it would be a melted book.

—Kate Greenstreet

Kate Greenstreet’s books are case sensitive, The Last 4 Things, Young Tambling, and The End of Something.

kickingwind.com

A book is a brick in the architecture of knowledge.

—David Clark

David Clark is a Canadian media artist whose whole thing is all about bits and pieces, narrative vertigo, and informal conundrums. After the internet was invented, he began tearing it to pieces and putting it back together bit by bit with glue and tape and with an eye for pathetic fallacy, delusions of reference, and apophenia. He teaches Media Arts at NSCAD University in Halifax, Canada.

chemicalpictures.net

The/a book pretends to be the end result of intellectual labour and hard graft. In reality, the/a book is a machine that plugs into other machines (both human and non-human, both biological and non-biological) with the express purpose of drawing in disparate species, entangling diverse temporalities, implicating multiple modes of communication and drawing out diversiform narratives. The/a book is the/a perfect example of continuously evolving symbiotic relationships between machines and human bodies, between matter and imagination; a hyperadapting transponder of time and language. The/a book circumscribes the limit of our belief in language as a carrier of signals that will guide (and infect) processes of consciousness across time, space and media. Every iteration of a/the book works towards that limit and seeks to push and expand it.

—Theodoros Chiotis

Theodoros Chiotis is a poet writing in Greek, English, Python and Perl. Amongst his publications are Futures: Poetry of the Greek Crisis (Penned in the Margins, 2015), Screen (in collaboration with photographer Nikolas Ventourakis; Paper Tigers Books, 2017) and limit.less: towards an assembly of the sick (Litmus, 2017). He lives in Athens and works as the Co-ordinator of Scholarly Research and Digital Development of the Cavafy Archive (Onassis Foundation). He has received a High Commendation from the Forward Prizes for Poetry and the Dot Award for New Media Writing from the Institute for the Future of the Book and Bournemouth University for his work Mutualised Archives.

Penned in the Margins

Selfcoding