A book is what reading looks like. It bears the same relationship to reading as space does to time.

—Gary Barwin

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and the author of twenty-one books of poetry, fiction and books for children. His latest book is the poetry collection No TV for Woodpeckers (Wolsak & Wynn). His recent national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour as well as the Canadian Jewish Literary Award (Fiction) and the Hamilton Literary Award (Fiction). It was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His interactive writing installation using old typewriters and guitar processors was featured during 2016-2017 at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. A finalist for the National Magazine Awards (Poetry), he is a three-time recipient of Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year, has also received the Hamilton Arts Award for Literature and has co-won the bpNichol Chapbook Award and the K.M. Hunter Arts Award.

garybarwin.com

The book is body and matter; and bodies (of every color, size and form) matter.
#elcuerpoimporta

—Alex Saum

Alex Saum is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture (20th and 21st Centuries) and Electronic Literature (Digital Humanities). She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Her academic work on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States. Her digital artwork has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals in the United States and abroad.

More info at alexsaum.com

a slow rue. a mess of beans, of categories, of spilt personalities & pretty ribbon.
an equation. a village of fractals. a before feathers there was finger painting.
a mongol court. lebanon. syria. palestine. christianity’s ego trip.
what venice bit. the first sheet. the 18th paper cut. the holy letterpress sinking into the ocean.
the first binary ascending from the foam. the ephemeral joy of mildew.
a heat rash on plump thighs. the last ream. mecca. alpha. omega. a resurrection.
an insurrection.

—LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). Her interdisciplinary work has been featured at the Brooklyn Museum, the Poesiefestival in Berlin, Museum of Modern Art, the QOW conference in Slovakia, the International Poetry Festival in Bucharest, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the 56th Venice Biennale and currently in Beijing as a Red Gate Artist in Residence. As a curator and director, she has staged events at BAM Café, Lincoln Center Out of Doors, The David Rubenstein Atrium, The Highline, Poets House and El Museo del Barrio. LaTasha is the recipient of numerous awards; of them include New York Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, the Japan-US Friendship Commission, Creative Capital and the Whiting Foundation Literary Award. She lives in Harlem.

The book is a dangerously unstable object :: It is the world :: It is not the world :: It is the world bending :: It is a constant movement-between :: The structure of the book mirrors :: Mirrors us :: Mirrors our time ::::

The book is a remarkable technology :: It is a shimmering substance :: It is a noise of the hands & thought :: The book is perhaps now a dead thing :: In the hands of the dead :: So be it :: We remain in the dark :: With these books :: The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through :: At :: In :: Against :: With care :: The book returns our labor to us ::::

The book stains the fingers like static :: You can always open it further ::::

—Aaron Cohick

Aaron Cohick is a letterpress printer/artist/publisher based in Colorado Springs, CO. His work focuses on the intersection of experimental writing and artists’ publishing. He is the founder and proprietor of the NewLights Press, and is also the Printer of The Press at Colorado College.

newlightspress.com
thepressatcoloradocollege.org

The book is a device whose content can only be imagined when it is still unread, consequently creating endless versions, and can be shared and expanded after it has been read. Still, it remains the same.

—Alessandro Ludovico

Alessandro Ludovico is a researcher, artist and chief editor of Neural magazine since 1993. He received his PhD degree in English and Media from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge (UK). He is Associate Professor at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and Lecturer at Parsons Paris – The New School. He has published and edited several books, and has lectured worldwide. He also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12’s Magazine Project. He is one of the authors of the award-winning Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google Will Eat Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook).

neural.it

The book is a compromise we’ve grown used to, for the sake of efficiency. The book is a clever marketing ploy to make you care. Do you care? The book is kompromat, to be used against us when the time comes.

—Miriam Suzanne

Miriam Suzanne is an author, performer, musician, designer, and web developer — working with OddBird, Teacup Gorilla, Grapefruit Lab, and CSS Tricks. She’s the author of Riding SideSaddle* and The Post-Obsolete Book, co-author of Jump Start Sass and the award-winning play: 10 Myths on the Proper Application of Beauty Products. Miriam loves open-source art and software, dark chocolate, and mediocre TV.

miriamsuzanne.com

In the book,
it’s the eyes that meet the words
first

The book is ready and includes reviews of astronauts

Skywriting is here then it’s gone

Handwriting a thing from the past is all thumbs now

For the letters that choose not to return to the word – it is a kind of suffocation

A holy text read silently, seen aloud
A book carried through history

I was reading a page in a book with an adjoining illustration that I wanted to examine closer. Instead of moving the book toward my face or my head thrust forward to see further details – i found myself putting my fingers on the image in the book and using that magnify finger and thumb motion over the picture you’d use on a tablet

—Nico Vassilakis

Nico Vassilakis writes and draws language. Many of his results can be found online and at his website:

staringpoetics.weebly.com

A book is an object that invites an experience.

Something must turn for the book to be experienced: pages, leaves, a word, a worm, your head, the room.

—Genevieve Kaplan

genevieve.kaplan.com

The book is a cultural compact, where culture may be understood as the experience of living in a place over time. A book is an insistence upon the hope to participate in an as-yet-undefined community given material form. A book’s materiality consists of acts of reception and propagation that mark that community; its form is thus iterated, variable, embodied, and entangled. Even the most trivial books memorialize their predecessors and anticipate their successors. Still the book lives among others as an other. The best books are amiable and aspire to ekstasis, they tremble in our hands or before our eyes. The worst mean to manipulate or deform desire.

—Michael Joyce

Michael Joyce is the author of fourteen books and a number of digital works, some predating the web. His most recent novel, Media: a picaresque is forthcoming in October 2018 from Steerage Press.

 

A book is a geography. It doesn’t have to be read in a linear fashion. As a matter of fact, I once met a grandmother who read the last chapter first, then started from the beginning. She wanted to know her destination. While reading the conclusion first may seem strange or unorthodox, it’s a unique way of traveling through a story, its characters, and (to a certain extent) defying time and space. We all have our own way of reading stories.

A book is a location. Its a place where words are gathered together and convene, then float out into the atmosphere. When the words are spoken or recited, they are subject to falling apart through speech. Books give birth to other books thus adding to the greater constellation and genealogy of a knowledge built up over time. It’s not just some object or an analog technology.

The book is also a home for everyday life. It holds and nestles receipts, bookmarks, and notes in the hope of haunting its next reader.

—Dorothy Santos

Dorothy R. Santos is a Filipina American writer, editor, and curator whose research interests include digital art, computational media, and biotechnology. Born and raised in San Francisco, California, she holds Bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of San Francisco and received her Master’s degree in Visual and Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow. Her work appears in art21, Art Practical, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Ars Technica, Vice Motherboard, and SF MOMA’s Open Space. Her essay “Materiality to Machines: Manufacturing the Organic and Hypotheses for Future Imaginings,” was published in The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture. She serves as a co-curator for REFRESH and works as the Program Manager for the Processing Foundation.

dorothysantos.com