SubText: Text/Page/Screen, September 15, 2016
SubText is an evening of national and Denver-based artists and creators presenting work that looks at how we use text: computer code, book publication, force for social change, invisible entity attaching itself to what we do and how we define who we are. The event takes place on Thursday, September 15, at 7 p.m., and also highlights artists and scholars from the University of Denver’s Emergent Digital Practices program, as well as features Amaranth Borsuk, a writer and digital maker based in Seattle. The lineup for the evening includes:
Amaranth Borsuk
Douglas Kearney
SpringGun Press
Miriam Suzanne
Joshua Ware
Khadijah Queen
W. Scott Howard
Rafael Fajardo
Noah Phillips
Laleh Mehran
Timothy Weaver
Amaranth Borsuk‘s most recent book of poems is Pomegranate Eater (Kore, 2016). She is the author, with Andy Fitch, of As We Know (Subito, 2014), an erased and redacted diary. Her intermedia project Abra (published in a trade edition by 1913 Press, 2016), created with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher, received an NEA-funded Expanded Artists’ Books grant and was recently issued as a limited-edition hand-made book and free iPhone and iPad app. Borsuk’s previous books include Handiwork (Slope, 2012); and Between Page and Screen (SpringGun, 2016; Slope, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems created with Brad Bouse. Her other digital collaborations include The Deletionist, an erasure bookmarklet created with Nick Montfort and Jesper Juul; and Whispering Galleries, a site-specific LeapMotion interactive textwork for the New Haven Free Public Library.
Douglas Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” His third poetry collection, Patter (Red Hen Press, 2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood and was a finalist for the California Book Award in Poetry. Cultural critic Greg Tate remarked that Kearney’s second book, National Poetry Series selection, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), “flows from a consideration of urban speech, negro spontaneity and book learning.” Someone Took They Tongues. (Subito Press 2016) collects several of his libretti, including one written in a counterfeit Afro-diasporic language. He was the guest editor for 2015’s Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, Best American Experimental Writing, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, The Breakbeat Poets, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Poets in America. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.
SpringGun Press (& Miriam Suzanne bio to follow). A SpringGun is unexpected, sudden, immediate, urgent—it’s happening now. It dwells within the context of cold war paranoia and the new post 9/11 era. A SpringGun is simultaneously insane, comical, violent, practical, ingenious, irresponsible, terrifying, vulnerable, and deadly. We’re not necessarily looking for political work, but work fueled with its own sense of urgency, play, and importance is a must. We’re interested in the internet as a medium both for its networking potential and accessibility; we want to create a platform for newer art forms to emerge and pull new intelligent voices into the literary fold. We’re interested in writers who read vigorously and are invested in the continued advancement and development of both “print” and digital writing. We’re looking for artists who believe that it’s important to interact with a community of ideas and artists, who believe no good art happens in isolation.
Joshua Ware lives in Denver, CO. His first book, Homage to Homage to Homage to Creeley, won the 2010 Furniture Press Poetry Prize and was published in 2011. He is the author of the chapbooks Excavations (Further Adventures Press, 2011) and A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations (Scantily Clad Press, 2009), as well as the co-author of I, NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press, 2009) and the forthcoming SDVIG (alice blue books, 2012). His writing and collages have appeared in many journals, such as American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Conduit, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Third Coast, Quarterly West, and Western Humanities Review.
Khadijah Queen is the author of four books and four chapbooks. Her full length collections are Conduit (Black Goat/Akashic Books 2008); Black Peculiar, winner of the 2010 Noemi Press book award and published in 2011; Fearful Beloved (Argos Books 2015); and Non-Sequitur, a verse play published by Litmus Press in 2015. Non-Sequitur won the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Performance Writing and was staged by theater company The Relationship at Theaterlab NYC in December 2015. Individual poems and prose appear or are forthcoming in Fence, Tin House, Brooklyn Magazine, The Force of What’s Possible, Fire and Ink: A Social Action Anthology, Best American Nonrequired Reading and in other journals and anthologies widely elsewhere. A fifth book, I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and will be published by YesYes Books in 2017. Her visual art has been exhibited at the Seattle Museum of Art, EYEDRUM Gallery in Atlanta, Cuchifritos Gallery NYC, and elsewhere nationally and internationally. She is currently a core faculty member in poetry and playwriting for the new low-residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University. Visit her website: khadijahqueen.com.
W. Scott Howard teaches poetics and poetry in the Department of English at the University of Denver. He received his Ph.D. in English and Critical Theory from the University of Washington, Seattle, where he was a member of the Subtext Collective. Scott worked at Powell’s Books (1990-93) where he co-managed (with Vanessa Renwick) the Small Press & Journals section, the dewclaw reading series, the prism interdisciplinary discussion series, and also managed the Critical Theory section. His interviews in PLAZM magazine (1993-97) are noted in the documentary film, Helvetica (2007). Scott is the founding editor of Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture. His multigraphs for Reconstruction include Water: Resources and Discourses (2006) co-edited with Justin Scott Coe; and Archives on Fire: Artifacts & Works, Communities & Fields (2016). His collections of poetry include the e-book, ROPES (with images by Ginger Knowlton) from Delete Press, 2014; and SPINNAKERS (The Lune, 2016). His work has received support from the Modern Language Association, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Scott lives in Englewood, CO and commutes year-round by bicycle.
Rafael Fajardo has been exploring the expressive potential of the medium of videogames through his creative work, his research, and his teaching since the 1990s. He is the founder of SWEAT, a loose collaborative that pioneered the creation of socially conscious videogames. Rafael’s game projects have been featured at the Digital Games Research Association’s Blank Arcade, the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Caixa Forum in Barcelona and various other museums and festivals. Fajardo has been engaging in collaborative interdisciplinary research in the field of games and education, concentrating on learning through game-making. His projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the Colorado Council on the Arts, in excess of one million dollars. Rafael and his collaborators have conducted lectures, workshops and game jams at OCAD, Parsons, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM SIGCSE, ISTE, the Denver Art Museum, and the Games for Change Festival. I.D. Magazine named Fajardo among the top fifty designers in the country in 2004. Fajardo has served on the board of AIGA Colorado, and was one of the founders of the AIGA Center for Cross Cultural Design. His course areas include historical and emerging design methods, typography and book design, and game design. Rafael received an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1993, a BFA and a BA in Studio Art with a concentration in Design from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a James Michener Fellow in Publishing at the University of Texas Press in 1991.
Noah Travis Phillips is an artist and researcher. He is an MFA student at the University of Denver in Emergent Digital Practices (EDP), a highly innovative program existing at the dynamic convergence of art & technology. He creates artwork in a variety of forms, which focus on anonymous internet media and art historical sources that intensify personal mythology and engage in broader cultural discourses. He is a research-assistant for a NAKFI Futures Grant involving ecological thinking. One of his works was featured in the 2015 Biennial of the Americas. He has exhibited work across the U.S. He has work in public and private collections. He currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. He can be found online at http://noahtravisphillips.com.
Laleh Mehran‘s research areas include the intersections of art and science, international politics, and emerging forms of time-based media. Mehran received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Electronic Time-Based Media. Her work has been shown individually and as part of art collectives at the Next 5 Minutes 4 Tactical Media Festival in Amsterdam, Holland; the European Media Arts Festival in Osnabruck, Germany; Ponte Futura in Cortona Italy; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, MA; the Orlo Video Festival in Portland, Oregon; the Carnegie Museum of Art; The Georgia Museum of Art; The Andy Warhol Museum; and the Pittsburgh Biennial at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in Pittsburgh, PA. More information may be found at Laleh’s personal website (www.lalehmehran.com).
As a new media artist, Timothy Weaver‘s concerted objective has been to contribute to the restoration of ecological memory through a process of speculative inquiry along the art | technology interface. His recent interactive installation, live cinema, video and sonic projects have been featured at FILE/FILE Hipersonica (Brazil), Transmediale (Berlin), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), Subtle Technologies (Toronto), Korean Experimental Art Festival (Seoul), Museum of Modern Art (Cuenca, Ecuador) and nationally at the Denver Art Museum, Boston CyberArts/MIT, SIGGRAPH, the New York Digital Salon and the National Institutes of Health. Additionally, Weaver has conducted visiting artist projects/lectures at the Santa Fe Institute, the University of Gavle, Creative Media Lab/Creative Programming (Gavle, Sweden), KTH/Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), University of New Mexico’s Art & Ecology Program, University of Pittsburgh and University of Colorado, Boulder. His course areas include interactive art and design, net art and design, sustainable design strategies, biomedia and research methods. Timothy received an MFA in Sculpture from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1993, an MS in Environmental Engineering and a BS in Microbiology from Purdue University. Timothy’s research areas include biomedia, biomimetics, bioacoustics, biological narrativity, emerging interactions, live cinema, immersive environments, sustainable design, ecosemiotics, and ecological memory.