[Purple-Blurb] Between Page & Screen: Digital, Visual, and Material Poetics on Thursday

[Nick Montfort]

Dear Purple Blurbers,

I'm looking forward to a presentation by Amaranth Borsuk this Thursday 
(March 31) at 4pm in MIT's 2-105 -- one that promises to be great, based 
on what I know of the project that Amaranth is discussing. (I saw this 
extraordinary conflation of letterpress printing and augmented reality at 
the Electronic Literature Organization's 2010 conference at Brown.) The 
event is earlier than the typical Purple Blurb meeting, to coincide with 
the CMS Colloquium this semester. I hope the time will work for many of 
you.

Here are the details on Amaranth's presentation:

Amaranth Borsuk will discus her poetic practice as a multi-media writer 
and artist, reading selections from recent work and showing images and 
performance footage from current projects. What is a poetics of 
materiality and how does it play out across print and digital media? What 
does a focus on the material of language do to our constructions of 
authorship? Borsuk will read from Between Page and Screen, a digital 
pop-up book of poems, Tonal Saw, a chapbook constructed from a religious 
tract, and Excess Exhibit, a flip-book of conjoined poems that mutate from 
constraint into rapturous abundance. She will also show digital work in 
progress and read selections from her recently completed manuscript 
Handiwork, whose poems explore the relationship between torture and 
writing, trauma and creativity through a combination of Oulipo constraint 
and surreal lyricism.

A poet and scholar, Amaranth Borsuk's work focuses on textual 
materiality--from the surface of the page to the surface of language. She 
is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Media Studies and 
Writing and Humanistic Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
where she works on and teaches digital poetry. She has a Ph.D. in 
Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern 
California, where she co-founded The Loudest Voice cross-genre reading 
series and the Gold Line Press chapbook series. Her essays and book 
reviews have appeared in print and online. Poems have recently appeared in 
Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, FIELD, Eleven Eleven, and Denver 
Quarterly, among other journals. She is the author of a chapbook-length 
poem, Tonal Saw (The Song Cave, 2010), and Excess Exhibit (ZG Press, 
forthcoming), a book of conjoined poems written collaboratively with poet 
and performance artist Kate Durbin, which includes drawings by Zach Kleyn. 
She has also collaboratively translated and transverted the work of Oulipo 
poet Paul Braffort together with Gabriela Jauregui and crafted an 
augmented-reality chapbook, Between Page and Screen, together with Brad 
Bouse. Recent collaborative work can be found in Black Warrior Review, 
Caketrain, New American Writing, and Action, Yes!. In addition to writing 
and studying poetry, Amaranth is also a letterpress printer and book 
artist whose fascination with printed matter informs her work on digital 
media.

Hope to see you there!

  -Nick

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
-   Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
-   77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
--
-   President, The Electronic Literature Organization