Human Artifacts. Spring 2023 Broadside Reading Series I

The computer is “utterly a human artifact,” according to poet Robert Pinsky. “It reeks of us, as do our trombones, cars, scissors, parades, pizzas.” The poets, writers, and artists in this series use this “human artifact”—the computer—to produce creative texts. Some provoke machine learning models; others write alongside them. Some shape digital texts from the ground up, bit by bit, while others use the Internet to facilitate community participation. We find that the concerns and the aura of their works are unmistakably human—not despite their use of computation, but because of it.

Human Artifacts is the title of the Spring 2023 Broadside Reading Series curated by Allison Parish. Happening twice annually, it features six writers from various backgrounds and writing disciplines, collaborating with Center for Book Arts’ Artists-in-Residence to create a collection of limited edition letterpress-printed broadsides. Each collaboration explores the relationship of text, image, and design, incorporating the artists’ visual conveyance of writers’ poetry and prose. To celebrate these collaborative broadsides, CBA will host two online readings by the authors accompanied by the artists they worked with.

Poets

Amira Hanafi is a poet, cultural worker, and artist working with language as a material. Their work uses systems, games, performance, and publishing to bring together communities of real and fictional characters who speak, interact, and sometimes exchange identities. Amira’s work has been shown widely online and in offline spaces around the world, most recently at the 5th International Biennale of Casablanca and at Les Abattoirs Musée in Toulouse, France. She is the author of the books Forgery (Green Lantern Press, 2011) and Minced English (2010), a number of limited edition print works, and a growing number of works of electronic literature, including as part of the transdisciplinary project A dictionary of the revolution. Amira is currently Writer in Residence at Coastal Carolina University, where they teach creative writing and work on projects that aim to constitute language for fluid identities and border-crossing bodies.

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator who works at the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry that received the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work and longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their fifth book, Negative Money, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2023.

Everest Pipkin (b. 1990) is a game developer, writer, and artist from central Texas who lives and works on a sheep farm in southern New Mexico. Their work both in the studio and in the garden follows themes of ecology, tool making, and collective care during collapse. When not at the computer in the heat of the day, you can find them in the hills spending time with their neighbors— both human and non-human.

Artists

Allison Carter-Beaulé (she/they) is a printmaker, poet, and teacher from Calgary, Alberta and Administrative Assistant at Center for Book Arts. Carter-Beaulé holds a BSc in biology with a double major in English literature from the University of British Columbia. She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Columbia University, where she was awarded the inaugural Max Ritvo Poetry Fellowship. You can find Allison in New York—either at the foot of a letterpress or waiting for the L train to take her to a letterpress.

Weiyun Chen (Winnie) is a graphic designer based in Brooklyn, NY; specializing in branding, exhibition, print and editorial design. She is working with lucky risograph as a designer; also she currently is part of School of Visual Arts student for Design/ Designer as Entrepreneur program. She is interested in exhibition, brand identity and editorial design and in general how design and life can complement and collaborate with each other. She desires to bring the passion for converting ideas and senses of human feeling into visual language.

Caslon Yoon (she/her) is a Graphic Designer. Her design practice aims to challenge methods of expression and uncommon familiarity with a focus on experimentation, conceptualizing, and craftsmanship. She enjoys exploring different worlds of art forms and incorporates her discoveries of diverse media in her designs. When she isn’t designing, you’ll find her knitting, reforming wearables, or capturing moments with her point-and-shoot film camera.

Curator

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. According to Ars Technica, Allison’s work “delight[s] everyone.” She was named “Best Maker of Poetry Bots” by the Village Voice in 2016, and her zine of computer-generated poems called “Compasses” received an honorary mention in the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica. Allison is the co-creator of the board game Rewordable (Clarkson Potter, 2017) and author of several books, including @Everyword: The Book (Instar, 2015) and Articulations (Counterpath, 2018). Her poetry has recently appeared in BOMB Magazine and Strange Horizons. Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah, and currently lives in Brooklyn.

About the Broadside Reading Series

CBA’s Broadside Readings Series program is a unique opportunity for poets and artists to collaborate. Every spring and fall season, CBA invites a poet to curate a new series of readings. CBA then commissions artists to collaborate with the participating poets to design and print for each of them a limited-edition broadside featuring their work. The broadsides are made available for sale to the public in-person and online in CBA’s bookshop.

Support

This program was organized by Center for Book Arts and Allison Parrish.