Human Artifacts. Spring 2023 Broadside Reading Series II

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

Josephine Giles (b.1986) is a writer and performer from Orkney, Scotland. Her verse novel ‘Deep Wheel Orcadia’ was published by Picador in October 2021 and won the 2022 Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction book of the year. Her poetry collections ‘The Games’ (Out-Spoken Press, 2018) and ‘Tonguit’ (Freight Books 2015) were between them shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Saltire Prize and the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Stirling. Her show Drone debuted in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and toured internationally, and her performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian’s best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup—in the “But Is It Art?” category.

Janelle Shane’s AI humor blog, AIweirdness.com, and her book, “You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How AI Works, and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place” use cartoons and humorous pop-culture experiments to look inside the artificial intelligence algorithms that run our world. (b. 1984, she/her/hers)

K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint. Their sound healing neuroscience opera, Song of the Ambassadors, premiered at Lincoln Center in 2022. They record and release music under the name Qenric. Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator, and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.

Artists

Kelli Anderson is an artist, designer, animator, and tinkerer who pushes the limits of ordinary materials to seek out possibilities hidden in plain view, in humble materials. Her books and projects have included a pop-up paper planetarium, a book that transforms into a pinhole camera, a working paper record, and techniques for misusing RISO to create tactile, inky animations. Intentionally lo-fi, she believes that humble materials can provide entry into the endless, tunneling complexity of our world, making those wonders accessible on a multi-sensory, rich, human level. By opening “black box” concepts up to the poetics and playfulness of the senses, her projects function as a lab space for collaborative thought, thereby broadening accessibility and the diversity of voices at the table. She is currently completing Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book on the relationship between typography and technology with Letterform Archive.

Valentina Améstica (Chile, b.1994). In an experimental line, Valentina develops her work between printing, typography, graphics, art installations, and poetry. With studies in graphic design in Chile and Experimental Printing, Binding, and Letterpress in Central Saint Martins (London), her works present crosses that address sensory issues, the fragility of memory, and personal and everyday experiences.

Eva Parra (1982) is a researcher, educator, and printmaker. She is part of the curatorial collective Indisciplinadas where she has developed exhibitions such as No room for books and soft [cover] revolution. She is the co-founder of Calipso Press, a printing studio, publishing label, and artistic collective established in 2015 in Cali, and since 2022 based in NY. Calipso hosts a residency program oriented to expanded publishing and printing experimentation. They have participated in Art book fairs such as NYABF, UNFOLD Shanghai, Libros Mutantes Madrid, Rrreplica México and curated contemporary art projects such as Post Digital Mimeography (Colombia Biennale, Pereira, 2016) and A Sketch for the Future (Miriam Gallery, New York, 2022).

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.

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