WorkshopsCritical DevelopmentImaginary Books: The Book as Performance – Summer 2023

Imaginary Books: The Book as Performance – Summer 2023

Event Info

This two-week, virtual workshop takes place on Zoom on Wednesdays, August 2 and 9, from 6–8pm ET.

Complete Schedule:

August 2, 2023, 6:00–8:00pm ET
August 9, 2023, 6:00–8:00pm ET

Please Note: Registration for this workshop closes on July 26 at 11:59 pm.

About the Workshop:

This virtual class at Center for Book Arts is taught by instructor Amaranth Borsuk.

This workshop invites participants to consider the question “What is a book?” Taking our cue from the artists of Fluxus, participants in this workshop will collaboratively create a series of event scores—short, instruction-based artworks—based on imaginary books of their own devising, as simple or outlandish as their heart desires. In this way, we will turn the creative process itself into an artistic practice and event, generating books as intimate performances we gift to one another. Our first session will be devoted to a short overview of the practice of event scores and to books made in unlikely forms and with surprising materials. We will ask ourselves, what is the most unusual or unconventional book we can imagine?

Participants will come up with 5-10 imaginary books to share with the group during the session. We will then work on composing event scores for our imaginary books, contributing them to a collective document. After the works are shared, in preparation for the second session, each participant will select one imaginary book to create. They will document their book with photography and a reflective artist’s statement, which they will share in the second session.

We will collect the event scores into a collaborative digital chapbook, which will be offered as a gift to all participants after the session—a source for inspiration for when we feel creatively “stuck” and a playful artifact of our time together.

Required Materials:

This class requires no specific materials or tools.

About Amaranth Borsuk:

Amaranth Borsuk’s work focuses on textual materiality from the surface of the page to the surface of language. Borsuk is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, Bothell, where she also serves as Associate Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics. She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where her work focused on the use of writing technologies by modern and contemporary poets to change their relationship to the page and their construction of authorship.

In order to best serve our community, many of our online classes are pay-what-you-can. The amount you choose to pay goes directly toward our instructors and toward creating scholarship opportunities for the future. Virtual workshops at Center for Book Arts will be recorded and the recording will be provided for all registered participants after the class.