Printed Matter and Information as Material (IAM) present ‘Reading Matters’, a multipart project that asks, ‘Is it possible to practice an art of reading? And if so, what might it leave behind and how can we read reading as art?‘ Members of the UK- and US-based editorial collective – Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris & Nick Thurston – explore the conditions under which acts of reading try to answer these questions. The presentation spans several threads, including an opening reading event on Oct 29, a distributed poster exhibition, and an onsite installation and digital library of texts available for download at the Printed Matter store.

Opening Reception & Poetry Reading: Saturday October 29, 5-7PM IAM and Printed Matter present a series of short readings from poets across the language arts who are engaged in the politics of language and materiality, and/or with a practice of re-reading. Readers include Valérie Steunou (performing the work of Kate Briggs), Holly Melgard, Diana Hamilton, Judith Goldman, Felipe Cussen, Robert Fitterman, with an introduction from Craig Dworkin. Join on Facebook here.

New IAM titles: IAM launch two new publications at the event, Simon Morris’ (ed.) catalog Reading As Art and Craig Dworkin’s latest book of poetry Twelve Erroneous Displacements and Fact. Reading As Art investigates the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the site of activity), as well as the bodies that engage in it and the circumstances in which it occurs.

Twelve Erroneous Displacements and Fact gathers Dworkin’s collection of thirteen FACTs (2005-16), poems which list the exact ingredients of the materials used to inscribe the text, and the object on which the work is published. These poems have listed the make-up of everything from a xeroxed sheet of paper to a compact disc to a smartphone touchscreen to a Himalayan wool rug.

Reading Matters Library: Producing functioning libraries as art exhibitions has been a linchpin of Information as Material’s work since 2009. At Printed Matter, IAM presents a selection of past artist’s books from numerous writers and artists. A complementary selection of publications from Printed Matter’s inventory will also be assembled. Both selections highlight artworks that somehow foreground an interest in reading – its histories, theories, practices.

Poster Exhibition: Printed Matter and IAM have produced a large double-sided poster, published in an edition of 300 and downloadable for DIY printing here. The poster announces itself as a distributed exhibition – it takes place everywhere it is displayed simultaneously between the opening on October 28 and Dec 31. After the turn to 2017 the same poster becomes documentation of the exhibition it previously was.

One side of the poster features a short abridgement from Nick Thurston’s new essay, ‘Readography’, written for the catalog Reading as Art. On the other side is Craig Dworkin’s final FACT poem, a text that records the relative molecular weights of the neurotransmitters activated by the poem as it is being read. Posters will be distributed to libraries and institutions, and are available at Printed Matter.

LibraryBox: An onsite LibraryBox features free-to-download selections of related content in digital form, co-curated by digital archivists and editors Chris Mustazza, Danny Snelson and Michael Nardone. The files will be available via a local wifi network in the store until the end of the exhibition.

PARTICIPANT BIOS

Information as Material:

Craig Dworkin is the author of several books of poetry, including, most recently: Chapter XXIV (Red Butte Press, 2013); An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Williamstown (Publication Studio, 2015); Alkali (Counterpath, 2015); and 12 Erroneous Displacements and a Fact (Information As Material, 2016). He teaches literature and theory at the University of Utah and serves as Founding Senior Editor to Eclipse.

Nick Thurston is a poet and non-fiction writer who makes artworks. This spring his guest-edited issue of the peer-reviewed Open Access journal Amodern (Montreal & Thunder Bay) was published; this summer a second edition of his most recent book of poetry, Of the Subcontract, was released by Coach House Books (Toronto); and later this year his edited collection of Pavel Büchler’s selected writings will be published by Ridinghouse (London, due winter 2016).

Simon Morris (b.1968) is a conceptual writer and teacher. He is Professor of Art and Director of Research in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at Leeds Beckett University. In 2002, he founded information as material (IAM). He is the author of numerous experimental books, including; Bibliomania (1998); The Royal Road to the Unconscious(2003); Re-Writing Freud (2005); Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010); and Pigeon Reader (2012). His curated exhibition, ‘Reading as Art’,is currently on show at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre.

Library Box:

Chris Mustazza is the Associate Director of the PennSound archive and a doctoral student in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Chris has edited previously unreleased collections of recordings of Gertrude Stein and James Weldon Johnson, and his writing has appeared in Oral Tradition, the Chicago Review, the Notre Dame Review, and Jacket2. He was awarded a creative grant by Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room to do research on his dissertation, tentatively titled “The Sociolinguistic Birth of the American Poetry Audio Archive.”

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist who currently lives in Chicago. His online editorial work can be found on UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and the EPC. He is the publisher of Edit Publications and founding editor of the Reissues project at Jacket2. Recent books include Radios (Make Now, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2014), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectual Association, 2011).

Michael Nardone lives in Montréal and is the author of The Ritualites (BookThug, forthcoming), Airport Novel (Gauss PDF, 2015), and Transaction Record (Gauss PDF, 2014). Recent writings appear in Amodern, Jacket2, Leonardo Music Journal, Future Concrete, Public Poetics, Camera Austria, The Conversant, Event, and The Dark Would language art anthology. In 2015, he was a PennSound visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.

Readers:

Diana Hamilton‘s first book of poetry, Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012) dealt primarily with women crying at work. A book of poem-essays, GOD WAS RIGHT. is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. She has published four chapbooks on moral philosophy, kissing women, shitting, and heartbreak, and she received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell this year.

Felipe Cussen is a professor at Universidad de Santiago de Chile. His main fields of research are experimental literature, links between poetry and music, and mysticism. He collaborates regularly with the musician Ricardo Luna, and is part of Foro de Escritores and Collective Task. He has recently published the EP quick faith (records without records, 2105), the book Explicit Content (Gauss-PDF, 2015) and the project Correcciones (Information as Material, 2106).

Holly Melgard is the author of the Poems for Baby trilogy (2011), The Making of The Americans (2012), Black Friday (2012), and Reimbursement (2013). Along with Joey Yearous-Algozin, she has also co-authored White Trash (2014) and Holly Melgard’s Friends and Family (Bon Aire Projects, 2014). She currently designs and co-edits Troll Thread Press, dissertates in the Buffalo Poetics Program, teaches writing at CUNY, and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Judith Goldman is author of Vocoder (Roof), DeathStar/Richo-chet (O Books), l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya), and agon (The Operating System, forthcoming). She teaches in the Poetics Program at SUNY, Buffalo and is currently at work on ________ Mt. [blank mount], a project that writes through Shelley’s "Mont Blanc” in the context of climate change and environmental disaster.

Robert Fitterman is the author of 14 books of poetry including Nevermind (Wonder Books, 2016), and Rob’s Word Shop (Ugly Duckling Press, forthcoming, 2017), and No Wait, Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself (Ugly Duckling Press, 2014). He has collaborated with several visual artists, including Serkan Ozkaya, Nayland Blake, Fia Backström, Tim Davis and Klaus Killisch. He is the founding member of the international artists and writers group Collective Task. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and at the Bard College, Milton Avery School of Graduate Studies.