Tuesday, November 25, 2008

return to the tapeworm foundry

The other day Darren Wershler-Henry visited us from Toronto. His book of 2000, The Tapeworm Foundry, was being celebrated by an exhibit in the KWH gallery ("KWH Arts," we call that ongoing project); Kaegan Sparks commissioned Writers House-affiliated people each to make art from an instruction of the sort that fills Darren's book. I wrote about this not long ago.

One artist dipped her long hair into calligraphy ink and dragged it across long rolls of paper (this is actually a classic Fluxus piece). Another created an inky footprint and then ran it through an OCR (text-recognition) program and printed the "language" that resulted and puts the two up on the wall, side by side. Another pair of artists counted all the periods (at ends of sentences) in all the books in a Writers House bookshelf, then printed out the periods on 8.5x11" paper and wrapped the bookshelf in the paper.

I gathered Darren, Kaegan and Kenny Goldsmith in my office and the four of us talked about Darren's book, the exhibit and about conceptual poetics/concrete poetry generally. This is the newest in the series of "PennSound podcasts", and please have a listen.