Abra: Expanding Artists’ Books into the Digital Realm

The recipient of an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the artist’s book in the twenty-first century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist’s book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers interact in dynamic ways with both the form and content of the work. A convergence of print and digital media, the project offers opportunities to consider the way materiality and embodiment are interlinked and how we might productively play with that system of exchange

The Book

"What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately." -- Publisher's website

Visual Poetry Through the Lens of the Long Poem : A Conversation

A conversation between Sacha Archer, Amaranth Borsuk and Terri Witek, ReVerse Butcher, Amanda Earl, Helen Hajnoczky, James Knight, Dona Mayoora, Imogen Reid, Ben Robinson, Kate Siklosi, Barrie Tullett, Shloka Shankar, and Nicola Winborn about long format projects – both in terms of the text matter being used and the length of time the projects take to complete