SUNY Buffalo hosted the 10th anniversary of E-Poetry earlier this year, and this past thursday, opened the Digital Poetry Exhibition at the UB Art Gallery. With its Electronic Poetry Center and new journal, Emerging Language Practices, SUNY Buffalo has established itself as one of the premier U.S. centers of electronic literature. The exhibit covers a trajectory of electronic poetry from its precedents and influences to today.
LANGUAGE TO COVER A WALL:
Visual Poetry Through Its Changing Media
November 17, 2011- February 18, 2012
UB Art Gallery
University at Buffalo
From the announcement:
The Digital Poetry component of Language to Cover a Wall, curated by Loss Pequeño Glazier, extends the traditions of visual poetry into present day digital poetics with an emphasis on visual, sound, video, interactive, and computational language practice, investigating digital media materiality through a variety of platforms. This part of the exhibition shows new works alongside rarely exhibited historical works crucial to the field, and presents an international range of digital poetry.
This is a major digital poetry exhibition (2nd floor) perhaps the largest and longest-running to date in a major U.S. museum. It is presented by E-Poetry, the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), and the Dept. of Media Study, SUNY Buffalo and features projections, sculpture, digital prints, Linux-based generative poetry, a future book, iPad poetry, an interactive nook — plus a digital poetry cinémathèque!
The exhibition demonstrates the dramatic shift successive new media have brought to the concepts and definitions of poetry. The exhibition curatorial team (Steve McCaffery, David Gray Chair Professor of Poetry and Letters, UB Department of English; Karen Mac Cormack, adjunct professor of English; and Michael Basinski, Curator of the UB Poetry Collection) seeks to increase awareness of concrete and visual poetry and its ongoing possibilities. An historical range of works by George Herbert, Lewis Carroll, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Barbara Kruger, Henri Chopin, Robert Lax, Dick Higgins, Daniel Spoerri, Alison Knowles, d.a. levy, Bob Cobbing, Siebren Versteeg, bpNichol, Bill Bissett and Guy de Cointet are among the three-hundred plus works on view.
Some of the digital poetry works in the exhibition will also appear in performance contexts, in dance or artist performance in February, offering a multifaceted approach to artistic practice in the digital medium, in the following events.
DIGITAL POETRY IN PERFORMANCE
UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts
Saturday, February 4, 2012, 7:30 pm
DIGITAL POETRY & DANCE
Black Box Theater, Center for the Arts
Friday, February 3, 2012, 7:30 & 9:00 pm
$10 at the door
Kerry Ring, Dance Director