Material Literacy

Reading as Experimental Performance: Holdup by Keith Godard and Emmett Williams
Honglan Huang
How does the material book make reading visible to us? How does the embodied experience of reading teach us to think conceptually about reading as a dynamic, tensile process? This talk addresses these questions through a close reading of Holdup by Keith Godard and Emmett Williams to help us understand how reader and book perform together in reading.
Interwoven Narratives: Textile Tactility and the Visual Articulation of Data and Language
Nishra Ranpura
Textiles have the power to reflect generations of cultural, social, and technological narratives through their motifs, materials, makers, and methods. Their intertwined roots with the world of computation give space to robust opportunities to not only evoke emotions, memories, and discourses; but essentially visualize the invisible worlds of myriads of data forms through multi-sensory and multi-dimensional outcomes. “Interwoven Narratives: Textile Tactility and the Visual Articulation of Data and Language” is a conversation about the pivotal role of textile tactility as a conduit for artistic research to unlock new dimensions of data and language expression, and knowledge dissemination.
The 2024 Contemporary Artists Books Conference (CABC) focusses on “Artists’ Books as Expanded Literacy.” The CABC planning committee asks: How can the artists’ book expand upon ideas of information and visual literacy, conceptions of language, data visualization, methods of presenting research, and beyond?
The 2024 CABC is supported by Center for Book Arts, with additional support from Deirdre Lawrence and the Grolier Club.