Join us for the November Book Art Series Presentation!
Wednesday, November 12, 8:00 pm CT
Presenter: Ryan Greene
Presentation Title: TONGUETWISTED [experiments in multilingual book design in print and beyond]
Zoom registration link: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/KjKu1X1STY2tScIlY4MtEA
Ryan Greene writes, translates, makes, and caretakes books in "Phoenix, Arizona," the city where he grew up. His most recent translations include projects with Elena Salamanca, Claudina Domingo, Carolina Dávila, Yaxkin Melchy, and Giancarlo Huapaya. He's learning.
As a translator, book artist, and community-based publisher, I'm interested in the challenges and possibilities of multilingual book design. For nearly a decade, I've been experimenting with physical, digital, and hybrid approaches to sharing texts in multiple languages. In my talk, TONGUETWISTED, I will show examples of projects I've designed and/or collaborated on since 2016 ranging from paper-based works to wind-blown sculptures to interactive coded "transfluxions."
Each of these projects responds to particular questions while raising new ones. For instance: How do we create books that allow texts in multiple languages to coexist non-hierarchically, without an implied reading order or priority? What are strategies to invite readers to engage (rather than skip over) text in a language they don't know? How can our choices of material and media model approaches to translation that are less rigid/analytical and more generative/indeterminate?
Though my talk will be structured as a "show-and-tell" with two cameras (one for my face and one for my hands, like María Carolina Ceballos did), I will also incorporate a collective resource-share with attendees to gather examples of other approaches to multilingual design in book arts. My hope is that the presentation can animate further experimentation and interchange of strategies between book artists working across various languages.
