This is another one of my pieces, much later.
Whoops, sorry.
This is a 5 by 5 by 5 cube, which I will put some lines on,
so you can see what I mean.
This cube is fully rotatable in 3D space.
You can grab it.
You can move it.
You can do whatever you want.
You can zoom.
You can unzoom.
You can get however you like it.
Take the lines off.
And I find them annoying.
You can reset it.
And if you wanted to step through in small increments,
you could.
Otherwise, you can just let the automation take over
and just watch what it does.
The mechanism at play here is these--
words will always remain facing front.
No matter how you move the cube, the words always face front,
so it always remains readable.
What's happening and what makes them readable is that
essentially, the grammatical structures in these five poems
are all palindromes at the word level,
as opposed to palindromes at the letter level.
So there are phrases that can reverse themselves.
But then they're are also meshed together, also,
so that any line that goes across is also a line that goes
back, which is different, which adds a layer of complexity.
But essentially, they're-- what it boils down to is they're--
it's a weaving of threads comprised of palindromes
at the word level.
And there's various levels of complexity
in the different pieces that can populate that cube.
And this is a guy named Jim Andrews.
Jim Andrews is amazing.
Also a guy who's sort of serially off the page.
I don't think he's ever done anything on a page.
In fact, he talks about his website as his book.
He calls vispo.com--
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
--his book.
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
This is one of the earliest things that he did.
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
It's sort of a deconstruction of--
[LAUGHTER]
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
--a mix of--
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
[LAUGHTER]
[GUTTURAL SOUNDS]
Really deconstructing poetry in a really insane, cool way.
But he's also done an enormous amount of other work
that I find legendary.
This is called "Nio."
I want to address this sound, because last time it
was really loud.
So just give me a sec here.
Skip the intro.
[MUSIC - JIM ANDREWS, "NIO"]
[VOCALIZING]
So what you have here is--
each one of these--
[VOCALIZING]
--is a little different sounding than the next.
Take them off.
Just want to isolate any given sound.
He also has a version of this that
allows you to take these things and chain them together
in any way you want, and more elaborately.
This is sort of like a display or a demo model.
There's a version of this that allows you to literally
actively put these pieces together
in any order that you want and control how they play
and how they loop.
This is a project--
John M Bennett has this poem, "I Lamp Sand Cluster."
And he has stated that his goal was
to see it published as many places
as possible, as many times as possible.
And this guy, Ross Priddle, who is Canadian publisher,
all-round great guy, mail artist,
started a project called The 5 Million Copies Project.
And he said-- he built a website,
and he invited mail artists all over the world
to send him mail art that had "I lamp sand cluster" on it.
And he was going to document all this
until he got to "5 Million."
So I worked with a friend of mine to--
we basically sent Ross Priddle a hard drive
that when you plug it into a computer,
it began cycling through five million different permutations
of this poem by changing the font and the color
and the layout on the page.
So I told Ross, five million copies.
Project over.
Take your website down.
[LAUGHTER]
But he didn't.
But the poems definitely don't exist on the page.
They exist-- as I said, only on a hard drive owned
by Ross Priddle.
This is a poem written by Canadian poet bpNichol.
"A Lake, A Line, A Lone."
This is set in concrete behind Coach House Press, where
Nichol used to work and a lot of his work was published.
And every day, they go out and they fill it up with water.
He died in 1944--
in 1988 at the age of 44.
He went in for surgery, expecting the use of his legs,
and died on the table.
So they set this concrete in concrete for him.
Jenny Holzer, another example of someone
who is sort of serially off the page.
This particular group here--
I'll show you some other stuff.
But this is just projections she has done.
And what you're looking at is not just
the projection, not just the individual projections
that there's this many of.
Each one of these is a particular installation
that had multiple projections.
So these are-- she's projecting text
onto buildings in pretty much this entire series.
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these.
She's also a wildly prolific tweeter.
Some other examples of things that she has done that
is off the page.
She just has a real knack for-- not knack.
Desire, I guess.
I don't see an awful lot of marriage of the form
to the text.
In fact, there seems to me to be almost--
she almost goes for a dissonance,
for a disconnect, for why the heck is this text set
in bronze on a plate mounted to the wall,
and why the heck is this text being followed-- or following
an airplane?
Which I love.
I mean, I think it's great.
This is, like I say, an example of three of hundreds of someone
who is hugely prolific in this regard.
This is a guy named John Martone.
And John Martone is a really good guy--
I think he's very off the radar.
I don't think he likes to publish very much.
Every time I invite him, he sends me a work,
and he sends me all sorts of handmade things all the time.
But he's not really actively seeking publication.
He's a very zen guy.
He makes his own books.
But he also makes a lot of pieces where he is writing
right on natural objects.
This-- if you can't read his handwriting,
this is "Forgive my being slow."
And this is a milkweed pod, which,
if you're familiar with the milkweed pod at all--
I mean, when they opened, they're
filled with bazillions of milkweed seeds.
But they-- but it does take forever for them
to open and explode with what they have.
And he has pieces that are on tree bark, all sorts of things.
He does a lot of-- a lot of his pieces
are sculptural out in nature, and he doesn't even
tell any about them-- people about them.
So you may be hiking in the woods sometime in Illinois,
and you'll come across a John Martone piece.
[INAUDIBLE]