Artist Emily Roysdon at The Making of Americans.
Columbia University radio station WKCR's Blair McClendon interviewed Triple Canopy editors Sam Frank, Lucy Ives, and Dan Visel about the annual marathon reading of Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which took place in January, and about Triple Canopy's new book, Corrected Slogans: Reading and Writing Conceptualism.
During the weekend of January 18–20, an Triple Canopy invited scores of New York–based artists, writers, publishers, scholars, and other collaborators to gather in Greenpoint to perform the entirety of Stein’s enormously long and allegedly unreadable novel. The reading lasted for 52 hours. The marathon inaugurated Triple Canopy's fifth year. There were coffee and donuts during the dawn walk-in hours; there was borscht at dinnertime; we toasted at the beginning and end. We tweeted (#MakingUSA) the Americans as they progressed.
On February 25th, Triple Canopy hosted Productive Behaviors, a conversation about new directions in digital publishing with its first designers-in-residence, the Zurich-based duo of Anthon Astrom and Lukas Zimmer. (Click here for a version of this podcast with slides.) Astrom and Zimmer began working together in 2007, when they initiated the Café Society Project, which investigates frameworks for reading, writing, and organizing information on-screen and in print. In 2011, they founded Astrom/Zimmer studio, which works in research, design, and software development. In the past five years, Astrom and Zimmer have won the Swiss Federal Design Award twice, among other accolades.
Astrom and Zimmer spent the month of February in Brooklyn, working with Triple Canopy as we develop a new publishing platform to launch in September. In the podcast they present their work and discuss issues pertaining to the shift from print to digital publishing with Triple Canopy editors. Together they ask how publishing platforms and applications might not only illuminate but also amplify the fundamental relationships between people, places, objects, and social processes that constitute Triple Canopy's expanded field of publication. Rather than shoveling all kinds of information onto the Web, how might we design interfaces, and facilitate reading experiences, that make productive use of the ineluctable differences between digital information and tangible things in the world? Moving beyond the naive fantasy of online knowledge production, how might we envision the circulation of information between those realms so as to be meaningful, even socially beneficial?
“As it curves near the guide line SING SOFTER.” The player piano roll as poem.
Erica Baum reads from her composition on the curious charm of player piano print, originally published in issue 16 of the magazine.
“The Melody Indicator” was produced in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, as part of Corrected Slogans (A Publication in Four Acts), Triple Canopy’s contribution to the exhibition "Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art," curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson and on view between October 12, 2012, and February 3, 2013.
