Beginning next week, Touch, Listen will be on exhibition at The Center for Book Arts in New York, alongside with works from some great artists of the century.

Throughout the years, Vito Acconci's work and Marshall McLuhan's writings have inspired my body of work in various different ways. To have my work on exhibition alongside with theirs is undoubtedly an honor for me.

Ear to the Page explores the interaction between recordings and books, using three categories: sound works that reflect the structure and aesthetic of books; packages that thematically entail a book as well as a CD or vinyl record; and books that have a sound component or somehow serve to transcribe or document ideas that previously existed, or potentially can exist, as sound.

Artists/Musicians participating in the exhibition include: Vito Acconci, Juan Arkotxa & Leslie Mackenzie, Bernard Baschet & Francois Baschet, Cathy Berberian & Eugenio Carmi, George Brecht, Inge Bruggeman & Hank Lazar, Jose Luis Castillejo, Jon Gibson, Kenneth Goldsmith, Grace Jones, Jennie C. Jones, Allan Kaprow, Dan Lander & Micah Lexier, Christian Marclay, Marshall McLuhan with Jerome Agel, John Simon and Quentin Fiore, Michalis Pichler, Steve Roden, Allen Ruppersberg, Tate Shaw & Andrew Sallee, Masumi Shibata, Michael Snow, Jan van der Marck/Art by Telephone, and Dennis Yuen & Morry Galonoy.

Organized by James Hoff and Alan Licht, Independent Curators.

Ear to the Page
September 22, 2010 - December 4, 2010
The Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, New York 10001
(212) 481-0295
Admission is free

Read a bit more about Touch, Listen.

Today is the last day of this year's National Poetry Month. In 2007 Morry and I created the piece Touch, Listen to celebrate NPM that year. A little bit of reminiscence:

Read about Touch, Listen and then a little bit more about Touch, Listen. And don't forget to call the phone number to hear a poem being read to you on the phone: then you get to celebrate NPM yourself as well.

After successfully upgraded the blogging software, I have added two (way overdue) new features to the blog.

ShareThis widget
At the bottom of each entry, you can now click on "ShareThis" to quickly e-mail the blog post or to submit it to most of your social networking sites (Facebook, del.icio.us, Twitter...) If you have a ShareThis account, you can put all your links in one place and your contacts will be memorized. It's way overdue but I finally got around to put it in! I hope you'll find it useful.


reCaptcha
You know captcha? They are those scrambled and distorted text that you need to type in before you can submit comments. I have updated the captcha interface to reCaptcha, a software created by Carnegie Mellon University which uses captcha to "digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows".

In other words, each time you submit a comment or contact me, you will help digitizing scanned words by confirming a couple of words against what the computer thinks they might be. So, please leave more comments and send me more messages, and digitize more words!

As an artist who also has a passion for both techology and book arts, I am obsessed with the continuous discussions and debates regarding the Kindle. Here is another thought-provoking article about the Kindle on NY Times. However, it seems that "e-book" is so new that we are still comparing the Kindle to the traditional book form, still talking about how the Kindle may or may not replace the traditional book medium, or how much we don't want that to happen.

I am a book artist, I love my physical books wholeheartedly, and I adore my Kindle. As technologies evolve and change forms, we gain some and we lose some. One doesn't have to replace the other. The debate over Kindle shouldn't be on an either/or premise, but rather what the new will bring to us, and what the traditional book medium will gain from the introduction of the new technology.

I am on Facebook pretty regularly, but I just haven't spent much time Twittering. Now things have changed, I switched to a new Twitter user name and decided to dedicate my Twitter feed to my bookmaking endeavors.

If you twitter, follow me: http://twitter.com/StudioCaiLun

Somewhat off-topic here, but as I have previous proclaimed my adoration for the Amazon Kindle, I might as well dwell on that once more, hopefully those of you out there who are e-book readers will find this useful.

I just stumped upon Calibre, an open source e-book management software. You can use it to organize your non-DRM e-book collection that you have converted, or obtained from ManyBooks.net and Feedbooks. It also allows you to edit your e-book's meta data so that they will be displayed correctly on your reader. It even downloads the articles from major newspapers/magazines and compile them into an e-book for you. Truly indispensable if you read e-books.

P.S. I have just got my hands on the brand new Kindle 2, and I was happy to say that I still love my Kindle 1, the early-adopter version.

Things by Edith Kollath, on display at the Damstuhltrager Gallery in New York until December 14th:


Via Bre Pettis

Following Oprah's recent endorsement of the Kindle, I realized that I haven't disclosed about me owning a Kindle here since I was being given one on my birthday this past July.

Yes, I own a Kindle and I love it.

A bookmaker uses a Kindle?

Some have said to me, "How could you even use a Kindle!?" They are shocked that someone who is passionate for handmade books would also love the Kindle. But it's true, I think the Kindle is fabulous.

Why I love the Kindle

I love it because it’s convenient and ultra-portable. I don’t have to carry a thick hardcover when I ride on the subway and buses everyday. I don’t like books being worn out, even mass-market paper back. I don’t have to worry about tearing pages or banging up corners with my Kindle. Whether I’m traveling or waiting to meet with someone, or at moments when the text is the focus, I stick to my Kindle.

With the Kindle, you don’t get to flip pages physically like you’d normally do, you don’t get to smell, to touch and to feel the paper, and you definitely don’t get the paper cuts; but you gain something entirely different and new. Like any e-book, I can carry my entire digital library with me. I can look up definitions of words instantly on the subway. When I search for the phrase “valley of ashes”, I can find the exact quote quickly from the Great Gatsby. Not to mention with the wireless feature, I can preview samples of books when I am riding on the subway or when I heard a mention of a title with friends or on the radio.