Professor Simon Morris

Inscription is an innovative new journal which addresses the theme of the material text from a range of perspectives, bringing together the critical, historical, theoretical and creative. Inscription will be at home equally in the first century as the twenty-first and will feature work by practitioners – book artists, printmakers and writers – alongside academic discussion. Its focus is not just on the meanings and uses of the codex book, but also the nature of writing surfaces, the process of mark marking and printing. The journal’s theoretically aware, trans-historical and cross-disciplinary remit will break with the conventions of academic ghettoization, creating connections between areas that have much to say to one another –bibliography, the artist’s book, and media theory, for instance – enabling more wide-ranging conversation and unexpected juxtapositions. It promises not merely to add to the field but to set new agendas for the next phase of the development of the study of material texts.

Reading Art Art (Book). This extensively illustrated catalogue documents an eponymous group exhibition curated by Simon Morris at Bury Museum & Sculpture Centre, England, from August-November 2016, featuring work by: Jérémie Bennequin, Pavel Büchler, Kate Briggs, Martin Creed, Craig Dworkin, Robert Fitterman, Tom Friedman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Eugen Gomringer, Jo Hamill, Carol Sommer, Nick Thurston, and Ian Truelove. Both the show and book are focussed explorations of the possibilities of reading as an artistic act. The works displayed and under discussion find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs. All of the works make reading manifest in some way; in so doing, they each show – differently – how reading is its own form of making. The catalogue also includes newly commissioned essays by Thomas Campbell, Kaja Marczewska, Simon Morris, and Nick Thurston, alongside texts relating to work in the show by Jérémie Bennequin and Kate Briggs, as well as a suggestive bibliography of further reading on the specific topic of the whole project.

I sent Zara Worth this Facebook post because I thought the chicken nugget would make a good full stop at the end of her guest-edited issue of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice on the subject of Social Media Speak (SMS).

Morris writes without writing, publishing over ten books in which not a single word is his own. Of course, this plagiarist’s favourite book is Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vilas Mattas. In a wide ranging presentation, Morris will talk about: writers who refuse to write; artists who just say ‘no’, the resurrectionists who reduced Michael Crichton, the author of the Andromeda Strain to tears; Andy Warhol and his surrogate Allen Midgette, the raving beauty with his high cheekbones, full mouth and sharp, arched eyebrows; Adam Chodzco’s missing actors from the cast of Salo; John Cage’s refusal to answer questions after lectures; and Chus Martinez posing as Mária Boston in order to persuade the Spanish author Enrique Vilas Matas to spend a week writing in public in a Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Kassel as part of the contemporary art exhibition Documenta 13. Morris will also reveal his methodology, performing as a psychoanalyst. The participant would enter the room and make themselves comfortable on the couch. Morris, seated behind them— there but not there — would gently reach forward and touch their forehead and the collaborator would begin to free-associate…

Solo exhibition as information as material (Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris & Nick Thurston) Do or DIY (Expanded Second Edition), Birkbeck University, The Peltz Gallery, Birkbeck School of Arts, University of London, April 11-18, 2015. In conjunction with the inaugural Cultural Literacy Conference in Europe. Cultural Literacy in Europe (London, May 2015). Meeting the challenge of Cultural Literacy What is Cultural Literacy? Cultural literacy is an ability to view the social and cultural phenomena that shape our lives – bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts – as being essentially readable. Cultural literacy engages with interdisciplinarity, multilingualism and collaboration. It is a way of looking at social and cultural issues through the lens of literary thinking, employing communication, comparison and critique on a scale beyond that of one language or one nation-state, and avoiding abstraction. Furthermore, it is as much about innovation and creative practice – whether scholarly, artistic or social – as it is about analysis, and it very often brings these two methods together. Developing knowledge and shared practices in the area of Cultural Literacy must be understood and promoted as a key strategic goal for a meaningful impact on European society and beyond it, by supporting individuals and groups in the continuous effort to achieve greater social justice and active forms of citizenship. CLE Conference 2015. The first Cultural Literacy in Europe [CLE] Conference took place in London, at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, on April 16-18 2015. A major outcome of the conference is a shared understanding of Cultural Literacy as a key societal challenge for the future of Europe and its relationship with the rest of the world. This recognition must lead to common objectives among academics, professionals, and representatives of cultural associations and funding bodies. The Conference demonstrated that excellent research and initiatives are already taking place in this area across Europe and beyond its borders. Whether working with methods and tools of Literary and Cultural Studies [LCS] or spanning other interdisciplinary areas, researchers and teachers in the Humanities and Social Sciences can make a key contribution to both understanding and answering the challenge of Cultural Literacy. The aims and objectives of CLE. The CLE initiative has two main aims: to achieve a broad shared understanding of the notion of Cultural Literacy and its importance; and to increase the visibility of the challenge presented by Cultural Literacy and of the contributions which LCS scholars and their fellow researchers continue to make in this area. To achieve these aims, CLE will bring together academics, educators, artists, policy-makers and members of the cultural industries, as well as a growing number of partner institutions from across Europe and beyond.

Participation in a group exhibition - re: follow-ed (after hokusai) exhibition at the Cabinet Du Livre D’Artiste, Université Rennes. Campus Villejean, Université Rennes 2. 28 September – 3rd December 2015. Edited and curated by Michalis Pichler and Tom Sowden. *The work, The Royal Road to the Unconscious was first publically displayed in 2003.

Extending the Spinning series of collaborations – whose beginning is marked by the iam publication Spinning Volume I – this new book presents itself as a script for a performance for two cyclists, in two acts, after Paul McCarthy, and about art education. Act One, ‘Sense’, sets the two performers off on stationary exercise bicycles. Whilst constantly cycling as hard as possible the two performers alternately speak in an exchange of quotations about art and education. Cycling to fatigue whilst reading aloud, Act Two, ‘Nonsense’, removes the etiquette of speaking one after the other and instead the cyclists overlay one another’s speech, one quoatation at a time, following a loose rhythm set by whichever performer reads the longer quotation. This shifting enunciatory texture is represented typographically through the book, and is followed by a full set of end notes that reference all the cited sources. Fuller information about the Spinning series can read in our post for Spinning Vol. I. Vol. II was originally published in conjunction with a performance at the Instal Noise Festival, Glasgow, in 2008, organised by Arika.

"A virus or process of contagion has been at work, intervening in Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, rupturing it and returning it to us in a new order.

The Royal Road to the Unconscious was conceived by the artist Simon Morris in order to conduct an experiment on Sigmund Freud’s writing. Utilising Ed Ruscha’s book Royal Road Test as a readymade set of instructions, seventy-eight students cut out every single word from Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. On Sunday, June 1st, 2003, the artist, Simon Morris (thrower) threw the words out of the window of a Renault Clio Sport on Redbridge Road, Crossways, Dorset, travelling at a speed of 90mph, approximately 122 miles southwest of Freud’s psychoanalytical couch in London. The action freed the words from the structural unity of Freud’s text as it subjected them to an ‘aleatory moment’ – a seemingly random act of utter madness.

For this, the first volume in a two book series, Simon Morris invited two literary theorists, Liz Dalton and Forbes Morlock, to each write an essay on a topic of their own choosing with fully referenced footnotes. Morris, the artist, then collected their respective essays and erased their titles and main body text, leaving only the floating footnote markers in place in the main body area and the footnotes themselves (in full) in place at the bottom of each page. He then sent Dalton’s erased essay, as an unaltered constellation of footnotes, to Morlock, and vice versa. In what has been wittily described by Sharon Kivland as “an academic blind date”, Morris asked the two theorists to try and write a reconstruction of one another’s essay, with only their own interpretation of the other’s footnotes as a guide. Interpretation Vol. I is the result. This book features the original essays (constructions), the footnote constellations (erasures), the interpretative essays (reconstructions), plus notes by Morris contextualising the process of the collaboration and profiles of each contributor. Working mischievously in the margins – and extending the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg, herman de vries, and Michael Camille – Morris invites a process of re-interpretative collaboration that brings a marginalised point of reference (the footnote) to inversely bear directly on the centre of the text and makes it central to the reconstruction of new texts. This book was designed by Peter McGrath of Groundwork Design (UK). It was launched in 2002 at Printed Matter, Inc., New York, with an accompanying exhibition.

For this, the second volume in a two book series, Simon Morris invited two artists who curate and write regularly, Tim Brennan and Cindy Smith, to each write an essay on a topic of their own choosing with fully referenced footnotes. Morris, the artist, then collected their respective essays and erased their titles and main body text, leaving only the floating footnote markers in place in the main body area and the footnotes themselves (in full) in place at the bottom of each page. He then sent Brennan’s erased essay, as an unaltered constellation of footnotes, to Smith, and vice versa. In what has been wittily described by Sharon Kivland as “an academic blind date”, Morris asked the two artists to try and write a reconstruction of one another’s essay, with only their own interpretation of the other’s footnotes as a guide. Interpretation Vol. II is the result. This book features the original essays (constructions), the footnote constellations (erasures), and the interpretative essays (reconstructions), distinguished as three stages in their being printed on three different shades of paper and including an A2 poster by Smith. It also features notes by Morris contextualising the process of the collaboration and profiles of each contributor. Working mischievously in the margins – and extending the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg, herman de vries, and Michael Camille – Morris invites a process of re-interpretative collaboration that brings a marginalised point of reference (the footnote) to inversely bear directly on the centre of the text and makes it central to the reconstruction of new texts. This book was designed by Peter McGrath of Groundwork Design (UK) and was funded by the generous support of The Henry Moore Foundation. It was launched in 2002 at Printed Matter, Inc., New York, with an accompanying exhibition.

This is the first codex form publication in the eponymous project, which was initiated by Simon Morris & Helen Sacoor in 1998 and continued until 2002 through collaborations with a huge number of fellow artists, curators, theorists, architects, and other bibliophiles. The broader project also included a second publication edited by Morris that hugely expands the concept and method explored in 1999, similarly entitled bibliomania 2001-2002 (published by information as material, 2002), plus exhibitions (in Leeds, London, and New York) and an online database. As the artists/curators of this project, Morris & Sacoor invited 15 artists whose own work informed the context of this project. Contributors were invited to send them a list of the books that reflected their own individual interests and practice. Their choices could range from the reverential to the ridiculous. bibliomania 1998-1999 contains all of the book lists returned in response, some typeset and others reproduced as facsimile images of the written page, in a slim and powerful multi-threaded bibliography. It also double as a refined catalouge: The British bookstore chain Waterstones bought in copies of books on the contributors’ lists and made them openly available for purchase on dedicated shelves at two of its stores in 1999, precisely as an exhibition. The contributors to this book are: Julie Ault, Victor Burgin, Neil Cummings, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Matthew Higgs, Daniel Jackson, Joseph Kosuth, Marysia Lewandowska, Jeremy Millar, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Cindy Smith, Haim Steinbach, and Greville Worthington.

This is the second and largest codex form publication in the eponymous project, which was developed by Simon Morris from 1998-2002 through collaborations with a huge number of fellow architects, artists, curators, psychoanalysts, theorists and other bibliophiles. The broader project also included an earlier publication based on a smaller number of solicited book lists, similarly entitled bibliomania 1998-1999 (with Helen Sacoor, 1999), plus exhibitions (in Leeds, London, and New York) and an online database. As artist / curator of the project, Morris invited the fifteen participants in the earlier bibliomania 1998-1999 edition to nominate further contributors. One hundred and fifty people took part in this expanded version of the project. Contributors were invited to send him a list of the books that reflected their own individual interests and practice. Their choices could range from the reverential to the ridiculous. bibliomania 2000-2001 contains all of the book lists returned in response, typeset as a 620-page directory that was ‘undesigned’ by Czech artist Pavel Büchler. Contributors to the project include: Henri Chopin, Claude Closky, Joachim Gerz, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Hiller, Langlands & Bell, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, Clive Philpott, Jane Rendell, Klaus Scherübel, Haim Steinbach, and Andrew Wilson.

his app is the next incarnation of the conceptual artwork, Re-Writing Freud by Simon Morris, bringing current technology and Freud together. The app will be available on both iPad and iPhone and will be priced the same as the book at £8.99 and will be available via the app store. Use your finger to randomly re-write Freud’s text. By subjecting Freud’s words to a random re-distribution, meaning will be turned into non-meaning and you will have to make sense of the new poetic juxtapositions. For the bookwork, Re-Writing Freud, published by iam in 2005, the artist Simon Morris re-wrote Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. For that project, Christine Morris designed a computer programme that randomly selected words, one at a time, from Freud’s 222,704 word text and began to reconstruct the entire book, word by word, making a new book with the same words, every time the programme was re-started. The resulting book was one instantiation of that process, scrupulously typeset according to the dimensions, fonts, chapter divisions and paragraph lengths of the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Freud’s work, and printed on equivalent paper stocks. Morris unleashed a virus. He put a contagious process to work, intervening in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, rupturing it and returning it to us in a new order. The world of dreams is subject to the laws of the irrational and Re-Writing Freud gave the spectator the chance to view Freud’s text in its primal state. The fine production was printed by Imschoot, Ghent, in an edition of 1000, and given their blue stamp of approval. With a conceptualist formalism, Morris’ version of Freud’s text follows the typographic layout found in the edition of Freud’s work owned by his long-term collaborator, the psychoanalyst Dr. Howard Britton, whose worn book cover and ‘Big Daddy’ sticker from a Sugar Puffs cereal packet sets the tone for Morris’ appropriation. With Re-Writing Freud, judgments about sense no longer themselves make any sense. The reader who responds to this book by complaining that it is nonsensical is neither right nor wrong, but asking the wrong question, posing an impossible problem in response this book’s insistent imaginary solution.” – Professor Craig Dworkin, University of Utah, from the Introduction to Re-Writing Freud, ‘Grammar Degree Zero

Mixing anecdote and advocacy, the first section of this two-part polemical essay offers an introduction to the concealed history of do-it-yourself publishing – as undertaken by some of the most revered writers in the modern Western canon. In looking back at some of those literary monuments, it also looks forward to the political praxis of the 21st-century's digital future. Remember the lessons of literary history. Don't wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.

Inspired by Georges Perec’s musings on reading, which he likens to “a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of breadcrumbs”, Simon Morris’ latest book sets exactly those feral avians to work on the very surface of Perec’s celebrated text "Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline". In the process he puts pressure on all of the terms in Perec's title: what does it mean to engage a text physically — looking at print, flipping pages, processing language, vocalizing, responding — without any of the social practices or semantics we usually associate with "reading." Or, to put this as Wittgenstein might: what activities still embody a grammar of reading even in the absence of what would seem to be its defining features. Moreover, Pigeon Reader intervenes as a precise facsimile edition of Perec’s book, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (trans. John Sturrock, London: Penguin books, 1997), with only the single chapter on reading modified. Pigeon Reader is thus also a kind of inversion, as well as an intervention: where British copyright laws permit copying 5% of a book, Morris has copied 95%. In reprinting the book to this extent, Morris’ conviction has gone beyond the recent tradition of the artists’ insert. Within the paratext he has corrupted the corporate branding, with penguins morphing into pigeons and advertisements re-imagined. One could be forgiven for asking why someone would remake an entire book just to make a conceptual play in a single chapter. Morris would likely respond by further appropriating and recontextualizing Perec’s closing words from "Reading": “These are questions that I ask, and I think there is some point in a writer asking them.”

GIJKH is a key example of conceptual writing, fusing art and literature - a performative retyping of Jack Kerouac’s beat classic, On the Road. The work employs appropriation strategies whilst playing between the analogue and digital. A serious experiment in textual literary criticism, collapsing the traditional distinction between reader and writer. GIJKH’s significance and originality have been subject to widespread critical debate. Darren Hick’s dedicated paper ‘Ontology and the Challenge of Literary Appropriation’ in the American Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism proposes it as a potential watershed work. Featuring in the first survey of conceptual writing, Against Expression, Northwestern University Press. An entire chapter on this book in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, Columbia University Press. Reviewed by; Doug Nufer in American Book Review; by Paul Stephens, Columbia University for Digital Humanities Quarterly; by Vanessa Place for Constant Critic; and Colin Herd for 3:AM Magazine. In Germany, it was extensively examined by three authors in Annette Gilbert’s critical anthology: Re-edited. Strategies of Appropriation of Texts and Books. GIJKH has also been exhibited widely as contemporary art; We Are Grammar, at Pratt Manhattan Gallery; HELP/LESS at Printed Matter Inc.; and the Liverpool Biennale’s publication The Unexpected Guest. The author’s been invited to give public lectures; the opening paper at the conference: Book Presence in the Digital Age, Utrecht University; Pennsylvannia University; Cabinet Gallery, NYC; and Harvard University, Boston. International critical interest in the publication demonstrates that conceptual writing is regarded as a significant paradigm shift in literature, acknowledging the impact of the digital age on writing. The work has seen artists creating new works inspired by this particular critical move; Joe Hale (UK) - Getting Inside Simon Morris' Head; Jayson Jadick (USA) - Retyping The Subterraneans; and Jacqueline Valencia (Canadian) – Retyping Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Re-writing Freud (touch screen kiosk edition), 2005 Re-Writing Freud (National Touring Exhibition Grant from Arts Council England &The British Council) exhibited at: An Art of Readers, Art & Essai, Rennes University, Rennes, France, March –April 2005, The Sleeper Gallery, Edinburgh, September – October 2005, The bookartbookshop, London, December 2005 and The University of Leeds, Leeds, North Yorkshire, February – March 2006

Algorithm in Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, 11 June 2014 on the invitation of Professor Dr Sander van Maas, from the Department of Musicology. The expert meeting on Algorithm and the Humanities aims to rethink the conceptual potential of the ‘algorithm’ at the crossroads of the humanities and the hard sciences. Under the influence of an increasing interest in for instance 'big data' the term 'algorithm' is quickly making its way into both popular discourses and the humanities, but not always supported by a thorough idea about what 'algorithm' actually means. Therefore, instead of merely considering algorithms as a new tool available for research, we aim for a more fundamental discussion about algorithms and algorithmic thinking, exploring the tension between its use as a relatively well-defined term in computer science, and a, both mathematically and culturally, much hazier and complex term outside that discourse. We want to open up a space to critically reflect on what and algorithms are and how they operate, rather than merely ask what they can do. Following an interdisciplinary approach, we plan on inviting several speakers to address firstly, the basic ‘logic’ behind algorithms (both mathematical or cultural), secondly, innovative historical and conceptual scholarship on algorithm, applying it to and connecting it with topics in the humanities and thirdly, artistic applications of algorithmic thinking that question its operations and explore its creative potential.

spinning: de-centering the self [with Rob Fitterman] at the Experimental Art School, Mildred’s Lane, Pennsylvannia, USA, August 2009. Act One, ‘Sense’, sets the two performers off on stationary exercise bicycles. Whilst constantly cycling as hard as possible the two performers alternately speak in an exchange of quotations about art and education. Cycling to fatigue whilst reading aloud, Act Two, ‘Nonsense’, removes the etiquette of speaking one after the other and instead the cyclists overlay one another’s speech, one quotation at a time, following a loose rhythm set by whichever performer reads the longer quotation. This shifting enunciatory texture is represented typographically through the book, and is followed by a full set of endnotes that reference all the cited sources.

A Text that Destroys Itself in the Process of Its Own Reading at the Gustav Metzger Congress, Atlantis Gallery, Brick Lane, London, 17 May, 2003. A collaboration between Dr. Howard Britton, Daniel Jackson and Simon Morris. A Text That Destroys Itself in the Process of its Own Meaning “Beginning with two separate texts on the work of Gustav Metzger, one black on white, one red on white, the authors Dr. Howard Britton and Simon Morris will take it in turns to read aloud pages from their work. Using Extraction, a computer programme created by the artist Daniel Jackson, words will be randomly removed, one by one, from each author’s text. 2 versions of Extraction will be running simultaneously. One will present the words from Britton’s text, ‘Gustav Metzger: a manifesto for destruction: between two deaths’, black on red. The other will present the words from Morris’s text, ‘Beyond Representation’, red on black. These will be projected onto the wall behind Britton and Morris, side by side like facing pages of a book. In the manner of a dada poetry recital, as one author reads from their text, the other author will simultaneously read aloud the words that have been randomly removed from the other text by the Extraction programme. Like a virus, or process of contagion, the aural presentation of words from one text will increasingly cover over the aural presentation of words from the other text, until meaning is completely destroyed/disappears. Extraction will aim to remove all the words in the performers text in the same time that it will take the performers to read their texts. Extraction presents the text, without the structure of their original meaning, and imposes its own order on the authors words. As the writer William S. Burroughs said: “Language is a virus from outer space.”

Simon Morris is a conceptual writer. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book. His investigations involve working in collaboration with many other people from art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. His role as an artist is to create a theoretical space that others feel comfortable working in and to erase his own ego in order to stimulate desire in others. He works to create a space of transference where linking and connecting can take place, a shared space of encounter. Morris proposes a collaborative model as the most productive way of working. His work is often inspired by the work of others – his engagement is poetic rather than logical. It may involve a purposeful misreading of the source material or even re-writing. The methodologies he utilises include destruction, rupture, erasure, nonsense, concealment and the irrational which allow him to create a fluid space of non-meaning. By working with non-meaning, the spectator is put to work in the construction of meaning.

The Royal Road to the Unconscious The Royal Road to the Unconscious was conceived by the artist Simon Morris in order to conduct an experiment on Sigmund Freud’s writing. Utilising Ed Ruscha’s book Royal Road Test as a readymade set of instructions, seventy-eight students cut out every single word from Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. On Sunday, June 1st, 2003, the artist, Simon Morris (thrower) threw the words out of the window of a Renault Clio Sport on Redbridge Road, Crossways, Dorset, travelling at a speed of 90mph, approximately 122 miles southwest of Freud’s psychoanalytical couch in London. The action freed the words from the structural unity of Freud’s text as it subjected them to an ‘aleatory moment’ – a seemingly random act of utter madness. Daniel Jackson (filmmaker), Maurizio Cogliandro (photographer) and Dallas Seitz (photographer) documented the action as 222,704 words erupted from the window of the car. They also recorded the stream of words strewn along the side of the road. Dr. Howard Britton, a psychoanalyst (driver), directed them to any slippages or eruptions of the Real that occurred in the reconfigured text. The poetic act of liberating Freud’s text allows us to engage with what Jacques Lacan called the register of the Real. The concept of the Real is far removed from anything that we conventionally attribute to reality. It is the experience of a world without language. If language names, it is all that escapes the name – an encounter beyond images and words. I received The Royal Road to the Unconscious this morning: most, most beautiful. I love it.” — Professor Anne Moeglin-Delcroix, University of the Sorbonne, Paris, France It’s time has come I think and you did it well.” — Ed Ruscha, artist

VISIONS – PART 1 – INFORMATION AS MATERIAL Johan Deumens Gallery (Haarlem), April 11 – May 16 2008. iam proudly accepted the invitation of Belgian gallerist and book dealer Johan Deumens to be the subject of the inaugural exhibition at his new gallery in Haarlem, in Spring 2008. The show was curated to present iam’s output in the context of other, object-based works that were also elements of the broader projects undertaken by each of our artist / authors – projects that iam is otherwise only able to represent via our publications and editions. Noises, writing machines, prints and source texts were all brought together to present the dynamic modes of appropriation that our artists engage in, and to suggest some of the lines of coherence to iam’s editorial trajectory.

Arts Research Initiative: Research and Practice Forum, Faculty of Education, Arts and Business, University of Cumbria, October 23, 2013.

This sellout event was a feast of sonic poetry featuring performances by Rob Lavers and Simon Morris, Nick Thurston, and a headline set by Dutch avant-garde composer Jaap Blonk. A VJ playlist, put together especially for the night by Canadian poet Christian Bök, provided the sights and sounds between performances and alongside the drinks. As Michael Hampton’s extensive review in Art Monthly (AM 355; April 2012) noted, the audience were politely reminded that the ears have no lids. As Jaap Blonk recalls: The reception of these first public performances was varying widely. On many occasions I was performing at rock or punk clubs as an opening act for a band, and lots of people were not at all into it. Their preference was either to just talk with their friends or hear their habitual kind of music. So they started to scream and protest, and often throwing things at me, especially beer, which fortunately was mostly given out in plastic, not glass containers. The culminating point of this kind of experience was a performance of the Ursonate, opening for a concert of The Stranglers at Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht in 1986, for an audience of about 2000 fans. When I was announced, even before I had opened my mouth, people started calling out: “Rot op!” (“Fuck off!”), and when I started, the atmosphere became very much that of a football match, but clearly an away game for me. With massive roaring they tried to drown out my voice, but of course the P.A. made me louder. Six stage guards were working hard to keep people from climbing the stage and hitting me, and hundreds of half-full plastic beer glasses flew about me. But in the course of the performance I managed to win over at least a few hundred people, who were roaring in my favor. The next morning one newspaper had the headline ‘Jaap Blonk Shocks Punk Audience With Dada Poetry’, which for me was a nice testimony to the fact that Schwitters’ piece was still very much alive, in spite of its age.”

Simon Morris has been called a literary pervert, philosophically irresponsible and an inspired lunatic. He would like to politely remind the audience that the ears have no lids. Charles Bernstein is the author of over 40 books, ranging from large-scale collections of poetry and essays to pamphlets, libretti, and collaborations, most recently All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions (University of Chicago Press).

Information as material (iam) was formally established by the English artist Simon Morris in 2002 but has its roots in his self-published books of the late 1990s. Based in the North of England, iam operates as a collective of writer-editors and as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve writing, publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, lectures and workshops. Iam’s editorial team is Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris and Nick Thurston; information on each of whom can be linked to via the BIOS page of this website, and contact details for whom can be found in the collapsable CONTACT tab at the top of this website. Likewise, further information about all of the authors / artists we work with can be linked to via the BIOS page. Our publications and editions are held in private and public collections around the world including Tate (UK), National Library of France (FR), and MoMA (USA). Our bookworks and DVDs are directly distributed internationally by Cornerhouse Publications (UK) and numerous bookstores. Synoptic posts on all of our publications and editions can be found as portfolio entries via the PROJECTS section on this website. For information on specific publications, editions not listed on the purchase page, or our critical and curatorial work please contact simon [at] informationasmaterial [dot] org.

The Voice and Nothing More. Delivered the keynote address at a week long festival at the Slade Research Centre, University College London, 12 - 16 January 2009. Curated by Sam Belinfante and Neil Luck. THE VOICE AND NOTHING MORE The Voice and Nothing More (vanm), curated by Sam Belinfante and Neil Luck, was a week-long festival exploring the voice as both medium and subject matter in contemporary arts practices. Both established and emerging artists worked with leading vocal performers and composers in an exploration of the voice outside language. vanm is symptomatic of a growing interest in the voice across arts practices and was intended to give leading visual art practitioners the opportunity to work with some of the most important singers and vocal ensembles in the UK today. Importantly, vanm was the product of a desire to encourage conversations between the contemporary arts communities that will elucidate art’s complicated relationship with the voice as well as generate new processes and strategies for engaging with it. Instead of merely placing musicians and artists in one space, vanm facilitated an ongoing discourse in and around the voice with the production of new ambitious, collaborative, artworks as well as the formation of new working practices. Artists and performers came together to generate exciting new collaborative works. Invited performers included Mikhail Karikis, Lore Lixembourg and Juice, as well as a specially formed large-scale vocal ensemble. Performers, working with the artists and resident composer Claudia Molitor, created new score-objects culminating in a series of new performances. Artists Martin Creed, Simon Faithfull, Dryden Goodwin, Bruce Mclean and Cornelia Parker along with emerging artists Athanasios Argianas, Amy Cunningham, Nick Laessing, Phoebe Unwin and Sarah Kate Wilson were just some of the 50+ artists taking part. To help launch the festival leading artist and educator Simon Morris held a lecture on the voice on Wednesday 14 January. The festival culminated with a presentation of groundbreaking objects/installations/performances, open to the public on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 January 2009. www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/thevoiceandnothingmore/

What is the role of art publishing today? How have artists adapted modes of publishing as a tool for their practice? How has the notion of artists' publishing activity changed, given the ever-increasing amount of fairs and an ever-evolving number of book-related collections in contemporary art museums? Publishing has developed a favorite site and medium for aesthetic and artistic experimentation. It has also become an alternative space for promoting unrestricted individual or collective discourse. The multi-part exhibition project Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 explores the potentials of publishing – in the form of books, magazines, journals, artistic interventions, websites – as a particular medium and context both to circulate information, knowledge – and to produce art. Instead of looking at the already historicized and analyzed period of the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition will highlight how a recent generation of artists use publishing as a productive tool for their practice. The focus lies on the period from 1989 until 2017, taking 1989 as symbolic date to underline the shift from analogue to digital. On a political level, 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall marks a significant date. On a social level, it is an important year as it indicates the invention of the World Wide Web. The project, like a toolbox itself, is composed of different parts, sections, and components. Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017 opens up and unfolds through different propositions, partly by material exhibits on display, partly through the presentation of time-based events, as well as through an offsite project. (Taken from Kunsthalle Wien's website). *The film ‘sucking on words’ was first publically screened in 2007

The Art of Reading: From William Kentridge to Wikipedia (Laboratorium van het Lezen), Exhibition organized by The House of the Book (a collaboration of Museum Meermanno and the National Library of the Netherlands). Location: The Hague, Museum Meermanno, Prinsessegracht 30, 2514 AP Den Haag Opening: 17 November 2017 Duration: 18 November 2017 – 5 March 2018   Selected artists and art works:   Scott Blake, Hole Punch Flipbook #2 (US, 2014) Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (US, 2012) Jan Dirk van der Burg, Tweetbundel (NL, 2015) Marinus van Dijke, Eye (NL, 2013) Paul Emmanuel, The Lost Men Project (ZA, 2006) Eyejack, Prosthetic Reality (AU, 2016) Juan Fontanive, Ornithology I (US, 2015) Carina Hesper, Like a Pearl in my Hand (NL, 2016) Mirabelle Jones, Asystole (US, 2017) William Kentridge, 2nd Hand Reading (ZA, 2014) Kraak & Smaak, Squeeze me (NL, 2004) Michael Mandiberg, Print Wikipedia (US, 2015) Simon Morris, The Royal Road to the Unconscious (GB, 2003) Didier Mutel, My way II (FR, 2014) Rick Myers, An Excavation, A Reading (GB, 2013) Heidi Neilson, Cloud Book Study (US, 2011) Joyce Overheul, De Drie Maanden uit het Leven van Rogier (NL, 2013) Sebastian Schmieg & Silvio Lorusso, 56 Broken Kindle Screens (DE, IT, 2012) Rebecca Sutherland, Hide & Eek (GB, 2013) Elisabeth Tonnard, A Dialogue in Useful Phrases (NL, 2010)   The exhibition will illucidate the reading process. The six rooms each have a theme that is linked to the physical process of reading: leafing through, touching, looking, remembering, focussing, and reacting. Most of our senses are involved in the process, as are many areas in the brain. Questions about the process will help the visitor formulate some answersi How does the reading brain work? What types of reading should be distinguished? How to deal with multi media books – sound, image, typography? How to experience works on paper versus digitized works? The show unites works that are multisensorial or pluriform (video/paper, sound/image etc). There will be no books in cases, all works can be touched by the visitors.   *The work, The Royal Road to the Unconscious was first publically displayed in 2003.

Paint Her to Your Own Mind. Contributing to a touring group exhibition which includes 147 artists / writers creating 147 differentrepresentations of beauty. Curated by Patrick Wildgust. Touring exhibition, on show at: Shandy Hall Gallery, Coxwold, York, 9 July – 30 September 2016 & Constantine Gallery, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, 7 – 23 October 2016 & &Model Gallery, 19 East Parade, Leeds, 28 October – 12 November 2016.

Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, Edited by Andrea Andersson (2017). One of the most important movements in twenty-first century literature is the emergence of conceptual writing. By knowingly drawing on the histories of art and literature, conceptual writing upended traditional categorical conventions. Postscript is the first collection of writings on the subject of conceptual writing by a diverse field of scholars in the realms of art, literature, media, as well as the artists themselves. Using new and old technology, and textual and visual modes including appropriation, transcription, translation, redaction, and repetition, the contributors actively challenge the existing scholarship on conceptual art. Rather than segregating the work of visual artists from that of writers we are shown the ways in which conceptual art is, and remains, a mutually supportive interaction between the arts. This publication accompanied the exhibition Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art, at Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, USA, March 21 – September 21 2014.

Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013), coincided with the exhibition "Ed Ruscha Books & Co." (an exhibition organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk). In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual artist’s books, among them Twentysix Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Real Estate Opportunities, and A Few Palm Trees. Featuring mundane subjects photographed prosaically, with idiosyncratically deadpan titles, these “small books” were sought after, collected, and loved by Ruscha’s fans and fellow artists. Over the past thirty years, close to 100 other small books that appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha’s have appeared throughout the world. This book collects ninety-one of these projects, showcasing the cover and sample layouts from each along with a description of the work. It also includes selections from Ruscha’s books and an appendix listing all known Ruscha book tributes. (Taken from MIT Press website). *The featured work, The Royal Road to the Unconscious, was first publically displayed in 2003.

Reading as Art, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, 27 August to 19 November 2016. Curated by Simon Morris. With funding from Arts Council England, Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, and Leeds Beckett University. This exhibition explores the potential of the act of reading as art. The works included in the exhibition find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it can take (silent reading, reading aloud, spontaneous reading, purposeful reading, and so on), the matter of reading (the book, the screen, the space of the page), the bodies that engage in it and the contexts in which it occurs. All of the works are concerned to make reading manifest in some way; in so doing, they each show – differently – how reading is its own form of making.  Reviewed by David Briers, ‘Reading as Art’ in Art Monthly's Anniversary Issue, October 2016, no. 400. “This is not the first time that Bury art Museum’s curators have evinced a strong interest in venturing into territories where text and art meet. Building on that foundation, this is their most successful foray in that direction so far: carefully selected, rewarding and genuinely absorbing.” & by Zara Worth, "Reading as Art" for This is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/reading-as-art, published on 25 November 2016. This is Tomorrow aims to become a comprehensive archive of contemporary art, providing those restricted by place or time with the chance to visit some of the most innovative and culturally significant exhibitions around the world. This publication is supported by the book "Reading As Art" edited by Simon Morris and published by Information As Material in York, November 01 2016. (112pp, ISBN 1907468269, ISBN 9781907468261 Distributed internationally by Cornerhouse: HOME in Manchester).

Convergance: Literary Art Exhibition at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 16 June – 6 August 2011 and toured to Limerick City Art Gallery, Ireland, 17 August – 29 September 2011. Curated by Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes. An exhibition about how reading literature can be at the core of contemporary art practice. The show highlights that writers such as Joyce, Goethe, Beckett, Kafka, Sebald and Vonnegut have something to say to artists today – and that artists make a major contribution to how we can all think about literature and aspects of the canon today: as something relevant and liberating. Exhibiting literature has been the domain of literary museums and monuments. On an island from which most renowned writers have emigrated, alternative modes of marking their role have to be – and have been – found: by artists and through exhibitions. These are held in public spaces and in a variety of venues. This exhibition, in exploring the relationships between art, literature and exhibitions, provides an alternative “monument” to writers, their works, to well-read artists – and to innovative ways of bridging these realms through exhibition.

Allen Ginsberg wrote in ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ (1955): ‘The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!... Everything is holy!’ Books, too, can be surprisingly hol(e)y. Their holes are often not aberrations or quirks so much as integral features. The material text has historically been riddled with them: needle holes made in order to stitch pages together; or tunnels made by bookworms and other pests; or pinpricks added by medieval scribes to mark out the layout of a manuscript page; or, in parchment works, large irregular gaps as a result of flaws in the animal hide. Holy, Holy, Holy presents a library of 20th and 21st -century books with holes – some intentional and some not; some playful and productive; some destructive and obscuring. On display will be a richly varied and international collection of titles, including books for children such as Katsumi Komagata’s What color? (1991), and Peter Newell’s The HOLE Book (1908), which invites readers to ‘open the book and follow the HOLE’; Scott Blake’s Hole Punch Flipbook #1 (2020) that puts holes in motion; Lucio Fontana’s perforated covers; Dieter Roth’s iconic die-cut volumes and South African artist Kendell Geers’ Point Blank (2004), an edition of 1,030 blank books with each copy shot at point blank range. In addition, we present works by Carolyn Thompson and David Bellingham, and a special preview of Inscription issue 2. What does it mean to claim that a hole is central to the physical form of the book? What political and ethical questions are at stake when an artist cuts through, or shoots, the codex? What can these holes tell us about the nature of the book?

Participation in a group exhibition - Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. The exhibition toured to the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, USA, October 12, 2012 – February 03, 2013 & The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, June 21-September 02 2013, Canada, and then to the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, USA, March 21 – September 21 2014 with the project included in the accompanying publication, Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art, edited by Andrea Andersson, University of Toronto Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8020-5912-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8020-6859-0 (paper). *The work Re-Writing Freud, book and interactive touch screen kiosk with attached printer was first publically displayed in 2005.

A Kind of “Huh”? at Les Abattoirs FRAC museum in Toulouse, France, 8 November 2012 to 23 March 2013 touring to the CCAS in Grenade from 13 April to 30 May, 2013. Curated by Jérôme Dupeyrat & Maïwenn Walter. In an interview with Willoughby Sharp made in 1973, Ed Ruscha said about the artist’s books he published in the sixties that all his work aimed for producing “a kind of ‘huh?’: — I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of « huh? » That’s what I’ve always worked around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message. Lots of artists use that. — Give me some examples of « Huh? » — I don’t know, somebody digging a hole out in the desert and calling it sculpture…“Huh?” : this onomatopoeia stands for “What is it?”, “Why?”, “What does it mean? etc.” These questions, which seem to express incomprehension or misunderstanding, which seem to testify a loss of criterion, can be paradoxically positive and constructive, because through doubt and questioning, the “huh?” effect is in fact a driving force of the process of aesthetic reception. Any artwork can provoke a “huh?” effect and anybody can feel this effect in various degrees when looking, reading or hearing an artwork. For that reason, if this exhibition is thought on a “huh ?” territory, it doesn’t consider it as a subject or a topic. Here, “huh?” is rather an implicit leitmotiv,something in mind when working, with nevertheless an hypothesis : the one that “huh?” effect is particularly active in artworks which are defined by oscillations between the obvious and the indecipherable, the trivial or the commonplace and the strange and the unexpected, between sense and non-sense, logic and absurdity, simplicity and abstruseness or hermeticism, between what the artwork shows and what it says. In the exhibition there will be both artists’ books or publications by artists and artworks in other mediums such as video, sculpture, photography, etc. Artists’ books and publications by artists because Ed Ruscha refers to them when speaking about this “kind of ‘huh?’” and because a library is the perfect place to show this kind of productions, which often aim to be books like any other. And artworks in other mediums because in spite of their specificities and in spite of their alternative value, artists’ books are not an autonomous, confidential or marginal genre in the sphere of contemporary art but are fully part of it. The artists whose work will be exhibited will be Aurore Chassé, Claude Closky, Information as Material, Julien Nédélec, Ed Ruscha.

Forms of Criticism Symposium, University of Westminster, Regent St. Campus, London. Thursday 30 June 2016 In the Editorial for the first issue of Art-Language (1969) Terry Atkinson raised questions about a possibility of combining creative and critical practice: ‘can this editorial,’ Atkinson wrote, ‘in itself an attempt to evidence some attributes as to what “conceptual art” is, come up for the count as a work of conceptual art?’ Forms of Criticism takes Atkinson’s idea as its starting point to engage with issues of criticism and form and interrogate limits between creative and critical practice. In poetry, fine art, film making, performance – in the creative sector – we are familiar with and applaud – or tolerate, in the very least – experiments which blur or transgress boundaries of genre, form, or creativity. Similar possibilities of formal experimentation remain significantly underexplored with respect to critical practice, although a growing interest in probing the limits of criticism can currently be observed. Forms of Criticism proposes to think about critical practice as a creative experiment with form in its own right and invites a re-examination of the relationship between research and forms adopted for presenting, communicating, and disseminating it. By considering diverse sites of critical and creative production the project focuses on experimenting with modalities of criticism and ways of addressing formal critical-creative hybridity. The event brings together artist, curators, writers, critics and scholars addressing questions of hybrid creative-critical forms in theory and practice though talks, performances, screenings, readings and installations. Speakers include: John Beck (IMCC), Kate Briggs (American University in Paris), Eric Cazdyn (University of Toronto), Ducks!, Gary Hall (Coventry University & Open Humanities Press), Peter Jaeger (poet and critic, Roehampton), Kristen Kreider (poet and artist, Royal Holloway), Richard Misek (filmmaker), Simon Morris (Leeds Beckett University) Jo Collinson Scott (musician and musicologist), Marquard Smith (Journal of Visual Culture and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam), and Nick Thurston (artist, University of Pennsylvania and Leeds).

Conceptual Poetics | 24-May-16 to 03-July-16 Inspired by Marcel Duchamp's approach to visual art, and sometimes described as a kind of 'uncreative writing', Conceptual Poetics may be the most contested (and popular) movement in contemporary poetry. Focusing on the UK scene, this exhibition features current work from presses such as if p then q, Information as Material, ZimZalla and If a Leaf Falls, as well as work by poets and artists such as Fiona Banner, Simon Cutts, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Yoko Ono. From Tuesday 24 May to Sunday 3 July 2016 The Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall, London

Participation in a group exhibition - Les Artistes Face Aux Livres, Scriptorial Place d’estouteville Avranches, France, February 07 – May 17 2015. Curated by Barbara Denis-Morel. *The work Re-Writing Freud was first publically displayed in 2005.

Participation in a group exhibition - Ed Ruscha Books & Co., an exhibition organized by Gagosian director Bob Monk. Gagosian Gallery in New York City, March 05 - April 27 2013 & The Brandhorst Museum in Munich, Germany, 06 June – 22 September 2013 & Gagosian Gallery Paris, 4 Rue de Ponthieu, 75008, Paris, France, March 12-May 7, 2015 & Gagosian Gallery, Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, USA, July 28-September 9, 2016. The work, The Royal Road to the Unconscious was first publically displayed in 2003. The 2013 exhibition “Ed Ruscha Books & Co.” coincided with the publication of MIT Press's Various Small Books: Referencing Small Books by Ed Ruscha (ISBN 9780262018777). The Royal Road to the Unconscious featured in this publication.

"Learn to Read Differently" - a fully illustrated (21 images) book chapter in the following collection: Book Presence in a Digital Age, Edited by Kári Driscoll, Jessica Pressman and Kiene Brillenburg Wurth. Book Presence in a Digital Age is an edited collection devoted to books and paper as bodies of literature in a digital age. The volume comes out of a major ongoing research project led by Prof. Dr. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, entitled “Back to the Book”, and focuses on the materiality of books and paper since the digital revolution. The proposed volume brings together leading scholars, artists, and publishers in the field and offers a variety of mutually enhancing perspectives on the past, present and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital. Under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing, London for publication in 2018.

Learn How to Read Differently, The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, 10th August – 21 September 2013. Curated by Dawn Bothwell and Sam Watson from Circa Projects. This exhibition was commissioned and curated by Circa (Newcastle). It presents poetic art works by Kate Briggs (Paris), Craig Dworkin (Utah), Simon Morris (Middlesborough), Lucia della Paolera (Brooklyn) and Nick Thurston (Leeds) that have, or will be, published by IAM. It also presents related art works by Kenneth Goldsmith (New York), Garry Neill Kennedy (Halifax, CA), Gareth Long (New York), Greville Worthington (Catterick) and an online-only collaboration between Thurston and Robert Fitterman (New York) hosted on circaprojects.org. On the invitation card (above), in the gallery, and online, Learn to Read Differently proposes a method of making art works through and as ‘conceptualist reading performances.’ This method presses the aesthetic legacy conventionally attributed to Conceptual art onto disparate notions of writing (from the literary to that of data management) to produce materially-specific poems as art works that have somehow re-read a thing (an idea, an object, etc.) that was already in the world. This is an art of reading things differently. It starts from a premise proved by the impossibility of making purely conceptual art: that art is always aesthetical and conceptual. To that it couples an obsession with language — as both signifier and material, and as always socio-historically codified. In doing so, it establishes a mode of making art that asks: What could we write if reading could be a materially productive act of making art? How might a certain kind of reading-as-making problematise the understandings of authorship, production and reproduction ensconced in our cultural industries? All of these art works celebrate reading differently as a praxis of exploring the elsewhere of what languages and their users can mean and do. In collaboration with Circa, this project continues information as material’s commitment to working with other people and against all-too-certain counter-productive divisions between contemporary art and contemporary literature. Curated by Dawn Bothwell and Sam Watson.

Responding to an invitation from Felipe Cussen and Riccardo Boglione to examine the state of ‘conceptual writing’ in 2021 for the Uruguayan journal Tenso Diagonal, Morris tackles the framing of conceptual writing on Wikipedia which cites Johanna Drucker, who claims that the movement is “probably over now, even in its newest iterations.” He responds vigorously by claiming, far from being over, the movement is ‘in rude health’ and cites three exemplary examples of recent conceptual writing and a new interdisciplinary journal as evidence of its continued investigations. He also uses the space to critique the idea that North America is the epi-centre of activity for this movement and hopes that future histories will remember the work that has taken place across the globe. Morris points out, like any cultural movement that presents a body of new ideas and radical thinking, there are some brilliant works; some average works; and some works that are just awful. In the illustrated essay, Morris tracks his own contributions as well as detailing the distinction between conceptual works that use an excess of information and those that use erasure and other procedures to work on the edge of perceptibility, in the space of the infrathin.

he Royal Road to the Unconscious (information as material, 2003) was conceived by the artist Simon Morris in order to conduct an experiment on Sigmund Freud’s writing. Utilizing Ed Ruscha’s book Royal Road Test as a readymade set of instructions, 78 students cut out every single word from Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. On Sunday, 1 June 2003, the artist Simon Morris (thrower) threw the words out of the window of a Renault Clio Sport on Redbridge Road, Crossways, Dorset, travelling at a speed of 90mph, approximately 122 miles south-west of Freud’s psychoanalytical couch in London. The action freed the words from the structural unity of Freud’s text as it subjected them to an ‘aleatory moment’ – a seemingly random act of utter madness.

Simon Morris, 'Pedagogically Intolerable’ in Hard to Read, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, (edited by Alan Dunn), Volume 9, no.3 (Bristol: intellect journals, 2017, pp225-236, doi: 10.1386/jwcp.9.3.225_7, ISSN 1753-5190

sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith, information as material, York, 59mins, 2007. The film was premiered at the Eccles Centre in the British Library and also screened at the Oslo Poetry Festival 2007. SUCKING ON WORDS DIRECTOR: SIMON MORRIS Critical commentary: Bruce Andrews, Barbara Cole, Robert Fitterman Film, Lighting and Sound: Fiona Biggiero, Jarrod Fowler, Jerome Harmann-Hardeman. Film editor: Christine Morris Original musical score: Rob Lavers Year 2007 Edition 500 Duration 59 mins sucking on words is a documentary film that features interviews with, and extensive performances by, the American poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It also features critical commentary on his intense and ground-breaking conceptualist practice from three of North America’s leading voices on avant-garde poetics. Shot on location in New York in 2007, the lively conversations featured in sucking on words are an ideal introduction to Goldsmith’s witty and provocative works, which are already regarded as hallmarks of 21st-century literature. The film showcases readings from some of his notorious books: No.111 (found phrases ending in the ‘r’ rhyme and filtered alphabetically by syllable count); Soliloquy (a transcription of every word Goldsmith spoke for a week); Day (a retyping of one day’s New York Times newspaper); Traffic (one day’s worth of hourly radio traffic bulletins); and The Weather (one year’s worth of radio weather bulletins). With many hats on at once – as a poet, as Founding Editor of UBUweb, as the host of a weekly experimental sound show on WFMU radio etc. – Goldsmith offers a punchy defence of the literary concerns and modes that have come to be gathered under the label ‘conceptual poetry’, and the techno-social context that has made those concerns and modes evermore pressing and dynamic. Included with the film is a 12-page inlay, featuring an edited version of Goldsmith’s blog for The Poetry Foundation, in which all of these lines of thought are pulled into a nigh-manifesto statement. sucking on words was premiered at: The British Library (London, October 2007); Shandy Hall (Coxwold, October 2007); and The Oslo Poetry Festival (Oslo, November 2007).

making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler, information as material, York, 49mins, 2010. The film was premiered at The Whitechapel Gallery, London and screened at the Vistamare festival in Pescara, Italy. Critical commentary: Craig Dworkin Film, Lighting and Sound: Christine Morris, Nick Schneider Film editor: Christine Morris Original musical score: Rob Lavers and Laurent Robin Year 2010 Edition 1000 Duration 43’33″ making nothing happen presents the work of internationally exhibited and widely acclaimed expatriate Czech artist Pavel Büchler. In urbane and incisive dialogue with Beckett, Kafka, Cage and Warhol, Büchler reframes their classic modernist gestures with insightful attention to the specifics of media and the overlooked materiality of the everyday: two Faber-Castell pencil stubs stood upright and made into miniature models of the towers of Kafka’s Castle; a passage from that novel estranged in broadcast through sculptural arrays of antique Marconi speakers; the applause (but none of the music) from all of the “live” albums in Büchler’s record collection; the collected silences of the lead-in tracks to recordings of John Cage records…. making nothing happen combines audio documentation, installation photographs, explanatory text, in-depth interviews and critical commentary, presenting Büchler’s work with a sly and witty stylistic nod to Büchler’s own slyly humorous conceptual style. Composed with the self-canceling rhythm of systole and diastole — the phosphorus flash of sudden oxidation from a struck match followed by the contracted fade of the burn; the inhalation of vaporizing nicotine followed by an exhalating sigh; the entropic spread of bureaucratic reports and the ’pataphysical reorganizations of conceptual art; the telling retelling of a joke about repetition; bursts of applause and measures of silence; marking and erasure (and the marking of erasure) — the film organizes its materials in a series of carefully balanced pairings. Accompanying the DVD, a 30-page booklet by celebrated American critic Craig Dworkin reviews almost one hundred compositions and performances of silent music — from Cage’s 4’33” to Büchler’s 3’34” — in a comprehensive survey of the best music you’ll never hear.

This is the book published alongside a group exhibition exploring the potential of the act of reading as art.The works included in the exhibition find different means to foreground and to investigate the activity of reading: the forms it ...

The Perverse Library 31st October 2010 The Laurence Sterne Trust and artist-publishers information as material are proud to announce a major exhibition of ‘conceptual writing’, drawn from a collection of work by internationally renowned artists and writers that includes Kathy Acker, Ed Ruscha, Jen Bervin, Christian Bök, Pavel Büchler, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, On Kawara, Sherrie Levine, Klaus Scherübel and James Joyce, to be held at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire between 4 September and 31 October 2010. Conceived and curated by artist, teacher and founding editor of information as material, Dr Simon Morris, the exhibition will be the first of its kind in the UK, and will show works by a generation of artists who have sought a radical reconsideration of the relationship between literature and the visual arts. Unfolding around Craig Dworkin’s book collection of 2,427 titles, many of them pricelessly rare objects, displayed on invisible bookshelves designed by Canadian architect Michael Farion, the exhibition will include: · A ‘Bibliography of Ugly Cousins’, for which Simon Morris has drawn together critical examples of appropriated writing, or ‘rip-off’ that expose the parasitic relationship between conceptual writing and writers, and their histories; · A collection of carbonised books contributed by artist and collector Greville Worthington, entitled ‘The Black Library’, from the remains of which vegetables are to be grown for consumption in the Shandy Hall Library; · A sonic library curated by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, founder of UbuWeb, the world’s largest online archive of visual, concrete and sound poetry. UbuWeb Radio will be streamed live for the duration of the show; · ‘Bouvard et Pécuchet’s Invented Desk for Copying’ by the young Canadian artist Gareth Long who, working with furniture maker and designer Wilf Williams, will present the copying desk as the latest in his series of sculptures pulled from the unfinished pages of Gustave Flaubert’s last novel. Perverse Library is co-organised by information as material, The Laurence Sterne Trust and In a word. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generous support of Arts Council England through their Grants for the arts programme, The Henry Moore Foundation and York College. Image, Scott Myles: Full Stop (2006) Scott Myles lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Search and Research, Projects in Art and Theory, Cologne (2009); STABILA, Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe (2008); ASKIT, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2007); Grey Matter, Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin (2006) and Kunsthalle Zürich, Zürich (2005). Find out much more here http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/a-perverse-library-2010-09-05/ Press The Perverse Library exhibition reviewed in The Guardian listings 16/10/10 Article by David Lister entitled Trouble at Mall in the Independent Arts and Entertainment section (28/9/10) mentions The Perverse Library "The avant-garde, like nostalgia, is not what it was. But it certainly exists. It is just to be found in locations that we might not expect..." The Perverse Library featured in an article by Hannah Duguid in the Independent (4/10/10) Shandy Hall featured in the Independent's 50 best Museums and Galleries. (23/10/10) Supported by The Heritage Lottery Fund.

# 1: Learn to Read Differently Publication as Practice is a series of talks by artists, writers, designers and publishers covering a range of concepts and approaches to artist books and experimental publishing. Speakers include Simon Morris (Information as Material), James Langdon, Nicole Bachmann & Ruth Beale (Performance as Publishing), FormContent, Jaroslaw Kozlowski, Sophie Demay & Charlotte Cheetham. (Open Books) Simon Morris examines the relationship between reading and art. He proposes a new method of making art via conceptualist reading performances. This method grafts the aesthetic legacy of Conceptual Art on to various notions of writing (from literary composition to data management) in order to produce materially-specific poems as artworks that have in some way re-read a found object. This is an art of reading things differently. It starts from a premise proved by the impossibility of making purely conceptual art: that art is always aesthetical and conceptual. To that it couples an obsession with language as both material signifier and social activity. In doing so it establishes a mode of making art that asks: What could we write if reading could be a materially productive act of making art? How might a certain kind of reading-as-making problematise the understandings of authorship, production and reproduction ensconced in our cultural industries? Morris’ work celebrates reading differently as a praxis of exploring the elsewhere of what languages and their users can mean and do. Morris is committed to working collaboratively and against all-too-certain counter-productive divisions between contemporary art and contemporary literature. In his presentation, Morris will examine four of his experimental bookworks. Simon Morris (b.1968) is a conceptual writer and teacher. He is a Reader in Fine Art at the University of Teesside in the UK. His work appears in the form of exhibitions, publications, installations, films, actions and texts which all revolve around the form of the book and often involve collaborations with people from the fields of art, creative technology, literature and psychoanalysis. In 2002, he founded the publishing imprint information as material. He is the author of numerous experimental books, including; Bibliomania (1998); The Royal Road to the Unconscious (2003); Re-Writing Freud (2005); Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head (2010); and Pigeon Reader (2012). He is an occasional curator and a regular lecturer on contemporary art and also directed the documentary films sucking on words: Kenneth Goldsmith (2007) and making nothing happen: Pavel Büchler (2010).

The CONCEPTUAL POETICS DAY is an annual event that explores the imaginary border between visual art and literature. Launched in 2013 at Miss Read: The Berlin Art Book Fair and took place in 2014 for the second time. Lectures, readings, discussions or other forms that navigate on both sides of the imaginary border between visual art and literature Literaturwerkstatt Berlin with Jérémie Bennequin, Janet Boatin, Annette Gilbert, Simon Morris,Takao Suzuki, Pär Thörn and others

British artist Simon Morris will use four of his experimental works – based on Freud, Kerouac, and Perec – to design a poetics of a different reading: Eating the Book. Jérémie Bennequin, an artist from France, will present his new book OMAGE à Broodthaers et Mallarmé. Michalis Pichler from Germany will present his versions of Mallarmé's Würfelwurf and Statements zur Appropriation as well as poems and other postnative manifestations. The Swedish soundpoet Pär Thörn and the Berlin dancer Takako Suzuki wil do an audio-visual presentation on the alphabetically ordered word material from Strindberg's novel Röda rummet (The Red Room). This event of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin is being supported by Freie Universität Berlin and the Volkswagen Foundation.

Simon Morris invited to lecture and create a workshop at Publishing as Performance Symposium, convened by PhDArts, Royal Academy of Art (KABK), Prinsessegracht 4, 2514 AN The Hague, The Netherlands “No signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification.” ..qu’il n’est aucune signification qui se soutienne sinon du renvoi à une autre signification“ Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977.126, 150 The symposium Publishing as Performance will examine the role of artist/authors engaged in new forms of publishing practices through the notion of the performative. The increasingly autonomous means of publishing (web and print) has expanded the forms and formats of publishing, re-defining the relationship of publishing to dissemination, and in turn of authorship to creative reproduction. The identity of the artist/ author is interrogated through emergent forms of publishing that considers appropriation, citation, re-distribution, and reinterpretation as tactics to resist and re-invent modes of circulation and distribution of the text. The performative is an interdisciplinary manner of considering the dissemination of text, its agency and movement through the world, its ability to draw attention to itself. The concept of performitivity will be taken up as a transformative force that concerns an emergent identity, a coming into being, its instantaneous and eventual outreach. The text will be examined through the thrust of its dissemination, how it is kept alive through its own performativity, as a temporal process, unfinished, that produces new meanings at each junction of its reception. “Il n’y a pas de première insémination ni d’origine singulière : le commencement est déjà dissémination, avant laquelle il n’y a rien.” Jacques Derrida Publishing as Performance conceptualizes the act of publishing as the global act of making a text public; how acts of exposure and circulation are creatively conceived of. The notion of publishing is not limited here to the traditional print on bound paper form. A multiplicity of emergent forms of publishing will be examined. Through widening and experimenting with emergent forms of publishing, the notion of intertextuality is further explored. Inter-textuality refers to a key element in Derridean thought, namely that a text generates meaning through its differentiating power from other texts. In other words, the meaning of a publication may be grasped through its interplay of multiple sources, formats, and networks that it is a part of Publishing as Performance Symposium further pushes the notion of inter-textuality through an interdisciplinary transposition. The symposium will examine how a text undergoes an interdisciplinary transposition across diverse disciplinary frames; from performance to book form to journalism to poem to document. Within this exercise of transposition across disciplines, the notions of origin and author enter into scrutiny. The symposium engages in new forms of research that examine, through the performative, how identity and authorship are manifested in relation to established networks of dissemination. The concept of the individual, the artist’s voice, is proposed as a potential challenge to institutional power and knowledge distribution, a voice that continually re-inserts and re-positions itself in relation to the politics of authorship and recognition.

In 2002 I established the publishing imprint ‘information as material’. Based in Middlesbrough (UK), iam operates as an independent imprint that publishes work by artists who use extant material — selecting it and reframing it to generate new meanings — and who, in doing so, disrupt the existing order of things. The imprint’s activities involve publishing, exhibiting, curating, web-based projects, and invited lectures. iam’s editorial team includes Craig Dworkin, Nick Thurston and myself. To date, iam have published 50 books, prints and DVDs by international artists and writers. Our books are distributed internationally by Cornerhouse in Manchester. More about the publishing imprint can be found at: www.informationasmaterial.org

Freud in Translation, Freud in Transition An International Conference Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London From November 2006 to January 2008, the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies is running an international Network on Psychoanalysis and the Arts & Humanities. This Network is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and by the Embassies of Austria, France, Italy and the Netherlands. Clinicians, artists and academics will meet in three international events and eight seminar series, to debate new psychoanalytic questions in their fields, focusing on six languages and four themes: Psychoanalysis and the arts; Pedagogy and practice; Histories & transmissions; and Psychoanalysis and politics. The eight seminar series will be held in London, Cambridge and Glasgow, each running a parallel jiscmail, and will lead to collaborative publications. The Network opens with a Conference: Freud in Translation, Freud in Transition, at the IGRS in November 2006. Based on the principle of exploration and debate, the Conference brings together clinicians, translators, artists, academics in the arts & humanities, and theorists, from three continents, and includes translation workshops, an interactive arts event, and plenary sessions. There are no formal papers; instead, four speakers will open each plenary by introducing the issues that they consider of most urgent concern, and debate will then be open to the floor. Speakers include (alphabetically): Sally Alexander, Jacqueline Amati, David Bell, Antal Bókay, Julia Borossa, John Forrester, Elsbeth Greven, Mary Jacobus, Darian Leader, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Griselda Pollock, Jane Rendell, Barry Richards, Andrea Sabbadini, Joseph Schwartz and Edward Timms; and artists include David Bate, Bill Furlong, Polly Gould, Lucy Harrison, Frances Hegarty, Jaspar Joseph Lester, Mark Lewis, Simon Morris, Sharon Kivland, Liz Pavey, and Phoebe von Held.

A PERVERSE LIBRARY Mixed-media performance ‘Writing Encounters’, York St. John University, 11-14 September, 2008. iam with student interns, Josh Cole & Sarah Illing. Commissioned for a three day conference / symposium at York St. John University, entitled ‘Writing Encounters’, A Perverse Library temporarily co-opted one of the university’s dance studios, which was adjacent to the main conference rooms. Over the course of the conference Simon, Nick, Sarah and Josh turned it into a site for a cumulative and collaborative reading of three book collections: the personal collections of Simon and Nick and the host institute’s library. To-hand technologies for reproduction were used, like photocopiers, heat printers, laserjet printers etc., and collaboratively the team constantly (re-)built a temporary collage in the spirit of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s famous London flat. A reading area with soft furnishings, a dj’able audio archive of conceptual sound poetry, and a book sale table stocked with publications brought by conference delegates were also set up in the room.

Writer collective information as material have been called literary perverts, philosophically irresponsible and inspired lunatics. They have also taught, published, produced, curated, exhibited and performed internationally. For their Whitechapel Gallery residency, Craig Dworkin, Christine Morris, Simon Morris, Nick Thurston and Simon Zimmerman programmed events that explored the possibilities opened up by conceptualist approaches to writing and performative approaches to reading. Through editions, conferences, workshops, discussions, screenings and collaborations, the York-based independent publishing imprint create a space for a poetic and critical engagement with issues such as ‘undesigning’, antiexpressionism and cultural piracy. Writers in Residence information as material lead a three day practice-based school focusing on experimental art writing, reading practices and developing your own publishing platform. Under the guidance of Simon Morris and Nick Thurston and guest participants including Canadian poet Christian Bök and artist, writer and translator Kate Briggs, students will collect, curate, produce and disseminate utilising DIY approaches to publishing. Following a series of workshops, lectures and performances, the school will culminate on Thursday evening with the public opening of a Perverse Library created by the participants

There are some artists who simply write novels and others who use the novel as an artistic medium, as valid as performance or video could be. The latter, who are the main object of the present research, are artists that seek a protracted engagement of the spectator with their work. Their creative strategies, focused on process rather than end results, are opposed to the predominant conventions of art institutions and the art market. The artist's novel introduces elements particular to narrative literature into the visual arts, like fiction, identification and issues of authorship. All of them point to a certain interest in undermining notions of personal identity and in creating new spaces for intersubjective exchange. Situated in a historical perspective, the artist's novel seems to be a derivation of relational aesthetics rather than of conceptual art, even though the creation of works that are purely textual might lead one to think otherwise. Artist's novels also enable mass production and distribution, and become a means for intervention in the public sphere. The presentation, organised by Cricoteka in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Warsaw, will take the form of a discussion platform dedicated to the phenomenon of the artist's novel viewed from different perspectives. The two-day programme will study the crossover between narrative literature and the visual arts: from the space of the page to the novel understood as a relational object, a form of public intervention ‒ from uncreative writing to the social life of the book. There will be a wide range of presentations: lectures, interviews and performances, prepared especially for the project. It is hoped that, together with the invited specialists, and with the help of the variety of research methods employed, this investigative programme will succeed in amplifying the notion of literary space and arrive at a new way of regarding the spectator-turned-reader. Lecture: Learn to Read Differently Simon Morris, the author of Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, will address strategies of appropriation and the conceptual approach to literature, along with the issue of authorship. These strategies are employed by many artists and can be interpreted from the vision of ‘uncreative writing’ (taking a lead from Kenneth Goldsmith’s book).

Simon Morris invited to guest lecture at Ravenstein Seminar 2014: Materiality of Literature, in Amsterdam organized by Utrecht University and OSL on the invitation of Professor Kiene Brillenburg Wurth ‘If the book no longer exists as a carrier of information, it may exist to distribute something else.’ Irma Boom (bookdesigner/artist) With the digitization of society, the form and function of the book as the central carrier of cultural information is changing rapidly. Nowadays literature and the literary experience have to compete with other media experiences and forms of cultural transmission, such as social media. How do new forms of media influence the structure of our perception? And in relation to literature, how are processes of reading and writing affected by these medial changes? These questions draw our attention to the materiality of literature: the differences (and similarities) between the works of print culture and electronic culture, between the experience of the physical book and the digital artwork and the different ways in which the book can be perceived as a concrete and tangible carrier of information. The theme ‘Materiality of Literature’ wishes to place literature within a broader media field and emerging debates on the materiality of culture by focussing on this central question: how can and should literature and its effects be studied in a changing media landscape? With this theme Ravenstein 2014 wishes to address fundamental questionsabout media history, media specificity and the current form and function of literature.

information as material, Writers in Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, April 01, 2011 – March 31, 2012. iam have proudly accepted an invitation from one of Europe’s most prestigous contemporary art institutions, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, to be their Writers-in-Residence. Building on the great work done by the first two writers to hold the post — Maria Fusco and Sally O’Reilly — iam will be presenting a series of editions and alternative schools, as well as engaging with the exhibitions programme during the year. Activities will happen on site and online. An archive of iam’s residency will be presented here. Writer collective information as material have been called literary perverts, philosophically irresponsible and inspired lunatics. They have also taught, published, produced, curated, exhibited and performed internationally. For their Whitechapel Gallery residency, Craig Dworkin, Christine Morris, Simon Morris, Nick Thurston and Simon Zimmerman will programme events that explore the possibilities opened up by conceptualist approaches to writing and performative approaches to reading. Through editions, conferences, workshops, discussions, screenings and collaborations, the York-based independent publishing imprint will create a space for a poetic and critical engagement with issues such as ‘undesigning’, anti-expressionism and cultural piracy. Visit the information as material invisible bookshelf in the Reading Room at The Whitechapel Art Gallery April 2011–March 2012.”

Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, edited by Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2011) pp 446-449. In much the same way that photography forced painting to move in new directions, the advent of the World Wide Web, with its proliferation of easily transferable and manipulated text, forces us to think about writing, creativity, and the materiality of language in new ways. In Against Expression, Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith present the most innovative works responding to the challenges posed by these developments.

Les Artistes Face Aux Livres, Scriptorial Place d’estouteville Avranches, France, February 07 – May 17 2015. Curated by Barbara Denis-Morel.

Doing Things With Words, at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery, 144 West 14th Street, New York City, from February 25 – May 7, 2011. Curated by Dave Beech and Paul O’Neill. Pratt Manhattan Gallery presents "We Are Grammar," a large-scale exhibition of 2D, sculptural, installation, and video works by over 40 contemporary artists who have been working with text from the past decade. "We Are Grammar" is on view now through May 7, 2011 and is free and open to the public. The exhibition is guest-curated by Dave Beech and Paul O'Neill. "We Are Grammar" features a new mode of text art that has emerged over the past decade. According to the curators, this mode claims neither to have inaugurated contemporary art's linguistic turn nor to have treated the use of language within art as something historical. Though not considered extraordinary, text art has yet to be completely incorporated into institutions of art. The value and potential of this form is acknowledged by a wide spectrum of contemporary artists who freely combine the use of text with performance, installation, video, photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, and printmaking. The exhibition examines the third generation of artists working in text art. The first iteration of this practice came in the 1960s, when text established itself as a legitimate tool for the creation of visual art. A second generation of text art began during the 1980s and 1990s, as postmodernists combined text with other mediums. The text art produced by the third generation of artists is characterized by a shared structure within linguistic practices; is dependent on linguistic forms; and is mediated by linguistic exchange that engages with the processes of nomination, documentation, and rule-following. In many cases text is no longer the 'face' of the artwork but rather part of its background. "Contemporary text art finds itself located at the intersection of philosophy, current thinking on art, and contemporary theories of language," said Beech. "By virtue of the properties of language it is an art that draws us into questions about how we think, live, judge, feel, and differ," O'Neill added.

Psyche and Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul An exhibition at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, January 28 –June 13, 2011. Curated by Nancy Kuhl Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul explores cultural, clinical, and scientific discourse on human psychology and its influence on twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers. Tracing important themes in the lives and work of key figures and artistic communities represented in the Beinecke Library’s Modern European and American Literature collections, the exhibition documents a range of imaginative encounters involving the arts and the study of the mind. The books, manuscripts, and visual works in Psyche & Muse represent aesthetic and philosophic lineages from the late nineteenth century to the postwar era; the exhibited materials reveal ways in which the study of psychology and core concepts of psychoanalysis were both intertwined and at odds with artistic production throughout the twentieth century. As indicated by the title of one section of the exhibition, Psyche & Muse is an exploration of “mixed narratives,” problematic stories, disrupted analyses. Documenting creative processes, intricate personal interactions, and the development of thought and insight, archives can provide a singular vantage from which to view and understand complex relationships and tensions between creativity, memory, dreams, love, and human psychology. But inevitably archives tend toward the incomplete, the fragmentary. Rich and vibrant as the archival record may be, it often tells us only part of a more complicated history, giving a hazy image, part of which remains out of focus. In this way, archives resemble subjects of endless interest to psychology—dreams, language, memory. Providing views of passionate collaborations and painful ensnarements, Psyche and Muse itself can be understood as an “entanglement” of a sort; an attempt to document personal and artistic associations, the exhibition enacts as it records the problems of language and the realities of anxiety. The exhibition reveals unfixed and evolving meanings as it recounts the unusual cases and fraught stories at the intersection of creativity and modern psychology.

Esthétique du livre d’artiste: collections et inventaires, FRAC, Fonds Régional d’art Contemporain, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur, 23 March – 26 May 2013. Curated by Anne Moeglin-Delcroix. On the occasion of the inauguration of the new premises and the opening of its Documentation Centre, the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur invites Anne Mœglin-Delcroix to set eyes on the funds' Books and Publishing multiple artists "FRAC, presented for the first time to the public. Historical pieces from his personal collection of artists' books complement its selection. The fund books, editions and multiples by artists from the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur was enhanced in 2010 with the donation of the Marseilles edition structure (A) Limited Store - (U) LS and comprises today ' hui over 3000 works. books, flip books, calendars, journals, postcards, posters, plus videos, CDs, vinyls and multiple identity of this fund in the wake of the historic commitment Fluxus and conceptual artists in favor of the broadest possible diἀusion printed artistic proposal. echoing a predominant orientation of the donation (U) LS and fund FRAC, the exhibition is organized around the collection of notions , archive and inventory.