Description
I, Sinkhole is a poem written with products in a Zazzle store. Where Andre Breton’s Poème-Objet constructions of the early 20th century incorporated everyday objects such as pearls, metal locks, a wooden egg, and a glass eye, I, Sinkhole translates the Poème-Objet construction into a kind of Poème-Produit where the radical availability presented by networked global culture in the 21st century is articulated in the everywhere and nowhere interspace of a Zazzle store. In this digital space, an infinite array of utilitarian objects - made strange by their proliferation and lack of context - can be immediately accessed by anyone in the world. As a further gesture of resistance to monological readings, the poem is fractured so that the reader must navigate multiple objects including a trucker hat, a ping pong paddle, and a lunchbox, in order to fully apprehend the poem. The full poem can be ordered by purchasing all the products directly from Zazzle, or each line can be ordered as a separate product.
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Featured in POÈME SBJKT, an exhibition of works of literature both on and off the blockchain that enhance, reinvent, and reimagine the relationship between text and image, analog and digital, blurring and challenging the lines that seek to divide.
POÈME SBJKT was curated by theVERSEverse in partnership with L’Avant Galerie Vossen and took place at Librairie Métamorphoses from May 25 - July 15, 2023.
ARTIST
Kate Armstrong is an established writer, artist, and curator whose work focuses on art and technology. Armstrong is a pioneer in generative art and literature: her interdisciplinary practice is conceptually driven and has included digital art, objects, video, events in urban space, generative text systems, and experimental narrative forms. Armstrong has written for P.S.1/MoMa, Blackflash, Fillip, SubTerrain, and the Kootenay School of Writing and For Machine Use Only: Contemplations on algorithmic epistemology (&&& c/o The New Centre for Research and Practice, 2016). Artist books include Medium (2011), Source Material Everywhere (2011), and Path (2012). Her international exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius, Lithuania), Psy-Geo-Conflux (New York), and Akbank Sanat (Istanbul, Turkey). Armstrong’s artworks are held in collections including Rhizome, the Rose Goldsen Archive, the Library of the Printed Web, and the Whitney Museum as part of Lorna Mills’ Ways of Something (2017).