&Now 2019 Conference

A painting can be seen and re-seen in various group shows, a sculpture can move across galleries, and a piece of installation art can morph to feature various site-specific locations, but when a poem, a short story, or an essay gets published in a magazine, that piece is rarely featured in another format. And what do these differing varieties of “publication” across artistic fields suggest for the image-text? What possibilities arrive for the video poem that is allowed to shift as it travels between festivals across the country? Or for a tactile essay that is displayed as an exhibit? What "several lives," for example, will an interactive digital text go on to have as digital platforms evolve?

On this panel, five interdisciplinary writers will talk about what happens when texts take on multiple lives through hybrid modes of publication: stories as performances, poems printed on fabric, essays as installations, and translations in video form. Our conversation will focus on the expansive opportunities available to multimedia literary works in several iterations that both meet and surpass the limits of traditional literary venues and the vocabularies of genre. The final third of our presentation will be devoted to a collaborative how-to for multimedia texts that (wish to) take on several iterations.