Abra is a hybrid project, a conjoined physical artist's book and iOS app, in which a prismatic poem cycle mutates under a reader's fingers.
Abra plays conceptually on notions of technological magic and the historic lineage of illuminated manuscripts. In the artist’s book, printed with laser cuts and thermochromic ink, poems grow, mutate, and vanish under a reader's fingers. Laser cuts in the pages culminate in a portal from the print text into the glow of the screen.
The app's text mirrors the book's, but mutates continually in infinite variations. The reader can shape and transform the text with a variety of tools and write their own language into Abra's corpus. Taking inspiration from Brian Eno's generative music apps, words added to Abra become part of its lexicon and resurface ambiently during later mutations.
Abra was supported by an Expanded Artists' Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago and the National Endowment for the Arts. The project was awarded the Turn On Literature Prize in 2017.
Download from the iOS App Store ↗
Publications:
Artists' book published by the Center for Book and Paper Arts (2015)
Abra: Expanding Artists’ Books into the Digital Realm, Gramma 22 (2016)
From Abra (full-color app screenshots as print poems), Bombay Gin 42 (2016)
Abra source code on GitHub
Stagings:
2016 - Abra launch, featuring Cecilia Corrigan, Alejandro Miguel, Justino Crawford, Claire Donato, Ben Fama, Farnoosh Fathi, Carla Gannis, Gordon Hall, Gabriela Jauregui, Becca Klaver, Claire Kwong, Paul Legault, and Nick Monfort. Printed Matter, New York
Exhibitions:
Turn On Literature public library exhibitions, Roskilde, Denmark and Bergen, Norway
ELO Communities, Mosteiro de São Bento da Vitória, Porto, Portugal
ISEA 2016 Cultural R>evolution Juried Exhibition, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong
HackTheBook, Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, Greece
College Book Art Association Exhibition, Vanderbilt College, Nashville TN
Press:
Kyle Booten, Making Writing Harder: Computer-Mediated Authorship and the Problem of Care, Electronic Book Review (2021)
Pete Hebden, Poetry Mobile Apps, The British Library Digital Scholarship Blog (2020)
Robert P. Fletcher, Digital Ekphrasis and the Uncanny: Toward a Poetics of Augmented Reality (2017)
Ann Royston, Provoking the Artist’s Book, Part 2: Analog and Digital (or the Raw and the Cooked), Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association (2017)
Robert Bolick, Bookmarking Book Art – Amaranth Borsuk, Books on Books (2017).
Dorothy Santos, Playing With the Written Word, Weird Sister (2016)
Simona Caraceni for Artribune, an imprint of Italian newspaper Il Messaggero (2016)
Urszula Pawlicka, Abra: A Living Text for iOS, University of Warmia and Mazury in Poland (2016)
A Book that Refuses to Stay on the Page, The Literary Platform (2016)
DJ Pangburn, Poetry Becomes Moving Art in App Form, Vice (2016)
Gemma Wilson, New App Explodes the Book, Seattle City Arts (2015)
See also:
