Photo by Serkan Ozkaya, "A Sudden Gust of Wind"
Tan Lin and Robert Fitterman are two of the most significant experimental writers of their generation. Both work extensively with found materials and with the language of the Internet. They will be introduced by Paul Stephens, who writes about Lin and Fitterman in his new book, The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing.
“I consider Google a mode of (loose) autobiography. A book in Google Books, like someone’s search history, isn’t really a book; it’s data connected to other data, and it’s searchable. Reading, like autobiography, is a subset of a search function.” — Tan Lin, from “A Book is Technology: An Interview with Tan Lin,” Rhizome
“The branch of conceptual poetry that interests me most is radical appropriation—how it echoes larger social and cultural concerns about piracy, open sourcing, repurposing, and navigating new information streams.” — Robert Fitterman, “My Sharona”
About the Artists
Poet, novelist, filmmaker, and new media artist Tan Lin draws on and samples source material from popular culture and the Internet to address issues involving copyright, plagiarism, and technology. He is the author of thirteen books, most recently the novel Insomnia and the Aunt, and the poetry collection Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004: The Joy of Cooking.
Robert Fitterman is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including No, Wait. Yep. Definitely Still Hate Myself, Holocaust Museum, Now We Are Friends, and Rob the Plagiarist. He teaches writing and poetry at New York University and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Paul Stephens has taught at Bard College, Emory University, and Columbia University. He edits the journal Convolution and lives in New York City.
Performance Program