Project Statement

by J. Drucker

Emerging Sentience was produced for the Poetry Plastique exhibition organized by Charles Bernstein and Jay Sanders at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. The conceptual foundation of the project is expressed concisely in its title: to make a work about sentience as an emergent property of intelligent systems. The original text had been written some time before, as one of the pieces in Deterring Discourse.

Emerging Sentience

Johanna Drucker

Agents

Johanna Drucker

type: initiating

role:
author

nationality:
born: United States
active: United States
citizenship: United States

dates:
birth: 1952-05-30

Brad Freeman

type: initiating

role:
artist
printer
designer

nationality:
active: United States
citizenship: United States

Publication Information

publisher: JAB Books

dates:
publication: 2001-00-00

publication history: This work exists in two forms: as a book, and as a wall hanging made up of the pages of the book. [A. Schutte]

Aesthetic Profile

movement:
postmodern (AAT)

subject:
artists' books (LCSH)

themes: intimacy, familiar space, collaboration, knowledge, memory, technophilia [A. Schutte]

content form:
experimental text (local)

publication tradition:
visual poetry (local)

community: other Marianne Boesky Gallery [A. Schutte]

note: This is a collaborative work, with Johanna Drucker writing the text, and Brad Freeman taking the photographs, doing the digital prepress, and printing the book. [A. Schutte]

Exhibition Information

exhibition history: Emerging Sentience was written, designed, and produced for the exhibition, Poetry Plastique, at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, February-March 2001.

reception history: unknown

Related Documents

manuscript type: other

location: artist's archive

note: In the Artists' Statement, Johanna Drucker and Brad Freeman describe their motivations for creating Nova Reperta (1999) and Emerging Sentience (2000).

manuscript type: mockups

location: artist's archive

note: A series of Johanna Drucker's hand-written and computer printed mocukps of the text only with no images. The mockups include: the entire text written as one block, the entire text written as a block with the white line of text in bold, the white text drawn out in groupings of four pages, the full text and white text broken apart by page, various edited copies, a set of 8 1/2" x 11" page mockups of the work, and a copy of the text emailed from Johanna Drucker to Brad Freeman with his subsequent edits on it.

manuscript type: texts

location: artist's archive

note: This is the exhibition catalogue put out for Poetry Plastique by Marianne Boesky Gallery and Granary Books. It includes introductions by the show's curators: Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein. It also includes an essay written by Johanna Drucker entitled, "Plastic Modalities: Emerging Sentience," and essays written by other contributing artists and poets.

manuscript type: mockups

location: artist's archive

note: This is a set of true-to-size page mockups with text only, and inserted notes about the images and layout.