TIA 2005: Art from Ephemera (Mail Art and the Internet)
Text and Image Arts
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Fall 2007 - Spring 2009

Thursday, January 31, 2008

PoetryPostcardProject.com

 Originally a commission by the Tempe Cultural Services Division for their show Textology: The Art of Letters, Matthew Shindell creates a suite of five postcards to be published through Galom Press, then sends them to ten poets with whom he is in contact with. The poets are selected among applicants and friends of his, and the applicants can apply on the site. The backs of the postcards have surveys and prompts to which the poets are to write their poetic response, such as the one in the example to the left by Kirsten Kaschock from the second postcard round. The poets can have an unlimited amount of postcard responses back to Matthew Shindell. Fans of the project can also contribute unsolicited postcards with their own poetry or abstracted text. To remain updated of the project, Matthew Shindell's poetry blog posts fairly regularly and is where the most current information can be found.

BookInscriptions.com


This is a screenshot of www.bookinscriptions.com, a blog started last year by a guy named Shaun.  He collects photos of unique book inscriptions, as he is interested in how these books were at one point gifts with meaningful messages that have now been discarded.  Shaun asks bloggers to send an image of an inscription they have found along with a picture of the book cover and details on how or where it was found.  Pictures, notes, and other items found inside books can also be sent in.  I went to a used bookstore in search of such an inscription, but could only find an old tattered newspaper article. 

Monday, January 28, 2008

Found Magazine.com


I found this while going through my Grandfather's attic. I was surprised to see how good looking men were back then. I slipped in into my purse without telling my grandfather, I'll never know the people and he'll never know I have it.


The picture above is my found object that I submitted to the website,foundmagazine.com. The picture turned out to be a picture of my grandfather's wrestling team in 1939, not knowing that my grandfather was actually present in this picture until my mom brought it to my attention. Previously before speaking with my mother I had taken it upon myself to submit the picture with my small blurb that described what I was posting and a little story behind it. The picture became more personal and extremely creepy that one of the "good looking men" was my 88 year old grandfather. I highly enjoyed partaking in the website and found the site extremely user friendly.



Monday, January 14, 2008

spring cleaning

The second round of this course will begin a bit later this month. The class has been revised slightly, based on my experiences with and feedback from a really stellar first batch of contributors, which will hopefully only improve this here blog component. The revised syllabus has been added (look to the right and down a bit), but it's subject to change before January 23rd.