Broadside Attractions at Intersection for the Arts
What A project where 12 artist/writer pairs created 2 versions of a broadside: a traditional version and a contemporary interpretation When Spring 2012 Role Co-collaborator with Jenny Bitner Key Players Maw Shein Win and Megan Wilson with Kevin Chen and Intersection for the Arts Highlight Watching people interact within our installation
Story Jenny Bitner and I created a traditional broadside around a selection from her novel. For the second part of the project, we addressed the shift to sharing information digitally. While we enjoyed the tactile element of our broadside, printed with a letterpress on beautiful paper, there was something great about a digital invitation, such as a Facebook invite, where dialogue, images, and links could be exchanged.
For our contemporary broadside, we decided to explore this interactive quality through a specially created space. We incorporated visual aspects of the broadside’s illustration – the checkerboard floor, the striped wallpaper, the howling wolves – with the text itself, which ran up the walls, down the teapot’s length, and around the rims of plates. The text also sprung from a pamphlet of short 2-person plays and could be cracked out of fortune cookies. People sat upon pillows on the checkerboard floor while acting out plays as wolves howling at the moon peered up at them from the bottoms of teacups.