In this hands-on session, the typewriter becomes a visual instrument: a machine for pressure, spacing, repetition, and productive error. We’ll work through short exercises, overtyping and “ghost” layers, grids and non-linear layouts, character-based illustration, and text sampling (cutting, re-routing, and re-sequencing a source text until it becomes a diagram or score).
Participants compose typewritten poems using spacing, overtyping, and rhythm as visual elements. The session encourages improvisation and tactile interaction, treating the typewriter page as both score and surface. Expect to make at least one finished piece on paper.
All materials are provided; no experience needed. Participants can opt in to have one work included in the Echo[es] living wall installation in the 2nd-floor gallery.
Echo[es]: traces in a grid unfolds at UB Art Galleries as a spring program of lectures, hands-on workshops, and a participatory mail exchange, bringing together visual poetry, experimental writing, mail art, and typewriter art. Framed in dialogue with Martha Jackson in Paris and Robert Creeley: Active Complement, the project draws on traditions of artistic correspondence to ask how networks form through text, image, and “slow communication” and are shaped by distance, delay, and return.
Echo[es] resonates in three movements. Across March and April, a series of public lectures and hands-on workshops in visual poetry and typewriter art punctuate the season—some offered in person and virtually— act as activations creating shared moments for learning, making, and conversation. In addition to that stream, a postal exchange begins to circulate: a curated selection of works from Buffalo, Latin America, and the international community enters the postal system, travels along branching routes, arrives in waves, and gathers momentum as the correspondence network grows.
By May, the gathered correspondence and workshop creations materialize as a collective installation: the echo-chain taking physical form as a living wall in the 2nd-floor gallery at the UB Center for the Arts. It will read as an accumulative, momentary palimpsest—poems, images, and traces shaped by latency (that postal “lag”), by what arrives quickly, what arrives late, and what returns transformed. At the intersection of Martha Jackson in Paris and Robert Creeley: Active Complement the wall lets visitors read the network as it surfaces: some intentions sharpen in transit, others are lost in branching routes, and others reappear only when they finally take shape, in display, in public, as an echo.
Program Date: April 18, 2026