Typewriter art treats language as something you can place, not just read, where blank space carries as much force as the letter. Intended for anyone interested in questioning the basic concepts of originality in creation, and what “authenticity” can mean inside contemporary experimental literature, this talk traces a lineage of space-language writing: from Stefi Kiesler (Austria), N.H. Werkman (Netherlands), Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd (Sweden), Dom Sylvester Houédard (UK), Henri Chopin (France), and Hansjörg Mayer (Germany) to contemporary practices by Alan Riddell (UK), Barrie Tullett (UK), Marianne Holme Hansen (Denmark), Fátima Queiroz (Portugal), Elena Asins (Spain), and Alyson Provax (Canada). We’ll also name the typographic “systems” at stake: typo-plastic, tiksels, dactylopoems, typestracts, typoems.
An exploration of the typewriter as both a writing tool and a visual instrument, this session highlights how constraint and repetition become aesthetic strategies, while asking how a page becomes a diagram, score, and echo-chain, shaped by distance, delay, and return.
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 8, 2026