Lynn Book

Lynn Book creates media-diverse works across a range of cultural sites through research and practice that center on questions and issues of embodiment, otherness, social structures and states of public imagination.   She collaborates with a range of people and environments, from media artists to architects, with musicians, whole communities, and recently, an opera company. These works are performance-based and take form in music concert frameworks, multimedia productions, as well as site-specific encounters.

Lynn also produces exhibition-based projects and programs as well as digital media works that include audio recordings and her current video project entitled “Un-Reading for Future Bodies”, a suite of ‘books’ that take up reading, reception and knowledge-making as performative acts.   Lynn’s aim is to rework epistemological relations between bodies, book objects, print and digital media to propose new maps for constructing meaning in a highly mediated cultural regime, magnified by a super-saturated technological one.

Book has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, a media project residency funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Franklin Furnace, among others.

Volume 1, “Escapes”, interrogates opera, Greek tragedy, media hybridity, performance, and what she herself calls voicing bodies, through the figure of Phaedra.  Volume 2, “Derangements” wrestles with the Chimaera and ‘her’ deranged boundaries, from ancient myths to concepts of hybridity in science and culture, bodies as super-organisms and the human microbiome.  The third volume is in development.

Since 2005, Lynn has established a stream of academic scholarships on creativity considered by way of the following categories: 1) high order creativity as realized in the arts 2) broad spectrum creativity found across all domains and cultures 3) critical creativity that converges critical thinking with creative engagement, and 4) creative potential in human and technological interaction.

Art and Research Interests

Long standing research includes: embodiment, otherness, social structures and states of public imagination.  Critical French feminisms, issues of exile, nomadism, critique of power, and language structures and linguistic invention have also deeply informed my work through the years. Current research interests include: reading, reception and knowledge-making as performative acts, epistemological relations between bodies, book objects, print and digital media. Themes involved in current work interrogates opera, Greek tragedy, media hybridity, performance, and what I call voicing bodies; deranged boundaries, ancient myths, concepts of hybridity in science and culture, bodies as super-organisms and the human microbiome.

http://www.vimeo.com/lynnbook%20

http://www.vimeo.com/lynnbook%20

Advisor: Studio/Research