Dan Waber
Dan Waber is unsure exactly who he is at the moment this is being written. In the past he has been a poet, playwright, publisher, and multimedia artist whose work most often involves the attempt to kit-bash language to do things its warranty doesn't cover.
He is the maker of Strings, which appear here on vispo.com, and would like you to know that, in a very real sense, everything that followed Strings owes a debt of gratitude to Jim Andrews, who saw value in them and has kept them available for decades.
Other pieces have landed in The Art of English, The Poet's Craft, Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 1, Drunken Boat, Iowa Review (Web), books, broadsides, anthologies and ephemeral publications, in mailboxes, on stage, in a puppet theater, on buses, gallery walls, and the Library of Congress. He has written more sestinas than there are particles in the known universe.
The online hub of his digital doings is logolalia.com.
He spends most of his time lately in his heirloom vegetable garden, unsullied by the crude language of humans.
Mark the Way
The text rubbings in Mark the Way were all made using lumber crayons and paper to take rubbings from public monuments. Each piece uses language from a single monument. Some monuments yielded multiple pieces, but no piece contains language from multiple monuments. These were all composed in situ, based on the language available. There was no pre-composition, no plan to go and find certain things in certain places. It was a way for me to respectfully engage in a dialogue with a form of communication that is normally a monologue. I was raised to believe that silence is complicity. I was also raised to have respect for the informed opinions of others (I think pluralist describes me best). By using only the language of the original messages, I feel I was able to be respectful of those whose views differ from my own without having to accept those views as my own.
These pieces were originally shown as Guns In Loving Memory at Test Pattern Gallery, Scranton, PA USA and, later, as The United States Of at The Oresman Gallery, Smith College, Northampton, MA USA.
