Open Wide: An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System represents five years of research including reading, writing, curating and making images. Working with the premise that digestion can be understood as a figuration for experience, the project brings together writing, images and sounds that reflect this subject from a range of genres, disciplines and media including visual art, cinema, ecology, biology and philosophy.
As an artist and academic, Associate Professor Randy Lee Cutler has followed the looping trajectory of digestion expanding the topic beyond its conventional implications. Taking up the form of an ABC primer, the abecedarium is a cross disciplinary guide to bodily rhythms, chemical reactions and aesthetic transformations. The result is an enhanced e-book comprised of writing and other interactive elements that offers a visual and thought provoking encounter with an emergent and expansive research field.
Cutler has collaborated with Celeste Martin, Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Design and Dynamic Media, to produce an innovative electronic publication that is situated at the threshold of conventional publishing. Martin has worked with the iBooks platform, usually adopted for textbook applications, to envision a multiple platform object that is part artist book, part research endeavor and part curated event.
Artists featured in the project are: Abbas Akhavan, Myron Campbell, Gaye Chan, John Cussans, Geoffrey Farmer, Kristina Fiedrich, Monique Fouquet, Allison Hrabluik, Elvira Hufschmid, Ingrid Koenig, Germaine Koh, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Liz Magor, Graham Meisner, Cindy Mochizuki, Damian Moppett, Ranu Mukherjee, Ryan Peter, Marina Roy, Margit Schild, and Holly Schmidt.
Open Wide: An Abecedarium for the Great Digestive System will be launched at READ books and Emily Carr University of Art of Design in March 2014. The e-book will be available for viewing in the Emily Carr Library as well as for purchase at the iTunes/iBooks store.
Above Artwork:
Randy Lee Cutler
Marie Antoinette (detail), 2012
(Handcut collage, 16 x 12 inches)
Below:
E-publication designed by Celeste Martin
