Biography

Steve Woodall is Director of the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and a principal investigator in the Center’s NEA-supported research project Expanded Artists’ Books: Envisioning the Future of the Book. In 1999-2000, as an artist in residence and project leader at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he helped establish a digital artist’s book studio, part of the research project and exhibition, XFR: Experiments in the Future of Reading. Since then he has continued to explore conjoined physical and digital media in artists’ books, for both creation and dissemination.

Themed Panel

Artists’ Publishing Network: A Collaborative Proposal
This themed panel will explore issues related to the development of artists’ publishing networks. The panel members will present two related, collaborative projects, explore a series of case studies and then conclude with a directed discussion session focusing on the question: what should an artist’s publishing network constitute? The anticipated outcome from this panel will be to form a network of interested participants in a future artists’ publishing network.
The two projects that we will present are: Artists’ Publishing: An Investigation into Digital Media as a means to Integrate Dissemination into the Creative Cycle, which seeks to identify ways in which artists can gain more creative control of the relationship between their production and its interaction with the viewer/audience; and Expanded Artists’ Books: Envisioning the Future of the Book, that aims to widen the audience for the artist’s book while encouraging the creation of new work by artists in other media.
This panel will be a foundational information gathering session for the next step in creating a partnership between educational, cultural, economic institutions and individuals. We seek to identify the gaps in our current system of artist-based networks and pinpoint key issues and potential partners in developing a pertinent and sustainable network dedicated to promoting artists’ publishing. We will be actively soliciting participation in the next phase of grant support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which offers a funding program for Partnership Grants: these are multi-institutional, multi-year projects that provide the opportunity for national and international partnering on key issues.