Johanna Drucker

Johanna Drucker is a book artist, poet, and scholar whose work focuses on the history of the book and print culture, history of information, critical studies in visual knowledge representation, and collection development in book arts. Recent books: Speclab (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Design History: A Critical Guide, with Emily McVarish (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2008), and Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Information Studies at UCLA. This is an 8-minute excerpt from a one-hour talk.  Here is an audio recording of the entire presentation, which took place on March 14, 2011, at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia.

One day, on the street, Bruce Andrews found several thousands of pages of scripts from the soap opera, As the World Turns. He then created an untitled piece we might call “This Is the 20th Century” (using its first line). It was apparently written to serve as a preface or blurb for a book by Johanna Drucker (Dark Decade). Andrews uses phrases from the TV scripts and also some language from Drucker. He read this stray-ish piece at an Ear Inn reading in 1994. Here is the recording — from PennSound's Bruce Andrews page where this '94 reading has been segmented (thanks to the talented Jenny Lesser). The blurb did not appear on or in Drucker's Dark Decade and remains unpublished.

complete reading (28:41): MP3
complete conversation with Charles Bernstein(29:47): MP3
Kelly Writers House, March 14, 2011