Earlier today we installed our December publication, The Dragon Imelda, by Cecilia Pinto at Genesis Art Supply. (Then we spent a fair amount of time walking around and look at art supplies!)
Don’t worry if you’re not an artist, Cecilia’s short story is well worth the trip, and it will be up in the front window for the next 3 weeks!
Please enjoy these photos from earlier this evening.
At long last we can announce that we will wrap the year up at Genesis Art Supply!
For those of you who aren’t familiar, Genesis Art Supply is a local business now located on Elston, just West of Damen. They’re also the brick and mortar store behind artsupply.com. They’re the place to go for airbrush supplies especially, but they have a nice selection for all sorts of art-making.
Beginning Sunday, Cecilia Pinto’s Piece, The Dragon Imelda, will be up for about 3 weeks. You’ll have plenty of time to catch it as you do your holiday shopping for the artists in your life.
Genesis Art Supply is located at .
Click here for a map.
Their hours are as follows:
Monday-Friday 9:00-8:00Saturday 9:00-7:00
Sunday 10:00-6:00
We are pleased to announce that our December writer is Cecilia Pinto, who will be sharing her prose piece, The Dragon Imelda. We will be installing her work this weekend. We will announce the location on our site very soon, so make sure to check back.
In the meantime, congratulations to Cecilia!
Cecilia Pinto is a writer working in various genres and have published fiction, poetry and non-fiction. She is a graduate of the writing program at the School of the Art Institute and teaches writing at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
Uptown Bikes puts on a pretty good light show, and we’re happy to be a part of it! It’s always gratifying to see how many people stop to see what’s going on in the window.
On November 1st we will be installing Racquel Malone’s poem, FallopianOde, at Uptown Bikes.
We are so happy to have found a great partner in the neighborhood that Malone requested, and a location that is so easy to get to! We are also proud to partner with a women-owned business to present this particular poem.
Uptown Bikes is right across the street from the Wilson Red Line stop, and only a few blocks from the Lawrence stop.
Uptown Bike’s address is 4653 N Broadway St, Chicago, IL 60640.
Click here for a map.
No doubt many of you already know Uptown Bikes for their reliable repairs, good bikes, and loads of accessories. Now you can add poetry to that list!
Check back here soon for photos, but don’t miss your chance to see the real thing!
Uptown Bikes’ hours are:
Mon-Tues-Thur-Fri: 11AM-7PM
Sat-Sun: 11AM-5PM
Wed:Closed
We have selected our winning writer for November. Congratulations to Racquel Malone!
Racquel Malone is a Chicago native and writer of poetry, screen + stage plays and songs. She studied theatre and media at Northeastern Illinois University. She is currently working on a short film titled koko, at last and of course, more poetry. When not writing, Racquel works in various theatres across the city. She plans to start a media company in the very near future to give a much needed platform to writers everywhere.
Racquel’s poem, FallopianOde, will be up and running soon. Check back in a few days to find out where.
(Drumroll please…) Our October writer is Emily Parenti!
Emily Parenti is a writer and recent graduate of DePaul University’s English Literature and Professional Writing programs. During the 2013-2014 academic year, she served as Co- Editor-in-Chief of the university’s literary magazine, Crook & Folly, which publishes graduate and undergraduate creative work. She has since worked as an editor on various other projects, including a chapbook distributed by a new Chicago-based journal of creative nonfiction, Slag Glass City.
Emily’s poem, Execution Points, will be on view at CMM Framing for the first three weeks of October. Literature Emitting Diodes is proud to be included in Chicago Artists Month, and we are excited to feature Emily’s work as part of it.
Our first installation went as smoothly as we could have hoped, and we even managed to snap a few photos of the process. We devised a portable frame for the LED display so we could take advantage of the storefront’s elevated window and avoid mounting anything in the ceiling. Our friends at Knee Deep Vintage were very accommodating, and the whole process took less than two hours.
Almost all of that time was programming Kanga’s piece, Aubrey Graham, into the display. We did this with a remote control, one letter at a time! Though slow, the process is fitting for Literature Emitting Diodes. The project investigates the impact of constraints on literature, for writers, readers, and publishers alike. Just as the writers are limited to 500 words, and the readers are constrained to the scrolling speed of the display, so are we publishers held to the limitations of the process.
Part of our fascination with limitations in art and literature is with their relative nature. Surely a remote controller is slower than a computer keyboard, but what about other methods still used by small presses? The slow pace and disorienting experience of only seeing a few characters at a time reminded us of setting metal type for letterpress printing. With so many contrasts between these two publishing media, their common ground as a generative constraint is one of the reasons we are so excited to see this project progress!
We are thrilled to share some documentation of our inaugural publication, Aubrey Graham by Surabhi Kanga.
We first photographed our LED display as soon as the text was programmed. Knee Deep Vintage was still bustling with Friday afternoon shoppers and Literature Emitting Diodes was just one among many elements in the storefront. Competing and collaborating with graffiti, posters, reflections and more, LED calls attention to the rich layers of language that inhabit the urban environment.
At dusk, the context changes. The LEDs glow brighter and the writing reads differently though, of course, the text has not changed. The writing scrolls on by, as it will do thousands of times before the end of July, unaware of the constant changes around it. Every reader will have a different experience, as we do each time we return to photograph the installation.
We hope our readers find this as exciting as we do, and we would be happy to share photos and videos taken by our readers as they experience the piece in their own respective ways.
Literature Emitting Diodes 