Tag: kinetic typography

Riveted in the Word 

The true story of a writer/historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke.

Warren Lehrer 
School of Visual Arts (SVA);
Purchase College 
SUNY (Professor Emeritus) 

Riveted in the Word is an electronic book inspired by the true story of a writer/historian’s hard-fought battle to regain language after a devastating stroke. Written and designed by author/designer Warren Lehrer, the multimodal book app uses writing, a custom interface, kinetic typography, and an original soundtrack to place the reader inside the mind of a retired American history professor as she recalls her journey with Broca’s aphasia. The interface toggles between columns of text that readers navigate at their own pace, and animated sections that evoke gaps between perceptions (thoughts, memories, desires) and the words needed to communicate.

Most of the inner monologue takes place while the fictionalized protagonist, Norah Hanson, PhD, is lying in bed thinking about her 20+ year rehabilitation, hopeful for the day ahead, which turns out to be a breakthrough day for her. The interface is often bifurcated down the middle, in a way that mirrors the two hemispheres of the brain, which get affected differently by a stroke. The reader witnesses Norah’s sense of humor, determined spirit, and seemingly fragmented-but-intelligible thoughts as they shift from present to past, and toward her upcoming public lecture, the first she’s given since the stroke.

BACKGROUND/METHODOLOGY

I first met and interviewed Willie Lee Rose, a historian of the American Reconstruction period, two decades after she suffered a massive stroke. She was 71-years-old at the time. Willie’s stroke affected the left hemisphere of her brain, which gave her the kind of aphasia that affects the use of language. Like many cases of Broca’s aphasia, she retained the memories and intelligence that she had before, but she suddenly didn’t have the language to communicate. Willie’s difficult but triumphant rehabilitation inspired me to write a fictionalized interior narrative of a scholar and stroke survivor—that takes place over the course of a few hours of one day.

The first iteration of Riveted in the Word was published in my 2013 illuminated novel, “A LIFE IN BOOKS: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley,” as an excerpt of one of my author-protagonist’s 101 books. In 2018, Willie Lee Rose died, at the age of 91, and a few years after that I decided to adapt Riveted into an electronic book, and dedicate it to Willie.

For the past twenty years, I’ve been enhancing my solo and collaborative printed books (non-fiction, fiction, and poetry) with animations, short films, and interactive media. I’ve also been focusing more and more on making work that helps create greater understanding of and empathy for neurodivergent and other human conditions such as Dyslexia, Alzheimer’s disease, displacement, trauma, and loss. So, I had the idea of developing Riveted in the Word as my first fully electronic book as a way of creating an immersive experience that could help readers have more awareness of the interior experience of this little understood condition.

In 2019, I had the good fortune of meeting Artemio Morales, a web developer with a literature background and passion for multimedia books. After deciding to work together on the Riveted in the Word ebook, we brainstormed about creating an interface that would in some ways split the difference between watching a movie and reading a book. Several months later, I sent him a 1,200 page storyboard, which he began translating into code using Unity. I also brought composer/multi-instrumentalist Andrew Griffin into the project because of the phenomenal job he did creating soundtracks for the animations of my and Dennis Bernstein’s “Five Oceans in Teaspoon” project. The three of us worked on “Riveted in the Word” for five years while juggling other projects.

OUTCOMES

Riveted in the Word launched in June, 2024 as a book app made for iPads, iPhones, and Mac computers, available for sale on the Apple App store, for $4.99. We are currently adapting it to work on Android and Windows devices and online through web browsers. The book app is co-produced and co-published by my non-profit arts organization EarSay, dedicated to nurturing and portraying stories of uncelebrated individuals and communities, and Artemio’s production lab, AltSalt, dedicated to publishing and promoting innovative works of electronic literature.

So far, we’ve had two official book launches to over-capacity audiences, one at the Center for Book Arts in NYC, one in Blue Hill Maine, in conjunction with the Maine Writers and Publishers Association’s “Word Festival.” Launches included real-time projection of the app with reading/performances by actress/author and my EarSay partner Judith Sloan, and Q&A with collaborators Andrew Griffin, Artemio Morales, medical professionals, and stroke survivors.

Over the past several months, we also presented performance/readings of Riveted at Torn Page, Art New York Studios, Topaz Arts, NYU Tish, Pratt Institute, the University of Wisconsin/Madison, and as part of the Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference/NY Art Book Fair, and the Electronic Literature Organization National Conference in Orlando, Florida/online.

Riveted was a featured title of the May, 2024 Print (Magazine) Book Club, along with another book that I wrote and designed, “Jericho’s Daughter.” That hour-long conversation was hosted by Debbie Millman and Steven Heller.

Riveted was the subject of a segment on New York Public Radio with me and Dr. Laura Boylan, a neurologist at Bellevue Hospital and faculty at NYU School of Medicine.

I also discussed Riveted in an hour+ interview with Carson Grubaugh on the Living the Line video podcast which features makers of graphic novels and visual literature.

In addition to receiving positive receptions from the design and electronic literature communities, I’m most hearted by the reception Riveted is receiving from health care professionals and stroke/aphasia survivors.

The National Aphasia Association (NAA) has endorsed Riveted and is featuring it on their Recommended Reading list.

Upcoming presentations include performance/readings at two New York medical schools and I’ve been invited to be a keynote speaker at an Art & Health Symposium in Tennessee.

In the attached Evidence of Outcomes doc, I’ve enclosed press quotes and other testimonials that attest to ways Riveted in the Word is innovative and contributes to the field(s) of design, electronic literature, and narrative medicine.

Riveted-in-the-word-OPTDownload

This project was the 2024 Design Incubation Educators Awards winner recipient in the category of Scholarship: Creative Works.

Biography

Warren Lehrer is a designer and writer known internationally as a pioneer of visual literature and design authorship. His work is acclaimed for its marriage of writing and typography, capturing the shape of thought and speech, and reuniting oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations, and performance. Honors include: Ladislav Sutnar Laureate, Center for Book Arts Honoree, Brendan Gill Prize, Innovative Use of Archives Award, International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, and fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Rockefeller, Ford, and Greenwall Foundations. His books are in many collections including MoMA, Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, Tate Gallery. Lehrer is a founding faculty member of the Designer As Author/Entrepreneur MFA program at the School of Visual Arts, Professor Emeritus at SUNY Purchase, and co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY. https://warrenlehrer.com/

Five Oceans in a Teaspoon

Scholarship: Creative Work Award Winner

Warren Lehrer, Designer, Professor, SUNY, Purchase  (visualizations)

Dennis J Bernstein, Poet, Executive Producer, Flashpoints Pacifica Radio (poems)

Five Oceans in a Teaspoon is a book and multimedia project written by journalist/poet Dennis J Bernstein, visualized and structured by designer/author Warren Lehrer. A large collection of short visual poems, Five Oceans consists of a 300 page book (Paper Crown Press), animations, a traveling exhibition (premiering at City Lore Gallery, NYC), and reading/performances. Steven Heller wrote the introduction to the book.

In 1979, Dennis J Bernstein and I began working on a book of poems, originally titled Stretch Marks. Instead of completing that book, we leapt into writing our first play together, and over the intervening years we collaborated on three books, including French Fries (1984), which has since been written about in scores of textbooks on visual literature, typography, graphic design and artists’ books. A few years ago, we began collaborating again on visual poetry, bringing together Bernstein’s words and my typographic visualizations. Forty years after our original effort we completed the project, now titled Five Oceans in a Teaspoon. Like with many of my previous works, this book sits at the center of a multibranched project.

Bernstein’s poetry, like his investigative journalism, reflects the struggle of everyday people trying to survive in the face of adversity. Structured like a work of music, the book (and exhibit) is divided into eight movements spanning a lifetime: growing up confused by dyslexia and a parental gambling addiction; graced by pogo sticks, boxing lessons and a mother’s compassion; becoming a frontline witness to war and its aftermaths, to prison, street life, love and loss, open heart surgery, caring for aging parents and visitations from them after they’re gone.

My methodology for this project: I selected the poems—out of thousands of Bernstein’s short poems written over 45 years—and arranged them into the book which can also be seen/read as a memoir in short visual poems. Each poem lead me to a composition. The ideas within the poem, its themes, metaphors, allusions, double meanings, ambiguities, subtexts, conflicts, voices, structure, rhythmic cadences, pauses and silences, underlying intent—were all grist for the mill. Many of the compositions give form to the interior, emotional underpinnings of the poem. Many compositions engage the reader to become an active participant in the discovery, navigation, puzzle, and interpretation of the poem. Some compositions allude to figuration or landscape, while others work more abstractly. At their best, the typographic compositions help create experience—within and across the pages of the book and in the animations. In a poem about Alzheimer’s, letters struggle to become words, search for memory; thoughts halt, rotate and stretch in a confusion of pleasure, frustration, habit and empathy. In a poem seen through the eyes of a child, letters and words form a colony of ants inspecting and devouring a discarded piece of candy. Other poems function diagrammatically, tracing patterns of relationships, war and peace, and struggles for human and civil rights.

Most of my previous projects embrace complexity, polyphony, and are longform works such as the 4 volume 1000+ page “Portrait Series” documenting American eccentrics, or my illuminated novel A LIFE IN BOOKS: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, containing 101 books within it embedded within a fictionalized memoir. For Five Oceans, I made dozens and dozens of iterations of each poem until a visual setting felt right—like it couldn’t be any other way. In his introduction, design historian/critic Steven Heller writes, “some of the compositions seem so simple and transparent resulting in self-evident grace and revelation.” This was the challenge of this project, to distill (like the writing does and the title suggests) a wide swath of experiences and emotions into a small space with minimal means: a seven inch square book, black and white, just using one type family throughout for the central voice of each poem, engaging the emptiness/fullness of the off-white page or screen.

Animations allow for a different kind of typographic realization/performance of select poems via time, kinetic typography, and soundtracks scored by composer/performer Andrew Griffin. Animations are featured in the live performance/readings, in the exhibition, public screenings and projections, and online. The exhibit also features prints of select poems from each movement.

Regarding impact and contribution to the field: As I write this, Five Oceans hasn’t even been published yet, officially. Yet there are indications that it will be impactful and receive critical attention. After reading an advance copy, Johanna Drucker, perhaps the foremost scholar of Visual Literature, writes: “In the long history of graphic word works, few, if any, have this range and repleteness.” In her forthcoming review in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Drucker calls Five Oceans an “engaging masterwork that has only a handful of precedents in literary and design history.” Bob Holman, leading chronicler of contemporary poetry writes, “Five Oceans re-envisions a poetry memoir via a textual kaleidoscope… Bernstein and Lehrer are the Rodgers and Hart of Visual Poetry.” Pulitzer Prize winning author Alice Walker calls Five Oceans “Brilliant and Beautiful.” Gail Anderson and Steven Heller’s recent book “Type Tells Tales” includes three sections on my work, one devoted to Five Oceans as a work-in-progress. Tim Samara’s new edition of Making and Breaking the Grid analyzes select poems from Five Oceans as exemplars of “verbal deconstruction/ narrative allusion/ pictorialization.” An article on Five Oceans just came out in Creative Review; others are due out in AIGA’s Eye on Design, Afterimage, Electric Book Review, JAB and other media outlets. Debbie Millman is interviewing me in October about Five Oceans and my work for her Design Matters podcast, and Dennis and I will be presenting this work at Letterform Archive in San Francisco, at the NY Art Book Fair, City Lore, and other locations around the US. 

Warren Lehrer is a writer, designer and book artist known as a “pioneer of visual literature and design authorship.” His books and multimedia projects attempt to capture the shape of thought and reunite oral and pictorial traditions of storytelling in books, animations, performance and installations. Awards include: The Brendan Gill Prize, IPPY Outstanding Book of the Year Award, Innovative Use of Archives Award, International Book Award for Best New Fiction, three AIGA Book Awards, Media That Matters Award, grants and fellowships from NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Rockefeller, Ford, Greenwall Foundations. He is a 2016 Honoree of the Center for Book Arts. His work is in many collections including MoMA, Getty Museum, Georges Pompidou Centre, Tate Gallery. A frequent lecturer and performer, Lehrer is the Leff Distinguished Professor at SUNY Purchase, a founding faculty member of SVA’s Designer As Author MFA program, co-founder of EarSay, a non-profit arts organization in Queens, NY.

Dennis J Bernstein is a poet, investigative journalist and award-winning host/producer of Flashpoints, syndicated by the Pacifica radio network. Recipient of many awards and honors, including Pulse Media’s Top Global Media Figure, Pillar Award in Broadcast Journalism, Artists Embassy International Literary Cultural Award. He founded the Muriel Rukeyser Reading Series in Brooklyn, NY. Books include Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom, Particles of Light, and three books with Warren Lehrer including French Fries, considered a seminal works in the genre. His poetry has appeared in New York Quarterly, The Chimaera, The Progressive, Texas Observer, ZYZZYVA, and numerous other journals.

Press kit

Recipient of recognition in the Design Incubation Communication Design Awards 2019.