About this collection
“Book of Nows (vol. 1)” is a generative book of text-image poems about daily, domestic time. If every invocation of the algorithm is a page, and each page is a day, then when the Book of Nows (vol. 1) is complete it will be a book that is ten years long.
I make books and prints by hand using a variety of media: letterpress, collagraph, risograph, digital printing, collage, and painting/drawing. I publish my own work, as well as that of other artists and writers, under the imprint the NewLights Press. Most of my personal work is about the book as an object that creates and represents different kinds of time. One way that time is represented in the books and prints that I make is through the use of generative matrices: physical printing matrices that are designed to change and/or decay with every pass of the printing press.
My work is largely about time, about how we exist in time, and understand time and the world through reading. Letters build into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages, and pages into books. Our days accumulate and build in the same way. We often imagine our days as linear but experience our memories as a network of associations. The experience of reading functions in a similar way: it’s not just beginning-to-end but a complex layering of connections and references.
I am interested in the book as a domestic object. The book is something that we live with, an object of the day-to-day. A large part of my work for the past several years has focused on an experimental alphabet/font that I call the “Threshold Alphabet.” The modular forms of the letters come from domestic space. They are based on windows, doors, and bookshelves, and also reference both woven fabric and digital screens. The Threshold Alphabet exists in time: it is always changing from piece to piece. It’s about slowing down reading, and drawing the reader’s attention to their experience of reading. A text or object can be read without always being completely or immediately legible. The Threshold Alphabet holds the reader in the space of not-knowing, of actively making meaning. The Threshold Alphabet is coded into the script and is not a separate font file.
The script begins by choosing a type of day: “day of labor” or “day of rest.” The two types of day determine both what text and times of day can be chosen. The different times of day are: “the pre-dawn” (for “day of labor” only), “the morning,” “the daytime,” “dusk,” “the night,” and “the quiet hours” (for “day of rest” only).
The time of day also determines the color palette. The color palettes were constructed by taking photographs of objects and scenes in my daily routine during the specified times of day. I pulled 2 - 4 colors from each photograph that were emotionally or symbolically resonant. Each palette contains 12 - 23 colors, and each image-poem can contain between two and the maximum for that palette.
The text of each image-poem is short and highly-constrained: words with up to four letters, five if they include the special ligatures of the Threshold Alphabet. Like our days, they contain both repetition and difference. The features script is written to generate a second, text-based poem based on the type of day, the time of day, and how the fabric pattern is constructed. The image-poem text is tangled in a generative pattern abstracted from woven and folded fabric (clothing, sheets, curtains, towels). The pattern adds another layer of legibility/illegibility to the text, both obscuring and revealing, like light, memory, experience, or time. The two texts and the pattern are meant to be read together, as a complete image-poem that catches just a moment in our growing constellations of days.
Creative Credit
The first prototype for this piece was developed as part of the Encryptoland Rabbit Fellowship.
NewLights Press
The NewLights Press is an interdependent printer & publisher working at the intersection of artists' books and experimental text/image//making. All of the books are printed & bound “by hand,” using a variety of techniques, ranging from the obsolete (letterpress) to the utilitarian (laser/Risograph) to the meditative (delamination). We try to maintain inclusive (& purposefully problematic) definitions of such mutable terms as “experimental writing,” “artists’ books,” and “printing techniques,” and to be similarly inclusive in the kinds of books that we produce, in an attempt to allow the different kinds of production to merge, separate, and converse with one another.
The NewLights Press is publishing-as-artistic practice, and is the imprint under which Aaron Cohick publishes his own work and that of other artists and writers. NewLights Press was founded in May of 2000 in Baltimore, Maryland. Aaron received his BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2002, and his MFA in Printmaking from Arizona State University in 2007. NewLights has been located in Baltimore, MD, Tempe, AZ, Oakland, CA, Colorado Springs, CO and will soon be moving to Louisville, KY. Aaron was the Printer of The Press at Colorado College from 2010 - 2023. Aaron's work, under both imprints, is held in public and private collections all over the world, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Library, the National Library of Australia, Yale University, SFMOMA Library, the Letterform Archive, the Newberry Library, and the Tate Britain Library. He has taught workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, the Bemis School of Art, the San Francisco Center for the Book, Naropa University, and Penland School of Crafts.
