The Centre for Expanded Poetics is based in the Department of English at Concordia University, Montréal 

The Centre for Expanded Poetics consists of two spaces: a reading/screening room for study, viewings, and seminar presentations, and a workshop for production. Our equipment includes a Risograph digital duplicator for small press printing; v-bed scanner for archival reproduction of printed texts; 75" touch wall and 120" cinema screen for viewing films and digital poetry;a 55" touch table for interacting with digital models and texts; 3D printer and laser cutter;  a suite of digital photography and video equipment. 

We are interested in collaborating on projects that deploy the affordances of such equipment to study and produce texts, objects, and images linking poetics with other arts and fields of formal inquiry (e.g. architecture, design, textiles, the sciences). We also maintain a program of study in philosophy, critical theory, and the poetics of embodiment. Our goal is to sustain a critical model of interdisciplinarity, attuned to the ideological functions of such work in the contemporary university while pursuing theoretical and material possibilities made available by digital technologies and new production techniques.  

We organize film screenings, equipment workshops, conferences, and symposia. Our library and reading room consists of a substantial collection of 20th and 21st century experimental poetry, as well as texts on art and architecture. 

We take an expanded approach to formalist analysis through materialist media studies and collaborative interdisciplinary research.

 

A materialist approach to the study of form and structure emphasizes the mediation of text, image, and object by specific technologies of writing, coding, reading, viewing, and hearing. An interdisciplinary approach brings the study of poetics into contact with the production and conceptualization of structure and form in other disciplines.

How can new media technologies enable a collaborative, hands-on practice of critical, materialist, interdisciplinary, formalist analysis? 

 

 

Our work grows from and is directed toward collaborative projects, exhibitions, symposia, and publications.  

MaMa, Zagreb

Conjuncture: 21st Century Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Politics

Since 2009, Petar Milat of MaMa and CEP Director Nathan Brown have coordinated a series of symposia taking place in Zagreb each June. These have featured major philosophers, artists, and theorists, combining formal lectures with roundtables, performances, and exhibitions. Lectures are recorded and available online. 

Topics
Untimely Imagination (2023)
Form (2018)
Structure (2017)
Poiesis (2015)
Sophistry: The Powers of the False (2014)
Modernity: The Bitter End (2013)
The Art of the Concept (2012)
To Have Done With Life (2011)
21st Century Materialism (2009)

Organism for Poetic Research 

The Organism for Poetic Research (OPR) is an experimental critical-poetic platform and a vehicle for the performance of research in poetics and poetic research.

Department for Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technics 

The Department for Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technics is led by Vera Bühlmann at the Vienna Technical University. 

Broken Dimanche Press

The Parapoetics series at Broken Dimanche Press in Berlin publishes experimental poetry working within and beyond the form of the book to explore asemic writing practices and narrative vantage points eccentric to human language.