About
Lynn Book is a transmedia artist whose adventurous work interrogates and theorizes Bodies - biological, physical, social, political, boundless. She deploys extended voice, material practices and technologies to make performance, video, text, new music, exhibition and collaborative culture projects that take shape in galleries, clubs, fields, streets, online, in recordings and in concert halls. Book’s work has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships, Franklin Furnace Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation for a project residency, and artist residencies at Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the MacDowell Colony.
Lynn Book Projects have been seen live in New York City, Chicago, Memphis, Vienna, Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, Budapest, Hong Kong, Slovenia and Slovakia, among other sites. Book’s video and audio works have been screened at festivals and exhibitions: The London Biennale, Manilla Pollination, Women Cinemakers Biennale, Outer Ear (Chicago), The Front (New Orleans); conferences: “Becoming Nomad: Hybrid Spaces, Liquid Architectures and Online Domains” (York, UK), “Performance, Body and Time in the 21st Century” (Brisbane, AU) among others. She’s created works for online and print publications, Anglistica, University of Naples, IT, ELSE, Transart, Synthesis, University of Athens and Abrigo Portatil, Brazil. Several video works from the “Unreading for Future Bodies” series can be found on Lynn Book’s vimeo channel.Unreading for Future Bodies (2012 - present) is a multi-year transmedia project that takes on reading, reception and knowledge making as performative acts that challenge the construction of meaning in highly mediated cultural regimes, magnified by super-saturation in the digisphere.
Book has been recognized as an inventive vocal artist since the early 90s, in Chicago and has worked in several duo collaborations including with Theo Bleckmann, Tatsu Aoki and Kevin Norton. She premiered the concert project, “Plot”, with long-time collaborator Katharina Klement (Vienna) by invitation for the “Sexing Sound” festival in Chicago, 2015 with “PLOT v.2” being performed at “Artacts”, an international festival of jazz and improvised music, St. Johann, Austria, 2017.
A significant initiative to digitize, preserve and create an online database and web portal resulted in the 2022 launch of the Lynn Book Projects Archive. Her corpus spanning over forty years includes performance art, sculpture and installation works from the late 70s and early 80s, with the earliest video documentation of “An Evening of Performance Pieces” from 1979. This initiative received support from the Mellon Foundation via the Humanities Institute, the Digital Scholarship Center at Wake Forest University as well as several student researchers.