‘Through Light and the Alphabet:’ An Interview with Johanna Drucker

 
 
Abstract:Johanna Drucker’s cumulative work as a writer, printer, book artist, and scholar of visible language in all its forms has accumulated in a critical and creative corpus which is, as one observer has put it, nothing less than “a conceptual framework for the relationship between the visual arts and the written arts.” Nowhere is such a conceptual framework currently more needed than in the post-alphabetic writing spaces of electronic media–an area to which Drucker has, in fact, lately turned her attention.
 

In this interview (conducted entirely via electronic mail) I have attempted to frame my questions so as to provide as complete an overview as possible of Drucker’s career, with particular emphasis on her recent interest in matters of the virtual. The text of the interview is accompanied by forty digital images of Drucker’s artistic work, as well as her brief catalogue essay entitled “The Corona Palimpsest: Present Tensions of the Book.”–mgk

 

Proceed to Hypertext…