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Projects

The Lynn Book Projects Archive (LBPA) is the online portal through which digitized works and materials can be discovered and explored. This archive continues to evolve with new data being added as they are digitized, preserved, organized and selected for it. To date, there are two primary ways to explore this online portal to the artist’s body of work - through Collections and Items. The Exhibits feature will follow. Collections are an important way to investigate specifics of an individual project or a sub-collection of related projects. Items deliver the entire database, and also open potential for targeted search options. Exhibits will be an area that is curated for a closer look at, for instance, themes, contexts, timelines.

The Projects Collection highlights media-diverse works by Lynn Book that include: multimedia performances, concert performances, audio recordings and installation works. As an artist who works in interdisciplinary multimodal approaches, Book is fundamentally concerned with the transformative potentials of people, practice and place. As an artist who teaches, her experiments in those arenas have often amplified and converged with her core creative work.

To date, the timeline for these projects covers the years 1983 – 2015 with many of the projects being made while Book lived in Chicago and New York City. Work from 2005 forward has been generated while she has lived in Winston-Salem, NC. The artist’s background in physical and material investigations in the context of the visual arts set the stage for her performance-centric multimedia work from the mid 80s forward. (See Early Works Collection, 1978-83). By the early 90s Book developed a distinct path as a vocal artist, composer and improviser that continues into the 2020s. More recent work has once again enfolded material practices and video into long-scale transmedia projects.

The Lynn Book Projects Archive poses special questions and challenges because so much of the artist’s work has revolved around the live performance or event. In addition, the individuated works that are emerging from an experimental ethos may differ in development or form, as well as, whether certain key data may be missing, etc. All of these aspects add other layers of complexity and interest in encountering the work and navigating the site.

To facilitate discovery and engagement with the LBPA, the following sequence was created to provide a feeling for that live experience and also to communicate coherence in understanding the work:
- documentation of the performance or project (video, audio, photo)
- core performance or project material (text, score, structure, design, film or audio elements)
- performance or project development (research, sketchbooks, notes, drawings)
- press (reviews, critic’s choice citations, previews)
- printed matter in support of the performance or project (venue brochures, programs)