Tucker Kapp, 2023
Tucker Kapp is the recipient of the 2023-2024 François-Xavier Marange Grant. Printmaker-artist-typographer, poet, and playwright Tucker Kapp is currently a PhD candidate at UQAM in Studies and Practices of the Arts. He is undertaking a research-creation dissertation to understand how tools (manual/corporeal, mechanical or digital) alter artists’ relationships to their creative processes and works. American by birth, and a Montrealer on occasion, he normally resides in rural France where he runs a small press publishing house, Les Écrits 9.
His 12-month residency will allow him to explore a research named : Creative writing and the use of tools : the phenomenology of technological materiality in the age of digitalization.
“In the context of my residency at the Atelier Circulaire, I wish to pursue various experiments in line with my PhD work, while taking a few side steps here and there. The main focus of my dissertation lies in unpacking how the tools of writing condition the creation of textual works, even if the resulting content appears similar or identical (black words on a white background). To put it another way, if we usually conceive of a text as a pure product of mind, how can we understand that the poem—its content, the ontological status of its creator, the color of the creative phenomenon, its degree of materialization—can be materially altered by the choice of a tool? The relationship of a human being with a given tool would seem to not only allow but promote certain practices. Beyond the ideas of nostalgia, romanticism, or anti-capitalist and anti-industrial activism, perhaps I seek in the midst of technical objects a form of subjectivity that might allow me to create better, more consistently and less distractedly, with more integrity. In the infatuation that exists around obsolete technical objects (vinyl records, typographic characters/clichés, overhead projectors) one is entitled to wonder if it is the object itself we seek, or even fetishize, or rather the result, be it in the creative processes themselves or in the works they bring into existence” In the aforementioned “side steps”, I wish to explore how printed images might express, perhaps better than words, the materiality of analogical creations, printed off mechanical presses”.
