The Operating System and Liminal Lab

EVOLUTION :: NEWS and OPPORTUNITIES

Hello, Exit Strata family! what an exciting year 2013 has already been. It’s been a while since we checked in and shared a little update about goings on with our ever-evolving organization, and there’s so much to tell you!
Read on below for announcements, upcoming events, and myriad opportunities for you to submit, get more involved, and co-create!
PRINT: 

As you know, January marked the launch of PRINT! Vol. 2, which was celebrated with much broo and some haha at the wonderful Launchpad BK. The issue is now available widely on and offline.
We have been receiving a bounty of submissions for the upcoming PRINT! Vol. 3, coming in June but there’s still time before the deadline! you have through March 15th to submit if you haven’t already. We are particularly interested in and seeking more visual submissions for this issue, so please share this call with artist friends!
We are also excited to announce our inaugural PRINT!: DOCUMENT Series, a collaborative project with The Trouble With Bartleby imprint, which will premiere a series of four limited edition chapbooks at our AWP Bookfair table in Boston next week.

The series includes : Strange Coherence – William Considine, Talk About Man Proof – Lancelot Runge and John Kropa, an admission as a warning against the value of our conclusions – Alexis Quinlan, and The Sword of Things – Tony Hoffman.  All four feature original woodcuts created for the project by Brooklyn artist Kevin William Reed.
Once again we’ve used the terrific Spencer Printing for this job and the result is outstanding. We heartily endorse and encourage you to take your projects this personal, professional, creative printshop! Their fearless leader, Nate Zaur, just welcomed his first wee one just as our first babies went to final print. Congratulations Nate! It’s a birth moment all around.
WEB: 
With great anticipation let us formally announce the 2nd Annual Poetry Month :: Inspiration, Community, Tradition series, which we have been quietly preparing for some months now, and which will once again feature 30 posts from 30 poets on 30 poets that have inspired and influenced their work every day during the month-long celebration.
After an enormously successful run last year we quickly filled up our roster for this year’s series by word of mouth alone! At the time of this posting we have less than 10 contributor slots left. Please contact us ASAP if you’d like to claim one as your very own!
We are currently in the process of expanding and solidifying our content streams, which as you know include the ongoing Field Notes and Awesome Creator series, online Collaborative Content courses (like Eric Meyer’s current FUCK THE MUSE miniseries), and ongoing profiles on creative social changemakers, in particular the 100,000 Poets for Change movement…as well as featuring written and multimedia content from community members from all disciplines.
Our intention has always been to be a platform for the community to celebrate and circulate work, dialogue, and process — and following that intention you will see a transition to more content coming direct from our community partners, beginning with the Launchpad Brooklyn incubator/events space, brought to you by LPBK’s Zane Van Dusen and their passionate team. (Look for an Awesome Creators profile very soon!)
The intention is to create and expand upon the platform as a natural hub for the “spokes” of our broad and multifaceted, geographically unbound community, supporting and combining our efforts to create a more-than-the-sum-of-our-parts whole. Please be in touch if you are interested in creating and sharing your organization’s content or blogging for one of the pre-existing series!(Or if you have another brilliant idea, we’re all ears!) We are actively looking for people who wish to write, particularly on an ongoing basis.

UPCOMING EVENTS: 
As mentioned above, we’ll be holding court at the AWP Bookfair in Boston from March 6 – 9, then…
we’ll be at Cakeshop with our musical friends ADC  on April 13th for an evening of music and wordplay, …
followed by our upcoming CoCo {Collaborative Content} Salon, on April 21st, where we’ll come together once again to co-create interdisciplinary work to be featured in PRINT! Vol. 3. And, also…
not to be missed is the Fifth Annual Chapbook Festival, hosted by the Center for the Humanities, to be held once again at the CUNY Graduate Center on May 3-4. We’ll have a table jointly as ExSt/ The Trouble With Bartleby and will be offering all print media to date, including our new PRINT! : DOCUMENT Chapbook Series and small-scale publications from community members near and far.
STAFF: 

Last, but certainly not least, we are excited to announce that this January marked a new ring of growth on our little sapling with the addition of Program Assistant Taylor Quilty to our team! You may have met Taylor at the Vol. 2 Launch or corresponded with him, or perhaps you’ve unwittingly been enjoying his masterful efforts at social media expansion via our Twitter of late… in any case, you’ll be seeing more of Taylor, both online and in the flesh. Come say hi to both of us at AWP!
A friend from Nicole Peyrafitte and Pierre Joris’s Domopoetics workshop at Naropa’s SWP 2012, our relationship with Taylor represents the rhizome in action — though I returned to Brooklyn and he to Asheville, NC, there was little distance and only a reaffirmation of the power of intentional community as we dialogued together over many months about the state of creativity, technology and new media, and the current evolution  of educational systems, both in and out of institutions.
We are so grateful and thrilled that he accepted our invitation to join us as a staff member. It bears noting, too, that Taylor’s journey is very much that of our target demographic: the creative, independent individual who, while excited and invigorated and inspired by today’s options is also overwhelmed and at times dismayed by the chaotic lack of clear navigation, the redundancy of resources, and the seemingly secret society nature of the creative “scene.” We hope that his process notes and first hand account of journeying resonate with you as we work together to address the difficulties he — and so many — face in the courageous, impractical, improbable choice to be an artist, poet, actor, dancer… to create today.
You’ll see our team continue to expand as our community partnerships evolve. Also, as mentioned above, we’re looking for dedicated bloggers as well as readers for our upcoming PRINT! Volumes. Let us know how you’d like to be involved! There’s always room for you in Exit Strata. You ARE Exit Strata, after all… 🙂