The two videos, Bibliographic Sound Track and The Ph.D Sound, examine how a book might be diffused into a general operating system, in this case a much maligned genre of office productivity software: PowerPoint. The two works explore communications platforms such as Twitter, SMS, status updates, IM chats, programming languages, video game walk-throughs, the couplet, the overhead transparency, indexes, public domain bibliographies, RSS, tables of plates, and the Powerpoint slide, as they affect reading and literary genres. The screening event performs an audience’s communal reading in an environment that has absorbed everything next to it in the room – from bibliographies to the smell of wet spanghum peat moss, the perfume Wet London Pavement, Glade Everglade Air Freshener and the music of New Order and Lucky Dragons.

Tan Lin is the author of more than ten books, including Heath (Plagiarism/Outsource) (2009) and 7 Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010) and Insomnia and the Aunt (2011). His work has appeared in numerous journals including Artforum, Cabinet, and The New York Times Book Review and his video work has screened at the Yale Art Museum, the Drawing Center, and the Ontological Hysterical Theatre. He received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award for Poetry in 2011. He currently teaches writing at New Jersey City University. He lives in New York City.