Admission
Christian Bök
NICKEL LINOLEUM
Nickel Linoleum is a series of ‘lowerglyphs,’ designed by Christian Bök in 1997 to celebrate the publication of the book, entitled Nicholodeon by Darren Wershler (whose work eulogizes the too early death of the Canadian poet, bpNichol, in 1988). Christian Bök has found 27 nickels (dated 1988), assigning each coin to a letter of the alphabet (from A to Z, plus the &) — and he has then spilled these coins across the platen of a ‘low-bit’ copier, during its activation, doing so 27 times, in order to make a set of ‘low-res’ images, whose output resembles either a spectral flame or a metallic swash. Christian Bök has then affixed each of these images onto a square tiling of linoleum in order to make a series of ‘paintings’ for the limited edition of the book by Darren Wershler. A published broadside collects every image into a ‘nickelodeon’ (an album of ghosts for collectors of this poetic volume).
THE INCANTATION OF FORTUNES
Christian Bök has also written a series of short poems for each of these images in his nickelodeon, adapting each one of them, as an NFT, for an online market. Each image constitutes a coin, a writ, a word, or a bank, all equipped with ‘locked caches,’ each containing a ‘fortune’ — and together, each of these fortunes contributes a stanza to a long poem, entitled The Incantation of Fortunes — a kind of numismatic engagement with the evolving currency in the ‘coinages’ of language upon the Ethereum blockchain. Christian Bök has promised never to publish (or to perform) this poem in any other context — and consequently, the buyers of each fortune must pool their insights about the work in order to see all the fragments in the puzzle of this fragmentary enchantment; moreover, the only person who can ever listen to a recitation of the whole spell (performed live by the poet, in a private setting) must first purchase an NFT, entitled Admission. The collection also constitutes a lottery, insofar as the artist has included a gift, placed at random, in one of the locked caches — a gift that constitutes a ‘ghost token,’ whose spirit haunts the nickelodeon, awaiting discovery by a reader, lucky enough to find this phantom dancing among the other bright flames of the alphabet.