A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
SAIC faculty member Mark Booth.

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Mark Booth

Associate Professor

he/him

Contact

Bio

Mark Booth received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited, played, and performed his work in a variety of established, peripheral, and obscure venues in the United States, Scandinavia, Australia, and Germany.

Personal Statement

Booth is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. His work in language, image, performance, and sound explores the tensions between observation, description, invention, imagination, and error. His work explores the material qualities of language, as well as the ways that language functions or fails to describe experience. Having learned to navigate the world as a dyslexic, Booth uses his work to investigate and make sense of his own slippery experience with thought, language, error, understanding, and meaning.  

Booth teaches creative writing and sound art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where his courses focus on the historical and creative aspects of audible poetics, language-based sound art, concrete poetry, visual poetry, text art, creative process, and the voice.

Work

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This class serves as an entry into the historical, theoretical and practical concerns of creative writing as an art form in itself and as a vital element of interdisciplinary projects. We explore the possibilities of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays and hybrid practices as writing for the page, as well as for performance, sound, installation, and image-based pieces. Readings include diverse examples of genre and form, as well as investigations of literary and thematic terminology. Students generate weekly responses to reading and writing exercises that focus on understanding the mechanics of writing, and are introduced to workshopping techniques and etiquette.

Class Number

2290

Credits

3

Description

This writing workshop's point of departure is a creative response to Charles and Ray Eames' influential film Powers of Ten and George Perec's essay Species of Spaces. In Powers of Ten, the Eames' explore humankind's scale in a progression of images in powers of ten as seen from an individual cell to Earth's position in the galaxy. In a similar fashion, Perec examines increasingly greater scales of experience¿¿from a blank piece of paper to the world and outer space. Using these concepts of scales of magnification, we write fiction and poetry about an imaginary universe of our own devising¿¿from the outer limits of space to life on a microscopic scale. We examine contemporary micro-nations, science fiction, the natural world, and other sources as exemplar and inspiration.

Class Number

2003

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1265

Credits

3

Description

Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.

Class Number

1998

Credits

3