About the artist

Andrew Duchon — Zen Materialist — is a poet and programmer living in Portland, Oregon.

He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science — visual perception and visually guided navigation — and has spent his working life in technology, on natural language processing, team communication analysis and news analysis. He has always put some science in the art and some art in the science; both are ways of understanding the same reality. Programming has nothing to do with writing the poems. Everything downstream of the poems is code, with him as curator.

Transbliterations began in the mid-2000s as a failed attempt to translate Pablo Neruda and turned into a method of its own. Volume One, 170 pages of Neruda, was written through the death of his brother and shared with a few friends. Volume Two answers all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, written in real time across 1,902 days on either side of the end of a marriage, and grows each poem into a garden of sculpture that does not exist yet. His sculptures have been shown as Zen Materialist by Balanced Forces.

The longer story is here.

Contact: zenmaterialist@transbliterate.com