Author(s):
Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, and Ian Hatcher

Abra is a magical poetry instrument/spellbook for iOS. In this free app on iPad and iPhone,
readers encounter a series of poems exploring themes of mutation and excess. The poems
themselves are constantly in motion, mutating gradually from one to the next. Readers can
take part in this process, touching words and watching them shift and undulate, casting
spells to set the text in motion, and grafting new words into the text, expanding Abra’s
vocabulary and introducing a lexicon of emoji and words in any character set on their device.
We invite readers to make the text their own.
A collaboration between the authors and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project
merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artists’ book with an iPad app
that can be read separately or together, with the iPad inserted into the back of the book. The
artist’s book contains a number of physical features that emulate the mutation and
the interactivity of the app, including blind-printed text, heat-sensitive ink, and laser-cut openings
that invite the reader to see page and screen as a continuous touch screen interface.

URL to work: www.a-b-r-a.com