Errant Elements

Errant Elements is a chapbook series organized around the Periodic Table of the Elements. The form – 118 folded chapbooks designed to be combined in various ways – supports a collective exploration of the combinatory affordances and stories of the elements. The format is a trifold brochure that folds into a square. This allows readers to play with the combinatory logic of elements, connecting pieces in different ways, constructing official or imagined elements and reading across diverse entries in ways that open new imaginaries. 

Errant Elements is edited by Gretchen Bakke and Marina Peterson

Call for contributions:

Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his model of the periodic table for the not-yet-known — elements that the prior century sought to standardize and classify by atomic weight and chemical properties — to allow history to fill in, but not to leave open to speculation, or to leave alone. As scholars, artists, poets and otherwise, we are proposing an imaginative refiguring of the periodic table. We seek contributions of prose, poetry, line drawings or graphics of max 500 words, or that might readily adapt to a simple folded chapbook. We will have at least one contribution for each element (118). Contributors may think through multiple elements, or their combination in the form of a molecule (for example, hydrogen and oxygen in water). We encourage contributors to think broadly and imaginatively through an element. We hope the simplicity of form, of folds, will open a proliferation of hues, fields, and approaches. What can be made from what is that isn’t yet? How might the elements be constitutive of something different? What is missing or lacking? How can those absences be incorporated or invented into the base materials? What needs to change from what we have to make what we don’t have? 

contact us at errantelements [at] gmail.com