Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary poet and artist whose work moves through text, video, performance, installation, broadcast, transmission, objects, memory, labor, and collaborative media. Her books include An Architectural Seance, CONSUMES ME, I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME, and the poetry collection XO. She has presented work at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Microscope Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, and international festivals, and she teaches writing at SUNY Albany.
from IN PORT. and the idea of threshold
The title from IN PORT. opens a useful path into Tyc’s larger practice. “Port” is a place of arrival, departure, exchange, transmission, cargo, migration, and temporary anchoring. The prefatory “from” makes the work feel extracted from a larger field, while the capitalized phrase gives the title the force of a location marker, signal, or state.
Tyc’s later work repeatedly develops this logic of passage. Text moves into video. A poem becomes a performance. A performance becomes a broadcast. An object becomes a prompt for memory. A voice becomes part of a collective transmission. The poetic work lives through movement among media and among people.
Poet Transmit and expanded poetry
Poet Transmit, developed with Victoria Keddie, is central to Tyc’s literary and artistic identity. The project brings poets, artists, broadcast systems, live performance, recorded media, and transmission technologies into one field. Readings become events that can be mixed, projected, rebroadcast, and encountered across different spaces.
Transmission changes the scale of poetry. A voice delivered in a room has one acoustic and social presence. A voice carried through television, radio, live video, or digital broadcast gains another. Delay, mediation, distortion, framing, and technical apparatus become part of the experience.
Paul Siegell provides a strong comparison through poetry shaped by live performance, music, visual form, public reading, and the physical energy of the page. Tyc’s work expands farther into broadcast and installation, while both writers treat poetry as an event unfolding through sound, space, and audience.
Video and poetic mediology
Tyc has described her work through the idea of poetic mediology, a practice attentive to the channels through which language reaches an audience. Video becomes especially important because it combines duration, image, sound, editing, framing, and text. A poem in video can be heard, seen, interrupted, layered, repeated, enlarged, or embedded in visual action.
The moving image also changes the reader’s role. Duration is partially controlled by the work. A cut determines transition. A soundtrack can alter the emotional pressure of a phrase. Text on screen becomes part of composition in space and time.
Bruce Covey offers a useful neighboring practice through digital vocabulary, found language, systems, and the transformation of contemporary technological speech into poetry. Covey works primarily through verbal structures, while Tyc extends poetic language through audiovisual transmission.
An Architectural Seance
An Architectural Seance joins built space with contact across absence. “Architecture” suggests rooms, walls, thresholds, foundations, scale, enclosure, and the organization of bodies in space. “Seance” suggests invocation, memory, spirit, loss, and an attempt to communicate across a boundary.
The title captures Tyc’s ability to make space emotionally active. Buildings and rooms can carry memory because events happened within them. Architecture stores traces of use. A poem can enter that stored field and treat physical surroundings as participants in recollection.
This spatial imagination connects with Eleanor Johnson, whose poetry moves through geometry, bodies, movement, ekphrasis, and systems for organizing space. Tyc’s architecture is bound to memory and media, while Johnson’s geometric structures bring a different kind of formal intelligence to spatial thought.
CONSUMES ME and material culture
CONSUMES ME turns consumption into an intimate relation. The phrase can describe appetite, capitalism, obsession, desire, exhaustion, or the sensation of being overtaken by a system larger than oneself. Tyc’s multimedia work around clothing production makes these meanings concrete through garments, labor, memory, exchange, and the invisible work embedded in objects.
Clothing carries personal history and global production at the same time. A shirt can hold memory for the wearer and labor history from the factory where it was made. Tyc’s work creates situations where these scales meet through text, performance, video, and participation.
The Shop project associated with CONSUMES ME invited exchange and storytelling around clothing while footage of garment production entered the installation. Objects became social documents. The work gave poetry a material setting where personal memory and global labor could occupy the same space.
FUTURE, collective voice, and public language
FUTURE grew from lines Tyc collected from signs during Occupy Wall Street and a rally following the Trayvon Martin verdict. Public language entered the work through protest signs, collective emotion, political urgency, and live participation.
For a Poetry Project performance, the text was distributed line by line to audience members, whose voices were recorded and mixed. Authorship expanded into a collective vocal field. The poem became an arrangement of separate voices sharing one emotional and political space.
This use of public language creates a meaningful comparison with Thomas Fink, whose poetry turns hybrid speech, social vocabulary, financial language, and verbal collision into experimental form. Tyc’s project emphasizes collective transmission and performance, while Fink’s work concentrates pressure inside the language itself.
ENDURANCE TRAINING and performed strength
ENDURANCE TRAINING investigates strength, diminishment, isolation, performance, and bodily endurance. Tyc combines research into NASA bed-rest experiments with material drawn from popular documentary culture, allowing institutional testing and emotional performance to meet within one work.
The project turns endurance into a question of visibility. Strength can be performed publicly, felt privately, measured institutionally, or experienced as isolation. Video performance gives these conditions duration. The body occupies time while the audience witnesses the effort.
SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS and relation
SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS places relation at the center of Tyc’s practice. The phrase echoes “significant other” and opens it toward alterity, companionship, projection, intimacy, and the ways humans imagine relationships with other beings and objects.
Tyc’s work often asks how identity changes through relation. A dog, collaborator, audience, garment, recording device, room, or distant voice can become part of the work’s social field. Relation becomes something composed through attention and media.
I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME
I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME makes recognition the basis of identity. The title proposes a self that exists through being known by another being. The dog becomes witness, companion, and source of relational certainty.
This idea deepens Tyc’s interest in otherness. Identity emerges through encounter. A poem can become a record of that encounter, and media can extend it by allowing voices, images, and gestures to circulate beyond the moment in which they were created.
Broadcast, radio, and Missives to the Ether
Tyc’s radio work MISSIVES TO THE ETHER continues her interest in transmission. The program combines conversation with artists and writers, questions about creativity and spirit, and tarot reading. Radio gives language an intimate distance: the speaker is absent from the listener’s room while the voice remains physically present through sound.
The title “ether” evokes an old vocabulary of invisible transmission and spiritual mediumship. That resonance connects broadcast technology with Tyc’s recurring interests in seance, relation, presence, absence, and messages moving across space.
Visual art and the poetic page
Tyc’s practice keeps text in conversation with visual art. Installation determines how bodies move around language. Video frames words inside images and duration. Performance gives text gesture and voice. Objects add material memory.
This cross-media relation can be read beside the work of Eleanor Johnson and Thomas Fink, whose poetry also engages visual and spatial thinking. Tyc’s distinctive contribution comes from keeping transmission itself visible. The medium becomes part of the poem’s social and sensory meaning.
Reading Cat Tyc
Tyc’s literary identity emerges through transmission, collaboration, memory, performance, objects, video, architecture, public language, and relation. Her work repeatedly asks what happens when poetry leaves the stable printed page and enters another medium.
Within contemporary poetry, Tyc occupies a field where text can become broadcast, installation, performance, moving image, and participatory event. The poem retains language at its center while expanding the conditions through which that language is encountered.
The strongest path through Tyc’s work leads from port to transmission. A port receives and sends. A broadcast receives and sends. A performance moves between speaker and audience. A garment carries labor and memory. A video carries image and voice through time. Her poetry grows through these transfers and makes relation itself a medium of composition.