ORAL.pub

Founded in 2016, ORAL.pub was on hiatus from 2020-2022. During its first years, ORAL.pub was based in Mexico, and all sites were available in both English and Spanish. Now based in New York and Bremen, we still emphasize careful translation, but welcome all languages (and have resigned to centralizing English).

ORAL.pub likes sites as communication-desperate, hypersensitive, and necessary as mouths… sites spiritually aligned with their medium (the web), which, like oral storytelling and oral sex, fundamentally (in its bones) refuses stable structures of power. We want web spaces that surpise and destabilize us into thought/feeling, whether with the simplest HTML/CSS or the newest tech tricks. We publish more poets/artists who learn to code than coders who learn to poet/art.

Personal websites (etc.) of artists-poets-ish who’ve contributed to ORAL.pub: Joseph Buckley, Kevin Cadena, Camila Cañeque, Sally, Qianxun Chen, Martha Daghlian, Bruno Darío, Mabe Fratti, Amaury Acosta Gutierrez, Gwen Harper, Fox Hysen, James Irwin, David L. Johnson, Eli Payne Mandel, Jonathan Mildenberg, Virginia L. Montgomery, Sawako Nakayasu, Mariana Roa Oliva, Frida Robles, Jorge Rodriguez Solorzano, Kit Schluter, Shanshan, Shelby Shaw, Pablo Somonte Ruano, Issa Tellez, Lee Tusman, Theadora Walsh, and Jody Zellen.

Our editorial team includes former contributor Pablo Somonte Ruano, former contributor Sally, Qianxun Chen, and founding director Theo Ellin Ballew. Rodrigo Echeverria (corpORAL director emeritus) and Maddie Butler (artistic director emeritus) were heavily involved in the first years, and many others helped massively with events and IG, including Aleph Escobedo, Sophie Swanson, and Lourdes Martínez. Please feel free to check out our old website (which physically emphasized bilinguality).

Through 2020, ORAL.pub websites were made by/with friends, many of whom Theo helped with code or paired with another coder. ORAL.pub now welcomes submissions of near-complete sites on a rolling basis, announcing on IG when submissions will be reviewed.

Email us with questions/comments/recs or if you'd like to get involved.
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Works in this genre that we especially admire and/or have loved and/or would have published—including some classics:

Mouchette - Martine Neddam, 1996; Superbad - Ben Benjamin, 1997; Brandon - Shu Lea Cheang, 1998; GeoGoo - JODI, 2008; Your World of Text - Andrew Badr, 2009; Sea and Spar Between - Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, 2010; Four Guillemets - Loss Pequeño Glazier, 2012; Summer - Olia Lialina, 2013; How to Speak Atlantean - Porpentine Charity Heartscape, 2013; The Readers Project - John Cayley and Daniel C. Howe, 2013; Surfacing - Nicole Starosielski, 2016; Black Room - Cassie McQuater, 2017; 17776 - Jon Bois, 2017; StoryFace - Serge Bouchardon, 2018; On the Apparently Meaningless Texture of Noise - Pedro Oliviera, 2019; The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic - Maria Mencia, 2019; Alibi - Ryan Kuo and Tiago de Abreu Pinto, 2019; The Soft Rumor of Spreading Weeds - Porpentine Charity Heartscape, 2019; Bog - First Edition - Eilidh Nuala Duffy; New York Apartment - Tega Brain and Sam Levigne, 2020; Get Well Soon - Tega Brain and Sam Levigne, 2020; Reconstructions - Allison Parrish, 2020; The United States - Joe Davies, 2020; Seedlings - Qianxun Chen & Mariana Roa Oliva, 2021; i have too much to hide - Benjamin Krusling, 2021; OK2: Whiteness Sequencer - Ryan Kuo, 2021; Yacht Metaphor - Cory in the Abyss/Jenson Leonard, 2021; REDES: bread and justice, peaches and bananas - Camila Galaz, 2021; Shapes of Sex - Nahee Kim, 2021; This Adventure is Neverending - Eva Macali, 2021; Looted - American Artist, 2021; Catch the Moonlight by the Tail - Uma Breakdown, 2021; Respawn - Hannah Jenkins, 2022; The Barnacle Goose Experiment - Everest Pipkin, 2022; Concrete Form - Chia Amisola, 2023; Intimate Codex - Andy Wallace, 2023; Avenge Her at All Costs - Lara Fielding (La), 2023

External Pages is a sister/sibling project. We love what they put into the world!!
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Martha Daghlian
Code by Ním Daghlian
Music by Drew McIntyre
Ed. 11;;; Apr 2024

[ENG] A Thousand Circlets

Lucie Castel y Gabriela Piña
Code by Luis Del Río Franco
Ed. 2;;; Mar 2017

[nonverbal] El aleph