Crystal Maze IV – ’1+2+3=3′ – Notre distraction favorite
En écho au travail de Pierre Faucheux (1924-1999), graphiste et directeur artistique dont la production fleuve s’étend des années 1950 aux années 1990, Crystal Maze IV – ’1+2+3=3′ – Notre distraction favorite – exposition, projections, lectures, 21 février – 11 mars 2013, Centre Pompidou, Paris – proposé par l’Agence du doute (Catherine Guiral, Brice Domingues, Jérôme Dupeyrat) est un labyrinthe où se rencontrent des objets, des images et des voix. Sur le principe du montage, ce dispositif réunit des créateurs dont les œuvres sont la trace d’un désir visuel trouvant satisfaction dans l’usage et le dépaysement des images. (+ d’infos sur Crystal Maze I, II & III)
La proposition est enrichie de conférences, discussions et programmation de films, qui composent tous ensemble un Crystal dont le spectateur est invité à observer les facettes.
L’agencement de ces créations et les différents évènements qui accompagnent cette proposition mettent en évidence une culture visuelle et des procédés communs à un ensemble de graphistes, d’artistes, de photographes, de cinéastes, dont les travaux s’étendent du tout début du XXe siècle jusqu’à aujourd’hui et peuvent faire l’objet de rapprochements, parfois inattendus, tant sur le plan formel que conceptuel.
Il ne s’agit pas de mettre à jour des emprunts (qui, lorsqu’ils existent, sont souvent réciproques), ni d’établir des généalogies entre les pratiques mais de montrer ce que des travaux dont le rapprochement est parfois évident, parfois forcé, peuvent avoir de références communes ou de procédés partagés et comment ils constituent ensemble un pan de notre culture visuelle contemporaine.
Les contours de cette culture visuelle ont été identifiés à partir du travail du graphiste Pierre Faucheux, en particulier ses “écartelages” et le travail réalisé avec son atelier pour les couvertures du Livre de Poche. Ces travaux sont souvent sous-tendus par des emprunts iconographiques et des procédés tels que la déchirure, le découpage, le collage, le montage, la colorisation : autant d’opérations graphiques et plastiques qui dépaysent les images pour les offrir à d’autres registres et pour lesquelles le travail de Pierre Faucheux constitue une matrice inépuisable…
Armin Hofmann—Farbe. Texts on the exhibition
Armin Hofmann—Farbe. Texts on the exhibition was published on the occasion of the exhibition in Zurich, 2012, providing background information about the color work of the Swiss graphic designer.
Armin Hofmann, trained as a lithographer, worked as a freelance graphic artist and is internationally renowned for his black-and-white posters. The exhibition offers the first insight into his intense engagement with color: the project’s focus is on a portfolio of silkscreen prints Armin Hofmann created over the course of ten years, from 1989 until 1999.
BITS AND PIECES – Charles Nypels Archive
In the early twentieth century, Charles Nypels became renowned as a typographer, publisher, printer, author and book artist. He is famous for his top-quality monumental classical design. Especially in classical typography, he deviated from existing typographical conventions. As a result, his work combines pure typography with important innovative elements highlighting inventiveness, playfulness and humour.
BITS AND PIECES, Charles Nypels Archive, a book by Emilio Macchia, is an attempt to define research potential that may emerge from analysis of some aspects of an archive, namely the Charles Nypels Archive. The archive resides at the JvE Academie, documentation center.
Blank Book Makers
The Blank Book Makers catalogue, published by Boabooks, is meant to address the latest developments in artists’ book history. An amazing corpus of new works makes up a most dynamic overview. There are many books dealing with the topics such as emptiness, space, or the very substance of pages, and Izet Sheshivari and Ramaya Tegegne deemed it necessary to look at the influence of books that have been published in neighboring fields to that of the artist’s book or book-works publications, in order for them to better define their investigation for the Saloon du livre and the Blank Book Makers, In Memoriam Michael Gibbs in June 2012.
Fahrenheit 39 – Workshops
Fahrenheit 39 is an italian art book festival, March 8-10, 2013, in Ravenna. For it 3rd edition, you can apply for two workshops: BOOK LOGISTICA, Every year Thousands of feelings disappear for lack of concrete form, by WERKPLATS TYPOGRAFIE; & WHERE ABOUT?, Which spaces for a new publishing production? by MOUSSE Publishing/Magazine.
BOOK MACHINE
©Jonathan Monk
Book Machine – from February 20 to March 11, 2013, Centre Pompidou, Paris – is an event dedicated to the process of book production in the grandest sense. In essence, the commitment of the artist to the realization of their book or catalog is an extension of their body of work, and this results in the creation of what we call the artist’s book.
At the heart of this engagement and from the depths of the Forum at Centre Pompidou, there will be an atelier and office of production open to the public. Visitors will witness a daily array of visual artists, writers and designers creating their books. Around this production, there will also be a live feed projection of the printing process and visitors can attend various events, lectures, discussions, screenings and performances connected with the concept of the artist’s book.
The Shelf Journal #2 – Publishing design, cult of the shelf
Why start a paper journal about books at a time when the internet is calling into question the average Westerner’s innate materialism, and at a time when the price of a book-as-object puts off devotees of free knowledge on the net? What is becoming of bound volumes today – that foundation of our society, those keepers of our history?
With the dematerialisation of editorial content, the practice of design within books is taking on an even more important dimension. Whether insignificant objects or works of art in their own right, books create through their different forms and stories a unique bond with those who read, consult and own them. This almost physical connection was the reason for creating The Shelf Journal.
Part place of worship and reflection for paper lovers, part experimental platform for designers, typographers and other graphic designers, The Shelf Journal explores the essence of our libraries’ charm: the limitless variations in form of this unique object.
Slide Shows – 2013
Slide Shows, presented by Fillip, is a specially commissioned project by Charlotte Cheetham. Taking the form of an ongoing series of video presentations by publishers, designers, and artists, Slide Shows offers one possible cross section of a newly emergent landscape of contemporary art publishing.
After the 2012 Slide Shows series, Slide Shows is back with new contributions by Precinct, David Horvitz, Samuel Nyholm, Xavier Antin, mono.kultur, Booklet.
Upcoming in the following weeks: Cambridge Book, Cannon Magazine, The International Typographical Union (I.T.U.), 4478zine.
The map or the territory
The online exhibition Print Error / Publishing in the digital age proposes to highlight, in a critical, conceptual and experimental way, one of the most important contemporary phenomena: the radical transformation of print media and its impacts on transmission of information and preservation of contents.
Stéphanie Vilayphiou is a Brussels-based graphic designer, member of the collective Open Source Publishing. She is especially interested in sharing of knowledge, questioning its social accessibility and alternatives to copyright. Through commissioned and self-initiated projects she explores manipulation of text: typography, code, vocabulary, translation. She currently works, in the frame of the European research project Libre Graphics Research Unit, on the editing of a reader on the mutual relation between tools, practice and free culture in graphic design.
In The map or the territory she selected a controversial book, Michel Houellebecq’s “The map and the territory”, which became renown for its evident quotes from Wikipedia, non-acknowledged by the author nor by the publisher. She took the book’s digitized text and wrote a software filter, which looks for each sentence (or part of it) in Google Books, finding the same sequences of words in other books. Visually the book transforms then in a digital collage of quotations (whose context is maintained in the background), loosing even the last bit of originality.
Vilayphiou embodies her sharp irony within a functional mechanism, exploiting Google’s industrial collection of texts and smartly expanding the mediating properties of language through the networks.
Talks
January 15, 2013, 7pm, Jeu de Paume, Paris
February 2, 2013, transmediale, Berlin.
Metahaven: Islands in the Cloud
Metahaven – design and research studio – has come to define a new methodology in graphic design. The studio’s speculative practice privileges the vocabulary of graphic design as a means of knowledge production, using it as a tool to analyze organizational models and power structures. Investigating political and economic design—including nation branding and logo production—in relation to statehood, currency and information networks, Metahaven places particular emphasis on transparency and visibility.
The Amsterdam-based studio produces a continuous stream of research that rarely results in finite, codified work. They publish books and essays, organize conferences and collaborate with policy makers, concurrently working on new commissions while maintaining a variety of self-initiated projects. Recent activities have included a range of research, identity and product design for WikiLeaks, as well as proposals for the identity of Sealand, a self-proclaimed sovereign nation-state located on a platform built by the British seven miles off the English coast as part of a naval defense strategy during World War II.
Materials from both projects are included in Islands in the Cloud exhibition, alongside elements relating to a new cloud hosting enterprise based in Iceland. From January 20, 2013, MoMA PS1, New York.
Type Compass – Charting new routes in typography
Type Compass – Edited and designed by Luca Bendandi, Michael Brenner, Emilio Macchia – explores the past six years of the typographic landscape through developments in type design, typographic installations and works by graphic designers and typographers whose primary mode of image is the letterform. Type Compass is conceived as a work-notebook, with sketches and notes pages to let the reader’s imagination flow along the inspiration. Inspiration that comes from some of the best and most active independent type foundries and design studios around the globe. Many works included in the book are often challenging and deemed controversial; coupled with a 2-color Pantone layout and a compact format.
Portfolios: Michael Savona – Reinhard Schmidt – Olya Troitskaya – Michèle Champagne – Dante H Carlos
Revue Correspondances
Correspondances est née d’une intuition du matin. De celles qui t’éveillent et prennent de l’ampleur au fil du jour. L’idée était simple : questionner le rapport entre texte et image en faisant appel à 10 correspondants (5 auteurs, 5 illustrateurs) dont la participation, écrite ou dessinée, s’inspirerait de la contribution précédente.
Correspondances ne se veut pas être un énième recueil d’oeuvres mais d’avantage une affaire de points de vue. Correspondances est l’art de concevoir et de transmettre le fruit de ses réflexions à travers un véritable téléphone arabe sur papier où chaque correspondant s’inspire et inspire.
JUNK JET 6: HERE AND WHERE! ISSUE
The global is but the local on world tour. On this tour the local is not preserving identity – be that cultural, political, or social, but it is (re-)inventing itself, as art, activism, or enterprise. The local even aims at becoming a global subject, without knowing what forces – be that swarm, viral, or whatever, this depends on.
The local is more or less ignorant about the www processes, but it is ready to get itself into anything – be that souvenirs, ruins, folklorisms, vernaculars, clichés, promises, romanticisms, naturalisms, exotisms.
Junk Jet N°6 is crazy about things of local time and place, in the form of objects, images, gifs, videos, sounds, architectures, or reflecting texts. Junk Jet comes with works from your localhost, or your local wifi kebab shop …
With contributions by 0100101110101101, Adam Cruces, Agathe Andre, Aids-3d, Alberto Bustamante, Alejandro Crawford, Aline Otte, Andreas Angelidakis, Angela Genusa, Angelo Plessas, Aude Debout, Aureliano Segundo, Blinking Girls, Caspar Stracke, Christine Nasz and Stefanie Hunold, Clement Valla, Cornelia and Holger Lund, Emilio Gomariz, ET AL., ETC., Francesca Gavin, Golgotha, Hugo Scibetta, Jennifer Chan, JODI, Jon Rafman, Julien Lacroix, Kareem Lotfy, Kim Asendorf, Laimonas Zakas, Louis Doulas, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, Neil McGuire, Nicholas O’Brien, Nilgün Serbest, Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Patrick Cruz, Sophia Al-Maria, Superpool, Tomas Klassnik.
Raphaël Zarka, Monographie de l’artiste
Présentation, le 20 décembre à 19h, Fondation d’entreprise Ricard à Paris, de la première monographie de l’artiste Raphaël Zarka et discussion en compagnie de l’artiste Yann Sérandour et des graphistes deValence à propos de la monographie de l’artiste, et plus généralement sur les rapports des artistes aux livres et leur travail avec les graphistes.
Beauregard, le 5 juillet 2012
Avec Beauregard, le 5 juillet 2012, George Dupin et Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié proposent un projet conçu comme un work in progress qui prend en compte la notion de chantier au sens large: d’une part, le Frac Bretagne représenté à travers ses activités, et de l’autre, le temps du chantier comme moment décisif entre un avant et un après, entre bilan et projet.
Sur une période de trois années, les artistes ont créé et réuni ensemble une vaste matière dont le statut oscille entre document, archive et œuvre, et dont la finalité est un livre. Celui-ci, de même que le chantier à ciel ouvert, expose son architecture interne.
L’un des principes de ce projet repose sur la manière dont sont reproduites les photographies : imprimées en négatif sur des feuilles noires avec de l’encre argent, les images se lisent en positif grâce à l’opacité de l’encre et à son pouvoir réfléchissant, amplifié lorsque l’on tourne les pages. Le recto des feuilles montre le chantier du nouveau bâtiment et alterne avec le verso, qui montre les bases de cette histoire : la collection, les réserves, la documentation sur les œuvres et les artistes, les archives des expositions et évènements passés, l’ancien site du Frac à Châteaugiron.
Deux expositions ont permis de montrer le matériau constitutif du livre, à savoir des documents et des feuilles d’imprimerie avec pour chacune de ces occasions un dispositif spécifique. Les photographies de ces expositions alimentent à leur tour le livre et en constituent la partie centrale.
Cet ouvrage – qui incarne donc la troisième occurrence de ce projet, présenté le 18 décembre 2012, 17h, Frac Bretagne, Rennes – tente une exploration subtile de l’histoire d’une institution, des liens entre la mémoire, la collection, les projets et la manière dont ceux-ci s’incarnent dans une architecture spécifique.
THE BILLBOARD BOOK PROJECT (LONDON)
In The Billboard Book Project (London), version three of Billboard Book series, British artist Jonathan Monk sets out with British designers OK-RM to design a very British-looking publication. All the more so because conventions of paper-folding and book-binding (adapted through an ingenious scheme of the designers), have been itemized — with the measurement “Royal” as a guide.
Jonathan Monk offers a third in his ongoing project of producing billboards which name the conditions of their own making, along with a book object, which neatly slices up the billboard and offers it in bound form. The “trick”, in each project, has been that Monk himself eschews designing his own work by choosing a design firms to articulate his own project.
OK-RM (Oliver Knight and Rory McGrath) are two designers who love the annals of Concept art, collecting facsimiles and originals of such 70s fare.
For their project to give visual shape to Monk’s idea (a billboard which talks about what went into it, and is offered also as a book), OK-RM turned to the hallowed conventions of — British — printing and binding. And the result is…Italian? In the wink of an eye, the great bookmakers of fifteenth century Venice call out to us, as OK-RM have chosen to turn individual versions of the billboard into books of diminishing shapes so that each billboard is offered in ever smaller classic book form. If you stack all the books on top of each other, in a kind of Origami way, the thing that emerges is nothing so much as a Fibonacci rhythm.
Colorado House – Times Vol.1 – The Puzzling Almanac
Colorado House, run by Charlotte Collin and Jana Papenbroock, is an independent publishing house specialised on printed and crafted matter with a particular focus on experiment, anthropology and process.
Times Vol. 1: The Puzzling Almanac is a pictorial atlas about the staging of memory and the disarray of taxonomy. 365 photographs from the early 19th to the early 20th century were assembled to collages, enabling the reader to browse through the unlikely associations between scientific inventions, ancient discoveries, and past current affairs. The juxtaposition of the stylized, historical photos conveys the ongoing mise-en-scène of reality and the poetic fiction of all systems of classification. Like an eternal inkblot test, what the reader makes of history is left to himself. The book can be read as an open puzzle from all directions, literally right to left, back to front, bottom to top, accomodating the reader’s own whim and perspective.
Mindgames & Shame @Motto
Mindgames, by Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar, published in collaboration with Werkplaats Typografie, incoporates metaphorical qualities depicting people and their relationships in an ongoing interchange between space, geometry, history, and meaning. This quadrangled story about shades and variations in co-dependence and sovereignty is inspired by a musician (John Lennon), a theorist (Henri Lefebvre), an author (Halldor Laxness), and a demented ruler of Rome (Caligula) – forming biographies that present portraits of associations rather than particular statements about individual lives. The publication was conceived as a way of enjoying information in the tradition of the autodidacts of the past – but in a style which is contingent to a reverence towards traditional modes of archiving the world.
A slideshow presentation – December 13, 2012, from 7pm, Motto, Berlin – addressing the sovereignty of the sign, and/or the independence of the phenomenon which had hitherto transported it, marks the official release of MINDGAMES – a publication conceived as abstract shapes, shrouded in words, to articulate a cross-dimensional plane of intrigue. The diagrams and images will describe the structures and concepts that occupied the mind of the author when creating the text. The presentation will include more than a hundred originally composed images and will be accompanied by a reading.
Shame is a recurring publication which observes and researches human feelings and the human body. Shame focuses on daily issues that easily pass by our attention and juxtaposes them to politics, design and art in printed form. This makes it look, at times, uncomfortable and embarrasing. Shame One was initiated and produced in the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, NL by visual artist Wolfgang Fuetterer and graphic designer Neda Firfova.