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.
Auto-Archive – Photocopy Show
Auto-Archive – a research project by Toby Huddlestone – shifts the archive from a post-event medium, to a structure that predicts and predetermines the outcome of an event.
It is a research project comprising presentation, discussion, exhibition, publication and review engaged with artworks that seem to archive their future outcome. Through their conceptual structure, each artwork attempts to predetermine their own outcome in some way – they set the parameters necessary in order to preempt what will be archived of them, thus providing a commentary into the future.
Auto-Archive Photocopy Show – january 25 – february 16, 2013, Time Share, London – is an exhibition comprising photocopies of works selected for the Auto-Archive project.
Using the photocopy as the exhibition medium, the works in this exhibition sit somewhere between raw research and re-appropriated artworks. Depending on artwork, the works will range from standard informational A4 prints to enlarged 1:1 artwork-size images, creating an ‘in-between exhibition’. Featuring Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Robert Barry, Dan Graham, On Kawara, John Latham, Peter Liversidge, Raimundas Malašauskas, Jonathan Monk, Gianni Motti, Bruce Nauman, PostDocument and more…
Candide – Journal for Architectural Knowledge
Candide is dedicated to exploring the culture of knowledge specific to architecture.
How is architectural knowledge generated, collected, presented, and passed on? Which forms of architectural knowledge can be observed? How can knowledge generated in reference to a specific task be applied to other contexts? Which experts, designers, and users, which institutions and organizations are involved? Which techniques, tools, and methods are instrumental?
Each issue of Candide is made up of five distinct sections. This framework responds to the diversity of architectural knowledge being produced, while challenging authors of all disciplines to test a variety of genres to write about and represent architecture.
4,492,040
4,492,040 is a facsimile reprint of a series of catalogs produced by curator Lucy R. Lippard. Drawn from material originally published between 1969 and 1974, 4,492,040 includes reprints of all four of the catalogs from Lippard’s hugely important “numbers shows” — a series of exhibitions named for the populations of the cities they were held in: 557,087 (Seattle), 955,000 (Vancouver), c.7,500 (Valencia, California), and 2,972,453 (Buenos Aires). As with the originals, 4,492,040 is made up of a collection of loose notecards containing statements, documentation, and conceptual works by each artist, to be rearranged, filed, or discarded at will. This new edition is supplemented by a new afterword by Lippard.
In collaboration with Afterall Books, New Documents presents a joint launch event for 4,492,040 and From Conceptualism to Feminism: Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, january 8, 2013, 7pm.
PIE #04 – FAILURE
Failure is an intrinsic part of experimentation, creativity and inconveniently, life. It’s said if you’re not failing often then you’re not trying hard enough. The beautiful screw ups, the happy accidents, the painful flaws and the Epic Fails are celebrated.
For Pie #04 – Failure the idea of failure was taken in all its variant forms and looked for the beauty, humour and wisdom gained from these unwanted mishaps.
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.
Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Dieter Roth Editions
The work of Dieter Roth (Swiss, b. Germany, 1930–1998) encompassed everything from painting and sculpture to film and video, but it is arguably through his editioned work—prints, books, and multiples—that he made his most radical contributions. These experiments include the use of organic materials in lieu of traditional mediums, including book-sausages filled with ground paper in place of meat, and multiples of plastic toys mired in melted chocolate, as well as a dazzling array of variations on printed postcards.
Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Dieter Roth Editions – from february 17 to June 24, 2013, MoMA, New York – focuses on Roth’s incredibly innovative and prolific period from 1960 to 1975. The centerpiece of the exhibition is an expanded presentation of Snow (1963–69), a Roth artist’s book, a trove of insightful information about the artist’s creative process and plans for other works. A selection of handmade books, miniature volumes, and the newly acquired Literaturwurst (1961–69), considered Roth’s most radical experiment with the book format, will also be on view.
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.
Images empruntées : l’artiste comme éditeur
Pierre Leguillon, La Promesse de l’écran — Manuel de photographie, 2011, prod. Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne
Il existe deux mots dans la langue anglaise pour traduire le mot français “éditer”. “To Publish” concerne la diffusion de publications dans l’espace public et “To Edit”, un travail d’agencement et de traitement de contenus lié au texte et à l’image, quel qu’en soit les modes de diffusion.
Le terme français regroupe implicitement ces deux significations. Rendre les choses accessibles et traiter le contenu, voilà deux aspects qui renvoient aux pratiques de collectes et d’appropriation de l’image photographique dans l’art depuis plusieurs décennies.
À l’heure où cette appropriation est entrée dans une ère numérique et post-industrielle, cette journée d’étude sera l’occasion de s’interroger sur les principes et les enjeux fondamentaux de telles pratiques ainsi que sur leurs évolutions récentes.
Images empruntées : l’artiste comme éditeur, journée d’étude, le 24 janvier 2013, Les Abatoirs, Toulouse, avec Christine Buignet, Natacha Détré, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Céline Duval, Morad Montazami, Christophe Viart; David Coste et les étudiants de l’université Toulouse 2 et de l’ISDAT, et Pierre Leguillon. Télécharger le programme complet.
Another Earth Catalog – Fabian Reimann
Fabian Reimann uses the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968 as a concise reference of tools for the improvement of the world and the self, as the starting point for the final issue of his own, visual-essay style Egozine “freeman’s journal”, now in its tenth year. His Another Earth Catalog, only interrupted once by a personal essay, consists of a continuous stream of images: reproductions of the Utopian visions of the late 1960s — including not only material published in the Whole Earth Catalog, but also of other visionary projects from the Cold War period and the dawn of Postmodernism. Fabian Reimann loosely maintains the five categories of the Catalog (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning) and connects the visions of the late 1960s with current images that show developments which can be traced back to the fantasies of these earlier times.
Bulletins of The Serving Library #4
Bulletins of The Serving Library #4 was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt & Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of perception in order to get a better view.
Bulletins by Dexter Bang Sinister, Rob Giampietro, Malcolm Mooney and Jan Verwoert, Lars Bang Larsen, Albert Angelo, Rhea Dall and Charlotte Johannesson, The Digital Theatre, Hollis Frampton, Diedrich Diederichsen, Mark Beasley, and Francis McKee.
Launches, December 21, 2012, 3.30pm, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
& December 22, 7pm, Ooga Booga, Los Angeles
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.
The Object Lessons
The Object Lessons is a book of short-stories by Francesco Pedraglio related to Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s work.
Part 1 — The Object Lessons is an exhibition.
Part 2 — The Object Lessons is a story inspired by an exhibition, considered through three parallel accounts told in the first, second and third person.
Part 3 — The Object Lessons is an exhibition inspired by the narratives, characters and artworks featured in a short story.
Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s exhibition in 2011 at Mudam Luxembourg took as a starting point a fictional text written by London-based curator Francesco Pedraglio, following the artists’ invitation to write a subjective text on their 2009 show at De Vleeshal in Middelburg. This text features two artists who, in the story, produce new works. The exhibition at Mudam is based on a new series of works taking their inspiration from the sculptures described in the story.
Brought together under the shared title The Object Lessons, the two exhibitions and the narrative that links them together are less the result of the implementation of a pre-ordained plan than the development of something akin to a sequence of echoes: an exhibition giving rise to a fictional text, itself engendering an exhibition. This development is emblematic of the pivotal place occupied by the interpretative process in the works of Nina Beier and Marie Lund, the production or activation of which regularly involve the intervention of other people. It is also representative of the way the two artists work together, especially gravitating around specific exhibition formats enabling them to combine individual and joint works.
Like Francesco Pedraglio’s text, which describes the encounter between two sculptors driven by the same concerns for the transitory nature of materials, albeit stone, the works in the show emphasise the different temporalities which overlap in the art work, from its conception to its possible destruction, by way of the time-frames of its display and its reading.
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.
Cambridge Book at Harvard
Join Cambridge Book – an art book collection and consultancy – & Arena – a collaborative tool for assembling information – for an open conversation about new information paradigms and small publishing enterprises, December 17, 5pm, at Harvard LABRARY Storefront, a pop-up space organized by the Harvard GraduateSchool of Design (GSD) and Library Test Kitchen.
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.
