Post Digital Print (quotes

Quotes from post digital print 

Key word / Quote / First thoughts 

  

Surealism

“One publishes to find comrades!” -
André Breton

Publishing

'This short statement brilliantly embodies the spirit of early avant-garde publishing, as well as that of independent publishing later in the 20th century.'-
 

Has publishing in  the 21^st century changed?

Publishing

'Rather, this kind of publishing is all about fostering and spreading ideas among like-minded people, through the ‘viral’ communication model so often applied by the alternative press.' -
 

This is how we used to spread ideas back in the day! Now its all changed?

Publishing

'Independent publishing, from the late 18th century onwards, was still mostly a medium used for spreading the kind of dissident political ideas which would eventually inspire the Mexican and Russian revolutions in the early 20th century – just as a multitude of new and extraordinary artistic and cultural movements was beginning to emerge.' -  

  Self publishing has the power to really create change back then. With the internet does it still have this impact to spread ideas?

Publishing

'And at the beginning of the American Revolution, in 1776, Thomas Paine became famous for (anonymously) publishing a uniquely popular pamphlet (with a circulation of hundreds of thousands of copies) titled Common Sense, which provided the intellectual spark for the uprising.' -
 

Another example of a piece which actually triggered an uprising

Electricity

'In the early 20th century, the introduction of electricity was rapidly transforming urban daily life as well as the media landscape. And so the various emerging avant-garde art movements envisioned a brave new world, driven not only by electricity itself, but also by industry and the new upcoming media, all of which were seen as tools for conceptually revolutionising the existing order.' -
 

Ludovico expresses how the introduction of electricity transformed media and energised the avarde garde artists.

Influence

'll helped to produce a new kind of typography, which aimed to express not only a rich variety of visual forms but also powerful emotions. pp40' -
 

This movement of printed media inspired new forms of aesthetic for typeography creating new ways it could be used.

Zines

'They may be seen as ancestors of the later ‘zines’: both are characterised by the same ephemeral nature (often going out of circulation after a single issue), and both challenge the graphic and journalistic conventions of their time, embracing instead the sheer pleasure of expressing ideas in print, in a way that reflects these ideas in content as well as graphic form' -   

Pretty cool to think that dada could have been the first zinesters. I really like that its about spreading ideas through graphic form. The ideas have changed and method of making the zines.

Type techniques 

'The Dadaists attempted to exploit the experimental possibilities of the printing machine, through a playful use of font sizes and by creatively integrating lines acting as content separators or as purely graphic elements.' pp35 -
 

Very interesting how these different movements used there own techniques for layout which would have had a lot of influence in graphic design.  They are challengeing the social norm through typography. Its interesting how this sense of rebel would have been communicated through just type.

Parody 

'Its first issue, edited by André Breton, was designed to closely resemble the conservative scientific review La Nature, thus deceiving the reader into an unexpected encounter with the Surrealists’ typically scandalous content. '

Documents, a later journal edited by Georges Bataille from 1929 to 1930, featured original cover art, harsh juxtapositions of pictures and text, and generally speaking a more extreme approach 

Techniques 

'In a way, all these magazines, even as they called into question the printed medium, also reflected upon this very medium (by emphasising its graphical space and the challenges inevitably posed by its technical limitations) – just as they questioned and reflected upon the historical era of transformation of which they were very much a part' -
 

They pulled this printed media into question through emphasising its graphical space and techinques challneges. Basicaly they make it more relevant through graphic design.

Graphic design

'Another contemporary master in this context was El Lissitzky, with the fascinating and visionary techniques he applied to graphic space. In his Prounen series of drawings from the early 1920s, he created complex, purely abstract three-dimensional spaces (using only ink and paper) which now may seem like a precursor of computer graphics and their endlessly programmable possibilities.' - 

Super intresting to think that this guy was creating graphics that show a lot of what we are doing now with 3d design programs.

I could defo do a project which pasticed him by recreating some of his famous work on cad?

  El lissitzky

“In contrast to the old monumental art (the book) itself goes to the people, and does not stand like a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to approach... (The book is the) monument of the future.”pp 43

' Lissitzky considered the book as a dynamic object, a “unity of acoustics and optics” that required the viewer’s active involvement'.

 Book

'Here Lissitzky speculated on different levels about the new characteristics of what he defined as “the book space”, which would definitively break with previous conventions – and he ends with a climactic definition in capital letters: “THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY”, championing a future vision of books more ‘optical’ and sensorial than physical, and combining this vision with the core technology of the time: electricity.'

Tech

'  the mimeograph the ideal medium for fostering freedom of expression and ideas,The key selling point was that it allowed short-run productions to be made cheaply, quickly and with reasonable print quality' pp37

'The perceived threat of the Samizdat phenomenon for Communist regimes was so great that the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu went so far as to forbid the possession of unmonitored typewriters by Romanian citizens.'

Print

'Another art movement, arguably one of the most influential to our current communication-driven mediascape'

Fluxus

'In these carefully designed objects, produced in limited editions that were in fact quite cheap to make, the printed components (brochures, leaflets, flip books, maps, playing cards, etc) were always an integral part of the concept.'

Fluxus

'Maciunas also collected various newspaper cuttings of Fluxus-related articles into a ‘newspaper roll’ to be displayed as a kind of advertisement in public spaces.'

Fluxus 

the ‘Fluxus newsletters’ were being published to facilitate communication and the exchange of ideas within the network of Fluxus artists spread across three continents.

Artists Books 

Several Fluxus publishing houses were founded, of which Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press was probably the most well-known, pioneering the artist’s book movement with book editions running anywhere between 1,500 to 5,000 copies and sold at standard book

News papers

the most consistent effort in print by Maciunas and his associates was certainly the Fluxus Newspaper

Publication

We wanted to get away from the bound magazine format, which is really quite restrictive.

Eternal network

ongoing, global artistic network in which each participating artist realizes that s/he is part of a wider network. It is a model of creative activity with no borders between artist and audience, with both working on a common creation.” (Chuck Welch, Eternal Network: A Mail Art Anthology) pp51

Magazines

Another powerful concept (and one foreseen by Fluxus) to emerge during this period was the idea of a ‘network’ of magazines. In its cooperative form, this concept was brought into practice by the Underground Press Syndicate, a network of counterculture newspapers and magazines founded in 1967 by several early underground publisher -
Fluxus directly influence underground press possibly

 

Magazines

The Whole Earth Catalog’s farewell statement in 1974 was prophetic for future generations of underground publishers: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” Through its contacts with worldwide Western radicalgroups as well as Third World liberation forces, the Liberation News Service was able to draw attention to a new global perspective by documenting important facts which were either totally ignored or else poorly documented by the mainstream press.

Print

At the time of writing, the development towards print as a valuable object can best be observed in the contemporary do-it-yourself book and zine scene. Until the late 1990s, this scene was mostly focused on radical politics and social engagement; the contemporary scene however is more fascinated with the collection of visual-symbolic information into carefully crafted paper objects. - Its turned into a valuable object  

Idea 

Many readers will continue to choose print products above electronic publications, possibly leading to a demand for networked (perhaps even portable) printers allowing individuals to print materials at any location, anywhere in the world. Combined with personal binding devices (however primitive), such personal ‘book machines’ would allow readers to ‘teleport’ print publications to and from any location. -

Really cool concept links in with open source.

I wonder if this could happen?

 

It may be worth envisioning a kind of ‘print sampling’, comparable to sampling in music and video, where customised content (either anthologies or new works) can be created from past works. -  Intresting idea