The Binder and the Server

Saturday 20 July, 5pm at Copeland Book Market
Publishing Forum reading group
Reading ‘The Binder and the Server’ published by Triple Canopy 2013
Open Reading Group reading with Banner Repeater, X Marks the Bökship and The Everyday Press. All welcome.

The Binder and the Server is the outcome of several group discussions among Triple Canopy editors, and was written by senior editor Colby Chamberlain. The essay details the history of Triple Canopy in order to stake out our position on the ideology of Internet culture. By carefully examining the history of new-media publishing and the shift from disciplinary to control societies, the essay addresses the politics of online identity, friendship, labor, and the dream of digital democracy. In short: On the Internet, we are all contractors.

Available from Lulu, price £3.95
http://canopycanopycanopy.com/Support
https://publishingforum.wordpress.com/2013/02/09/the-binder-and-the-server/

Temporary download for reading group use only:
The Binder and The Server PDF

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The Social Life of The Book

Wednesday 17 April 2013, 7 – 9pm meeting at X Marks the Bökship

We will be reading on the night extracts from “The Social Life of The Book”
SLOB #02 Moyra Davey, The Wet and the Dry & SLOB # 03 Lois Luthi, Infant A

The Social Life of the Book is a collection of commissioned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. who consider books less as finished objects or forms but for their disruptive potential and their ability to produce new relationships, new publics and new meanings.

http://castillocorrales.fr/?p=1763
https://publishingforum.wordpress.com/

The Publishing Forum: Reading Group is a joint reading group with Banner Repeater, X Marks the Bokship, and Arnaud Desjardin from The Everday Press, with a specific focus on publishing. Continuing with our enquiry into publishing, past, present and future.

If you would like to join the reading group and be kept up to date with new reading material please join the Publishing Forum: reading group facebook page here:http://www.facebook.com/groups/202464053220727/

Counter Intelligence

Wednesday 27 March 2013, 7pm
Meeting at Banner Repeater
Reading extract from Counter Intelligence

Counter Intelligence is a catalogue of self-published and autonomous print creations from the hands-on exhibition of zines, comics, pamphlets and other self-produced print at the 121 Centre, Brixton in 1995 organised by Jason Skeet & Mark Pawson.

Reviews 250 titles, plus short essays looking at specifics of autonomous self-publishing as well as placing this activity in a wider context; Autonomy, Dialectics of desk-top-publishing, Cultural Noise, Appropriate Scale Publishing, Price No Object/ Priceless Objects, Postal Pleasure, Refusing regularity, A Zinester Rants, The Free Information Network, E-zinesand computer bulletin boards, Autobio Comix, and a Non-exhaustive resources section.

The COUNTER INTELLIGENCE exhibition was also shown at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York and included in Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s 1996 live-life/life-live project. A vital doccument of its time.

We will be reading an 8 page extract reprinted by Mark Pawson for the Reading Group. Pick up a copy from Banner Repeater and X Marks the Bökship.

Counter Intelligence
Published 1995
Size A4 / 28 pages

 

 

Artists’ Magazines, An Alternative Place for Art.

Artists’ Magazines, An Alternative Place for Art
By Gwen Allen
Published by MIT Press, 2011

Wednesday 13 March 7 – 9pm at  X Marks the Bokship

Reading Chapter 7: Artists’ Magazines in the 80s.
Magazine publishing is an exercise in ephemerality and transience; each issue goes out in the world only to be rendered obsolete by the next. To publish a magazine is to enter into a heightened relationship with the present moment. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists’ Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others.

Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists’ postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; Art-Rite (1973-1978), an irreverent zine with a disposable, newsprint format; Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation; 0 to 9 (1967–1969), a mimeographed poetry magazine founded by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer; FILE (1972–1989), founded by the Canadian collective General Idea, its cover design a sly parody of Life magazine; and Interfunktionen (1968–1975), founded to protest the conservative curatorial strategies of Documenta. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, DIY quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. (A work by John Baldessari from the late 1960s shows a photograph of Artforum, captioned “THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.”) Artists’ Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.

International Art English.

International Art English
On the rise—and the space—of the art-world press release.
by Alix Rule & David Levine
Published by Triple Canopy, 2012

Wednesday 27 February 2013, 7 – 9pm at Banner Repeater.

Of this English upper-middle class speech we may note (a) that it is not localised in any one place, (b) that though the people who use this speech are not all acquainted with one another, they can easily recognise each other’s status by this index alone, (c) that this elite speech form tends to be imitated by those who are not of the elite, so that other dialect forms are gradually eliminated, (d) that the elite, recognising this imitation, is constantly creating new linguistic elaborations to mark itself off from the common herd.

—E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure, 1954

“International Art English” was produced by Triple Canopy as part of its Research Work project area, supported in part by the Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Read the article here http://canopycanopycanopy.com/16/international_art_english

 

Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894.

Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 
By Alessandro Ludovico, introduction by Florian Cramer
Published by Onomatopee, 2012
Pages: 192
Size: 9.2 x 1.5 x 25.2 cm
Graphic design: Eric de Haas

Wednesday 6 February 2013, 7 – 9pm at  X Marks the Bökship

We will have read and be discussing;

Chapter 2 – A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print.
Chapter 3 – The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times.
Chapter 4 – The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page.

A link to an online PDF is here: or

The book is available to buy from http://www.onomatopee.net
Price: € 15,00

In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.

Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?

In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.

Against Intellectual Property.

Against Intellectual Property.
By N. Stephen Kinsella.
Published by Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008

Wednesday 23rd January 2013, 7 – 9pm at Banner Repeater

Liner Notes. Conversations about Making Books. i.e. Leipzig.

Liner Notes. Conversations about Making Books. i.e. Leipzig.
Markus Dreßen, Lina Grumm, Anne König and Jan Wenzel
Published by Spector Books, 2010
224 pages, 11.1 x 17 cm
Designed by: Markus Dreßen, Lina Grumm
Translated by: Jan Caspers
Leipzig 2010
ISBN: 978-940064-84-4

Wednesday 9 January 2013, 7 – 9pm at X Marks the Bökship

FOOTNOTES TO ONE’S OWN PRODUCTION — In Liner Notes we introduce a number of books produced in recent years by book designers who had studied at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts. However we weren’t attempting to identify commonalities between these designers or the foundations of a ‘school’, but rather the very different approaches and attitudes which are evident in their work. However, the definition ‘in their work’ is rather misleading, because two of the editors, Markus Dreßen and Lina Grumm, had themselves studied book art and graphic design at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig while the other two, Anne König and Jan Wenzel, were involved in several of the publications as authors. Thus Liner Notes is also about our own books and the communicative networks in and around the Academy of Visual Arts in which we participate ourselves.

ALIENATING EFFECTS — How to talk about your own work? What would be an appropriate mode to rigorously avoid the obtrusive, marketing-like appearance all too prevalent in many self-presentations? Which aesthetic attitude would allow you to observe yourself from a playful distance? In Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Lehrstücken’ [Learning Plays], especially in the Messingkauf Dialogues [Buying Brass] which spell out his theory of drama, we discovered performative models which could make our own positions and those of others visible. We liked Brecht’s experimental setting which allegorised everyday speech and behaviour. We liked this gestural form of contradiction and affirmation, of exposure and concealment, of simplification and completion, because it allows the portrayal of a highly complex self-concept.

This book is published as an english text supplement to »Liner Notes. Gespräche über das Büchermachen, Leipzig z.B., Spector Books 2009.

The Fox. Issue 1

The Fox. Issue 1
First published by Art and Language, 1975
Republished by The Everyday Press, 2012

Wednesday 12 December 2012, 7 – 9pm at Banner Repeater

“It is the purpose of our journal to try to establish some kind of community practice. Those who are interested, curious, or have something to add (be in pro or con) to the editorial thrust… the evaluation of ideology… of this first issue are encountered, even urged, to contribute to following issues.”

The Fox (1974–76) We will be reading A Declaration of Dependence by Sarah Charlesworth, Perimeters of Protest and other articles in the review section.

Graphic Design, History in the Writing, 1983 – 2011.

 

Graphic Design, History in the Writing, 1983 – 2011.
Edited by Catherine de Smet and Sara De Bondt
Published by Occasional Papers, 2012
ISBN 978-0-9569623-0-0
£20.00

Wednesday 28 November 2012, 7 – 9pm 
Meeting at 21 Tudor Grove, E9 7QL

Continuing with our enquiry into publishing, past, present and future, we will have read and be discussing the two essays, by Teal Triggs and Johanna Drucker from: Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011)

The first anthology of its kind, Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1983–2011) comprises the most influential texts about graphic design history published in English. Edited by a graphic design theorist and a practicing graphic designer, the book chronicles the development of the emerging field of graphic design history from 1983 to today, underscoring the aesthetic, theoretical, political and social tensions that have underpinned it from the beginning. Graphic Design: History in the Writing is a long-overdue sourcebook for students, teachers, curators and anyone else interested in the past and future of a field in rapid development.