Cyberfeminism Index

Clara Istlerová: A Life Among Letters is the first publication in the United States to delve into the design landscape of the former Czechoslovakia through the lens of Czech designer Clara Istlerová (born 1944). A trailblazer in her field, Istlerová was one of the few women in the male-dominated field of Czech typography. This publication introduces readers to Istlerová’s renowned book designs, particularly highlighting the analog processes she utilized to create one of the most influential books on Czech architecture, Švácha, Rostislav. From Modernity to Functionalism (Odeon, 1985).

The publication features an intimate interview with Istlerová conducted by editor Anežka Minaříková, accompanied by work from Istlerová’s personal archive alongside discussions detailing her creative process. Offering a vivid portrayal of an era where design was a tangible, labor-intensive endeavor carried out in close collaboration with typesetters and printers, the publication unveils the Czech design narrative of the twentieth century to English-speaking readers, highlighting Istlerová’s lasting impact and central role.

Design by Anežka Minaříková and Marek Nedelka

Published to accompany the artist’s first retrospective exhibition, Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art examines the work of the inventive yet overlooked Teddy Sandoval, a central figure in Los Angeles’s queer and Chicanx artistic circles. Sandoval was known for producing subversive and playful artworks in a range of media that explored the codes of gender and sexuality, particularly conceptions of masculinity.

This publication surveys Sandoval’s work alongside other queer, Latinx, and Latin American artists whose practices profoundly resonate. This expansive catalogue features essays by C. Ondine Chavoya, David Evans Frantz, Raquel Gutiérrez, and Mari Rodríguez Binnie, as well as biographical entries on other artists featured in the exhibition, including Félix Ángel, Myrna Báez, Álvaro Barrios, Ester Hernández, Hudinilson Jr., Antonio Lopez, María Martínez-Cañas, Marisol, and Joey Terrill.

Design by Content Object
Co-published by Inventory Press, Williams College Museum of Art, Vincent Price Art Museum, and Independent Curators International

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure is a toolkit for writing and remembering queer and trans histories. Expanding on Nat Pyper’s series of fonts whose letterforms derive from the life stories and printed traces of countercultural queers of the last several decades, this new book showcases overlooked biographies alongside previously unseen archival materials, as well as Pyper’s unique approach to designing fonts as containers for memory.

The book debuts a new essay by Pyper, and includes contributions from Paul Soulellis, Claire Star Finch, Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Rosen Eveleigh, and G. B. Jones that offer vital perspectives on queer archival practices, language lineages, design as protest, and love as the basis for research. Part reader, part type specimen, part love letter, these fonts foreground the politics of queer memory while opening up new avenues for writers, designers, and curious readers.

Dear writer,
A Queer Year of Love Letters is a series of fonts that remembers the lives and work of countercultural queers of the past several decades. The series aims to make the act of remembering these overlooked and illegitimate histories accessible to other people, as easy as typing. Better yet: it aims to make the act of typing an act of remembering. That these fonts might be considered typefaces is incidental. They are an attempt to improvise a clandestine lineage, an aspatial and atemporal kind of queer kinship, through the act of writing.
I began making these fonts in order to rapidly document and disseminate the work and ideas that they cite. I pack these histories, or part of them, into fonts for a couple of reasons. First, font files are durable. OpenType fonts (.OTFs) have persisted in their ubiquity since the late '90s and maintain their utility as a nimble and reliable format. Second, fonts have the capacity to contain a hefty amount of information within a tiny package. In under 100 kilobytes, an entire alphabet! In the font’s metadata, a manifesto! Fonts then function as a useful format for ferrying information from one place to another.
I am using these fonts as time machines. These machines take me back—to Robert Ford and Black gay and lesbian underground publishing in early 1990s Chicago; to the Lesbian Alliance, a socialist-feminist enclave in 1970s St. Louis, Missouri; to G.B. Jones and queer punk filmmaking in 1980s downtown Toronto—but they also take me forward to unknown futures through the act of writing itself. In use, these fonts engage the past as a provocation. They engage the past as a verb.

Is this romantic? Yes.

Love,
Nat

This instalment of Bricks from the Kiln doubles as issue #6 of the journal and as an exhibition catalogue for the thematic show ‘BFTK#6: Tentative — Incomplete — Inconsistent: A Catalogue of the Disappeared, Destroyed, Lost or Otherwise Inaccessible’. Presenting objects, artworks, artefacts, models, events and animals that no-longer — or never did — exist in physical form, the exhibition explores themes of death, destruction and reincarnation, examining persisting interests in notions of ephemerality and permanence, memory and record, preservation and erasure, creation and reconstruction.

How do we remember and memorialise? How is space given to the unrecorded? How do we experience the out of reach, concealed, unseen, undiscovered? How can the dematerialised be materialised again, through the mediation of writing, image and sound?

THE ALMOST HORSE
Helen Marten
(inside front / back cover)

‘STILL IN ALL HEARTS, IN ALL BELLIES, IN ALL TOES’:
A BELATED REVIEW OF FESTIVAL DE FORT BOYARD
Matthew Stuart & Andrew Walsh-Lister
(pp.6–8)

EDDYSTONE
Rachael Allen
(pp.11–18)

TO MAKE THE STONE STONY
Emily LaBarge
(pp.21–26)

WHEREFORE AM I NOW?
Lucy Mercer
(pp.29–40)

WESTON: THE TOWN THAT WAS, AND THEN WASN’T
Crystal Bennes
(pp.43–52)

NOTES TO ACCOMPANY VIOLENT INNOCENCE (2019)
Will Harris
(pp.55–64)

GHOST, POCKETS, TRACES, NECESSARY CLOUDS
Matthew Stuart
(pp.66–69)

CONNECTIVITY OF TOUCHING
Ali Na & Mindy Seu in conversation
(pp.71–76)

PEARL
Rose Higham-Stainton
(pp.79–84)

NOTES FROM NEW MEXICO
Jennifer Hodgson
(pp.87–98)

THE MOOG OF AHMEDABAD
Paul Purgas
(pp.101–108)

IN WHICH DECIBELLA ESCAPES AUDITION
Sarah Hayden
(pp.111–122)

D.C.B.: A PARTIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Juliet Jacques
(pp.125–136)

PINBALL REMAINS: ON THE PINBALL ISSUE OF THE SITUATIONIST TIMES
Ellef Prestsæter
(pp.139–150)

TOMB III – CADMIUM (2021)
Gilbert Again
(pp.152–154)

NON-DESCRIPT ANIMAL
David Hering
(pp.157–161)

Cover & Bookmark artwork by Helen Marten

Image RIP, the first publication from Source Type, is centered around New York graphic designer Geoff Han’s investigation into the Shenzen-based printer Artron and explores subjects ranging from design, production, work, and the environment in the post-industrial economy. The book gathers essays by Danielle Aubert, David Bennewith, Geoff Han, Ming Lin, Shanzhai Lyric, David Reinfurt, Mindy Seu, and Dena Yago, and features images by Ann Woo. Image RIP reflects a consistent theme in Han’s practice of the manipulation of image reproduction, printing, production, code, and other techniques to affect the process of viewing and reading.

The acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks' Love Song to the Nation, All About Love is a revelation about what causes a polarized society and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.

"The word 'love' is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness—not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society's failure to provide a model for learning to love.

As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question "What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.

From the 1970s through the 1990s more than one hundred feminist bookstores built a transnational network that helped shape some of feminism's most complex conversations. Kristen Hogan traces the feminist bookstore movement's rise and eventual fall, restoring its radical work to public feminist memory. The bookwomen at the heart of this story—mostly lesbians and including women of color—measured their success not by profit, but by developing theories and practices of lesbian antiracism and feminist accountability.

At bookstores like BookWoman in Austin, the Toronto Women's Bookstore, and Old Wives' Tales in San Francisco, and in the essential Feminist Bookstore News, bookwomen changed people's lives and the world. In retelling their stories, Hogan not only shares the movement's tools with contemporary queer antiracist feminist activists and theorists, she gives us a vocabulary, strategy, and legacy for thinking through today's feminisms.