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Design

Design

Cover of The Mollino Set

Rollo Press & Cabinet Books

The Mollino Set

Lytle Shaw

Photography €18.00

New York-based professor Lytle Shaw journeys to Italy in this adventurous exploration of the life and work of architect, designer, and photographer Carlo Mollino (1905–1973). In 1933 the young Mollino received a commission from Mussolini’s regime for his first building: an administrative centre in Piedmont. Later works include furniture and interior design, a book on photography, and an asymmetrical car that raced at Le Mans in 1955.

The book centres around Shaw’s realisation that this prolific talent’s conflicted legacy offers a unique window on the role that post-war Italian politics and culture played in the country’s reimagining of itself as a victim, rather than a proponent, of fascism.

Cover of Zoo Index - Reader (volume 1)

Self-Published

Zoo Index - Reader (volume 1)

Terezie Štindlová

Ecology €28.00

Zoo Index Reader examines the relevance and effect that zoos have in shaping our gaze towards non-human animals and by extension ourselves/each other.

Through a mixture of visual research into zoological space—in the form of an A-Z glossary—and written contributions on the history of menageries, the confinement and privatization of land, pets, zoo architecture, the "naturalization" of animals, and the role of zoos and animals in the history of cinema, among many other things, this first volume asks: Do we need zoos? What does a meaningful coexistence with animals look like? Why have we decided to give a balloon to an elephant?

With Terezie Štindlová, jacob lindgren, A+E Collective, Chanelle Adams, John Berger, Andrea Branzi, David Hancocks, Eliot Haworth, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Suzanne van der Lingen, Angelo Renna, Laurel Schwulst, Richard Weller.

Designed by Terezie Štindlová

Cover of Abécédaire d’auto-édtion féministe

Censored Magazine

Abécédaire d’auto-édtion féministe

Labrosse Apolline, Clémentine

Design €15.00

Combien rêvent de créer leur propre magazine ? Comment s’y prendre ? Pensé comme un guide, ce livre rassemble des outils, techniques, ressources, conseils et idées pour qui voudrait se lancer dans l’auto-édition ou l’édition. Révolutions éditoriales, graphiques et artistiques - il questionne en même temps l’existence d’une pratique féministe de l’imprimé autonome. Un abécédaire subjectif, joyeux et non exhaustif imaginé par les fondatrices autodidactes de la revue Censored - issu de leurs expériences et de leurs rencontres.

L’objectif de ce livre est de divulger et transmettre la méthode employée par Apolline et Clémentine Labrosse pour publier Censored, de la maquette Indesign à la promotion, en passant par l’organisation interne. Accessibilité, budget, droits, écriture inclusive, La Poste, graphisme, obligations légales… Au total, plus de 60 mots pour transmettre leur vision, hacks et autres stratagèmes. Ce livre est le fruit d’un constat : alors que nous sommes nombreuxses à voir dans l’imprimé un pouvoir révolutionnaire et un terrain d’expression créative et de lutte - difficile d’obtenir des informations pour apprendre à créer un zine, une revue soi-même, à diffuser massivement ou localement. L’édition ne se contente pas de délivrer une recette concrète, mais présente également des observations et réflexions après cinq années d’exploration des nombreuses stratégies visant à amplifier les voix en marge et à transformer les imaginaires : du mouvement des riot grrrls à la création de structures plus officielles.

Ce livre est le deuxième publié aux éditions trouble. Il a été relu et amélioré par Isabella Utria Mago, Elvire Duvelle-Charles et Maria Tasso.

Cover of On Crip Time

Sticky Fingers Publishing

On Crip Time

Michiel Teeuw, Kaiya Waerea

Design €13.00

This publication brings together works produced during the ‘Woke Designers Reading Club: Designing on Crip Time’ programme devised by Kaiya Waerea and Michiel Teeuw in Autumn 2022. Here we gathered to read, watch, listen and write through questions orbiting around how systems of time are enforced to prevent disabled people from accessing the future.

In this publication, you will find a range of unruly resistances. From flowcharts of lives lived and unliveable, to prayer mats, to posters, to diagrams cartographing time, to manifestos for being in a world that is built to erase us.

Designed by converger / Michiel Teeuw
Printed and finished by Sticky Fingers Studio

Featuring Celina Bermudez Vogensen, Claudia Rose Walder, emma kath cullen, Helen Stratford, India Boxall, Lindsey Allen, Michiel Teeuw, Oren Shoesmith, Rabindranath X Bhose, Ray Soller, Ren Sheikh & shreyasi pathak, with an introduction by Kaiya Waerea.

23x18cm finished size, includes an A5 24pp pamphlet, 6 A3 unbound sheets & 1 A3 wrap cover, risograph printed throughout

Cover of Image RIP: After Printing, Work & Planet Earth

Source Type

Image RIP: After Printing, Work & Planet Earth

Geoff Han

Design €35.00

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.

Cover of yksihW kcalB

Sternberg Press

yksihW kcalB

Dexter Sinister

Design €25.00

The 15-year history of the production of a "German scotch" Black Whisky, made by Dexter Sinister together with Stahlemühle, a distillery set up by former publisher, Christoph Keller.

The story is told in reverse, starting with the delivery of 342 bottles to Berlin in 2022, and ending with an interview with Christoph for the journal Dot Dot Dot in 2007, during which the idea began to germinate. A summary of the project is accompanied by photographs taken at the time, interspersed with five previously published texts (an essay, three conversations, and a statement of intent) written along the way.

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey, collapsing together distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity.

Cover of Seeing Making: Room for Thought

Inventory Press

Seeing Making: Room for Thought

Adam Michaels, Kevin McCaughey and 1 more

Design €33.00

Seeing <―> Making: Room for Thought both studies and presents the creative process of constructing ideas with images. By activating the techniques of montage, the book reveals a wide field of view and a space to engage new critical connection between a multiplicity of objects from the past and present. Realized through an intergenerational collaboration of three cultural producers committed to making theory visible, a transformative anthology of critical essays by Susan Buck-Morss anchors this kaleidoscopic project. Images and ideas sync with Buck-Morss’ perceptive texts on visual culture, history, politics, and aesthetics, fusing criticism with visual play and linking collective imagination and social action.

Building upon the methods and ways of seeing put forth by visual thinkers like Walter Benjamin and John Berger, designer Kevin McCaughey (Boot Boyz Biz), designer, editor, and publisher Adam Michaels (IN-FO.CO/Inventory Press), and renowned theorist Buck-Morss collectively assemble colliding material into new relation. What results is a (typo-) graphic articulation that thinks seriously about the stakes of ideation and reorients the space of the book in the service of a theory and philosophy that speaks the language of our image-based information age.

Cover of Viscose 05: Retail

Viscose Journal

Viscose 05: Retail

Camila Palomino

Periodicals €27.00

Viscose is a journal for fashion criticism. The fifth issue of Viscose explores fashion’s multifaceted retail spaces and cultures. With the evolution of shopping in the 20th and 21st centuries as its focus, the issue looks at the shop as a central nexus where communities and identities are continuously produced and re-imagined through commerce. With a special attention to the role of fashion retail within urban spatial politics, we seek out histories of projects—often developed with or by artists—that have embraced the shop as a medium of both possibility and contestation. 

With contributions by:
Dennis Brzek, Anastasia Howe Bukowski, Michael Bullock, Felix Burrichter, Canal Street Research Association, Noah Dillon, Harun Farocki, Anna Franceschini, Ignacio Gatica, Christian Hincapié, Juje Hsiung, Jessica Kwok, Rhonda Lieberman, Matthew Linde, Marge Monko, Cheuk Ng, Luis Ortega, Camila Palomino, Andreas Petrossiants, Leah Pires, International Library For Fashion Research, Vésma Kontere Mcquillan (International Library For Fashion Research), Rose Salane, Alice Sarmiento, Museum Of Modern Shopping, Jeppe Ugelvig, Sean Vegezzi, Post Vsop, Evie Ward, Leah Weirer

Cover of Discipline Park

Wendy's Subway

Discipline Park

Toby Altman

Toby Altman’s Discipline Park documents the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago, a landmark of architectural brutalism designed by Bertrand Goldberg in the 1970s. Altman was born in the building, and years later, was employed by Northwestern University when they tore it down. His personal proximity to the site leads to a wider critical evaluation of the cruelty of a neoliberalism that asks us to draw sustenance from the very institutions that poison and erase our bodies, habitats, and histories. But, as it indicts the present and its claustrophobic, ruinous politics, Discipline Park also recovers or reinvents utopian vistas through an extended engagement with Goldberg's architectural practices.

Cover of Commons in Design

Valiz

Commons in Design

Christine Schranz

Non-fiction €29.50

The scarcity of resources, climate change, and the digitalization of everyday life are fuelling the economy of swapping, sharing, and lending—all of which are in some way linked to a culture of commoning. In this context, we understand commons as community-based processes that use, collectively manage, and organize generally accessible resources—referring to both goods and knowledge.

Commons in Design explores the meaning and impact of commons—especially knowledge-based peer commons—and acts of commoning in design. It discusses networked, participatory, and open procedures based on the commons and commoning, testing models that negotiate the use of commons within design processes. In doing so, it critically engages with questions regarding designers’ positionings, everyday practices, self-understandings, ways of working, and approaches to education.

Contributors: Rachel Armstrong, Errantry Media Lab (Max Stearns & Nathalie Attallah), Yuhe Ge, Juan Gomez, Luis Guerra, Katherin Gutiérrez Herrera, Cyrus Khalatbari, Rilla Khaled, Cindy Kohtala, Torange Khonsari, Álvaro Mercado Jara, Nan O’Sullivan, Victoria Paeva, Sharon Prendeville, Zoe Romano, Gregoire Rousseau, Daniela Salgado Cofré, Christine Schranz, Elpitha Tsoutsounakis, Eva Verhoeven, Jennifer Whitty

Cover of Fair Game Leipzig

Nieves

Fair Game Leipzig

Nathalie du Pasquier

Art €12.00

“This publication was planned before it was decided to coincide it with the exhibition Fair Game Leipzig at the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig. It is composed of drawings that I made in 2013. The cover instead was designed in 2019 in relation to the exhibition in Leipzig. I wanted it to be in contrast with the gentle drawings inside.” — Nathalie Du Pasquier

A famous designer and co-founder of the Memphis group in Milan in 1981, Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957 in Bordeaux, France, lives in Milan, Italy) accompanied the (post)modern adventure around designer Ettore Sottsass, with the creation of objects, fabrics, carpets, and furniture. In 1986, she started devoting herself exclusively to two- and three-dimensional painting. Memphis's radicalism and formal inventiveness measured solely in terms of a scathing and iconoclastic postmodernism erased a little too quickly the adventure's modern foundations. Nathalie Du Pasquier's paintings are a perfect revelation of these connections: axonometric compositions applied to painting, the palette of muffled colors, objects, when they are present in the compositions, wink at the purism of a Corbusier or an Ozenfant. Mixed with memories and assimilations arising from the most tridimensional Suprematism–the architectones–some paintings and constructions also give prominence to this history of art and the applied arts.

Cover of 17 Movements

Damaged Goods

17 Movements

Jozef Wouters

Design €13.00

17 Mouvements collects traces of a project that Decoratelier - the workspace and arts platform of Jozef Wouters - did in the fall of 2022 around the ‘5 blocs’ area in Brussels (Rempart Des Moines/Papenvest).

When Nuit Blanche invited them to build a gym, Camille Thiry and other Decoratelier associates did not want to design another generic muscle cage. Together with the neighbourhoods inhabitants, they built 17 distinct movement spaces, each tailor-made to an individual’s size, needs, dreams and aches. The gym equipment has meanwhile been removed from public space, but this eponymous book (ed. by Jozef Wouters) combines notes and reflections (language: French) by Camille with beautiful photography by Enzo Smits, documenting the ingenious and unique negotiations that were a part of this collaboration.

Cover of Better Living Catalog

Primary Information

Better Living Catalog

Pippa Garner

Monograph €19.00

Pippa Garner’s Better Living Catalog, originally published in 1982, takes the form of a mail order catalog featuring clever and whimsical inventions that parody consumer goods while simultaneously critiquing America’s obsession with ingenuity, efficiency, leisure, and comfort. These works, which were made as prototypes and photographed for the publication, take the form of improbable accessories, clothing, footwear, home appliances, and office gadgets.

For example, the “Reactiononometer,” a portable wristband, instantly measures social success, while the “Digital Diet Loafers” display the wearer’s weight with every step. If the “Munch-o-Matic” reduces deskwork interruptions by flinging a snack right into the user’s mouth, other items promise financial solvency (the controlled cash flow “Autowallet”), sustainable waste management, or mess-free companionship (the “Pet-a-Vision” TV console). The artist asserts that all of the products in the book are “absolute necessities for contemporary survival.”

The Better Living Catalog was a pop hit when it was published, earning Garner spots on nighttime TV talk shows and attention from magazines like Vogue and Rolling Stone. In a meme-filled culture, the works still resonate today, finding their analog in widely-circulating consumer products, and—in the case of the “High Heel Skates”—even appearing unattributed in the runway collection of a major luxury fashion brand.

A few years after the Better Living Catalog was published, Garner began her gender transition, which she has characterized as an artistic project that draws conceptual parallels to the altered consumer goods she has continued to create since the 1970s. The artist’s practice has always been about hacking—gender hacking, she stated, was “an excellent premise for maverick conceptual art and diametrically opposed to anything I’d ever done.”

Many of the prototypes Garner created for the publication were repurposed or recycled, making this previously rare gem of an artist book one of the artist’s few works to now be widely available.

Born in 1942 in Evanston, Illinois, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) began her practice in the late sixties as a member of the highly regarded Transportation Design department at ArtCenter, California, with plans to become a car stylist, and was drafted to Vietnam to serve as a combat illustrator. In the mid-80s, Garner began her gender transition, which she considers a conceptual artwork, marking an extension of her practice from twenty years of altering cars, garments, and consumer products to using her own body as raw material. Garner appeared on the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and other talk shows, showcasing her satirical consumer product inventions, and her artwork has been featured in Car & Driver, Rolling Stone, Arts & Architecture, and Vogue, among other publications. In the 1980s, her performance, design, and video work was exhibited in institutions including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; since 2015, she has had exhibitions at STARS, O-Town House, Redling Fine Art, and Parker gallery in Los Angeles; Jeffrey Stark in New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Kunstverein München; 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine, Metz; Kunsthalle Zurich; and Art Omi, Ghent, New York. She is the author of three other books: Utopia… or Bust! Products for the Perfect World (1984), Garner’s Gizmos & Gadgets (1987), and the zine Beauty 2000 (1992/2021).

Cover of The Rainbow Book

Nero Editions

The Rainbow Book

F. Lanier Graham, Larry Wurn and 1 more

Design €28.00

The book is a reprint of a cult text of post-1968 psychedelic culture: The Rainbow Book, published in 1975 in Berkeley, California, on the occasion of The Rainbow Show exhibition held at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The Rainbow Book is a collection of essays and illustrations devoted to the rainbow and color spectra, analyzing the significance of color (both physical and metaphysical) from antiquity to modern times.

An encyclopedia of the cultural and artistic manifestations of the rainbow: in myth, magic and paintings, as well as in prints and poems. The book includes poems by Virgil, Dante, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, and others; paintings by Giotto, Bosch, Van der Weyden, Dürer, Rubens, Blake, Turner, Constable, and Church; and the sacred art of Tibet.

The book is printed on sheets of different colors, according to the rainbow spectrum, and reports notions of increasing complexity, accessible at first to younger readers and later to the more experienced and interested in the subject.

The reprint accompanies the exhibition Rainbow. Colors and Wonders between Myths, Arts and Science at MUDEC in Milan (February 16–July 2, 2023), and the release of the first issue of MUdec United.

Cover of LSD #03 – A DIY Issue

Les Presses du Reel

LSD #03 – A DIY Issue

Jean-Michel Géridan

Periodicals €12.00

The third issue of Le Signe Design (the Cahiers of the National Graphic Design Center) is about DIY practices and is based on the work of Gilles de Brock, graphic designer who became a ceramic tile manufacturer.

Do It Yourself practices are not, as is commonly assumed, limited to home improvement, nor just a way of subverting—hacking—a given social and political organization. They are also a way of looking both forward and backward, at our future and our heritage. They involve our heritage insofar as they allow constituted groups to revive past knowledge and skills threatened with extinction. They look forward in that they make it possible to create tools that do not yet exist but could.

The applications of the Do It Yourself approach range from niche practices to everything everywhere, and what they have in common is that they are always in opposition to the mass market. Some examples of this extremely diversified movement include self-publishing, cosplay, biotechnology, hacking (especially in the sense of programming), and producing digital artworks and music. Its most mediatized (and often romanticized) contemporary manifestation is what are called fablabs, but this term is too limited to cover the phenomenon in all its vast variety.

The roots of the DIY movement go back to the magazines Popular Mechanics(1902) and Mechanix Illustrated (1928), popular education publications meant for readers in small towns and the countryside who needed to be self-reliant and repair broken manufactured items rather than buying new ones. The late 1960s saw the emergence of movements motivated by environmental concerns and a distrust of consumer society. Many people—like some student co-op members, hippies in North America and punks in Europe—wanted to share resources. Stewart Brand's famous Whole Earth Catalogue, subtitled "Access to tools", launched in 1968, constitutes our contemporary reference.

This issue is appearing in parallel with the solo exhibition retracing the career of Gilles de Brock, whose production is deeply infused with the DIY spirit. Yet his practice can't be reduced to the things he has actually made. It is part of the kind of knowledge-sharing economy proclaimed in Brand's counter-culture manifesto, able to go even further today thanks to the participatory and interactive Web 2.0.

Texts by Pao Lien Djie, Maya Ober, Nina Paim, Anthony Masure, Guillaume Helleu, Tereza Bettinardi, Jean-Michel Géridan.

Cover of BRICKS FROM THE KILN #5

Bricks from the Kiln

BRICKS FROM THE KILN #5

Andrew Walsh‐Lister, Matthew Stuart

Periodicals €20.00

Bricks from the Kiln is a semi-yearly journal and multifarious publishing platform established in mid-2015 to support critically minded and explorative writing on and around art, design and literature. Edited by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister, the forthcoming issue, number five, begins with a single sentence:

blankets topologies in glistening snow and blood — produces instructional spattering, again and again — coughs up clotted network diagram hairballs of illegibility — parasitically draws on / from Thomas Browne’s quincunx — meets for The Big ROAR tomorrow, yesterday — lifts loud cows off the page, aloud — flips the coin of language, heads or tails? — politely speaks on writing heard yet seen — twists tongues, transliterates and teases — makes contact with ancestral spirits — traverses the foothills of La Marquesa, past and present — is the Spectre at the feast — (re)traces polymorphous concrete poems — dashes, gestures, speaks, breathes, moves, joyness — is, as ever, tentative, incomplete and inconsistent.

Contributions by Helen Marten, Rebecca May Johnson, Johanna Drucker, Louis Lüthi, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Ursula K. Le Guin, Quinn Latimer, Stefan Themerson, Slavs and Tatars, Ashanti Harris, Catalina Barroso-Luque, Kevin Lotery, Bronac Ferran with Greg Thomas and Astrid Seme with Alex Balgiu.

Cover of Making Something from Some Things: Inventory

Accidental Interest Books

Making Something from Some Things: Inventory

Lizzy Ellbrück

This book is an inventory of Somethings made from Some Things. It includes 108 Somethings observed, arranged and embedded in a narrative and explores the potential of the domestic as a creative negotiation.

It draws (1) On, (2) How, (3) She*, (4) Sets: 
(1) on the agency of Making Something
(2) on she* as conviviality and her* body, 
(3) on How Somethings Work, or the beautiful choreography of a spider building a web by Ines Cox and
(4) the plot as a place.

Words are used like Some Things. They struggle with language, juggle semiotics. Each Something tells a story of its materialisation and idealisation, its genealogy, provenance, and on the complexity of labour. 
A third voice engages with the aesthetics of Somethings. Anton Stuckardt therefore enters Somethings within a literary meandering.
The inventory further reflects on the order of things and draws five different variables  of order within the linearity of a book. 

This book is designed by Lukas Marstaller and published by AIB.  
It appears on the occasion of Lizzy Ellbrück’s exhibition Making Something from Some Things, sited at the ZKM Pavilion, the Badischer Kunstverein and on these 192 offset printed pages.

Cover of All horses are the same colour

Estonian Academy of Arts / EKA GD MA

All horses are the same colour

Lieven Lahaye

Design €12.00

Parts make up a body, the ringing of bells directs attention, the toilet brushes from KFC collect cultural residue, a series of gaps create the possibility of an alternate reality, avatars lead lives otherwise impossible, the signs at a market form a typeface, excavations reanimate the ghost and a pile of rocks becomes a portal to understanding. [publisher's note]

Authors: Carlo Canún, Rita Davis, Mark Foss, Michael Fowler, Oliver Long, Alexandra Margetic, Gréta Þorkelsdóttir, Patrick Zavadskis

Cover of Borrowing Positions. Role-Playing Design & Architecture. BOOTLEG

Lugemik

Borrowing Positions. Role-Playing Design & Architecture. BOOTLEG

Ott Kagovere, Kaisa Karvinen and 1 more

Design €17.50

A speculative book reflecting on design and architecture centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Play) organised by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book aims to approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

Texts by Ana Yin Aiwen, Teo Ala-Ruona, Michael A. Fowler, Ott Kagovere, Kaisa Karvinen, Tommi Vasko.

Cover of MsHeresies 4 — Daffodils

Rietlanden Women's Office

MsHeresies 4 — Daffodils

Elisabeth Rafstedt, Johanna Ehde

Periodicals €10.00

This fourth issue of MsHeresies republishes the chapter *Daffodils* — a warped monologue about a domestic poisoning — from Rosalind Belben’s book Is Beauty Good (1989).

It is typeset alongside a collage of material from two medieval manuscripts: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae and De natura rerum (circa 1130–74), which was illuminated and transcribed by a group of eight nuns at the Benedictine abbey of Munsterbilzen in Maastricht; and the so called Claricia Psalter (late 12th–early 13th century) from the abbey of saints Ulrich and Afra in Augsberg, also made by a group of nuns and named after the novice Claricia who is believed to have drawn herself hanging like the tail of a drop-cap Q in the psalter section of the book.

Cover of Dear Friend Catalogue 2019-2022

Lugemik

Dear Friend Catalogue 2019-2022

Ott Kagovere, Sandra Nuut

Periodicals €20.00

Dear Friend is a monthly letter format publication covering design events, issues, and ideas. This publication distributed via snail mail is initiated by Sandra Nuut and Ott Kagovere.

The publication edited by Sandra Nuut & Ott Kagovere features all the letters from the Dear Friend publishing project, which they initiated at the Graphic Design Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2018. The book includes contributions by Singapore-based design writer Justin Zhuang, designer and writer Else Lagerspetz, and artist Lieven Lahaye. The book is designed by Ott Kagovere and published by Lugemik and Estonian Academy of Arts.

Texts by Justin Zhuang, Lieven Lahaye, Else Lagerspetz

Letters written by Alicia Ajayi, Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, Claudia Doms, Nell Donkers, Maarin Ektermann, Rosen Eveleigh, Maryam Fanni, Saara Hannus, Eik Hermann, Paul John, Maria Juur, Ott Kagovere, Maarja Kangro, Arja Karhumaa, Kristina Ketola Bore, Nicole Killian, Rachel Kinbar, Tuomas Kortteinen, Keiu Krikmann, Kadri Laas, Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye, James Langdon, Jungmyung Lee, Kai Lobjakas, Michelle Millar Fisher, Maria Muuk, Sheere Ng, Sandra Nuut, Laura Pappa, Jack Self, Indrek Sirkel, Paul Soulellis, Triin Tamm, Laura Toots, Alice Twemlow, Loore Viires, Sean Yendrys, Justin Zhuang

Cover of Immutable: Designing History

Onomatopee

Immutable: Designing History

Chris Lee

Design €22.00

Immutable: Designing History explores the banal genre of the document and its entanglement with statecraft and colonial(ism/ity). This is framed as a ~5,000 year chronology, imbricating the developments of money and writing — from Mesopotamian clay tablets to distributed ledgers, like the blockchain. Immutability figures as a design imperative and hermeneutic for considering a variety of techniques (material, technological, administrative, etc.) of securitization against the entropy of a document's movement through space/time, and the political.

This project is driven by a contrast: design educators tend to teach forms like logos, books, websites, etc., but not passports, money, property deeds, etc., in spite of these being, I contend, design's most profoundly consequential forms.

As an alternative historiography, Immutable gestures both towards anthropologist Laura Nader's call to "study up" (on those in power), and the radical educator Paolo Freire's recognition of the "limit situation" as a generative condition for emancipatory praxis. The book's aim is to orient graphic design towards the vocation of imagining, naming, and remembering beyond the horizons of its role as a managerial, administrative, and colonial instrument that imposes a rationality of vision and accountability upon what is knowable, thinkable and sayable.

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a graduate of OCADU and the Sandberg Instituut. His research/studio practice explores graphic design's entanglement with capitalism and colonialism/ity through the banal genre of the document. He is also currently developing a typographical project that narrates the oscillating status of Asians between the "model minority" and "yellow peril" as a function of the consolidation of Euro-American settler identity. Chris is an Assistant Professor in the Undergraduate Communications Design Department at the Pratt Institute.

Cover of Making Matters: A Vocabulary for Collective Arts

Valiz

Making Matters: A Vocabulary for Collective Arts

Florian Cramer, Janneke Wesseling

Ecology €22.50

The world today faces overwhelming ecological and social problems and the concern for material existence on earth is more pressing than ever. Making Matters spells out various roles that visual artists and designers play facing these issues. Collective action is necessary and inevitable.

Collective action often changes the artist’s identity and working habits: from individuality and autonomy to collectivity and collaboration, both locally and globally. These developments have given rise to new kinds of collective art and design practices: artists work together with non-artists, make products for their local environment and take on multiple identities, such as researcher, community activist, computer hacker or business consultant. 

Making Matters looks at art practices across all continents that do not conform to a Western concept of art nor to traditional distinctions between art, design, research and activism—where the boundaries between art, design, research and activism become blurred or are dissolved.

The entries in this vocabulary experiment with concepts and keywords of current art practices that may no longer be recognizable as art.

Editorial committee: Florian Cramer, Anja Groten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Marie-José Sondeijker, Janneke Wesseling

Contributors:  Aliens in Green, a.pass / Lilia Mestre, Florian Cramer, Display Distribute / Elaine W. Ho, Feral Atlas / Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou Anja Groten, Thalia Hoffman, Jatiwangi art Factory / Bunga Siagian & Ismal Muntaha, Eleni Kamma, Frans-Willem Korsten, Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Pia Louwerens, Dani Ploeger, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Olu Taiwo, Janneke Wesseling, West / Baruch Gottlieb, West / Akiem Helmling, Z. Blace

Cover of Cyberfeminism Index

Inventory Press

Cyberfeminism Index

Mindy Seu

Design €40.00

Hackers, scholars, artists and activists of all regions, races and sexual orientations consider how humans might reconstruct themselves by way of technology.

When learning about internet history, we are taught to focus on engineering, the military-industrial complex and the grandfathers who created the architecture and protocol, but the internet is not only a network of cables, servers and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.

The creation and use of the Cyberfeminism Index is a social and political act. It takes the name cyberfeminism as an umbrella, complicates it and pushes it into plain sight. Edited by designer, professor and researcher Mindy Seu (who began the project during a fellowship at the Harvard Law School's Berkman Klein Center for the Internet & Society, later presenting it at the New Museum), it includes more than 1,000 short entries of radical techno-critical activism in a variety of media, including excerpts from academic articles and scholarly texts; descriptions of hackerspaces, digital rights activist groups, bio-hacktivism; and depictions of feminist net art and new media art.

Contributors include: Skawennati, Charlotte Web, Melanie Hoff, Constanza Pina, Melissa Aguilar, Cornelia Sollfrank, Paola Ricaurte Quijano, Mary Maggic, Neema Githere, Helen Hester, Annie Goh, VNS Matrix, Klau Chinche / Klau Kinky and Irina Aristarkhova.