I tackled mutant publishing practices for the latest dizzyingly fab issue of Junk Jet, Flux us, Flux you. (With goggly-eyes, too.) I share the issue with Enrique Ramirez (maggots), Greg J. Smith (suckage), and John Southern (slop), who each turned in terrifically wonky submissions.
I had imagined the Blue Lobsters piece running with full-page images from the publications mentioned, but sadly just the text was run. I think the editors ran out of space. Ah, the confines of print. Below is the text and you'll find my mini zine within a zine here.
Blue Lobsters
Late 90s. Print was probably already dead then. It had taken
too many phone calls to find a cheap offsetter. Indie bookstores feared the big
boxes cutting in on their Thirdspace. Distributors, bowing to shelving and
stocking requirements laid down by the chain store, put limits on the sizes of
independent magazines. (This was around the time Metropolis magazine dropped from full tabloid to its current
shelf-friendly size.)
Still, I was blissed out on the print shop’s Thomas Paine
authenticity. I figured it’d gloss my tracks with a meaning and texture not
found with rapid digital printing. The details: the smell of ink, rich and
bitter like coffee, the Berkeley Co-op apron worn by the grizzled anarchist,
the cranky press he quietly turned, and his punk rock partner’s punctilious
manner. I can’t remember if I printed 500 or 1,000 copies. Some sit in a box in
the basement. On my last visit home I opened it up: A hundred ochre-covered
pamphlets, surprisingly un-yellowed a decade on.
And now? Print is dead, again. As publishing empires
collapse, the market bets on journalism’s odds of survival. Consensus says
books are a lost cause. Are folks ready to cotton to Kindle? Has twitter killed
the blog, the book, and the building? (I ask in a mere 83 characters.)
As go buildings, so go design magazines. This past year saw
shelter and trade titles stumble and fold under the double deadweight of slow
building starts and curtailed ad revenue. A year after Lehman’s collapse,
missing consumer design rag Domino is
like missing cotton candy—a vague remembrance of a cavity-inducing indulgence,
so sweet at the time.
Indeed, I have to stop myself from falling into the vat of
saccharine nostalgia that surrounds the publishing in the grand scheme, architecture
publishing, and my own little niche of zinedom. Staple fold reminiscences, no
matter how open hearted, tend to lead to a single polar standoff: print versus
digital. But dividing publishing into two camps leaves us empty handed. Even
the Gray Lady, the New York Times,
splits her time between the two realms, pacifying those who stand and read the
paper on the subway and those who glean their info online.
Meanwhile a number small architecture and art publications
are sneaking into the space between the two modes. They are dependent on both
mediums. They rely on social networks and digital technologies for form and
content, but ultimately these wee volumes find their way into readers’ hands.
For Gary Fogelson, Phil Lubliner and Soner Ön, the Brooklyn-based trio who
makes up The Holster, publishing is performative. It calls attention to the act
of making, even if that act is really just stapling some laser printed sheets.
The collective commissioned sixteen artist to create PDFs, then set up their print-on-demand imprint, Demand & Supply, at
zine expos and book fairs. Armed
with laptop and printer, they publish in real time, straddling the
gap between intimacy and automation.
Ephemera obsessions are de rigueur within certain circles of
the contemporary art world. In 2001, the darling Hamburger Eyes established DIY publishing as the go-to format for
photogs wanting to capture the grit of everyday life. And galleries/retailers
like New York City’s Printer Matter and LA newcomer Ooga Booga curate short run
editions into a kind of artistic lifestyle. That architecture should eventually
re-embrace self-publishing after years of the book-versus-blog discourse is
welcome, if not entirely unsurprising. The discipline is known to be a bit
tardy.
Within the field of architecture and ubiquitous computing
the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series
was relatively early adopter print-on-demand services, even as design students
had been using the technology for one-off books for awhile. The publication is
the outcome of a discussion on the Institute for Distributed Creativity (iDC)
mailing list, which then grew into a 2006 symposium at Urban Center and Eyebeam
in New York. Unlike the Supply & Demand series, it uses the mainstream online publisher
lulu.com as its printer and distributor. PDFs are available for free on the
Situated Technologies website, making the decision to read online or in hard
copy a personal choice.
I am tempted to call these new
publications “zombies,” following Todd Gannon’s assessment (Log, Fall 2008) of Archigram and other sixties
practitioners unbuilt work that persists in its influence after facing a
critical death. Especially since that groups’ publications provide the
emotional, if not intellectual or formal, underpinning of today’s self-publishing
efforts. Or as he puts it in the essay, “Return of the Living Dead: Archigram
and Architecture’s Monstrous Media:” “In nine and one-half eponymous pamphlets
released from 1961 to 1974, Archigram took advantage of the highly
reconfigurable space of the printed page to manipulate forms, juxtapose
elements, and orchestrate architectural experiments impossible in other media.”
But given that
experiments in other media could now be taken to define much of architectural
practice, I prefer to call these half-breeds “mutants.” Living between paper
and screen, mutants are part of publishing’s evolution, even if a specific
characteristic proves too unwieldy to pass on to the next generation. Some mutations are sneaky. As is the loud
paper broadsheet, published as half
issue, half catalogue for the “A Few Zines” show that opened at Studio-X in
January 2009. Designer Chris Grimley used the column width of a blog post to
organize the page. Without being explicit, the broadsheet triggers digital
references.
An
iPhone is the mutant appendage needed to read Standpunkte One. Aptly entitled This Will _ This, the first issue features a single essay by John Harwood and Jesse
LeCavalier who conceived the pamphlet with graphic designer Guillaume Mojon. (Standpunkte Magazine itself is out of Basel, Switzerland and edited by
Reto Geiser and Tilo Richter.) A shiny black cipher, the publication is full of
totemic black and white graphics. Yet, a 2D bar code reader app brings the
pamphlet to life. Encryption is at the root of this first issue. A scan of the
cover graphics takes you to www.thiswill-this.net.
Where the editorial statement reads: "You will not to be able to read
this, at least not all of it. This is fine with us." By placing the phone
a filter between the web and the printed page, This Will _ This, frustrates the act of reading, but still maintains
the need for a book object. It explores, as the editors write, "the
thresholds and overlaps between material and immaterial media.”
It
is impossible to state that mutant publishing will bring traditional print
media back from death’s door. That economic model needs to independently
reassemble its DNA. (Then again, it may reanimate quicker than we think. Tina
Brown’s online Daily Beast just announced that it is teaming up with Perseus
Books Group to create rapid-print paperbacks.) But these mutants—esoteric
pamphlets operating at the riff of “material and immaterial media”—show dynamic
signs of life and happily elude any nostalgic impulse.