a few zines

zines, liberated

A Few Zines was the first show at Studio-X New York and it was included in the new "The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation," (GSAPP Books, 2010). It's a beautiful book edited by the fabulous Gavin Browning and designed by MTWTF.

At the launch event in October at Storefront for Art and Architecture, I performed Maxium Maxim, a riff on the aphorism collections that go hand in hand with the invention of printing. 

The cabaret was a performative and multi-media book launch for "The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation" (GSAPP Books, 2010), edited by Gavin Browning, at Storefront for Art and Architecture (97 Kenmare Street, NYC).

In this cabaret:

DAVID BENJAMIN will telecommunicate,
GAVIN BROWNING will tell a story,
CRAIG BUCKLEY will surprise,
MTWTF will publish,
MICHELLE FORNABAI will paint,
EVA FRANCH will emcee,
LARISSA HARRIS & DAMON RICH will conspire,
MITCHELL JOACHIM & IOANNA THEOCHAROPOULOU will narrate,
JANETTE KIM will count,
MITCH McEWEN will rap,
DANIEL PERLIN will make noise,
SARAH WILLIAMS will visualize,
MIMI ZEIGER will formulate,
and MARK WIGLEY will wrap things up.

blue lobsters

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.

lackluster: future shack

In anticipation of A Few Zines, Amy Balkin sent over a story intended for the never-published fourth issue of her and James Harbison's zine, Lackluster.

I was happy to save the interview with Phil Patiris from the proverbial dustbin:

In this 1996 interview, Phil Patiris speaks to James Harbison, co-author of the zine Lackluster, about what the artist himself describes as, “the world's longest work in progress…Future Shack.” Future Shack is a video whose epicenter is the Biosphere 2 project. Biosphere 2 is a structure that was built in Oracle, Arizona in the late 1980s to house a closed ecological system and serve as a prototype for space colony habitation. 

Future Shack progresses to expostulate on the information age, the rise of the information class, and how the Biosphere can be extrapolated right into people's homes. Patiris is a pioneer of one of San Francisco’s foremost time-based art meccas, Artists’ Television Access. He is also the creator of the video work, “The Iraq Campaign: A Television History in Color” (1991), made during the first Gulf War.

Future Shack

Phil Patiris:  Anyone who's been raised on Star Trek and the Space Program has encountered the idea of colonizing space, and the Biosphere 2 project is an attempt to experimentally determine whether people can live for extended periods of time in a completely sealed environment.  The purpose of the Biosphere project is to build such an environment here on earth and then to put people inside for an extended length of time - the first crew was in for two years - to see if they could manage a small ecosystem. 

The project is a definite brainchild of the 1970s and ‘80s. By the late ‘80s financing for such a project was obtained from Ed Bass, one of the Bass brothers. The Bass brothers, by the way, are major shareholders in the Disney Company. Ed Bass kicked in $150 million, and they built this large, glass greenhouse that they called Biosphere 2.  Biosphere 1of course being the earth; and Biosphere 2 is the replica of the earth.  And they built it in the Arizona desert near Tucson.

My interest beyond the general interest in space fantasy and colonization comes from the fact that I had a few friends who worked on a promotional video for the Biosphere while it was still being built.  One of them actually was the stepson of somebody who worked at the University of Phoenix, which was involved in the educational aspects of the Biosphere Project, so there was a little "in" there. He happened to be a video producer and he and a couple other people went down to the Biosphere and got to roam around with their video equipment for several weeks, taping the inside of the unfinished Biosphere.  Not many people got inside the place.  So that was fascinating.

And what made it even more fascinating was that the main person on this (video) project, who was a devotee of the Biosphere and all that it represented, once he got in there, began to find out that all was not right in the Bio-world. He got discouraged, and so he pulled out of the video project after having collected about $103,000 already. And they took him to court.  They didn't just sue him for breach of contract; they sued him with criminal racketeering charges. They basically threw the book at him.  He was drawn into it of course, and my two other friends were drawn into it, and I got a real taste for how nasty the supposed progressives of the Biosphere can get when it comes down to legal and money matters and the preservation of their well-crafted image.

James Harbison:  Well, do you think the investors were so nasty because it wasn't a very sound investment?

PP:  They were nasty because, like most true believers, they don't have a sense of humor. They take themselves way too seriously, and couldn’t handle any kind of criticism whatsoever.

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