loud paper

tackling tactics

via Center for Tactical Magic

This week I hosted a Glass House Conversation, asking: "What tactics have emerged in architecture and design since the financial crisis? What’s the operational mode of the bust, or how do we work now?"

The answers were varied, personal, and for the most part went beyond the standard cliches of architectural practice. By looking at the tactical side of recessionary practice, the conversation re-evaluated the vocabulary architects and designers use to explain what they do. I was surprised at the acknowledgment of the messy issues of interdisciplinary practice and, even thought the term "expanded architect" is a bit overkill at moment, the variety of roles designers are taking on—entrepreneur, cultural capitalist, publisher, NGO— and the kinds of projects, small and large, they're tackling.

I was also surprised that at a point in history where cynicism would be forgiven, the answers were forward thinking, not nihilistic. Bryan Boyer wrote: "I look to skills such as negotiation, translation, and optimism as survival tactics in the post-2008 era. I’m taking tactics to mean skills or maneuvers that can be developed through practice. Even optimism needs to be practiced every now and then."

The question is one I lifted from the first Interventionist Toolkit piece over at Places Journal. And I'll be presenting the Interventionist Toolkit research to the Right to the City symposium in Sydney at the end of next week as part of a panel entitled "Tactics for DIY Cities." And the question from above plays a role as I look at how recessionary-era work employs tactics of DIY and arts activism to create urban change. I’m also very excited to share the panel with artist Marjetica Potrč. I can’t wait to hear more about her current projects that blend art installations with social justice and infrastructural thinking.
 
Finally, the second in my series is online: The Interventionist's Toolkit: Posters, Pamphlets and Guides. It highlights some great work from The Hypothetical Development Organization, Candy Chang, Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (everyone should download A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible), the Center For Urban Pedagogy's Making Policy Public series, Studio X and Gavin Browning, and The Center for Tactical Magic, among others.

Here's a snippet:

...Or consider A User’s Guide to (Demanding) the Impossible, published by the arts group Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination to correspond with the Long Weekend, an action organized by Arts Against Cuts and held at Goldsmiths college in London in early December 2010. The event was held to protest Prime Minister David Cameron’s reduction of government funding for British higher education, a spending cut of nearly 40 percent that targeted arts, humanities and social sciences while protecting the budgets of science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs. Held just days before a major MP vote, the 48-hour event offered a series of resistance workshops. The downloadable user’s guide presented a history of art activist strategies. Included were interventionist examples such as The Tactical Ice Cream Unit; created by The Center for Tactical Magic, the TICU is an ice cream van that not only serves up scoops but also distributes radical literature to local communities and acts as a grassroots mobile communications hub. Another project profiled in the guide is the mid-1960s project, The Free Store; created in the mid-1960s by the Diggers (a group of San Francisco artists and actors, and later called the Free City Collective), the Free Store used tactics that we now see as familiar: it occupied an abandoned storefront, and inside, it distributed goods, food and health services for free or exchange. Recognizing the incendiary nature of the pamphlet, User's Guide authors Gavin Grindon and John Jordan write: "This guide is not a road map or instruction manual. It's a match struck in the dark, a homemade multi-tool to help you carve out your own path through the ruins of the present, warmed by the stories and strategies of those who took Bertolt Brecht’s words to heart: 'Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.'"

Read more here.

maximum maxim

"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Now books are written by the public and read by nobody." –Oscar Wilde

 

The popularity of the aphorism, a short, memorable, often pithy statement, goes hand in hand with the invention of printing. Throughout the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, aphorisms and maxims were published globally in thick, bound collections. Although print remains precarious in a digital age, the aphoristic statement lives on.

For last night's Book Launch Cabaret at Storefront for Art and Architecture to celebrate Studio-X's newest release, The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation (GSAPP Books, 2010), edited by Gavin Browning, I presented Maximum Maxim MMX a zine, in slideshow form, maximized with maxims germane to architecture and publishing.

Here's a slideshow.

I hadn't intended on selling copies, but there was such an interest, that I've decided to run an edition.

Order your copy here:

life is a cabaret, old chum

I'm excited to participate in the Book Launch Cabaret at Storefront this Friday, October 8 at 7pm. A Few Zines was the first show at Studio-X New York and it included in the new "The Studio-X NY Guide to Liberating New Forms of Conversation." (A beautiful book edited by the fabulous Gavin Browning and designed by MTWTF.)

I'll be performing Maxium Maxim, a riff on the aphorism collections that go hand in hand with the invention of printing. 

More details:

BOOK LAUNCH CABARET!

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.

Sponsored by Columbia GSAPP, IZZE Sparkling Juice, KPFF Consulting Engineers, Original Sin Hard Cider and Storefront for Art and Architecture.

zines reign in spain

I'm excited to announce that loud paper and a number of "A Few Zines" alumni will be included in the show 'De Zines.' Curators Óscar Martin and Roberto Vidal (who are also inspired artists and designers) have brought together nearly 400(!) independent titles—I'm happy to see loud paper, Face B, Thumb Projects,  Standpunkte, and Mas Context share shelf space with Cabinet, Fantastic Man, Temporary Services and other pubs that span the editorial range from food to art to design and back again.

If you are in Madrid this summer, make sure to stop by the gallery.

Inéditos 2010
La Casa Encendida
29 June to 29 August 2010

Just leave enough time to read your way through this amazing collection of independent publishing—the show celebrates a form that manages to thrive in a dicey economic environment by skirting any easy definitions or making polarities between content and form, print and digital. 

‘De Zines’, tries to reflect what is happening in the contemporary editorial creation on the level of independent publications, how this area relates to the artistic production and social, cultural and current political environment. Around 400 international publications have been gathered from most established magazines in the market until handmade zines and a selection of experimental magazines.
In times of constant technological revolution and immediate access to information through the network, paper, as a media for the dissemination of culture and information seems destined to disappear. However, the number of independent publications do not stop growing. In fact, different forms of communication, digital and analogue can coexist. It’s about different ways, uses and times ranging between the immediacy of digital and the traditional way of disseminating and consuming cultural creation and art. Its contents tend to be more timeless and invite paused reflection. Beautiful design and text written with loving care in a continuous search for seamless integration between content and form. In general, they are still spaces for dissemination, review and reflection on cultural production. Objects themselves, everlasting, pages of printed paper that can be touched with the fingers, means of underground cultural expression. In the case of experimental magazines involves a different way to approach to these publications, full of visual impact, subject to different interpretations, inexhaustible source of emotions and feelings. They already have a notable presence in art fairs, specialized bookstores and museum shops.

These editorial projects, heirs of the phenomenon do it yourself culture derived from punk and art movements such as Dadaism, Surrealism and Fluxus, are living a resurgence. Some have remained fairly true to those principles, others have grown in distribution,  budget and number of prints. They all share an independent spirit in addressing issues like music, film, fashion, design, art, philosophy, economics, literature, photography ... or closer personal projects to more people. In fact, they are a response to dominant culture, with a clear activist attitude, trying to spread other ways to understand their relations with society and even with oneself. Independent publications may be the future of print media. In fact they get a significant speed in the dissemination of current culture with a democratic way to create and share images, ideas and information. Pages filled with an impeccable editorial design, a media for freedom of expression of the obsessions and passions their creators want to communicate, have a voice.

’De Zines’, articulated as a consultation room, a space that does not only creates traffic but a place to stay, increasing the desire to know, trying to help the audience to find a  those issues so that a sense of recognition. In short, create networks among people with a similar vision in a global and plural world.

in junk veritas

Please join VAMOS Architects, LGNLGN, and Junk Jet magazine for the U.S. launch of the Junk Jet n°3 flux-us! flux-you! issue. To celebrate, Junk Jet and Vamos Architects will each create a dynamic installation, Jetistics: The Analysis of Junk and I Know You.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Festivities begin at 6:30 and we'll be there until 10 pm.

RSVP over at the Facebook event page.

Drinks sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery and Original Sin Hard Cider.

VAMOS Architects Storefront
100 N 3rd Street (Between Berry and Wythe)
Brooklyn, NY 11211
Subway: L, Bedford stop

 
JETISTICS: THE ANALYSIS OF JUNK.
THE JUNK OF ANALYSIS?
 
After three years of publishing the experimental magazine Junk Jet, it is time for a serious analysis of junk. Therefore, Jetistics reports revealing details and secrets of world’s most important periodical publications dealing with junk data. As evidence, the presentation tracks and compares changes over time, showing overall trends and local details, analyzing patterns and breaks of junk.
 
For the storefront of VAMOS Architects, Jetistics builds, in neo-neo-classicist style, a monumental micro-architecture, or an architectural micro-monument.
 

What you see is what you jet: junk data, statistical landscapes, golden rate graphs, bumps charts, purchase waves, classical façade, trend analysis, random walks, empirical measurements, data paths, dot-dash plots.

I KNOW YOU
In the spirit of engagement, VAMOS Architects will create I Know You, a physical diagram of a social network. With help from residents, businesses, and visitors on the block, the project will emerge throughout the course of the day.
 
VAMOS Architects is a sociologically-driven design firm led by Evan Bennett and Silvia Fuster. Collaborators and clients include Macro Sea, DBI, Calvin Klein, DvF, and Chris Blackwell/Island Outpost.
 

These events coincide with the first annual North Third Block Association’s block party, which celebrates the block’s unique mix of businesses: bookstores, design shops, boutiques, chocolatiers, restaurants and bars.

new city, new additons

A Few Zines hits Chicago on Monday (panel and reception on Friday, April 9) and it seems that each new venue grows the exhibition. This time we have a slew of new publications: David Garcia Studio's two MAPs (Manual of Architectural Possibilities), both Antarctica and Quarantine; Fred Scharmen's Losing My Edge, a lgnlgn-related release; hard copies of the new and prolific MAS Context (I can't believe how good #5 is); and the latest edition of Standpunkte (the German title roughly translates to "How did you do that?" 6 talks about architecture).

To get your hands on copies, come by the show at University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Architecture, Room 3100, 845 West Harrison Street, Chicago.

and then we take chicago

Back in December I met with Iker Gil, the mastermind behind MAS Context (There's a new one out now!). We drank super-fueled Intelligentsia cortados at the Monadnock and cooked up a plan to bring A Few Zines to Chicago. Fast forward to spring, and the show opens at UIC's School of Architecture on April 5 and closes with a top notch panel on April 9.

The closing-night panel, Publishing Futures, includes:

Brendan Crain, The Where Blog

Penelope Dean, University of Illinois, Chicago, Flat Out

Iker Gil, UIC, University of Illinois, Chicago, MAS Context

Marc Fischer, Temporary Services

Jimenez Lai, University of Illinois, Chicago, Bureau Spectacular

Publishing Futures: Content, Context, and Emerging Formats With e-book, tablet, and social media technologies rapidly reshaping the publishing landscape, how new and old formats respond? Publishing Futures observes the changes facing art, architecture, and design publishing—blogs, journals, zines, and magazines—and speculates on future models.

Closing Panel April 9, 2010

Panel Discussion: 6:00 – 7:30 pm

Reception: 8:00 pm ‘til late.

Many thanks to Andrew Clark at Mas Studio for designing a kick-ass poster. His stats come from ASME.

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.

tiny revolutions

Last week, Derek "Deek" Diedricksen sent over his book, Humble Homes, Simple Shacks, Cozy Cottages, Ramshackle Retreats, Funky Forts, and Whatever Else We Could Squeeze in Here! You have to love a volume that comes with its own well-deserved exclamation point.

Deek's book is humble, Xeroxed in black and white with a plastic comb binding. This is no Lulu affair, but it is a great outpouring of passion. In about 100 hand-drawn pages Deek illustrates everything you need to know about building a tiny house. Some fifty projects from The Ultra Wee Tree House to the Hunchback Hovel to The Po' Man's Shower (you can be small and clean), are rendered with the comic book glee of a true zinester.

For me, each page is a mutant love child of my past year, A Few Zines meets Tiny Houses. I never imagined the two could co-exist, but Deek did. For him, a hardcore playing Eagle scout, the link between DIY construction and DIY publishing is seamless. And inspired. Without moaning about the ill winds blowing down both media and housing, Deek tackled his pages with 83 black pens, one after another they gave themselves to his one man revolution.

Deek lives in Stoughthton, MA and is at work on a scrap house (The Gypsy Junker)  in his front yard. You can follow all his doings and buy a copy of Humble Homes at RelaxShax.

into the archives

Many years ago Samuel Miller, a budding web designer, noticing I didn't have a proper web presence, emailed me and offered his services, no strings attached. I jumped at the chance and gave him full license to build the site, even when the first design featured an illustration of a fetus rotating in a wireframe.

Then came the handcrafted version 2.0, which allowed me to easily upload articles into the loud paper database.

Now, he's done it again. Like out of the blue came a beautifully streamlined site—home to the article archives. For which I offer a humble "thank you."

I won't be posting any new material to the loudpapermag.com, but it is your source for those early articles from some of today's stars, who may or may not blush when I make these links. But how can I resist Paranoid Chic, from Eric Howeler, Sam Jacob on Lilliput Lane, or Kazys Varnelis on Teen Urbanism? So many good pieces to choose from, I suggest exploring the dark and often murky depths.