Archive of Floating Things

Between Danube kilometre 1902 (Orth / Donau, Austria) and 0 (Sulina, Romania), all kind of flotsam is being fished out of the Danube with a landing net, measured and documented. The artist tries different approaches on how to “read” all the collected materials and she invites the viewers to discover. Besides the tangible aspects, she also touches on questions of the creation of value, of permanence and durability, and the paradox of holding on to something ephemeral.
2023, self-published, multi-part publication, riso & digital print, flexible edition of 100.
Supported by MS-FUSION A.I.R., Federal Ministry Republic of Austria, Culture Moves Europe Mobility Fund and a lot of individuals.

The Epoch of Other Things

The exhibition catalogue of “Chronicle of the Other Object” is a monograph of the Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Yu’s works, which originated from his solo exhibition at TKG+ in 2022 and focuses on his recent creative methods. Responding to the exhibition’s theme of “Material and Time” and the openness of interpreting “other objects,” the visual design leans towards a template of technological objects from the last century (such as disks and electronic materials), and a column-shaped object that symbolizes the collision of analog signals with material time. Through this sense of unknown void, the book expresses a mixed state of assembly of time and unknown technological objects.

Ben Cain: Resistance/Persistence

The things in this book—mostly cardboard, found things, written things—are not made for galleries and museums. They were produced for small-scale events held on streets, squares or at social centres, and typically they have a very short life expectancy.
Ben Cain’s book focuses on art as an activity that might be unannounced, might be clandestine, might be private, and nevertheless takes place in shared spaces—and it wants to generate and participate in public debate.

Yulia Bas – Fragments of self perception

Yulia Bas’ powerful portraits reflect transformation, development and the beauty of imperfection.

Layout principles were largely inspired by the work: Like most of her artwork, it also employs very narrow margins (from image subject to canvas edge) and edge-dropping images to create an image effect without frames.
The book as a view behind the artwork: the endpaper and the structure of the cover are linen-like, the inside of the book is gray-beige, as is the case with your canvases. The text blocks work with a system of different indents, on the one hand to structure the text, but also to pick up the fragment effect.

Vijai Maia Patchineelam: The artist’s job description

“The artist’s experience of being inside art institutions, starting from the effort made to be accepted in order to develop one’s art practice, then the experience of going through them, and while in them, the many ways of having to learn how to be inside. This will in several ways inform the development of an artist’s practice, for the good or for the bad. Making this publication has been an attempt at recognizing and dealing with, rather than avoiding, the tensions that exist in the relationship between artists and art institutions at a time when most art institutions themselves are under the pressure of austerity-politics.”

Behind the screens

When creating a font, the letters go through various shapes before they get their final look. On the way from sketch to the letter, many variations must be dismissed. Designers end up learning that an overall project cohesion may take precedence over one solution and it’s own quality. However, on that path, new ideas are born. Each passing phase contributes to the process and represents a step closer to the goal. This book is a way to preserve these forms and give them a new purpose. Rejected letters and shapes now become artistic elements and build compositions that communicate on an aesthetic level, but also provide an insight into details that change during the creation of Yaud typeface.

Where are you from? From the Danube?

What if I become part of the river? What if the land passes by – trees, cities, industrial areas, stretches of land, islands, history? What if I am between the banks, floating on the border? The publication “Where are you from? From the Danube?” shows views of the riverbanks, photographed from the shipping channel of the Danube, which come together to form a long, diverse, and yet continual line, that has no defined beginning.
2023, self-published, 56 pages, 13×18,5 cm, riso-printed, spiral binding, edition of 42.
Supported by MS-FUSION A.I.R., Federal Ministry Republic of Austria, Culture Moves Europe Mobility Fund, County of Upper Austria.

The Restoration of Our Time

The book “The Restoration of Our Time” presents “restoration-restart” state in a hardcover format with bare back. The cover extends from the front to the back and the spine, and the crack symbolizing the flaws in the artwork is imprinted with embossed silver on the outer cover. The first chapter of the book, “Pursuing an Ideal Era,” focuses on the research and discussion of the works of seven senior artists, accompanied by images of the artworks. The second chapter, “Restoring Memories,” compares the “before-after” restoration works and uses mapping on tracing paper to analyze the different erosion phenomena of each artwork explain the details of how to restore them to their current state.

Dapim Tzehubim – Shimon Tzabar Artist Book

An artist book design uniting two works by Israeli artist and political activist Shimon Tzabar. The visual sections are the three editions of Tzabar’s fanzine Dapim Zehubim (‘yellow pages’), exploring war and anarchy in 1960s Jerusalem, visually reference ANARCHY magazine and include contributions from renowned Israeli poets and artists. Accompanying these visuals are four chapters of Tzabar’s philosophical work “The White Flag Principle; How to Lose a War and Why,” penned during his political self-exile in London after Israel’s Six-Day War. These works, created at different times, complete each other and reveal Tzabar’s worldview.

Art Histories of a Forever War: Modernism between Space and Home

The book design reform artist Wang Dahong’s work “moon gate”. The representative work fusion the Chinese and Western modernism’s, bring out the imagination of cosmic space consciousness. The inner pages are design in two-ways, Chinese and English. In order to restore the exhibition venue and bring the intertextual dialogue between Asia and the West, modern and contemporary.

But Beautiful—A Book About Jazz

Geoff Deyer recounts the lives of eight brilliant jazz musicians and their fallible, neurotic sides in But Beautiful – A Book About Jazz. In chapters, Deyer tells stories of Young, Monk, Powell, Mingus, Webster, Baker, Pepper, Ellington and Carney. Within each chapter, individual anecdotes are strung like pearls. The experimental book design explores their lives as a leporello. This form underlines the structure of the book by giving each artist his own space. Just as the passion for music unites all of them, all sections of the book are connected by a purple ribbon. The 209 pages, set in Futura, shine in five different colours of foil on the dark aubergine soft cover.

Realities of Ignorance

The visual point for the exhibition “Unconsciousness” lies in the layered extraction of certain magnificent and mystical color tones from the paintings of the three artists. with the use of translucent golden paper and white elastic threads, responding to the exhibition’s theme of “a state of consciousness still in chaos, lacking awareness and understanding”. This design aims to convey a sense of accessory and an unconventional book structure that blurs the line between the book jacket and cover, yet still maintains a sense of opening and closing. 

Matter & Meaning

Matter & Meaning — A Research On Text And Textile Towards Alternative Fashion Perspectives.

Text has not only an etymological connection to Textile, but also a metaphorical one. The publication Matter & Meaning explores the relationships between the textual and the textile. The four parts of the book form the fabric for four self-made garments. Part A,B,C and D materialise into a top, sleeves, trousers and skirt. The book is thus brought into the space performatively and ultimately led back into the book. The common thread of the book is constructed by highlighted keywords that link the texts. The interconnectedness creates a dynamic fabric that generates new meanings.

Out of Line – A Visual Script

«Out of Line» functions as notation for mediation as well as documentation of movement. It began as an experiment and lead to a performance whose central component is walking.
Through the binding type and the horizontal structure of the sequences, different possibilities of application of the script arise. Individual scenes can be navigated side by side, one can quickly get an overview of an entire scene, as well as get an overview of transitions between scenes by just opening the leporello in different ways. Format and binding allow a comfortable handling in a rehearsal context and through the reduced visual language an intuitive access and efficient decoding in said context are ensured.

C-LAB CREATORS 2018-2020

As a record of the three-year creation achievements in Taiwan’s
Contemporary Cultural Experiment Lab (C-LAB), We take “scale” as the
conceptual framework, turns this publication into a dictionary format
and use the book side to bring the image of index. The exposed Spine
Case Bound assemble the book title. The cover and inner page with line
segments and frosted oil print, make the scale touchable. Bring in the
silver materials present the experimental imagery.

Non-Faces Faces

This publication collects images that were accidentally included within MegaFace — a dataset with 1,000,000 images of faces used to evaluate the performance of facial recognition algorithms. MegaFace was built with a combination of imprecise computational and human processes resulting in images being added that are not actual photos of people— including depictions of faces as paintings, illustrations, and statues as well as images of nature and various objects. This book organizes a selection of the non-faces images into new categories and illustrates the tendency of both humans and machines to mistakenly perceive patterns between unrelated things.

Collaboration with Federico Pérez Villoro

C-LAB Future Media Arts Festival

This design started off with the concept of “Future Archives”. By de-constructing and reforming the main visual on a blue PVC material, we presented the sense of futurism. We purposely vague the boundaries between “cover” and “inner page” in responding to the artistic imagine carried by the book itself. We tried to reflect the experimental part of the exhibition by leading the readers to flip through the pages, hoping them could enter a new context of exhibition.

2017-05-09, 06:20, 535218 or 29535218

The project focuses on a form of steganography embedded in most commercial printers. In addition to the intended content, many printers also print encoded metadata as a pattern of matrices of small yellow dots imperceptible to the naked eye. This technology has been used for years at the request of the US government as a way to combat counterfeiting. However there are no regulations around it nor wide knowledge of its uses — becoming a threat to free speech, anonymity and privacy. The project is a guide to decoding the yellow dot pattern, and graphic tests to interact with a special blue light made for the publication.

In collaboration with Federico Pérez Villoro, and Siyao Zhu

The Ark Museum

The book of The Ark Museum is designed based on the concept of ancient European museum books, in response to artist Tu Wei-Cheng’s focus on the idea of “self-systematization” in his artwork. Its layout imitates and incorporates the style of old civilization books, resembling classic literature with its large hardcover binding and rounded spine. It also features deliberately aged antique bronze hardware clasps, enhancing the gesture of “opening” the book, as opposed to simply flipping through it. This design echoes the idea of The Ark as a carrier that saves multiple species from disasters, as well as the diverse and exotic civilizations collected within the book.

Utopia is on the Road

A glimpse into the intersection of modern bicycle technology and Bauhaus mentality: The “Utopia is on the Road” collection by Tecta consists of three specially painted bicycles, created in cooperation with Open cycles, which are accompanied by selected pieces of furniture. Based on the designs of textile artist and Bauhaus teacher Anni Albers, art director Dominik Kirgus developed the frame design. The challenge was to design around differently shaped round tubes with varying radii. The catalogue bundles the collection back onto the surface—showcasing the bikes and furniture in action.

Concept, Layout & Typesetting: Tobias Groß, Tonda Budszus
Photography: Constantin Meyer, Lennart Kramp

Dhanya

The book is the result of the experiment done during the lockdown period of Covid 19. I had read and selected poems written by Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi to write in calligraphic style. Since there was scarcity of materials during lockdown period, I had creatively composed these poems on my old used paper having strokes, background, alphabets etc. after understanding the emotions and reference of the poems. Each composition is unique with various stylization of calligraphy. In this attempt I have considered to connect Gujarati language literature with calligraphy art.