The Library of Nonhuman Books

These publications are all generated by Artificial Intelligence for the Library of Nonhuman Books through a custom-made reading-machine which uses Computer Vision and AI to find short poetic combinations of words on every page of an existing book. The system automatically erases all other words, and searches for an illustration from the Google Image Archive to “illuminate” the page according to the meanings of the resulting poem. The system generates and publishes the book without human intervention. An experiment for our post-literate society, which increasingly defers its reading and writing to nonhuman counterparts.

Book ‘Oceans of the moon’

Encyclopedia meets book design. Discover the fascinating notes of early lunar exploration and explore our natural satellite from a new perspective. Thrilling book design with a symbiosis of historical encyclopedias, fascinating illustrations and content creation with the new tool ‘artificial intelligence’ take the reader to wondrous locations of the moon and offer an immersive experience. With this fictional mind game an artistic narrative of an approach of observation long since disproved by research is formed: Historical interpretation meets scientific elaboration with the methods of a digital world. Without AI, the texting and illustration of the book idea would never have materialized.

Print Wikipedia

Print Wikipedia is a both a visualization of Wikipedia and a poetic gesture toward the challenges of knowing in the age of big data. To create the piece, I wrote software that transforms Wikipedia’s entire English-language database into 7,473 volumes of 700 pages each and then uploads them for print-on-demand. It draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form: by the time a volume is printed, it is already out of date. Print Wikipedia premiered in 2015, and in 2016 I produced a 3406 volume German version, and a 1165 volume Dutch version. https://printwikipedia.com/

The New Gold Standard

The New Gold Standard is the outcome of research exploring methods to view and analyse how the the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are manipulated. The entire book takes the form of a graph, bringing to light the nonsense and greed that dictates its value, whilst allowing these layers of information that would otherwise be lost in a digital format to become more tangible to the reader. The content of the graph dictates the format of the book, whilst its binding using a aluminium bar compliments this by adding a sense of weight. The book is designed using a custom inDesign script to display the graph across each page, with golden images and overlay silkscreened on each page.

A side note

The base of the concept was inspired from the price tags and the side notes that filled the streets of Cairo, they are both used to attract the customers to buy the goods. Therefore, I took this inspiration and dug deep into the amateur designer of these side notes and price tags who inspired me to create the narrative.

The Grocery Shop

Be’alet el Kholasa is a fantasy/unrealistic store where you can find some truths or reality checks about life, whether they please you or not, as products/objects we normally see in everyday life.The zine is produced and bound manually at home, it is designed to be opened into a 3D grocery shop where the illustrations of the products are displayed.

healing colours

I discovered a characteristic of my homeland – the carp pond. I began exploring ponds near my home town; many of them have become wild. I was captivated by the water, fascinated by the colours of the pond. I went for serval years to the same pond of my childhood and photographed through all seasons the underwater light and underwater colours. When in 2022 my parents burned my childhood buildings with a excavator I photographed the former suicide room of my uncle and extreme light came through the window. I realised the light of the underwater photographs is combinded to my childood memories and emotions thats why I went always into the water when I am coming back to my childhood’s ponds.

The straight line, it only exists in imagination.

“Dirt is clean when there is a volume” (gertrude Stein): a clear yet metaphorical statement. As Franzi Bauers DIN A4 publication printed on three different laserprinters in a presumably B/W print on the (non-)existance of the straight line. The collection of manifesto variations, quotes and images questions societal assumptions on norm, borders and knowledge production.
The publication writes on and about the assumption of the existance of straight lines, varries these assumptions, comments them and has them commented. The print publication exists in addition as a performance as well as a print-it-yourself version and blures the relations between digital and haptical gestures.

Animal Behaviour

The book is built for the animated film “Animal Behaviour” by artists Yiying Gao and Shikai Tao. It consists of more than 22 separable magenetic transparent pages and the cover with magnetic spine, in addition the box accompanies as a book packaging and at the same time as a viewing device with a door peephole.

The Metamorphosis Workshop

The metamorphosis workshop creates special reading conditions through the conception of singular works. It is in this sense that these ten variations of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, one of the greatest classics of French literature, were conceived. These editions also represent Andréa’s will to show the formal plurality that the act of publishing enables and moreover underline the importance of the relation between content, support and form. Thus implying that we could reiterate this process with another novel, to generate new heterogeneous forms, with different axes of reading. The books would become a tool for analyzing the book.

LOADED GUNS. Independent magazines and political activism: a classification of approaches and a proposal of design hints for future publishing experiences.

Loaded Guns explores the ways in which some independent social magazines do political activism in the current climate of increasing xenophobia and weakening democracies.
The format was chosen to host large images and to give breath to the texts. The font used for the title and other text elements, with the fine lines of its glyphs, symbolises the many magazines and approaches that pursue the common goal of doing activism. The Swiss binding allows a complete opening of the volume, to facilitate interaction with it and to better access the contents. The images are laid out on black pages, the texts on white pages, generating an alternation that is already visible when the book is closed.

Meantime

Meantime is an independent magazine about the history of Singapore told through personal stories. Each issue presents a unique shape that defies the traditional book format. The third issue comes with a bite taken out of it, while the fourth issue has a slice taken off the bottom so the publication appears to be sinking when put upright.

Art Without Place

A collective project that reflects on the consequences of Covid-19 pandemic on the cultural sector from the perspective of cultural workers: artists, curators, art critics and others. The publication is a result of artistic research initially conveyed in 2020 online by artist Ana Kuzmanić via www.artwithoutplace.com. The publication design and binding reflect the continuous never-ending scroll effect of the webpage. Pages are bound solely with glue, to emphasize temporality.

Recreation

The zine “Recreation” is an exhibition catalogue where each page is a postcard that can be torn off along the perforation. Driven by both budget limitations and immense enthusiasm, we took it upon ourselves to print the zine using a risograph, leading to a series of unexpected choices. For example, the printed pages smudged the backs of other pages, so we had to cover the spots with a golden marble texture around the artwork captions. This added coherence to the zine’s color scheme and paid homage to Soviet architecture.

More than pixels

An editorial and design concept dedicated to raising awareness of the past, present, and future species. The explored visual language reflects typography and image pixelation. I see each pixel as a block from something bigger; the more pixels there are, the clearer the situation becomes. The format portrays connectivity; it represents the stages a species can find itself mainly because of the human impact on the environment. The book sizes are gradually decreasing, forming an ‘arrow’. That is meant to point out that we cannot change the past, but we can look up to it, and learn from the mistakes that were made so we can offer a better present and future for the remaining species.

MADE IN Crafts and Design Narratives

The book is an accompanying artefact of the MADE IN exhibition, which celebrates the relationship between crafts and contemporary design. In terms of content, it assumes the role of an archive, while in terms of form, it is the result of a close collaboration between designers and the printer. This attention to detail is evident in various aspects, such as the soft binding of a large volume, the use of black thread, the functional ribbon, and the screen printing on the text block. The data hierarchy is resolved through careful typographic decisions. The cover, with the repeated iterations of the MADE IN phrase, alludes to the various aspects of anonymous production.

Gülbin Ünlü

My design for the 164-pages book of artist Gülbin Ünlü, published at Hammann von Mier, was developed like sound: playing with beats, dynamics, harmonic flow, rhythmic changes, coexistence meets interruption. Ünlü’s work pushes boundaries, she combines painting, print, photography, video, social media, performance, installation, collaborative actions and music. Sampling, mash-ups and references form echoes as hidden memories and found their way into the book’s structure, layout and typography. The fonts in use – primarily Louche, Agne, Fixture, Alliance – come together as if you place [in]compatible moods alongside: resistant, rotating, lyrical, bohemian, sometimes cramped, even prosaic.

Van de Onderaannemingsovereenkomst

Van de Onderaannemingsovereenkomst, Of Beginselen van Poëtische Recht (2016) is a complete Dutch-langauge edition of my poetry collection about computational capitalism, Of the Subcontract, Or Principles of Poetic Right (2013), the 100 poems in which were written by underpaid workers hired on Amazon’s labour-pooling platform Mechanical Turk.

Van de Onderaannemingsovereenkomst was translated using Google, left uncorrected, then poured back into the design files for the first print edition.

The front cover is a simple photograph of the first print edition, which partially captures a selfie via the mirror card used.

Spanish (2019) and German (2020) translations have since been published.

hybrid publishing systems

This publication is a collection of works that were produced in the course “Hybrid Publishing” at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz, Germany. Besides the different works, it also contains essays, research results and a glossary. The contents of the publication are stored in a mediawiki that is linked to the frontend website. From there the material can be viewed and printed, either selectively or in its entirety as a publication. This hybrid approach enables a collaborative working process and facilitates later additions.

TYPE_BREAK (Analysis of letter fragmentation)

TYPE_BREAK is a collection of typographic experiments, for which an art book was the best solution.
In my works, I research borderline situations between image and letter. In this case I limited my toolbox to the letter “A”. I placed this basic typographic form in a constructive, geometric grid structure, as a visual fragmentational method. Through the step-by-step application of this method, segments are created. The steps of this typographic process are like animations, they can be presented very well using the book’s pages, showing one after the other as we turn the pages in the book.
This artist’s book is a book published by the artist, produced with offset printing.

Chronicles of My Underground

The book by the architect and art critic Sergei Chubraev is a memoir of the appearance of the Leningrad Rock scene. It covers the period from 1986 to 1992. The book shows both famous and unknown figures of underground culture and how it affected late Soviet creative youth lives. The text is richly illustrated with the author’s own photographic archive, the first iteration of the layout had plenty of pictures, but he kept taking those out one-by-one, and it is visible in the final layout.

Sanja Iveković, A Punch In The Eye

Artists’ book A punch In The Eye is a collection of previously unpublished letters from the 70s that Sanja Iveković was sending to her friends in France. In the book all the letters have been translated into English, which creates additional textual layer, yet follows the composition of the text from the original collage letters that used the popular Yugoslavian press.

“These letters, which are not exactly letters, but rather objects of art, will evidently cause trouble to the postal service of every country they pass through…as examples of artistic labor, these fragments of correspondence will instantly embody the impropriety that art represents; as art is permanent rebellion…” BoraĆosić

“Nordwand – A 30s epic adventure”

“Nordwand” – A 30s epic Adventure” is an experimental pop up book created by Libri Finti Clandestini to pay homage to all the people, known and unknown, who during the third decade of the 20th century tried, with or without success, to conquer the North face of the Eiger (Switzerland, 3967 m.).

The book is handmade in a single copy with brown paper 120 g/m2, and was created on the basis of a “Concertina Cilena”.

The content-form relationship of the book is fundamental: the paper (a single piece folded dozens and dozens of times and therefore trimmed on the sides) becomes a mountain in which tiny climbers, turning the pages, reach the highest point of the structure, conquering its summit.