heftl 1 – Following the Danube

The first “heftl” (~booklet) is a declaration of love for the Danube, an abstract travel diary between Belgrade and Sulina.
2020, self-published, 48 pages, riso-printed, handbound, edition of 80. Awarded as “One of the most beautiful books in Austria 2020”.

Various up- or recycling projects emerge from this publication, working with its’ paper-leftovers as a resource: Danube Carpets (weaving paper-carpets with the bleed paper strips), Danube Paper (scooping paper with paper left-overs and Danube water), Part of the Flow (upcycling leftover prints in secondhand or found frames).

Man Who Captured the Landscape

Continuing the visual planning of the exhibition, the album “The Wind Catcher – Fang Qingmian’s Images and Returns” is designed to resemble a vintage family album with its antique bronze ring binding and hardcover fabric texture. The unique blue color used in the main visual is incorporated into the front and back pages, implying that this album is not just a collection of photographs but also a dialogue on contemporary art and its significance, before delving into the content co-created by the curator and contemporary artists and image makers.

Das OETZ Archiv

Das OETZ Archiv: A book about the former OETZ-magazine from Düsseldorf, Germany.
A special feature of this book are the chapter separators consisting of pages folded into each other. The additional free space created by the folded pages implemented a haptic orientation system which allows readers to navigate easily through the chapters or the registers.

OETZ is a magazine made by design students from Düsseldorf, Germany. It was published from 1979 to 1987 under the direction of Helmut Schmidt-Rhen.
The most prominent aspect of this magazine is the asynchronous binding which is placed 8 cm of the left paper edge. This created short pages on the first half and wide pages in the second half.

INTERPHASE

My final project, Interphase, is a book whose entire content was generated by multiple artificial intelligences. The book consists of seven stories based on the seven deadly sins. Thereby, my goal was to check what the AI thinks about these topics, because a collaboration with an artificial intelligence also requires to be aware of its moral values. Three text AIs wrote the individual stories in collaboration. I provided the initial input in the form of a sentence. The rest was generated by the AIs themselves in a cascading manner. A fourth AI generated additional images based on the texts. All seven stories provide deep insight into the diverse mindsets of AI. (Whole book see Website above)

BLACK BOX – TONY OUSLER

The exhibition proposition of “Black Box” immediately brings to mind an imagining of a “dark and mysterious space”. This space could be an endlessly contracting container, guiding the audience into the artist’s investigation of mysterious phenomena and media history, or it could be a reflection on the limits of science and a sensory preview of video and installation spaces in Tony Oursler’s work. At the same time, it led us to create a laser surface of dazzling, colorful media light, placing the main title and visual elements on top, using silver foil card with laser film, and distributing it on exhibition VIP tickets, invitations, exhibition brochures, and album covers.

The Ditch

The Ditch, by photographic artist Emanuel Cederqvist, recounts the story of a forgotten defence line built on Öland, a small island on the east coast of Sweden, during the Second World War. The line was intended to act as an obstacle for tanks, splitting the island into two parts near the village of Föra. In the book, Cederqvist’s images are combined with documentary material from the Swedish War Archive, records which remained classified until the 1980’s.

The cover is screen printed with white pigment on a blue paper and debossed with a glossy transparent foil.

Archiv der Aspekte

The publication “Archive of Aspects” summarises all the archives created during the course, including their individual elements. Mass, repetition, development, system, parameter, algorithm were keywords we dealt with. The publication deals with the creation of a personal graphic archive which is composed of e.g. generated shapes, colours or words.

Dispute Islands

An atlas of disputed island territories that shows
all the conflicts in relation to the exclusive
economic zones. Each of the island
disputes is accompanied by a photographic
component based on Google satellite images, map and informational page.

Narbut. Studies. Memoirs. Letters. [A Supplemented Reproduction of the “Narbut Anthology”, destroyed in 1933]

Heorhii Narbut was one of the main Ukrainian artists and graphic designers of early 20th century. After his death, a collection of memories by his colleagues was published to honor his memory. But the Soviet authorities destroyed this publication for censorship reasons. Only two incomplete book fragments preserved, and nowadays it has finally been published.
It is not known what the original cover was like. So we created an algorithm that generated a unique collage of the works shown in the book on the cover of each copy. So, each of the 1000 copies of the first edition has its own unique, unrepeatable cover. The last copy of the edition has a white cover and is the property of the designer.

Heat of Sand

by Satoshi Tsuchiyama.

Satoshi, a visual artist from Japan who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, won the Landskrona Foto & Breadfield Dummy Award in 2020. He visited Israel and Palestine between 2017-19 to witness the normal everyday life in the religiously and culturally rich region. During his visits, he explored the scorching sand and graffiti-filled streets, and captured the singular beauty in the raw, tough and vulnerable ordeal of perseverance and adaptation of the inhabitants. Part of his work was documenting the contemporary dance scene.

Published in 2022 by Breadfield Press

Epic and Elegy

Chen Fei-Hao’s creative mediums and dimensions span “text,” “photography,” “moving images and spatial installations.” For this project, the artist hopes to create a comprehensive presentation of his personal life experiences and creative/exhibition materials since 2013. In terms of conceptualization, we quickly focused on the idea of a “file box” format, hoping that this would be a data box with a hierarchical relationship and contextual references. The content includes a “historical epic” with a conventional narrative and a “requiem” that outlines obscure anecdotes and stories. The two complement each other, weaving together the artist’s research context over the years.

Line_Boundary_Trace

L_B_T explores the border as a divisive line from the dual perspectives of humans and machines. Archiving both satellite images of land characterized by border conflicts and artificially generated images of those same landscapes using RunwayML, the publication’s contents become animated, evolving fluidly, when the reader flips through the pages. As images of different locations become distilled into a singular gestural stroke, losing specificity and familiarity, the book is a speculative archive as well as a challenge to the arbitrariness in which we lay claim to our borders.

Hous purchase & Nightwood

The book pair is a combination of the radio play “Hous purchase” by W. Hildesheimer and the novel “Nightwood” by D. Barnes, which Hildesheimer has translated into German. A conversation between a buyer and a seller takes place in “Hous purchase”. A block of text rotated by 90° picks up their strange dialogue. The two speakers interlock in the middle. “Nightwood” tells the story of the night culture of various characters from the 1920s. Areas of life condemned by society become more visible as the story progresses. The colouring of the pages ranges from white to dark grey, emphasising the dark mood of the story. The brightly coloured soft cover and Japanese binding unite the two books.

Persimmons

Persimmons is an interactive book, translating poetry into art through linguistic analysis and code. Its inspiration is derived from the beauty of words and the structure of language systems. Words taken from a poem by Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons”, are analyzed linguistically through Rita.JS and run through Processing, to generate patterns corresponding to the text’s phonetic structure. The reader can interact with the poetry in book form, using pull tabs that morph the text into its coded patterns and manifest Lee’s words into a visual form.

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.