Although digital data are adorned by the myth of lossless transmission and migration, everyday experience does prove the existence of degradation and data loss in various forms. The artistic research project Rotting Sounds has investigated the causes, mechanisms, and effects of such deterioration in the context of digital audio.
The accompanying publication takes on a similar ruthless approach: during the course of research all trash was collected and has been shredded to dip paper. The sheets produced determines the entire book edition of 20! As an addition a digital publication is being offered decaying from download to download.

Editors: Almut Schilling, Thomas Grill, Till Bovermann

The book is an autobiography about my uncle’s childhood in rural northern Italy during the economic boom. The projects archive my uncle’s memories while also reflecting on the concept of “book as object”. As my double role as nephew and designer, the book became a reflection on the relationship between writer and designer, making and translating a book, visual and written language. The three main concepts of the book are space, time and memories, which have been visually and structurally reinterpreted within the physical properties of book. For instance: The navigation system of the book is time-based. Months and years are mark the progression of the reading instead of page numbers.

Organised Chance documents the insights gained from Open_collab: Global/Local, a collaborative workshop created by Patrick Thomas. The workshop was held as part of Melbourne Design Week, which was organised by Chris Norman and Wayne Smith. The publication provides an opportunity to further explore design systems that embrace randomisation through interviews, visual essays, and analytical studies.

Each edition of Organised Chance is completely unique. Using a generative layout system built in Processing, alongside variable printing techniques, the design of the publication itself becomes an experiment in designer/algorithm collaboration.

A selection of book covers for Tyrfi publication, with texts of new and established writers from the wide spectrum of literature (novel, poetry, essay, etc.)

Design techniques from the opposite pole of printed communication – the poster – were applied in visual syntax, image and text intergration as well as the overall books design, challenging the established book visual devices and structure aiming to a hybrid book for a generation of readers who, as El Lissitzky mention 100 years ago, grows up with a different relationship with the world and space, with image and color and teaches a new plastic language.

The EIKO typeface was designed by Caio Kondo, a Japanese-Brazilian rooted type designer. His main inspiration is his country of origin, Japan. During the creation of this type specimen, I focused on Japanese writing culture, especially Japanese calligraphy. I chose a scroll as the format for the publication, based on the proportions of calligraphy papers. After creating the type specimen, two of my colleagues and I created a structure to help scroll through the pages of the final product.

A catalogue accompanying the exhibition “Thonet Reimagined” curated by Jörg Schellmann for his gallery in Munich. Thonet Reimagined features contemporary art created to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the legendary furniture manufacturer. The catalogue embodies the main feature of Thonet furniture—bent wood—through choice of typography and form. The design of the book’s edges highlights the processual nature of the featured works and reinterpretations by the artists—especially when the catalogue is bent.

Concept: Chan Sperle, Tonda Budszus
Layout & Typesetting: Chan Sperle, Tonda Budszus
Typeface: CS-Serpentine by Chan Sperle

Does our character determine the countries where we are born? The theme of this magazine was to compare the criteria of aesthetics of different countries through alphabets and fonts. Two quite popular alphabets were compared – Latin and Cyrillic. The comparison was made through a selection of the constituent cultural environments.

Překročit hranice / Grenzen überschreiten, an almost thousand pages thick bilingual book project is presenting newly published / addapted dramatic texts of german writers, that have been during years 2019–20 performed in the theater Činoherní studio in Ústí nad Labem. The text disappearing/appearing in book binding, soft translucency od 80g Munken paper, bilingual layout & word-numbering of pages are reflecting nature of the colaboration project of theaters along czech-german border, in Ústí and Dresden. Our aim was to pull the reader in the flow of rare dramatic texts, not to bore on thousand pages, not to make self-served design. photo: Tomáš Lumpe, Jiří Dvořák / Print: Indigo Print, Praha

It’s not a book, it’s a protest! It is an opportunity to tell what is really going on, about how people in Russia feel under the oppression of the authorities. In this zine, the metaphor of the ‘Country of Birch’ (sometimes we call Russia that, it has a lot of national, native meaning) turns into a metaphor about severe censorship and the prohibition of one’s opinion. This story is about confrontation in spite of it.

“Sorry, I fucked this up” is a collection of Polaroids by photographer Melina Papageorgiou, taken in Berlin, Hamburg and Greece from 2013 to 2020. They capture everyday situations, portraits of friends and encounters. The cover as well as the title of the work “Sorry, I fucked this up” come from a Polaroid labeled with these words. By enlarging the images heavily and consciously cutting out the classic white frame of the Polaroids, the images become rougher and appear closer. Flaws common to instantly developing photos, such as burned-out dots, the red-eye effect, under- or overexposure, and blur, are now amplified.

A key emphasis of Thermal House is its cooperative and inclusive potential, and they organise various community-driven workshops. Works and publications can be produced flexibly, quickly and efficiently, avoiding the time-consuming process of mainstream publishing, by locally available material and producing and distributing in sustainable amounts.

For practicality and sustainability, there is a reduction in the print format (print rolls of 58mm width) and print quality (to half-tone black and white raster), which is contrasted to the overwhelming presence of contemporary glossy images. Authors and readers are confronted with a page-less, endlessly designed, reading experience.

The project is about creating a new collection named « Trilogie », which aims to explore an alternative way of understanding architecture through photography, text and drawing. Neither a photography book nor an architectural essay, it nevertheless relies on images and text to restore, by the means specific to the book object, the experience of wandering through an architecture, from context to detail. Coming after a first prototype issued in very few copy (less than 200), dealing with the work of the architect and teacher Jean-Patrick Fortin, Trilogie Grachaux launch the collection for good. Each new issue will feature an architect, an author and a photographer.

The collaborative magazine Forma Oberta is edited in an non-ordinary format in terms of design and periodicity. It follows the rythm of the stations. Creators from all around the world participate in the magazine in different languages with different formats (from essays to graphic design or poetry), shaping the editorial line of the magazine. The main distinctive feature of FO is the Open Edition Process: It is based into an anonymous bi-directional and constructive feedback to all the entries by all FO members. To avoid dogmatisms, the final decision of publishing or not each creation is taken in an uncentralized way and it emerges from the pool of individual opinions.

The Hidden Life of an Amazon User project by Joana Moll exposes Amazon’s often unacknowledged exploitation of users, which is embedded at the core of the so-called internet companies’ business strategies. Such strategies rely on apparently neutral user experiences afforded by attractive interfaces. These interfaces obfuscate sophisticated business models embedded in endless pages of indecipherable code, all of which are activated by user labor. In turn, these strategies have a significant energy cost, part of which is involuntarily assumed by the user. Thus, the user is not just exploited by means of their free labor, but is also forced to assume the energy costs of such exploitation.

“The Cloud of Unknowing”, 2022.
This is an open series of unique editions of a nonhuman (AI) reading of a 14th century text.
Constellations of words, which carry mathematical significance, such as polygons and other shapes, are revealed between the words.
By re-reading The Cloud of Unknowing millions of times, our machine seeks to test ideas of computational transcendental nihilism through processes of coded erasure and abstraction, reduction and illumination, revealing paths for computational unknowing.
Each unique edition is duly annotated with the UTC time of reading and original publication details, and, like the other volumes in the series, is added to the Library of Nonhuman Books.

Monochrome explores the research of Davide Mancini Zanchi, whose polymorphic practice repositions and reinterprets the objects of everyday life in order to create new narratives. Designed on the occasion of the solo exhibition held at the Fondazione Pescheria Centro Arti Visive in Pesaro in 2021 – in strong synergy with the artist himself – the book transposes the physical space of the display within the publishing project, through a narrative path punctuated by different moments (or rooms). The layout and design choices in the volume, which result in the often unexpected use of images and typography, return the most interesting and multifaceted attitude of the artist’s practice.

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.

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.

Visual Impact is student designed book jacket that addresses the ways in which practicing designers can create meaning to influence the world around us. The jacket was designed using collaging techniques.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.