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.

“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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.