Archive for the ‘Publishing Forum: Reading Group’ Category
Publishing Forum, reading group reading Counter Intelligence / Wednesday 27 March, 7pm
Wednesday 27 March 2013, 7pm
Meeting at Banner Repeater
Reading extract from Counter Intelligence
Counter Intelligence is a catalogue of self-published and autonomous print creations from the hands-on exhibition of zines, comics, pamphlets and other self-produced print at the 121 Centre, Brixton in 1995 organised by Jason Skeet & Mark Pawson.
Reviews 250 titles, plus short essays looking at specifics of autonomous self-publishing as well as placing this activity in a wider context; Autonomy, Dialectics of desk-top-publishing, Cultural Noise, Appropriate Scale Publishing, Price No Object/ Priceless Objects, Postal Pleasure, Refusing regularity, A Zinester Rants, The Free Information Network, E-zinesand computer bulletin boards, Autobio Comix, and a Non-exhaustive resources section.
The COUNTER INTELLIGENCE exhibition was also shown at Gavin Brown’s enterprise in New York and included in Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s 1996 live-life/life-live project. A vital doccument of its time.
We will be reading an 8 page extract reprinted by Mark Pawson for the Reading Group. Pick up a copy from Banner Repeater and X Marks the Bökship.
Counter Intelligence
Published 1995
Size A4 / 28 pages
Publishing Forum: reading group: Artists ‘ Magazines, An Alternative Place for Art by Gwen Allen
Publishing Forum: reading group – Reading Artists ‘ Magazines, An Alternative Place for Art by Gwen Allen
Wednesday 13 March 7-9pm
Magazine publishing is an exercise in ephemerality and transience; each issue goes out in the world only to be rendered obsolete by the next. To publish a magazine is to enter into a heightened relationship with the present moment. During the 1960s and 1970s, magazines became an important new site of artistic practice, functioning as an alternative exhibition space for the dematerialized practices of conceptual art. Artists created works expressly for these mass-produced, hand-editioned pages, using the ephemerality and the materiality of the magazine to challenge the conventions of both artistic medium and gallery. In Artists’ Magazines, Gwen Allen looks at the most important of these magazines in their heyday (the 1960s to the 1980s) and compiles a comprehensive, illustrated directory of hundreds of others.
Among the magazines Allen examines are Aspen (1965–1971), a multimedia magazine in a box—issues included Super-8 films, flexi-disc records, critical writings, artists’ postage stamps, and collectible chapbooks; Avalanche (1970-1976), which expressed the countercultural character of the emerging SoHo art community through its interviews and artist-designed contributions; Art-Rite (1973-1978), an irreverent zine with a disposable, newsprint format; Real Life (1979-1994), published by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan as a forum for the Pictures generation; 0 to 9 (1967–1969), a mimeographed poetry magazine founded by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Meyer; FILE (1972–1989), founded by the Canadian collective General Idea, its cover design a sly parody of Life magazine; and Interfunktionen (1968–1975), founded to protest the conservative curatorial strategies of Documenta. These and the other magazines Allen examines expressed their differences from mainstream media in both form and content: they cast their homemade, DIY quality against the slickness of an Artforum, and they created work that defied the formalist orthodoxy of the day. (A work by John Baldessari from the late 1960s shows a photograph of Artforum, captioned “THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT.”) Artists’ Magazines, featuring abundant color illustrations of magazine covers and content, offers an essential guide to a little-explored medium.
Continuing with our enquiry into publishing, past, present and future, the reading group meetings will be held alternately at Banner Repeater and X Marks the Bokship and all are welcome to join us. We meet every two weeks on Wednesday evenings from 7 – 9pm.
We will have read and be discussing Chapter 7: Artists’ Magazines in the 80s, and we will be meeting at X marks the Bökship .
Publishing Forum: Reading Group / Wednesday 6 February 2013, 7pm
Wednesday 6 February 2013, 7 – 9pm
Publishing Forum: Reading Group
A joint reading group with X Marks the Bökship, Banner Repeater and The Everyday Press which has a specific focus on publishing.
Post-Digital Print, The Mutation of Publishing since 1894
By Alessandro Ludovico, introduction by Florian Cramer
Published by Onomatopee, 2012
pages: 192
size: 9.2 x 1.5 x 25.2 cm
graphic design: Eric de Haas
We will have read and be discussing;
Chapter 2 – A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print.
Chapter 3 – The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times.
Chapter 4 – The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page.
A link to an online PDF is here: or
The book is available to buy from http://www.onomatopee.net
Price: € 15,00
In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over?
In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of the avant-garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art.
Previously Read:
The Case for Books: Past, Present and Future. By Robert Darnton. Published by PublicAffairs, 2010
The Electric Information Age Book. McLuhan / Agel / Fiore and the Experimental Paperback. By Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Adam Michaels. Published by Inventory Books, Princeton Architectural Press, 2012
The Binder and the Server. Published by Triple Canopy, March 2012
Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. By Liz Kotz. Published by MIT Press, 2010
Graphic Design, History in the Writing, 1983 – 2011. Published by Occasional Papers, 2012
The Fox. Issue 1 (1975) First published 1975. Republished by The Everyday Press, 2012
Liner Notes. Conversations about Making Books. i.e. Leipzig. Published by Spector Books, 2010
Against Intellectual Property. By N. Stephen Kinsella. Published by Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008
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