A New Program for Graphic Design

Posted in graphic design, history on April 9th, 2024
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines. Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid- to late-20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

Author: David reinfurt (Ed.)

Publisher: Inventory Press

Order here

HaFI 018 – Skip Norman: On Africa. Skip Norman. Harun Farocki Institut; Motto Books

Posted in Film, history, Motto Books, writing on November 17th, 2023
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

HaFI 018 reprints a document containing the script of Skip Norman’s film On Africa (1970). Norman, born in Baltimore in 1933, had left the U.S. in the early 1960s to study German, theater, and medicine in Göttingen. In 1966 he moved to Berlin to join the newly founded German Film and Television Academy (DFFB). By 1969, he had made the films Riffi (1966), Blues People (1968), Cultural Nationalism (1969) and the graduation film Strange Fruit (1969). He shot On Africa together with Joey Gibbs after graduating from the school. The filmmaker about his film: “The starting point is the relationship between Europe’s prosperity and Africa’s poverty; Europe’s destruction of societies and cultures, and the simultaneous use of Christianity and racial theories as justification for a massive exploitation of the colonized.” On Africa was first shown at the Festival in Mannheim in 1970 and then broadcast on television by WDR in 1972.
The script is accompanied by images from the film, and followed by five short commentaries by Sónia Vaz Borges, Madeleine Bernstorff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tom Holert, and Volker Pantenburg.

Das Heft enthält das Skript für Skip Normans Film On Africa (1970). Norman, 1933 in Baltimore geboren, hatte die USA zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre verlassen, um in Göttingen Deutsch, Theaterwissenschaft und Medizin zu studieren. 1966 zog er nach Berlin, um an die neugegründete Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (DFFB) zu wechseln. Bis 1969 entstanden die Filme Riffi (1966), Blues People (1968), Cultural Nationalism (1969) und der Abschlussfilm Strange Fruit (1969).
On Africa entstand gemeinsam mit Joey Gibbs nach Normans DFFB-Abschluss. In Normans Worten: „Der Ausgangspunkt dieses Films ist das Verhältnis zwischen Europas Wohlstand und Afrikas Armut; Europas Zerstörung von Gesellschaften und Kulturen, und gleichzeitiger Einsatz von Christentum und Rassentheorien als Rechtfertigung einer gewaltigen Ausbeutung der Kolonialisierten.“ On Africa wurde am 7. Oktober 1970 bei der XIX. Internationalen Filmwoche Mannheim in der „Informationsschau“ aufgeführt; 1972 lief der Film im WDR.
Das Skript wird begleitet von zahlreichen Bildern aus dem Film und kontextualisiert durch fünf Kurzessays von Sónia Vaz Borges, Madeleine Bernstorff, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Tom Holert und Volker Pantenburg.

Order here

Die Aufstellung. Rebekka Bauer. Verlag Marian Arnd

Posted in Exhibition catalogue, history, photography, writing on March 28th, 2023
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Die Aufstellung thematisiert die Weitergabe von Traumata des 2. Weltkriegs im Wohnhaus meiner Familie. Ausgangspunkt ist ein Archiv von 500 Metallobjekten, die mein Großvater, ein ehemaliger Wehrmachtssoldat, über mehrere Jahrzehnte im Keller unseres gemeinsamen Wohnhauses fertigte. Die Objekte werden in der handwerklichen Routine zu Trägern des Traumas. Um den Einfluss der unausgesprochenen Kriegserlebnisse auf den Familienalltag zu zeigen, setze ich die Metallgegenstände sowohl mit Kriegsfotografien als auch Familienfotos ins Verhältnis, die Ausschnitte aus dem Alltag meiner Familie bis in die frühen 2000er Jahre zeigen.

Order here

Omen: Phantasmagoria at the Farm Security Administration (1935-1944). León Muñoz Santini, Jorge Panchoaga. Gato Negro Ediciones

Posted in history, photography, politics on March 21st, 2023
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Chasing the ghost, the traces of oblivion, and the echoes of what was and no longer is, the book “Omen” is a revision and reframing of the fraction of the photographic archive of the Farm Security Administration (1935-1944) hosted at the New York Public Library. That program—perhaps there is no need to add—was one of the milestones of modern documentary photography, instrumental on the constructing an hegemonic narrative; one mainly about triumph against adversity, division, and catastrophe in the recent history of the United States.

But by stressing the gaze over that monumental set of images, and scrutinizing at the corners of the pictures, at the backgrounds and details—in the secondary characters, in what should not be there, that which appears by chance, accident or error— it is possible to discover a different narrative, one that is thicker, murkier, more troubled, complex, contemporary and contradictory. Both a shatter and an apex: a premonition of the genealogical continuity of the many (tumultuous, visible and invisible, thunderous and silent) systemic violence that make up the face of American society.

A book that serves as a mirror of the distressing reality of the United States in our days, and, a the same time, as a device for reflection on the way historical and documentary photography is read and understood, taking the editorial eye to its ultimate consequences.

Photographs by Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, Jack Delano

Excavations at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library

Concept and selection by León Muñoz Santini, Jorge Panchoaga
Edition by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio

Order here

Amaneceres Domésticos / Domestic Dawns. Carmen Espegel, Andrés Cánovas, José María de Lapuerta (Eds.). Ediciones Asimétricas

Posted in history, illustration, interior, lifestyle, photography on March 14th, 2023
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

“Amaneceres Domésticos. Temas de vivienda colectiva en la Europa del siglo XXI” presenta, a partir de obras construidas, los temas principales que van modelando la vivienda colectiva europea en el siglo XXI. A través de una serie de conceptos, ejemplificados con proyectos construidos, sus editores, Carmen Espegel, Andrés Cánovas y José María de Lapuerta, proponen un lugar de reflexión y debate sobre el presente y el futuro de los espacios que habitamos. A través de 28 ejemplos paradigmáticos de vivienda construida organizados en torno a siete categorías: Conciencia climática, Recargas activas, Cuidados domésticos, Nueva gestión, Contextos urbanos, Vivir y compartir e Identidades icónicas, más un epílogo COVID se muestran los conceptos fundamentales de la nueva habitabilidad que se están desarrollando en la vivienda colectiva de la Europa de principios del siglo XXI, propiciando de este modo un debate que permita continuar avanzando en este sentido.

Textos de Carmen Espegel, Andrés Cánovas, José María de Lapuerta, Eduardo Prieto, Almudena Ribot, Hilde Heynen, Marina Otero Verzier, Elli Mosayebi, Amparo Lasén, Uriel Fogué y Javier Echeverría
Diseño: gráfica futura
Traducción: Noemí Gª Millán y Mike Lumber
Edición: Fundación ICO, Ministerio de Transportes, Movilidad y Agenda Urbana (MITMA) y Ediciones Asimétricas

Order here

Taxonomy of The Barricade. Image Acts of Political Authority in May 1968. Wolfgang Scheppe. NERO

Posted in history on April 14th, 2022
Tags: , , , ,

An iconographic taxonomy—researched, conceived, and ideated by Wolfgang Scheppe, also author of the book’s final essay—that traces the state and police visual control through almost 500 images from the May 1968 police archives in Paris.

The pictorial order of a regime of surveillance applied during the last wide-ranging insurgence in Europe’s history surfaces from the analysis of this unique visual archive. Following the events happening at the Sorbonne in May 1968, alongside general strikes and nationwide factory occupations, France’s state of emergency becomes apparent through a specific iconography of visual control.

This critical moment in the development of governmental visualization strategies towards a totalitarian god’s perspective on the urban fabric has been researched and documented for the first time, by employing the vast photo archives of the Archives de la Préfecture de police de Paris. Among other characteristic typologies of authoritative monitoring aspects, the events in May ’68 marked the historic beginning of the deployment of helicopter based aerial photography as a means of governmental crowd control in a situation of escalating insurrection. The political will to gain an unobstructed view on any individual motion pattern represented in the project leads to epistemically-new technologies that combine observation with political governance, and the use of force as recently manifested in the agency of drones and face recognition.

Order here

Kushtetuta? #3. Petrit Halilaj & Alvaro Urbano (Eds.)

Posted in history, politics, Zines on August 27th, 2021
Tags: , , , , , , ,

kushtetuta_3 kushtetuta-3-petrit-halilaj-alvaro-urbano_motto_1 kushtetuta-3-petrit-halilaj-alvaro-urbano_motto_2 kushtetuta-3-petrit-halilaj-alvaro-urbano_motto_3 kushtetuta-3-petrit-halilaj-alvaro-urbano_motto_4

Kushtetuta? #3, 2021

Printed zine, edited by Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano.

Kushtetuta, an independent fanzine started in 2012 whose title means “constitution” in English. In Albanian, if you divide the word into KUSH TE TUT A?, it means “who scares you?”.

This is a special issue coinciding with Kosovos Parliament‘s drafting of the Civil Code.

This time we would like to celebrate queer lives under the theme of codes. Such as language code, gestural code, gender codes, secret codes..

Edition 1/500

Contributions:

Daniela Aparicio Ugalde & Jo Landt @gorditx_petrolerx
Atdhe Behluli @atdhe_5000
Cooking Sections @cookingsections
Forrest Bess
dyqlberizm
Sokol Ferizi @havok_celeste
Hal Fischer
Nezim Frakulla
Plator gashi & Hashim Shala
GENERAL IDEA @aa_bronson
Robert Gober
Felix Gonzalez-Torres @felixgonzaleztorres.foundation
Enver Hadzijaj @neverenver
Petrit Halilaj
David Horvitz @davidhorvitz
Jetmir Idrizi @jetmiridrizi_jetko
jehonË Jahaj @nanajoteneberlin
Egzon Krasniqi
Maria Loboda @marialoboda000
şugarİye madİsİ @ovulundesi
AD MINOLITI
Ndre Mjeda
Henrik Olesen
Jill Peters
Leart Rama @leart_rama
Morgan le Ferec & Marouchka Payen
Arbër Selmani
Diamond Stingily
Christine Sun Kim @chrisunkim
Gábor Tóth @rehfeldt_mailartarchive
Alvaro Urbano @alvaro_urbano
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt @rehfeldt_mailartarchive

Order here

Raw Material Company. On Art History in Africa. Crowdfunding Campaign. (until June 1st, 2020)

Posted in history on May 7th, 2020

RAW_Kickstarter

Please support our presale campaign for our upcoming publication with Raw Material Company.

De l’histoire de l’art en Afrique / On Art History in Africa

Editors: Koyo Kouoh, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Eva Barois De Caevel, Mika Hayashi Ebbesen

Authors: Eva Barois De Caevel, Yaëlle Biro, Hamady Bocoum, Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Paul Goodwin, Emi Koide, Koyo Kouoh, Peju Layiwola, Dominique Malaquais, Massamba Mbaye, Malick Ndiaye, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, Marie Helene Pereira, Sean O’Toole, Ruth Simbao, Suzana Sousa, and Cédric Vincent.

African art history continues to be dominated by Western scholars who set the tone for the field. Their cultural frames of reference, which they cast as universal, exert influence on the interpretation of African art, social conditions, and cultural milieu. The knowledge produced in most institutions and academic or independent publishers outside of Africa communicates the extant system in place within those localities. In other words, the audience for such forms of knowledge production is not (necessarily) in Africa. A contradiction is born of this state of affairs; most contemporary Africans do not necessarily recognize themselves in what they are reading, yet they tend to hold this material as truth. To what extent do Africans have a say in the way this knowledge is produced and consumed? What strategies and methodologies exist that counter and rebel against the dominance of a Western academic status quo? These are some of the questions this book examines.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mottobooks/de-lhistoire-de-lart-en-afrique-on-art-history-in-africa

Artistic gestures and practices of thought— writing, drawing, and publishing @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt — 23.08.2018

Posted in Events, history, illustration, Journals on August 17th, 2018
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

kao_jun_honn_drawingWith KAO Jun-Honn, Pages magazine—Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, Walid Sadek and Nida Ghouse, Alexander Schellow, Leah Whitman-Salkin, and Paola Yacoub

An open bookshop and a reading area will be organized by Motto Books consisting of curated
selection of books that are integral to the ideas discussed

 

Thursday, August 23, 2018 / 2pm – 9:15pm, full programme below

Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10,
10557 Berlin

 

World cultural paradigm shifts not only effect social configurations but also the state of artistic production. One of the main concerns are the changing conditions of hospitality and openness to the vitality of artistic and intellectual life. What are the possibilities to foster an extended intelligibility of artistic engagement and what are the threats for artistic expression in different political contexts?

In experimenting with modes of engagement and cultural translation, multiplying perspectives, and reflecting on forms and acts, this encounter Artistic gestures and practices of thought—writing, drawing, and publishing will endeavor to activate the power of arts and of practices of thought. Doing so, it questions their modes of presentation and public reception in diversified contexts and networks of knowledge, where the conditions for the transmission have changed significantly.

Exploring the construction of symbolic and artistic spaces, necessarily heterogeneous, where experimentations and ideas are shared in direct relation to artists and writers’ practices, researches, and publishing projects, it will be conducive to formats that authorize great complexity, including editorial modalities or discursive configurations.

 

FULL PROGRAM. Free entrance, in English

     14:00  Welcome note by Annette Bhagwati (HKW)

     14:10 KAO Jun-Honn
(in Chinese with simultaneous English translation)

Through walking, filming, drawing and writing, the artistic research and practice of KAO Jun-Honn focuses on issues about economical and territorial transformations in Taiwanese contemporary society, and traces of colonial spatial politics and repression structures. The project A community still unwritten by history deals with inquiring and writing about the Daoboushe (Daobou tribe) indigenous community who once resided in the mountains on the outskirts of present-day Sanxia District in New Taipei City. The community endured the tragedy of the Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan’s “Five Year Plan for Barbarian Management,” where the Japanese government ordered police and military forces to obliterate the community in the Daoboushe Incident. The few surviving community members were relocated to the mountains of present-day Fuxing District in Taoyuan, with their ancestral land taken over by the Japanese Zaibatsu Mitsui Corporation. KAO with a team explored the area in an effort to excavate relics that remain from the Daoboushe Incident of 1906. The project is part of his recent book Notes on Traversing: Mountain Warfare, Empire and Images of Taiwan (after the book, Notes on Traversing Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, written in 1914 by Japanese officials on the Japanese army’s conquering the indigenous tribes of Eastern Taiwan).

The book will be published in English by Motto Books. KAO Jun-Honn is an artist and researcher living in Taipei who received in 2017 from Tainan National University of the Arts a PhD in Art Creation and Theory.

     15:10 Break

     15:30 Alexander Schellow

Alexander Schellow’s practice has its basis in reconstruction through drawings from memory. Engaging in different situations (the complex urban and social texture of Tirana, Albania, Marseille, France or Taipei, Taiwan, among others), he walks and experiences them, focalizing his gaze on details. The moment of drawing comes later; a few months after the direct experience, back in his studio, Schellow explores his memories, and starts to create complex, spotted drawing-structures – point for point, focusing on actual situations/ visual surfaces he experienced in the past. As in the artist’s words: The practice of reconstruction, sometimes complemented by a set of intentional manipulations (in the form of spatial interventions, for instance), can be used as a means of research, for example in urban environments. Using one’s own perception as a possible point of departure, one can examine and figuratively ‘document’ concrete spatial and temporal references of bodily and perceptive experiences within specific contexts.

Alexander Schellow is an artist living in Brussels and Köln. He is Professor of animation film at erg, Brussels.

    16:20 Leah Whitman-Salkin
in dialogue with Alexis Zavialoff, founder of Motto Books

Leah Whitman-Salkin’s practice as an editor is focused on the collaborative aspects of editing, with her work exploring translation, the space of the visual and the written, and the process of making public through publishing. She is the founder, with Simon Battisti, of 28 November, an experiment in making community space, alternative distribution, and publishing practices through a bookshop and reading room in Tirana, Albania. In 2016 she was the curator, with Simon Battisti and Åbäke, of the Albanian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale—an editorial project on translation, music, and emotive spaces. She is deputy editor of Harvard Design Magazine, and former editor at Sternberg Press. Her talk will reflect on the economy and ecology of real and imaginary spaces, and the translation, both in thought and language, of desire, place, and making public.

    17:10 Break

    17:30 Paola Yacoub

Paola Yacoub is an artist based in Berlin and the founding director of ARP—Artistic Research Practices at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut. In promoting the relevancy of the arts, the program ARP proposes an active platform of inquiry of contemporary practices offering the necessary conditions for pushing forward artistic action and new pedagogical perspectives, exchanges among artists, writers, architects, critics and researchers from various fields (arts, sciences, philosophy, politics), as well as the diversity in the performance realm. It is engaged with ethical, social and political questions surrounding artistic and editorial practice.

Artistic works from the 2000s in Lebanon were generally part of the post-conceptual movement. One of the main inquiry conducted at ARP defined it as a field of application of a norm: the permission to remain indifferent to the agents’ intentions. We postulated its dissolution. Editorial practices have a strategic function from this point of view as they engage intentionalist or anti- intentionalist positions. Examples will be presented.

Paola Yacoub graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, and worked at the Institut Français d’archéologie du Proche-Orient in charge of the excavation in downtown Beirut from 1995 to 1999. She collaborated with Michel Lasserre on notations of aspect variations of territories in conflict and post-conflict situations. Her monographic exhibitions include among others Paola Yacoub, Drawing with the things themselves (Beirut Art Center, 2011), and Paola Yacoub, kiss the black stones (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012).

    18:20 Dinner pause

    19:00 Walid Sadek, with Nida Ghouse

How does the troubled history of civil war continue to impact the conditions of living in postwar Lebanon? In The Ruin to Come, a collection of essays, written in Beirut between 2006 and 2016, Walid Sadek looks at the conditions of living under a temporality theorized as the “protracted now” of a civil war—one structurally capable of perpetuating the conditions of its own dominance—and argues, that although this temporality seems dominant, it nevertheless remains untranquil in the many unfinished strains of a troubled history that resist falling back into a settled and distant past. The book proposes and investigates diverse concepts of labor: the labor of ruin, the labor of the corpse, the labor of near blindness and the labor of missing.

The presentation of The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War (Motto Books & Taipei Biennial 2016) and reading by the author will be followed by a conversation with Nida Ghouse. Walid Sadek is an artist and writer living in Beirut. He is Professor and currently Chair of the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. His early work investigates the familial legacies of the Lebanese civil war. He later began to posit, mostly in theoretical texts, ways of understanding the complexity of lingering civil strife in times of relative social and economic stability. His later written work proposes a theory for a post-war society disinclined to resume normative living. More recently, his artworks and written texts seek a poetics for a sociality governed by the logic of protracted war and search for eruptive temporalities to challenge that same protractedness.

Nida Ghouse is a writer and curator. Her ongoing writing project «Lotus Notes» has appeared variously in Mada Masr (Cairo 2014), After Year Zero (University of Chicago Press 2015), ARTMargins (MIT Press 2016), and Critical Writing Ensembles (Mousse Publishing 2016). She recently co-curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017), and is currently working towards The Matrix of All Possible Narratives (with Anselm Franke and Erhard Schüttpelz, slated 2020), both at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. She was previously director of Mumbai Art Room, where she installed Walid Sadek’s Thoughts on Speaking Dead.

        20:00 Pages, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi in Conversation with Corinne Diserens, via Skype

Pages is a bilingual Farsi/English magazine developed and edited by artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi alongside their collaborative projects. Produced both in Iran and the Netherlands, it was initiated in 2004 and until now nine issues have been published. Pages has recently expanded to an online platform which aims at creating a space beyond the predefined economies of accumulation and distribution in archiving and publishing. In their presentation, Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi will talk about the trajectory of ideas that led to initiating Pages’ new platform (www.pagesmagazine.net) and delve into the relation to archiving and writing pursued in this platform while presenting sections of contributions by invited authors.

Pages: Issue 1, Public & Private, February 2004 / Issue 2, Play & Location, May 2004 / Issue 3, Desire & Change, September 2004 / Issue 4, Voice, June 2005 / Issue 5, On the Verge of Vertigo, August 2006 / Issue 6, Eventual Spaces, September 2007 / Issue 7, In Translation, March 2009 / Issue 8, When Historical, May 2011 / Issue 9, Seep, October 2013.

Artistic gestures and practices of thought—writing, drawing, and publishing is organized in collaboration with curator Corinne Diserens and Motto Books.

With the support of

Motto, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, National Culture and Arts Foundation & Taipeh Vertretung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland

A Thirteenth Month Against Time. Slavs and Tatars. Newman Popiashvili Gallery.

Posted in Editions, history, Motto Berlin store on April 10th, 2018
Tags: ,

IMG_0934IMG_0945IMG_0798 IMG_0822 IMG_0848 IMG_0871 IMG_0878 IMG_0888

A libretto of daily polemics, reflections, and musings on the very defeatist approach to time so dear to S&T, A Thirteenth Month Against Time runs thirty-two days (or pages) in length and acts as an addendum to one’s everyday calendar or diary.

 

2008, mimeograph print, offset print, hand-pasted colour stickers, stitched binding, in black case with white embossed foil

Edition of 100, numbered

 

Buy It

support (at) mottodistribution.com