Reading Tests. Jack Henrie Fisher & Popahna Brandes. Jan van Eyck Academie.

A note about the words in the book – where they come from and what has happened to them.

Many of them, the ones on the right-side and the ones at the end, are “suspicious” words from Google Books, words from book scans which can’t be machine-read. Google offers these unreadable words as reversed Turing Tests to human readers in their project to digitize all the books in their digital library. These images of words have been gathered for this book in thousands of refreshes at the threshold to a PDF download. A human writer, in turn, has read the words for some rhythm of sense. In these tests she has rearranged them accordingly.The texts to the left are, in the first section, edited from a medium-sized dictionary used for dictionary attack, the machine procedure whereby every word of a dictionary is fired at an empty internet password field.

The second section alternates verso and recto pages from Freud’s “Mistakes in Reading and Slips of the Pen”. These pages have been submitted and resubmitted to an optical character recognition which rotates, stretches, and darkens pixels in order to bring the image closer to what might be recognized as a letter. When a recognition takes place, the image becomes a text and can be highlighted, underlined, crossed out, edited – formal actions which turn out to hinder a reading conversion the next time around. This recursivity may proceed to the point of invention – that is, a new letter is found or drawn by the reading software.

Raymond Williams’ essay “Means of Communication as Means of Production” is captured in the third section, erringly, as text, with all the mistakes this process must make from a low-resolution scan. A typographer has underlined some pertinent points within it.

At the end of the book, the suspicious, unreadable words are given over and over again to optical character recognition, alongside an interfering element – usually a curved line, the current standard for hindering spam-intending machine readers. These images, as well as whatever reading marks can follow from a recognition, are cut and straightened and moved around in each subsequent reading, on their way to becoming texts, but never completely assuming sense.

D 12 €

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Documenta 1955-2012: The Endless Story Of Two Lovers

This publication contains 60 photographs taken from Documenta, one of the most respected contemporary art exhibitions in the world.
All of the photographs, from different eras, have as subject of two elements that make possible the history of art itself: the work and the viewer. A journey through time that does not concern only the history of one of the most important exhibitions in the world, but in general the changes, the costumes, customs of the society that produced it. The book is a portrait of a love story between two people – one human, the other inanimate – that, although speaking a different language, are able to relate. These photographs have captured the peculiarities of these meetings. The dialogues of course we cannot hear, but can only imagine.

D.15€

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Skalitzer. 68
July 21 – August 25 2012
Saturdays only!

Skalitzer. 68 invites artists, editors, performers for a series of lectures, presentations, exhibitions and events which will take over the spaces of Chert, Motto and Silberkuppe each Saturday, between July 21 and August 25.

21.07.2012: Margaret Harrison, Petunia, Convolution Journal for critical experiment

Margaret Harrison – talk and screening presented by Silberkuppe, starts at 7 pm
Convolution Journal/Petunia Magazine – talk and screening, starts at 8.30 pm

For their joint presentation at Motto Berlin, Convolution, Journal for Critical Experiment and Petunia, developed a talk-screening performance.
The two magazines share a questioning about the status and ways of criticism, experimenting with new ways of communication through their magazines: in Petunia, there are no chapters or sections, but diverse textual forms, from theoretical texts to diary entries to pure fiction or comics, mostly concerning contemporary art.
Convolution journal seeks to promote a proliferation of the forms available for cultural critique, taken in the broadest sense. It ventures to publish short, experimental work that challenges prevailing divisions between creative writing and criticism, poetry and prose, image and text. Convolution brings together a shifting collectivity of scholars, artists, poets, musicians and critics to explore the fragmentary, the interdisciplinary, the visual, the unpublishable, and the miscellaneous.
Conversation about critical form will include readings by Convolution contributors Michael Baers and Christian Hawkey.
Their presentation ends with the screening of “Born in Flames” – starting at 10.00 pm
A 1983 documentary-style feminist science-fiction film by Lizzie Borden that explores racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in an alternative United States Socialist Democracy.
Through the life of two different feminist groups of New York City, the film becomes a manifesto for direct activism, showing different points of view and discussions about it, culminating in the message that the action should inevitably come from the oppressed. 80 minutes, English.

http://www.chert-berlin.com/

http://www.silberkuppe.org/

http://petunia.eu/

http://convolutionjournal.com/

20 exhibitions reviews, 8 interviews, 10 exhibitions in pictures, some artists special projects, and the chronicles.

Featuring: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Richard Phillips, Philippe Parreno, Peter Zumthor, John Martin, Willem de Rooij, Camille Henrot, Kirsten Everberg, Rosa Barba, Laurent Grasso, Davide Belula, Rob Pruitt, Fabrice Gygi, Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Frédéric Pardo, Sturtevant, Tatsumi Hijikata, Alexandra Midal, Joe Bradley, Joachim Koester, Peter Halley, Luigi Ontani, Andreas Gursky, Haim Steinbach, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, Guy Debord, Scott Bourne, Josh T. Pearson…

Edited by Eric Troncy and Stéphanie Moisdon, Frog is an international art and architecture magazine.
Graphic design: M/M (Paris).

D : 18€

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Verities N°2: The Muse Issue

Contributors to The Muse issue include Harry Callahan, Nan Goldin, Gustav Metzger, James Ferraro & Paul Elliman.

Verities is an independent biannual publication of thought, observation and reflection, giving equal focus to visual arts and literature.

Verities explores new ways-of-seeing the most ordinary and overlooked situations, revealing the arresting and irrational in the everyday. The ability to disorient and estrange through a subjects illumination makes for a potentially explosive catalyst that sits at the heart of Verities.

Each issue artists and authors explore a new theme through artworks, photography, design, fashion, essays and short stories. Finding the new in the old and celebrating the old in the new, rescuing beauty from vulgarity, and pushing social issues to the fore. Verities makes intellectual content accessible, yet is not afraid to challenge its readers.

D 12 €

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Job Centre Plus

Zine by Paul Haworth, June 2012.

D 4€.

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Sourcebook. Lewis Chaplin. Fourteen-Nineteen Books.

Sourcebook presents the detritus and collected imagery of a year of contemplation, frustration and ambivalence with the nature of photography. From an initial starting point of the typographic reference book, within its pages a myriad of situations and pictures present themselves – each at once recognisable and indecipherable.

Drawing heavily on ideas of representation and the ‘reading’ of an image, the work within is open-ended; a liquid, unstable mix of ideas and images that attempt to elude the conclusive, finite nature of the captured image or the printed photo. Instead, Sourcebook aims to be fluid – at once a source of reference and stimulation for future creative processes, and a photographic document littered with unanswered questions, oblique strategies and glimpses of meaning.

1st Edition of 200, Nov 2011.

D 20.50 €

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Bummerland. Will Alder. Fourteen-Nineteen Books.

Bummerland is a publication about riding the waves. Through washed-out images of calm seas, rolling California hills and faded memories from a thousand summers past, Will Adler constructs a fantastical landscape of cute girls, deserted beaches and salty tides; at once immediately tangible, but dreamlike. Images bleed through pages, fold back on themselves and merge into an oscillating, hazy scrapbook of memories, of adventures and experiences – image experiences made and committed to memory in the downtime, that perfect fluctuating time between catching the next wave, or on the journey to the next big adventure.

Full Colour newspaper, unbound. 2nd Edition of 300, June 2012.

D 13  €

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The Tristans, Part 2.1. Lewis Chaplin. Fourteen-Nineteen Books.

The Tristans, Part 2.1 is part of Lewis Chaplin’s ongoing photographic and anthropological series of enquiries into the life of the islanders of Tristan Da Cunha – the most remote inhabited place in the world. Tristan Da Cunha is an active volcanic island no bigger than Manhattan, located in the middle of the Pacific ocean, a 14-day boat voyage away. The Tristans are British, using the pound sterling and the charming postcode of TDCU 1ZZ for the whole island – there are 250 of them, and seven surnames. Tristan Da Cunha now stands on the frontline in the battle against cultural hybridization and postmodernism, as they cling to the post-colonial remnant that is their island.

1st Edition of 200, July 2012.

D 11.50  €

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Useless: New Writing in Art and Design. Royal College of Art.

Graduating students from the Royal College of Art’s new Critical Writing in Art and Design MA programme present their first collaborative publication — a collection of essays that work to deconstruct the idea of uselessness within a diverse range of ideas, projects, interviews and stories. These works, which provide a multitude of perspectives on the theme, form an object that spans topics across art, product design, architecture, literature, radio, information technology and more.

Contributors
Freire Barnes | Anna Bates | Jigna Chauhan | Nicola Churchward | John Dummett | Jeanette Farrell | Natalie Ferris | Clo’e Floirat | Elizabeth Glickfield | Charmian Griffin | Christina Manning-Lebek | Peter Maxwell | Dora Mentzel | David Morris | Jonathan P. Watts

Paperback: 180 pages
Publisher: Royal College of Art
Language: English
Product dimensions: 210 x 130 x 15 mm
Design: Pedro Cid Proença
Cover illustration: Fabienne Hess.

D 10 €

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