Space for Visual Research. Spector Books
edited by Markus Weisbeck, Mathias Schmitt, Michael Ott

The Space for Visual Research was established at the Bauhaus-University Weimar in 2013 as a workshop and laboratory for experimental research into new graphic, abstract and visual worlds. The Space’s mission is to support the exploratory urge for new aesthetics, in particular by empowering design students to create their own individual imagery. The resulting Space for Visual Research publication is a lab book, a log of visual experiments conducted using physics, chemistry, optics and reproduction technology as starting points for image production. Technical explanations open up possibilities for customized reproductions of each visual experiment presented here, while commissioned interviews and essays as well as a hand-picked bibliography render Space for Visual Research a useful reference tool for visual research generally today.

With texts by Alex Marashian, Liam Gillick, Karl Schawelka and Sophia Gräfe.

26€
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The visual Event : An Education In Appearance. Oliver Klimpel (ed.). SPECTOR BOOKS.

Is it possible to understand graphic design as a practice beyond an object-centric approach, as a practice beyond the conception and production of well-designed and printed artefacts? Which other potentials to create a public should be considered integral to design as an activity? “The Visual Event” explores the question of how such an extended practice could be thought, which graphic, spatial and temporal forms such a situational practice could take, and tests the idea of the “visual event” from various perspectives of visual culture. The project compiles numerous contributions by artists, academics, designers, architects, and students of the System-Design Class at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig.

€22.00

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VELE.Tobias Zielony. Spector Books.

“Le Vele di Scampia” is a futuristic housing estate in northern Naples and a Camorra battlefield. Conceived by Francesco di Salvo in the late seventies and widely recognised for their urbanistic, “Le Vele” (The Sails) were squatted by mafia families even before completion. Today the building complex is a symbol of the Camorra’s power in the Naples region and a key centre of European drug trafficking. Matteo Garrone shot his movie “Gomorra” based on the Novel by Roberto Saviano on the site in 2008. Tobias Zielony’s film “Le Vele di Scampia” from 2009 originates in this very place. Seven thousand single images, shot at night with a digital single-lens reflex camera, are used to create nine minutes of animation film. The book “Vele” is based on this animation film with an selection of 287 single images.

€40.00

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I can not repeat what I hear

Natalie Czech’s works meander between concrete poetry and conceptual photography. In der newest publication she directs her main focus to the writing process and its inherent possibilities. For the series “Voyelles”— which refers to Rimbaud’s eponymous poem — Czech invited ten authors to describe a fictitious synesthesia-invoking photography in her name. In the publication’s other series, “Poems by Repetition”, the stylistic device of repetition simultaneously creates echo, music, rhythm, stuttering, and beat. Natalie Czech uses newspaper articles, record covers, books, different iPad models and Kindle readers as supporting media for the poems and thus creates a dialogue between printed text and illustration, the literary form of a poem and the artistic practice of photography. The artist transforms literary into visual strategies and formally writes poems in the medium of photography.

Author: Natalie Czech
Publisher: Spector Books
Language: english / german
Pages: 139
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 978-3-944669-07-6
€28.00

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Vasarely Go Home

In “Vasarely Go Home” Andreas Fogarasi investigates a double event that took place in Budapest on October 18th, 1969. Opening that day, Victor Vasarely, the internationally renowned artist of Hungarian origin, had a large retrospective exhibition at the Mücsarnok/Kunsthalle in Budapest. While Hungarian avant-garde art of that time was forbidden or at best tolerated by the authorities, Vasarely’s exhibition – organised by official cultural politics – became an important public event attracting a huge number of visitors. Because of these double standards at play, the show was met with both high expectations and scepticism from the local artistic scene. The second – undocumented – event taking place that evening during the exhibition opening was a one-person protest by artist János Major. He carried a small sign in his pocket that he discreetly showed to friends and acquaintances when he encountered them in the crowd. The sign read “Vasarely Go Home”.

Author: Andreas Fogarasi
Publisher: Spector Books
Language: english
Pages: 144
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 978-3-944669-54-0
€24.00

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Human – Space – Machine. Stage experiments at the Bauhaus

In 1921, Walter Gropius founded a theater workshop at the Bauhaus. It conducted new research and experiments on the relationship between humans and technology. The central protagonists Lothar Schreyer, Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholoy-Nagy investigated the issues of mechanization, machine industrialization, and rationalization. They sought a new, meaningful relationship with the dynamized, increasingly technically animated environment. In their stage laboratory, they developed abstract motion studies, designed atmosphere machines, and built theater apparatus. They also organized the famous Bauhaus celebrations, where they staged themselves as a collective of “new humans”. For the first time, an exhibition and a catalog with sketches, drawings, photographs as well as films, figurines, costumes, models, and apparatus are now devoted to the experiments and concepts of the legendary Bauhaus stage.

Author: Müller & Wesse (Stephan Müller) and Luise Bartels Torsten Blume, Christian Hiller
Publisher: Spector Books
Language: English
Pages: 252
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 9783944669229
€36.00

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14.12.2013: Jean-Pascal Flavien / Spector Books @ Motto Berlin

“A sequence or phrase” is a monographic catalogue on Jean-Pascal Flavien’s work, published following his two exhibitions at the Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’Art Contemporain (FR) and the Kunstverein Langenhagen (DE), both in 2012. It includes contributions by Vanessa Desclaux, Vanessa Joan Müller, and Olivier Michelon. It is published by Spector Books, and designed by Pascal Storz with Jean-Pascal Flavien.

“A sequence or phrase”, 112 pages, Spector Books, 28€

Flavien’s work combines architectural experiments, book publishing, and performance with other media such as video, drawing, installation, and sculpture. 
His recent solo exhibitions include breathing house at Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-les-Eaux; ‘Jean-Pascal Flavien’ at Kunstverein Langenhagen; Cinonema, no drama cinema at South London Gallery (both 2012). and two persons house at Capacete, São Paulo (2010). Flavien has participated in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions including Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2013); Les Abbatoirs, Toulouse (2012); Musac, Leon; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunsthaus Bregenz (all 2011) and Tate Modern, London (2008).
Upcoming solo exhibitions will take place at Catherine Bastide, Brussels, and Galerie Esther Schipper, Berlin.

The launch will coincide with the opening of the no drama bar @ Motto Berlin, where a new edition by Flavien will also be presented.

Glühwein will also be prepared by David Horvitz and Magdalena Bournot

http://www.spectorbooks.com/

Silver Tower. Matthias Hoch. With texts by Harald Kunde, Andreas Maier, Markus Weisbeck. Spector Books

The old Federal Republic of Germany is history — a fact made especially poignant by these photos of the abandoned Dresdner Bank building. The tower — the most beautiful high-rise in Frankfurt on Main — was opened in 1978 as the bank’s head office. The construction was planned by ABB Scheid und Partner architects office, the corporate design was developed by Otl Aicher. Following the bank’s acquisition by Commerzbank in 2009 the head office of Dresdner Bank was vacated. In “Silver Tower”, a series of pictures taken between 2009 and 2011, photographer Matthias Hoch explores the deserted building. He looks for signs and remnants of an era, for the biography of the place. Meticulously structured surfaces, signs of wear and the interplay of light and shade are probed to reveal their traces to the camera: scratches, marks, layers.

124 pp., 45 colour illustrations and 30 pictures from the archives of Dresdner Bank.
Leipzig 2013.

Price: €34

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Mario Pfeifer / Markus Weisbeck / Spector Books @ Motto Berlin.
TALK: 7:30 Sharp!

Mario Pfeifer’s publication “A Formal Film…” is a critical reader that is part of his film project of the eponymous title — an innovative expansion of the genre. The complex exploration of the intercultural, film-historic, political and urban issues that are discussed in Pfeifer’s film not only surface on the level of texts, they also become manifest in the materiality of the book itself and its production process. The artist’s book was produced in Mumbai in collaboration with local producers and created using six different local printing techniques on nine different, locally sourced paper stocks. In March 2012 Mario Pfeifer and designer Markus Weisbeck set out the formal aspects of the publication in collaboration with local manufacturers and the authors of the texts in Mumbai, India.

The publication was recently selected as one of the best 50 international artists book and will be presented at Kaleid 2013, London.

During the book launch a collector’s edition with hand-painted dust-jackets will be on view besides originally commissioned illustrations and print related materials from the production in Bombay.

Designer Markus Weisbeck and artist Mario Pfeifer will be present to introduce the conception, production and reception of the publication that served previously for panel discussions on issues of cross-cultural labor representation, collaborative strategies and knowledge production at MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Artists Space New York, Studio X Mumbai and Khoj New Delhi.

Mario Pfeifer: A Formal Film in Nine Episodes, Prologue and Epilogue –
A Critical Reader

Edited by Susanne Gaensheimer, Bernd Reiß – MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan and KOW

Form by Markus Weisbeck in collaboration with Kurnal Rawat and Anand Tharanay of Grandmother India

With Contributions by Suprio Bhattacharjee, Kaushik Bhaumik, Amira Gad, Susanne Gaensheimer, Nikolaus Hirsch, Ranjit Hoskote, Shanay Jhaveri, Kurnal Rawat, Bernd Reiß, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Anand Tharanay, Ragunath Vasudevan, Markus Weisbeck and Mario Pfeifer
Hardcover, 300pages, numerous color illustrations w. Bookmark and Dust-jacket
Offset, Letterpress, Xerox, Silkscreen
Published in Hindi and English by Spector Books, 2013
ISBN 978-3-940064-60-8

Fabian Reimann uses the „Whole Earth Catalog“, first published in 1968 as a concise reference of tools for the improvement of the world and the self, as the starting point for the final issue of his own, visual-essay style Egozine „freeman’s journal“, now in its tenth year. His „Another Earth Catalog“, only interrupted once by a personal essay, consists of a continuous stream of images: reproductions of the Utopian visions of the late 1960s — including not only material published in the „Whole Earth Catalog“, but also of other visionary projects from the Cold War period and the dawn of Postmodernism. Fabian Reimann loosely maintains the five categories of the „Catalog“ (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning) and connects the visions of the late 1960s with current images that show developments which can be traced back to the fantasies of these earlier times.

Author: Fabian Reimann
Publisher: Spector Books
Language: English
Pages: 192
Size: 15 x 10.5 cm
Binding: Softcover

Price: €12.00
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