The Electric Information Age Book is a collaboration between Jeffrey Schnapp and designer Adam Michaels of Project Projects (NYC) in the form of an excavation of a moment from the e-Book’s prehistory and metabook on a cut-and-paste genre of original paperbacks.
The book explores on a time span in mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when former backstage players —designers, graphic artists, editors, “coordinators,” and “producers”—stepped into the spotlight to create a set of exceptional paperback books. The period begins in 1966 when Jerome Agel and Quentin Fiore, in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, first developed The Medium Is the Massage into “an inventory of effects,” and continues to 1975, the publication year of Other Worlds, Agel’s collaboration with the exobiologist Carl Sagan. Graphic designers such as Fiore employed a variety of radical techniques —verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics— that were as important to the content as the text. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electric Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks brought the ideas of contemporary thinkers to mass audiences and established a distinctive new graphics-rich, montage-based genre of bookmaking that still resonates loudly today.
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Roma Publications is an independent art publisher, based in Amsterdam, founded in 1998 by artist Mark Manders and graphic designer Roger Willems. It is used as a platform to produce autonomous publications in close collaboration with artists, institutions, writers and designers.
Roma publications is conceived similarly to an exhibition that would evolve with time as one publication leads to another, while serving as a platform of exchange between a growing number of artists, designers, writers, poets and institutions. Published in editions that range between 2 and 150 000, every issue has its own rule of distribution based on the specific content of the projects: they can be given away for free, only exhibited in gallery spaces, or sold online or in bookshops.
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Never Odd or Even - an exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde - presents word-sculptures, word-images, wall texts, "write-along" animation films, mindmaps, etc. The art works focus on the written word's ability to activate an inner imaginative world, and engage in an architectural interaction with the museum spaces. The title suggests doubts, but is also a pun – a palindrome, which can be read both backwards and forwards. Puns as well as the audience's ability to complete the content of works are at stake.
Never Odd or Even is based on the Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball's art project with the same title, and the project is included in the exhibition. Deball’s Never Odd or Even is both a performance and a book consisting of 30 fictional book covers for unwritten books created by various authors and illustrators. The first edition of the book was made in 2005, but for the exhibitions in Berlin and Roskilde a brand new version has been published by BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE. Three Danish authors write their own text for a book cover, and present it on 10.03.2012 as Never Odd or Even performance.
Artists: Rosa Barba (DE/ITA), Erick Beltrán (MEX), Nanna Debois Buhl (DK) & Brendan Fernandes (KE), Mariana Castillo Deball (MEX), Simon Evans (UK), Peter Fischli & David Weiss (CH), János Fodor (HU), Lise Harlev (DK), Ferdinand KRIWET (DE), Ján Mancuška (SK), Tris Vonna-Michell (GB), Ciprian Muresan (RO), Henrik Olesen (DK), Pablo Pijnappel (FR), Adam Pendleton (US), Sebastián Romo (MEX), Dmitry Vilensky (Chto Delat?) (RUS) and Phillip Zach (DE).
Curator: Solvej Helweg Ovesen, in collaboration with Grimmuseum, Berlin and Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde.
Opening
13.01.2012, 17-19:30 h
With a performance by Tris Vonna-Michell, 18:30 h
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Museum of Contemporary Art Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde
