Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Collection and Research

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After the National Library, now on view at [Villa Stuck](https://tinyurl.com/bdza4yjn) to Sept. 15.


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Cussen_This is me.pdf

Original post on Instagram

Cussen

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On September 18, 2018, the author posted a completely blank, white square image on his Instagram account with the caption “This is me.” He then bought 1,000 random comments, added briefly after the post, from the social media marketing company buysocialmediamarketing.com for $99.99. The book documents these comments, making it a reverse engineering attempt to determine whether the comments were written by actual people or bots, as well as misusing them to produce a work that can be sold again and thereby lessening their costs.

The front cover shows the original Instagram post, the back cover reproduces the invoice.


isbn

open edition

10.8 x 17.5 cm / 4.25" x 6.875" (Pocket Book)

experimental literature

perfect bound

paperback

unpaginated

color

social media

documentation / archiving

outsourcing

détournement / hack

Lulu

authorship

internet culture

economy / labor

instagram

This is me

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Giulia Ciliberto's website

Silvio Lorusso's website

Lorusso

Ciliberto

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The presentation of this two-volume blank work on Giulia Ciliberto and Silvio Lorusso’s websites is introduced with the following famous quote from Ulises Carrión: “The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say” (Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” 1975).

Apart from the pursuit of aesthetics and perfection, their work has another objective, as the blurb reveals: “Print on Demand technology allows to make a book without the intermediation of a publisher, setting autonomously size, amount of pages and price. *Blank on Demand* is an experiment that aims to probe the limits imposed by this production process. The two volumes constituting the project are produced through the self-publishing platform Lulu.com. The volumes’ formats correspond respectively to the maximum and minimum dimensions currently available for the print; similarly, page amount and price are set according to the limit values allowed by the platform. The two volumes are completely blank, except for the presence of the ISBN code. The experiment investigates the influence of the current technological context on the materiality of the book object” (blurb on Lulu).

The resulting two volumes are a 10.8 x 17.5 cm paperback, forty pages long and priced at €5.44; and a 15.2 x 22.99 cm hardcover, 740 pages long and priced at €999,999.99. This pair of books—that, considering their price, will probably never be ordered and printed in their entirety—becomes the sum of the technical and formal conditions for publishing on print-on-demand platforms. The project still allows its authors a small triumph over the opaque print-on-demand machinery, because the complete automatization of production will most probably lead to the absurd situation that a book with empty white pages, on which nothing is printed, is also unnecessarily sent through the printing machines: “We were particularly fascinated by the idea of paper sheets going through all the complex print machinery without any purpose” (Silvio Lorusso, “Print-on-Demand. The Radical Potential of Networked Standardisation”). 

For our library, we only purchased the paperback version, for obvious reasons. The fact that the hardback version is likely to forever remain a printed work in potentialis, and is thus manifested more as an artistic idea than as a physical object, does not make it pointless at all: “These are works that cannot or should not be printed but insist on printedness—even if only imagined—all the same” (Sophie Seita, “Thinking the Unprintable”). The evidence that the hardback version saw the light of day and was printed at least once is provided by a photo of the shipping certificate from Lulu and the artist’s proof. 

The two artists’ accounts have been blocked by Lulu. The paperback version is now available again, as they re-uploaded it specifically for our library via a newly created account.

no longer available 

multiple editions

15.2 x 22.9 cm / 6'' x 9'' (US Trade)

artist’s book / bookwork

artistic research

blank pages

hardcover

study / analysis

pricing

constraint

standard / default

platforms / companies

print-on-demand

book / book design

scale

Blank on Demand

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Zwaska

“*This is where* is an ongoing chance-based publication project, which explores the increasingly immaterial nature of place. The images are randomly-selected Google streetviews (which are often captured at noon to avoid shadowing) of cities like Paris, Tokyo, etc. [Each] copy is compiled from all tweets containing the phrase ‘this is where’ between noon and 12:15pm local time for each city. Consequently the text and imagery for each 15-minute issue originates from the same, albeit ambiguous, time and place. And though text and image are randomly paired, surprising narratives often emerge” (blurb on Lulu).

The Paris edition, for example, appropriately begins with the tweet: “This is where the book begins; the rest is still unwritten,” which corresponds well with the photo of a path leading into a forest. Mostly, though, as is common in social media, the tweets are very personal: “This is where you sent me!!!! Love you all so much!” or “My sweet baby this is where the game ends now,” while the pictures, instead of urban hustle and bustle in the three metropolises, surprisingly often show deserted streets in rather rural landscapes or desolate areas. The design of the books, especially the changing arrangement of the photos on the spread and the use of blank pages, breathes the spirit of Ed Ruscha. 

The copies we ordered have significant trimming and binding errors. In *Mexico City* and *Tokyo*, the page numbers are cut off in places. In *Paris*, the pages are in the wrong order (1–2 and 47–48 in the middle, instead of the beginning and end, of the booklet). According to Lulu, however, the trim is within the permitted range, and the artist should not have placed the page numbers so close to the edge.

14.8 x 21.0 cm

photobook

saddle stitch bound

defective copy

found material

versioning / seriality

montage / remix

generative / automation

narration

google

maps / street view

twitter

This is where

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*SOLITUDE* contains the complete code and execution instructions for the solitaire card game Klondike, playing through all possible variations. A software version of Klondike was included with Microsoft Windows in the 1990s and has appeared under the name of “Solitaire” ever since, allegedly making it the most popular single player card game. Freedman and Rydberg’s computer program simulates a playthrough of all possible variations, which will take several years for a personal computer to read/execute. The project can be read as a reflection on loneliness and the social function of games in relation to computing and automation. Moreover, it challenges the status of code and instructions for conceptual writing, presenting the program as a thought experiment in book form rather than an application ready to be executed.

THE COMPLETE GAMES

SOLITUDE