A few examples of niche print on demand systems?

Make and print your own newspaper:
http://www.newspaperclub.com/

AND is a platform exploring print on demand technologies to publish conceptually driven artists' books
http://www.andpublishing.org

From Thursday 20^th to Sunday 23^rd November OSP went to contemplate the Bolwerk archives landscape from the window of Frans Masereel Centrum. As part of Bolwerk‘s residency, we were invited to propose a reading of Bolwerk’s material inbetween its punctuation. Linked to our actual and future projects, this journey also presented itself as a good start to investigate archive visualization/schematics and digest. We arrived with a proposal focussing on tools development, bases of an archives blender, a small chain of automatic process.

On the spot, in the plastic yurt heated by a wood-burning stove, we discovered 87000+ files on the Bolwerk nas harddrive. All our sources (scripts, tests, drawings and pictures) are gathered in this public git repository. In the current documentation text, you can find links to readable files and preview of the result.

To have an overview of all the digital archives, we first built 4 bash scripts going through the directories looking on 4 criterias:

• time scale
• number of files
• size of the files
• filetypes

From this, we get a text output already drawing a first visual landscape, see landscape-saturday.csv

Then, in a graphic translation attempt, we started a plotter script, to plot this landscape into visual/graphic shapes. Is it the rotary structure of the physical archive in the yurt, or our temporary traveler status here that resonate with Bolwerk’s seems permanent one? It’s not clear but we had this idea to draw the directories as bags, attributing one parameter to their description elements. - width : time scale - height : number of files - colors of the bag : filetypes - roundness : size of the files See plot4.svg (in /plotter directory).

The shapes are distributed along the timeline from left to right (1997-2011). The most large they are the more the files and directories they contain, the vertical piling was defined by the browsing order. The archives has been clearly compiled with 2 past periods of grouping, and a more regular the lasts years (as many archiving of digital files travel from one kind of media to another).

This attempt to draw the landscape with differents bags, raised again questions that were floating around us for a while. How to shape the bags/directories, can we avoid the designer/developer dichotomy (starting from an arbitrary symbol/drawing / from an arbitrary process)? Plot only the dots contained in the files in the directories, as a free interpretation of the screening process present in different place in this graphic farm and in answer for the astonishingly new question from Marthe for us “how the shape of the dot vary with fonts”? Or the files as dots? Why are we somehow reluctant to visualize the data of the archives? After years of Edward Tufte impact on some of us and on the field, is it linked to Ted Byfield’s conference in Tel Aviv where he develop some aspects of its critics, or the approximation found at middle page and elsewhere, or around that article or these pamphlets about visualization? Is the muted but even more palpable and strong influence, here at the wood cutting Masereel mansion, of the Isotype system from the team Neurath/woodcutter Arntz and particulary the transformation of complex source information into a sketch for a self-explanatory chart, mainly by the transformer Marie Reidemeister?

Looking to it as a landscape in a contemplative way, looking at the hard-drive in a calm way, different for an top/down approach of some past anthropological pseudo-objectivity or burning with some efficiency in mind, by practicing it like to roving some paths in the forest? Because we feel that practicing the data, chewing it up, became part of it as in any quantum experience was the only way to try to balance a bit the asymmetric and problematic relationship that we can have with a 14 years archive of a multi-crossed-mono-person-organisation (and that we dare to link with Roy Wagner, à propos des relations initiales avec les Daribi de la Nouvelle-Guinée, “leur façon de ne pas me comprendre n’était pas la même que celle que j’avais de ne pas les comprendre” maybe also because our permanent cross-lingual during that residency, which shape also deeply the incorrect writing of the current post).

Our favorite atomic bricks, fonts and her quarks glyphs, and more precisely fonts contained in the pdfs contained in the archive, appears to be possible candidates to bootstrap us from the wood smoke. An excavator is added, the fonts resulting of that operation shows how different applications embed and subset fonts when exporting pdfs. By counting the fonts, merging the fonts that are each directory, based on glyph missing, producing the digital upper-and-lower-cases of Bolwerk.

As a last detour we plotted the samples collection through Scribus outlined pdf, see plotter/samples, like an echo to decrypt from a certain today in the fiction of being already in the future.

• samples_all_outlined.pdf (all the chars of the merged fonts – 458 pages)
• interpunctie_samples.pdf (all the periods of the merged fonts on one sheet)
• interpunctie_samples_all.pdf (more interpunction)
• and interpunctie_all_esthetified.pdf for which Gijs write us as a temporary end dot: “I’ve put some thought into that name. It felt like a bizarre act / twist:to just center the text out of aesthetic considerations. After such a rough process.”

This week was the 3rd in 3 radio shows by L'étranger for Interpunctie.

Full playlist with podcast, active links etc. is here:

http://ltgpanik.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/show235/

Discl.

125 Paris, Nov. 22, 1983, D., 1985, inf. Rap., p. 10. Paris, March 6, 1991, D.S. 1992, somm. 75 (the author of an advertising film is supposed to have waived his right of attribution since such a film has no credits)

Dancing at the big nas bolwerk archives hard drive in the yourte looking the screen journeying the archives !

Find all the sources of the plotter here

Last meeting with Romy Ruegger, Lucie Kolb, Maria Karagianni Isabelle Pauwelyn and Marthe Van Dessel we discussed about the relation between formats, standards, proportions and dimensions.

Lucie Kolb introduced a work she made around the 'A4', or the din A standard we are using in all our bureaucratic administration.


Different publications were introduced as reference material. Do we chose a specific format because of its link in content and form to an existing publication?


Books have a wider variety of formats, sometimes the genre defines the format. Like Penguin books established a format for fiction story books.


Finally we chose for defining 'dimensions' to enhance the relation between analogue and digital publishing and the reader.

The proportion of a 'wide' screen resolution (e.g. 1440*900) is compared with a spread (2 pages) of a book.

The size of one page:?

MAXIMUM
591*737 px > 20,84*26 cm

BEST SCREEN + A4 print
400*500 px > 14.11*17.6 cm

MINIMUM
200*250 px > 7,06*8,8 cm

No.2: 18th October 2011

No.1: 11th October 2011

Dear ........... insert name here,

Once... we often amused ourselves recording our conversations or reading aloud to each other from various books. Unusually ourselves... we have been reading this blog as an extenuation of it's creators wider literary bents and the debate is fascinating. So throwing our hat into the ring after along time out of the ropes, we don't read the posts, just the comments, so sorry if the replies seem out of whack... maybe we borrowed this keyboard from J. or swapped it for a t-shirt, maybe J. bought in a store and has no idea what it means.

In response to Maria 's entry on the Labyrinth of Babel: I found an interesting page in english on Otlet's work and linked some other files. The imagery makes me think of the object that Romy carries around the Interpunction Residency!

Paul Otlet (1868 - 1944 ) was a Belgian lawyer, information theorist and librarian who designed The Universal Decimal Classification system. He wanted to penetrate the boundaries of the book itselve, to unearth the “substance, sources and conclusions” inside.

In 1910, in the wake of the Brussels world’s fair, Otlet and LaFontaine created an installation at the Palais du Cinquantenaire of the Palais Mondial. Originally envisioned as the centerpiece of a new “city of the intellect,” the Mundaneum was to be the hub of a utopian city that housed a society of the world’s nations.

"Otlet believed that documents could best be understood as three-dimensional, with the third dimension being their social context: their relationship to place, time, language, other readers, writers and topics. Otlet believed in the possibility of empirical truth, or what he called “facticity”—a property that emerged over time, through the ongoing collaboration between readers and writers. In Otlet’s world, each user would leave an imprint, a trail, which would then become part of the explicit history of each document. "

In 1919, shortly after the end of World War I, Otlet successfully lobbied King Albert and the Belgian government to furnish a new home for the Mundaneum, taking over 150 rooms in Brussels’ Cinquantenaire. Inside the new Mundaneum, he began to assemble his vast “documentary edifice,” eventually comprising over 12 million individual index cards and documents.

After Otlet’s death in 1944, what survived of the original Mundaneum was left to languish in an old anatomy building of the Free University in the Parc Leopold, all but forgotten. Over the ensuing half-century, more than 70 tons’ worth of its original contents were destroyed. Finally, in the mid-1990s, a group of volunteers began resurrecting Otlet’s original vision, hoping to preserve and refurbish the original Mundaneum.

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, as a whole or in certain of its parts.

- Paul Otlet (published in "Monde" 1934)

read the whole article: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/forgotten_forefather_paul_otlet

watch the short video: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/files/banda/forgotten_forefather_paul_otlet/otlet_traite_sm.mov

Documentary (23min)about Paul Otlet: http://www.archive.org/details/paulotlet/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,775951,00.html

17TH OCTOBER 2011

we've abandoned our pre-planned narrative, as at first the temptation to tell someone else's story was the space to tell our own, but then we realized that even that framework was Oh... I don't know ... insignificant ... I would say... we should continue as we've been going, as we've done all along, people send us stuff, we find stuff, we make stuff and then it gets broadcast, we don't take hand outs from the state, we work, pay our taxes, the show is our workbench, although we are not handy with red dots. we're not burlesque and did not go to school, we simply tell tall tales about this and that ... and are not serious at all. we discovered that "..." could pay ... but in the end we also discovered that it makes your life impossible ... from that moment on you are ... only concerned about the parrot. probably the point of our presence here is to punctuate your space, like a a rent in the clouds. or punctuate tomorrow. on 18th October we will oscillate between old neoism, collective tapes (from 1980's), wu-ming recordings (prolaxe) and a bunch of sound sent by bartan shumak (sic) from berlin. tune in. see the agenda. WE READ (PAST TENSE) FLIPSIDE (Al & Hud) RATHER THAN MRR (Tim is toast)... if you understand that then you will understand it all.