Alexandre Leray, Stéphanie Vilayphiou (eds.): Considering Your Tools: A Reader for Designers and Developers (2013)

“A teaching tool that makes the research accessible to design students and young professionals. This reader will provide them with accessible theory so that they can put the radical changes that are taking place in their profession, into perspective.”

“Today’s creation largely depends on digital tools. Far from being a neutral means to an artistic achievement, those tools are actually opinionated: they carry values and are full of conventions about the way things “ought” to be done. To us, a greater awareness of the role of digital tools is—if important to everybody—crucial in the education of artists and designers. Instead of means, the soft- and hardware tools can become partners to consciously think and converse with, to question and interrogate and to clash with. And because (visual) creation is so tightly coupled with technological development, a larger awareness of these tools can help one speculate about future practices and invent the tools to support them.

Contrary to other contemporary fields of creation, there is little literature on these questions in the sphere of graphic design. This is why we felt it was important to bring together texts and showcases on this topic into one comprehensive corpus: a tool to think about tools.

This publication contains newly commissioned, translated and re-issued texts, distributed over 5 chapters: Discrete Gestures is about how our body is informed by our digital tools; Reading Interfaces takes on different approaches to computer literacy; The Making of the Standards is about the social and technical processes behind the elaboration of norms; Myriadic Composition Tools tackles the question of software as a cultural object through the lens of digital typography; Finally, Shaping Processes discusses methodologies for open and critical collective practices. For each chapter, a short note problematize the questions behind the texts.”

With texts by Isabelle Stengers (0); Gerrit Noordzij, William A. Dwiggins, Evan Roth et al., Donald E. Knuth, Vilém Flusser, Friedrich A. Kittler, George Francis, Pierre Huyghebaert (1); Florian Cramer, Alexandre Leray and Stéphanie Vilayphiou, Olia Lialina, Lev Manovich (2); Denis Jacquerye, Unicode Inc., Anthony Froshaug, Open Source Publishing, Henri de Montrond, Martin Arnaud, Mark Pilgrim, Mailing list www-talk, Eric Schrijver (3); Maurice Girod, Robin Kinross, Femke Snelting and Alexandre Leray, Jacques André et al. (4); Christopher M. Kelty, Matthew Fuller, and Aitor Méndez (5).

Co-editors: Nicolas Malevé, Yvan Monroy Lopez, Lilly Nguyen, Camille Pageard, and Eric Schrijver
Publisher Libre Graphics Research Group, May 2013
Various licenses

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Aleksandar Bošković: Photopoetry and the Bioscopic Book: Russian and Czech Avant-Garde Experiments of the 1920s (2013)

The extraordinary junction between poetry, photography and photomontage — photopoetry — flourished in avant-garde books and journals throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The new genre aspired to appropriate the products of technological culture in creating poetry more alert to the mass sensibility of a rapidly changing mechanical age. As a new hybrid form that combines poetic text and photographic images, it was ripe for poetic experimentation and production of optical provocations.

This dissertation focuses on three avant-garde photo-poetry books — Mayakovsky and Rodchenko’s About This (1923), Nezval and Teige’s Alphabet (1926), and Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s unpublished and little known To the Workers of Kursk (1924-7) — examining them from the angle of the bioscopic book, a concept envisaged in a programmatic manner by El Lissitzky in 1923. (from the Abstract)

Dissertation
Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 2013
309 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (9 MB, updated on 2020-7-23)

See also Mayakovsky and Rozhkov’s book in PDF (3 MB, via vk.com). Commentary: Bošković (2017).

Iakov Chernikhov: Postroyenie shriftov (1958) [Russian]

A book on the history of Russian and Latin typography from the avant-garde architect Iakov Chernikhov.

Построение шрифтов [Constructing Fonts]
With N.A. Sobolev (Н.А. Соболев)
Published in Moscow, 1958
Reprinted by Architektura-S, Moscow, 2007
ISBN 5964700330
116 pages
via Arch-grafika.ru

PDF (68 MB, updated on 2015-11-10)