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LIBROS PROJECT
LIBROS PROJECT
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MAY KIM 2015
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LIBROS PROJECT
MAY KIM 2015
Graphic design is a form that travels from inside and outside of the computer. It travels through the realm of cyberworld, through digital programs, through accounts, through the printers, through the machines and through the human hands.
However, the bookshelf or any ‘housing’ for the books don’t get a lot of attention. Books are common, mass produced (accessible) but fragile; easy to get damaged; harder to keep clean than e-books or text messages stored safely in Cloud sytems. That’s the reason why we get sentimentally attached to the “physicality” of letters, books, and prints.
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LIBROS PROJECT
Does Design get a proper archive it deserves, that preserves both digitally and physically? Books are often overlooked in the endless Information Age, by the “Internet Generation.” Designers, however, have consistent drive to explore the formats of books. (i.e. Irma Boom, Tauba Auerbach, etc.)
LIBROS PROJECT
Libros Project was a research of book formats, unexplored formats of housing of books, and the relationship between the printed matters, and where type lives. Books have been studied long enough to have their own data. Countless studies had been done on the subject matter of “books”. The newsstands are interesting, to be seen as “type hubs” that live among the city, living among the people, with the nature, with architecture, and others; which inspired me to extend the research onto this project.
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BALTIMORE, MD
Designers can easily study the book format chart to teach themselves how to archive and preserve the works they make through their career, and design their own form of personal archive - whether it be a bookstand, a binder, a website, a flat file cabinet.
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“For designers the everyday represents the site of actual use - the messy reality where designs are negotiated. This is a realm beyond the carefully circumscribed boundaries of design proper; it is outside the client-designer commission or the controlled nature of test markets and focus groups.” Andrew Blauvelt, Rituals of Use from Strangely Familiar.
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Nicholson Baker, Inky Burden from The Way the World Works.
BALTIMORE, MD
“Pages, for the most part, live out their long lives in the dark, keeping hidden what inky burdens they bear, pressed tightly against their neighbors, communicating nothing, until suddenly, like the lightbulb in the refrigerator that seems to be always on but almost never is, one of them is called upon to speak — and it does.”
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MAY KIM 2015
LIBROS PROJECT
“How could one classify the following verbs: arrange, catalogue, classify, cut up, divide, enumerate, gather, grade, group, list, number, order, organize, sort? They are arranged here in alphabetical order. These verbs can’t all be synonymous: why would we need fourteen words to describe just one action? They are different, therefore. But how to differentiate between them all? Some stand in opposition to one another even though they refer to an identical preoccupation: cut up, for example, evokes the notion of a whole needing to be divided into distinct elements, while gather evokes the notion of distinct elements needing to be brought together into a whole.”
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Georges Perec, Penser/Classer (Think/Classify)
MAY KIM 2015
“Disorder in a [personal] library is not serious in itself; it ranks with “Which drawer did I put my socks in?” Opposed to this apologia for the sympathetic disorder is the small-minded temptation toward an individual bureaucracy: one thing for each place and each place for its one thing, and vice versa.
Georges Perec, On the Art and Science of Classifying One’s Books.
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LIBROS PROJECT
Between these two tensions, one which sets a premium on letting things be, on a goodnatured anarchy, the other that exalts the virtues of the tabula rasa, the cold efficiency of the great arranging, one always ends by trying to set one’s book in order. This is a trying, depressing operation, but one liable to produce pleasant surprises, such as coming upon a book you had forgotten because you no longer see it and which, putting off until tomorrow what you won’t do today, you finally re-devour lying face down on your bed.”
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LIBROS PROJECT
2. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
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1. Form, Function, Beauty = Gestalt, Max Bill
LIBROS PROJECT
3. A Short History of Cahiers Du Cinema, Emilie Bickerson
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4. The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee
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MAY KIM 2015 LIBROS PROJECT
1. Art Fiction, Joshua Abelow
LIBROS PROJECT
2. Multiple Signatures, Michael Rock
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3. A Primer of Visual Literacy, Donis A. Dondis
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1. 032C, Magazine
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LIBROS PROJECT
2. TUSH, Magazine
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LIBROS PROJECT
3. VICE, Magazine
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LIBROS PROJECT
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“Reading is only one aspect of consumption, but a fundamental one. In a society that is increasingly written, organized by the power of modifying things and of reforming structures on the basis of scriptural models (whether scientific, economic, or political), transformed little by little into combined “texts” (be they administrative, urban, industrial, etc.), the binomial set production-consumption can often be replaced by its general equivalent and indicator, the binomial set writing-reading.”
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LIBROS PROJECT
Michel De Certeau, Reading as Poaching from The Practice of Everyday Life.
LIBROS PROJECT
“Designer Jonathan Adler (1966– ) says your house should be an antidepressant. I agree. And so does the art world. When a curator comes home and finds nothingness, they get a minimalist high. When a dealer comes home and finds five Ellsworth Kellys leaning against a wall, they’re also high in much the same way. Wikipedia tells us that “hoarding behavior is often severe because hoarders do not recognize it as a problem. It is much harder for behavioral therapy to successfully treat compulsive hoarders with poor insight about the disorder.” Art collectors, on the other hand, are seen as admirable and sexy. There’s little chance of them seeing themselves as in need of an intervention. Perhaps the art collecting equivalent of voluntarily getting rid of the Jif jar is flipping a few works.”
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Douglas Coupland, Stuffed: How Hoarding and Collecting Is the Stuff of Life and Death, e-flux.
MAY KIM 2015
“Today, an “important graphic design” is one generated by the designer himself, a commentary in the margins of visual culture. Sometimes the design represents a generous client. More often, it is a completely isolated, individual act, for which the designer mobilized the facilities at his disposal, as Wim Crouwel once did with his studio. It always concerns designs that have removed themselves from the usual commission structure and its fixed role definitions. The designer does not solve the other person’s problems, but becomes his own author.”
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LIBROS PROJECT
Daniel van der Velden, Research and Destroy: Graphic Design as Investigation.
LIBROS PROJECT
“Production is a concept embedded in the history of modernism. Avant- garde artists and designers treated the techniques of manufacture not as neutral, transparent means to an end but as devices equipped with cultural meaning and aesthetic character.” Ellen Lupton, The Designer as Producer.
SUPERSTUDIO 1970 Niagara o “L’Architettura Riflessa” Niagara or “Reflexive Architecture”
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Peter Lang and William Menking, Superstudio: Life Without Objects.