Title: Letterpress: a celebration
Location: St Bride Library Bride Lane, Fleet Street London EC4Y 8EE
Description: events with our RSS feed.
Type Dump: image from the Out of Print research cluster at Glasgow School of Art

Letterpress is again to be celebrated, or so the growing popularity of the process would certainly suggest. Increasing numbers around the world are setting up their own small studios, looking for tuition, or commissioning letterpress within commercial design work. All this thirty years after the process effectively became commercially obsolete. And in spite of the fact that letterpress can be messy and slow, often requires a lot of space, not to mention the considerable constraints it brings to layout, colour, artwork and type. So why do so many people still want to get involved, and how do they make a success of their efforts?

Join us at St Bride Library to review and discuss the phenomenon of letterpress in the twenty-first century through a packed one-day programme of talks, demonstrations and displays of work. Meet practitioners and exchange stories as we bring together the different communities working with letterpress, from printers and designers to students and general enthusiasts. Be inspired and maybe even find out what you need to set up on your own!

Speakers

• Phil Abel – Hand & Eye Letterpress
• Claire Bolton – The Alembic Press
• Alex Cooper & Rose Gridneff – London College of Communication
• Alan Kitching & Celia Stothard – The Typography Workshop
• Alan May – Press builder
• Harry McIntosh – Compositor and typecaster
• John Randle – Whittington Press
• Patrick Walker – dust

Tickets

• Full rate: £60 / £50 Friends of St Bride Library
• Students, over 60s: £30 / £25 Friends of St Bride Library

Start Time: 09:30
Date: 2008-11-07
End Time: 17:00

Title: Talk: Ryan Gander
Location: Somerset House
Description: In conversation with exhibition co-curator Emily King.

Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-11-20
End Time: 19:30

Title: Trattoria Al Capello
Location: Somerset House
Description: Designer Martino Gamper and friends design every aspect of the guerrilla restaurant, including the furniture, tableware, cutlery and food. Join them for this one-off dining event in the gallery.
(Limited capacity)

Date: 2008-11-03

Title: Dot Dot Dot Magazine Evenings
Location: Somerset House at The Studio
Description: Dexter Sinister organise three nights of talks, which will create the content for the next issue
of internationally renowned arts journal Dot Dot Dot. Dexter Sinister will effectively compose a \’live\’ issue of the complete journal, existing in ‘real’ time before being hardened into printed form.
(Limited capacity)
Wednesday 29 October, Thursday 30 October, Friday 31 October

Date: 2008-10-28

Title: Jonas Mekas Presents Flux Party
Location: London Rio Cinema
Description: Legendary artist-filmmaker Jonas Mekas presents FLUX PARTY featuring the Fluxfilm Anthology as assembled by George Maciunas, rare Fluxus audio and surprise performances. Drinks and specially made Fluxcakes will be served.

Fluxus was a provocative and humorous art movement that produced objects, performances and events which challenged the boundaries between traditional art and everyday life. Early Fluxus pieces included feeding a bale of hay to a piano, a painting to be stepped on, or the sound of dripping water.

The Fluxfilm Anthology, showing here in its most comprehensive version to date, includes \”Zen for Film\” (clear film for collecting dust), \”Four\” (Yoko Ono’s infamous film of bare bottoms), \”Smoking\” (cigarette smoke shot with a high speed camera) and other films of comical street performances, counting games, x-ray movies and interference patterns. The Fluxfilms embodied the minimal aesthetic, playfulness and poetic dimensions of Fluxus and transposed its performative aspect into the cinema.

This informal late night screening is a unique chance to see films by artists such as George Brecht, John Cale, Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, Chieko Shiomi, Ben Vautier, Wolf Vostell and Robert Watts presented on the big screen of the Rio Cinema, East London\’s splendid art deco picture palace. Jonas Mekas will be present to discuss Fluxus and his friend and fellow Lithuanian émigré, the late George Maciunas.

Seminal figures of the New York downtown art scene since the beginning of the 1960s, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) and George Maciunas (1931-78) were connected through many different projects. Mekas was a central force of the avant-garde film scene and presented early screenings at Maciunas’ AG Gallery. Maciunas coordinated Fluxus as an international community of artists, whose contributors also included Joseph Beuys, Henry Flynt, Takehisa Kosugi, John Lennon and La Monte Young.

Maciunas was also fundamental in the emergence of SoHo as an artistic centre in New York. As early as 1966, he began to purchase dilapidated industrial buildings and convert them into cooperative real estate, starting the trend for loft style living. Jonas Mekas was one of the first to participate in the Fluxhouse venture, acquiring space for both his own home and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque / Anthology Film Archives.

Last year, Mekas returned to Lithuania to inaugurate the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius, presenting his own Fluxus collection to the public for the first time in a joint Mekas / Maciunas exhibition. The centre is planning an extensive film archive and a Fluxus Research Institute. In 2009, Mekas will act as the Ambassador of Vilnius during its year as the European Capital of Culture.

Curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant and Mark Webber. Presented by the South London Gallery. With thanks to Benn Northover, Serpentine Gallery, Re:Voir and the Rio Cinema.

Start Time: 23:15
Date: 2008-10-17

Title: Jost Hochuli: Systematic book design?
Location: Bridewell Hall, St Bride Foundation
Description: The adjective ‘systematic’ (from the Greek word ‘systematikos’) means, in one dictionary definition: ‘proceeding from a system, methodical, planned; corresponding to a system’. Systematic book design thus means: book design that follows a plan fixed before the work begins. A conscious, rational procedure sooner or later reaches an end: the unconscious – or that which is a matter of feeling – plays a large and often decisive role in design. Using examples from some of his own works, Jost Hochuli will try to show where the irrational has resolved rational decisons.

After this talk Jost will be happy to answer questions both on book design and aspects of typographic detailing, the subject of his new book \’Detail in typography\’. Copies of this book published by Hyphen Press will be available for on sale on the evening at a specially discounted rate.

About the speaker

Jost Hochuli is a Swiss typographer and graphic designer. After study at the Kunstgewerbeschule St.Gallen, he trained as a compositor with the printer Zollikofer and at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich; his education was completed in 1958–9 in Adrian Frutiger’s class at the Ecole Estienne. Since then he has practised as a freelance graphic designer, eventually specializing in book design. In 1979 he co-founded the co-operatively run publishing company VGS Verlagsgemeinschaft St.Gallen, for which much of his book design work has been done. He has taught at the schools at Zurich and then St Gallen since 1967. As writer and editor, his books include Book design in Switzerland (1993), Designing books (1996), and a major monograph on his work: Jost Hochuli: Printed matter, mainly books (2002). An English-language edition of his Detail in typography was published earlier this year. He has edited and designed the annually published ‘Typotron’ series of booklets (1983–98) and the Edition ‘Ostschweiz’ (from 2000).

Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2008-11-27

Title: Felix Gmelin ‘I feel so divided’
Location: Vilma Gold
Description:

I’ve got a machine for seeing, called eyes
To hear, I’ve got ears
To talk, a mouth
But they feel like separate machines
there’s no unity
A person ought to feel unified
I feel like I’m divided
Jean-Luc Godard, Pierrot Le Fou, 1965

Vilma Gold is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Felix Gmelin.

In “I Feel so Divided” Felix Gmelin uses painting, photography, film, and sound to create a spatial montage that explores the abilities of cinema and the visual arts to organize and disorganize the senses. The different found, copied, interpreted and quoted elements – excerpts from a 1926 German documentary about a school for blind children, fragments from Vsevolod Pudovkin‘s “Asynchronism as a principle for sound film” and Diderot’s “Letter on the Blind”, and more – are combined with a new series of paintings which depict children judged “good” or “bad” by the Nazi regime. Together the parts of the exhibition form an open constellation of historical and iconographic associations, continuities and ruptures. If the traditions of cinema and the visual arts have today entered into a state of profound uncertainty, then perhaps, Gmelin seems to suggest, their pieces can be disassembled and reassembled to create forms that think.

Felix Gmelin was born in Heidelberg in 1962 but lives and works in Stockholm. Gmelin has participated twice in the Venice Biennale, 2007 and 2003; in the October Salon 2006, Belgrade, and also in the Berlin Biennial 2006. He has had solo shows at institutions including Portikus, Frankfurt, Gasworks, London and Malmö Konstmuseum, Malmö. Currently his work can be seen in a group show at Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

Start Time: 18:30
Date: 2008-10-09

Title: ZineSwap Launch
Location: Bricklane - RAQ Factory

Rag Factory
16-18 Heneage Street
(Just off brick Lane)
Description: Zine Swap Shop:
This will be a chance for you to bring along your zines and swap them with other people. You will give us your zines, and in return will be given a selection of other people\’s work.

Zineswap aims to be a resource through which people can swap their zines with one-another.

It also aims to become a vast archive of contemporary zine publishing, existing as both an online catalogue
and an annual exhibition.

They are looking for contributions from people that self-publish their own zine or magazine. Content is not limited in anyway, your zine can be about anything.

Start Time: 13:00
Date: 2008-11-01

URL: http://www.zineswap.com/

(* bring your own booze)

Map

Title: Assemblages - Loris and Livia
Location: Brag Boutique
Description: ‘Assemblages’ 4 prototypes, first collaboration of Loris Jacquard & Livia Lauber.

URL: http://lorisetlivia.com/
Date: 2008-09-17

Title: the Placard headphone festival
Location: Café OTO
Start Time: 13:00
Date: 2008-09-20
End Time: 23:00